Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, five aristocratic families in Russia are transformed by the vagaries of life, by war, and by the intersection of their lives with each other. Hundreds of characters populate War and Peace, many of them historical persons, including Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, and all of them come to life under Tolstoy's deft hand.
War and Peace is generally considered to be Tolstoy's masterpiece, a pinnacle of Russian literature, and one of history's great novels. It contains elements of history, narrative, and philosophy, and this Standard Ebooks edition restores the Russian given names, patronymics, and diminutives anglicized by the Maudes, along with Tolstoy's original four-book structure.
Fans of sweeping historical epics will find no greater reward than this doorstop of a novel-Tolstoy's ultimate meditation on war, peace, love, and the sheer scope of human life.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)