War and Peace

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. Tolstoy himself refused to call it that, saying it was “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and s