War and Peace

:See also War and Peace (album)

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War and Peace (????? ? ??? , in original orthography ????? ? ????) is an epic novel of Russian history and society by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869, which tells the story of Russia during the Napoleonic Era. This panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society, noted for its mastery of realistic detail and variety of psychological analysis, is generally regarded as one of the world's greatest novels. The novel also sets forth a theory of history, concluding that there is a minimum of free choice; all is ruled by an inexorable historical determinism.

Related Topics:
Novel - Russia - Leo Tolstoy - 1865 - 1869 - Napoleonic Era

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The Russian words for "peace" (pre-1918: ????) and "world" (pre-1918: ????) are homonyms and since the 1918 reforms have been spelled identically, which lead to an urban legend saying that the original manuscript was called "????? ? ????" so the novel's title would be correctly translated as "War and the World". However, Tolstoy himself translated the title into French as "La guerre et la paix". The urban legend has been perhaps fuelled by Russian TV Quiz "???? ???? ??????", which in 1982 presented as "correct" answer the "world" variant, based on 1913 edition of "World and Peace" with a typo in the title. There is also a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Related Topics:
Homonyms - 1918 reforms - Vladimir Mayakovsky

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called "????? ? ????", written in 1916.

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War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth and age. The heroine, Natasha Rostova, for example, reaches her greatest fulfillment through her marriage to Pierre Bezukhov and her motherhood. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense.

Related Topics:
Novel - Anna Karenina - 1878

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