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Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man
Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man
Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man
Audiobook4 hours

Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man

Written by Leo Tolstoy

Narrated by Simon Vance

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

In these two famous short novels, Leo Tolstoy takes readers to the brink of despair. At the end of life worldly ambition offers no consolation for the spiritually empty soul. But Tolstoy is the master of themes of redemption. He turns his morbid topic into hope, leading toward spiritual awakening. Tolstoy offers his readers a lifetime of perspective on a most human subject, death. // Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illyich is a small book with singular depth of insight. The book was published in 1886, breaking a nine-year literary silence after the publication of Anna Karenina. It is considered to be one of the great explorations of death and dying in all of Western Literature. No author in so few words summons so many emotions into the reader's soul. This masterpiece is here paired with another Tolstoy short novels, Master and Man, which too examines the human response to mortality. Together these two stories will ultimately offer encouragement to the spiritually hungry. // Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is considered by many to be the greatest novelist in Western Literature. Several classic novels belong to his pen including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In addition he wrote many short novels, including The Death of Ivan Illyich.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 2005
ISBN9781596441699
Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man
Author

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy grew up in Russia, raised by a elderly aunt and educated by French tutors while studying at Kazen University before giving up on his education and volunteering for military duty. When writing his greatest works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy drew upon his diaries for material. At eighty-two, while away from home, he suffered from declining health and died in Astapovo, Riazan in 1910.

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Reviews for Tolstoy

Rating: 4.26806208273689 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the great masterpieces of literature. I read this book quite a few years ago and it helped to ignite my love for books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    So some brief, tired thoughts on War and Peace. I don't think its all that great an accomplishment to have read it or anything - its a good book, it goes pretty quickly all things considered, and after all its just like any other book; its just made up of *words* after all. And its an enjoyable read if you like 19th century novels. And if you like 19th century novels, well this one has a lot of words, so you might like this one for a long time.Basically, I liked it because it did pull together a couple different things. It was at heart a novel about Russian aristocracy and their involvement (or not) with the War of 1812 but it was also a bit of a skewering treatise on history and the philosophy of history. Tolstoy makes many jabs at contemporary historians and their conclusions regarding Napoleon and why things turned out the way they did - but more importantly about whether, over the course of history, individuals (e.g. Napoleon or Tsar Alexander) or masses of individuals (not just armies but the people making up armies) matter. Actually, that's really what the heart of the second epilogue is really all about (the first epilogue had to tie up all the loose ends and lives of all the main characters). So yes, its about the nature of Power and History and the Individual and Free Will and all that, but it tackles all that with the use of a novel to make the points interspersed with some more abstract assertions/ramblings as opposed to an all-out uber-essay. Whether or not one agrees with Tolstoy or likes the story or the characters I feel that for the attempt that is being made, the novel is 'Worth Reading', simply for the scope of what it attempts to do. And even with the room to run, I don't think it manages to achieve it. Which makes me think that this is a limitation of the format/venue. There's only so much persuasion that assertions and made up characters (even ones with clear predilections and personalities and thus behaviors that are 'in character') can achieve.On the whole, I liked, or at least sympathized or related with several of the characters and felt they were well-rounded and not flat at all (though some minor ones were still kinda two-dimensional and others though named barely get mentioned - but hey, there's a lot of characters). Some of them I felt were timeless - in that human nature was reflected well and I could see someone today behaving similarly, albeit with different social circumstances. The wild drunken party at the beginning was something out of Animal House or Superbad or any other similar movie. Pierre's socialite wife Ellen winds up with a different ending to a scene in Dirty Dancing. Natasha is a Nice Young Girl who happens to have a crush and winds up making out with just about every male character except for her brother (but including her cousin) until she winds up falling in love with a sugar daddy. Most characters wrestle at some point with the Existence of God, the Meaning of Life, and/or What It Means To Suffer so there goes the connection with the Human Condition. Pierre is that person in so many people's lives who is Always Looking For Something and wanders through so many phases.. from atheism to wine and women to Freemasonry to altruism to politics to playing at the military to Suffering to something akin to zen/Buddhism until he finds Love (oh how cliche by now!). Boris is the ambitious one and Nickolai has the gambling problem and two loves (well, actually, there are a lot of characters with two loves). Prince Andrei is the capable practical pragmatic handsome one who gets philosophically burned and goes all Ayn Rand but then in one last return to duty/country dies young. So, my point is simply that Tolstoy had a good handle on how to flesh out characters to make them 'real people' and to put them in situations that forces them to change in ways that a reader can relate to.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Took me a month to read, but definitely a masterpiece. It took a notebook to keep all the characters straight for the first half of the book. There was a bit too much about battle techniques contained, but all in all I can see why Tolstoy is considered a master as he can amuse, horrify, entertain, and make one weep during the very same story line. I especially liked seeing how Tolstoy developed his characters and then transformed then or their circumstances. One of the story's main characters, Pierre Bezukhov has his epiphany while being held captive by the French as he befriends Platen, a peasant, and learns to be happy, no matter the situation. The author certainly raises/discusses issues such as ideas of free will, fate, and providence Tolstoy has certainly nailed Napoleon, if other historians are correct.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Amazing in so many ways. The characters were wonderful, and the story captivating. Tolstoy's insights and discussions were a joy...I love the way his mind works: the allegories, the poetic philosophy countered by logic. I devoured it in less than 2 weeks and didn't want it to end. I found it surprisingly readable and don't think that it at all deserves the reputation for heft, and denseness that it's received.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Really excellent. BUT. Did it really nead ONE epilogue, let alone two plus an author's note?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    War and Peace was one of those books I always intended to get round to, someday, when I had more time. Since I'm unlikely to find myself with more free time than I have now in the future, it's probably for the best that my dad dared me to read the whole book -- he was quite specific about this -- including the epilogue. The whole epilogue. In translation, obviously, although he did jokingly suggest I learn Russian first and try it then.

    I have to say, I loved it. The quote on the spine of my edition is: "It's a book that you don't just read, you live." And to some extent, that's true. I started out reading it intending to read one hundred pages a day -- a pretty easy goal for me, and one I thought I could keep up, even if I found the book boring. Then one day I had quite a bit of free time and... I read three hundred pages in a single day. And after that, the book was virtually never out of my hand, unless I needed both hands to eat dinner or play a video game (or, to be realistic, type -- I live and die a ten fingered typist). It went everywhere with me.

    The characters in this book came to life in my head. I loved the Rostovs, aww'd at Pierre, and adored Andrei. I didn't think I'd like the old Prince Bolkonsky, but I ended up loving him too. The characters are written so well. There's so many of them, yet they all stick in my head. Every single one of them had some life, even if they whirled in and out of the story and had only a handful of chapters they even appeared in. Obviously, I'm no judge of the accuracy of the translation, but I liked the way it was written.

    The thing I didn't get on so well with was the philosophising about war. I'm not very familiar with the period in history discussed, so I had a little trouble following that. The second part of the epilogue struck me as both unnecessary -- the main narrative got all those points across -- and extremely boring. In fact, I sort of wondered how Tolstoy had got a time travel machine and sat in on my Religious Studies A Level, because a lot of the stuff about free will came right out of my syllabus. (I concluded he was probably a soft determinist, in case anyone wanted to know.)

    I'm giving it five stars because it sucked me in so much and made me care so much, despite the bits I didn't so much enjoy.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'm never reading this book in 3 1/2 days again. If you want the easy time of it watch the film with Audrey Hepburn then read the last 100-150 pages of the book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Rarely has a novel with such a thumping thesis (Tolstoy’s rejection of the so-called great man theory of history) been so affecting, so charming at times, and so brutally honest at others. Once you give yourself over to it, it is engrossing and the pages (the many, many pages) seem to fly by. And perhaps not surprising for such a long and complex work, your allegiances to characters develop and shift over the course of the novel. Whether it is the moral development of the seemingly dense Pierre, or the reclamation of the overly proud Prince Andrei, or even the dizzying excitement of Natasha and its aftermath, the care that Tolstoy takes with his fictional characters helps humanize the necessarily violent battle sections of the novel. Despite the frequent authorial disquisitions on the impossibility of the will of one man, be that man Napoleon or Alexander, directing the outcome of huge events, Tolstoy regularly brings the focus down to single individuals in the midst of a battle and we see how personally meaningful their individual actions are for them.There is no need for me to recommend this novel. It stands as one of the bulwarks of imaginative fiction and for that reason alone, if no other, it deserves to be read. But what I would say is how surprisingly funny and charming and at other times heart-poundingly tense it can be. So as well as being an important, possibly a necessary, read, it is also a good read. Enjoy!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am so glad that the group read afforded me the opportunity to finally buckle down and tackle this one, which has been an albatross of sorts of my previous reading failures. If you, like me, have repeatedly struggled and abandoned reading this one in written form, may I suggest you consider attempting an audioread? Listening to the story as opposed to slogging through a physical read has made all the difference for me. Yes, the story is rather long-winded and I really found the war/battle scenes started to get to me - as did the sections where Tolstoy waxes philosophical on various topics - but I was rather surprised to discover that: 1) Tolstoy has a sense of humor; 2) he does an excellent job conveying his historical analysis of the Napoleonic Wars and where he differs from the viewpoints of historians of his era; and 3) he really knows how to present well-rounded characters for his readers. I admit that I didn't take to all of his characters - thank goodness, I had plenty of characters to develop any love/hate relationship with! - prime examples in the first half of the book being a decided dislike I developed for Natasha and Nickolei. Okay, I admit that it was their youthful idealism that grated with me so I was glad to see then transform into characters worthy of some attention. I really enjoyed witnessing the transformation of a number of characters as the story progressed. I admit there were times when I had a bit of difficulty keeping all of the characters straight in my mind - seriously, the pet names, etc just added to my overall character confusion! Tolstoy, when in story mode (not waxing philosophical or in historical analysis mode), tells a really good story, filled with romance, social status and even a tiny bit of intrigue. ... but I still don't understand why the story had to be so darn long! Seriously, by the time I had reached the epilogues, I was done. That being said, I will probably re-read it at some point, with a focus on the philosophical aspects. Tolstoy does present some interesting arguments. I just wasn't in the mood to focus on those parts on this read. Overall, really glad to finally be able to strike this one off my reading Bucket List. I think I am now ready to consider tackling Moby Dick.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There is actually quite a bit I want to say about this novel. First off, it's good - very good. When people said that they have read it more than once, I always thought, why on earth would you read it more than once - it's HUGE. But now I get it. It's a sweeping saga that unfolds on an epic scale. And once you have sorted the slightly intimidating cast of characters and their titles (not to mention the myriad of derivatives and nicknames), you become invested in their stories. I think that Pierre is my favorite character, but they were all well drawn and interesting. I would have liked to know more about the slutty Hélène and her slimy brother Anatóle, but that was not to be.What brings the book down a bit, I think, is Tolstoy's need to interject his own thoughts and theories into the narrative. This makes for a slightly jarring sensation - it throws the rhythm of the book off balance and feels like commercials have been inserted into the story. And now for a word from our sponsor... These asides are irritating and condescending, but also at times informative and insightful. Mostly they just make your eyes glaze over. I think he should have published these bits separately as a companion piece or put them together in the back of the book for further reading for those who were interested. So this is why, although I loved the book, my rating is not higher. I also made a slight deduction for the two epilogues. Two? No one needs two epilogues!! And let me just state right here that I did not and will not read the epilogues - they always annoy me and quite often ruin a perfectly good book. So no. Just no to the epilogues.The other thing I want to address are the translations and the audio versions of this book. I listened to the version that is narrated by Neville Jason - this is a five star listen if you are judging the narrator's performance. I cannot recommend this version highly enough - he is fabulous! Every character has a unique voice, and that's saying something right there because there are a LOT of characters in this novel. Jason also does a great job with all of the accents and with reading all of the French in its original form and then directly translating it without it becoming awkward or weighty. Don't be intimidated by the fact that the combined audios (it's in two separate books) are more than 60 hours of listening time. I listened at 1.25x speed for the peace parts and 1.5x speed for the war parts. Ha! This audio version is from the Maude translation, which brings me to the final thing I wanted to address - in my opinion, the Maude translation is superior to the P&V translation. Just saying. I often followed along in print, and what I had was the P&V translation - this allowed me to see the variations between the two, and I was amazed at what a difference the translation makes. The Maude version is so much more lyrical - much better use of language and word choice. Because after all, cudgel and club bring to mind different images in my head even though they are synonyms. The same thing with flushed and embarrassed. SO I am thankful that I chose to listen to Neville Jason because I liked his voice and his style - if not, I would have missed out on the lovely Maude translation and been stuck with the much drier and less poetic V&P version.One last thing. The humor that is scattered throughout was an unexpected surprise. And it was delightful:p.242 "He could not simply tell them that they all set out at a trot, he fell off his horse, dislocated his arm, and ran to the woods as fast as he could to escape a Frenchman. Besides, in order to tell everything as it had been, one would have to make an effort with oneself so as to tell only what had been. To tell the truth is very difficult, and young men are rarely capable of it. They were expecting an account of how he got all fired up, forgetting himself, how he flew like a storm at the square; how he cut his way into it, hacking right and left; how his saber tasted flesh, how he fell exhausted, and so on. And he told them all that."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    War and Peace... it's not an easy read. At my workplace, it's slang for a long and tedious email. I have a vague memory of reading this in my early teens, but it must have been an abridged version and anyways I remember nothing except a sense of the inevitable in the characters' lives. War and Peace was published in 1869 and is considered Tolstoy's most important contribution to literature. I'll be careful not to call it a novel since he apparently objected to that label. I'm sure someone has coined a term for this hybrid of history and narrative.I'll be honest: this was a slog. I love Dickens and gulp down Hugo. Collins has no terrors for me (well, besides his Gothic-y ones) and I've plowed through Radcliffe without a tremor. I didn't think War and Peace would be so hard to get through, but it was. I started well but then just lost interest. Finally, several months later, I picked it back up and began, determinedly, to make my way to the end. I was going to finish it or be finished by it. Just under a year later, I read the last page and found myself both relieved and a bit sorry to be leaving that world.Resignation, a prominent virtue in some of the characters, is important in the reader as well. Indeed, for me the substantial enjoyment of the book only began once I gave myself up to it. By approaching the digressive sections with the same attitude as the narrative portions, I began to appreciate it and see why it has been hailed as such an important piece of literature. I feel a little foolish, actually... only discovering how to enjoy it in the last three hundred pages or so.The story sprawls and spreads in all directions, encompassing a wide range of characters who are all made real to the reader via Tolstoy's omniscient narrator voice. We get inside their heads and are privy to all their thoughts, recognizing our own mental landscape in their often illogical, self-absorbed thinking. Natasha is one of the most vivid characters I've ever read. Pierre, Andrei, Marya, Sonya, Nikolai, Petya... they all come alive and I remember them almost as people I knew rather than characters I read about.Tolstoy has a very decided opinion on historical figures and events, and expounds on it frequently! He believes that history is determined not by the decisions and actions of single figures (like Napoleon) but by the interplay of thousands and millions of individual wills. Again and again Tolstoy picks apart the historical analyses of critical battles and tries to demonstrate that success doesn't prove there was brilliant planning, and failure doesn't necessarily indicate ineptitude. He says that the ancients gave us a model of historical events that focused on the actions and personalities of hero-figures, and we can't get used to the idea of history without them — so we fashion historical protagonists and endow them with our belief in their power. He's eloquent and persuasive, but I found I had much less interest in his digressions than with Hugo's novel-length forays into the Napoleonic battles or Melville's detailed descriptions of whaling. Perhaps it's the repetition and the almost-petulant tone of his arguments?About halfway through the book, I watched the three-hour movie version starring Audrey Hepburn (perfectly cast as Natasha) and Henry Fonda. It was surprisingly faithful and we enjoyed it quite a bit. Of course the movie can't show the spiritual transformations several characters experience, like Prince Andrei's moment of illumination in the surgeons' tent, Pierre's slow maturation, or the fascinating mind and vitality of Natasha. Nor did the movie delve into Pierre's experimentation with Freemasonry, which Tolstoy describes in great detail. I wonder if knowing the end of the story actually helped me to enjoy the latter part of the book, seeing it all unfold with the details that the screen version simply can't convey.I read the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is reputed to be among the best. My expectations were probably too high. There are definitely some awkward sentences, especially when Tolstoy is describing a character's inner thoughts and motivations, but it seems to be more what he wrote rather than a translator's misstep.Books have been written on this book, and a quick review will hardly do it justice. And with my experience of the story spread out over a year, I'm not going to capture all my thoughts about it. I will just say: I am glad I read it and learned the art of literary surrender.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Indrukwekkend zonder enige discussie. Vooral door het brede panorama, zowel in de tijd, maar vooral in de geledingen: niet alleen Napoleon, Alexander en hun generaals worden gevolgd, maar vooral de individuen (zij het dan nog die uit de adel).Hoofdfiguren zijn duidelijk Pierre, Andrej en Natasja. Zij evolueren en de veranderingen leveren dikwijls de interessantste beschouwingen op, maar niet altijd is het verloop consistent. Zo maakt Pierre nogal wat "bekeringen" door. Literair munt vooral het tweede boek uit (met enkele van de mooiste bladzijden uit de wereldliteratuur), hoewel het verhaal daar aan spankracht verliest. Het verslag van Austerlitz en Borodino is ongemeen boeiend door de onconventionele invalshoek. Naar het einde toe wordt de schrijftrant langdradig, met soms ellenlange theoretische beschouwingen die dikwijls overlappen. De eerste epiloog moet dat compenseren, hoewel de verhaallijn daar doodbloedt. De tweede epiloog is bijna niet te volgen.Eerste keer gelezen op 18 jaar, erg onder de indruk
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's a masterpiece, to say the least... I read it a long time ago (in Russian, of course) while still living in Ukraine.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm just a woman who loves to read and don't feel worthy to review or rate this sprawling epic with its huge cast of characters. Having said that, I will give a few humble impressions.War and Peace depicted a panoramic vision of Russian life (esp. of the privileged elite class) during Napolean's devastating invasion in the early 1800's. Tolstoy accomplished a masterful balancing act between individuals with all their humanity and the historical destiny of a nation. He was obviously fascinated with all aspects of war and held the military in high esteem.There are many examples of amazing writing of powerful and memorable events. **Spoiler** I'll never forget the reverent death scene of Andrei or the imprisonment of Pierre and how he achieved spiritual freedom during utter deprivation. I read this book over a two-month period, which probably diminished its impact. I can only give W & P (hanging my head in shame) a four-star rating. Tolstoy is a gifted writer, but, in my humble opinion (and with tongue somewhat in cheek), approximately 20% of the book was drier than dust...and, it shouldn't take anybody over 1,200 pages to tell the reader who won the war and who gets the girl.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I finally read this in the space of 26 days after it had been sitting on my bookshelf for a decade. For the most part, War and Peace is simply brilliant. The main characters are wonderfully drawn, and I loved getting inside their heads and rooting for them all the way through. I also felt that I got a good sense of what it was like to be in (or on the edges of) the upper echelons of Russian society in the early 19th century through the descriptions of various social scenes and the viewpoints of minor characters. I also enjoyed the war scenes involving the main characters.However, I didn't quite get on with some of the other war parts and the various passages ruminating on history in general, especially towards the end. I was also a little let down by some of the main characters' fates as described in the first epilogue (mainly the way in which the female characters are depicted), but I recognise that this is partly due to the era in which the novel is set/was written.Despite that, I'm really glad I finally read War and Peace, and will be looking up some of Tolstoy's other works in the future.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow - that word pretty much sums up my reaction to this book. My first thought upon finishing was that I want to reread this book sometime soon because I want to revisit the characters that I loved through the last part of the book from the beginning. It is such a long book, and did take me such a long time to get through, that I feel like I would get so much reading through it again.

    There is not much more to say about it that hasn't been said hundreds of times by countless others. I enjoyed the characters, love stories, war stories, the plot, and even the diversions into farming and war theory. The last thirty pages were tough because they deal with Tolstoy's views on why history happens. It was tough because I wanted more about the characters and their lives.

    I would recommend this to anyone who has the discipline to read a book of this size. It is well worth your time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Took me a month to read, but definitely a masterpiece. It took a notebook to keep all the characters straight for the first half of the book. There was a bit too much about battle techniques contained, but all in all I can see why Tolstoy is considered a master as he can amuse, horrify, entertain, and make one weep during the very same story line. I especially liked seeing how Tolstoy developed his characters and then transformed then or their circumstances. One of the story's main characters, Pierre Bezukhov has his epiphany while being held captive by the French as he befriends Platen, a peasant, and learns to be happy, no matter the situation. The author certainly raises/discusses issues such as ideas of free will, fate, and providence Tolstoy has certainly nailed Napoleon, if other historians are correct.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    War and Peace focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.I really enjoyed listening to this book on audio. Loved the history and the love stories centered around Natasha Rostov. Tolstoy's writing is very detailed but the information is very interesting. I look forward to reading Anna Karenina. I would highly recommend War and Peace to those who enjoy books about the history, war, love and romance.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book made a profound impression on me. I bought this version recently because it received such stellar reviews.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If the philosophic concepts were not the conclusion to Tolstoy’s narrative, I would have given the book three stars as opposed to four; some being extremely outdated, while others extraordinarily beguiling! Beautifully written.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    An intensely mediocre book, sliding to bad in a few places.

    I have often been told that classics are classics because they posses some characteristics which enable them to transcend their time of composition and appeal to readers across time and space. If this is true, War and Peace is not a classic.

    This book essentially seeks to deal with the period from roughly 1805-1812 and focus on the Napoleonic conflicts in Europe as well as the fortunes of a few Russian families.

    First, the stuff that I liked - The first 20% of the book is very good. Tolstoy does deft social satire and critique. The writing is compact and witty. The battle descriptions are graphic, powerful and carry a flavour of authenticity.

    Unfortunately, all of this goes rapidly downhill as the book progresses.

    My biggest problem with this book is the dominance of Tell vs Show. Tolstoy loves to Tell. He embarks on long lectures and these go on for pages and pages and get extremely tedious. There are essentially three types of lectures:

    Philosophical: These became more common in the latter half of the book and is Tolstoy musing on life, human nature, history, ethics, god etc. They can be extremely tedious.

    Historical: In these Tolstoy sums up and narrates historical events to move his story along. While these can be informative, they are very clumsily integrated into the book and therefore make the narrative more cumbersome. To make matters worse, Tolstoy starts spouting of on long rants against Napoleon and on the virtues of the Russians.

    Story Based: These are the worst. Tolstoy really does not do a good job writing character changes and transitions over long periods of time. So he resorts to character narration. For example: "X decided his life was going badly. So he listened to Y and Z. He thought deeply on their advice. He realized [Insert badly written internal monologue here]. Therefore X started doing a, b and c, and Started visiting P." These character passages in passive voice were intensely irritating and seemed to be a symptom of the authors inability to internalize his own characters and instead use them as convenient mouthpieces.


    Apart from the dominance of Tell, a major problem I faced while reading was the intensely bad dialogue and the even worse internal monologues. A significant portion of dialogue is inane and seemed to serve no purpose. This was quite puzzling for me as the dialogue in the initial parts of the book was pretty good.

    Also Tolstoy does not seem to understand the point of having an epilogue. He takes this opportunity to wax eloquent about his own rather idiotic ideas about the nature of history, how Napoleon the man had no redeeming features and how Tsar Alexander was a misunderstood genius. My favourite was when he defended the suppression of liberalism in post-1815 Europe. To him if following reason, freedom and equality had been allowed this would have made the various liberal revolutionary movements in Europe unnecessary and destroyed their potential. Therefore history governed by reason is somehow antithetical to life.

    So, to conclude, War and Peace is an unwieldy, clumsy, tedious preachy accumulation of ideas. It does not really need to be read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Whew. I read somewhere, #tolstoytogether perhaps, that reading this one is alternately “yes, exactly!” Or “wait, what??”

    Yup. Both sublime but also rooted in so much mid-1800s Russian cultural context that flew right past; still wonderful.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    That epilogue tho
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I understand that the popularity of this book comes at the price of having 4 interleaved narratives - something for everyone. There's history, action, ballroom dances and philosophy. Personally I could do without the ballroom scenes and the prerequisite amount of suicide attempts but no section is overly long. I found Tolstoy thoughts on war really interesting though his contempt for Napoleon goes quite far (not that he spares the Russian generals either). The fictional parts have Pierre at its centre (with an abundance of other characters) and following him through his coming of age and adult life we see how he turns from a principled young man, through motivated searching idealist and eventually broken by his war experiences into an aimless husk letting life happen to him without opposition (god being behind every action).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The balance between tradition and reform, of the long influence of French culture and simmering Russian nationalism through the course of the Napoleonic Wars is seen through the eyes of numerous noble Russians from 1805 to the end of the French invasion in 1812. War and Peace is considered Leo Tolstoy’s greatest work as it follows the lives of youthful and idealistic Russian nobles as they attempt to find their way in society and the world during times that would be defined by one man who spanned across Europe to their doorsteps.The saga begins in the Russian Empire in 1805. When Pierre Bezuknov, Natasha Rostov, and Andrei Bolkonsky are first introduced with all their youthful ambition, despite their privileged circumstances, is to find meaning in their lives. Kind-hearted but awkward Pierre, the illegitimate son of Russia's richest man, wants to change the world for the better. The spirited Natasha is searching for true love, while handsome and gallant Andrei, frustrated with the superficiality of society, seeks a higher purpose. At the same time, the French army under Napoleon edges ever closer to Russia's borders. Natasha's older brother Nikolai joins the Imperial Russian Army immediately and matures during the war against Napoleon. Like Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, he also experiences romantic vicissitudes: despite his childhood love for his cousin Sonya, his impoverished parents insist he marry a rich bride like the superficial Julie Karagina or the religious Marya Bolkonskaya. Having begun with Napoleon's military campaign against Russia and Austria in 1805, the story concludes in 1812 after Napoleon's invasion of Russia has failed and he has retreated and withdrawn from Russian territory. The families at the center of the saga have undergone major changes and lost members, but those remaining have experienced a transformation and a new life, with new growth and new families started.The sprawling narrative that Tolstoy constructs around his characters and locations varying from Moscow, St. Petersburg, various Russian estates, and battlefields spanning Austria, Poland, and Russia is wonderful. Unfortunately it is marred by Tolstoy’s decision to lecture the reader on his view of history as opposed to other interpretations not only took me out of the book—even though half my reading is history—but allowed me to think about the characters and the narrative he was having them go through resulting me quickly finding them fools and idiots who essentially deserve all the bad things that happen to them, except Sonya who is Tolstoy’s emotional whipping horse. The introduction by Pat Conroy and the afterword by John Hockenberry in the Signet Classics edition are completely worthless and if you get this edition ignore them.War and Peace is a great book if not for Tolstoy’s narrative disrupting historical lecturing that takes your attention away from large tapestry that he created thus exposing foolishness of his characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    ... only about 100 pages into the Ann Dunnigan translation (Signet Classics: my copy is missing its back cover, and the edges of the paper are starting to brown -- they tear easily). As usual, I find Tolstoy's writing beautifully limpid, but here so far it is hard to hold back thoughts like "do I really care 1400 pages' worth about a bunch of rich people?" I acknowledge this as a limitation of mine. Presumably Tolstoy's art will triumph over these misgivings ... it always has in the past. Yes, I know, rich people are people too.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I knew this would be a challenging read - I've been sort of building up to this by trying to read a few books based in Russia to get an idea of the cultural taste and to get used to the nickname/name structure (I never did get used to it, and am still confused). I was surprised to see how modern the language seemed considering the book was written 164 years ago (ish), Tolstoy was a very good writer and some sentences were pure poetry. Gorgeous prose, though the dialogue was a bit more dated and harder to understand why/in what context somebody would suddenly exclaim something. I couldn't get connected with any of the characters save for Pierre, who is by far the most interesting, best character in the book. His journey was fascinating, and anytime he was the subject of the narrative, the pages flew by. Some of the battle sections really reminded of the Civil War Trilogy, good and bad - no doubt the Shaara's got influence from War and Peace. The logistical parts of "soldiers marched here. soldiers ate some food. soldiers slept. orders were given" are still dull as mud, but the inner turmoil of the soldiers, the battles themselves, their outlook on life and the immediate aftermath are terrific. I could've done without the 2nd part of the Epilogue, but overall I'm pleased to have read it. I didn't enjoy it as much as many hardcore readers and enthusiasts, but I would say a successful attempt. Certainly one of the most difficult reads I've ever attempted, it did feel like homework at times, but enjoyable homework nonetheless.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There are many lists of "The 100 Best Books Ever Written," or, "Fifty Books You Should Read before You Die," and lists similar to these that show War and Peace as the number 1 best book ever. And there are other similar lists which list something else. Those latter lists are just plain wrong and not to be trusted or consulted.
    There is nothing I could say that would add to the reams of paper others have spent talking about this marvel. But I would like to suggest a couple of tricks for a person thinking about reading it or struggling a little with reading it.
    First, get a good translation of it. There are many and probably all are good, but the one that works best is one which minimizes the use of nicknames for characters and which also includes a list of characters either at the beginning of the volume or as an appendix. A "too literal" translation will tire you out and justify not completing the book.
    Second, the first 100 to 125 pages are absolutely necessary to the book but they are also the place a reader might decide that the book is boring or difficult. Ignore the impulse to quit reading! You'll be glad of those first hundred pages as you move more deeply into the plot and action.
    Third, my usual habit when reading a book is to have two or three going at once. I began reading War and Peace as I read two other books. I found that doing that made it more difficult to read War and Peace, harder to follow its storyline and to keep the characters straight and more likely to set the book aside.. So, drop anything else and read War and Peace all the way through and let the other books wait. (Anyway, the other books cannot possibly be a good as War and Peace and reading them along side W & P will make you less fond of them; they simply will not hold up to comparison).
    Fourth, read the Wikipedia article about Napoleon before you get too far into the novel. This will help understand the actual historical timeline and give you a basis for how historians view Napoleon compared to Tolstoy's views. Frankly, I think Tolstoy's views are the better of the two.
    Finally, underline, highlight, write marginal notes and keep some notes. This book is not a good one to check out from the library or attempt on an reader. And anyway, you'll want to read it again sometime later in your life. (It is one of only a half dozen that I have read three or more times, excluding, of course, the Dr. Seuss books).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" when I was in middle school at a time I was too young to really appreciate it as anything but an accomplishment that impressed my teachers at the time. And even though I read a ton of Russian novels in college, something about that early experience put me off Tolstoy... (I was definitely more of a Dostoevsky girl.)At any rate, I spent the last couple of months reading "War and Peace" and it was absolutely marvelous... I enjoyed nearly everything about it-- from the ins and outs of the family drama during peace time, to the descriptions of Napoleone's failed march into Russia to Tolstoy's musings on the nature of man and war. Overall, just an excellent book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An epic that spans multiple intrigues of the lives of its principal characters. A story that is remembered for its immensity and scope and recommended to all of those who enjoy to read literary fiction.