The Vintage Classics Russians Series - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history
Leo Tolstoy was born in central Russia on 9 September 1828. In 1852
he published his first work, the autobiographical Childhood. He
served in the army during the Crimean War and his Sevastopol
Sketches (1855-6) are based on his experiences. His two most
popular masterpieces are War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenina
(1875-8). He died in 1910.
Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated
works by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov and Pasternak. They were
twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for
their translations of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina) and their translation of Dostoevsky's Demons was one
of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in
France.
If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will
show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it
*The Times*
This is, at last, a translation of War and Peace without the
dreadful misunderstandings and "improvements" that plague all other
translations of the novel into English. Pevear and Volokhonsky's
supple and compelling translation is the closest that an English
reader without Russian can get to Tolstoy's masterwork. This is a
great achievement. It is hard to imagine how this translation could
be superseded."
*Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Professor of Slavic Languages and
Literatures,*
It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in
it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this
would be it
*Andrew Marr*
Reveals Tolstoy in his majestic scope and precision to this reader
for the first time, unencumbered by the pidgin archaisms of
previous translations, ringing with mastery and truth
*Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year*
It may sound pretentious, or strange, but I can remember the weeks
(three weeks, to be precise) I spent reading War and Peace as a
peak experience of sustained excitement and deep delight. Part of
the delight was the largeness and strangeness of this world - the
sense of the vastness and extremes of Russia, the unboundedness of
everything
*Finacial Times*
There is a good argument to say that any decent library must make
room for War and Peace
*Independent on Sunday*
War and Peace... is gleefully experimental... Tolstoy is the
greatest miniaturist in the history of the novel. He is
economical... [An] outlandish, wonderful novel
*Guardian*
The greatest of all novels. Read it again, to test and savour the
infallible truth of Tolstoy’s understanding of every stage and
aspect of human life
*New York Times*
To read him . . . is to find one's way home . . . to everything
within us that is fundamental and sane
*Thomas Mann*
In War And Peace, richly observed human life - its catastrophes and
passions, its thrills and tedium - mark out Tolstoy as a fox, who
knows all about the dizzying diversity of existence
*Observer*
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