War and Peace (Oxford World's Classics)

387 pages

English language

Published March 31, 1998 by Oxford University Press, USA.

ISBN:
978-0-19-283398-3
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OCLC Number:
38854953

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5 stars (4 reviews)

War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), when the royal court in Paris was the centre of western European civilization,[16] is still fresh in the minds of older people. Catherine, fluent in French and wishing to reshape Russia into a great European nation, made French the language of her royal court. For the next one hundred years, it became a social requirement for members of the Russian nobility to speak French and understand French culture.[16] This historical and cultural context in the aristocracy is reflected in War and Peace. Catherine's …

116 editions

Review of 'War and Peace' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

So, War and Peace. It's a big one, for sure.

But I feel like it's a lot shorter than people think it is. War and Peace has become our archetypal "long book," but it's shorter than Les Miserables (which I read last year) and reads a lot faster. It's a book more on the scale of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is still long, but is also fairly widely read.

With that out of the way, let's get into it.

Russian Names

This is probably a common barrier to people understanding this book and others like it. In my case, I worked my way up to War and Peace by reading some of Dosteovsky's work: The Gambler, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. At one point when I was reading Brothers K, it just clicked and I started to get how the …

Review of 'WAR AND PEACE' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book is so difficult to review; it's so vast and varied and my responses to it are vastly varied. If this turns into a sprawling mess, then it is only a dim and distorted image of the book itself, which is flawed, too.

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN CURTAILED IN PROTEST AT GOODREADS' CENSORSHIP POLICY

See the complete review here:

http://arbieroo.booklikes.com/post/334930/post

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4 stars
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5 stars