War and Peace

“Shimmering. . . . [It] offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh, to approach it not as a monument but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World


Wall Street Journal: Every culture thinks its literature will stand the test of time. What is it about the Russian novelists that makes us come back to their work again and again?

Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky: I think there’s the phrase ‘the accursed questions’ attributed to Dostoyevsky: What is the meaning of life, the existence of God, the mystery of death, the big metaphysical spiritual questions? Those questions were central to Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries in a way that they had all but ceased to be in Western European literature. The Russians were engaged in portraying a fully human destiny rather than one dictated by class, social position, personal ambition and so on—which is a vision similar to what we find first of all in Homer, as well as Dante and Shakespeare. We thirst for that vision and are grateful to find it in the great Russians. The aliveness of Tolstoy’s heroes may come ultimately from the same wholeness of vision, which is not generalized and abstract, but deep in detail.

--From “Translating Tolstoy,” The Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2009
Read the full interview here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574539613167679976.html


The introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to stimulate your group’s discussion of War and Peace. Richard Pevear calls War and Peace “the most daunting of Russian novels, as vast as Russia itself and as long to cross from one end to the other. Yet if one makes the journey, the sights seen and the people met on the way mark one’s life forever.” This guide is intended to help you and your reading group take this long and satisfying journey together. The guide is designed so that your group can divide your reading and discussion into four sessions, based on the four volumes of the novel. Each volume is roughly three hundred pages.
 

The translators have provided the following useful resources in this volume:
 
1. Richard Pevear’s introduction [pp. vii–xvi]
 
2. A chapter-by-chapter summary, which is helpful if anyone needs to skip sections, or has forgotten what happened earlier [pp. 1265–1273]
 
3. A historical index, which provides information about historical people and places mentioned in the text [pp. 1249–1264]
 
4. Numbered end notes, which provide explanations for historical events, phrases, people in the book, keyed to numbers in the text [pp. 1225–1247]
 
5. A list of major characters and family relations [pp. xvii–xviii]
 
6. English translations from the French (and occasionally German), provided at the bottom of pages where needed