War and Peace Original Edition!

First Edition in English of "War and Peace" TOLSTOY, Leo. War and Peace. A Historical Novel. Translated into French by a Russian Lady and from the French by.
Table of contents

First edition identification and notes -First American edition published in 6 volumes, translated by Clara Bell, in , New York. Log-in or create an account first! Gottsberger, New York, First Editions, First Printings with all the title-pages dated and with the proper Gottsberger imprint on versos. Each book is in great shape. The bindings are tight with NO cocking or leaning and the boards are crisp.

There is NO writing, marks or bookplates in the book. Overall, a spectacular set of this First edition in English housed in a custom clamshell slipcase for preservation. We buy Leo Tolstoy First Editions.. First American edition, first printing.

Publisher's uniform decorated brown cloth, boards elaborately tooled and ruled in black, front boards lettered in gilt with gilt-stamped Napoleonic and Russian Imperial crests, spines lettered in gilt; brown-coated endpapers, flyleaves. General wear and rubbing particularly to spines and spine ends — more so on the later volumes, occasional light foxing to fore-edges.

Large armorial bookplates in all volumes Ex-Rugby School of Warwickshire, England - birthplace of rugby football. Overall a very good, untouched set. Housed in custom case. Recent scholarship makes a fairly compelling case that the virtually unattainable UK Vizetelly edition commonly labeled as the first edition in English was released simultaneously in January, thereby making this set, or at least the first two volumes, equals for first English language appearance. The books were released in both brown cloth and wrappers complete wrappered sets when encountered, will cost you a healthy multiple of this asking price.

While the American market sets are commonly available, ours offers an interesting wrinkle in that it's an export issue. Gottsberger set aside an unknown number of the first printing sets for release in Europe with title pages bearing the imprint of their publishing partners in London, Paris, and Leipzig containing Euro-market aimed advertisements at the rear — far less common than the ubiquitous domestic sets. This is a cool addition to the shelf, whether you're a Tolstoy fan or general high spot collector. They say you won't understand him until you're And they are right.

The magic comes with the proper mix of life pain and acute self-awareness. Before Tilsit, Vol. Brown cloth boards with gilt lettering and black line illustrations. Five volumes of a 6 volume set, missing the last volume, vol. I Before the Tilsit: II Before the Tilsit: Overall in very good to near fine condition. Idler Fine Books Published: Original blue diaper cloth, titles to spines in gilt, titles and Romanov eagle to front boards gilt. Ownership signature to front pastedowns, annotation to front free endpaper of vol.

Some marks to covers, minor foxing to endleaves and edges, vol. IV front hinge partly cracked but holding, text block sound. First translation into English from the original Russian, UK issue, omitting the preface to the US edition but retaining Dole's editorial footnotes. Two versions of War and Peace in English had been issued prior to Dole's version, both in , but neither was translated directly from the Russian, using instead an intermediary French translation. Gottsberger, The first two volumes, published in one book, of the six volume set of the first US edition of this classic.

This is the first two volumes that were published, followed by four more to complete the entire work. Housed in a collector's slipcase.. Bookbid Rare Books Published: First Constance Garnett translation. Publisher's red cloth, vol.

First edition identification and notes

III slightly bowed, early gift inscription on pastedowns, else near fine. First Constance Garnett Translation. The first Constance Garnett translation - the one by which most English speakers first encountered Tolstoy's masterpiece. James Cummins Bookseller Published: III slightly bowed, early gift inscription on pastedowns, else near fine Edition: Limited Editions Club, Fine in close to Fine glassines and Near Fine slipcases with a little staining. Numerous full-page color lithographs and black and white drawings in the text, as well as color endpaper and cover designs, by Barnett Freedman.

Translated by Louis and Aylmer Maude. Spines a touch rubbed at the tips, with no loss. Near Fine in a bit darkened but still Near Fine slipcases. Recently bound in full black morocco, titles to spine gilt, raised bands, top edge gilt. A handsomely leather bound set of this classic novel which was first published in The Limited Editions Club, Translated from the Russian by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Introduction by Aylmer Maude.

Illustrated with lithographs and drawings by Barnett Freedman. Volume 3 with a very small brown stain to top edge of text block, very good and clean otherwise. All volumes clean and tight. Slipcases a little faded, with a few small bumps but very clean and quite well preserved. This edition limited to copies, numbered and signed by the artist.

Also includes the artists thumb print over signature. This is copy no. An overview of Napoleon's advance on Russia as well as his subsequent retreat from a distinctly Russian point of view. Ad Infinitum Books Condition: Very good condition ISBN: Orange illustrated boards, each volume with a different person portrait picture on cover; Volumes have light sctach marks down some area of spine; Spine has some wear to bottom edge; Edges have some wear; Contains many color illustrations; Endpapers have lovely illustrations; Slipcases are in good condition; Slipcase edges have some soil and rubbing down; Slipcase top has some stains and one as white paint marks; Slipcase covers have some specs of soil and scratches; Slipcase has stamp on bottom which states, "Made in Britain"; Slipcase interior has some scattered foxing, as does the spine label; Limited edition number of , SIGNED by illustrator, who ALSO inked his THUMB next to signature;.

Hard Cover in Slip Case. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Better World Books Condition: Bound in full Wassa goatskin blocked with a design by Jeff Clements, internally clean and bright, illustrated with drawings by Feliks Topolski, No.

A fine copy contained in the publisher's solander case. Gilt decorated brown goatskin. Natasha learns from Pierre of Anatole's marriage. Devastated, Natasha makes a suicide attempt and is left seriously ill. Pierre is initially horrified by Natasha's behavior, but realizes he has fallen in love with her.

As the Great Comet of —12 streaks the sky, life appears to begin anew for Pierre. Prince Andrei coldly accepts Natasha's breaking of the engagement. He tells Pierre that his pride will not allow him to renew his proposal. With the help of her family, and the stirrings of religious faith, Natasha manages to persevere in Moscow through this dark period. Meanwhile, the whole of Russia is affected by the coming confrontation between Napoleon's army and the Russian army.

Pierre convinces himself through gematria that Napoleon is the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. Old Prince Bolkonsky dies of a stroke knowing that French marauders are coming for his estate. No organized help from any Russian army seems available to the Bolkonskys, but Nikolai Rostov turns up at their estate in time to help put down an incipient peasant revolt.

WAR AND PEACE Volume 1 Part 1 - by Leo Tolstoy - Unabridged Audiobook - FAB

He finds himself attracted to the distraught Princess Maria. Back in Moscow, the patriotic Petya joins a crowd in audience of Czar Alexander and manages to snatch a biscuit thrown from the balcony window of the Cathedral of the Assumption by the Czar. He is nearly crushed by the throngs in his effort. Under the influence of the same patriotism, his father finally allows him to enlist. Napoleon himself is the main character in this section, and the novel presents him in vivid detail, both personally and as both a thinker and would-be strategist.

Pierre decides to leave Moscow and go to watch the Battle of Borodino from a vantage point next to a Russian artillery crew. After watching for a time, he begins to join in carrying ammunition. The battle becomes a hideous slaughter for both armies and ends in a standoff. The Russians, however, have won a moral victory by standing up to Napoleon's reputedly invincible army.

The Russian army withdraws the next day, allowing Napoleon to march on to Moscow. Among the casualties are Anatole Kuragin and Prince Andrei. Anatole loses a leg, and Andrei suffers a grenade wound in the abdomen. Both are reported dead, but their families are in such disarray that no one can be notified. The Rostovs have waited until the last minute to abandon Moscow, even after it is clear that Kutuzov has retreated past Moscow and Muscovites are being given contradictory instructions on how to either flee or fight.

Count Fyodor Rostopchin , the commander in chief of Moscow, is publishing posters, rousing the citizens to put their faith in religious icons , while at the same time urging them to fight with pitchforks if necessary. Before fleeing himself, he gives orders to burn the city. The Rostovs have a difficult time deciding what to take with them, but in the end, Natasha convinces them to load their carts with the wounded and dying from the Battle of Borodino.

Unknown to Natasha, Prince Andrei is amongst the wounded. When Napoleon's army finally occupies an abandoned and burning Moscow , Pierre takes off on a quixotic mission to assassinate Napoleon.

He becomes anonymous in all the chaos, shedding his responsibilities by wearing peasant clothes and shunning his duties and lifestyle. The only people he sees are Natasha and some of her family, as they depart Moscow. Natasha recognizes and smiles at him, and he in turn realizes the full scope of his love for her.

Pierre saves the life of a French officer who fought at Borodino, yet is taken prisoner by the retreating French during his attempted assassination of Napoleon , after saving a woman from being raped by soldiers in the French Army. Pierre becomes friends with a fellow prisoner, Platon Karataev, a Russian peasant with a saintly demeanor. In Karataev, Pierre finally finds what he has been seeking: Pierre discovers meaning in life simply by interacting with him. After witnessing French soldiers sacking Moscow and shooting Russian civilians arbitrarily, Pierre is forced to march with the Grand Army during its disastrous retreat from Moscow in the harsh Russian winter.

After months of trial and tribulation—during which the fever-plagued Karataev is shot by the French—Pierre is finally freed by a Russian raiding party led by Dolokhov and Denisov, after a small skirmish with the French that sees the young Petya Rostov killed in action. Meanwhile, Andrei has been taken in and cared for by the Rostovs, fleeing from Moscow to Yaroslavl.

He is reunited with Natasha and his sister Maria before the end of the war. Having lost all will to live, he forgives Natasha in a last act before dying. Pierre is reunited with Natasha, while the victorious Russians rebuild Moscow. Natasha speaks of Prince Andrei's death and Pierre of Karataev's. Both are aware of a growing bond between them in their bereavement. With the help of Princess Maria, Pierre finds love at last and marries Natasha.

The first part of the epilogue begins with the wedding of Pierre and Natasha in Count Rostov dies soon after, leaving his eldest son Nikolai to take charge of the debt-ridden estate. Nikolai finds himself with the task of maintaining the family on the verge of bankruptcy. His abhorrence at the idea of marrying for wealth almost gets in his way, but finally he marries the now-rich Maria Bolkonskaya and in so doing saves his family from financial ruin though manages to do so without selling any of his wife's property.

Nikolai and Maria then move to Bald Hills with his mother and Sonya, whom he supports for the rest of their lives. As in all good marriages, there are misunderstandings, but the couples—Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and Maria—remain devoted to their spouses. Pierre and Natasha visit Bald Hills in There is a hint in the closing chapters that the idealistic, boyish Nikolenka and Pierre would both become part of the Decembrist Uprising.

The first epilogue concludes with Nikolenka promising he would do something with which even his late father "would be satisfied" presumably as a revolutionary in the Decembrist revolt. The second part of the epilogue contains Tolstoy's critique of all existing forms of mainstream history. The 19th-century Great Man Theory claims that historical events are the result of the actions of "heroes" and other great individuals; Tolstoy argues that this is impossible because of how rarely these actions result in great historical events.

Rather, he argues, great historical events are the result of many smaller events driven by the thousands of individuals involved he compares this to calculus, and the sum of infinitesimals. He then goes on to argue that these smaller events are the result of an inverse relationship between necessity and free-will, necessity being based on reason and therefore explainable by historical analysis, and free-will being based on "consciousness" and therefore inherently unpredictable. The novel that made its author "the true lion of the Russian literature " according to Ivan Goncharov [17] [18] enjoyed great success with the reading public upon its publication and spawned dozens of reviews and analytical essays, some of which by Dmitry Pisarev , Pavel Annenkov , Dragomirov and Strakhov formed the basis for the research of later Tolstoy scholars.

The liberal newspaper Golos The Voice, April 3, 93, was one of the first to react. Its anonymous reviewer posed a question later repeated by many others: What kind of genre are we supposed to file it to?.. Where is fiction in it, and where is real history? Writer and critic Nikolai Akhsharumov, writing in Vsemirny Trud 6, suggested that War and Peace was "neither a chronicle, nor a historical novel", but a genre merger, this ambiguity never undermining its immense value. Annenkov, who praised the novel too, was equally vague when trying to classify it. In general, the literary left received the novel coldly.

They saw it as devoid of social critique, and keen on the idea of national unity. They saw its major fault as the "author's inability to portray a new kind of revolutionary intelligentsia in his novel", as critic Varfolomey Zaytsev put it. Shelgunov in Delo magazine characterized the novel as "lacking realism", showing its characters as "cruel and rough", "mentally stoned", "morally depraved" and promoting "the philosophy of stagnation". Still, Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin , who never expressed his opinion of the novel publicly, in private conversation was reported to have expressed delight with "how strongly this Count has stung our higher society".

On the opposite front, the conservative press and "patriotic" authors A. Vyazemsky among them were accusing Tolstoy of consciously distorting history, desecrating the "patriotic feelings of our fathers" and ridiculing dvoryanstvo. One of the first comprehensive articles on the novel was that of Pavel Annenkov, published in 2, issue of Vestnik Evropy. The critic praised Tolstoy's masterful portrayal of man at war, marveled at the complexity of the whole composition, organically merging historical facts and fiction.

Navigation menu

In the end the critic called the novel "the whole epoch in the Russian fiction". Slavophiles declared Tolstoy their " bogatyr " and pronounced War and Peace "the Bible of the new national idea". Strakhov was the first critic in Russia who declared Tolstoy's novel to be a masterpiece of level previously unknown in Russian literature. Still, being a true Slavophile , he could not fail to see the novel as promoting the major Slavophiliac ideas of "meek Russian character's supremacy over the rapacious European kind" using Apollon Grigoriev 's formula.

Years later, in , discussing Strakhov's own book The World as a Whole , Tolstoy criticized both Grigoriev's concept of "Russian meekness vs. Western bestiality" and Strakhov's interpretation of it. Among the reviewers were military men and authors specializing in the war literature. Most assessed highly the artfulness and realism of Tolstoy's battle scenes. The army general and respected military writer Mikhail Dragomirov , in an article published in Oruzheiny Sbornik The Military Almanac , —70 , while disputing some of Tolstoy's ideas concerning the "spontaneity" of wars and the role of commander in battles, advised all the Russian Army officers to use War and Peace as their desk book, describing its battle scenes as "incomparable" and "serving for an ideal manual to every textbook on theories of military art.

Unlike professional literary critics, most prominent Russian writers of the time supported the novel wholeheartedly. Goncharov, Turgenev, Leskov, Dostoyevsky and Fet have all gone on record as declaring War and Peace the masterpiece of the Russian literature. Embracing the whole epoch, it is the grandiose literary event, showcasing the gallery of great men painted by a lively brush of the great master This is one of the most, if not the most profound literary work ever. It also serves as a monument to Russian history's glorious epoch when whatever figure you take is a colossus, a statue in bronze.

Even [the novel's] minor characters carry all the characteristic features of the Russian people and its life. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in a May 30, letter to Strakhov described War and Peace as "the last word of the landlord's literature and the brilliant one at that". In a draft version of The Raw Youth he described Tolstoy as "a historiograph of the dvoryanstvo , or rather, its cultural elite". Nikolai Leskov , then an anonymous reviewer in Birzhevy Vestnik The Stock Exchange Herald , wrote several articles praising highly War and Peace , calling it "the best ever Russian historical novel" and "the pride of the contemporary literature".

Marveling at the realism and factual truthfulness of Tolstoy's book, Leskov thought the author deserved the special credit for "having lifted up the people's spirit upon the high pedestal it deserved". In this respect the novel of Count Tolstoy could be seen as an epic of the Great national war which up until now has had its historians but never had its singers", Leskov wrote. Afanasy Fet , in a January 1, letter to Tolstoy, expressed his great delight with the novel. The manner in which Count Tolstoy conducts his treatise is innovative and original.

War and Peace

The first French edition of the War and Peace paved the way for the worldwide success of Leo Tolstoy and his works. Since then many world-famous authors have praised War and Peace as a masterpiece of the world literature. Gustave Flaubert expressed his delight in a January letter to Turgenev, writing: What an artist and what a psychologist! The first two volumes are exquisite. I used to utter shrieks of delight while reading.

Collecting War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo - First edition identification guide

This is powerful, very powerful indeed. Romain Rolland , remembering his reading the novel as a student, wrote: It is life itself in its eternal movement. Isaak Babel said, after reading War and Peace , "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. This is the reason for our trust in his presentation. War and Peace has been translated into many languages. It has been translated into English on several occasions, starting with Clara Bell working from a French translation. Only about 2 percent of War and Peace is in French; Tolstoy removed the French in a revised edition, only to restore it later.

Unlike the other translators, Dunnigan even succeeds with many characteristically Russian folk expressions and proverbs. She is faithful to the text and does not hesitate to render conscientiously those details that the uninitiated may find bewildering: On the Garnett translation Pavlovskis-Petit writes: War and Peace is frequently inexact and contains too many anglicisms. Her style is awkward and turgid, very unsuitable for Tolstoi.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the novel by Leo Tolstoy. For other uses, see War and Peace disambiguation. List of War and Peace characters. Encyclopedia of Russian Literature. Cambridge University Press, pp. New York City , New York: Leo Tolstoy , Routledge Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace. Retrieved 29 January The New York Review of Books. The ideology of English: French perceptions of English as a world language. Catherine the Great and the French philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Grim.

Retrieved 3 December Works in 12 volumes.