Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Indialog Publications
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 1111
ISBN/UPC (if available): 818798175X
Description
Tolstoy's aesthetic and ethical web brings into its compassionate fold, a varied group of individuals, both “great” and “small,” “important” and “insignificant,” all richly detailed, and fully fleshed out. A human being is not characterized by merely the great events of his/her life; rather, the certain nuances of behaviour, and the everyday responses to everyday situations articulate the way one is.
In War and Peace, with the characters of Natasha, Pierre, Princess Mary, Helene, Nicholas, early nineteenth century Russia comes alive with the smell and taste of life in all its vivid details. Tolstoy's artistic vision succeeds in converging and commingling the apparently contradictory aspects of life and history, the private and the public, and the struggle between the inexorable rush of historical determinism and individual will.
EXCERPT
The best way to obtain true happiness is without any rules, to throw out from oneself on all sides, like a spider, an adhesive web of love to catch in it all that comes: an old woman, a child, a girl, or a policeman.
-Tolstoy