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A Study Guide for Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
A Study Guide for Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
A Study Guide for Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
Ebook33 pages32 minutes

A Study Guide for Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Themes for Students: War and Peace.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Themes for Students: War and Peace for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 21, 2015
ISBN9781535842396
A Study Guide for Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace

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    A Study Guide for Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace - Gale

    1

    War and Peace

    Leo Tolstoy

    1865

    Introduction

    War and Peace, by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, is often called the greatest novel ever written. It is certainly one of the longest, and its great length is one source of its enduring fame and reputation. The panoramic novel tells a story of sweeping scope that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars in early nineteenth-century Europe. The events depicted in the novel begin in 1805 and end in 1812, the year of Napoleon Bonaparte's fateful invasion of Russia. It is a story of wartime and peacetime, love and marriage, birth and death. It is a story of families, of societies and nations, of soldiers and civilians, of peasants and nobility, of country estates and city salons. In short, War and Peace is a novel that attempts to seemingly encompass and interconnect every aspect of life.

    Tolstoy's contemporaries were never quite sure what to call War and Peace. It had too many unusual elements to be classified simply as a novel, and indeed, Tolstoy himself denied that it was a novel. What was it then? What is it now? It is a novel, of course, but it is more than that. It is a study of history and historians, a unique portrayal of Russian society, a philosophical tract, and an attempt at Russian mythmaking. Tolstoy presented history using the techniques of fiction and analyzed that history within the text itself. He then attached a purely philosophical (and much-criticized) epilogue on the nature of history, power, and free will. The book is often described as a prose epic, a designation that links it to the great verse epics of the ancient Greek poet Homer and those of Virgil, his Roman

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