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Leo Tolstoy was born in central Russia on 9 September 1828.In 1852 he published his first work, the autobiographical Childhood. He served in the army during the Crimean War and his Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6) are based on his experiences. His two most popular masterpieces are War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-8). He died in 20 November 1910. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have been nominated for the PEN-Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize three times and have won it twice. They live in Paris
It may sound pretentious, or strange, but I can remember the weeks (three weeks, to be precise) I spent reading War and Peace as a peak experience of sustained excitement and deep delight. Part of the delight was the largeness and strangeness of this world - the sense of the vastness and extremes of Russia, the unboundedness of everything * Finacial Times * Reveals Tolstoy in his majestic scope and precision to this reader for the first time, unencumbered by the pidgin archaisms of previous translations, ringing with mastery and truth * Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year * It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this would be it -- Andrew Marr This is, at last, a translation of War and Peace without the dreadful misunderstandings and improvements that plague all other translations of the novel into English. Pevear and Volokhonsky's supple and compelling translation is the closest that an English reader without Russian can get to Tolstoy's masterwork. This is a great achievement. It is hard to imagine how this translation could be superseded. -- Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it * The Times *
