Epic in scope and thematic diversity, ranges across a vast canvas and cast, eschewing received history as it creates alternative vision ( )

Took me so long to read as it was really heavy going, but i enjoyed it, a well crafted novel that develops beautifully, because of its length you really get to learn about the characters, settings and everything else you can imagine, for a book so old it really has stood the test of time. ( )

I love these characters. ( )

Still holds up after more than a century and a half, especially in the lively, idiiomatic new translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky, which captures Tolstoy's style. His shrewd comments about war on pp. 600-604 could have been used in the 60's anti-war demonstrations, and by modern history scholars still dissecting the Civil War. 1200 pages, and gripping all the way, after you master the character's' names that is. I copied the list of characters from the beginning of the book and referred to it for about 50 pages, and then just sped along. Tolstoy really skewers phonies, portrays people as realistic whole characters, and is not above gentle satire of his own noble class. He was way ahead of his time in seeing the peasantry as real people, often intelligent, often crafty. Recall most Russians in the 18th and early centuries were serfs, virtually slaves, and were looked down upon by the upper class. ( )

I am now in the middle of the 4th and last volume so I think, bar accidents, I am pretty sure to finish it. It has completely changed my view of novels.

Hitherto I had always looked on them as rather a dangerous form - I mean dangerous to the health of literature as a whole. I thought that the strong 'narrative lust' - the passionate itch to 'see what happened in the end' - which novels aroused, necessarily injured the taste for other, better, but less irresistable, forms of literary pleasure: and that the growth of novel reading largely explained the deplorable division of readers into low-brow and high-brow - the low being simply those who had learned to expect from books this 'narrative lust', from the time they began to read, and who had thus destroyed in advance their possible taste for better things. I also thought that the intense desire which novels rouse in us for the 'happiness' of the chief characters (no one feels that way about Hamlet or Othello) and the selfishness with which this happiness is concerned, were thoroughly bad (I mean, if the hero and heroine marry, that is felt to be a happy ending, tho every one else in the story is left miserable: if they don't that is an unhappy ending, tho it may mean a much greater good in some other way). Of course I knew there were tragic novels like Hardy's - but somehow they were quite on a different plane from real tragedies.

Tolstoy, in this book, has changed all that. I have felt everywhere - in a sense - you will know what I mean - that sublime indifference to the life or death, success or failure, of the chief characters, which is not a blank indifference at all, but almost like submission to the will of God. Then the variety of it. The war parts are just the best descriptions of war ever written: all the modern war books are milk and water to this: then the rural parts - lovely pictures of village life and of religious festivals in wh. the relations between the peasants and the nobles almost make you forgive feudalism: the society parts, in which I was astonished to find so much humour - there is a great hostess who always separates two guests when she sees them getting really interested in conversation, who is almost a Jane Austen character. There are love-passages that have the same sort of intoxicating quality you get in Meredith: and passages about soldiers chatting over fires which remind one of Patsy Macan: and a drive in a sledge by moonlight which is better than Hans Andersen. And behind all these, and uniting them, is the profound, religious conception of life and history wh. is beyond J. Stephens and Andersen, and beside which Meredith's worldly wisdom - well just stinks, there's no other word.

I go on writing all this because my pen runs away with me: meanwhile perhaps you have read the book long ago and even advised me to read it! If you have not, I strongly advise you to try it. Its length, which deters some people, will not frighten you: you will only rejoice, when the right time comes - say after tea some day next autumn when fires are still a novelty - at that old, delicious feeling of embarkation on a long voyage, which one seldom gets now. For it takes a book nearly as long as War and Peace to seem as long now as a Scott did in boyhood.
- from a 29 March 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume I ( )