Voina I Mir (War and Peace).

TOLSTOY, Leo. (Count Lyof N Tolstoi).

Item Number: 4446

Moscow: T. Ris, 1868-69.

First edition. Octavo, 3 volumes, contemporary half morocco, gilt titles to the spine. All half titles present. Unlike Anna Karenina, War and Peace first appeared in full book form, not in periodicals. Six parts bound in three volumes. In very good condition with all the half title pages present, pre-revolutionary stamp on the title pages. Some light foxing and wear to the page edges, a clean set of this rarity. Only a handful of first editions have appeared at auction in the last eighty years.

Widely considered the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the human spirit. Tolstoy’s genius is seen clearly in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle—all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual’s place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: "To read him . . . is to find one’s way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane." "There remains the greatest of all novelists--for what else can we call the author of War and Peace" (Virginia Woolf).