War and Peace. A Historical Novel.

TOLSTOY, Leo. [Count Lyof N Tolstoi].

Item Number: 115458

New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1887-88.

First American edition, early printings of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Small octavo, six volumes, original wrappers. Translated from the French edition by Clara Bell. In very good condition with some rubbing and wear to the extremities. Exceptionally rare in the original wrappers, with no examples traced at auction in the last 80 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).