I am reading him like I read War and Peace as a vast panorama of Russian society at a particular time and place. It is a great adventure.
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At _what_ "particular time." Tolsoi is writing in the late 19th-c; the novel is set in the early 19th-c. I would suspect that the 'grain' of the novel was more that of the late centyury than of the period the novel is set in. But I don't know enough about Russian social history to judge it concretely. (For what it's worth, the Iliad is 'accurate' neither for its own time nor for the time it refers to, but for a period slightly earlier than the period of its composition.)
Carrol