[lbo-talk] (no subject) War and Peace

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Tolstoy is writing about a generation after the event. He did exhaustive research in writing the book; it is the greatest historical novel written to date. For a discussion of the historical novel and its significance, Lukacs' "The Historical Novel" has not been bettered. 

Joanna 

----- Original Message ----- 
Chuck Grimes 

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. 

-------- 

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 

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