WAR AND PEACE. A Historical Novel...Translated into French by A Russian Lady and From the French by Clara Bell. Revised and Corrected in the United States

New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1886. 6 volumes. First edition in English, First Issue of each volume with the proper dating and Gottsberger imprint to the verso of each title-page. 8vo, publisher’s original brown cloth lettered in gilt on the spines, with black tooled borders and gilt pictorial decorations in all over designs to the covers. 322, [6 ads]; 357, [2 ads]; 321; 270, [10 ads]; ii, 290, [10 ads]; 391. A very pleasing set of this rare survival. The original cloth remains in quite good condition, the hinges are strong and tight, some light edgewear to expected areas of the cloth, the tips and the spine ends just a bit rubbed primarily from shelving, two volumes with a bit more wear to the tips of the spines than the others. Ads comport with those in the copy at Harvard University. RARE FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH. A COMPLETE SET OF FIRST ISSUE VOLUMES, ALL IN ORIGINAL BINDINGS AND IN A PLEASING STATE OF PRESERVATION. Tolstoy’s epic of the Napoleonic wars has few peers in world literature; John Galsworthy described it as “the greatest novel ever written.” E. M. Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel , declared that “(N)o English novelist is as great as Tolstoy, that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side.” Similarly, De Vogüé, the “greatest French authority on Russian literature...remarks that:...’ It is a faithful picture of life: the experience of a traveller thrown among a society new to him--constraint and boredom at first, then curiosity and at last a firm attachment. I admit sotto voce that I know nothing superior to it in any literature.’”
War and Peace can be said to stand “at the crucial point where the modern novel begins.” Tolstoy’s immediate predecessors in the development of the modern novel were the great French analytical novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Rousseau and Stendhal, who influenced Tolstoy greatly. Tolstoy registered this change in distinguishing his method--the point of view method--from the old dramatic method, such as found in Dostoevsky. Very loosely, the point of view method did not simply relate words and actions of characters, as in the dramatic method, but provided psychological insight as to why characters thought and acted the way they did. “Tolstoy in War and Peace transcends the limit of the novel and does what had previously been done by the epic. Thus War and Peace has to be put in a group not with Madame Bovary, Vanity Fair, or the Mill on the Floss, but with the Iliad, in the sense that when the novel is finished nothing is finished--the stream of life flows on, and with the appearance of Prince Andrew’s son the novel ends on the beginning of a new life.”
‘Tolstoy’s original intention was to recount the Decembrist movement which culminated in the revolt of 1825 and was the predecessor to the “back to the people” movement of the seventies and the revolutionary movements that culminated in the communist overthrow of tsarist power in 1917. However, when Tolstoy began to investigate the Decembrist conspiracy, he began to delve deeper into the historical events preceding it. That is, to the French invasion in 1812 and the Russian events leading up to the invasion. Although Tolstoy was interested in the role that the Masons played in opposing tsarist power, these parts were probably made ambiguous by the censors of the time.’