instal the new version for apple War and Peace

More surprisingly, the US, even during the cold war, paid its respects to the text at the culture factories on both coasts.

As part of a Year of Literature, declared in 2015 in what is now the Russian Federation, a four-day continuous public reading of the book was broadcast live on television, radio and internet.Īudrey Hepburn as Natasha and Vitorio Gassman as Anatol in 1956. The old Soviet Union considered Tolstoy’s novel a work of such national importance that millions of state roubles backed Sergei Bondarchuk’s mid-60s movie version, which was reported to have sold 135m tickets at the time of its first release. Its status as an exemplar of seriousness has long made the book attractive to cultural commissars wishing to emphasise their highbrow credentials. Critics indicting a writer for glibness or triviality will sniff that the volume on offer is “not exactly War and Peace”.

And, because the novel’s bulk includes lengthy reflections on politics, philosophy and theology, it also serves as a standard of intellectual ambition. Official reports – into Bloody Sunday or the Iraq war – are described by the press as being, for example, “three times longer than War and Peace”. As the book is around 1,300 pages long, it has become shorthand for prolixity. In English vernacular, the title of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 epic about the Napoleonic wars does double metaphorical service.

Instal the new version for apple War and Peace