Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (first complete edition, 1869) is the most ambitious novel ever written and, by common agreement, one of the greatest. Across more than a thousand pages it follows several aristocratic families — the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, and the scheming Kuragins — through the Napoleonic Wars, from the glittering drawing rooms of 1805 to the French invasion of Russia in 1812, the carnage at Borodino, the burning of Moscow, and the retreat that destroyed Napoleon's Grande Armée.

But the wars are only the weather. The book's true subject is its people: Pierre Bezukhov, the awkward heir who searches through wealth, faith, and captivity for a way to live; Prince Andrei, who goes to war for glory and is changed forever by a glimpse of the open sky; and Natasha Rostova, whose journey from a girl's first ball through betrayal and grief to hard-won maturity carries the novel's deepest current of life. Around them move hundreds of figures, historical and invented, rendered with a realism so complete that the book reads less like a story than like life itself observed from above.

Woven through the narrative is Tolstoy's great argument about history — his rejection of the "great man" theory, his conviction that kings are the slaves of history, his sense that vast impersonal forces, not commanders, decide the fate of nations. Against the emperors' delusion of control he sets the peasant Platon Karataev, whose simple acceptance teaches the captive Pierre what no philosophy could. The result is at once an intimate family chronicle and a meditation on chance, freedom, and meaning.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude — the version Tolstoy himself approved — in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.