How Do You Read “War And Peace”?
So you’ve decided to take on take on one of the greatest literary achievements known to man: Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. Are you prepared to tackle a work so monumental that it covers 125+ characters in 1000+ pages? Here are some simple tips to help you so. Buy War and Peace. If you don’t speak Russian, I recommend the English translation. Constance Garnett’s translation is the most widely accepted version among scholars. Don’t fret over the long names. Russian employs the use of a special name called a patronymic, which is quite similar to our middle names. It involves taking the first name of your father, and adding the prefix -ich if you’re male, or -ovna if you’re female. So if your father’s name was Nikolai and you’re a boy, your patronymic would be Nikolayevich. Similarly, don’t let the millions of nicknames Tolstoy uses for each character confuse you. In Russian there are several diminutive forms for each name. Remember these as simply nicknames, which are often used between
