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Originally Posted by JSWolf
What is the best edition of War and Peace?
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Although it can be had free from many sources, my favorite is the latest translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It's not a freebie, by any stretch, 12.99 at amazon. It is heavily footnoted with biographical (on the military side, where the characters are real people) and Russian Culture information of the time.
War and Peace traditionally had a large amount of dialog text in French, for example in the opening scene in Anna Pavlovana's drawing room. Upper society in Russia at the time spoke a good deal of French. Tolstoy wrote it that way. The latest translation keeps with that tradition, but is footnoted for the proper translation of the French. You will notice that the amount of French decreases with time as French influence with Russia decreases as result of the wars, particularly the Napolean Invasion.
It's best to read on an iPad, which makes navigating the many footnotes and translated French a bit easier. I didn't have my kindle voyage at the time, but might be easy on that. It would be difficult without a touch feature type kindle to quickly navigate the many footnotes and French translations by moving a cursor and hitting enter, like in older kindles.
The other translation I've read is the Signet Translation. It gets around the french problem, by not having all the passages in French, just maybe the first few words. For example in Anna Pavlovana's drawing room, the first words spoken by Anna to Prince Vasily are "Eh bien, mon prince....", the rest of the passage is in English. In the aforementioned translation the whole first paragraph is actually in French, with Pavlovana complaining of the antichrist, Napolean. Signet does it this way so you get a sense of when french is spoken without having to have all the French in it. The Signet translation is 1.99, and was the first translation I read, in paperback. (And I carried it around in my briefcase on many business trips!)
The Signet is an easier read, but if you want to learn about the culture, and the biographical information of the main real characters and some of the military history of the wars, then read the aforementioned version. The footnotes are very detailed, in one instance down to the level of describing that a particular communique dispatched prior to a battle was indeed the actual sent communique. It's a great read in either version, but reading the aforementioned version was an eye opener for me, and that was the third time I read it.
The cover of the signet classics edition says it's the greatest novel ever written. I'd tend to agree. Tolstoy himself didn't classify it as a novel, however, saying Anna Karenia was his first novel, even though he wrote War and Peace first. War and Peace is a story woven around a telling of the true events of the War in 1805, and then Napolean's invasion of Russia, hence Tolstoy's classification of it not being his first novel.