Two non-Russians translating War and Peace at the height of the first Red Scare - it sounds positively awful.

The things that you've said about the Easton Press just reinforce everything that I keep saying about translations! I was looking, after I read Siddhartha in German, at amazon.com's English versions because I was thinking of linking the book, but apparently there's a big translation scandal (based on the comments) about that book, too.

I may write a separate review of War and Peace at some point just to expand on the reason that War and Peace is universally read in Russia but not with the same fervor that accompanies the reading of other authors and works. As with most great writers (yet another way in which real literature and bad derivative genre fiction differ), it is very hard to separate Tolstoy the man with Tolstoy the writer and his books.

The entire phenomenon of "Tolstoyism" was a highly controversial one. Tolstoy remains a heretic for the Orthodox Church, and most Russians find his ideology dissatisfying. I personally loathe his elevation of the Russian peasant (honestly, I would probably loathe the elevation of any group in the way Tolstoy does it). I find that his complete and total destruction of Natasha Rostova as a person betrays his rampant misogyny (Chekhov parodied this in Dushechka, and Tolstoy responded by saying that he felt Dushechka portrayed a "perfect woman", completely missing the sarcasm).

As a result, when I hear "Tolstoy" I think "misogynistic crazy old man who thought he was better than everyone else, became a vocal vegetarian and helped contribute to a failed social experiment that had disastrous results for Russia and the world - oh, and he was a phenomenal writer".

For all that, his prose style is arguably one of the best of all the Russian writers. He is direct and clear and uses his words well. Pushkin is probably the only writer that is stylistically better. Aesthetically, I think there are several writers on a par with him and only a few that are better. Ideologically, however, he's down At the Bottom with Gorky.