

Two respected new translations made War and Peace widely available in paperback in the second half of the twentieth century, one by the British translator Rosemary Edmonds for Penguin Classics in 1957, and the other by the American Ann Dunnigan for Signet Classics in 1968. In fact, about a dozen translations have appeared since the novel’s first complete publication in Russian in 1869, but only a handful stand out.

Which translation of War and Peace should I read?īy Rosamund Bartlett, translator and author of Tolstoy: A Russian Life.Īs with most of the Russian classics, there are several translations of Tolstoy’s immortal War and Peace for the anglophone reader to choose from.

