Thanks to all, panelists and commentators alike, for your thoughtful and vivid contributions to our first Reading Room. Anything you’ve left unsaid? Fresh apercus you’re keen to share? In December we’ll return to discuss another classic, “The Education of Henry Adams.” There’ll be a new panel and a new moderator from the Book Review. You’ve got a few weeks, so start reading now.
Meanwhile, readers keen to re-experience “War and Peace” may be interested in another new translation — in fact an altogether different version of the novel — just released by Ecco Press. The translator is Andrew Bromfield. Here’s how Daniel Halpern, Ecco’s publisher, describes the book:
[P]ublished in Russian only seven years ago, [it] represents Tolstoy’s first completed draft of the epic that would later undergo intense rewriting and revision. Bromfield has created the first and only English-language translation, [working from a text] reconstructed from Tolstoy scholar Evelina Zaidenshnur’s fifty years of painstaking research and analysis of the massive Tolstoy archives. It is based on an earlier, shorter text — which differs from the 1500-page “canonical” text — and includes the reproductions of the original Nikolai Bashilov drawings (and others) commissioned by Tolstoy.
This version is an altogether different work from any War and Peace readers have previously encountered — different, but no less “authentic” — without the revisions that later followed from the author, which added lengthy historical and philosophical passages, as well as much dialogue in French. This edition follows the original by translating all that dialogue out of the French. These characteristics have made for a version that some have called “more accessible” and “reader friendly.”
