The great writers of the last two centuries have competed with each other to heap praise on Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace. "What an artist and what a psychologist!"-- Gustave Flaubert, Tolstoy's contemporary, on reading War and Peace. More recently, Virginia Woolf commented "There remains the greatest of all novelists, for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?"

Louise and Aylmer Maude, the translators of this edition, knew Tolstoy personally, and he approved this translation.