Scholars have an academic view on the classic Russian novels - and one needs to know for sure who the ‘bad’ or ‘good’ guy is among the characters and what the author’s attitude to the subject matter of his writing. That’s the most frequent question that a Russian school kid has to answer while studying literature. In Russia, we used to laugh that school girls usually read only ‘peace’ pages flipping through ‘war’ ones, while the boys, in contrast, preferred the descriptions of the battle scenes rather than Natasha Rostova’s feelings.

Petersburg, both noble society and peasantry and, of course, both war and peace times.

Rewriting the novel about six times (and his wife had to do it by hand every time), Leo Tolstoy managed to show both Moscow and St. ‘War and Peace’ is an epic novel that tells a story of several families and another hundred characters and their private lives, while the major historical background is the war between Russia and Napoleonic France. That's around 7 hours of subtitles for those inclined to see this spectacle in it's purest form.Natasha Rostova is known to be a young and lighthearted girl, but finds happiness in marriage and kids, while her family suffers from debts and her first fiance dies at war between Russia and Napoleonic France. Image/Rusico is presenting a definitive DVD version in the Sovscope widescreen ratio with the original 70mm six-track magoptical sound on four discs. A colossal epic that gives true meaning to the term 'years in the making with a cast of thousands!'. All in all, this is probably the biggest visual spectacle ever put on film, even in the age of CGI (a fact which only makes the viewer more appreciative of the logistics involved in setting up a production as big as this). There's enough creative casting to make most of the characters come alive, although much of the drama is wooden and stagey (just as in the book, I might add). The production design and set pieces are delivered on a massive scale, with battle scenes that are basically re-enactments of history. It's generally successful in a clinical way. It's a long, two-part movie that tries to give moviegoers as much of an experience as readers often get from the novel. Bondarchuk brings Tolstoy's enormous literary work to the screen with all the scope and pomposity that the Soviet film industry could muster in the sixties.

War & peace leo tolstoy