https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leo-tolstoy/war-and-peace/louise-maude_aylmer-maude
Just sharing another book. Enjoy!
"Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, five aristocratic families in Russia are transformed by the vagaries of life, by war, and by the intersection of their lives with each other. Hundreds of characters populate War and Peace, many of them historical persons, including Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I, and all of them come to life under Tolstoy’s deft hand."
If only Lev's writing style and this topic fit you. I was surprised to discover in my school years that many had read it or at least claimed it, while I couldn't start to care two books in before dropping it altogether the first time, while I was the only one who could finish Quite Don, another long masterpiece from another author, that describes how pre- and revolutionary times of total chaos affected the lives of ordinary people, they both studied in the last years of HS. I feel like it's both me being pissed off at (less) pretentiousness and (more of) overblown reputation of the first opus and also the more grounded, simple theming of the second one that I can relate to as a poor left-leaning person. I don't want to underappreciate it's language and symbolism, their long-going tree metaphor is a noticaebale highlight of all russian lit, and one character being concussed under the beatiful skies of Austerlitz (first book) is a banger of a quality rarely seen before, but for a majorly lefty platform like Lemmy, I'd recomend Scholokhov's work as a viable alternative if one would get bored with Leo's writing like me. That story, surpisingly approved by Stalin, may give some insights into how average person could feel and act trying to survive in the polarized society of an ongoing civil war. And that's frustratingly actual in these tiring times.