Recommendations
Books Like War and Peace
Best books to read after War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's War and Peace is a novel of extraordinary scope — five aristocratic families, the Napoleonic Wars, the burning of Moscow, and a philosophical argument about whether history is made by great men or by the accumulated weight of millions of small decisions. These recommendations extend the experience through Tolstoy's other major works and through epic fiction that shares its ambition.
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's other great novel — the story of Anna's affair, her social destruction, and her parallel with Levin's search for meaning in the country. Generally considered slightly more unified than War and Peace (Anna Karenina has no philosophical digressions) and the most natural next Tolstoy novel.
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's late novella about a judge who discovers he is dying and realizes he has lived incorrectly — the compressed, spiritual counterpart to the large social panoramas of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Often read as a pivot point in Tolstoy's career toward the religious and moral writings of his later period.
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian novel that most seriously rivals War and Peace in ambition and depth — a murder trial, a philosophical argument about God and suffering, and a portrait of three brothers whose different relationships to faith define the range of Russian spiritual life. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky together define the nineteenth-century Russian novel.
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Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
The French novel that most directly parallels War and Peace in its ambition: both are enormous novels with historical panoramas, philosophical digressions, and a moral argument about the relationship between individual goodness and social justice. Reading Hugo and Tolstoy together shows the range of nineteenth-century European social fiction.
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The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal
Stendhal's 1839 novel about Fabrice del Dongo — the Battle of Waterloo seen from ground level — was one of Tolstoy's direct influences on his own battle scenes. The Waterloo chapters of The Charterhouse are the direct ancestor of the Borodino chapters of War and Peace.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The British novel that most seriously rivals War and Peace in its social comprehensiveness and its interest in what individuals owe each other — Dorothea Brooke, like Pierre Bezukhov, is a person of large aspirations and genuine goodness operating in a world smaller than their capacities.
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Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
Pasternak's 1957 novel about a doctor-poet in Russia from the Revolution through the Civil War is the twentieth-century Russian attempt at the scope and historical ambition of War and Peace — a personal love story embedded in the largest historical events of the era.
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Resurrection
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's 1899 novel — his last — about a nobleman who recognizes a woman he seduced and abandoned years earlier among the prisoners he is asked to judge, and who tries to make amends. The late Tolstoy novel that most directly expresses his moral and spiritual views, and a natural next step after War and Peace.
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