Sessions will be facilitated by Roxana Zirakzadeh and Andy Gilman.

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Regarded by many as one of the greatest novels ever written, War and Peace was published in 1869 and set during the Napoleonic Wars. Like other works often placed into this type of genre, War and Peace is hardly conventional, and is not even easy to categorize. Tolstoy himself points out that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence he hesitated to classify the book solely as a novel, a poem, or a historical chronicle… and we shall take his lead in this series. The author worked from extensive source material, including interviews, original documents from the war three generations before, history books (revered and criticized), and other historical novels. Tolstoy also drew from his own experience from the Crimean War. 

In 1876 Dostoevsky wrote: "My strong conviction is that a writer of fiction has to have most profound knowledge - not only of the poetic side of his art, but also the reality he deals with, in its historical as well as contemporary context. Here [in Russia], as far as I see it, only one writer excels in this, Count Lev Tolstoy. Isaac Babel said, after reading War and Peace, "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy." 

Online seminars in this series will take place on Thursday evenings, 5:30-7:00PM Pacific Time. Attendees will be mailed the text. Sessions will be facilitated by Roxana Zirakzadeh and Andy Gilman. Groups will be limited to 16 participants and no prior knowledge is required. Teachers will be offered 3 CEU credits for participating. This twenty-two-week series is $800. Community of Lifelong Learner subscribers receive a discount of $100 through a refund. Payment options are available.