WAR AND PEACE

New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1886. First US edition. Near fine.. First edition in English of one of the great novels of the 19th century, an exceptionally fresh and bright set. A remarkably lovely set of this first English rendering of Tolstoy's monumental classic, translated by Clara Bell by way of the French. The novel's quality survived the linguistic journey intact; as an anonymous reviewer wrote, "the worst paraphrasing from Russian to French and from French to English cannot efface the brilliant effects of the original." Contemporary enthusiasm for the Russian novelists, and for Tolstoy in particular, was stronger and steadier in the US than in England: by the 1870s, "there were probably three times as many American as British translations, and their quality was generally superior as well" (May). Tolstoy had then the power not only to awe the Anglophone world, but to shock it; but those critics who found his novels "as dirty and obscene as the worst parts of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass" (Maurice Thompson) fell into obscurity without wounding their target, whose stature has never diminished. "There remains the greatest of all novelists-for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?" (Woolf). Six volumes, 6'' x 4.5'' each. Original brown cloth with decorative stamping in black and bright gilt. Dark brown endpapers. All title pages dated 1886, Gottsberger imprint on versos. 322, [14] publisher's advertisements; 357, [1], [2] ads]; 321, [1]; 270, [10] ads; 290, [10] ads; 391, [1] pages. Housed in custom clamshell box. Early ink ownership signature to front free endpaper of one volume. Minor wear and slight bumping to extremities, nearly invisible touch up to some spine heads; one volume only with tiny dampstain at gutter. Overall clean and tight.