Matthew Arnold once said that a novel by Tolstoy isn’t a work of art but a piece of life. It’s hard to conceive of higher praise than that for a novelist, whose difficult task is to distill the human experience into the pages of a book.
Many readers and critics agree with Arnold and consider the praise to be justified. Indeed, many consider Tolstoy to be the greatest novelist of all time. “War and Peace” is often pronounced the greatest novel ever written.
