Public domain novels such as Louisa May Alcott and Dickens have been wonderful sources for plays, short stories, and other creative projects. I was surprised to find, however, that the 1922 public domain translation of War and Peace hasn’t been used much by students to create new works. This is especially remarkable because Tolstoy himself was such a critic of copyrights! I think few students take advantage of the public domain status of War and Peace because current translations are so confusing. Students usually need to find the French phrases the in footnotes, for instance. Tolstoy’s insistence on using a half-dozen names for many characters doesn’t help readability nor all the anachronisms in the text. I decided to make a free public domain (Creative Commons) resource for students. On this website are several free resources, including my edit of the novel. I re-edited War and Peace to simplify the names. I also translated all the foreign words into English (and placed them directly in the text) and eliminated many of the anachronisms.
My version (along with Maudes’ version) is now freely available to download in EPUB, MOBI, PDF, or an editable version (RTF or DOCX). Or you can read the text online. My hope is that students of Tolstoy will be inspired to create their own creative works based on War and Peace. Also, students who are writing papers can use the simplified names version for textual analysis. Questions such as “Who does Tolstoy write about more, Count Rostov or his wife?” or “When is the last mention of Lise in the book?” can be answered much more easily with this electronic version because the characters are not referred to as “Natasha’s mother” or “the little Princess”, etc.