Languagehat on Tolstoy

Languagehat on Tolstoy’s use of repetition, and the translation of War and Peace:

One of the things that surprised me when I started reading War and Peace in Russian was that it wasn’t particularly well written in the “fine writing,” Nabokovian sense. The sentences were baggy, the words were not carefully harmonized, and there was an astonishing amount of repetition. But le style, c’est l’homme, and Tolstoy himself was baggy and unharmonized, and I was soon as caught up in the story as I had been when I read it in English.