When “War and Peace” was first published in the 1868, people weren't even sure what to call it. Tolstoy's sense of life was too big to be captured by any traditional narrative. One critic called him “a giant harnessed to his great subject” – the whole of human life.

The book also became an epic, Oscar-winning Soviet film. Director Sergey Bondarchuk’s 1968 screen version took seven years to make – longer than it took Tolstoy to write its subject. Costing, what was at the time, an astonishing $100 million, it took seven hours to watch.

For one modern Russian novelist, Zakhar Prilepin, it displays the complete canvas of the human condition – everything from the universe to first love, and the lives of both rich and poor.

“War and Peace has everything that concerns people – love, jealousy, passion, war, peace and courage. It helps not only solve the mystery of the Russian nation, but it also helps understand humans placed in various circumstances, balancing between life and death,” Prilepin believes.

The book has been translated into many languages. Tony Briggs has produced one of the many English versions, 1,400 pages in all, and a gargantuan 366 chapters.

“The story of ‘War and Peace’ is how we get it wrong, how complicated and difficult life is. There’s a famous Russian proverb – ‘Living a life is not just crossing a field’ – and one of the things about war and peace is that privileged people have got everything going for them until they find life a difficult, disappointing business,” Briggs says.

Nabokov also in top ten

The must-read list was put together by Newsweek magazine, and took into account such reasons as the influence of the book on history, its intellectual impact and significance in modern times, as well as its popularity among critics and readers.

It was chosen by a rather varied cast – including US libraries and universities, and even American celebrity Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

Russian readers have mixed views on whether such lists are of real literary importance. Many believe the general concept of comparing books to be baseless.

However, Tolstoy is not the only Russian author to hit the “top ten” rating – Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel “Lolita” came fourth, outdone only by George Orwell's “1984” and James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.

Among other key works on the list are William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”, Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” and Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy”.