"The Red and the White" offers a clear echo of one major literary accomplishment and in its form it challenges a second masterpiece. There are similarities, both of large design and of special technique, between "The Red and the White" and "War and Peace."

Having marched boldly into such company the book must justify its ambition by showing a brilliant command of its material. And it does show that command. Encompassing chaos, as the Russian revolution is dramatized in the process of destroying an old way of life, the novel brings into artistic order a monumental account of the sufferings, loyalties, betrayals, deaths, and rebirths incident to such a gigantic convulsion of social evolution.

As his master Tolstoy did before him, Troyat looks at a crisis in world history over the shoulders of a tight little circle of representative men and women. The members of the Arapov family...