"The Red and the White" is Troyat's most ambitious and most successful novel to date. It is a variegated picture of Russia during World War I and through the two revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent civil war….

The reader is at first bewildered by the profusion of details and the multiplicity of scenes and characters. [Five] or six secondary plots unfold simultaneously. Characters appear and disappear. A few lines of narrative recall the general background of events that filled history in 1915–19. The individual fortunes of the members of one large family and of their friends are the warp and woof of this bulky novel. (p. 7)

The author is an expert story teller, omniscient but never obtrusive or pedantic, able to shift his point of view from the battle scenes at the front to dismal hospital rooms, then to the mob discontent with the Czarina and Rasputin, to the...