“Bloody hell, Prince Vasíli, Genoa and Luca are pretty much just Napoleon’s holiday homes now,” reads the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s seminal epic, War and Peace.
It goes on to depict a 19th-century St Petersburg populated by “posh wankers”, “complete drongos”, “gorgeous sheilas” and “massive pissheads”. They “talk shit”, give “zero fucks” and drink “cuppas”, and before long, soldiers start “fanging about”.
Astute readers may twig that this is not Tolstoy’s original Russian prose, published in 1869, or any of the widely available English translations now in the public domain.
This is the “bogan Australian” edition by Ander Louis, the pen name of a 39-year-old IT analyst and father of two based in Victoria.
“In 2019 I had no kids and no job, so a lot of time to pursue silly things,” Louis explains over Zoom from his family home in Melbourne’s outer north.
Louis had first read War and Peace just a few years earlier. He had always loved literature, self-publishing several novels and teaching creative writing to school groups – where he would jokingly tell kids that every aspiring writer needed to read Tolstoy’s 150-year-old classic.
“But none of them do, myself included,” he laughs.
The 1,200-page tome had always seemed “unapproachable”. Then, in 2017, he joined a Reddit group that pledged to crack it in a year, communally reading one of its 361 chapters each day. What started as a challenge became a revelation, and soon Louis set out to translate his new favourite book into a more familiar lexicon, line by line.
Louis had grown up between Lilydale in the Yarra Valley and the coastal town of Wonthaggi, raised on a 90s diet of TISM, Full Frontal, meat pies and footy clubs, where Strine was like a first language among his extended family.
“It’s a huge family tree, and there’s a lot of bogans in there, all different types and shapes, which is a beautiful thing,” he says.
“It’s a very specific and very informal vernacular [to use] as a lens to filter through this, like, aristocratic Russian novel. It’s just kind of inherently funny.”
Using an out-of-copyright 1922 translation as a source, he found Australia’s earthy slang and class signifiers were strangely well-suited to Tolstoy’s world.
“There is a spectrum of bogan, they’re not all alike. There’s a whole bunch of different types of bogan, so I wanted to have different characters roughly line up with different types of bogans.
“Tolstoy wrote the book 60 years after it’s set, so the narrator in the book is actually anachronistic – he is able to refer to things that happened after the events of the book. So [my] narrator will refer in his analogies to, you know, a Four’N Twenty pie or a Ford Falcon – things that did not exist in 1800s Russia.”
Neither did terms like “strewth”, “a shit tonne” or the uniquely Australian usage of “cunt”. Louis saved the latter’s first appearance for Prince Anatole – a character hated by many readers, who Louis calls a “total dipshit”.
“There was a weird sense of pride when I dropped a C-bomb into Tolstoy’s War and Peace,” he says, laughing.
At times the 347 pages he has translated so far recall the glut of remixed classics that flooded bookshops after the success of 2009’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But Louis clearly isn’t doing this for the money – the first two books were completed largely for the amusement of himself and a few strangers online, before he essentially abandoned it after becoming a parent.
Then, in April, the US tech writer Leah Reich stumbled across Louis’ work on Reddit, calling it a “wormhole back to a different Internet. A better, more human Internet.” She posted an excerpt on Bluesky and overnight he saw more ebook sales than in the previous six years.
“I think it’s a beautiful thing to imagine that maybe some people that would have never read this book might now,” he reflects, still surprised by the sudden interest after Reich’s widely shared post.
“I actually wanted it to be a real translation – that when you read my copy, you’ve still read War and Peace. The difference is now it’s got an Aussie accent, and a little bit of humour injected into it, which breaks down that barrier.”
Now Louis hopes to revive the once-dead project – he only has 14 books left to go.
“A lot of my favourite scenes in the book are yet to come,” he says. “And then there are chapters that I remember finishing and going, ‘What the hell was that?’
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do when I get to those … but I’ve got a long time to figure that out.”
