The longest novels. The largest books in the world. Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged"

It's amazing how much time an author spends writing the longest novel of his life. Most likely, writing a novel takes many years of the author's life: individual passages and parts of the book need to be put together, then published and presented to the public.

However, no one blames the authors for such a lengthy process of creating a book, since everyone understands perfectly well that not every story can be summarized in a couple of chapters, moreover, the author must take into account all the details in order to convey his idea to the reader. Many of us prefer that our favorite book or story never ends. Below are the longest novels in the world. You will be interested to familiarize yourself with this list.

1. Vikram Seth "A Suitable Groom"

If one had to choose the world's longest novel based on word count, surely Vikram Seth's A Suitable Groom would rank in the top ten, as it has a whopping 593,674 words! The book describes the lives of four families, and, in parallel with this description, the author illuminates the historical and social events that took place in that era. The novel is full of many different details and is rich in bright, colorful, lively descriptions, which helped the author to carefully and thoroughly convey to the reader the atmosphere of the time in which the events of this story unfolded.

2. Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged"

The novel Atlas Shrugged tells the story of Dagny Taggert, the main character who is trying with all her might to save her transcontinental railway from crisis and death. Against the backdrop of unfolding events, Dagny learns to think and act independently of the principles of the time. There are 565,223 words in the book! This is truly a story worth reading as it beautifully describes how to fight for what you care about and what you believe in.

3. Carl Sandburg “The Memory Stone”

The historical novel "The Memory Stone" by American writer Carl Sandburg consists of 532,030 words. The author tells the reader about the long path of development American Dream, which lasted for more than three centuries. The book covers a very long period: it describes the colonization of America, the events of the Revolution in America, Civil War, as well as the Second World War. The novel itself meant a lot to Carl Sandburg, given the fact that even the red headstone of Sandburg's grave is named the Stone of Remembrance.

4. James Clavell "Gaijin"

"Gaijin" tells about the events of 1862 that took place in Japan. This was a time when foreigners were traveling to Japan in search of new markets to trade, but it eventually culminated in the Opium Wars (two 19th century wars initiated by Britain and France against Imperial China). The novel contains romance, history, and drama, with a total word count of 478,700. The only logical explanation for such a large volume of pages is that the author had to describe material that was too difficult to comprehend.

5. Hubbard L. Ron “Mission Earth”

Believe it or not, the book “Mission Earth” has a whopping 1.2 million words! Many people think that in fact this is not one novel, but a collection of short stories, but the author still insisted that Mission Earth is one complete novel, published in ten volumes. The plot of the book is based on the story of an alien invasion and war between planets; events unfold either on Earth or on the planet Voltar.

6. Madison Cooper "Sironia, Texas"

Sironia, Texas, written by Madison Cooper, is not far removed from the 1,100,000 word Mission Earth novel! The author describes the life of an ordinary American town in the first twenty years of the 20th century in the novel thirty main characters! The book is not easy to read, since it is difficult for a modern reader to perceive the author's style.

7. Samuel Richardson "Clarissa, or the story of a young lady"

This novel by English writer Samuel Richardson contains 969,000 words. It tells about the unfortunate fate of a girl named Clarissa Harlow, whom her parents forcibly, solely for their own personal interests, want to marry to a man she does not love. Having guessed their intentions, Clarissa runs away from home with a man who promises to protect her, but the girl does not even suspect what he is really up to. This is a very difficult book with a long, sad, dramatic plot.

It seems that there are some similarities between these long novels. All books reveal very difficult topics to understand, which is why the authors of these novels had to describe the events so carefully and in detail in order to convey to the reader the full meaning of the stories.

The book is 1856 meters long

When asking which book is the longest, we primarily think about word length, not physical length. Although, for example, in the city of Castello, residents created the longest book in the world - 1856 meters. It was designed in the form of a huge papyrus scroll, which was carefully wound around a pole. As a result, 11 fairy tales were included in this creation. However, even with all the merits of the authors of the above-mentioned record, they are unlikely to have devoted their entire lives to this idea. Because the length of the word itself, and sometimes “depth”, is a more labor-intensive and serious quantity.

Jules Romain

It was Jules Romain who became the author of the longest work in the world. Its length in terms of the number of printed words (it’s hard to even imagine) exceeds 2 million! And the page index itself, measuring 50 sheets in size, causes a very mixed reaction. The novel is called “People of Good Will” (Les Hommes de bonne volonte) and is composed of 27 volumes; the book was written over 14 years - from 1932 to 1946.

In the preface of his long creative marathon, the author questioned the structure of writing Balzac's masterpieces such as Proust and Roland. Because he considered the “mechanistic” idea of ​​writing multi-volume novels, where the whole is revealed through an individual personality, unacceptable. That is, Jules Romain himself, publishing his first volume back in 1932, was confident in the idea of ​​the chaotic and disorderly plot and the lives of all his characters (there were about 400 of them in “People of Good Will”).

Poverty, politics and culture

The longest book really has it all: criminality and spirituality, wealth and poverty, politics and culture. Moreover, of course, all events are supported by the ideas of history of that time. In general, the novel told about the events of 1908-1933. With this work, the author rather tried to help understand all the vicissitudes of the time of crisis that the French people faced. However, Jules Romain did not shy away from writing articles and essays on various scientific, political and literary themes- He was known as an erudite person.

However, the novel itself was subsequently subjected to harsh criticism. Literary world did not accept the work the way the creator wanted. The prosecution prescribed this work as a distorted statement of facts. Jules Romain has been criticized for misunderstanding history. Therefore, if you are ready to justify the writer, even in the 21st century, then start reading the longest book in the world.

Not all writers agree with the statement “Brevity is the sister of talent.” In today's selection we offer longest novels in literary history. The authors spent years creating them. But it will take a lot of time to read them.

By the way, the novel “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy was in the top ten, so every Russian schoolchild can proudly say that he is familiar with one of the longest books first-hand.

10. “Tokugawa Ieyasu”, S. Yamaoka

This novel was published in parts in Japanese newspapers. If you collect all the parts into a single work, you will get at least 40 volumes. The plot of the novel is dedicated to the first shogun of the Tokugawa clan, who united the country and established peace in it.

9. “Quiet Don”, M. Sholokhov

All four books that make up the novel take up about 1,500 pages. There are 982 characters in the novel, of which 363 are real historical characters. Behind " Quiet Don» Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize with the consent of Stalin.

8. “Les Miserables”, V. Hugo

Hugo created one of his main works over the course of eighteen years, from 1834 to 1852. Then the author revised the text several times, adding and removing various fragments.

7. “In Search of Lost Time”, M. Proust

This is a whole cycle of 7 novels, in which there are more than two thousand characters. The books are replete with emotional outbursts and bizarre narrative twists. In total, In Search of Lost Time contains more than one and a half million words, which occupy about 3,200 pages.

6. “The Forsyte Saga”, D. Galsworthy

Novel Nobel laureate amazes with clearly defined images of the characters. The work covers the history of the family from 1680 to the 1930s. “The Saga” formed the basis for 6 film adaptations, the most recent of which has a duration of 11.5 hours.

5. “War and Peace”, L. Tolstoy

Anyone who has read War and Peace can be divided into two categories. Some are completely delighted with the novel, others cannot stand it. But the epoch-making work in three volumes does not leave anyone indifferent.

4. “Quincanx”, C. Palliser

This work is a modern pastiche of a Victorian novel. Each of the two volumes has a volume of 800 pages depending on the edition. The plot is full of mysteries, symbolism and unexpected twists.

3. “Ulysses”, J. Joy

The novel is considered one of the best works of English-language prose. Ulysses was written over seven long years and tells the story of a single day in the life of Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom. The novel was first published in parts between 1918 and 1920.

2. “Astraea”, O. d’Urfe

The novel was written in 21 years hard work. The work in the first edition fit on 5,399 pages. Published in 1607, the novel tells the story of the love between the shepherdess Astraea and the shepherd Celadon. The book contains a lot of inserted short stories and poetic inclusions.

1. “People of Goodwill”, R. Jules

The novel by the French playwright, writer and poet was published in 27 volumes. The work contains more than two million words on 4,959 pages. The table of contents of the world's longest novel is about 50 pages long. It is noteworthy that the book does not have a single and clear plot line, and the number of characters exceeds four hundred.

“Tokugawa Ieyasu” by the Japanese writer Sohachi Yamaoka - about 40 volumes in book version. Yes, I decided not to make a secret to which the reader would have to wade through the jungle of various information and comments, and immediately named the winner. Those who are interested in nuances and terminological subtleties are welcome to the following study.

When talking about the longest novel, we, of course, first of all think about volume. And the question of how to calculate the length of a work seems naive at first glance. We can copy the text of the work into in electronic format and see how many words or symbols appear in it. But the very mention of the Japanese author leads to the common observation that in languages ​​with hieroglyphic graphics, one character is one word. This means that the text in Japanese will contain fewer characters than its translation, for example, into Russian. But in the paper version, both options can be approximately the same due to the size of the hieroglyphs, which are usually printed larger than the letters.

The book version is a completely separate issue. Some publications fit “War and Peace” into one book, and others into two. The number of pages may also vary due to different fonts and sheet sizes. But the twice-mentioned Sohachi Yamaoka seems to be hinting that truly long novels run into dozens of volumes.

Question 2. What is a novel?

This would also seem to be a ridiculous question. We all intuitively understand that Crime and Punishment and The Master and Margarita are novels. And that “Eugene Onegin” is also a novel, in verse. But “The Horse's Name” is a story. And the point here is not only in volume, but also in the essential features of the novel that distinguish it from other prose forms: the presence of several plot lines, a certain number of main and minor characters, etc.

By the way, regarding length, in the history of literature there is an example of a very long work that is technically a story. "Ulysses" by the Irish writer James Joyce stretches to almost a thousand pages, but it has one plot line and one main character– Leopold Bloom, so it’s still a story.

But another nuance is more important for us. Can we consider a novel a work in which new adventures happen to the main characters in each chapter? The film adaptation of “The Idiot” in ten episodes is a multi-part film. And “Secrets of the Investigation” is a series. I think the cinematic analogy is clear. Can we consider the stories of Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo a novel or is it a collection of stories compiled into one book? I hope it will now be more clear that the terminological research is given for a reason.

"Tokugawa Ieyasu"

Let's finally figure out our winner, especially since he belongs to the category of never-ending stories brought together. You are unlikely to find the novel “Tokugawa Ieyasu” by the Japanese writer Sohachi Yamaoka in a bookstore. The thing is that this work can only conditionally be called a novel. Yamaoka published chapters of his work in a daily newspaper starting in 1951. No one carried out a special publication. However, it is understandable: it’s no joke, if all the parts of the work are combined together, you will get a hefty 40-volume publication.

There are hardly a dozen people in the world who have read the novel from beginning to end. But we know the name of the main character - this is the first shogun from the Tokugawa clan, who united the country rising sun and established peace in it.

Yamaoka's novel was published in a separate edition, and before that it was distributed in many issues of Japanese newspapers, which is why it can deservedly be called published twice. The novel by the American writer Henry Darger, “The Story of Vivian Girls,” was not only never published, but it was found after the author’s death. In the novel, the Earth is only a satellite of another, larger planet, and the plot describes the military resistance of child slaves to their brutal enslavers. Of course, you are intrigued and want to know the volume of the work. The answer is: 10 weighty volumes, which in total contain more than 15 thousand pages! No one has yet counted the number of words, but scientists suggest that there are about 10 million.

"People of Goodwill"

Let's move on to published novels that you can get, open and read. Even if not in Russian. The record holder here is the French writer Romain Jules (real name Louis Henri Jean Farigul). He set the task of understanding in detail the reasons for the troubles of the inhabitants of France over a quarter of a century, from 1908 to 1933. The result turned out to be large-scale - 27 volumes, occupying 5 thousand pages. The table of contents alone spans 50 pages!

Interestingly, People of Goodwill was translated into English. Publishing house “Peter Davis” published the novel in 14, even more weighty, volumes. The word count in both cases exceeds 2 million.

"Astraea"

A novel by another French writer, Honoré d'Urfe, 21 years in the making, was also published. In addition, its volume is even larger: the love story of the shepherdess Astraea and the shepherd Celadon is 5,400 pages. However, we mention “Astraea” after Romain Jules because the publication dates back to 1607 and today this novel is unlikely to be available in its entirety. But you can read the dissertation of candidate of philological sciences Tatyana Kozhanova “The problem of the comic in Honore d’Urfe’s novel “Astrea”” (Moscow, 2005).

"In Search of Lost Time"

Not a novel, but a whole cycle of 7 novels - “In Search of Lost Time” by another Frenchman, the sophisticated Marcel Proust, is only slightly inferior to “Men of Good Will”: 3200 pages and 1.5 million words. If instead of working you read for 8 hours a day at a speed of, say, 40 pages per hour (that is, 320 pages daily), then reading the Proustian cycle will take you 10 working days, or 2 calendar weeks. If you read 40 pages a day with Saturday and Sunday off, then In Search of Lost Time will take you 4 months.

Graphomaniac outsiders

May the titans of literature forgive me the sports term, but writers whom we considered incredible graphomaniacs find themselves, if not at the bottom, then somewhere in the middle of the impromptu table of the longest novels. If we talk about Russian writers, it turns out that the first one that comes to mind, “War and Peace,” is by no means the leader of the list. The work of Count Tolstoy contains about 1,400 pages of the modern edition. While “Quiet Don” by Mikhail Sholokhov takes 1500 pages. The researchers also calculated that there are 982 characters in the Nobel laureate’s novel, of which 363 are real historical figures.

But we also had authors who decided to write multi-volume epic descriptions. Most of them are unlikely to be heard by the modern reader. So, for example, the writer Georgy Grebenshchikov will be recognized by his last name. Being under the significant influence of Roerich, who managed to paint 7 thousand canvases during his life, the musician’s namesake wrote an epic novel in 12 parts, “The Churaevs,” published in Paris and New York in 1937.

Morality

Services have recently appeared on the Internet where you can challenge yourself with a literary challenge: I will read so many books this year. And you need to indicate the number yourself. To check after a year whether you coped with the word given to you.

Finding out the longest novel is, of course, good, interesting and entertaining. But don’t forget that in life quality can be more important than size. For example, at my parents’ house I came across a 12-volume collected works of F. M. Dostoevsky, which I bought as a student, as it turned out from the surviving receipt - on July 3, 2004. The collection includes all works by Fyodor Mikhailovich of large and medium form. Having devoured the first volume, I thought it would be nice to finally fulfill my student dream of reading all of Dostoevsky. I don’t take on any obligations, because you shouldn’t give your words if you can’t keep them. But, God willing, I will read for myself much more than the longest novel - the great writer embodied in his novels!

In conclusion, I urge you to devote at least 20 minutes a day to a book, and you will remember what an indescribable pleasure it is to read.

Longest ever published literary works in the entire history of publications - a novel called “People of Goodwill”. Its author is a French writer, author of poetic and dramatic works, a scientist - Louis Henri Farigul, who became known under the pseudonym Jules Romain.

Some statistics

The novel “People of Goodwill” was published over 14 years, from 1932 to 1946, the publication included 27 volumes. According to estimates, the volume of this epic work was just under five thousand pages, and the number of words in it exceeded two million. To this considerable figure we can add a name index and a table of contents, which together occupy another 150 pages. Therefore, the number of words in the novel is approximately 2.5 times that of the Bible.

Jules Romain, who was a supporter of “right-wing” political ideas, in his work tried to give detailed description, assessment and explanation of contemporary events that took place in France in the first third of the twentieth century (the novel covers the period from 1908 to 1933) from the point of view of his beliefs.

This difficult task was solved with the help of an introduction to the text huge amount characters, total number more than four hundred, and real-life personalities in it coexist with fictional ones. Collected in one book typical representatives from different walks of life and professions, the author takes them through the vicissitudes of difficult times and watches how their lives change.

In addition to the huge volume and quantity characters, distinctive feature The novel is the lack of a clear plot line. Each character acts in life's circumstances differently, their stories intersect only on rare occasions. The plotlessness of the novel is not accidental. Romain used it like new artistic technique, already in the preface to the book, criticizing such works as “Roland” and “Proust” by his compatriot Balzac and other books that reveal an idea through the prism of an individual character.

Criticism of the novel “People of Good Will”

According to the author, the work was supposed to reflect the history and mood of European society, but the novel was negatively assessed by critics, and Romain was accused of distorting facts. This can be explained by the fact that right-wing beliefs were completely discredited after the end of World War II; accordingly, such a view of the events of the times described in the novel could not find support in the literary community. However, “People of Goodwill” is a novel that gives, although tendentious, a very detailed picture of the life of an entire generation, so it is worth reading for those who are interested in history, sociology and philosophy.