A book battle has been raging in the North American literary community, as two newly published translations of Leo Tolstoy's 19th-century classic War and Peace compete for readers.

Russian-to-English translation team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have returned to the Russian master's oeuvre to deliver a newly translated version of Tolstoy's famously lengthy tome.

Leo Tolstoy revised War and Peace for three years in the 1860s, leading to a tiff between two recent translations. (Hulton Archive/Getty)
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The Paris-based duo, who are married, shot to fame in 2004, when their version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina became a bestseller after being selected for TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey's book club.

For their latest translation, the couple remained faithful to the traditionally weighty version of Tolstoy's epic about members of Russian society dealing with the Napoleonic Wars. They have produced a more than 1,200-page translation for Knopf, which went on sale last week.

Pevear and Volokhonsky's book hit North American bookstores shortly after a take on the Tolstoy classic by Andrew Bromfield, a lesser-known but still respected Russian translator from Britain.

Bromfield's book, which is billed War and Peace: the Original Version, hit North America in September.

At just 886 pages, his version — released earlier this year in Britain and first published in Russia in 2000 — has been described by some as a more accessible and user-friendly edition of the vast work.

In addition to calling the shorter version "twice as short, four times as interesting," the Russian publisher touted it as "more peace, less war."

According to Bromfield's publisher, Ecco Press, an imprint of Harper Collins, its book is based on an 1866 version of Tolstoy's epic tale (the author went on to revise and add to his book for three more years).

A literary spat has emerged during the North American release of the two books this fall, with Pevear penning an open letter criticizing Ecco and its shorter version, while Knopf officials denounced the rival title as "a serious mistake."

The missives sparked a fiery response from Ecco co-founder and publisher Daniel Halpern, who in defence of his book this month took a shot at the fact that Pevear "doesn't actually read the original Russian."

In the introduction to the shorter of the two new releases, Bromfield writes that Ecco's version isn't intended "as a substitute for the canonical version so much as its complement."