I just picked up “War And Peace” at a yard sale TODAY!
I do appreciate and understand your objection to the speeches in Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand even said in an interview that the Book was a vehicle for expressing her philosophy, so, instead of writing a Philosophy Book, she wrote a Novel where the characters spout it! LOL!
The same thing happened in The Fountainhead, but not as much.
I agree that if the speeches were condensed and more “pithy”, Ayn would have gotten many more followers to espouse her cause.
The version of W & P that I am reading is the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. They are a husband/wife team. She (Volokhonsky) is Russian and help to clarify the uniquely Russian aspects of the novel. They’ve done translations of several of the big Russian novels by Tolsoy, Dostoevsky, et al.