Given its length — the 1,167 pages translated, in three volumes, into English, are only one section of a five-part, 6-million word epic — and given its scope, comparisons between Pak Kyung-ni's "Land" and Tolstoy's "War and Peace" are inevitable. The titles, however, illuminate a key difference between the two sagas.
The nouns in Tolstoy's title suggest, correctly, that the author is concerned with geopolitical wrangling of the sort that ends up in history books. "Land," on the other hand, focuses, as its title indicates, on that fundamental thing the lust for which is the root cause of many wars, but to which peasants are more closely bound than generals. Pak's characters, therefore, are not the actors of history one finds in the Russian master's novels (though Tolstoy was well aware how insignificant individual actors are), but rather the acted upon. Her achievement in bringing the Korean peasantry and their world to life is breathtaking. "Land" is one of the great national epics, a major contribution to world literature.
To say that Pak's characters are not, by and large, the actors of history but the acted upon is to describe their relationship to history; it is not to say that, even in their remote village, it was possible for them to live outside of the turmoil of their times. This section of "Land" takes place at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, a time when the country was under pressure to Westernize, and also when it was falling victim to Japanese imperialism, a sad development cemented into place with the 1910 annexation of Korea by Japan.