Tolstoy insisted War and Peace was not a novel at all
Its author refused to call it a novel, a poem or a chronicle. War and Peace mixes five aristocratic families with long essays on history, packs in roughly 160 real people, and was copied out by Sophia Tolstaya in as many as seven full manuscripts before Tolstoy would let it go.
Leo Tolstoy started the book in 1863, the year he married and settled on his country estate. He quickly found that few written accounts of Russian home life in the Napoleonic period survived, so he gathered histories, letters, memoirs and conversations with people who remembered the French invasion of 1812. His own service in the Crimean War gave him first-hand knowledge of how the imperial army worked.
An early draft appeared in instalments in The Russian Messenger from 1865 under the title 1805, later called The Year 1805. Unhappy with it, Tolstoy rewrote the entire work between 1866 and 1869, and the complete book, with a very different ending, sold out almost at once. Nobody knows exactly why he chose the final title. One guess points to Proudhon's 1861 book La Guerre et la Paix; another to Suetonius, who called the emperor Titus a master of war and peace.
The story runs from 1805 to 1820 and follows the Bezukhovs, Bolkonskys, Rostovs, Kuragins and Drubetskoys. At its centre stand Pierre, an awkward illegitimate son who suddenly inherits a fortune, and Natasha Rostova, lively and impulsive. Around them march real events, from Austerlitz to the burning of Moscow and the crossing of the Berezina. Tolstoy borrowed a camera's range of view, cutting between sweeping overviews and a single character's thoughts in a way that later readers compare to cinema.
Language carries meaning too. Much of the early dialogue is in French, the everyday tongue of a nobility shaped by Catherine the Great's court; one character must take Russian lessons. French fades as the book goes on, which some read as Russia shaking off foreign influence once France becomes the enemy. The later volumes and the second epilogue turn into essays on power and how history is written, and some abridged editions cut them out entirely. Tolstoy himself said Anna Karenina was his first true novel.
Source: War and Peace
