War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as one of the central works of world literature. War and Peace and Tolstoy’s other major prose work, Anna Karenina (1875-1877), are considered Tolstoy’s finest literary achievements.
The novel charts the history of the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version, titled The Year 1805, were serialized in The Russian Messenger between 1865-1867. The novel was first published in its entirety in 1869. In 2009 Newsweek ranked it No. 1 on its Top 100 Books list. In 2007 TIME Magazine ranked War and Peace No. 3 in its poll of the 10 Greatest Books of All Time, while Anna Karenina ranked No. 1.
Tolstoy himself said War and Peace was “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.” Large sections, especially in the later chapters, are philosophical discussion rather than narrative. He also said the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call War and Peace a novel; instead, he regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “no single English novel attains the universality of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.”
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