War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - 1865
Introduction
War and Peace, by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, is often called the greatest novel ever written. It is certainly one of the longest, and its great length is one source of its enduring fame and reputation. The panoramic novel tells a story of sweeping scope that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars in early nineteenth-century Europe. The events depicted in the novel begin in 1805 and end in 1812, the year of Napoleon Bonaparte's fateful invasion of Russia. It is a story of wartime and peacetime, love and marriage, birth and death. It is a story of families, of societies and nations, of soldiers and civilians, of peasants and nobility, of country estates and city salons. In short, War and Peace is a novel that attempts to seemingly encompass and interconnect every aspect of life.
Tolstoy's contemporaries were never quite sure what to call War and Peace. It had too many unusual elements to be classified simply as a novel, and indeed, Tolstoy himself denied that it was a novel. What was it then? What is it now? It is a novel, of course, but it is more than that.
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