Saturday, June 20, 2026

007 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 1869






007

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

1869


Combining love, tragedy, philosophy and a history of the Napoleonic wars, Tolstoy claimed his four-volume epic was “not a novel”; Dostoevsky disagreed, describing it as the masterpiece of Russian literature. Though the first part of the work was serialised in the Russian Messenger in 1865, earlier versions are thought to date back to 1856, and Tolstoy is said to have redrafted it as many as 20 times.

First sentence

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.”

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