He conducted interviews with war veterans and other eyewitnesses. Tolstoy began work on the novel in 1863, and extensively consulted primary and secondary resources. Yet Tolstoy's novel eventually transformed into a historical document in its own right, and continues to shape the popular imagination of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia today.īut this begs the question-from where does Tolstoy derive his own narrative authority? He derided contemporary historians for bending their chosen narratives to meet the demands of nationalist apologism. In particular, Tolstoy took great pleasure in his criticism of canonical interpretations of 1812. Tolstoy explicitly resisted calling his work a novel, despite the fact that it contains novelistic elements, and instead proposed his own sui generis form of historiography that is consciously skeptical of the very concept of historical narrative. War and Peace is a 1,200-page testament to Tolstoy’s evolving philosophies on history, historiography, and the nature of fate and free will, transmitted through a series of real historical figures from the Napoleonic campaigns of 1812, as well as through fictional characters of his own creation.Īs a work of literature, War and Peace rejects all attempts at defining its genre in the traditional sense of the term.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was, perhaps above all else, a man who loved a hot take.
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