![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Russians like to claim that the title of the book could be a clever play on words.Tolstoy tried to get everyone into his novel: emperors, generals, nobility, peasants, soldiers, all with their own mannerisms and speech patterns. The narrative mentions 559 different characters, of which about 200 are historical figures.In 1908 he made a particularly dismissive entry in his diary: “People love me for the trifles – War and Peace and so on – that they think are important.” As early as 1870 he wrote to a fellow author that he was glad he would never write anything as ridiculously verbose as War and Peace again. Don’t worry if the novel is not your cup of tea – Tolstoy himself was not a fan of War and Peace.When Russian spelling was reformed in 1918 and several useless letters were removed – the ъ in particular – the novel ended up about 11 pages shorter.Whether you’re a Tolstoy aficionado or you tend to steer clear of his lengthy works, check out some fascinating facts about this classic of Russian literature. A century and a half ago, on July 1, 1865, the first installment of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace was published in the newspaper Russkiy Vestnik (the novel was titled The Year 1805 in the serialization, which ran through 1867. ![]()
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