War and Peace (Russian: Война и миръ, Voyna i mir) is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It was serialised in the journal The Russian Messenger from 1865 to 1867 and published in full in four volumes in 1869.
Tolstoy began work on the book in 1863, originally intending to write about the Decembrists, the noble revolutionaries of 1825. To explain their formation he kept reaching further back in time, eventually settling on the Napoleonic era as the true subject. He revised the text repeatedly — his wife, Sophia, is said to have copied out the manuscript by hand seven times.
The novel is set chiefly between 1805 and 1820. It opens at a soirée in St. Petersburg on the eve of the War of the Third Coalition and closes after the upheaval of 1812, when Napoleon's Grande Armée invaded Russia, occupied a burning Moscow, and was destroyed in its winter retreat. An epilogue carries the surviving characters into the 1820s.
At its centre are five aristocratic families:
Tolstoy famously described War and Peace as "not a novel, even less a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." It interleaves fictional drama with portraits of real figures — Napoleon, Tsar Alexander I, General Kutuzov — and pauses for long essays on the nature of history, free will, and the limits of human reason. These philosophical interludes culminate in a Second Epilogue devoted entirely to historiography.
Major themes include the contrast between authentic life and society's artifice, the search for spiritual meaning, the ethics of violence, and Tolstoy's conviction that history is shaped not by the will of "great men" but by the accumulated movements of ordinary people. The novel's influence has been enormous: it is routinely listed among the greatest works of world literature and has been translated into dozens of languages and adapted many times for screen, stage, and opera.