Publisher's Synopsis
War and Peace is well known as being one of the longest novels ever written, though not the longest. Tolstoy began writing War and Peace in the year that he finally married and settled down at his country estate. The first half of the book was written under the name "1805". During the writing of the second half, he read widely and acknowledged Schopenhauer as one of his main inspirations. However, Tolstoy developed his own views of history and the role of the individual within it. The first draft of the novel was completed in 1863. In 1865, the periodical Russkiy Vestnik published the first part of this draft under the title 1805. In the following year, it published more. Tolstoy was dissatisfied with this version, although he allowed several parts of it to be published with a different ending in 1867. He heavily rewrote the entire novel between 1866 and 1869. Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstaya, copied as many as seven separate complete manuscripts before Tolstoy considered it again ready for publication. The version that was published in Russkiy Vestnik had a very different ending from the version eventually published under the title War and Peace in 1869. Russians who had read the serialized version were anxious to buy the complete novel, and it sold out almost immediately. The novel was translated almost immediately after publication into many other languages.
