Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote "War and Peace" over the course of six years. More than half a century separated the events described in the novel from those experienced by Russia when "War and Peace" was published: Tolstoy chronicles the details of the wars of 1807 and 1812 - between the Russians and Napoleon's armies - alongside the carefree existence in the salons of the Russian aristocracy.
As Vladimir Nabokov notes in his "Lectures on Russian Literature", "War and Peace" was written when Tolstoy had found temporary peace in family life, when "his restless soul, torn between his sensual temperament and his hypersensitive conscience," rested for a while. Before the upheavals (familial, economic, and moral) began again, he managed to finish "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", and then, although elderly, he decided to wander: his thirst for wandering never left him.
What left him was his physical strength. In 1910, while heading to a secluded monastery, he died in the waiting room of a train station. A romantic end for a count with immense wealth by the Volga, fully aware of his class origin, with an unceasing inclination towards maximum entropy.
As for "War and Peace," a magnificent "historical" novel, it represents a product of his creative contradiction: it is the strictly structured work of a personality in complete disorder, in confusion, in search of the good (Tolstoy felt revulsion in the face of the egoism and greed of the ruling class), but also in moral panic (characteristic of his time, which was tormented by the dilemmas of "Bonapartist" individualism and Christian self-denial).
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
