Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote "War and Peace" in six years. More than half a century separated the events described in the novel from those that Russia was experiencing when "War and Peace" was published: Tolstoy recounts the details of the wars of 1807 and 1812 - between the Russians and Napoleon’s armies - alongside the carefree atmosphere that prevailed 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 hyper-sensitive conscience," rested for a while. Before turmoil (familial, economic, and moral) began again, he managed to finish "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina," and then, despite being 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 ending for a nobleman with vast wealth on the Volga, fully aware of his class origins, with an unceasing inclination toward the greatest possible entropy.
As for "War and Peace," the magnificent "historical" novel, it is the product of his creative contradiction: it is the rigorously structured work of a personality in complete chaos, in confusion, in search of the good (Tolstoy felt disgust at 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).
