The novel "War and Peace" is a classic of Russian literature and a large-scale historical and artistic canvas, which is known all over the world. Its author, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, spent a huge amount of energy on the creation of his masterpiece - but how was War and Peace actually created?
The birth of a great novel
Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace for six years - from 1863 to 1869. For the first time, the idea of writing a novel about the Decembrists visited the writer in 1856, and in early 1961 Tolstoy read the first chapters of the work "The Decembrists" to his friend Ivan Turgenev. Having begun to describe the life of the Decembrist, who returned with his family to Russia after 30 years of exile in Siberia, Leo Tolstoy decided to tell in his novel about the youth of the protagonist, but later changed his mind and left the description begun indefinitely.
In the writer's handwritten archives, more than 5,200 finely scribbled paper sheets have been preserved, by which it was possible to trace all the stages of the creation of "War and Peace".
The novel was supposed to take place in 1856 before the abolition of serfdom, but Tolstoy revised this idea and decided to return to the Decembrist uprising, which began in 1825. After some time, the writer abandoned this idea, starting "War and Peace" with the Patriotic War of 1812, which was closely connected with 1805. Tolstoy gave the title Three Pores to his novel, which captured the half-century history of Russia.
The events of the first period described the beginning of the century and its first 15 years, which fell on the youth of the first Decembrists. The second period described the December uprising of 1825. The third period included the end of the Crimean War, the 50s, the death of Nicholas I, the amnesty of the Decembrists and their return from Siberian exile.
Work processes
At different stages of writing his novel, Leo Tolstoy presented it as a broad epic canvas, on which he “painted” the history of the Russian people and tried to comprehend its character in an artistic way. The writer hoped to finish his masterpiece rather quickly, but the first chapters went to print only in 1867, and on the rest Tolstoy continued to work for several more years, constantly subjecting them to harsh editing.
Abandoning the title Three Pores, the writer planned to name the novel Eighteen hundred and five, and then All's Well That Ends Well, but none of these titles suited him.
The final name in the form of "War and Peace" appeared at the end of 1867 - in a handwritten version of the word "peace" Leo Tolstoy wrote with the letter "i". According to the Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Russian Language by Vladimir Dal, "mir" means the universe, all people, the whole world and the human race, which is what Tolstoy meant when he described the impact of war on humanity in his great novel.
