The Originals: War And Peace - Om Books

There is nothing stronger than those two: Patience and Time.
The year was 1805. Napoleon’s conquest of western Europe was causing anxiety among the Russians. In alliance with the Austrian empire, the Russian troops were trying to resist Napoleon’s onslaught.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy chronicles the French invasion of Russia and its impact on Tsarist Russia, through the stories of five families-the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins, and the Drubetskoys.
The Russian Messenger published portions of the manuscript, titled The Year 1805, as a serial from 1865–1867. Dissatisfied with the published version, Tolstoy extensively rewrote the novel between 1866 and 1869. After his wife, Sophia Tolstaya, copied as many as seven ‘separate’ manuscripts, the author considered it for publication, again.
Tolstoy finally changed the name to War and Peace; it is believed that he borrowed the title from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s 1861 book, La Guerre et la Paix.
War and Peace has been translated into several languages and is regarded as Tolstoy’s finest literary achievement.

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in Russia’s Tula Province, Yasnaya Polyana, into an aristocratic family. Regarded as “the greatest living novelist” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy’s two seminal works are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878).
When he was a student of Oriental Languages at the University of Kazan, his teachers thought he was an incapable student who was unwilling to learn. Unsurprisingly, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana. In 1851, reeling under gambling debts, he decided to accompany his elder brother Nikolay, an army officer, to the Caucasus and join the army. He served as a second lieutenant in the Crimean War (1853-1856). It was during this period that the writer in him was born.
One of his earliest and most notable autobiographical novels was Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852-1856). Novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Hadji Murad (1912) followed. In his last days, Tolstoy was revered as a moral and religious teacher. Even Mahatma Gandhi sought the Grand Old Man’s advice on non-violence and resistance.
In 1910, Tolstoy died of heart failure at the railroad station of Astapovo, Russia. He was 82.