War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as one of the central works of world literature. War and Peace and Tolstoy's other major prose work, Anna Karenina (1873–77), are considered Tolstoy's finest literary achievements.
The novel charts the history of the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version, titled The Year 1805, were serialized in The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. The novel was first published in its entirety in 1869. Newsweek in 2009 ranked it first in its Top 100 Books. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 20 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
Tolstoy himself said that War and Peace was "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". Large sections, especially in the later chapters, are philosophical discussion rather than narrative. He also said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call War and Peace a novel. Instead, he regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel.