About this book: War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature. It is considered Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other major prose work Anna Karenina (1873-1877). Tolstoy himself, somewhat enigmatically, said of War and Peace that it was 'not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle'. Large sections of the work