He became angry about the crazy inaccuracies in the historical accounts being published and decided to correct historians once and for all by laying it all out in his own book. Tolstoy combined all this research with firsthand knowledge about the ways wars were really fought (he had been an embedded journalist during the Crimean War in 1857). Even more impressive, he traveled to the actual battlefields, compass and surveying tools in hand, to map out for himself where the troops were stationed and how they attacked and defended. No, he dove into the archives, getting his hands on actual letters sent by Napoleon and the Russian and French generals and figuring out the personalities involved from the way they wrote about their activities. Tolstoy’s research didn't just involve reading some history books and calling it a day. When he was done, he ended up with what is pretty much the most impressive-sounding book to ever brag about reading: War and Peace.Īnd with good reason.

And so, from 1865 to 1869, he indulged his inner history buff by digging deeper and deeper into Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia in 1812. Tolstoy was from a wealthy, aristocratic family (that's Count Tolstoy, thank you very much), so he could basically write whatever he wanted without worrying too much about how many copies he was going to sell. Transformers 5? Here we come.īut what if you didn’t have to worry about what your audience thought, or at least didn’t stress about whether your big work was going to pay for your kids’ schools and whatnot? Well, then you'd be Leo Tolstoy. And as we all know from the summer blockbusters we pay to see, if you’re trying to make bank from providing entertainment to the masses, you need to stick to some tried and true formulas: go big, stay away from anything too complicated…and then rinse and repeat for as long as you can. Why? Well, if you’re like pretty much every other writer in the 19th century, you’re totally doing it for the money – fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, people gotta eat, and all that. Mostly, though, you’re really, really stressed out. You’re wearing wool underwear (cause you can’t really afford the nice silk ones), sitting in your dark little room, the candlelight is flickering (still waiting on that Thomas Edison guy), and you’re holding a quill pen in your hand thinking about the blank page in front of you. Picture yourself as a writer in the middle of the 19th century.

War and peace leo