Note: The novel is split up in 15 books and two epilogues.

Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense.

While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such.

War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels. War and Peace (Russian: Война и мир, Voyna i mir in original orthography: Война и миръ, Voyna i mir') is an epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era.

Librivox public domain recording of War and Peace, Book 15, by Leo Tolstoy.

War and Peace free download