Biography | Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace Finished in This Surviving Wing

People credit a Moscow imprint with War and Peace and leave the desk out of the story.

The pages were written in this house.

After the central manor was sold in 1854, Tolstoy moved in 1856 into one of the two remaining wings at Yasnaya Polyana.

He brought Sofya Andreyevna here after their marriage in 1862. Most of their children were born under this roof.

From 1863 he worked on the book that began in print as 1805 and became Voyna i mir.

The Russian Messenger printed early parts in 1865 and 1866. Tolstoy was unhappy with those versions and rewrote the whole.

Sofya copied complete manuscripts again and again before he would release a text.

In autumn 1867 he went to the Borodino field to check the ground for the battle chapters.

In June 1867 he contracted with Pyotr Bartenev for a separate book edition, paid for by the author.

The first complete edition appeared in six volumes at T. Ris's Moscow press in 1868–69, in a run of nearly five thousand copies.

A second six-volume printing followed in 1869 with light corrections to the early volumes.

Later collected editions folded the book into four volumes.

The study the visitor sees was rearranged over the decades. Anna Karenina was written end to end after a southern extension of 1871–72.

War and Peace belongs to the years when this wing was already the family house and not yet that later study.

The furniture and the library of some twenty-two thousand volumes that remain are the family's own objects, kept after the estate became a museum in 1921.

Stand in the rooms and the scale of the book is less mysterious. It was made at a dining table and a desk on a working estate, between harvests and children's noise, over six years.

Photo: Tolstoy House at Yasnaya Polyana, SiefkinDR, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons