Tolstoy worked on War and Peace for about six years, from 1863 to 1869, and the making of it looked less like writing than like rebuilding. He drafted in dense, messy bursts, then had the whole thing recopied so he could tear into it again the next morning.
Six Years of Rewriting
He began in 1863, soon after marrying Sophia Behrs and settling at Yasnaya Polyana. Early parts appeared in The Russian Messenger from 1865 under the title 1805. He was never satisfied with what he'd published. Between 1866 and 1869 he rewrote the whole thing, chasing a form that didn't quite exist yet, and to get the battle scenes right he traveled to the Borodino battlefield to walk the ground himself. The complete novel came out in 1869.
What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.
Leo Tolstoy, from his 1868 essay on War and Peace
That refusal to fit an existing shape is part of why the book took so long. He was inventing its form as he went, and invention means revision. See the full Leo Tolstoy writing routine for how the daily habit fed the years of work.
Sophia and the Copying
The engine that made all that revision possible was Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya. Night after night, once the children were asleep, she sat with his cramped and heavily struck-through pages and copied them into a clean hand, sometimes reaching for a magnifying glass to decode his corrections. By her own account she copied the novel seven times from beginning to end, and some passages were reworked many times more than that. Each morning Tolstoy woke to a legible fair copy he could attack again, which is how a single page might travel through version after version before he let it go.
There's a practical lesson buried in that arrangement. The recopying forced physical distance between Tolstoy and his own words. Reading his sentences back in someone else's handwriting made them slightly foreign, easier to judge the way a stranger might. It worked, in effect, like a nineteenth-century version of printing out a draft to edit it with fresh eyes.
What You Can Steal
- Treat the first draft as raw material. Tolstoy generated volume, then remade it. The draft's job is to exist, not to be right.
- Put distance between you and your words before you edit. A clean copy, a printout, a change of font. Anything that lets you read it as a stranger would.
- Expect to rewrite more than you write. Whole sections of the book were redone many times over before he was satisfied.
- Do the field research. He walked the Borodino battlefield rather than guess at it.