War and Peace is the book people name when they want shorthand for impossibly long. The count lands somewhere between 560,000 and 590,000 words depending on which text you're counting, which is roughly six standard novels stacked on top of each other.

The Direct Answer
Between about 560,000 and 590,000 words.
The figure quoted most often for the Russian text is 587,287 words. English editions come in lower, and Broke by Books' survey of novel lengths puts one English translation at 561,304. Tolstoy wrote the novel between 1863 and 1869, and the first complete edition ran 1,225 pages.

Why There Is No Single Figure

587,287 is the number that circulates most, and it comes from digital counts of the Russian text. English counts run lower. Broke by Books lists 561,304 for an English edition, a gap of about 26,000 words. Neither is wrong. They're counting different books.

Three things move the total. Translations differ in how they handle the long French passages in the original, some of which are footnoted, some translated inline and some left in French. Editions differ on whether the second epilogue, a long historical essay with no narrative in it, belongs in the main text. And abridged editions, which are commoner than most readers realise, drop the philosophical chapters altogether. If you want one figure to quote, say roughly 580,000 for the complete Russian text and note that English editions vary.

The structure explains the bulk. The novel runs 361 chapters, and twenty-four of those are Tolstoy arguing directly with historians rather than telling a story. Those chapters are the ones abridgements remove, and they're a large part of the reason the word count outruns the plot.

Six Years, and Seven Copies by Hand

Tolstoy began in 1863 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow where he had grown up and where he did nearly all his serious work. An early version ran serially in The Russian Messenger from 1865 to 1867 under the title The Year 1805. He was unhappy with it and rewrote the entire novel between 1866 and 1869.

His wife Sophia Tolstaya copied as many as seven complete manuscripts by hand before he would release it. Do that arithmetic. Seven passes over something near 580,000 words is more than four million words transcribed by candlelight, in the evenings, after the children were down, into notebooks her husband would tear into again the next morning.

The copying system was doing more than clerical work. Every pass was a full rereading by two people, which is a level of scrutiny no modern manuscript gets. Tolstoy used the passes to move chapters, rebalance the battlefield material against the drawing rooms, and adjust how much historical argument sat inside the story. The length you're measuring is the length that survived seven audits.

How It Compares

Six standard novels, give or take. It's longer than Ulysses at around 265,000 words, longer than Stephen King's It at around 445,000, and longer than The Lord of the Rings at around 480,000. Only a small set of famous novels go past it: Proust's In Search of Lost Time at roughly 1.2 million words across seven volumes, and Richardson's Clarissa, which most readers meet only as a statistic.

The pace is the part worth stealing. Six years for 587,000 words is about 268 words a day if you count every day of the six years, weekends and illnesses included. Tolstoy wasn't producing at speed. He kept at a modest daily rate for six years while a second person copied everything he wrote. That combination, patience plus a real second reader, is available to any writer who wants it.

For the study, the locked door, and the daily shape of Tolstoy's working life, see the full Leo Tolstoy writing routine page.

Reading how Leo Tolstoy worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.

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What You Can Steal