December 1, 1869: "War and Peace" Is Published
December 1, 1869: Having been serialized in magazines for the past 4 years, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is published in full, in book form. Voyna i mir becomes the byword for great Russian literature, but also for a very long book. Eventually, people would say, "What's taking you so long? What are you doing, reading War and Peace?" or "I could have read War and Peace in the time it took for you to (do whatever it was you did)!"
Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the work comprises both a fictional narrative and chapters in which Tolstoy discusses history and philosophy. An early version was published serially beginning in 1865, after which the entire book was rewritten and published in 1869. It is regarded, with his 1878 novel Anna Karenina, as Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, and it remains an internationally praised classic of world literature.
From the reign of Empress Catherine II, a.k.a. Catherine the Great, from 1762 to 1796, French had been the main language of the Russian imperial court, and thus French became the country's second language. This may have been a partial inspiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, who took power in 1799 and crowned himself Emperor in 1804, to invade Russia in 1812. This failed invasion, and the heroic resistance to it, provides the centerpiece of the novel.
In 1882, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky would add to the art of Russian resistance to Napoleon with his 1812 Overture. Of course, in the years to come, Russia would ally itself with France, and Britain, in the Triple Entente, and, like those nations, ally itself against Germany.
Tolstoy died on November 20, 1910, of pneumonia, at the age of 82. Indeed, 1910 was a bad year for writing, as Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Jules Renard, William James and Julia Ward Howe all died. Tolstoy had lived to see Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905, but would not live to see the nation shattered by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution.
Bernard Montgomery, who would become Britain's top military leader of World War II, would write, "Rule 1, on page 1 of The Book of War, is: 'Do not march on Moscow.' Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: 'Do not go fighting with your land armies in China.' It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives."
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December 1, 1869 was a Friday. There were no scores on this historic day: It was too cold for baseball, the first college football season in America had already ended, English soccer was still all-amateur, and basketball and ice hockey hadn't yet been invented.
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