Leo Tolstoy spent six years researching, drafting, and revising a manuscript of roughly 1,200 pages, then insisted it was not a poem, not a historical chronicle, and not a novel. This episode unpacks War and Peace by looking at the man who built it. We start in 1863, with Tolstoy newly married to Sofia and settled on his estate, drafting a modest project titled 1805. When he found that historians recorded troop movements and treaties but nothing about daily life, he hunted down journals, letters, and unpublished memoirs, and drew on his own traumatic experience of the Crimean War and the chaos of the Imperial Russian Army.

The conversation covers the influence of Schopenhauer’s idea of the irrational will, Sofia’s hand-copying of seven complete drafts from Tolstoy’s nearly illegible manuscript, and the five aristocratic families anchored by Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostova. We examine how the shift from French to Russian in the dialogue tracks the birth of a national consciousness, how Tolstoy’s cinematic zoom from the battlefield to a single soldier shattered the romance of war, and why 24 of the book’s 361 chapters are philosophical essays attacking the great man theory of history.

• Andrei’s wounding at Austerlitz and his realization that Napoleon is small beneath the infinite sky
• Pierre’s captivity and the peasant Platon Karataev as Tolstoy’s true hero
• Tolstoy’s argument that history is the sum of millions of tiny unrecorded actions, illustrated with astronomy and a traffic jam
• Polarized reactions from left and right critics, and praise from Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Hemingway
• Adaptations from Bondarchuk’s Oscar-winning 1966 film to the 1972 BBC series and the musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812