You can probably imagine how hard it was to write novels in the past without even typewriters. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy was written before the invention of the typewriter, meaning that it had to be written by hand.
However, it wasn’t Tolstoy who wrote everything nearly for the publishers. While he did handwrite the initial drafts, his wife, Sofya Tolstoy, had the job of painstakingly deciphering his messy handwriting and creating drafts that the publishers could read.
One round of writing wasn’t enough. Tolstoy was notorious for his perfectionism, and so, when Sofya would write out one of his drafts — at night, by candlelight — he would then scribble over the words, make more notes and edits, and then hand it all back to her to handwrite a clean draft again.
And he did this seven times! Keep in mind, this ended up being a 1,200-page book!
Sofya was just 18 at the time they married, when this duty first fell on her. At the same time, she had to raise their children and keep the house clean, which is why all the writing was done at night, as it was the only time available.
To make matters worse, the novel that we know from the 1869 publication wasn’t the original one published as serials. The original story was published as short serials starting in 1865 — two years after he originally started the draft — with the first half of the novel titled 1805. Parts continued to be published until 1867, but Tolstoy wasn’t happy with the finished work, and it had a different ending.
Between 1866 and 1969, he rewrote the story, which Sofya continued to clean up, until it was ready to be published as a whole novel stretching 1,200 pages, split into four volumes and an epilogue split in two parts.
Due to the way the whole piece was published and then changed, Russians were eager to buy the completed work, so War and Peace sold out immediately, and it was quickly translated for the world to read. Don’t worry; Sofya didn’t handwrite any of the translations!
Out of all of Tolstoy’s novels, War and Peace was never banned. While the leftist factions didn’t like it, the Russian government viewed it as supportive of the regime, as the main focus was on Russia’s triumph over Napoleon’s forces. It was only as Tolstoy got older and more anti-establishment that his works started to be banned, but War and Peace continued to excel.
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