Do Tell Me What It Is? No, Dearest Sweet One, Honey, I Will Only Tell Me, You Will?

War and Peace (Russian: Война и мир, Voyna i mir; in original orthography: Война и миръ, Voyna i mir") is an epic historical novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels.

War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense. (From Wikipedia.)

Translated by Aylmer Maude (1858 - 1938).

This is the first of four instalments, reading in progress. The instalment covers the year 1805.