Editing War and Peace (section)

==Realism==
The plot of the novel is set 60 years before Tolstoy wrote it, but he had spoken with people who lived through the 1812 [[French invasion of Russia]]. He read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the [[Napoleonic Wars]] as well as letters, journals, autobiographies, and biographies of Napoleon and other key players of that era. There are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in ''War and Peace''.<ref>Pearson and Volokhonsky, ''op. cit.''</ref>

He worked from primary source materials, such as interviews and other documents, as well as from history books, philosophy texts, and other historical novels.<ref name="FeuerMiller2008">{{cite book |author1=Kathryn B. Feuer |author2=Robin Feuer Miller |author3=Donna Tussing Orwin |title=Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xf7umXHGDPcC |access-date=29 January 2012 |year=2008 |publisher=Cornell University Press |isbn=978-0-8014-7447-7 }}</ref> Tolstoy used a great deal of his own experience in the [[Crimean War]] to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the [[Imperial Russian Army]] was structured.<ref>Troyat, Henri. ''Tolstoy, a biography.''  Doubleday, 1967.</ref>

Tolstoy was critical of standard history, especially [[military history]], in ''War and Peace''. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written.