In what year does the novel War and Peace begin?

War and Peace begins in 1805. Tolstoy opens the novel in July of that year at a soirée in Saint Petersburg hosted by Anna Pavlovna Scherer, a maid of honour and confidante of the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna.

The date places the opening inside the Napoleonic Wars and the War of the Third Coalition. Russia is preparing for conflict with Napoleon’s France, and the conversations in Anna Pavlovna’s salon immediately connect private aristocratic life with the diplomatic and military crisis spreading across Europe. French is widely spoken among the Russian nobility, reflecting the culture of the imperial court.

The novel later moves through major events of the era, including the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, and the aftermath extending into 1820. The year 1812 is especially important, but it is not the beginning; it marks the French invasion of Russia and the novel’s central wartime climax.

The opening year also explains the work’s early serialized title, 1805, before Tolstoy extensively revised the manuscript and published the complete novel as War and Peace in 1869.