War and Peace was first published in full in 1869. The completed novel appeared in Russian as Война и мир after Leo Tolstoy revised and expanded material that had already begun appearing in periodical form.
Tolstoy worked on the novel for much of the 1860s. An early version of part of the work was published in the journal The Russian Messenger beginning in 1865 under the title The Year 1805. Tolstoy later reworked the manuscript extensively, changing its structure, emphasis, and ending before the full book edition was completed.
The date can be confused because publication was gradual rather than a single simple event. Serial publication began before the finished novel existed, while the complete revised work is associated with 1869. The novel's historical narrative begins during the Napoleonic era and culminates around the French invasion of Russia in 1812, but its publication history belongs to the nineteenth-century literary world of Tolstoy's Russia.