Leo Tolstoy originally wrote the novel War and Peace in Russian.
The work also contains substantial dialogue in French, reflecting the education and social habits of the Russian aristocracy during the early nineteenth century. French was widely used by elite families, and Tolstoy employs it to show social identity, intimacy, affectation, and changing political attitudes. This bilingual texture can lead readers to mistake French for the novel’s original language.
Tolstoy’s narrative prose is Russian, while some passages and conversations appear in French in the original text. Modern editions often translate or annotate the French sections so that international readers can follow the story without specialist language knowledge.
War and Peace is set during the Napoleonic Wars, but its Russian literary identity is central to the book. The novel was first published in Russian in the 1860s, and its original title is commonly rendered in English as War and Peace.