In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel War and Peace to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title, 1805. When Bashilov questioned a detail of historical verisimilitude—shouldn’t the turn-of-the-nineteenth century officers be wearing powdered wigs?—Tolstoy responded:

When I first began writing 1805, I discovered somewhere that powder had been done away with at the beginning of [Czar] Alexander’s reign, and I wrote on that basis; I later came across evidence, as you did, that it was still used in 1805. I didn’t know what to do. … Decide for yourself, whatever is most agreeable and convenient for you. In favor of drawing people wearing powder is the reason that if there is positive proof that powder was in use in 1805, I can correct the new edition and allude to powder and uniform. In fact it’s probably necessary to draw people wearing powder and in historically accurate uniform, to which I shall try to be faithful in the new edition.

Tolstoy’s place in history had already been confirmed by Nikolai Strakhov, one of the great literary critics of his day, who called War and Peace, “a complete picture of human life. A complete picture of the Russia of that day. A complete picture of what may be called the history and struggle of peoples.” While Tolstoy had bunted on the question of whether his officers would have worn powdered wigs, he knew his novel was vulnerable to accusations of historical inaccuracy. In his 1868 author’s note to the fourth serialized volume, he compared a few of his characters with their real-life counterparts, still concerned with the question of whether or not his portrayals had been accurate in the way a historian would judge correct.

The divergence between my description of historical events and the accounts of historians … is not accidental but inevitable. A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects. As a historian would be wrong if he should try to present a historical figure in all his entirety, in all the complexity of his relations to all sides of life, so an artist would not fulfill his task by always presenting a figure in his historical significance. Kutuzov did not always ride a white horse, holding a field glass and pointing at enemies. Rastopchin did not always take torch in hand and set fire to his Voronovo house (in fact he never did it at all), and the empress Maria Feodorovna did not always stand in an ermine mantle, her hand resting on the code of law; but that is how they are pictured in the popular imagination.

In the note, Tolstoy also addressed the exclusion from his work of what his critics called “the character of the time,” which he catalogued as “the horrors of serfdom, the immuring of wives, the whipping of adult sons.” His concern: “This character of that time, which lives in our imagination, I do not consider correct and did not wish to express.” Tolstoy instead sought to portray “the greater alienation of the upper circles from the other estates, from the reigning philosophy, from the peculiarities of upbringing, from the habit of using the French language, and so on.” Tolstoy would eventually take out much of the French and then ask his wife to restore it in the version he wanted to see before his death. For all his bravado, he feared it might affect the novel’s relationship to posterity.

Tolstoy would have no greater critic than his former friend, Ivan Turgenev, whose mercurial reactions to War and Peace would become famous. Turgenev was estranged from Tolstoy after falling out with him over literary and personal offenses—Tolstoy had even challenged Turgenev to a duel—but each still saw the other as a great writer worthy of consideration. In letters to his friends, Turgenev called the novel a “puppet show” and a “fraud” with “no trace of a genuine depiction of the period,” full of “an enormous amount of the old psychological hubbub ... that positively constitutes Tolstoy’s monomania.” He elaborated: “A misfortune ensues when a self-educated man, even a Tolstoy, undertakes to philosophize. He inevitably saddles his hobby horse and thinks up some sort of a system, such as, for example, historical fatalism, and then he begins to write.” But in those same letters, Turgenev also wrote “the novel does contain things that in the whole of Europe no one but Tolstoy could have written, and that make me break out in goose pimples and a fire of enthusiasm” and “things are there which will not die as long as the Russian language exists.”

Turgenev’s divided opinion eventually resolved into support, and he became one of the novel’s greatest champions. To the extent we read War and Peace today, we do so in part because of Turgenev’s goose pimples and his advocacy of the novel abroad, especially in Paris, where his French writer friends did not yet read the Russians. When Flaubert read War and Peace, he asked if the novel was Tolstoy’s debut.