Leo Tolstoy’s wife helped him write “War and Peace.”

Illustration of Tolstoy

As the saying goes, “behind every great man is a great woman,” and that apparently includes renowned Russian novelists. To wit: Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofya Tolstoy, helped him write War and Peace, one of the most influential works of literature in history. (That it isn’t universally considered Tolstoy’s magnum opus is a testament to his prowess, as Anna Karenina is equally revered.) The couple married in 1862, when Leo was 34 and Sofya was 18, and began their informal collaboration on Tolstoy’s sprawling tome the following year. In addition to sitting with him as he wrote, Sofya was also the first set of eyes on the manuscript and suggested changes along the way — including the removal of a graphic scene that took place during one of the main characters’ wedding nights.

As the first typewriter had yet to be invented at the time, Tolstoy naturally wrote the book by hand — not that his penmanship was particularly easy to read. Perhaps the most important project Sofya undertook, according to biographer Rosamund Bartlett’s Tolstoy: A Russian Life, was taking her husband’s “execrable handwriting, and then preparing a legible final draft of the manuscript,” an undertaking described as “a gargantuan task.” She sometimes had to use a magnifying glass to decipher the author’s chicken scratch and rewrote the entire manuscript eight times. Leo and Sofya’s far-from-perfect relationship is dramatized in 2009’s The Last Station starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, with both actors receiving Academy Award nominations for their performances.

By the Numbers

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Leo Tolstoy wasn’t a huge fan of his own book.

Tolstoy was a prolific writer throughout his 82 years, but he’s long been associated primarily with his two most epic works: Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He wasn’t especially pleased about this, however, writing,“People … love me for those trifling things like War and Peace, etc., which seem to them very important.” The sentiment has been interpreted by some as a sign that the long process of writing and publishing the novel simply took too much out of the author. He later penned an essay for the journal Russian Archive called “A Few Words About the Novel War and Peace,” in which he clarified his thoughts on the novel — including his insistence (however vague) that it was not, in fact, a novel: “What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less a [narrative] poem, and even less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it was expressed.”