Tolstoy from the pages of the Guardian and Observer

With Tolstoy’s War and Peace returning for a new screen adaptation, we look back at the esteemed author’s life and work through the Guardian and Observer archives

The first mention in the Manchester Guardian of War and Peace by Count Leo Tolstoy appeared two years after its publication, on 7 February 1871. The paper’s St Petersburg correspondent cited Tolstoy and his work as an example of steps being made in Russia to establish a ‘national culture’, and noted that the novel had created ‘something amounting to a sensation’.

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