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I wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1869. It is roughly 580,000 words. I revised it seven times. My wife Sonya copied it out by hand, in full, for each revision — seven times, approximately 580,000 words each time. She copied four million words of my drafts. I am grateful to her.

The book is about 1812 and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, but it is also about the relationship between the great man theory of history and what I believed was the actual mechanism of events: the sum of millions of individual actions, none of them individually decisive, producing outcomes that no single will directed.

Napoleon did not conquer Russia because of his genius. He failed to conquer Russia because of an infinite number of small decisions, accidents, supply failures, frosts, moments of fear and courage and chaos. Kutuzov, who seemed to do nothing, was correct. The best strategy was to let the mechanism of reality take its course.

History is not made by great men. Great men are the names we give to the outcomes of processes no one controlled.