Five years of Tolstoy’s life were devoted to the writing of War and Peace (1864-1869). Within its pages he marshaled a panoramic array of kings, princes, and nobles as they lived and moved during the times of the great Napoleonic wars. The leading characters principally belong to the highest Russian society, linked together by an inflexible code of laws and customs, and affected in varying degrees by the vitiated moral atmosphere of the Russian court.