This was done for the first time in 1885 by Clara Bell, who translated it from the French version. Tolstoy was, of course, a Russian author, so for us to be able to read his novel, it first had to be translated into English. Again, the page number will vary from edition to edition due to different sized pages and print used. The 587,287 words in War and Peace end up being 1,215 pages. Of course, paperbacks would weigh much less.

As the above photo shows, the hardback version can weigh almost 4 pounds (3 lbs, 14 oz). The actual weight of the book depends on the edition and whether or not it’s paperback or hardback. If it’s one of your favorites, you now know something about it that you didn’t know before. The word count for the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan takes the record: 4,410,036 words! Just imagine writing more than four million words.ĭid you think that The Lord of the Rings would be near the top of the list? Think again! Tolkien managed to write his classic in “just” 481,103 words. The Harry Potter series consists of more than one million words. If we do that, we come across several famously lengthy stories. Remembering War and Peace was written as a four-volume set with two epilogs, it’s fair if we include some series. One would think after spending so much time on one book, Tolstoy would have been too exhausted to write anymore, but he went on to write Ana Karenina, which was published in 1877, as well as several other novels. Tolstoy completed his first draft in 1863, but he later spent three years rewriting most of it. War and Peace has 587,287 words, making it more than ten times longer than your NaNoWriMo novel. How many words are there in War and Peace? If you have read this book, give yourself a medal and a pat on the back. The philosophical passages that make up much of the book are heavy going. War and Peace is considered Tolstoy’s masterwork and a significant contribution to literature, but I must admit that though I’ve tried a couple of times, I’ve never made it through the whole thing.

If someone talks about doing something in the time it takes to read War and Peace, you can be sure that they mean it’s going to take quite a long time, and if your teacher comments that he or she wanted an essay from you, not War and Peace, your essay was way too long. Leo Tolstoy’s historical novel on the Napoleonic invasion of Russia has become a byword for long books.

War and peace leo