The plot novel is set 60 years before Tolstoy wrote it, but he had spoken with people who lived through the 1812 French invasion of Russia. He read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars as well as letters, journals, autobiographies, and biographies of Napoleon and other key players of that era. There are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace.[12]
He worked from primary source materials (interviews and other documents) as well as from history books, philosophy texts, and other historical novels.[9] Tolstoy used a great deal of his own experience in the Crimean War to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the Imperial Russian Army was structured.[13]
Tolstoy was critical of standard history, especially military history, in War and Peace. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written.