According to the widespread version, the words in the title of the world-famous novel are not antonyms at all. Proponents of this theory justify it by writing the word “peace” in pre-revolutionary spelling. We checked whether this is actually true.

When the conflict with the title of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s novel first arose is not known for certain. However, she gained the greatest fame after appearing in the TV show “What? Where? When?" in 1982 a corresponding question was asked. Leningrad library employee Yuri Vartanov was interested, why the title of the pre-revolutionary edition of “War and Peace” contains the letter i (“mir”), and not the familiar “i”. The author’s response read: “Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy did not write a novel under the title “War and Peacetime,” he had in mind the broader title “War and the People,” “War and the Universe.” By the way, the experts dealt with the question.

After the release of the program, an interesting fact was distributed in books and periodicals. An additional argument in favor of the theory was that in the epilogue of the novel, Lev Nikolaevich actually reflects on the emergence of wars in the world and their impact on the world. And the legend was cemented in our minds in 2000, as part of the anniversary series of games “What? Where? When?”, where the question was repeated in retro format with the same comment.

Let's look at the facts. Indeed, Dahl’s pre-revolutionary dictionary states:

“World: universe; matter in space and force in time; community, society of peasants."

“Peace: absence of quarrel, hostility, disagreement, war; okay, agreement."

Now let's look at the cover and title page of the first separate edition of the novel (1868):

It turns out that the original edition was quite consistent with the classic (“War and the Absence of War”) perception of the title of the novel. What happened next? All subsequent pre-revolutionary editions of the novel also contain the word “mir” in the title - all but one. We are talking about that very publication of 1913, one of the volumes of which was demonstrated to experts. But even there, out of eight cases (four on the title page, four on the first page), the decimal i occurs only in one place - on the first page of the first volume. Could librarian Yuri Vartanov, who probably had access to all four volumes, or the editors of the program who prepared the illustrative material not know about this? It seems like they should have noticed the discrepancy. But people make mistakes.

There are two more versions of the origin of the error. The word “mir”, written by the hand of Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy, appears in the contract for the first publication of the novel. It looks similar in the work of Archpriest Georgy Florovsky, “The Ways of Russian Theology,” where the priest examines Tolstoy’s novel.

In conclusion, we note that a simple reader, of course, can make a mistake in perceiving the title, but it is unlikely that all the hundreds and thousands of qualified translators into other languages who received such titles as La guerre et la paix, War and Peace, Krieg und Frieden, Guerre e pace would have done this.

So the version that Tolstoy wrote the novel “War and Society” remains only a beautiful legend.