War of 1812 Vienna, during which British diplomats had clashed with Russian and Prussian diplomats over the terms of the peace with France, and there were fears at the Britain might have go to war with Russia and Prussia. Now each side was tired of the war. Export trade was all but paralyzed and after Napoleon fell in 1814 France was no longer an enemy of Britain, so the Royal Navy no longer needed to stop American shipments to France, and it no longer needed to impress more seamen. It had ended the practices that so angered the Americans in 1812. The British
War and Peace is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". Large sections, especially the later chapters, are a philosophical discussion rather than narrative. Tolstoy also said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call "War and Peace" a novel. Instead, he regarded "Anna Karenina" as his first true novel. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" states: "It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"". Tolstoy began writing "War and Peace" in 1862, the year that he finally