Leo Tolstoy Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history. Tolstoy's relationship with his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. This saw him seeking to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the renunciation of the copyrights on his earlier works. Some of the members of the Tolstoy family left Russia in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union, and many of Leo Tolstoy's relatives and descendants today live in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States. Among them are Swedish jazz singer Viktoria Tolstoy and the Swedish
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