The Decembrists was a planned novel by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

, who finished three chapters. Its hero was to have been a participant in the abortive Decembrist Uprising of 1825, released from Siberia

Siberia

Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

n exile after 1856.

Termination of writing

During composition, Tolstoy decided to begin with what he saw as the roots of the Decembrist movement in the 1812 Napoleonic invasion of Russia. The result was his celebrated novel War and Peace

War and Peace

War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...

, set between the years 1805 and 1820. Its final chapters carry the action up to the period of the Decembrists. Tolstoy may have intended War and Peace to be volume one of a planned trilogy, whose subsequent parts would center on the years 1825 and 1856, respectively. It is known that he conducted research into the Decembrist movement with much the same thoroughness that he had approached the Napoleonic wars

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...

. The sequel

Sequel

A sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of or expands upon issues presented in some previous work...

s, however, were never written.