Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace over six years, rewrote it by hand at least eight times, and then declared it was not a novel at all. He was not being modest. He meant the book broke the form.
Most great nineteenth-century novels introduce you slowly. War and Peace drops you straight into a Petersburg drawing room, mid-argument, in French:
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist — I really believe he is Antichrist — I will have nothing more to do with you..."