I can assure you it most certainly is NOT “War and the World”

One of the things that was a source of amusement for me in college was the fact that the Russian word Мир (“Mir”) meant both “peace” and “world” and we would joke that when the Soviets would declare that they wanted peace, they were really saying that they wanted the world.

The obvious next step from there was to assume that Leo Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace had a title that was potentially mistranslated and it really should be War and the World (Russian, in common with the majority of Indo-European languages does not have articles, so there’s no problem with the insertion of “the” here).

While listening to P.D.Q. Bach’s “1712 Overture,” I found myself delving into a Wikipedia rathole from the P.D.Q. Bach piece to the Tchaikovsky “1812 Overture” to the Tolstoy novel, which gives a pre-reform title of Война и миръ. Which in turn led me to the article on the various orthographic reforms in Russian where I learned that the elimination of the letter і from the Russian alphabet led to the creation of a homonym for the homophone pair, миръ/міръ where the first means peace and the second world. And since Tolstoy was writing before the elimation of і in favor of и, he did in fact mean his novel’s title to be War and Peace and not War and the World.