The article attempts to identify the non-obvious sources of L. N. Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace and analyze the features of their creative transformation by the writer. The research shows that the desire to constantly correlate artistic descriptions of War and Peace with the true realities of the past is a through principle in Tolstoy’s work on the novel. The identified principle of mastering the material allows us to more convincingly consider as sources of this or that image some documentary and artistic works that do not have an exact match with the novel, which, in one way or another, ended up in the field of vision of the creator of War and Peace. From this angle, the research considers the works of I. N. Skobelev, N. E. Mitarevsky, A. A. Kononov, N. A. Durova, and F. N. Glinka. Cases of Tolstoy’s appeal to the poetry of A. S. Pushkin and D. V. Davydov are considered. It is concluded that the psychological reflection and rethinking of the heroic era of national history in the novel corresponded to the ideas of the writer’s educated contemporaries, and at the same time, looking to the future, shaped the Russian historical worldview for decades to come.