The epic genre is becoming the only one natural to me.
Diary entry, 3 January 18631
AT SOME POINT in the autumn of 1862 Tolstoy received a surprise visit from the father and grown-up daughter of a large family he had helped to evacuate during the siege of Sebastopol. His visitors were themselves surprised to discover that Tolstoy had married, and they were to encounter a further surprise. When Tolstoy's wife came running into the drawing room to meet the visitors, the beautiful, tall young lady she was introduced to could not help staring at her. 'What, Lev Nikolayevich,' she blurted out, 'this young girl is your wife?' Sofya Andreyevna was indeed very young - she had just turned eighteen, and would have looked even younger, as she was wearing a short brown cotton dress rather than the elegant gown the guests were clearly expecting the new Countess Tolstoy to be wearing. Tolstoy had specially ordered and purchased it for her, on the grounds that he would never be able to find his wife under the steel-hooped crinolines and dresses with long trains fashionable at that time. He also did not believe that such formal attire was suitable in the countryside anyway. Sonya had become pregnant almost immediately after their wedding, and the dress was loose-fitting as well as very plain.2 Her husband's own preferred attire in the countryside was a baggy grey flannel shirt, belted around the waist, worn loose over trousers tucked into boots.3
Tolstoy was embarking on the happiest years of his life, but there was no question of husband and wife ever being equal partners in this marriage. At thirty-four, Tolstoy was acutely conscious of his bride being a child, and he even refers to her as such in his diaries.4 He was also only two years younger than his mother-in-law, Lyubov Alexandrovna Bers, whom he had known since childhood, their fathers having been good friends. Indeed, his youngest brother-in-law, Vyacheslav, was just one year old when Tolstoy married his sister Sonya. Nevertheless, it suited Tolstoy to have a young girl as his bride. As their son Sergey would later comment, his father was deeply in love with his mother when he married her, but he also wanted someone he could educate and mould according to his own tastes.5 Sonya, happily, accepted her husband's moral authority from the beginning, and even directly referred to herself in letters to him in the early years of their marriage as his 'eldest daughter'. In one letter she reassures her husband that she has not forgotten his 'parental advice'.6
Then there was the difference in social backgrounds. Sergey also notes at the start of his memoirs that his father had not wanted to marry an aristocrat like himself. As the daughter of a doctor descended from a German immigrant and an illegitimate Russian noblewoman, Sonya certainly could not boast such an impressive pedigree. When she married, she took on a title as well as all her husband's views, and she liked being Countess Tolstoy. Her husband later renounced his title, but she continued to sign herself 'Grafinya'S. A. Tolstaya' (grafinya being a Russian form of the original German Gräfin). Sonya never had the time to ruminate on the religious and philosophical ideas which inspired her husband's radical change of lifestyle — she was too busy raising their family — so it was all the harder for her to repudiate the values he had so carefully inculcated her with during the first decades of their marriage and suddenly live another kind of life.
Sonya's great-grandfather was Johann Bärs (or Behrs), an officer in the Horse Guards from Saxony, whose coat-of-arms depicted a bear repelling a swarm of bees, as befits a surname derived from the German word for bear.7 Ivan Bers, as he became known in his Russianised incarnation, was sent to St Petersburg by Empress Maria Theresa in the mid-eighteenth century to assist Empress Elizabeth with Russian military training. Before he was killed in action in 1758 at the Battle of Zorndorf, he married and had a son, Evstafy (Gustav), who grew up in Moscow, became a chemist and married into another Russianised German family. Evstafy Bers lost all his wealth and possessions in the great Moscow fire of 1812, but through his German connections was able to give his two sons a fine education. They both became students at Moscow University in 1822, and trained as doctors at the same time as Russia's most famous nineteenth-century medical practitioner Nikolay Pirogov. One of the two sons was Sonya's father Andrey, born in 1808.
Owing to its low social rank, medicine was not a highly regarded profession in early-nineteenth-century Russia, and certainly never pursued by aristocrats. At the time the Bers brothers qualified, when they were about twenty years old, the most respected doctors were still foreign, but still socially inferior. In the late 1820s Andrey Bers became family doctor to the Turgenevs (when the future writer was still a boy), and accompanied them to Paris. For the next two years he devoted himself to further study, Italian opera, and, it seems, Turgenev's redoubtable and unhappily married mother, who bore him an illegitimate daughter, Varvara, whom she raised as her ward (which makes Sonya Turgenev's half-sister). After he returned to Moscow, Andrey Bers started working as a doctor attached to the Senate, which was located in the Kremlin, and then under Nicholas I he was appointed court physician. This entitled him to a cramped, low-ceilinged state apartment adjacent to the Kremlin Palace, the Tsar's imposing 700-room Moscow residence. This is where Sonya was born in 1844.
The family was never wealthy. They had servants in their Kremlin apartment, of course, but they never owned a country estate or possessed any serfs. Working for the Russian state meant that Dr Bers entered the civil service and the Table of Ranks, thereby gaining greater social respectability. Indeed, by finally attaining the eighth rank of collegiate assessor in 1842, Andrey Estafevich was entitled to acquire hereditary nobility, but he was still considered a very unsuitable match for sixteen-year-old Lyubov Islavina, to whom he proposed after treating her as a patient. Quite apart from the fact that her family were old-world Russian aristocrats, albeit an illegitimate branch, who regarded him as little better than a tradesman, Bers was by this time already thirty-four, and a Lutheran to boot. Nevertheless, the marriage went ahead, and Andrey and Lyubov Bers had eight children. Sonya was the middle of three daughters, who were all educated at home, first by German governesses. When she was sixteen, in 1860, Sonya acquired a private teaching qualification from Moscow University. By this time she had got to know Tolstoy's family quite well, having taken dancing lessons on Saturday afternoons one winter with his sister Masha's three children. Masha had been her mother's friend since childhood, and when the Bers came to visit Varya, Liza and Nikolay at home, their uncles Lev and Nikolay would sometimes be there as well.8
When Tolstoy first started to visit the Bers during his trips to Moscow, everyone assumed he was interested in the eldest daughter Elizaveta (Liza). But in the summer of 1862 he turned his attention to Sonya. It was an eventful few months. When the secret police had raided Yasnaya Polyana that summer Tolstoy had been away on the Bashkirian steppe taking his two-month koumiss cure, having been in poor health. He learned of the raid only when he visited the Bers in Moscow on his way back home to Yasnaya Polyana at the end of July. Days later he had guests. Lyubov Alexandrovna, plus her three daughters and youngest son were on their way to spend a couple of weeks at Ivitsy, her father's estate, which was not far away, and they decided to stay the night with Tolstoy. Lyubov had not been to Yasnaya Polyana since she was a child, and she was shocked by the patch of weeds growing in the gaping empty space where the old house had stood before being dismantled by its new owner. The wing that Tolstoy had settled in had never been intended to be a principal home, and it was quite a squash accommodating everybody. Along with the permanent residents (Tolstoy, Aunt Toinette and her companion Natalya Petrovna), his sister Masha was still staying, and now there were five extra guests. Beds were made up on the blue-and-white striped sofas downstairs for the three girls Liza, Sonya and Tanya, then twenty-seven, eighteen, and sixteen years respectively. A few months later the spartanly furnished room would be where Tolstoy sat down to write the opening chapters of War and Peace.9
After being shown around, the city-dwelling Bers children were most excited to be taken into the garden to pick raspberries. Tolstoy, meanwhile, was distracted from his preoccupation with the recent disturbing events by the charms of Lyubov Alexandrovna's ingenuous middle daughter. No sooner had the Bers arrived at Ivitsy than 'le Comte', as they called him, came riding over on his white horse to visit them.10 This is when he started communicating with Sonya by spelling out the first letters of words with a piece of chalk, which he would later immortalise when describing Levin's courtship of Kitty in Anna Karenina. One can only marvel at Sonya's ability to understand the words behind the letters 'V. v. s. s. 1. v. n. n. i. v. s. L. Z. m. v. s. v. s. T.', which in English would read: 'In your family there is a false view of me and your sister Liza. You and your sister Tanya must defend me.' A week later Tolstoy decided to accompany the Bers back to Moscow, and he then spent the next two weeks walking almost daily to visit them at their dacha five miles north of the city, and falling more and more in love with 'S', as he refers to her in his diaries.
During this euphoric time Tolstoy tried to concentrate on a pedagogical article he was writing, but not very successfully. He did, however, write a forceful letter to Alexander II in which he complained in the strongest terms about the search of his estate:
I consider it unworthy to assure Your Majesty that the insult I have suffered is undeserved. All my past, my contacts, my activities in serving people's education, which are open to all, and finally the journal in which my most heartfelt convictions are expressed, could have proved to anyone interested in me, without the deployment of measures which have destroyed people's peace and happiness, that I could not have been a conspirator, an initiator of proclamations, murders or arson. Apart from the insult, suspicion of criminal activities, apart from the opprobrium in the opinion of society and that feeling of eternal threat, under which I am obliged to live and work, as a result of this visit, I have completely plummeted in the opinion of the people, which I have cherished, which I spent years earning, and which was vital for the activity which I had chosen - the foundation of schools for the people.
Alexander II happened to be visiting Moscow, which meant the letter could be hand-delivered. The Tsar did not bother to reply to Tolstoy himself, but Prince Dolgorukov, the head of the secret police, was instructed to send a mealy-mouthed letter of self-justification to the governor of Tula for him to pass on.11
Fortunately Tolstoy had other things to occupy him at this time. Rather than return to Yasnaya Polyana, he had stayed on in Moscow when the Bers returned to their Kremlin apartment at the beginning of September, and for once the strength of his romantic feelings stopped him from becoming too self-analytical. The previous year, when he was considering the merits of another woman as a potential bride, his sister Maria had warned: 'For heaven's sake, don't analyse too much, because once you start analysing, you always find some stumbling block in every straightforward issue, and without knowing how to respond to what and why, you run away.'12 He had indeed prevaricated back then, and nothing came of the liaison, but this time he moved swiftly, perhaps realising the dangers of reflection. On Sunday 16 September he proposed to Sonya and, at his insistence, they were married seven days later.
It was not just that the engagement lasted only a week that made their marriage quite unusual, or even that Sonya was so nervous she could only eat pickled cucumbers and black bread in the days leading up to the wedding.13 Tolstoy offered his fiancée the choice of going back to live with her parents, a honeymoon abroad, or starting their new life straight away in Yasnaya Polyana.14 Sonya chose the last option; she never went abroad even later in her life. There was no time for Lyubov Alexandrovna to sew her daughter a complete trousseau, but Tolstoy made sure to give Sonya his old diaries to read, not wanting to conceal anything in his past. As an innocent and inexperienced girl who had seen little of life, she was deeply shocked and upset by what she later termed his 'excessive conscientiousness'. The previous month she had given him a thinly disguised autobiographical story to read, it is true, in which she described a young girl being courted by a prince of 'unusually unattractive appearance' and volatile opinions.15 But this was different. Sonya found it painful to learn about his sexual conquests and romantic liaisons with peasant women, no matter how much he now repented of them.16 Her father, meanwhile, was seething with anger. Initially opposed to the marriage, he felt deeply for his slighted elder daughter, who should have been the one to marry first, and he was only gradually reconciled. Sonya's mother was also hardly overjoyed by the match, and for a while adopted a patronising tone with Tolstoy, whom she continued to call by his childhood nickname of 'Lyovochka'.17 Both parents were well aware, however, of Tolstoy's eligibility, and of the unlikelihood of finding similar suitors for their other daughters.
The wedding was scheduled for eight in the evening but was delayed by at least an hour and a half. In the haste of all the packing that had to be done in preparation for the journey to Yasnaya Polyana, which would begin immediately after the ceremony, Tolstoy's servant had forgotten to leave out a clean shirt for him. Thus instead of his best man arriving at the Bers' apartment to announce that the bridegroom was waiting in the church, a sheepish Alexey Stepanovich came to rummage through the packed luggage.18 The ceremony took place at the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady in the heart of the Kremlin, minutes from the Bers' apartment. Dating back to the late fourteenth century, this small church is the oldest of all the Kremlin buildings, and in the nineteenth century it became part of the Great Palace built by Nicholas I. (All one can see of it nowadays is its single white drum and golden cupola rising above the palace's green rooftop — it has not been returned to the Orthodox Church, nor is it open to the public.) Unlike the grand cathedrals nearby, where state occasions were held, this was a church attended by those who lived and worked in the Kremlin, and on the evening of Tolstoy's wedding it was filled with gatecrashers — curious employees of the court who worked in the palace — as well as the small number of invited guests. None of Tolstoy's own family were present except for his aunt Polina, who accompanied Sonya to the church in the carriage, along with her nine-year-old brother Volodya, who carried the icon of St Sophia the Martyr she had j'ust been blessed with by her mother and uncle. Tolstoy's brother Sergey had been in Moscow, but had departed already so that he could organise a proper welcome party for the couple at Yasnaya Polyana.19 His sister Masha was in Marseilles.
Late in the evening, after the celebratory champagne, and after observing the Russian custom of sitting down and saying prayers before going on a journey,20 the newly-weds set off in the brand new dormeuse Tolstoy had purchased for the occasion: a particularly well-sprung carriage with extensions so that a bed could be made up for the occupants. It came with six horses, driven by a coachman and postilion. Sonya found it difficult to leave her family, as she had never been parted from them before, nor had she ever travelled in the autumn or winter, let alone at night. The light given off by the streetlamps of Moscow was exchanged for pitch blackness as soon as they left the city. It was also raining heavily. Still unable to pluck up the courage to switch from the vyform of address to the more intimate ty with her husband, Sonya was also terrified: they had never been alone before. The married couple barely spoke before stopping at the coaching inn in Biryulevo, fifteen miles south of Moscow, where they spent their wedding night. 'She knows everything', 'Her fright', 'Something painful' were amongst the pithy telegraphic comments Tolstoy made in his diary after they finally arrived at Yasnaya Polyana the following evening.21 A couple of weeks later Sonya was evidently still struggling to come to terms with the 'physical manifestations' of their relationship, which she found appalling, but which she discovered were clearly so important to him.22
At the house they were greeted by Sergey, who offered the traditional Russian bread and salt as a sign of welcome, and by Aunt Toinette, holding up the family icon of the Mother of God of the Sign. Sonya bowed deeply before them both, crossed herself, kissed first the icon and then Aunt Toinette. Tolstoy did the same.23 Over the next few days Sonya met the various members of the household as they came to offer their congratulations to the happy couple. They included Nikolay Mikhailovich the cook, Anna Petrovna the cowherd, accompanied by her daughters Annushka and Dushka, grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna's old maid Agafya Mikhailovna, always knitting stockings, even while she was walking about,24 the jolly laundrywoman Aksinya Maximovna and her pretty daughters Polya and Marfa, as well as the coachman, the gardener, the pastry cook and numerous other servants and peasants from the estate and neighbouring villages. Sonya's mother had thoughtfully given her 300 roubles, so she would not have to depend on her husband for money initially, but it nearly all disappeared as gifts to those who came to offer congratulations. Henceforth, Sonya was entirely dependent on her husband in financial matters, and disliked having to ask him for money. He never made her feel she was a penniless bride without a dowry, however, nor that his wealth belonged to him alone, she notes in her autobiography.25
Yasnaya Polyana was now also Sonya's domain, and she would barely leave it for the first eighteen years of her marriage. Aunt Toinette put Sonya in charge of running the house straight away, handing her an enormous bunch of keys on a ring, which she later hung from the belt round her waist. Sonya had not grown up in luxury, but she was nevertheless taken aback by the austerity ('almost poverty') of her new surroundings. Her husband was used to sleeping on a grubby dark red leather pillow without a pillowcase,26 and there was no bath anywhere in the house. Sonya was determined to change that. When her trousseau arrived, her silverware replaced the ancient metal cutlery and a silk eiderdown replaced the cotton one, which, much to her husband's amazement, she lined with a sheet.27 She embroidered 'L.T.' in red on his underwear.28 After finding an unpalatable species of vermin in her soup one day, Sonya also tackled the lack of hygiene in the kitchen. White chef's jackets and hats soon materialised, and Sonya took over responsibility for the daily menu. Over time she built up a Yasnaya Polyana cookery book consisting of 162 recipes, for everything from 'Partridge in Herring Sauce' and 'Duck with Mushrooms' to 'How to Cook a Pike'. Then there were recipes for traditional Tolstoy dishes such as almond soufflé, and black bread pudding, or the special Bers recipe for apple pie, and Marusya Maklakova's lemon kvass (comment: 'very good').29 Sonya came to be very fond of Nikolay Mikhailovich the cook, even if he was too drunk to turn up to work sometimes, and had to be replaced by his breezy wife. He had once played the flute in old Prince Volkonsky's serf orchestra, and had turned to cooking when he lost his embouchure, as he recounted to her with a sad, wry smile.30
The first few days and weeks, while Lev and Sonya were setting up house together, were a mixture of wild happiness and the inevitable friction caused by the differing habits and expectations of two people who in reality barely knew each other. Tolstoy wrote to Alexandrine soon after arriving back at Yasnaya Polyana to tell her that he had not known that it was possible to be so happy, and that he loved his wife more than anything else in the world.31 He also commented on experiencing 'unbelievable joy' in his diary, but just a few days later he recorded having an argument with Sonya, and expressed his sadness at discovering their relationship was no different from that of any other couple.32 By this time, Sonya had resumed the diary she had started keeping two years earlier, and she now turned to it whenever she began to sense she was losing her husband's affections. She was certainly beginning to lose his attention. Tolstoy could occupy himself with domestic matters and marital bliss up to a point, but after a while the prolonged distraction from intellectual pursuits began to be irksome. Three weeks into their marriage, he confided to his diary: 'All this time I have been busy with matters which are termed practical. But I'm finding this idleness difficult. I cannot respect myself. So I am not satisfied with myself and not clear in my relationships with others... I must work ...'33
First of all, Tolstoy was behind with the August and September issues of his journal Yasnaya Polyana. His heart was no longer in it, but there were two articles for it that he needed to finish, one of which typically put forward the Tolstoyan idea that the peasant children actually had more to teach their supposed teachers than the other way round. At the end of September Sonya's spurned elder sister Liza sent in the brief article about Luther she had been commissioned to write by Tolstoy. It was conceived as one of the popular historical sketches he hoped would interest peasant children. Whether it was due to her suddenly being elevated to a countess, or just plain jealousy of anything which took her husband away from her, Sonya resented and disliked Tolstoy's involvement with the peasantry. Having grown up in the city, peasants were alien beings to her, and neither then nor later did she understand her husband's deep devotion to them. She certainly never came to share his love of the muzhik, much to his chagrin. But there was an additional reason for her jealous resentment: she had read with horror the entries in his diary about his romantic liaison with the peasant girl Aksinya Bazykina, such as the one in which he claimed that he was in love 'like never before'. Sonya knew she might run into her any day, because Aksinya had not, of course, moved away and was still working on the estate. 'I've been reading the beginnings of his works,' she wrote now in her own diary on 16 December 1862, 'and I'm disgusted and sickened by everywhere where there is love, where there are women, and I'd like to burn absolutely all of it. So that I don't have to be reminded of his past.'34
The trouble was, Tolstoy's involvement with the peasantry was also a creative and linguistic one. Fighting in the Crimean War had revealed to him how great was the abyss between the educated classes and the peasantry. Reluctant to continue writing solely for the nobility, he had resolved to try to bridge that abyss, not only by writing fiction in which the protagonists were peasants, but in an unvarnished language and style that was close to peasant speech. His first experiments in this vein had produced several unfinished stories which he returned to in the first few months after he married, and Sonya helped with the completion of one of them by writing out a fair copy to send to the publisher. Thus began what was to be an extraordinarily fruitful partnership, in which Sonya acted as amanuensis to her husband, performing an invaluable service by deciphering the often barely legible handwriting of the amendments which were invariably crammed into the margins of his tortuously composed drafts. 'Polikushka', a parable about the evils of serfdom, was the first story Sonya copied out,35 and it was published in early 1863.36 Another of Tolstoy's stories of peasant life was entitled 'Tikhon and Malanya', but at some point in December 1862 he abruptly stopped working on it, most likely for the simple reason that the central female character Malanya was modelled on Aksinya. He never returned to it, and it was published for the first time only after his death.37
Marriage diverted Tolstoy from the path taking him closer to the peasantry that he had started out on. He now embarked on the lengthy but productive detour which just happened to result in him writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's changes of direction may no longer have been as frequent as when he was in his twenties, but they were no less violent when they took place. For two and a half years he had turned his back on art while he had thrown himself into his revolutionary educational activities and worked as a Justice of the Peace. Now he was preparing to turn his back on working for the peasantry and leave this life behind to return to the cultural milieu of his class. But before he could proceed, he needed to fulfil his obligation to his publisher Mikhail Katkov, who had lent him 1,000 roubles back in February 1862 to pay a gambling debt. This was the last time Tolstoy gambled. Under the terms of the deal, Katkov was to have the right to publish Tolstoy's 'Caucasus novella' in his journal the Russian Messenger. It was nowhere near finished, however. Tolstoy tried vainly to persuade Katkov to allow him to send money now rather than a manuscript, but eventually he knuckled down and pulled his various drafts into shape.
Tolstoy had been working on this novella for ten years — longer than for any work he ever published — and it had undergone many changes as he read and absorbed works such as The Iliad.38 What was ultimately published in the January 1863 issue of theRussian Messenger was a novella entitled The Cossacks,39 but because Tolstoy had submitted his manuscript so late, the issue in fact only physically appeared at the end of February. He had planned to write a sequel, and he continued to toy with this idea, but really his mind was on other things. The Cossacks is a kind of Rousseau-inspired metaphor of Tolstoy's spiritual journey in the decade before his marriage. It tells the story of Olenin, a young Russian officer from Moscow, who is stationed with some Cossack villagers during his period of service in the Caucasus. He envies them their freedom, perceiving in them a natural grace and nobility, and he falls hopelessly in love with a particularly alluring Cossack girl. Ultimately, however, Olenin realises he cannot overcome his aristocratic, metropolitan background and become one with nature like the Cossacks, and he realises he has to go back to his old life. Something similar happened to Tolstoy when he married, and he openly acknowledged that his views on life had changed when writing to his closest confidante, Alexandrine.40 He was now ready to go back to writing fiction for an educated audience about members of his own class.
In January 1863 Tolstoy announced in the Moscow press that his journal Yasnaya Polyana would cease publication.41 Later that year his schools would also close, causing the student teachers to disperse. Sonya did not regret their departure, as the dense fumes of tobacco smoke during the meetings she had attended in their small drawing room had made her nauseous while she was pregnant.42 She came to hate the students' presence on the estate as soon as she began to feel at home at Yasnaya Polyana, inasmuch as the students came from an alien social background, and took her husband away from her.43 But Tolstoy still had to publish the December 1862 issue of his Yasnaya Polyana journal, and he completed his last article for it on 23 February 1863. Two days later Sonya wrote to her sister Tanya to tell her her husband had started a new novel.44 This was War and Peace. Over 5,000 manuscript pages, numerous false starts, several different titles and six years later, it was finished. In the exhilaration which overcame Tolstoy soon after marrying he declared that he wished to have the freedom to work on a long-term project ('de longue haleine'),45 but even he could not have imagined the life he would breathe into this novel would be quite as long drawn-out as this.
Just as it took the newly married couple several months to acclimatise to each other, it took the best part of the year for Tolstoy to find his focus with this new novel, but there was no question that he wanted to harness this new surge of creative energy to the composition of a substantial work of fiction. First he tinkered with an idea for a story he had been given back in 1856, about the fate of an old piebald gelding that had once been renowned for its speed. 'Kholstomer', usually translated as 'Strider', is one of his most remarkable stories. Tolstoy later adopted a third-person narrator, but much of the story is told from the horse's point of view. One summer when he had been visiting Turgenev, and they were returning home from an evening walk, they encountered an emaciated old horse standing in a pasture with strength only to swish its tail at the flies buzzing round it. Tolstoy went up to stroke the horse and commented on what it must have been thinking, prompting Turgenev to tell him he must have been a horse in a former life. Tolstoy was not happy with the story in 1863, so he put it aside, and resumed work on it some twenty years later at the instigation of his wife.46
Work on the estate also distracted Tolstoy from his purpose initially, especially with the approach of spring. Filled with new energy, Tolstoy bought cattle, sheep, birds and pigs, and tried vainly to interest Sonya in milking and butter-churning. Apart from being pregnant, she was also a city girl, and she found she could not tolerate the smell of manure in the cattle-sheds.47 For a while Tolstoy took an interest in a distillery which he built with his neighbouring landowner and friend Alexander Bibikov.48 Sonya tried to dissuade Tolstoy from pursuing this project on moral grounds, but he argued that he also needed grain for his pig-breeding.49 In any event, it only operated for about eighteen months. Far more rewarding was the planting of about 1,000 apple trees at the Nikolskoye estate,50 and an orchard of about 6,500 trees at Yasnaya Polyana. Each spring they produced clouds of exquisite pink and white blossom, which always seemed to Tolstoy to be about to float up into the sky.51 This was on a much larger scale than Tolstoy's animal husbandry, which was never terribly profitable; indeed, it was believed that the Yasnaya Polyana orchard was the second largest in Europe. By the mid-1870s, Tolstoy had increased its size from ten to forty hectares.52 Sonya was actually keen to help with tree planting — this was one aspect of farming she did not find too distasteful. That autumn she for the first time experienced the air on the estate filling with the dense, sweet smell of thousands of ripening apples. By May 1863, when she was weeks away from giving birth, it became physically impossible for her to do very much, but that did not stop Tolstoy chastising her for being idle.53
Tolstoy also became passionately interested in bees after he got married. He bought some hives from Sonya's grandfather, and installed them in a distant part of the estate, about a mile from the family home in the lime and aspen wood beyond the Voronka river.54 Sonya tried and failed to share this passion as well. As she later wrote in her autobiography:
The whole of Lev Nikolayevich's passionate nature was revealed in this enthusiasm. He developed enthusiasms for the most diverse things throughout his life: games, music, [ancient] Greek, schools, Japanese pigs, pedagogy, horses, hunting - too many in fact to count. And that's not including his intellectual and literary interests: they were most extreme. He was madly passionate about everything at the height of his enthusiasm, and if he could not convince whomever he was talking to of the importance of the activity he was caught up in, he was capable of being even hostile to that person.55
While she was growing up in Moscow, Sonya had never had time on her own. Now when Tolstoy pursued his enthusiasms, she was left by herself at home, and she became very lonely, as she recorded in her diary. Sometimes during the early summer of 1863, when her husband spent whole days with his bees, she walked through the fields to take him his lunch or a glass of tea in the evening, and would find him with a net over his head arranging the combs in a hive, or capturing a swarm.56 After sitting there and getting stung, she would face a solitary walk back home. As well as reading about beekeeping, Tolstoy spent hours observing the patterns of behaviour of his bees, assisted by his beekeeper, an old man with a long grey beard. During the summer he was also helped by Nikolka, the gardener's young son.57 His absorption with the Yasnaya Polyana apiary abated after about two years, but his enthusiasm for beekeeping left its mark in his writing. Firstly, there is the famous epic simile in War and Peace, borrowed from Virgil'sAeneid, in which Moscow in 1812 is compared to a queenless hive. Conversely, Tolstoy thought of a busy hive when conveying the atmosphere of the ball in Anna Karenina, and a little later in the novel he describes bees on their first spring flight after the relocation of their hive for the summer. The precision of his vocabulary, overlooked by most translators, tells us a great deal about the rigour he applied to his study of apiculture.58
Apart from the prolonged visit to Yasnaya Polyana of Sonya's sister Tanya and brother Sasha, plus two of their cousins, Tolstoy had one other major distraction from the writing of fiction in the summer of 1863. In the middle of June, husband and wife temporarily stopped writing and reading each other's diaries, and for a short period at least, Sonya was able to claim Tolstoy's full attention: on 28 June their first child was born. In her autobiography Sonya does not describe the birth of Sergey as a joyous event. This was not only because he arrived in the world over a week early, and caught everybody unawares. Lyubov Alexandrovna just managed to arrive in time, but the set of baby clothes she had sent from Moscow did not. The newborn had to be wrapped in one of Tolstoy's nightshirts before being placed in the crude limewood cradle that had been made by the family carpenter. Both the midwife, Maria Ivanovna Abramovich, and Dr Shmigaro, the chief doctor at the Tula armaments factory, were Polish exiles, whose number in Russia had exponentially increased after the government had brutally suppressed the Polish uprising that January. Compared to the thousands of Poles deported to Siberia, the Tolstoys' doctor and midwife had a much easier fate. Over the next twenty-five years Maria Ivanovna would make many j'ourneys from Tula to Yasnaya Polyana — she assisted Sonya at all except one of the births of her thirteen children, five of whom did not live to adulthood.
Tolstoy had not completely abandoned his Populist ways, and now he flatly refused to allow Sonya to take on a wet-nurse, despite mastitis making it impossible for her to breast-feed baby Sergey. Lyubov Alexandrovna found it exasperating that her daughter meekly followed her husband's wishes, and must have been relieved when her own husband weighed in with some common sense. The crusty Dr Bers had already lost patience with his son-in-law's unorthodox ideas on numerous occasions. He had been upset and offended by a pedagogical article Tolstoy had written the previous year condemning university education, for example, and had written and told him so.59 In August 1863 he wrote to Lev and Sonya from Moscow to tell them they had both gone mad. 'You can be sure, Lev Nikolayevich, my friend,' he wrote, 'that your nature will never become that of a peasant, j'ust as your wife's nature cannot tolerate that which can be tolerated by the Pelageya who beat up her husband and the innkeeper at a tavern outside Petersburg (see Moscow Gazette, issues 165 and 166).' Tolstoy, he remarked tartly, was skilled at writing and talking, but not always so smart when it came to practical things.60
It took a while for Tolstoy to acquire paternal feelings for Sergey. He refused to hold him when he was very small,61 and only began to love his son when he was nearly two years old and very unwell. It was 'a completely new feeling,' he noted in his diary in March 1865.62 Nevertheless, it was with the birth of Sergey that the happiest years of the Tolstoys' marriage began. Lev and Sonya's relationship became stronger and more stable, leading him to declare in his single diary entry for 1864 that he and Sonya meant more to each other than anyone else in the world.63 Sonya no longer had time to be bored or lonely, and as a mother she was now fulfilling her husband's idea of womanhood, but she was doing more than that. By sitting up late at night to write out fair copies of her husband's drafts, which gave her a sense of involvement in his creative life, she was also indispensable to his artistic productivity. This profound happiness in Tolstoy's personal life was intimately connected to the extraordinary creative energy which was welling up inside him, and which would be expressed in the writing of War and Peace.64 He wrote about this to Alexandrine in October 1863:
I've never felt my intellectual and even all my moral energies to be so free and so capable of work. And I've got work going on inside me now. This work is a novel about the period from 1810 to 1820 ... I'm now a writer with all the power of my soul, and am writing and thinking as I have never written and thought before. I'm a happy and calm husband and father, with nothing to hide from anybody, and no wish except for everything to go on like this...65
Two autumns later, in September 1865, Tolstoy noted in his diary that his happiness with Sonya was the sort of happiness enjoyed by one couple in a million.66
The first parts of War and Peace started appearing in 1865 under the title 'The Year 1805'. Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons had been published in its entirety in one journal issue in 1862, but it was a fraction of the length of War and Peace. It was more customary for substantial prose works to appear in instalments in the country's top literary journals before appearing in book form. This is how Tolstoy proceeded, but given his propensity for changing tack and carrying out endless revisions, this was a risky venture. True to form, by the time he had published the first parts of War and Peace, which he had contracted to the Russian Messenger, Tolstoy had completely changed his ideas about where his novel was going. Even when he then started publishing the novel under his own auspices in book form, his thoughts were not fixed, and changes were also made to his text in the 1870s and 1880s, leading inevitably to much confusion. In the 1920s one Tolstoy scholar even felt compelled to write an article about the difficulties in establishing which was the canonical text of the novel.67
Tolstoy's impulse to write on the events of 1805 had come from his interest in the Decembrists — the group of army officers who had staged an ill-fated uprising in December 1825 at the time of Nicholas I's accession. Occupying Paris after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 had opened their eyes to a more enlightened system of government, and they returned to Russia full of hope that the liberal-minded Alexander I might now introduce political reform. When their hopes were dashed, they turned to conspiracy with the revolutionary aim of replacing Russia's autocratic rule with a republic, or at least a constitutional monarchy. The mutiny they staged in St Petersburg's Senate Square after Alexander I's death was a dismal failure, however, and the leading Decembrists were punished with either execution or lifelong exile in Siberia. Fear of revolution marked the whole of Nicholas I's reign. In 1856, as part of Alexander II's liberalisation of Russian society after the death of his father, the new tsar amnestied those Decembrists still serving long sentences of exile in Siberia, and amongst them was Tolstoy's distant relative Prince Sergey Volkonsky. It was Volkonsky, whom he met in Florence in 1860, that Tolstoy had in mind when he first began planning a novel about the Decembrists. He soon discovered, however, that he needed a larger cast of characters, and that he also needed to go back in time to 1812 in order to bring their story to life. That in turn led him to the realisation that he really needed to go back to 1805, when Russia first went to war with Napoleon. As he explained in one of the many forewords he drafted, which reflect his changing views of the novel, 'I was ashamed to write about our victory in the struggle with Napoleonic France without writing about our failures and our disgrace.'68 Tolstoy's initial plan, then, was to capture artistically the history of his nation over a fifty-year period and call it 'Three Ages'. The first 'age' would encompass the events of 1805 to 1812, the second would focus on the 1820s, and in particular on the fateful uprising in 1825, while the third would bring the action into the 1850s, and incorporate the disastrous Crimean War, the unexpected death of Nicholas I and the amnesty of the Decembrists at a time of hope for reform. As we know, Tolstoy eventually ended up concentrating on the events leading up to 1812 and their immediate aftermath, and he never in fact went back to his early fragment about the ageing Decembrist returning to Moscow from Siberia in the 1850s. He had no idea, however, when he was starting out in 1863, of the dimensions his new novel would ultimately assume.
If Tolstoy was able to sustain his concentration for six years and maintain an iron discipline, it was because of the hospitable environment in which he was able to work, living in his beloved ancestral home deep in the heart of the Russian countryside, supported by his devoted wife. For a while he even moved his study downstairs so that he was not distracted by family life. The old vaulted store room where old Prince Volkonsky had once hung his hams on the hooks still hanging from the ceilings, and where Sonya had stayed before their marriage, was also where he wrote the first chapters of War and Peace, after trying fifteen different openings. Isolated from the outside world (there was not even a railway connection to nearby Tula until 1867), with weeks and months going by during the winter when there were no visitors, Tolstoy could fully immerse himself in the hundreds of sources he gathered about Russian history during the Napoleonic Wars, and also draw deeply on his powers of imagination. Most of his fiction to date had an element of autobiography, but now he also found inspiration for his most memorable characters amongst his immediate family, with the vivacious and ingenuous Natasha, his most beloved character, reflecting aspects of the personalities of both his wife and his sister-in-law Tanya at different times.69 Tolstoy also looked further back into his family's past for raw material, projecting his aunt Toinette's love for his father on to the hopeless devotion of Natasha's adopted sister Sonya for her brother Nikolay. His knowledge of the habits of his epicurean grandfather Ilya Andreyevich gave substance to his portrait of Count Rostov, and he breathed life into the story of old Prince Bolkonsky and his daughter Maria at their Bald Hills estate by conjuring up in his imagination the secluded life led by his other grandfather Prince Volkonsky and his unmarried mother at Yasnaya Polyana. A few of his brother Sergey's traits went into Prince Andrey,70 and the desperate Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov was partially inspired by his distant cousin, the swashbuckling Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy. Sonya's sister Tanya liked to flatter herself that the character of Natasha was modelled exclusively on her, but the truth is that real-life people merely provided Tolstoy with the necessary spark he needed to create. His canvas was huge, and it is not surprising to find Homer on the list of authors he acknowledged as having made an impact on him at this time, alongside Goethe, Victor Hugo and Stendhal.71
Numerous friends, relatives and acquaintances helped Tolstoy with the research for War and Peace, including leading historians and his doughty father-in-law Andrey Bers, who shared his personal memories of living through the events of 1812 as a child, and rounded up an army of old Moscow ladies ready to tell their story. Andrey Estafevich also enjoyed the task of tracking down contemporary newspaper cuttings for Tolstoy, as well as the correspondence of people who had lived in Moscow during Russia's war with Napoleon.72 Tolstoy made regular research trips to Moscow, and profited particularly from a long visit he made in the autumn of 1864 after breaking his arm. He had been riding his horse Masha, accompanied by two of his borzois, and had fallen off while impulsively galloping over a ploughed field in pursuit of a rabbit one of them had spotted.73 Old Dr Shmigaro did such a poor job of setting the arm in Tula that Tolstoy travelled to Moscow for a further operation, and he spent his convalescence researching early-nineteenth-century Russian history. Sometimes this meant sitting in the Rumyantsev Museum, poring over manuscripts about Russian Freemasons, and sometimes he took himself off to the Chertkov Library to read letters and memoirs and look at portraits of Alexander I's generals.74 These two public libraries had just opened in Moscow, and without them his task would have been much harder. Tolstoy had actually picked a wonderful time to write a historical novel.
The decade of the 1860s was not only famous as the era of the Great Reforms. This was also a golden age for Russian literature, with Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky all at the height of their powers. It was an important time for music: Tchaikovsky became a student at the Petersburg Conservatoire when it was founded in 1862, and then was immediately appointed to teach at the even newer Moscow Conservatoire when he graduated; they were the first institutions in Russia set up to train professional musicians. The opening of the Mariinsky Theatre in 1860 paved the way for Russian opera and ballet to flourish, and the easing of censorship led to the publication of previously suppressed literary and historical works. These included the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, a persecuted leader of the Old Believer sect, published for the first time in 1861. It had been suppressed for two whole centuries, owing to fears that the spread of sectarianism could lead to popular rebellion. The opening of Moscow's first public libraries was part of this great explosion in Russian cultural and intellectual life, and contributed substantially to it. In 1862 the refurbished Pashkov House, one of the many elegant Moscow mansions damaged in the fire of 1812, opened as the Rumyantsev Museum, home to a research library and important art and archive collections (Tolstoy's own manuscripts were later deposited there for safekeeping).75 The following year Alexander Chertkov's son Grigory made available to the public for the first time his late father's unique and rich collection of books and primary sources devoted to the history of Russia. The Chertkov Public Library was established in a specially built wing of the family's spacious mansion in the centre of Moscow, and Grigory Chertkov proceeded to increase the holdings to about 20,000 items. The respected historian Pyotr Bartenev became the first librarian at the Chertkov Library, and, also in 1863, founder-editor of its journal Russian Archive. The latter performed a valuable service in publishing primary sources about eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Russian history, many of which were vital for Tolstoy when he was writing War and Peace. Bartenev also went out of his way to help Tolstoy with unpublished historical materials for his new novel.
By the end of 1864, Tolstoy delivered to the Moscow offices of the Russian Messenger what he believed would be the first part of his new novel, entitled 'The Year 1805'. The thirty-eight chapters he submitted correspond roughly to the first two parts of what is now volume one of War and Peace, and they were published in the January and February 1865 issues of the journal. The day after the February issue appeared (actually in March), Andrey Estafevich wrote to the Tolstoys to let them know he had just been at a reception given by the Military Governor-General, and that Tolstoy's latest instalment had been much talked about. This had been Dr Bers' first social engagement after a long convalescence recovering from a tracheotomy (as a court employee he had to ask the Tsar for special permission to grow a beard).76 He was obviously pleased to be out and about again, and reported that the subject of Tolstoy's protracted negotiations over his royalties was also hot gossip in Moscow. Feeling he would be better placed to act for his son-in-law, Andrey Estafevich offered his services to Tolstoy, but the deal had already been done.
Tolstoy had driven a hard bargain with his editor Mikhail Katkov. At the beginning of his career, back in 1852, he had been paid fifty roubles per printer's sheet, but he now felt he could ask for more — a lot more. Nikolay Lyubimov, a retired professor of physics at Moscow University and Katkov's closest editorial associate (or favourite donkey as he was referred to disparagingly in some circles), was deputised to act as go-between, and in November 1864 he spent two hours trying to persuade Tolstoy to back down and accept a rate of fifty roubles for his new work.77 But Tolstoy knew his own worth, insisted on 300 roubles, and got it. This meant Katkov paid his star author 3,000 roubles for the first section of the novel (ten printer's sheets).78 This was a lot of money. As a concession, he managed to persuade Tolstoy to agree to a separate book publication of all the chapters which made up 'The Year 1805' after they had been published in the Russian Messenger, which then had about 3,000 subscribers. They agreed on a print run of 500 copies, with Katkov as the beneficiary, and the book went on sale in June 1866, for a price of two and a half roubles.79 Working out exactly how much these figures would be at today's values is a difficult and rather fruitless exercise, but one can gain a good sense of relative worth when comparing Tolstoy's honorarium with the average manual worker's wage at the time, which was about ten roubles a month - the eventual price of War and Peace when it was finally published as a book. Village teachers earned about twenty-five roubles a month, which was what Tolstoy paid the governesses who came to teach his children, on top of providing them with room and board.80
The year 1866 was something of an annus mirabilis for Mikhail Katkov, as he found himself publishing Tolstoy's novel and Dostoyevsky's masterpiece Crime and Punishment on the pages of his journal at the same time. Dostoyevsky was not the easiest of authors, but on this occasion far more amenable than Tolstoy. He struggled to meet the deadlines for each of the monthly instalments of Crime and Punishment, but he kept to them, and the novel was complete by December 1866. (If Tolstoy read it, which is unlikely, he did not record what he thought about it.) With War and Peace, things were altogether trickier. By this point, Tolstoy had come up with a new title: 'All's Well That Ends Well', projecting a happy ending which was different from the one he had initially conceived, and different again from the ending of the final version of the novel. Tolstoy still believed he would finish his new work the following year, and that spring he began lengthy and ultimately disappointing discussions with an artist whom he commissioned to produce illustrations for the projected book publication.81
Katkov wanted to continue printing the next sections of Tolstoy's novel in the Russian Messenger in 1867, before producing it in book form. Accordingly, a new set of negotiations began in November 1866, but the following spring there was still no agreement, and in June 1867 Tolstoy took matters into his own hands. Deciding against first publishing the rest of the novel as monthly instalments in a journal in the time-honoured Russian fashion, he decided now to publish it in separate volumes as they were completed. He turned for help to Pyotr Bartenev. The eventual form of War and Peace changed radically as a result, and the nature of the changes can be roughly gauged by consulting the list of 'distinguishing merits' compiled by a commercial Moscow publisher of the so-called 'first complete edition of the great novel completed in 1866, before Tolstoy reworked it in 1867-1869':
1. Twice as short and five times more interesting.
2. Almost no philosophical digressions.
3. A hundred times easier to read: all the French text is replaced by Russian in the author's own translation.
4. Much more 'peace' and less 'war'.
5. Prince Andrey and Petya Rostov remain alive.82
Igor Zakharov, the publisher in question, drew on authoritative editions to compile the version of the novel he published in 2000,83 but he was pilloried for his popularising efforts on Russian television, and also by literary scholars anxious to preserve the integrity of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Zakharov was certainly disingenuous in claiming he was bringing to readers the 'real Lev Tolstoy' and the 'real War and Peace' as Tolstoy translated the French material in the novel into Russian later, for the 1873 edition.84Nevertheless this 'edition', which appeared in English translation in 2007,85 is helpful in throwing into greater relief the impact which Tolstoy's collaboration with Pyotr Bartenev had on the future evolution of War and Peace, which has everything to do with the greater number of historical sources he now consulted. Tolstoy once commented that turning to Bartenev with a research query was like turning on the tap of a samovar.86
Tolstoy drew up a contract with Bartenev and a Moscow printer to publish his novel in June 1867. He was now at last calling it War and Peace, perhaps under the influence of Proudhon's 1861 tract of the same name, which had appeared in Russian translation in 1864. He was perhaps also acting under the influence of Herzen, who had written three articles under this title in 1859.87 Tolstoy and Bartenev agreed to an initial print run of 4,800 copies of six separate volumes, corresponding to the six parts the novel was then divided into, with a planned price of eight roubles. Fifteen per cent of the proceeds were to go to Bartenev for copy-editing the book and dealing with the censor, and twenty were to go to booksellers.88 Sonya's father was clearly still keen to be involved, and he turned out to be very useful when Tolstoy experienced unexpected delays in receiving the first proofs. In the summer of 1867 Andrey Estafevich fired off regular bulletins to Yasnaya Polyana to report on what was going on in Moscow, telling Tolstoy when Bartenev was coming back from his dacha, what he said upon his return and so on and so forth. Tolstoy, meanwhile, realised that the first half of volume one was much longer than the second. While he started pruning the first part, which he believed improved it immeasurably, he requested Bartenev to take out as many indentations as possible in the first half and increase them in the second. This created some very long paragraphs.89
While Tolstoy was proofreading the early chapters for the publication of this new edition he was, of course, still writing and researching later parts of his novel. In September 1867 he did some research of a different kind. He was getting near to the crucial Battle of Borodino in his narrative, and in order to deepen his understanding of the movements of the 250,000 soldiers who took part in it, he decided to go and inspect the battleground, located near the town of Mozhaysk, about seventy miles west of Moscow. The Battle of Borodino was the decisive confrontation between Napoleon's Grande Armée and the Russian forces led by General Kutuzov in 1812, and accordingly it occupies a pivotal position in Russian history, and indeed in War and Peace, coming roughly at the halfway mark in the novel. The battle took place during the course of one long day, but it occupies twenty chapters in Tolstoy's epic narrative, including discursive commentary from the author himself. Combining the lofty perspectives of both the historical figures of Napoleon and Kutuzov with the ground-level viewpoint of fictional characters like Prince Andrey, in charge of a regiment, and Pierre, a civilian who unwittingly becomes caught up in the maelstrom, Tolstoy's artistic tactics are equal to the most sophisticated and effective of military strategies, while his campaign against professional historians no less aggressive.
Napoleon's troops had been marching relentlessly on Moscow since invading Russian territory in June 1812, and the speed of the French army's advance led Alexander I to appoint the venerable Prince Kutuzov as his commander-in-chiefjust days before the historic battle, replacing General Count Barclay de Tolly. Kutuzov was sixty-seven years old, but greatly revered by all ranks in the Russian army. Unlike Barclay de Tolly, the Lutheran descendant of a Scottish family which had settled in the German Baltic province of Livonia in the seventeenth century, Kutuzov was thoroughly Russian. He established his defence of Moscow in the village of Borodino, and it was here, at dawn on 7 September 1812,90 that the two armies met for their bloody encounter. The fatalities were enormous, with the Russian army losing as many as 44,000 men, and the French 58,000. Technically the victory was Napoleon's, as he was able to march on to Moscow after Kutuzov withdrew, but his forces were fatally weakened. Tolstoy's conclusion was that the Russians had scored a crucial moral victory at Borodino, the kind which 'convinces the opponent of the moral superiority of his enemy, and of his own impotence'. He was unabashed about including in his novel authorial pronouncements to this effect:
The direct consequence of the Battle of Borodino was Napoleon's groundless flight from Moscow, his retreat along the old Smolensk road, the defeat of the 500,000-strong invasion, and the defeat of Napoleonic France, on which had been laid for the first time the hand of an opponent whose spirit was stronger.91
Half a century later, when he came to visit the battleground, Tolstoy found accommodation in a local convent and spent two days wandering around the village and surrounding fields of Borodino, in the company of his brother-in-law Stepan Bers, then twelve years old, who was thrilled to be taken along. Tolstoy was disappointed not to be able to talk to a recently deceased veteran of the war who had worked as the custodian of the monument to the battle which stood in the middle of the field, but he used his eyes effectively instead. By sketching out a plan of the battlefield, and noting where the troops had been positioned, he was able to work out vital details such as exactly in whose eyes the sun had shone when it came up on that fateful day. Before heading back home, he got up at dawn and completed one last tour of the battlefield. Tolstoy's skewed presentation of history in War and Peace has attracted criticism ever since it was published; indeed, some of his accounts of the battles in 1812 left some veterans apoplectic with rage at his manipulation of historical sources to suit his own artistic and ideological ends. There is nevertheless a general consensus on the authenticity of his portrayal of the events at Borodino.92
After coming back from Borodino, Tolstoy finished the part of the novel which culminates with Natasha's seduction by Anatole Kuragin. This comes at the halfway mark in the final version of the novel, at the end of volume two. Tolstoy regarded this episode as the crux of the entire work, since it functions as a kind of mirror of Napoleon's 'violation' of Russia, with which it coincides, and he found it extremely difficult to write. This was also perhaps partly because he was reflecting the recent experiences of his sister-in-law Tanya, who had gone through something similar with an inappropriate suitor.93 At this point, Tolstoy decided it would be best to publish everything he had written so far rather than hold up publication until he had finished the next part (which covers the Battle of Borodino). The three volumes of the first book edition were accordingly published in December 1867, and sold for a price of seven roubles. One critic took exception to having to pay such an 'indecent' price for the three slim volumes with yellow covers which he claimed had a large typeface more suitable for old people and children. Nevertheless the books sold.94 The next volume went on sale three months later in March 1868, with a cunning advertising ploy: those who bought the first four volumes would receive the fifth free, while those who waited until the edition was complete would have to pay more, since the price would then go up. The books sold so well, however, that a second edition, incorporating certain new revisions, appeared that autumn.95The Russian reading public was still relatively small, so this was no mean achievement.
By 1868 Tolstoy was working furiously to finish War and Peace. The further he got into the novel, the clearer its shape became to him, and the greater his inspiration and sense of purpose. He was anyway a person of extraordinary sensitivity, and now, in the middle of this enormous creative outpouring, his friend, the poet Afanasy Fet, likened him to a great bell made of the thinnest glass, liable to produce a sound at the slightest touch.96 It was this sensitivity which compelled him to respond to some of the early carping reviews by publishing in Pyotr Bartenev's journal Russian Archive 'A Few Words About the Novel War and Peace' in March 1868. Long before he had finished writing his novel, he hoped he could thus anticipate any further misapprehensions, which he knew were inevitable. First he confronted the tricky question of the genre of his novel by offering his own oft-quoted, and not necessarily very helpful definition: 'What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less a [narrative] poem, and even less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it was expressed.' Justifying his apparent lack of reverence for conventional European literary forms, Tolstoy quite rightly argues that from Gogol's Dead Souls to Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, 'in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one artistic work in prose, even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, a [narrative] poem or a novella'. He also tackles other potential points of contention, such as the fact that not only the Russians but also the French speak a mixture of French and Russian in the novel. And as well as providing a robust defence of the artist's right to diverge from historical accounts in evoking past events, he explains that his invention of names such as Bolkonsky and Drubetskoy, so similar to the well-known real-life aristocratic surnames of Volkonsky and Trubetskoy, was governed by a desire for his fictitious characters to have names which would sound pleasant and natural to the Russian ear.97
When he wrote his 'Few Words' about the novel he had been working on 'continually and exclusively' for the previous five years, Tolstoy openly acknowledged he had been able to take advantage of 'optimal living conditions'. Presumably he had in mind not only his comfortable state of financial independence and all the fresh air and exercise he could want, but also the emotional and practical support provided by his wife. Sonya gave birth to four children during the six years Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, and also suffered at least one miscarriage (in October 1867). After the birth of Sergey, Tanya was born in 1864, followed by Ilya in 1866 and Lev in 1869. When she was not looking after their children, Sonya worked willingly as her husband's scribe, and thus became intimately involved in his creative life. This sometimes required a good deal of patience, as she records in her autobiography:
Sometimes proofs which had been finally corrected and sent off were returned again to Lev Nikolayevich at his request in order to be recorrected and recopied. Or a telegram would be sent to substitute one word for another. My whole soul became so immersed in the copying that I began myself to feel when it was not altogether right; for instance, when there were frequent repetitions of the same word, long periods, wrong punctuation, obscurity, etc. I used to point all these things out to Lev Nikolayevich. Sometimes he was glad for my remarks; sometimes he would explain why it ought to remain as it was; he would say that details do not matter, only the general scheme matters.98
If her brother Stepan's memoirs are to be believed, Sonya copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace seven times. Unfortunately this supposition appears to have been wishful thinking on his part: Nikolay Gusev dismisses it as a myth in a footnote of his 900-page biographical study of Tolstoy's life and works from 1855 to 1869. Conceding that some of Tolstoy's chapters were indeed reworked and copied many times, he points out that others went straight to press.99 On the other hand, there were numerous chapters which Tolstoy rewrote endlessly, so Sonya's contribution should not be underestimated. Deciphering his execrable handwriting, and then preparing a legible final draft of the manuscript, was a gargantuan task, and in 1866, during a particularly intense period of the novel's composition, a clerk was also employed to help with the copying.100
Tolstoy was wise enough to know he needed sometimes to take a break from his literary activities, and his general custom was to concentrate on his writing from autumn through to spring, and then enjoy outdoor pursuits like shooting and riding during the warm summer months when Sonya's sister Tanya and other friends and relatives would come to stay at Yasnaya Polyana. In 1865 he discovered an enthusiasm for Anthony Trollope, whose novel The Bertrams provided welcome light relief and a distraction from his immersion in Russian history.101 And during a stay in Moscow the following year, he also took up sculpture for a brief period (not surprisingly, it was the figure of a horse which he decided to tackle as his first subject).102 Tolstoy never lost his readiness to try out new pastimes, even in old age. He also began to use the newfangled mode of railway transport as soon as he had the chance: the construction of an extensive network of Russian railways in the 1860s is also the legacy of the era of the Great Reforms. The Moscow—Kursk railway line was completed in 1867, while Tolstoy was working on War and Peace, and it cut his journey times in half.
When, a few decades later, Yasnaya Polyana became a site of pilgrimage for thousands of Tolstoy's devotees, its sheer accessibility had a lot to do with it: the mainline station built in the village of Yasenki, south of Tula, was just four miles down the road from Yasnaya Polyana. A large number of the many Tolstoy followers who made the journey felt it was their duty to publish an account of their visit afterwards, but amongst the mountain of memoirs of personal meetings with Tolstoy, there is one which stands out not only by virtue of the fact that it was written a long time before all the other ones, but also because it happens to be well written. Its author was Eugene Schuyler, an American writer and diplomat who arrived in Moscow in 1868 to take up the post of consul.103 Schuyler was one of the very first Americans to receive a PhD, and had taken up Russian after meeting crew members of the Alexander Nevsky, the imperial navy's last wooden frigate, when it was docked in New York. In 1866 he published the first American translation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and on his way to Russia the following year, he met the author in Baden-Baden. Despite the coolness in their relationship at that time, Turgenev gave Schuyler a letter of introduction to Tolstoy. Schuyler's account of his visit to Yasnaya Polyana gives us a vivid glimpse into Tolstoy's life in the autumn of 1868.
At five o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday 14 September, the twenty-eight-year-old Schuyler found himself getting on a train in Moscow, and nine hours later, at two in the morning, he got off at Yasenki to be met by Tolstoy's carriage. Torrential rain meant that it took a further hour and a half to drive the four miles to Yasnaya Polyana. Upon arrival, however, he was relieved to be told that 'late hours were kept' and that the usual time for morning coffee was eleven o'clock. The following day he joined the count and his young wife, plus their three young children, Seryozha, Tanya and Ilya, and their English governess, for breakfast. Tolstoy, he discovered, had in fact been up at dawn, and had gone off into the woods with his dogs and his gun. Schuyler was duly taken hare-hunting himself, and later came to have a particular appreciation for the exquisitely written chapters describing shooting parties in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He had before then only ever made botanical excursions into forests, in search of trees and shrubs, and had never held a gun, but he now acquired direct experience of one of Tolstoy's greatest passions:
It was new to me to sit still and use my ears as well as my eyes; to appreciate the different noises of the wood; to know whether that was a twig or a leaf which fell - for the leaves were just falling ... to distinguish between the noises made by the birds; to speculate as to the origin of unknown sounds, and to have one's attention always strained for the patter-patter of the hare.104
Tolstoy did little work on War and Peace during the week in which he entertained Schuyler, but he got his American guest to help him sort out his ever-expanding library. At the end of his stay, Schuyler was granted permission to translate The Cossacks, a project which took a while for him to complete due to his professional commitments. After Moscow, he was posted to St Petersburg for several years, during which he made an intrepid and noteworthy journey to the new cities of Russian Turkestan, then created a storm during a posting in Constantinople by exposing atrocities committed by the Turks against the Bulgarians, thereby helping their nationalist cause. As a result, he was removed from his post in 1878 and appointed as American Consul in Birmingham, which he clearly found boring, as this is where he finally finished his translation of The Cossacks (he is game enough to admit in his memoir that Tolstoy did not rate it very highly).105 Schuyler and Tolstoy shared a deep interest in Peter the Great, to whom Tolstoy turned as the possible subject of his next novel after completing War and Peace. In 1873/Iolstoy eventually abandoned his Peter the Great project to write Anna Karenina, but chapters of Schuyler's study of the Russian tsar finally started appearing in 1886.
After a wonderful week of convivial outings and conversations about literature and education which continued late into the night, Schuyler returned to Moscow, leaving Tolstoy to get back to War and Peace. The novel's fifth volume was published in May 1869, and the sixth and final volume appeared in December of that year (it was only when Tolstoy started to revise the novel a third time in 1873, in connection with a new edition of his collected writings, that he reduced the six initial volumes to the current four). It had been a long haul. Tolstoy worked phenomenally hard during the six years it took to write War and Peace, and Sonya had to bite her lip on the frequent occasions when he was late for dinner. As she records in her autobiography, she would tell herself on such occasions that being on time for meals was too petty a concern for geniuses like her husband.106 A great believer in gymnastics and vigorous exercise outdoors, Tolstoy was physically very robust and he certainly had the stamina required to complete such a gargantuan project, but he frequently endured periods of poor health during the writing of War and Peace. There were times, particularly towards the end, for example, when he suffered from terrible migraines,107 and others when he felt generally so unwell that he had to travel to Moscow for a consultation with Grigory Zakharin, one of Moscow's leading clinicians.108
War and Peace was wildly popular with the public when it was first published, but it also provoked a storm of controversy.109 It was clear to everyone that what Tolstoy had produced was something exceptional, and the writer Ivan Goncharov was not exaggerating when he proclaimed that Tolstoy had now become a 'real lion of literature'.110 Many members of the older generation, however, thought that Tolstoy had distorted Russian history, and felt affronted. Politically motivated younger critics desperate to push Russia further on the road to reform, on the other hand, reviled the conservative family values Tolstoy upholds in the novel, and in particular his celebration of the nobility. Even those with no particular axe to grind found Tolstoy's lengthy digressions disconcerting. Many Russian prose writers, meanwhile, were simply consumed with envy, and dismissed War and Peace with a few withering comments.
Amongst the novel's early critics was Turgenev, who had additional personal reasons to be galled by the greater success his younger contemporary seemed so effortlessly to achieve. But Turgenev was at heart a modest and generous man, and by the time the French publisher Hachette brought out the first French translation of War and Peace in 1879, their differences had been resolved. He now took every opportunity to promote Tolstoy to the French public, which was almost completely unfamiliar with his works. The appearance of the translation of War and Peace completed by 'Une Russe' (Princess Irina Paskevich, born Vorontsova-Dashkova, who was a remarkable Petersburg grande dame in her own right)111 gave Turgenev a felicitous opportunity to write to Edmond About, editor of the Paris newspaper Le XIXe Siècle. In his letter, which was published on 23 January 1880, Turgenev provides French readers with an introduction to the novel and its author which is superlative in its concision and objectivity, and deserves to stand in full as the last word on this chapter of Tolstoy's life:
Dear Monsieur About,
You were kind enough to place in the XIXe Siècle my letter about the opening of the exhibition of paintings by Vereshchagin. The success I dared to predict for it, and which even exceeded my expectations, has given me the courage to write to you again. I'm writing to you again about the work of an artist, but an artist who creates with a pen in his hand.
I have in mind the historical novel by my fellow countryman, Count Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace, a translation of which has just been published HUSBAND, BEEKEEPER, AND EPIC POET by Hachette. Lev Tolstoy is the most popular amongst modern Russian writers, and War and Peace, if I may be so bold, is one of the most remarkable books of our time. This expansive work is pervaded by an epic spirit; in it the private and public life of Russia in the first years of our century is recreated by a masterly hand. Before the reader passes a whole epoch, rich with great events and major figures (the story begins not long before the Austerlitz defeat and goes up to Borodino); a whole world unfolds with a multitude of characters belonging to all levels of society, taken directly from life. The manner in which Count Tolstoy develops his theme is as new as it is original; this is not Walter Scott, and, it goes without saying, this is also not Alexandre Dumas. Count Tolstoy is a Russian writer to the core of his being; and those French readers not put off by certain longueurs, and the oddity of certain judgements, will be right in telling themselves that War and Peace has given them a more direct and faithful representation of the character and temperament of the Russian people, and about Russian life generally, than they would have obtained if they had read hundreds of works of ethnography and history. There are whole chapters here in which nothing needs to be changed; and there are historical figures (like Kutuzov, Rostopchin and others) whose characteristics have been etched for all time; this will never perish.
As you see, dear Monsieur About, I am expressing myself extravagantly, and yet my words do not fully convey my thoughts. It is possible that the deep originality of Count Lev Tolstoy will impede the foreign reader's sympathetic and rapid understanding of his novel by its very power, but I repeat - and I would be happy if people trusted what I say - that this is a great work by a great writer and it is genuine Russia.
Please accept, dear Monsieur About, assurance of my devotion.
Ivan Turgenev.112