Tolstoy (30 page)

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...
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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