Tolstoy (31 page)

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.
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Igor Zakharov, the publisher in question, drew on authoritative editions to compile the version of the novel he published in 2000,
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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.
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Nevertheless this 'edition', which appeared in English translation in 2007,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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