Tolstoy (32 page)

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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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,
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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'.
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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)
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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.
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8. STUDENT, TEACHER, FATHER

Poetry is the fire burning in a person's soul. This fire burns, warms and brings light ... There are some people who feel the heat, others who feel the warmth, others who just see the light, and others who do not even see the light ... But the true poet cannot help burning painfully, and burning others.

That's what it is all about.

Diary entry, 28 October 1870
¹

BY THE MIDDLE OF
1869, nearly the whole of Russia was engrossed in
War and Peace
and avidly awaiting its conclusion, according to a Petersburg newspaper.
²
Tolstoy still had to oversee the publication of the last chapters (which finally went on sale that December), but his mind was racing in all sorts of new directions. In truth, his interest in the novel was already beginning to recede by this time. He spent the following summer immersed in German philosophy, then embarked on an intense study of Russian fairy tales and folk epics, with a view to putting together books to help children learn to read. He read Shakespeare and Molière and started writing a play. He toyed with ideas for a novel about Peter the Great, and at the same time began contemplating another completely different novel about the predicament of a high-society woman in contemporary Russia. He also began learning ancient Greek. But he was happiest when his mind was not racing. In fact, in the weeks and months which followed the completion of
War and Peace,
Tolstoy was happiest when he did not have to think at all. Games of bezique with his aunt were a pleasant diversion on cold winter evenings, and a sign that he was unwinding (he generally switched to playing patience compulsively when he was at the start of a new work), but what he really enjoyed was cross-country skiing out in the woods, and skating on the big pond below his house. He gave lessons to his six-year-old son Sergey, and spent hours mastering complicated manoeuvres on his own.
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When summer arrived he worked in the garden, digging up nettles and burdock and tidying up the flowerbeds.
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He also took himself off to the fields to spend whole days mowing with the peasants. 'I cannot describe to you not just the enjoyment but the happiness which I experience in doing this,' he wrote to Sergey Urusov, whom he had met and become friends with during the defence of Sebastopol.
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He later did describe it, though, when he was writing
Anna Karenina:
the novel's most lyrical passages are devoted to the ecstasies of scything rather than the blossoming of romance. With the return of autumn Tolstoy went hunting as usual, mostly for woodcock and hare, but the following year he shot two wolves while on an expedition with friends.
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