Leo Tolstoy

Historians define the decade that started with the abolition of serfdom in 1861 as the period of Great Reforms. In order to deal with tens of millions of newly acquired subjects, the emperor introduced limited local self-government, in the form of zemstvos, elected assemblies that were responsible for schools and health care. The government granted new independence to the judiciary and introduced trial by jury for criminal cases. University enrolments were greatly increased. A relative relaxation of censorship increased freedom of the press. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions soared and their pages soon filled with ardent and highly partisan discussions. Writers wrote novels about the issues, a popular shorthand for the most pressing problems of the day. Never in its history had Russia experienced a period of such public excitement. Tolstoy as ever went against the current. Isolated in Yasnaya Polyana, he was imagining a heroic past, when nobles and peasants were tied by a bond and could understand each other, and at the same time trying to recreate it in his own estate in an entirely different epoch and social environment.

By the mid-1860s a story about the amnesty of the rebellious aristocratic rebels had become obsolete. Tolstoy went back in time to explain the self-sacrifice of his heroes. The Decembrists started to morph into War and Peace. Common wisdom connected the birth of the Decembrist conspiracies with the glorious campaign that had taken the victorious Russian army to Paris in 1814. Young officers had liberated Europe and, in the process, had exposed themselves to European liberties. For Tolstoy, who stopped his narrative at the expulsion of French troops from Russia, the spirit of emancipation did not originate abroad, but emerged from the immediate contact between nobles and the Russian soldiery, mostly comprised of peasants in uniform.

Unlike Olenin in The Cossacks, Pierre Bezukhov did not have to suppress the demands of his intellect to draw closer to the peasant Platon Karataev. Their conversations in French captivity became a spiritual revelation for an inquisitive aristocrat. Likewise, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky experienced a feeling of unity with the soldiers he led into battle at Borodino. Mortally wounded, he was deprived of the chance to join the Decembrist conspirators of 1825, but in the epilogue, his fourteen-year-old son Nikolenka has a prophetic dream in which he participates in the rebellion. Nikolenka wakes up in tears, assured that his father would be proud of him.

According to Tolstoy, not all classes of Russian society took part in the birth of the nation. Courtiers and bureaucrats, unlike landowners, officers, peasants and soldiers, did not spend their lives on the land and in the fresh air. The notion of a nation as an organic body was foreign to them. Prince Andrei’s initial infatuation with Mikhail Speransky, the mastermind of Alexander I’s reforms, ended as he observed the great statesman’s snow-white hands. The way of life and daily habits of a particular noble were far more important to Tolstoy than his political views. In the epilogue, Pierre joins the conspirators, while his brother-in-law Nikolai Rostov expresses his readiness to fight the rebels as his oath to the emperor commands him to do. Despite this, Nikolai and Pierre remain loving relatives, both deeply Russian in their convictions and loyalties.

In Childhood Tolstoy adopted the fictional worldview of a boy to create an idealized image of a noble estate. After the abolition of serfdom he gave an unashamedly nostalgic description of the serf economy. Nikolai is portrayed in the epilogue of War and Peace as a ruthless landowner, who abstains from beating his serfs only out of respect for the tender feelings of his wife. Still, ‘long after his death the memory of his administration was devoutly preserved among the serfs’, who remembered that he took care of them and put ‘the peasant’s affairs first and then his own’ (WP, p. 1013).