Leo Tolstoy

At Yasnaya Polyana Tolstoy favoured beekeeping over other agricultural activities. He spent hours and days observing bees in their hives and comparing their seemingly chaotic, but perfectly choreographed, flights with the movement of human masses. In 1864 he sent Katkov a translation of Karl Vogt’s article on bees, which had been completed at his instigation by Elizaveta Bers, writing in the accompanying letter: ‘I’ve become an ardent beekeeper, and so I can judge’ (Ls, I, p. 185). Katkov never published the article. He expected a novel from his famous author, not an agricultural treatise. The progress of the novel was, however, slow and difficult. Rebuilding the hive of history was impossible without tracing the trajectories of individual bees. Tolstoy believed that ‘a month in the life of a single sixteenth-century peasant’ (CW, XVI, p. 126) was as legitimate a topic for historical research as was the history of the whole of Europe. His iconoclastic philosophy of history demanded equally unconventional psychology.

Tolstoy began by challenging the concept of ‘the person’ that traditionally constituted a foundation of literature and moral philosophy. In preparatory notebooks to his novel he claimed to have discovered the new law of ‘subordination of personality to its movement in time’, which ‘demands that we reject the inner conscience of the unmovable unity of our personality’ (CW, XV, pp. 233–4). Thoughts, feelings and decisions of a given individual have very little to do with his or her conscious preferences, but are the result of numerous impulses that keep any individual soul in constant flux.

When Pierre first sees Natasha after the war, he fails initially to recognize the woman he had loved all his life and from whom he had been separated for only a few short months. Her sufferings had made her an entirely different person. When Natasha smiles, however, her image in Pierre’s eyes is restored and his enduring love and longing revive. This episode is breathtakingly convincing and powerful precisely because of its psychological improbability. In the ensuing conversation Pierre tells Natasha how ‘shocked’ he was by the news of his wife’s death and how ‘very sorry’ for her he felt (WP, p. 987). However, a month and a dozen pages earlier he is described by Tolstoy as ‘remembering . . . that his wife is no more’ and repeating to himself ‘Oh how good! How splendid!’ (WP, p. 976). Pierre is not trying to deceive his beloved. He has forgotten his recent feelings and thoughts so completely because Natasha’s attentive gaze made him an entirely different person and parts of his previous experience have ceased to exist.

Tolstoy considered the failed elopement of Natasha with Anatole Kuragin ‘the most difficult part and the keypoint of the whole novel’ (Ls, p. 143). Natasha was ready to succumb to Kuragin’s seduction not because she had ceased loving Prince Andrei. On the contrary, on the eve of his imminent return her expectation had reached its highest pitch, making her especially sensitive to erotic infatuation. Yet, on a deeper level, her fatal decision reveals a hidden fear of the pending marriage. Love for her fiancé notwithstanding, her sexual instincts draw her to Pierre, as she somehow senses that he is the man with whom she could have numerous healthy children. In the initial version of War and Peace, finished in 1866, the mutual unconscious attraction of Pierre and Natasha is much more explicit. At the end, Prince Andrei, exasperated by his bride’s incomprehensible betrayal, asks Sonya whether ‘Natasha has ever loved anyone deeply?’ ‘There is one, it’s Bezukhov,’ said Sonya. ‘But she does not even know it herself.’²

The story Sonya Bers wrote and gave to Lev before their marriage was entitled ‘Natasha’. It dealt with an intense rivalry between two elder sisters, but the main character was their naive and charming youngest sibling. Tanya Bers had herself chosen the name for her literary representation and Tolstoy followed her example. In a letter to Mikhail Bashilov, the first illustrator of the novel, he asked the artist to ‘model Natasha on Tanichka [diminutive of Tanya] Bers’. He was sure that, ‘having seen a daguerreotype of Tanya when she was 12, then her picture in white blouse when she was 16, and then her big portrait last year’, Bashilov ‘won’t fail to make use of this model and its stages of development which are so close to my model’ (Ls, I, p. 209).