Leo Tolstoy

In his memoirs Tolstoy’s son Ilya confessed that he had often asked himself, ‘whether papa was in love with Aunt Tanya’, and finally became convinced that he was. Ilya rushes to explain that there was nothing impure in this love resembling a sort of ‘amitié amoureuse’,⁵ of which Tolstoy himself could have been unaware. Tolstoy’s wife, full of deep resentment towards her great husband, wrote in her late memoirs that his relations with his sister-in-law could have ended badly had it not been for her romance with Sergei. This is highly unlikely. For both Tolstoy and Tanya any sort of affair would have been more than unthinkable. At the same time Tolstoy, with his lifelong habit of introspection, could hardly be unaware of his feelings. War and Peace is arguably the longest and the most exquisite declaration of love ever written by any man to any woman. Tanya was present at the first reading of the opening chapters and wrote about her impressions in a letter to Polivanov, Sofia’s rejected suitor. Those listening, she told Polivanov, liked Pierre ‘less than all the others’, but she liked him ‘more than all the others’, because she ‘loved people like that’ (Kuz, p. 319). Clearly Tanya had understood the point.

The first two instalments of the novel appeared in the January and February 1865 issues of the Russian Herald under the title ‘1805’. It was clear to all that this title was bound to change and that the narrative would develop beyond that year. Tolstoy’s focus was not a set period, defined in the title, but the flow of time. These two instalments were followed a year later by three more, printed in the same issue as the first chapter of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. However, while Dostoevsky kept to the discipline and provided successive chapters until the end of the year, Tolstoy’s readers had to wait longer. Responding to readers’ interest, Tolstoy decided to switch from serial publication in a periodical to separate volumes: ‘1805’ was therefore republished in book form at the end of 1866. The first full draft of the novel was finished by the end of 1866, but then Tolstoy began revising or rather rewriting the text. It took another two years before four reworked volumes appeared in 1868, this time entitled War and Peace. The two final volumes completed the publication in 1869.

The narrative in War and Peace concludes in an open-ended way. In the epilogue, Pierre returns from St Petersburg, where he helps to launch a conspiratorial society, to enjoy marital bliss. The ordeals of the family seem to be over, yet every reader knew what awaited the characters in the near future. Months of captivity in the retreating French army, the Great Fire of Moscow and Count Rostov’s carriages full of wounded officers would pale into insignificance compared with the thirty years that Pierre would have to spend doing hard labour and as an exile in Siberia as a punishment for the Decembrist revolt in 1825, with Natasha sharing her husband’s hardships. History may have reached a lull that coincides with the last page of the novel, but it will return with a vengeance soon enough.

When preparing the first chapters for the Russian Herald, Tolstoy begged Fet for his thoughts: ‘I value your opinion, and that of a man whom I dislike all the more the older I get – Turgenev. He will understand’ (Ls, I, p. 193). Fet sent Tolstoy several letters full of glowing praise, complemented later by a poem in which he wrote that he ‘stood in holy awe before the elemental force’ of Tolstoy’s genius.⁶ Contrary to Tolstoy’s expectations, Turgenev at first failed to understand. He found ‘1805’ ‘positively bad, boring and unsuccessful’, and was especially irritated by Tolstoy’s ‘petty psychological observations’. He could not believe that the author ‘places this unfortunate product higher than The Cossacks!’ With the publication of new volumes, Turgenev gradually changed his opinion, but still could not forgive Tolstoy his ‘philosophizing’ and ‘Slavophilism’ (WP, pp. 1107–8).