Leo Tolstoy

Critical reaction was mixed: the book did not fit into any literary category that existed at the time. Tolstoy himself insisted that his book ‘is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle’ (WP, p. 1090) and expected the reviewers to guide the reader through the complex threads, and not to juxtapose his art with his philosophy. In his diary he likened the critics, who admired ‘the sleigh ride at Christmas, Bagration’s attack, the hunt, the dinner, the dancing’, but not ‘the theory of history and philosophy’, to dogs who believe that the ingredients thrown out by a cook are the actual meal he is preparing (Ds, p. 170). He wished to be acknowledged as the first and the best. When his brother-in-law, a military officer, asked him why he was so nervous about the opinion of the critics, Tolstoy replied: ‘You want to be a general, I also want to be a literary general’ (Kuz, p. 333).

Tolstoy got the promotion he craved. The public was impatient to read the new literary sensation. No book in the history of Russian literature had ever been received with such enthusiasm and none earned its author such profits as War and Peace. It largely exceeded the revenues generated by Tolstoy’s estate. Critics also gradually began to recognize the novel’s greatness. Nikolai Strakhov, a Slavophile thinker who was to become a close friend of Tolstoy, wrote in the January 1870 issue of the magazine Zarya (Dawn):

The picture of human life is complete. The picture of the Russian of those days is complete. The picture of what we call history and the struggle of nations is complete. The picture of everything that people consider to be their happiness and greatness, their sorrow and their humiliation is complete. That is what War and Peace is. (WP, p. 1102)

The marriage and the novel put an end to Tolstoy’s gambling. The stakes from both endeavours could hardly be any higher. While the result of Tolstoy’s bet on family life was at best uncertain, his gamble on War and Peace had definitely broken the bank.

Victory is a mixed blessing, for there is always the day after. For Tolstoy the reckoning began even before he had finished proofreading the last volume of War and Peace. In August 1869 he travelled to Penza Province to buy an estate. The price of land was rising; Tolstoy finally had spare cash that he planned to invest. Staying in a coaching inn in the small town of Arzamas, he suddenly fell into a prolonged state of unbearable panic and felt himself close to death. Tolstoy wrote about it to his wife and fifteen years later, at an entirely different period of his life, described it in an unfinished story ‘Notes of a Madman’, named after the eponymous tale by Gogol:

Why have I come here? Where am I taking myself? Why and where am I escaping? I am running away from something dreadful and cannot escape it. I am always with myself and it is I who am my own tormentor. Here I am, the whole of me. Neither Penza nor any other property will add anything to or take anything from me. It is myself I am weary of and find intolerable and such a torment . . . ‘What foolishness this is!’ I asked myself, ‘why am I depressed, what am I afraid of?’ ‘Me’, answered the voice of Death, inaudibly, ‘I am here!’ A cold shudder ran down my back. Yes! Death! It will come – here it is – and it is not ought to be. Had I actually been facing death, I could not have suffered as much as I did then. Then I should have been frightened. But I was not frightened now. I saw and felt the approach of death is advancing and at the same time I felt that such a thing ought not to exist. My whole soul was conscious of the necessity and right to live, and yet I felt that Death was being accomplished . . . There is nothing to life. Death is the only real thing, and death ought not to be . . . Something was tearing my soul apart and could not complete the action. (TSF, pp. 307–8)

As ever, Tolstoy’s analysis is mercilessly detailed and precise. He is not writing about the fear of death – the narrator knows he is not dying. The object of his horror is the sudden physical awareness of one’s own mortality, the omnipresence of death that makes life senseless. The scale of despair was proportionate to the intensity of his attachment to life, the inner conviction of ‘a necessity and a right to live’. Death, Tolstoy was sure, ‘ought not to be’, yet at the same time, it was a reality and the only reality.

Such feelings were not new to him. Tolstoy was always prone to bouts of anxiety and depression and this time he was terribly overworked and exhausted. The ‘Arzamas horror’ caught him when he was completing the book in which he intended to give a convincing solution of an enigma of death. Still, that liberating feeling of universal love, with which Prince Andrei left the world, eluded him. There was no way of forgetting or reconciling oneself to death.