Leo Tolstoy

Shortly after the completion of Anna Karenina Tolstoy wrote a letter to Turgenev asking for forgiveness, stating that he ‘bore no hostility’ towards his former friend and offering ‘all the friendship he was capable of’ (Ls, I, pp. 318–19). The letter could not have arrived at a more appropriate time. Turgenev’s health as well as his creative energy were on the wane. He had gone out of fashion with the reading public and regarded promoting Russian literature in Europe as his main mission. Tolstoy was his greatest asset. He cried on reading the letter and at the first possible occasion came to visit his old friend and foe at Yasnaya Polyana; they met five times in the remaining years of his life. Turgenev charmed Tolstoy’s family with funny stories about Paris life and once even danced the cancan in front of his daughters. Contrary to his habits, Tolstoy did not argue or interrupt, but just recorded the event in the diary he had by then resumed: ‘Turgenev – cancan. Sad’ (Ds, p. 177).

Turgenev was initially not very receptive to both Tolstoy’s major novels. He found ‘truly magnificent pages (the race, the scything, the hunt)’ in Anna Karenina, but on the whole found it ‘sour’ and ‘smelling of Moscow, of incense, of old maidishness, of Slavophilism, aristocratism and so on’ (AK, p. 748). Now he reversed his earlier opinions. In 1879 the first French translation of War and Peace was published in Paris. Turgenev possibly encouraged this enterprise and sent a letter full of glowing praise to Edmond About, the editor of the Parisian newspaper XIXe Siècle. He called the novel ‘a great work by a great writer and . . . genuine Russia’ (WP, p. 1108). Turgenev also sent copies of the French edition to leading French critics and writers including, of course, his literary hero.

Flaubert was quick to respond. In his letter, which Turgenev copied to Tolstoy in January 1880, he criticized the author for repetitions and philosophizing, but his general impression was more than favourable. He found the book to be ‘of the first order’, noting the author’s art and psychology, and passages ‘worthy of Shakespeare’, and confessed that during the long reading he could not contain himself from ‘outcries of admiration’ (TP, I, 192). The author of Madame Bovary died the same year and did not have a chance to read Anna Karenina as its French translation appeared only in 1885.

Tolstoy’s reaction to this new level of recognition is unknown. Most likely he was unfazed. At first, relieved from the burden of Anna Karenina, he was contemplating a return to his earlier literary plans, albeit radically revised: the novels about Peter the Great and the Decembrists. The former took the shape of an epic narrative provisionally entitled A Hundred Years, which was to unfold simultaneously in parallel settings at court and in a peasant hut, covering the whole period from the birth of the modernizing tsar up to the beginning of the reign of Alexander I in 1801. The latter was to deal with the aftermath of the 1825 rebellion, when the former conspirators encountered the people they had hoped to liberate in Siberian exile. When added to the already completed War and Peace and Anna Karenina, these works would have amounted to a tetralogy stretching over two centuries of national history.

These plans soon ran into the ground. The historic philosophy of War and Peace implied that the acts of the ruler reflect the cumulative will of the nation; and thus Peter’s victory meant that he was on the right side of history. Tolstoy no longer believed that. The more he studied the period, the more the great reformer seemed to him a ‘debauched syphilitic’ (CW, XXXV, p. 552) beheading his subjects with his own hands out of purely sadistic pleasure, as he described the Westernizing tsar a quarter of a century later. Already in 1870, reading The History of Russia by the eminent Russian historian Sergei Solovyev, Tolstoy remarked in his notebook:

Reading how they plundered, ruled, fought, devastated (history speaks only about this), you can’t help thinking – what did they plunder? And from this question to another one: who produced what they plundered? Who and how made bread for everyone? Who caught the black foxes and sables they gave as presents to ambassadors, who extracted gold and iron, who bred the horses, oxen, rams, who built the houses and palaces, who transported the goods? Who bore and brought up these people of the same root? . . . Among the functions of the people’s life there is this necessity to have the people plundering, devastating, bathing in luxury and bullying. And those are the rulers – the miserable ones who have to renounce anything human in them. (CW, XLVIII, p. 124)