War And Peace

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 into the Russian aristocracy, at Yasnaya Polyana, 130 miles south-west of Moscow. His parents died when he was young, but he and his siblings grew up happily, cocooned by female relatives. At the age of sixteen, he entered the university at Kazan but failed his courses and returned to Yasnaya, which he had just inherited. By then, age 19, he had contracted his first dose of venereal disease, a continuing risk during the following years of debauchery and gambling in Moscow and Petersburg.

Tolstoy’s largely autobiographical Childhood was accepted by the Contemporary in 1852, the first writing he had submitted for publication. Despite its modest aims and rather dry realism, it was popular and was followed by Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857). Even greater success attended the three-part Sevastopol in December, May and August (1855 – 6) – which presented his experiences and observations as an artillery officer while leading men under fire during the Crimean War (1854—6) and undermined the false glamour of warfare. He soon became well known in Petersburg literary circles, though he found celebrity uncongenial and hurried back to Yasnaya.

Tolstoy began War and Peace in 1863, just as his first son was born. His wife Sonya (short form of Sofya Andreyevna) was only eighteen, and she bore him another twelve children. He devoted the 1870s to Anna Karenina, and, despite his artistic and commerical success, he became obsessed by thoughts of his own mortality and tormented by a religious yearning that could not be reconciled with the activities of the Church, and he thought constantly about suicide; this crisis is minutely described in A Confession (1878 – 9).

Eventually he came through it but it had changed his life radically: he eschewed society, living and working at Yasnaya Polyana, wearing a peasant’s shirt and doing much manual work; renounced writing, violence, stimulants of all kinds, including meat-eating; and required impeccable moral standards of all. This was his new religion: the best of Jesus, without his church. His moral stance – especially his pacifism – attracted interest from all over the world, and Tolstoyan communities were formed in several countries by disciples. But he was impossible to live with. His lack of love and charity towards those closest to him, especially his wife, remains as a blot on his reputation. He did continue to write, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Resurrection (1899) and Hadji Murat (1911), and a moving five-act tragedy of gruesome subject matter, The Power of Darkness (1890).

But at the age of eighty-two Tolstoy, estranged from all his family except for one daughter, Alexandra, fled with her, for a monastery. He fell ill at the railway junction, where he died. His body was interred at the top of a small ravine at Yasnaya, where as a small boy he had searched for a little green stick on which was supposedly inscribed a secret formula guaranteeing continuing happiness and brotherly love.

However, newly married and fully occupied in his mid thirties, Tolstoy had looked for the rewards of family happiness (the title of a story written in 1859), and for a few years he found them. Sonya devoted herself to him and to their children, ran the home and the business side of the estate, and found time to help him with his work. A woman of striking intelligence, she had a good education at home and at university, where she had obtained a teaching diploma. She had also tried writing, and a short novel which she destroyed was said by her sister Tanya to have contained the germ of the relationship between Natasha Rostov and her mother.⁵ Now Sonya would transcribe what Tolstoy had written during the day, and once claimed to have written out much of War and Peace no fewer than seven times. She discussed the story with her husband, decoded his difficult handwriting and corrected minor errors of spelling and grammar. Her hand in the shaping of his work was strong and decisive; it may have been more influential than has ever been fully acknowledged.