2
A Married Genius
The thought of marriage was not new to Tolstoy. From his early twenties he had been envisaging the idea of family life. When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, he set himself three aims: ‘1) to gamble, 2) to marry, 3) to obtain a post’ (Ds, p. 19). He managed only the first. Five years later, he confided to his diary an intention ‘to go to the country’ and ‘get married as soon as possible’ (Ds, p. 99). On 1 January 1859 he made another New Year’s resolution: ‘must marry this year or not at all’ (Ds, p. 138). As his diaries and letters reveal, over the years he had considered nearly a dozen young women as prospective brides. Only once, however, did Tolstoy take practical steps in this direction. In 1856 he planned to marry Valeria Arsenieva, the orphaned daughter of some country neighbours, for whom Tolstoy was acting as guardian.
Tolstoy’s courtship proceeded in a predictably tortured manner. He constantly questioned himself in his diary whether he loved Valeria and whether she was capable of true love. One day he found her attractive and sweet, another repugnant and stupid. He also bombarded the girl with long didactic letters telling her how she should dress, behave and feel in order to become a good wife. Their frequent conversations doubtless evolved on similar lines. Both parties eventually tired of such peculiar relations. After half a year of hopeless deliberations, Tolstoy suddenly went abroad sending Valeria a formal apology. Two years later, an idealized version of Valeria, as he imagined her at the height of his self-imposed infatuation, appeared in Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, a novella that described life as it might have been if he and Valeria were married.
‘While education is free, upbringing is based on coercion,’ Tolstoy wrote a couple of years later in his article ‘Upbringing and Education’. ‘There is no right to an upbringing. I do not recognize this right. The young generation that always and everywhere protests against the coercion of upbringing does not recognize it, has never recognized it and never will’ (CW, VIII, pp. 215–16). Meanwhile, it was precisely this type of coercive upbringing that Tolstoy practised on poor Valeria, while she dared not protest for fear of losing such an enviable match. In fact, Tolstoy never regarded the family as a union of two separate human beings, but rather as a joint symbiotic personality. In Anna Karenina Konstantin Levin is surprised to find out that his wife became for him an integral part of his own self and he ‘could not now tell where she ended and he began’ (AK, p. 438). Tolstoy’s vision of family happiness was as maximalist and uncompromising as was his notion of literary perfection. Yet he also realized that if he failed at marriage he would not be given a second chance.
Before falling in love with his future wife, Levin often visited the Shcherbatskys and fell in love with the family. Strange as it may seem, it was the whole Shcherbatsky family – especially the feminine part of it – that Levin was in love with. He could not remember his mother . . . so that in the Scherbatskys’ house he saw family life for the first time . . . such as he had been deprived of by the death of his own father and mother. All the members of that family, especially the women, appeared to him as though wrapped in some mystic poetic veil, and he not only saw no defects in them, but imagined behind that poetic veil the loftiest feelings and every possible perfection. (AK, p. 19)
The marriage of the two elder Shcherbatsky sisters relieved Levin of the necessity to choose. Tolstoy’s relationship with the family of the doctor Andrei Bers was similar, but more complicated. Andrei’s wife Liubov’, born Islavina, is described in Childhood. As rumours had it, as a ten-year-old Lev had once pushed her from a balcony, jealous of the attention she gave to another boy. As a friend and regular guest of the Berses, Tolstoy was captivated by the vision of family happiness he had been deprived of in his own early years: he once told his sister that if he were ever to marry, it would be to someone in the Bers family.
Andrei and Liubov’ had five sons and three daughters. Tolstoy loved to spend time with the teenage girls and even played leapfrog with them. The sisters, all of whom had developed literary interests, admired ‘the count’ (‘le comte’) as they called him among themselves. Unlike Levin, his future novelistic alter ego, Tolstoy also had the allure of being a famous writer. In Russian families it was traditional to marry off daughters in order of age. When the Berses first detected Tolstoy’s matrimonial intentions, they were confident that he was interested in nineteen-year-old Liza (Elizaveta), the most serious and well behaved of their daughters, whom they believed to be better prepared for matrimony than her younger siblings.
Tolstoy also was considering this possibility: ‘Liza Bers tempts me, but nothing will come of it’ (Ds, p. 145), he wrote in his diary in September 1861. Next year events took a sudden and dramatic turn. On his way to the Samara steppes for a course of kumys treatment, Tolstoy stayed with the Berses for a day. After his departure, the youngest sister, Tanya (Tatiana), found the middle one, Sonya (Sofia), in tears. ‘Do you love the count?’ asked a surprised Tanya, well known for her ability to ask awkward questions. ‘I don’t know,’ answered Sonya, sobbing. ‘His two brothers died from consumption’ (Kuz, p. 89). Sonya had already promised her heart to a student, Mitrofan Polivanov, and fifteen-year-old Tanya, as she recalled many decades later, was struck by a sudden realization of the inherent duality of human feelings. After ‘the count’ returned from Samara the Berses paid two short visits to Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy first took notice of Sonya not so much as a little girl, but as a charming young woman. By the time he reached Moscow in August 1862, Tolstoy was already asking himself the perennial question: did the feelings he was experiencing amount to real love? ‘I am afraid for myself – what if this is only the desire for love, and not love? I try to look only at her weak sides, but still. A child! It could be’ (Ds, p. 146).
Sisters Sofia (Sonya) and Tatiana (Tanya) Bers in 1861.
In the short and tumultuous romance that rapidly started to unfold between a 34-year-old man with rich and varied experience and an innocent girl of eighteen, Sonya took a definite lead. Already in August she was telling Tolstoy that she had written a story describing the complex situation in the family. As her younger sister recalled, the story had two characters: the middle-aged Prince Dublitsky, energetic and intelligent with ‘unattractive appearance’ and ‘fickle opinions’, and Smirnov, a young man of positive, calm temperament with ‘lofty ideals’. The female character Elena was a young and beautiful girl with big black eyes. She had two sisters: the elder, cold Zinaida in love with Dublitsky, and the younger, lively Natasha. Smirnov fell in love with Elena, and proposed to her, but her parents were hesitant, considering the couple too young for marriage. Suddenly Elena started to realize that she loved Dublitsky, who also preferred her to her sister, and felt guilty before both Zinaida and Smirnov. At some point, exhausted by the inner conflict, Elena contemplated retiring to a convent, but finally managed to arrange a marriage between Dublitsky and Zinaida while herself marrying Smirnov.
The Preshpekt, the main route to the house in Yasnaya Polyana, 1903–5.
On 26 August 1862 Sonya handed the story to Tolstoy who, as usual, was deeply unsure whether he deserved to be loved. It is difficult to imagine a more provocative move. Sofia’s story made the renowned author feel encouraged, touched, excited and mortified at the same time:
She gave me a story to read. What force of truth and simplicity! The uncertainty torments her. I read it without a sinking heart, jealousy or envy, but ‘unusually unattractive appearance’ and ‘fickleness of opinions’ touched me on the raw. I am calmed down now. All this is not for me. (Ds, p. 146)
In his diary Tolstoy reflected further about Sonya’s possible intentions, using his characteristic psychological analysis of the layered structure of human motives: ‘On the way back I thought: either it is all unintentional, or her feelings are unusually subtle, or it is the basest coquetry . . . or else it’s unintentional and subtle and coquettish’ (Ds, p. 147).
In response to the story, he wrote a letter to Sonya explaining that he was misunderstood in her family and never really loved Liza or intended to marry her. Not daring to commit this explanation fully to paper, Tolstoy limited himself to using the initial letters of every word. In one of the most memorable episodes in Anna Karenina, Kitty, guided by the miraculous intuition of a loving woman, understands the message written to her by Levin in the same way. Whether it was the spell of Tolstoy’s novel or the power of a family legend, which it reflected, Countess Sofia Tolstoy repeated the same story in her memoirs. In fact, this display of celestial harmony between like-minded souls never actually took place. In his diary Tolstoy explicitly says that Sonya ‘made him decipher the letter’ (Ds, p. 147). Regardless of this, his passion was growing stronger and stronger.
‘Don’t intrude where youth, poetry, beauty and love are’ (Ds, p. 147), Tolstoy wrote in his diary on 7 September 1862. He then immediately proceeded to confess that deep in his heart he was imagining Sofia reading this entry and that he actually had made it ‘for her’. Three days later he left the Bers house ‘without hope and more in love than ever’. While he desperately wanted to ‘cut the knot’ and to ‘tell her and Tanechka’, Tolstoy lacked the courage to do so. By now the whole family, except for Liza, who still cherished hopes of her own, realized what was happening. ‘I am beginning to hate Liza as well as pity her,’ wrote Tolstoy in his diary. ‘Lord help me and guide me’ (Ds, p. 148). His frenzy became unbearable:
I am in love, as I never believed was possible to love. I am mad, I’ll shoot myself if it goes on like this. Spent the evening at their house. She is charming in every way. But I am the repulsive Dublitsky. I should have been on my guard sooner. Granted, I am Dublitsky, but love makes me beautiful. Yes, tomorrow morning I’ll go to their house. There have been moments, but I did not take advantage of them. I was timid, I should simply have spoken. I just want to go back now and say everything in front of them. Lord, help me. (Ds, p. 149)
On 13 September Tolstoy returned to the Berses, but once again found himself unable to speak out. The next day, realizing that making an open declaration was beyond his power, he wrote a proposal to Sofia, pleading for her to consider her response ‘without hurrying’. Tolstoy assured her that he would be able to bear her ‘no’, but ‘not to be loved as a husband as much as’ he loves ‘would be even more terrible’ for him. (Ls, I, pp. 108–9). He carried the letter in his pocket for two more days, feeling unable to deliver it.
There was more to Tolstoy’s indecision than a usual fear of making an irreversible step, excessive shyness or even the acute sense of the burden of age and sinful experience he had to carry in his new life. He was determined that not only future family happiness, but the fulfilment of his literary calling and chances for moral salvation depended upon the choice and the power of Sofia’s love and devotion to him. He found himself on the verge of either absolute bliss or eternal ruin. At some point he composed a different version of his letter, explaining why he had to renounce hope and stop visiting: ‘I demand from marriage something terrible, impossible. To be loved as I can love, but this is impossible.’ Then he decided to take the risk. ‘My God, how afraid I am of dying,’ he confessed in his diary after completing his formal written proposal. ‘Happiness, and such happiness, seems to me impossible’ (Ds, p. 149).
On 16 September Tolstoy again visited the Berses and accompanied Tanya, who had a fine soprano voice, on the piano. Sonya and Liza were listening nervously nearby. Tolstoy decided that he would hand Sonya the letter if her sister managed to hit the difficult high note at the end. Tanya performed impeccably and shortly afterwards saw Sonya rushing from the room with a piece of paper in her hands, hesitantly followed by Liza. Tanya ran downstairs to the girls’ room and heard Liza shouting at Sonya, demanding that she reveal what ‘the count’ had written to her. ‘He made me a proposal,’ Sofia replied quietly. ‘Refuse immediately,’ cried Liza hysterically. Their mother appeared, ordered Liza to stop and told Sonya to give an immediate answer. She went back and said, ‘Yes, of course.’ The next day Sonya explained to a desperate Polivanov that she would not have betrayed him with anyone else, but ‘one cannot help loving Lev Nikolaevich’ (Kuz, pp. 130–34).
Traditionally the preparations for a wedding in Russian noble families would take between six and eight weeks, at the least. Tolstoy would not hear of any procrastination. For the first time in his life, he felt a strong erotic attraction to a woman of his own social standing. In his diary he recalled ‘the kiss by the piano and the appearance of Satan’ (Ds, p. 150), obviously meaning sexual arousal. Apart from that, he felt that the time to realize his family utopia had arrived. He was eager to retire to Yasnaya Polyana, enjoy marital bliss and engage in the only two activities he now found appropriate: managing the estate and writing.
His impatience notwithstanding, Tolstoy subjected Sonya’s love to two highly challenging tests. Convinced that spouses should be fully transparent to each other, he gave her his diaries to read. Sonya was shocked and dismayed by the descriptions of her fiancé’s lust and sexual exploits, and especially by the story of his infatuation with Aksinya Bazykina, with whom he had fathered a son. Then, unable to quell his ‘doubts about her love and the thought that she is deceiving herself’ (Ds, p. 150), Tolstoy breached all customs by visiting his bride on the morning of their wedding day and drove her to tears by inquiring whether she was completely certain she wanted to marry him.
The wedding took place on 23 September 1862, a week after the engagement and exactly a month after Tolstoy had, for the first time, mentioned Sonya in his diary as ‘a child’. The couple were married in the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady in the Moscow Kremlin, where Andrei Bers resided as a local doctor. The spurned Liza and the unlucky Polivanov participated in the ceremony. According to Sofia’s memoirs, the marriage was consummated in the carriage taking the newlywed couple from the church to Yasnaya Polyana. Very soon Sonya was pregnant. Their first son, Sergei, was born on 28 June 1863, followed by a daughter Tatiana in 1864, and sons Ilya and Lev in 1866 and 1869, respectively.
The Tolstoys’ honeymoon and the first years of their marriage were far from idyllic. Leo’s feelings proved to be even more fickle than Dublitsky’s opinions. During their first night at Yasnaya Polyana, he had ‘a bad dream’, which he summarized in his diary in two words: ‘Not her’ (Ds, p. 150). After a month of frenzied courtship, he suddenly started to suspect that he had married the wrong woman. The next day he recorded ‘unbelievable happiness’. A week later ‘there was a scene’ that made Tolstoy ‘sad that we behave just in the same way as other people’. He wept and told Sonya she had hurt him with regard to his feelings for her. ‘She is charming,’ he concluded in a rather unpredictable way, ‘I love her even more. But is it all genuine?’ (Ds, p. 150). Tolstoy felt there was something unnatural in their relations. In a long letter to his sister-in-law Tanya, he jokingly described a dream in which his wife had turned into a china doll (Ls, I, pp. 177–9). Was this a veiled expression of erotic dissatisfaction?
The inevitable difficulties of mutual adjustment were aggravated by jealousy. Sonya, stunned by the revelations about her husband’s past, was constantly expecting him to revert to his old ways. In one of the entries in her diary she expressed an ardent desire to murder Aksinya and to tear off her son’s head. Leo, never fully believing he deserved the love he longed for, was traumatized by every real or imaginary token of Sofia’s interest towards any young man who happened to be around. Tolstoy hardly suspected her of physical infidelity; but for him feelings mattered most and he was never completely confident about his wife’s inner world.
The diaries that both spouses kept during the early period of their marriage reflect constant clashes followed by passionate reconciliations. The intense emotional regime imposed by Tolstoy demanded that they share their diaries. Sofia and Leo felt a duty to be sincere and to confess every shade of feeling, but could not avoid anticipating each other’s reactions. Gradually the stream of entries slowed into a trickle and then nearly stopped. They were to resume fifteen years later with even greater intensity when, for Sofia, the diary became the main tool for settling scores and proving her case before her husband and posterity.
Sofia’s situation was, of course, significantly more difficult. Unlike her husband, who enjoyed his native environment, she had grown up in the Kremlin, the literal centre of the empire. A fashionable and educated city girl had to turn herself into a rural landlady, playing cards with Tolstoy’s old aunt Toinette, taking care of children and sharing a responsibility for running the estate. ‘He disgusts me with his peasants’ (SAT-Ds, p. 43), she confessed in her diaries two months after the marriage. Still, Sofia coped remarkably well in the circumstances. During the final months of her first pregnancy Sofia informed her younger sister that she and Lev were ‘becoming real farmers and buying cattle, birds, piglets, calves’ (SAT-Ds, p. 526). They had also acquired ‘a lot of bees’ and the estate abounded with honey. During a visit to the Tolstoys Afanasy Fet was enchanted by the sight of an unexpectedly young and visibly pregnant girl running around the farm with a huge bundle of keys on her belly.
Tolstoy in 1862, before marriage.
Tolstoy immersed himself in agriculture with his usual fervour. He had early decided to get rid of the stewards and managers. He did not need any intermediaries between himself and the peasants. Contrary to the persistent advice of his father-in-law, he adamantly refused to hire a steward, believing that together with Sofia they could do the job much better. On 3 May 1863 Tolstoy informed Fet that:
Sofia in 1862, before marriage.
Sonya is working with me too. We have no steward; I have people to help with the fieldwork and the building, but she manages the office and cash by herself. I have bees, sheep, a new orchard and a distillery. Everything progresses little by little, although of course poorly, compared with the ideal. (CW, LXI, p. 17)
Fet, who unlike his friend ran his estate as a profitable business, was unconvinced. When he asked for his sincere regards to be passed on to the countess if she was not busy ‘playing dolls, sorry playing cash’ (TP, I, p. 366), Tolstoy replied curtly:
My wife is not playing dolls at all. Do not offend her. She seriously helps me, carrying a burden, from which she hopes to free herself in the beginning of July. I made a discovery . . . Try to fire all the administration and sleep until 10, everything will go no worse. I made this experiment and am quite satisfied with it. (CW, LXI, p. 20)
The abolition of serfdom had cut the traditional bond of personal dependence between the masters and the servants. As Nekrasov, Tolstoy’s first publisher, wrote in his poem ‘Who Lives Well in Russia’, ‘the great chain has broken and struck the landlord by one end and the peasant by the other.’1 This ancient chain was to be replaced by economic cooperation based on common interests. Tolstoy still believed in the natural alliance of the two classes living on the land, which would protect peasants from proletarianization and landlords from ruin. Though he needed the income from the land to sustain his growing family, money was not the main reason Tolstoy chose to live in the country. He retreated to Yasnaya Polyana to build a family utopia that would be a bastion against the advance of modernity. Rural economy was only an auxiliary tool in this campaign. His main battlefield was literature. By the end of 1862 he had closed down his village school and pedagogical magazine, wondering why these occupations held his attention for so long.
Old debts still plagued him. Prior to his marriage he had lost a considerable sum of money at the gambling table and had to borrow 1,000 roubles as an advance for The Cossacks from Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the magazine Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik). At the end of the 1850s many authors disillusioned with Sovremennik had switched their allegiance to Katkov. A once moderate conservative who was gradually turning into a morbid reactionary, Katkov was no less successful and efficient as a publisher than Nekrasov. Katkov provided an alternative to radical journalism and was supported by the authorities. He gladly made the loan to Tolstoy and kept rejecting all attempts by the repentant writer to repay the debt in money. Having settled in Yasnaya Polyana with a young wife, Tolstoy rushed to complete an overdue story.
The most difficult task facing him was to decide a natural outcome of Olenin’s longing for Marianna. After numerous changes, Tolstoy came to a decision. Irritated by the constant womanizing of her suitor Lukashka, the bravest Cossack in the settlement, Marianna finally gives her consent to Olenin. After a quarrel with his bride, Lukashka loses his usual self-control and is mortally wounded by the Chechens. Full of remorse and hatred towards her unwanted admirer, Marianna throws Olenin out and he is left with no option but to go back to St Petersburg.
Katkov published The Cossacks immediately. The next issue of Russian Herald contained ‘Polikushka’, a short story mostly written abroad. The reading public welcomed the return of a favourite author. The critics admired The Cossacks and praised the vivid, nearly ethnographic portrayal of life in the settlement and the characters of Marianna, Lukashka and especially Yeroshka, the charismatic drunken old braggart and guardian of Cossack common law, lore and wisdom. Fet believed that The Cossacks was Tolstoy’s best work so far. Turgenev was equally ecstatic, though much less appreciative of Olenin’s spiritual quest. He recognized it as Tolstoy’s self-portrait, but felt no personal sympathy for the author. Still, Turgenev was happy to greet the return of a wayward son of Russian literature and thankful for the card loss that had compelled Tolstoy to pick up his pen again.
The only person who was dissatisfied was Tolstoy himself, as he wrote in his diary in January 1863: ‘Corrected the proofs of The Cossacks – it’s terribly weak. Probably for that reason the public will be pleased with it’ (Ds, p. 158). Though he had contemplated writing a sequel to the story if it were to be well received, Tolstoy never returned to The Cossacks, in spite of the public’s nearly universal enthusiasm. By adding a subtitle – A Caucasus Tale of 1852 – Tolstoy distanced himself from his narrative in time and placed it in the period preceding the Sebastopol stories. ‘Who is this person who wrote The Cossacks and “Polikushka”? And what is the use of discussing them?’ he wrote to Fet in early May 1863. ‘“Polikushka” is drivel on the first subject that comes into the head of a man who “wields a good pen”, but The Cossacks has some pith in it, though it is bad’ (Ls, I, p. 115). The ‘pith’ was Tolstoy’s passionate attempt to dissolve himself in a wild and natural environment. Describing Olenin’s fourteen-hour walks around the settlement, Tolstoy writes that no thought ever stirred in him during those strolls and he came home ‘morally fresh, strong and completely happy’ (CW, VI, p. 88).
In the same letter Tolstoy told Fet that he was working on the story of a horse known as ‘The Strider’. Most of it is told in the first person of the horse. Criticism of social conventions from a ‘natural’ point of view had been popular since the eighteenth century, and horses, with their proximity to humans, could serve as ideal observers of their habits. Nevertheless, ‘The Strider’ was not a satirical allegory. Instead it conveyed Tolstoy’s empathy with the plight of the animal and admiration for its calm acceptance of the order of life, decay and death. Tolstoy nearly completed the story, but did not publish it for more than twenty years until his wife rediscovered the manuscript in his papers. Work on ‘The Strider’ was halted when Tolstoy finally began writing his magnum opus.
Tolstoy drafted fifteen beginnings before he felt he could proceed. He was not yet sure of the plot, the names of the main characters, or the title of the book, but was certain that it was going to be a masterpiece. Never before, and arguably never after, was he so confident in himself. In October 1863 he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy:
I’ve never felt my intellectual powers, and even all my moral powers, so free and so capable of work. And I have work to do. This work is a novel of the 1810s and 1820s, which has been occupying me fully since the autumn . . . Now, I am a writer with all the strength of my soul, and I write and I think as I have never thought or written before. (Ls, I, p. 118)
Preparing the first chapters for publication, Tolstoy informed Fet, with his usual self-denigration, that the new book, although he ‘liked it more than his previous work, still seemed weak’, but could not resist adding that what was to follow would be ‘tremendous!!’ (Ls, I, p. 193).
Historians define the decade that started with the abolition of serfdom in 1861 as the period of Great Reforms. In order to deal with tens of millions of newly acquired subjects, the emperor introduced limited local self-government, in the form of zemstvos, elected assemblies that were responsible for schools and health care. The government granted new independence to the judiciary and introduced trial by jury for criminal cases. University enrolments were greatly increased. A relative relaxation of censorship increased freedom of the press. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions soared and their pages soon filled with ardent and highly partisan discussions. Writers wrote novels about the issues, a popular shorthand for the most pressing problems of the day. Never in its history had Russia experienced a period of such public excitement. Tolstoy as ever went against the current. Isolated in Yasnaya Polyana, he was imagining a heroic past, when nobles and peasants were tied by a bond and could understand each other, and at the same time trying to recreate it in his own estate in an entirely different epoch and social environment.
By the mid-1860s a story about the amnesty of the rebellious aristocratic rebels had become obsolete. Tolstoy went back in time to explain the self-sacrifice of his heroes. The Decembrists started to morph into War and Peace. Common wisdom connected the birth of the Decembrist conspiracies with the glorious campaign that had taken the victorious Russian army to Paris in 1814. Young officers had liberated Europe and, in the process, had exposed themselves to European liberties. For Tolstoy, who stopped his narrative at the expulsion of French troops from Russia, the spirit of emancipation did not originate abroad, but emerged from the immediate contact between nobles and the Russian soldiery, mostly comprised of peasants in uniform.
Unlike Olenin in The Cossacks, Pierre Bezukhov did not have to suppress the demands of his intellect to draw closer to the peasant Platon Karataev. Their conversations in French captivity became a spiritual revelation for an inquisitive aristocrat. Likewise, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky experienced a feeling of unity with the soldiers he led into battle at Borodino. Mortally wounded, he was deprived of the chance to join the Decembrist conspirators of 1825, but in the epilogue, his fourteen-year-old son Nikolenka has a prophetic dream in which he participates in the rebellion. Nikolenka wakes up in tears, assured that his father would be proud of him.
According to Tolstoy, not all classes of Russian society took part in the birth of the nation. Courtiers and bureaucrats, unlike landowners, officers, peasants and soldiers, did not spend their lives on the land and in the fresh air. The notion of a nation as an organic body was foreign to them. Prince Andrei’s initial infatuation with Mikhail Speransky, the mastermind of Alexander I’s reforms, ended as he observed the great statesman’s snow-white hands. The way of life and daily habits of a particular noble were far more important to Tolstoy than his political views. In the epilogue, Pierre joins the conspirators, while his brother-in-law Nikolai Rostov expresses his readiness to fight the rebels as his oath to the emperor commands him to do. Despite this, Nikolai and Pierre remain loving relatives, both deeply Russian in their convictions and loyalties.
In Childhood Tolstoy adopted the fictional worldview of a boy to create an idealized image of a noble estate. After the abolition of serfdom he gave an unashamedly nostalgic description of the serf economy. Nikolai is portrayed in the epilogue of War and Peace as a ruthless landowner, who abstains from beating his serfs only out of respect for the tender feelings of his wife. Still, ‘long after his death the memory of his administration was devoutly preserved among the serfs’, who remembered that he took care of them and put ‘the peasant’s affairs first and then his own’ (WP, p. 1013).
In a draft of his introduction to the novel, Tolstoy confessed that he was afraid he would be ‘guided by historical documents rather than by the truth’ in his description of the events and ‘important personages of 1812’ (WP, p. 1087). He managed to overcome these doubts because of his conviction ‘that nobody would ever tell what I had to tell’. He believed that ‘specific qualities’ of his ‘development and personality’ (WP, p. 1087) provided him with an access to historical knowledge better than any documents. This type of argumentation is typical of non-fiction, when an author explains the importance of his unique personal experience. Tolstoy used the same strategy in relation to the history of the Napoleonic wars. He searched for ‘general laws’ governing history, but believed that the way to discover these laws was to concentrate on ‘artistic representation of the memories’ (CW, XV, p. 132; XLVIII, p. 87). In Childhood, the Sebastopol stories and The Cossacks he described events as directly witnessed by the narrator. Now he needed to introduce events that took place before he was born as if they were personal recollections.
To achieve this goal, Tolstoy inscribed the national epic into a family chronicle. The transparent play with surnames and the exact reproduction of real first names and patronymics of his ancestors, together with the meticulous description of the everyday lives of both families, provided the necessary aura of authenticity. To be sure, the disenchanted aristocratic liberal Nikolai Tolstoy had little to do with the brave officer and passionate rural landowner Nikolai Rostov. Likewise, the educated and enlightened Maria Volkonsky did not resemble pious and humble Maria Bolkonsky. Tolstoy sought rather to achieve a general impression of the historical reconstruction of a family history, not to render all the details in the most accurate way.
The story of Nikolai and Maria, however, is only an auxiliary plot in the novel. Tolstoy used a more sophisticated approach in dealing with the main characters. He divided his authorial alter ego between Pierre Bezukhov, in whom dissipated habits, emotional and intellectual instability and lust competed with innate kindness, an ardent desire for moral goodness and admiration for the simple wisdom of the Russian peasant, and Prince Andrei with his quest for glory, Napoleonic ambitions and aristocratic arrogance. Each character had to resolve one of the two existential problems that tormented Tolstoy throughout his life: the power of sexuality and the fear of death. Pierre was to show the author and the reader how to handle erotic passions, Andrei how to deal with mortality.
In War and Peace these intractable existential problems are happily resolved. Pierre manages to tame his instincts in marriage. Prince Andrei, having nearly recovered from his mortal wound, chooses eternal universal life over personal existence and celestial over earthly human love. In Tolstoy’s early works, only simple and unreflective people were blessed with graceful exits. This time he awarded a radiant death to the character representing the lofty part of his soul, while the earthly part stayed alive to enjoy carnal pleasures in a way that is morally irreproachable. In the first version of the novel, which Tolstoy provisionally entitled All Is Well that Ends Well, Prince Andrei voluntarily cedes Natasha to his friend. In the final text, all ends even better: Tolstoy suggests that Pierre’s eventual success in the struggle between the author’s competing alter egos for the heart of the same woman is more than just a consequence of Prince Andrei’s death. It is a reassuring victory of the real over the ethereal, of this world over the next.
In the 1860s Tolstoy was not yet the avowed pacifist he later became. He abhorred the senseless loss of human life, but still regarded a fight against invaders as the natural and therefore legitimate instinct of a people protecting their own land. Reconciling his image of the war with his anarchist credo was difficult. Even the most consistent opponents of the state grudgingly agree that war is the prerogative of central authority. Tolstoy was never ready to compromise his beliefs or make partial concessions. He developed a provocative and controversial theory of historical process defined not ‘by power . . . but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events’ (WP, p. 1061). Rulers, leaders or military commanders only pretend to govern millions of individuals, but in fact succumb to the cumulative force of their wills.
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).
Tanya (Tatiana) Bers was not beautiful, as her portraits testify. According to Ilya Tolstoy, Lev’s second son, ‘her mouth was too large, she had a slightly receding chin, and she was just the least bit squint-eyed, but all this only accentuated her extraordinary femininity and allure.’3 All Tolstoy’s children, who remembered her as a middle-aged married woman marked by deep personal drama and loss, spoke about the fire burning in her and the joy of life that captivated and infected those around her with a sense of happiness. When Tolstoy and Sofia married, Tanya was sixteen. She quickly established a personal bond with her future brother-in-law. She was on first-name terms with him before her elder sisters and then began to call him by the even more familiar diminutive Levochka.
Like many people endowed with a choleric temperament, Tolstoy was prone to wild hilarity. His youngest daughter, Alexandra, born when he was 56, remembered him laughing ‘unrestrainedly like a very young creature, interrupting his laughter with groans of exhaustion, swinging his body, blowing his nose and wiping away his tears’ (AT, I, p. 238). His laughter was also highly infectious. Tanya Bers, brimming with vitality, became for him a companion of choice. She was a frequent guest at Yasnaya Polyana and spent hours with him at his hives and on fishing and hunting trips. Shortly after the marriage, Sofia recorded in the diary ‘unpleasant feelings towards Tanya’, who she believed was ‘pushing herself too close in Levochka’s life’ (SAT-Ds, p. 73). The young countess was unconsciously replicating the reaction of her elder sister to her own romance with Tolstoy several months earlier.
Tatiana Bers in 1862.
Tanya was an accomplished singer and Lev enjoyed accompanying her on the piano. As Alexandra writes, her ‘singing and voice had the same elusive charm, harmony and contained passion as all her character’ (AT, I, p. 269). Tolstoy was receptive to this ‘contained passion’. ‘Tanya – sensuality’, he remarked in his diary three months after his marriage. Two weeks later he added: ‘Tanya – the charm of naiveté; egoism and intuition’ (Ds, pp. 151, 157). His letters to her are full of funny nonsense worthy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and of paternal advice ‘to guard her heart’ as ‘the mark on the tormented heart remains forever’:
Remember Katerina Yegorovna’s words: never add sour cream to a fancy pastry. I know that the artistic demands of your rich nature are not the same as the demands of ordinary girls of your age; but Tanya, as an experienced man, who loves you not just because we are relations, I am telling you the whole truth. Tanya, remember Mme Laborde; her legs are too fat for her body – a fact which you can easily observe with a little care when she comes on to the stage in pantaloons. (Ls, I, pp. 113–14)
‘I took Tanya, added Sonya, stirred it up and got Natasha’ (AT, I, p. 270), once said Tolstoy listing the ingredients of his most charming female character, who infuses War and Peace with an atmosphere of love and fullness of being. Sofia’s presence is evident only in the epilogue, when Natasha unexpectedly turns into a devoted, commanding, jealous wife and caring mother. In the body of the novel Tanya seems to have been the author’s only source of inspiration. However, the transformation Tolstoy imagined for Natasha never occurred to her main prototype in real life. Long after her marriage Tanya Bers retained her irrepressible, exuberant femininity.
At the time of Tolstoy’s short but passionate courtship of her elder sister, Tanya was enjoying a teenage romance with her cousin Alexander Kuzminsky. The description of Natasha’s first kiss with Boris Drubetskoy at the beginning of the novel was based on a confession made by Tanya to Tolstoy. Tanya’s subsequent amorous adventures gave Tolstoy new material for the development of his plot as he was writing. In St Petersburg in 1863 she had a brief but intense infatuation with Anatole Shostak, who had a reputation as a notorious seducer. Anatole followed Tanya to Yasnaya Polyana, where they had a scandalous rendezvous in the forest, after which Sofia and Leo drove him out of the house. In her memoirs Tanya wrote that the next time she saw Anatole was twenty years later. Yet Sofia’s letters to Leo reveal that Anatole returned to the estate when Tolstoy was absent and that his flirtation with Tanya continued even during the early stages of her next romance, one that was to have far more dramatic consequences.
Tolstoy’s only remaining elder brother, Sergei, was living near Yasnaya Polyana. He lacked Leo’s literary talent and spiritual curiosity, but had a similarly wild temperament. Unlike Leo, he was handsome. For nearly fifteen years he had been living openly with a Gypsy singer, Masha Shishkina, and they had several children. When Leo introduced him to the Berses, Sergei could not hide his astonishment that his brother had chosen Sonya over Tanya. He fell in love with Tanya and managed to conquer her heart, a process that was perhaps helped by her mimetic desire to join the Tolstoy family. Sergei, however, remained hesitant and torn between his new passion and his existing family. He pleaded with Tanya not to reject him, fixed deadlines for a final choice and kept postponing them, promised to visit her for a decisive rendezvous and never appeared. Driven into a state of utter despair, Tanya tried to poison herself, but fortunately changed her mind and was saved.
Sergei Tolstoy and Tatiana Bers at the time of their romance.
The catastrophe seemed to have broken these tortured relations, but in June 1865, having met Tanya in Yasnaya Polyana, Sergei once again fell under her charms and proposed, which was accepted. Marriages between in-laws were forbidden by the Orthodox Church, so the couple planned a secret wedding that could later be legalized with the help of Leo’s connections at court. These plans collapsed in less than two weeks. In spite of his proposal, Sergei was still not sure whom he should marry. He claimed that having seen Masha’s solitary prayer, he felt unable to leave his old partner, but also complained that Masha’s parents had blackmailed him by threatening to denounce his proposed marriage to Tanya as illegal. Both versions could have been true. Indignant and humiliated, Tanya released Sergei from his vows. Finally, she became repentant about the whole affair and ashamed of her role in it. More than a year after this, her health remained precarious.
Unable to return to Yasnaya Polyana, Tanya went to recover at the estate of Dmitry Dyakov, a man who had been a model of comme il faut behaviour and an object of homoerotic veneration for Tolstoy in his younger days. Dyakov also fell under the spell of Tanya’s charm. Once, in response to her desperate self-blame, he told her that, were he free, he would have immediately proposed to her. Dyakov’s wife died shortly afterwards, and he did as he had promised. Tolstoy strongly advised his sister-in-law to accept, probably hoping to keep her within his close circle of friends and relatives or in an attempt to bring actual life closer to the plot he devised, but Tanya chose Kuzminsky, who was still waiting for his chance. They married in August 1867. According to family legend, on their way to the church they encountered Sergei and Masha, also heading to their wedding.
A year earlier Tanya had sung before Fet and his wife at the Dyakovs’. Fet knew her story, knew that doctors had advised her against singing, as it was considered damaging to her lungs, and probably had in mind the suspected suicide of his own former love, Maria Lazich, also an excellent singer. Eleven years later, having again listened to Tatiana’s singing in Yasnaya Polyana, he recalled her earlier impressions in one of the most beautiful love poems in the Russian language:
You sang until the dawn, worn out to the point of tears, Now love means you, and you alone, no other love but you, And I then longed to live, my love, that all my living years, I could love you and embrace you and shed my tears for you.4
Tolstoy appreciated the poem, but not the feeling behind it, ‘Why does he want to embrace our Tanya, he is a married man?’ (Kuz, pp. 400–401), he asked, characteristically failing to discriminate between life and art.
Tolstoy ignored Tanya’s plea not to make her intimate life public. He needed the details he had witnessed as well as those she had confessed to him to achieve the verisimilitude he desired. He did not even bother to rename her first admirer. Tanya’s love, impatience, despair and repentance served as a model for the story of Natasha’s relations with Anatole Kuragin and Pierre’s reaction to her shame and sorrow. When, on the eve of publication in 1868, Kuzminsky found out that the illustrator had modelled the image of Natasha on his wife, he ordered his family to leave Moscow. He also wanted to sever ties with the Tolstoys, but Tanya refused, declaring that she owed ‘everything good and holy in herself to Levochka’ (Kuz, p. 444). She knew Tolstoy had created her as a person and her brilliantly written and perceptive, if not entirely reliable, memoirs show to what extent she had internalized the image of Natasha Rostova. Unfortunately the memoirs stop around the time of her marriage, though the Kuzminskys continued visiting Yasnaya Polyana for many years.
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).
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.
A day before leaving for Penza, Tolstoy wrote to Fet telling him that he had spent the entire summer reading German philosophy. He had always believed that abstract reasoning had no value unless connected to actual moral issues, but now, approaching the end of his monumental work, he searched for a general justification for human existence. Tolstoy found Hegel an ‘empty collection of phrases’, appreciated Kant, but Schopenhauer gave him ‘spiritual joy’ he ‘had never experienced before’. Tolstoy told Fet, an old admirer of the German philosopher, that he found Schopenhauer ‘the most brilliant of men’ (Ls, I, p. 221) and offered to produce a joint translation of his works, the job that later Fet had to accomplish alone.
Tolstoy at forty years old, in 1868, after he had just finished War and Peace.
Schopenhauer believed that the driving force for all our decisions, passions and ambitions is an unconscious ‘will to live’. The desires provoked by the will to live are ‘unlimited, their claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one’. The human mind is able only to produce illusionary goals hiding from an individual bound for destruction, the futility imminent in all his wishes and labours. In reality, ‘nothing whatever is worth our exertions, our efforts and our struggles, all good things are empty and fleeting, the world on all sides is bankrupt, and life is a business which does not cover the costs.’7
This vision was close to Tolstoy’s cherished notion of the human beehive, in which the movement of bees is driven by a natural force beyond individual control. Although the idea of a will to live comes across in War and Peace as a fundamentally benign force, the influence of the great German pessimist is evident in the second epilogue of the novel. As he approached the end of his magnum opus, Tolstoy was gradually losing his optimism. Schopenhauer had helped him to reassess his views.
In 1865 Petr Boborykin, the editor of the magazine Reader’s Library and one of the most prolific writers of his time, asked Tolstoy for a contribution. Boborykin was a highly popular author but is now remembered mostly because of the reply Tolstoy drafted but decided not to send:
Problems of the local self-government, literature and emancipation of women etc. . . . are not only not interesting in the world of art; they have no place there at all . . . The aims of art are incommensurable (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations. If I were to be told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours’ work to such a novel; but if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about 20 years’ time by those who are now children, and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my life and all my energies to it. (Ls, I, p. 197)
Tolstoy wanted his novel to bring him money and fame, but these petty goals were secondary to his desire to tackle the most pressing existential problems. What compelled him to spend seven years chained to his desk was his hope of making people fall in love with life. His own drama, however, was that having completed his task he found himself unable to love life himself; moreover, he desperately hated it. He wrote to Fet in January 1871: ‘I’ve stopped writing and will never again write verbose nonsense like War and Peace. I am guilty, but I swear I’ll never do it again’ (LS, I, p. 230).
In 1884, when going over the history of his discord with his wife in his diary, Tolstoy remembered the early 1870s as the time ‘when the string snapped’ and he ‘became aware of his loneliness’ (Ds, p. 188). Never before were his depressions so acute. Sofia, who had already witnessed a lot, was appalled to see her hyperactive husband lying motionless on the sofa, staring at the ceiling and pleading with her to leave him alone and let him die peacefully. He was afraid he would go insane and felt that everything was finished for him.
In the 1850s, during his previous, much less powerful crisis, Tolstoy had turned to teaching, which helped to lift the depression. Now he decided to try the same path and resumed the old challenge. In January 1872 a new school for peasants opened in the house at Yasnaya Polyana, with Sofia and their elder children Sergei and Tatiana helping Tolstoy. The circumstances, however, were very different this time. The introduction of local self-government had yielded remarkably quick results. Popular education was no longer uncharted territory. Village schools had proliferated; hundreds of future teachers were studying new methods in universities and seminaries. Twelve years earlier Tolstoy had tried to popularize his approaches to teaching through an educational magazine. This time he decided that speaking to teachers was useless and that he needed to address pupils themselves. He started compiling the ABC (Azbuka) and Russian Books for Reading (The Primer), which he began to publish the same year with the help of Sofia and Strakhov, who had become an ardent convert to Tolstoy’s way of thinking and an eager assistant in all his enterprises.
The ABC and Russian Books for Reading came out between 1872 and 1875, and again in 1878–9 in different versions. Tolstoy could never republish his work without editing and sometimes completely rewriting it. For the first time in his life he was writing not about, but for ‘the people’. He planned to give lessons in basic reading, arithmetic, natural sciences and morality to millions. His preparations were, as usual, extensive; he perused collections of Russian folk songs, fables and proverbs, the Lives of the Saints that constituted the main source of religious instruction for the majority of peasants, books on mathematics, physics, astronomy and pedagogical literature written by British and American authors involved in organizing summer schools for working-class children.
It was also a painstaking literary experiment; the stylistic idiom he had elaborated over many years of effort was thrown into the dustbin as ‘verbose nonsense’. No longer could he afford rich vocabulary, complicated syntax, expressive details, powerful metaphors, digressions or meticulous psychological analysis. The texts he included in his books vary in length from two or three sentences to several pages and are uniformly plain, dry and simple. Works of art usually lend themselves to different interpretations, but the ABC and The Primer leave no room for ambiguity: the moral lesson needed to be evident to all and without any explanation:
The poor man came to the rich man to beg. The rich man did not give him anything and said: ‘Go away’. The poor man did not leave, then the rich man became angry and threw a stone at him. The poor man took the stone, put it close to his bosom and said: ‘I’ll keep this stone until I can throw it at him’. It happened this way. The rich man did a bad thing; they took everything from him and led him to prison. When he went to prison, the poor man came, wanting to throw the stone at him, and then he thought again and dropped the stone on the ground, saying: For nothing, did I carry this stone: when he was rich and strong, I was afraid of him and now I pity him. (CW, XXII, pp. 84–5)
The story illustrates the Russian saying ‘to keep a stone in one’s bosom’, which means ‘to bear a grudge’. Tolstoy tells the story about the uselessness of revenge and the advantages of forgiveness without abstract words and moral notions, to make it accessible to a six-year-old who has just learned to read. In the same way, when introducing elementary natural sciences he avoided talking about laws, concentrating instead on observable phenomena like the yearly cycle of the seasons, the effects of heat and cold, rain and the evaporation of water. He also invented his own technique for teaching the alphabet that was, from his point of view, better suited to a child who could not attend school regularly.
The first reaction among professional teachers was negative. Tolstoy failed to receive the approval from the Ministry of Education that was required for school textbooks. Reviews were nearly unanimously hostile. His financial loss amounted to 2,000 roubles, not a critical sum of money, but nonetheless substantial. In his response to the critics, Tolstoy wrote that he was so ‘sure that his books meet the basic needs of the Russian people’ that he did not even bother to give explanations; as a baker, giving bread to the hungry, does not explain how they should consume it (CW, XXI, p. 409)
Tolstoy was suggesting a free schooling system with diverse curricula and teaching methods, based on peasants’ immediate needs and the kind of education they wanted to give to their children. He would never agree that academics, educators, government bureaucrats or elected representatives had a right to decide how or what to teach to peasants. His opponents believed in a standardized national educational system that Russia was still lacking. They wanted to prepare pupils for the new life that their parents could not possibly envisage. Tolstoy aspired to give them the necessary tools to improve their traditional way of life without changing it.
Once again, Tolstoy was engaged in an uphill struggle and continued fighting against the odds. In 1874–5 he completely rewrote his book and produced the New ABC, which was finally granted approval for use in schools. Sales soared. In Tolstoy’s lifetime the New ABC and Russian Books for Reading went through 28 editions, selling 2 million copies. They were not accepted as manuals and textbooks, but were considered an essential part of early reading. At the very least, this was a good starting point for the continuation of the crusade, but by the mid-1870s Tolstoy’s interests were already far from the classroom.
During his personal crisis in the late 1850s and early ’60s Tolstoy had stopped publishing, but continued writing and searching for a new path forward. Now he did the same thing. For a while he contemplated turning from prose to drama. In February 1870 he wrote to Fet that ‘all this winter’ he had been ‘occupied solely with drama’ and that ‘characters in a tragedy and comedy begin to act’ (Ls, I, p. 225). He had already authored two rather mediocre comedies directed against nihilism and the emancipation of women. Many years later he would return to writing for the stage with considerable success. This time, however, his dramatic designs remained unrealized. Unlike many nineteenth-century realists, in his novels Tolstoy did not withdraw from the text in order to create an illusion of objectivity. Instead he pushed himself to the front, ceaselessly commenting, moralizing and guiding the reader. A play form did not allow for such authorial projections. Compelled to hide himself behind his characters, he lost confidence.
One of his plans concerned the period of Peter the Great and his Westernizing reforms that engendered a Europeanized elite in a profoundly non-European country. In War and Peace Tolstoy had looked for the ways to remedy this rupture; now he wanted to go back to its roots. Having established a subject, Tolstoy decided to shift the form from drama to historical novel, a genre much more comfortable to him.
Historians always emphasized the personal role of the tsar in the Westernization of Russia, but this approach contradicted Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. For the start of the novel, he chose the confrontation between the young tsar and his sister Sophia, then acting as a regent. Peter escaped from Moscow to the Troitsky (Trinity) monastery, leaving his sister in the Kremlin and thus allowing people to switch loyalties, moving from one camp to another. Tolstoy compared this precarious moment to a tilt in the scales: when someone starts pouring grain on one side, the opposite side with the weight stays, at first, solidly in place, but an extra handful suddenly lifts it in the air, where it hangs in the balance and any light touch may tip it either way.
Tolstoy’s research for the new novel was even more intensive and profound than when he had written about 1812. He studied chronicles, copied out words and expressions from historical dictionaries, read books about everyday life in the period. In spite of all this he struggled to empathize with his characters – they were too remote. He could not achieve the desired effect of immediate presence, when the actions and words of the protagonists give the impression of having been recorded from reality rather than invented. His wife was right when she wrote to her sister that ‘all the characters of the time of Peter the Great are ready, dressed and put in their places, but do not breathe’ (CW, XVII, p. 632). She expressed the hope that they might yet come to life.
This was, of course, far from impossible. Tolstoy knew how to rework his drafts and cope with narrative problems. He believed that ‘the whole knot of Russian life resides’ in the Petrine period and wanted to unravel it. But the deeper Tolstoy delved into the end of the seventeenth century, the more clearly he saw that he would be unable to proceed. In December 1872 he wrote to Strakhov that ‘he has surrounded himself with books about Peter I and his time, made efforts to write, but could not’ (CW, XVII, pp. 629–30). Suddenly he found himself writing a novel in which the action was proceeding in the immediate present.
In March 1873 Tolstoy finally started writing the new novel in earnest. This time his progress was quick: in May he informed Strakhov that he had finished a novel ‘in draft form’ (AK, p. 747) and in September wrote to him that he would be completing the novel soon. This was somewhat premature, but in the second half of 1874 Tolstoy started thinking about publication. In November Tolstoy asked Katkov to pay him the hefty sum of 10,000 roubles as an advance payment. When Katkov started bargaining, Tolstoy approached Nekrasov, who had acquired the magazine Notes of Fatherland after Sovremennik had been closed by the authorities. When Nekrasov expressed interest, Katkov doubled the advance. On 1 January 1875, Strakhov congratulated Tolstoy on having been paid 20,000 roubles, ‘an unheard price for a novel’.8
The first instalments of Anna Karenina appeared in the Russian Herald from January to April 1875, then from January to April 1876 and from December 1876 to April 1877. The long intervals were caused by Tolstoy’s characteristic procrastination, and his slow and painstaking rewriting and editing of the text. At the same time, this peculiar rhythm of publication helped the illusion that the plot was unfolding in real time. The novel, as it progressed, absorbed events taking place in the outside world: the consequences of military reform, fresh court intrigues, a visit by a foreign opera company to St Petersburg and the country sliding into war with the Ottoman Empire. Katkov’s publications were the main force rallying public opinion around the Slavic cause: the national movements in Bulgaria and Serbia fighting against the Turks for independence. In April 1877 an initially reluctant emperor bowed to public pressure and declared war. Political developments that could not have been envisaged when Tolstoy started his novel filled its pages and changed the fates of the characters.
Tolstoy was wary of the Panslavicist and imperialist ideology espoused by the Russian Herald. In the last part of the book he resoundingly attacked the war and the bellicose spirit of its proponents. The final chapters were prepared for publication in the May 1877 issue, but Katkov insisted on cutting the most explicit passages. When Tolstoy rejected this demand, Katkov refused to publish the ending, instead providing readers with a very short summary and a reference to a full edition under preparation. Infuriated, Tolstoy answered with an indignant letter and cut all relations with the editor. The last part appeared as a separate publication in June 1877, and the full text, once again revised with Strakhov’s help, in January 1878.
Notwithstanding this scandal, the ideological orientation of Anna Karenina made it more appropriate for a conservative magazine than a progressive one. Tolstoy was writing a novel about adultery. The problem of the emancipation of women was not confined to post-reform Russia, it was one of the most prevalent issues in European thought and social practice at that time. Despite the remarks he had made in an unsent letter to Boborykin, this problem had always deeply concerned Tolstoy. In 1863, when he began working on War and Peace, his old foe Chernyshevsky had smuggled out a revolutionary novel from captivity in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. The incredible incompetence of the Russian censors had allowed Nekrasov to publish What Is to Be Done? in Sovremennik. Artistically weak, it made an easy target for the critics, but it was the first book in Russia to deal with the problem of sexual compatibility and to suggest divorce and cohabitation as possible solutions to family problems. Tolstoy had already refuted Chernyshevsky in the epilogue to War and Peace, but his rage was still boiling.
In 1868 Tolstoy drafted an imagined conversation with his female would-be critics, in which he argued that the highest and most sacred mission of a woman was motherhood. No great man, argued Tolstoy, who lost his mother at the age of two, had ever been brought up without maternal care. In the following year John Stuart Mill published his essay The Subjection of Women, forcefully arguing for gender equality. The essay achieved immediate fame and was twice translated into Russian. In a polemical reply, Strakhov reiterated the idea of the sanctity of familial bonds, but conceded that ‘sexless’ women, who had failed to discover their true calling or passed their procreative age, could possibly benefit from formal education and social activity.
Such compromises were not in Tolstoy’s nature: he wrote a letter to Strakhov, fully supporting his main argument but insisting that there are no ‘sexless’ women, ‘just as there are no four-legged people’ (Ls, I, p. 227). Those not fortunate enough to have their own families could help bring up other women’s children. Tolstoy went so far as to repeat Schopenhauer’s assertion that prostitutes helping to channel away the excesses of male sexuality are more socially beneficial than the women working in offices. Probably unwilling to scandalize his correspondent, whom he had not yet met personally, Tolstoy decided against sending the letter.
For an old bachelor like Strakhov, the questions raised by Mill were an intellectual problem; for Tolstoy they were of existential importance. He had married believing that marriage could redeem sexuality. After seven years of family life, he concluded that sexuality itself undermined and corrupted marriage. In 1872, in a letter to his spinster aunt Alexandra Tolstoy, Lev compared the forthcoming wedding of his favourite niece Varvara to a ‘sacrifice, an immolation on the altar of some terrible and cynical deity’ (Ls, I, p. 241). No doubt he was thinking about the eighteen-year-old virgin ‘sacrificed’ in the carriage after his wedding. He blamed his premarital past, when he had irreversibly debauched himself and could not help debauching his wife by awakening her sexual desires. Shortly before the marriage of Tanya and Kuzminsky, Tolstoy told Sofia that he was afraid of and disliked the sensuality he noticed in the couple. Later, in a letter to Tanya, Tolstoy wrote about his joy at the news of her pregnancy and the ‘unpleasant feeling’ he had during the long interval after the previous one. A trace of male jealousy, perhaps, but no doubt Tolstoy was expressing his deeply held beliefs.
Schopenhauer taught that love was the most powerful illusion in the human heart, necessary to veil the drive to procreate: ‘Marriages from love are contracted in the interest of the species, not of individuals. It is true that persons concerned imagine they are advancing their own happiness; but their actual aim is one that is foreign to themselves, since it lies in the production of an individual.’9 The Tolstoys procreated successfully. To Sofia’s dismay, Leo was indifferent to babies, but started loving children when they became toddlers. Sofia was a good and caring mother but marital relations, with all the jealousy, ‘scenes’ and reconciliations, remained fragile and too dependent on the ebbs and flows of Leo’s erotic desires. Scared at first by her husband’s ardent sexuality, Sofia gradually learned to share his passion, as she confesses in her memoirs. For many years she probably remained a reasonably good bedmate for her insatiable husband. Unfortunately this did not make their life any easier.
Sofia in 1866.
In February 1871 Sofia gave birth to her fifth child, named Maria after Leo’s mother. Both her pregnancy and delivery were extremely difficult and the doctors thought that another pregnancy could be life-threatening. Tolstoy adamantly refused even to consider any contraceptive measures that were for him abomination worse than death. In Anna Karenina the final degradation of the heroine happens not when she betrays her husband, or even when she leaves him and their son for a lover, but when she reverts to contraception in order to stay sexually attractive to Vronsky. The rejection of motherhood turns Anna into a drug addict and a psychopath. In the middle of the novel she had been on the verge of dying. Retrospectively, the reader is prompted to conclude that this would have been a better outcome for Anna. Sofia went on to deliver eight more children, but three babies born after Maria died early; Tolstoy’s decision caused fissures that never healed completely.
Apart from his interest in pathologies of the modern family, Tolstoy had literary reasons to revert to a novel about adultery. He was an avid reader of Western prose; his diaries, letters and conversations record scores of references to contemporary British, French and German novelists of different calibre; most often, favourable ones. However, one name is conspicuously absent from the list: Tolstoy mentioned Flaubert rarely, most often negatively and avoided speaking about his main novel. The only exception confirms this tendency – in 1892 Tolstoy wrote to his wife that he had read Madame Bovary and found it to have ‘considerable merits and good reasons to be esteemed by the French’ (CW, LXXXIV, p. 138), offering both tongue-in-cheek praise and an awkward attempt to pretend he had not read the book before. Flaubert’s masterpiece had appeared in Paris in 1856. In January 1857 the author was put on trial for immorality before being triumphantly acquitted a month later. When Tolstoy arrived in Paris, two weeks after the trial, the city was still in a state of uproar. Tolstoy spent time with Turgenev, who believed Madame Bovary to be the best creation ‘in the whole world of literature’. There is little doubt that Tolstoy would have read the sensational novel.
Flaubert’s book is the ideal expression and a fine example of the spirit of nineteenth-century realism. Impeccably objective and detached, full of stunningly accurate, detailed and recognizable descriptions, it traces with an iron logic the psychological transformation of a pious girl full of dim poetic hopes and aspirations into an adulterous wife, who squanders her husband’s money on an unfaithful lover and is driven by the inevitability of ruin to a horrifying suicide. Flaubert meticulously avoids any comments or moralistic conclusions, letting the characters and events speak for themselves. Fifteen years later Tolstoy took up the gauntlet and gave his own version of love, adultery and suicide.
The first draft of Anna Karenina, written in 1873, was very preliminary in nature: the names of the characters, their appearance and details of their biographies varied, some parts of the text were not yet ready and the author filled the gaps with short notes explaining what he was planning to write. Still, unlike War and Peace, the outline of the plot as well as the relations between the characters were clear to him from the very beginning. Present are all three couples connected by two pairs of siblings – Anna and Alabin (Oblonsky) and Dolly and Kitty – and the love of both female protagonists, Anna and Kitty, for the same man. Tolstoy made an early decision to begin the novel with the crisis in the Oblonsky family and to end it with Anna’s railway station suicide. In the beginning of 1872 Tolstoy deliberately went to see the deformed body of Anna Pirogova, the abandoned housekeeper and lover of a local landlord, who had thrown herself under a train. The stories of the two Annas have very little in common, but Tolstoy was struck by the horrifying symbolism of the accident.
The early draft also bore the strong imprint of Schopenhauer’s particular strain of misogyny. For the German thinker, women were born exclusively for attracting males and childbearing; and, as a consequence of this reproductive function, inclined to search for a mate with whom they might more successfully procreate. Anna, in this version, is a lascivious animal, not so much morally corrupt as inherently immoral. The other characters see her as possessed by a ‘devil’, an evil force or, in Schopenhauerian terms, the will to live. When she gets pregnant by Udashev (Vronsky), Anna’s wet eyes shine with happiness. As was by now his custom, Tolstoy made things more subtle and less straightforward as he rewrote the novel. If the ‘will to live’ or ‘force of life’, as Tolstoy called it in the epigraph to one of the chapters, is irresistible, how could one possibly blame Anna? She had been ‘sacrificed’ on the altar of sexuality through marriage and denied frequent pregnancies. In the interval between War and Peace and Anna Karenina Tolstoy had mastered ancient Greek in order to read the classics in the original. He had been planning to read Sophocles and Euripides to use their experience in his own dramas. Instead, he turned his second novel into a classical tragedy of fate. In the final text, Anna is not acquitted, but her descent into hell acquires tragic greatness.
The chronological and cultural gap between a contemporary reader and Russian high society in Tolstoy’s time obscures the historical dislocation in the foundation of the plot. Anna’s stigma is grossly exaggerated; by social standards of the time, her behaviour was, of course, scandalous, but hardly unprecedented or exceptional. Russian high society was rife with stories of adultery and civil marriage. Emperor Alexander II lived and fathered children with his mistress, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya. This caused consternation among conservatives, who consolidated their opposition around the empress (one of whose ladies-in-waiting was Alexandra Tolstoy) and the heir to the throne. Such an aristocratic Fronde had little chance of bucking the trend set by a modernizing autocrat. Victorian bourgeois morality did not take root in a country where the bourgeoisie was relatively weak and uninfluential.
Tolstoy’s own married sister Maria had a daughter with her civil partner, the Swedish viscount Hector de Kleen. Maria’s history was different from Anna’s – she had left her husband because she was not willing to ‘serve as a senior wife in his harem’.10 She was soon abandoned by the viscount and felt deeply repentant of her sins, but she never became a pariah. Likewise, Sofia’s sister Liza, who failed to charm Tolstoy in 1862, divorced her impotent husband and remarried after eight years of unconsummated family life at exactly the time when her brother-in-law was writing Anna Karenina.
In a scene symbolically set in a theatre, the murmur of gossip is transformed into a roar of public damnation by Anna’s inner voice. Her inner demons define her predicament, driving her towards near madness and ultimately to tragedy. In the epigraph to the novel, ‘Vengeance is mine and I’ll repay,’ Tolstoy quotes Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, but it remains unclear whether the actual revenge in question is performed by the just God of the New Testament or the ‘terrible and cynical deity’ of sexuality. Following Rousseau, Tolstoy condemned the hypocrisy of those who practised the vices for which they blame Anna, but ‘society’ was guilty not of ruining her love, but of corrupting her soul. Vronsky’s seduction of a married woman meets with universal approval. Vronsky’s mother also initially welcomes this liaison; Tolstoy was obviously thinking of his dear aunt Toinette, who wished for him to have an affair with a well-born married woman, a badge of honour for a young noble male.
‘Emma Bovary – c’est moi,’ Flaubert famously said. Tolstoy could hardly have made the same claim for Anna, though he endowed her with a flame of carnal desire all too familiar to him. There is no doubt, however, that Tolstoy could have said this about Konstantin Levin, the most autobiographical character he ever produced. Levin’s surname is derived from the author’s first name: Lev. Tolstoy endowed Levin with his own biographical details, traits of character, ways of estate management, everyday habits and preferences, social views and a sense of an anxious spiritual quest – nearly everything apart from literary talent. He did not have much left for Vronsky, the ideal image of a man comme il faut.
Nevertheless, ‘despite a marked difference between Vronsky and Levin’ (AK, p. 637), Anna is able to discern in them ‘that common trait, which caused Kitty to fall in love with them both’. This ‘common trait’ was that of Tolstoy, who divided himself between the two characters. In War and Peace the main female character is first enchanted by an impeccable officer, but then understands her true feelings. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy goes further. In an episode that serves the same role as the decisive meeting between Pierre and Natasha in War and Peace, Levin falls in love with Anna. When he returns home, Kitty’s hysterical outburst seems to be excessive, if taken at face value; nothing has actually happened that could threaten their marriage. Still, both Levin and the author know that Kitty is right.
The interrelationship between Levin and Anna’s family stories is often seen through the prism of the first, proverbial sentence of the novel: ‘All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (AK, p. 1). The structure of the novel, however, as well as the meaning of the opening maxim, cannot be reduced to such a shallow contrast. ‘It is well known that happy marriages are rare,’ wrote Schopenhauer.11 Tolstoy described two happy families, if entirely different ones, in the epilogue to War and Peace and after that lost all interest in this subject.
In one of the drafts of Anna Karenina he wrote: ‘We like to imagine misfortune as something concentrated, as a fact that happened, while misfortune is never an event in life, it is life itself, the long life which is unhappy, life which preserves the attributes of happiness, when happiness and the meaning of life are lost’ (CW, XX, p. 370). It is this existential despair that drives Levin, a ‘happy and healthy family man’ (CW, XX, p. 562), so close to suicide that he has to hide the rope and the gun from sight so as not to hang or shoot himself. Mutual devotion and numerous children protect Levin and Kitty from the utter destitution of Karenin and Anna, or semi-destitution of Oblonsky and Dolly, but they are ‘unhappy in their own way’. Levin’s final religious revelation has nothing to do with his family; and on the last page, he even decides not to tell Kitty about it.
Tolstoy never needed reminders that death was near and omnipresent, but the 1870s provided him with many particular occasions to reflect on this. The year 1873, when Tolstoy started the novel, brought news of the death of Dasha Kuzminskaya, Tanya’s elder daughter and the darling of both families. This was followed several months later by the sudden death of Tolstoy’s fourth son Peter at the age of seventeen months. Next year Tolstoy’s beloved aunt Toinette, Tatiana Yergolskaya, passed away after a prolonged illness. Another aunt, Pelageya Yushkova, who took care of him in Kazan and who had lived at Yasnaya Polyana as a widow for several years, died in 1875. That year also witnessed the deaths of two more of Tolstoy’s babies, Nikolai and Varvara: the former did not survive until his first birthday, the latter passed away shortly after she was born. Death encircled Tolstoy’s novel from the railway accident at the beginning that serves as a portent for Anna’s suicide at the end.
In his first major novel, specially devoted to war and with infinitely more characters, Tolstoy showed death much more often than in the second. In War and Peace death is a necessary part of life’s eternal cycle. The deaths of old Prince Bolkonsky, Prince Andrei and Hélène allow for the marriages of both Nikolai and Maria and Pierre and Natasha, leading to the births of their numerous offspring. In the world of Anna Karenina death begets new deaths: Anna’s suicide induces Vronsky to go to war hoping to end his life there, and the death of Levin’s brother drives Levin to near suicidal despair, from which he is mysteriously saved only by the help of a religious peasant.
In February 1873 Tolstoy wrote to his cousin Alexandra that he had reread War and Peace for the new edition with a feeling of ‘repentance and shame . . . not unlike what a man experiences when he sees the remains of an orgy in which he has taken part’. Still, he was ‘consoled’ by the fact that he ‘was carried by this orgy heart and soul, and thought that nothing else mattered beside it’ (Ls, I, p. 257). He also told Alexandra that he was ‘on the point of writing something again’, but the ‘orgy’ did not repeat itself. In August 1875, midway through his work on the novel, Tolstoy complained to Strakhov that he had to ‘set down again . . . at dull, commonplace Anna Karenina and prayed to God [for] strength to get it off [his] hands as quickly as possible in order to clear a space’ (Ls, I, p. 280). Two months later he told Fet that ‘in order to work, it is necessary for scaffolding to be erected under your feet,’ that for a long time he was idly ‘sitting and waiting’ (Ls, I, p. 281) for the scaffolding, but now he felt they are in place and could resume his work. He was struggling to believe in the importance of his enterprise.
No wonder Tolstoy’s new novel lacked the ‘elemental force’ that stunned Fet in the previous one. He compensated for that with an unsurpassable mastery of form that made William Faulkner, himself not alien to the secrets of the genre, call Anna Karenina ‘the best novel ever written’. In the draft of the introduction to War and Peace, Tolstoy insisted that he was not writing a novel and that ‘Russians in general do not know how to write novels’ (WP, p. 1087). Now he was challenging those who were inclined to take him too literally. Gone were the fascinating weaknesses of his first major narrative: irritatingly long digressions, unprepared transformations of the characters, illogical holes in the plot, such as the thirteen-month pregnancy of Prince Andrei’s first wife. The existential horror that permeates the pages of Anna Karenina had to be finely balanced by the perfection of the text. The Russian educator Sergey Rachinsky, one of the few representatives of his profession who had admired Tolstoy’s ABC and The Primer, wrote to Tolstoy that Anna Karenina was composed of two magnificent, but hardly connected novels. Tolstoy responded that he was ‘proud of the architecture – the arches have been constructed in such a way that it is impossible to see where the keystone is’ (Ls, I, p. 311). Such a defence of one of his completed works was nearly unique in the tens of thousands of letters Tolstoy wrote.
In May 1873, when finishing the first rough draft, Tolstoy wrote to Fet that ‘good and evil are only materials out of which beauty is made’. Waiting for Anna to appear in the study of Vronsky’s house, Levin gazes at the ‘wonderful picture on the wall’:
It was not a picture, but a living and charming woman with curly black hair, bare shoulders and arms, and a dreamy half-smile on her lips, covered with elegant down, looking at him victoriously and tenderly with eyes that troubled him. The only thing that showed she was not alive was that she was more beautiful than a living woman could be. (AK, p. 630)
When Anna enters she turns out to be ‘less brilliant’, but Levin fails to notice it as ‘there was something about her, new and attractive, which was not in the portrait’ (AK, p. 630). The world that Tolstoy created was falling apart, but it was inherently beautiful. The author depicted it always staying on the scaffolding, without detaching himself from it in the manner of Flaubert. The effect of absolute realism was achieved not because Tolstoy ‘objectively’ portrayed the development of his characters, but because he portrayed himself portraying his characters, thus guaranteeing that the picture was true to life.
Anna Karenina provoked the ire of radical critics. Nekrasov, possibly still reeling from his failure to acquire the rights for the manuscript, wrote that Tolstoy had ‘proved with patience and talent that a woman, being a mother and a wife, should not engage herself in affairs with officers or courtiers’,12 attempting with an epigram to reduce Tolstoy’s novel to nothing more than trivial moralizing. Another critic, Petr Tkachev, called the novel ‘a newest epic of aristocratic amours’.13 These predictable barbs could still not reduce the success of the book, which became evident immediately after the publication of the first instalments and only grew after that. Readers were eager to read instalments as they were published and to buy the book; Tolstoy expected the planned collected edition of his work that was to include Anna Karenina to bring a profit of more than 60,000 roubles. Many critics’ assessments were also more glowing than anyone could have dared to expect.
Tolstoy should have been especially flattered by the praise of Dostoevsky, who had always interested him as one of the ‘martyrs of 1848’ and as a writer. Tolstoy had mixed views on his major novels, but considered Notes from the House of the Dead ‘the best book in all modern literature, Pushkin included . . . sincere, natural and Christian’ (Ls, II, p. 338). This quasi-documentary narrative raised a topic eternally close to Tolstoy’s heart: the meeting between a noble intellectual and people from the lower classes, brought together in the morbid environment of a hard labour camp. In his review, Dostoevsky wrote that Tolstoy’s novel is marked by ‘depth and potency with a realism of artistic portrayal hitherto unknown in Russia’ and asserted that the book was the ultimate answer to the question of what Russia can give to Europe (AK, pp. 760–61). The final part of the novel, with its denunciation of the Balkan war, left the militarist Dostoevsky profoundly disappointed.
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)
At that time Tolstoy still believed that a ruling class, however repulsive, was a necessity in the course of history. Nearly a decade later he could no longer see any justification for their plundering and bullying. Writing the history of a nation was one thing, but writing the history of a criminal gang was totally different. By the same token, if a peasant family was not, as he had previously believed, mysteriously connected with events in the palace, its story was that of a victim, rather than a historical actor. Tolstoy knew his job too well not to understand that this approach would not sustain a narrative stretching over a century. The story of the exiled Decembrists also lost its allure. The dialogue between the nobles and the peasants he envisaged became useless, because the educated classes had nothing to teach or even to say to those who worked on the land. The only useful thing the ruling elite could do was simply to disappear and let the suffering people lead their own life according to their own ideals and values.
In April 1878, three months after the publication of the complete text of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov that everything seemed to be ready for him to start writing – and fulfilling his earthly mission. The only thing he was lacking was ‘the push of belief . . . in the importance of the occupation . . . the energy of delusion, that earthly elemental energy that could not be invented’ (CW, LXII, pp. 410–11). The ‘energy of delusion’ that had previously sustained him stemmed from a belief that his writing would change the world or, no less importantly, himself. When working on War and Peace that energy was burning in him; when he wrote Anna Karenina its intensity became more subdued, but he still managed to keep it alive. Now there was no literary plan that could spark that delusion.
In his Confession, written in 1879 and published in 1882, Tolstoy gave a concise description of how his life was brought to a virtual standstill by a simple question he asked himself many times: ‘“Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world – and what of it?” And I could find no reply at all’ (CW, XXIII, p. 11).
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