Tolstoy

Tolstoy had driven a hard bargain with his editor Mikhail katkov. At the beginning of his career, back in 1852, he had been paid fifty roubles per printer’s sheet, but he now felt he could ask for more – a lot more. Nikolay Lyubimov, a retired professor of physics at Moscow university and katkov’s closest editorial associate (or favourite donkey as he was referred to disparagingly in some circles), was deputised to act as go-between, and in November 1864 he spent two hours trying to persuade Tolstoy to back down and accept a rate of fifty roubles for his new work.⁷⁷ But Tolstoy knew his own worth, insisted on 300 roubles, and got it. This meant katkov paid his star author 3,000 roubles for the first section of the novel (ten printer’s sheets).⁷⁸ This was a lot of money. As a concession, he managed to persuade Tolstoy to agree to a separate book publication of all the chapters which made up ‘The Year 1805’ after they had been published in the Russian Messenger, which then had about 3,000 subscribers. They agreed on a print run of 500 copies, with katkov as the beneficiary, and the book went on sale in June 1866, for a price of two and a half roubles.⁷⁹ Working out exactly how much these figures would be at today’s values is a difficult and rather fruitless exercise, but one can gain a good sense of relative worth when comparing Tolstoy’s honorarium with the average manual worker’s wage at the time, which was about ten roubles a month – the eventual price of War and Peace when it was finally published as a book. Village teachers earned about twenty-five roubles a month, which was what Tolstoy paid the governesses who came to teach his children, on top of providing them with room and board.⁸⁰

The year 1866 was something of an annus mirabilis for Mikhail katkov, as he found himself publishing Tolstoy’s novel and Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment on the pages of his journal at the same time. Dostoyevsky was not the easiest of authors, but on this occasion far more amenable than Tolstoy. He struggled to meet the deadlines for each of the monthly instalments of Crime and Punishment, but he kept to them, and the novel was complete by December 1866. (If Tolstoy read it, which is unlikely, he did not record what he thought about it.) With War and Peace, things were altogether trickier. By this point, Tolstoy had come up with a new title: ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, projecting a happy ending which was different from the one he had initially conceived, and different again from the ending of the final version of the novel. Tolstoy still believed he would finish his new work the following year, and that spring he began lengthy and ultimately disappointing discussions with an artist whom he commissioned to produce illustrations for the projected book publication.⁸¹

katkov wanted to continue printing the next sections of Tolstoy’s novel in the Russian Messenger in 1867, before producing it in book form. Accordingly, a new set of negotiations began in November 1866, but the following spring there was still no agreement, and in June 1867 Tolstoy took matters into his own hands. Deciding against first publishing the rest of the novel as monthly instalments in a journal in the time-honoured Russian fashion, he decided now to publish it in separate volumes as they were completed. He turned for help to Pyotr Bartenev. The eventual form of War and Peace changed radically as a result, and the nature of the changes can be roughly gauged by consulting the list of ‘distinguishing merits’ compiled by a commercial Moscow publisher of the so-called ‘first complete edition of the great novel completed in 1866, before Tolstoy reworked it in 1867–1869’:

1. Twice as short and five times more interesting.

2. Almost no philosophical digressions.

3. A hundred times easier to read: all the French text is replaced by Russian in the author’s own translation.

4. Much more ‘peace’ and less ‘war’.

5. Prince Andrey and Petya Rostov remain alive.⁸²