Tolstoy

By 1868 Tolstoy was working furiously to finish War and Peace. The further he got into the novel, the clearer its shape became to him, and the greater his inspiration and sense of purpose. He was anyway a person of extraordinary sensitivity, and now, in the middle of this enormous creative outpouring, his friend, the poet Afanasy Fet, likened him to a great bell made of the thinnest glass, liable to produce a sound at the slightest touch.⁹⁶ It was this sensitivity which compelled him to respond to some of the early carping reviews by publishing in Pyotr Bartenev’s journal Russian Archive ‘A Few Words About the Novel War and Peace’ in March 1868. Long before he had finished writing his novel, he hoped he could thus anticipate any further misapprehensions, which he knew were inevitable. First he confronted the tricky question of the genre of his novel by offering his own oft-quoted, and not necessarily very helpful definition: ‘What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less a [narrative] poem, and even less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it was expressed.’ Justifying his apparent lack of reverence for conventional European literary forms, Tolstoy quite rightly argues that from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, ‘in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one artistic work in prose, even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, a [narrative] poem or a novella’. He also tackles other potential points of contention, such as the fact that not only the Russians but also the French speak a mixture of French and Russian in the novel. And as well as providing a robust defence of the artist’s right to diverge from historical accounts in evoking past events, he explains that his invention of names such as Bolkonsky and Drubetskoy, so similar to the well-known real-life aristocratic surnames of Volkonsky and Trubetskoy, was governed by a desire for his fictitious characters to have names which would sound pleasant and natural to the Russian ear.⁹⁷

When he wrote his ‘Few Words’ about the novel he had been working on ‘continually and exclusively’ for the previous five years, Tolstoy openly acknowledged he had been able to take advantage of ‘optimal living conditions’. Presumably he had in mind not only his comfortable state of financial independence and all the fresh air and exercise he could want, but also the emotional and practical support provided by his wife. Sonya gave birth to four children during the six years Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, and also suffered at least one miscarriage (in October 1867). After the birth of Sergey, Tanya was born in 1864, followed by Ilya in 1866 and Lev in 1869. When she was not looking after their children, Sonya worked willingly as her husband’s scribe, and thus became intimately involved in his creative life. This sometimes required a good deal of patience, as she records in her autobiography:

Sometimes proofs which had been finally corrected and sent off were returned again to Lev Nikolayevich at his request in order to be recorrected and recopied. Or a telegram would be sent to substitute one word for another. My whole soul became so immersed in the copying that I began myself to feel when it was not altogether right; for instance, when there were frequent repetitions of the same word, long periods, wrong punctuation, obscurity, etc. I used to point all these things out to Lev Nikolayevich. Sometimes he was glad for my remarks; sometimes he would explain why it ought to remain as it was; he would say that details do not matter, only the general scheme matters.⁹⁸

If her brother Stepan’s memoirs are to be believed, Sonya copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace seven times. unfortunately this supposition appears to have been wishful thinking on his part: Nikolay Gusev dismisses it as a myth in a footnote of his 900-page biographical study of Tolstoy’s life and works from 1855 to 1869. Conceding that some of Tolstoy’s chapters were indeed reworked and copied many times, he points out that others went straight to press.⁹⁹ On the other hand, there were numerous chapters which Tolstoy rewrote endlessly, so Sonya’s contribution should not be underestimated. Deciphering his execrable handwriting, and then preparing a legible final draft of the manuscript, was a gargantuan task, and in 1866, during a particularly intense period of the novel’s composition, a clerk was also employed to help with the copying.¹⁰⁰