Tolstoy

Tolstoy did little work on War and Peace during the week in which he entertained Schuyler, but he got his American guest to help him sort out his ever-expanding library. At the end of his stay, Schuyler was granted permission to translate The Cossacks, a project which took a while for him to complete due to his professional commitments. After Moscow, he was posted to St Petersburg for several years, during which he made an intrepid and noteworthy journey to the new cities of Russian Turkestan, then created a storm during a posting in Constantinople by exposing atrocities committed by the Turks against the Bulgarians, thereby helping their nationalist cause. As a result, he was removed from his post in 1878 and appointed as American Consul in Birmingham, which he clearly found boring, as this is where he finally finished his translation of The Cossacks (he is game enough to admit in his memoir that Tolstoy did not rate it very highly).¹⁰⁵ Schuyler and Tolstoy shared a great interest in Peter the Great, to whom Tolstoy turned as the possible subject of his next novel after completing War and Peace. In 1873, Tolstoy eventually abandoned his Peter the Great project to write Anna Karenina, but chapters of Schuyler’s study of the Russian tsar finally started appearing in 1886.

After a wonderful week of convivial outings and conversations about literature and education which continued late into the night, Schuyler returned to Moscow, leaving Tolstoy to get back to War and Peace. The novel’s fifth volume was published in May 1869, and the sixth and final volume appeared in December of that year (it was only when Tolstoy started to revise the novel a third time in 1873, in connection with a new edition of his collected writings, that he reduced the six initial volumes to the current four). It had been a long haul. Tolstoy worked phenomenally hard during the six years it took to write War and Peace, and Sonya had to bite her lip on the frequent occasions when he was late for dinner. As she records in her autobiography, she would tell herself on such occasions that being on time for meals was too petty a concern for geniuses like her husband.¹⁰⁶ A great believer in gymnastics and vigorous exercise outdoors, Tolstoy was physically very robust and he certainly had the stamina required to complete such a gargantuan project, but he frequently endured periods of poor health during the writing of War and Peace. There were times, particularly towards the end, for example, when he suffered from terrible migraines,¹⁰⁷ and others when he felt generally so unwell that he had to travel to Moscow for a consultation with Grigory Zakharin, one of Moscow’s leading clinicians.¹⁰⁸

War and Peace was wildly popular with the public when it was first published, but it also provoked a storm of controversy.¹⁰⁹ It was clear to everyone that what Tolstoy had produced was something exceptional, and the writer Ivan Goncharov was not exaggerating when he proclaimed that Tolstoy had now become a ‘real lion of literature’.¹¹⁰ Many members of the older generation, however, thought that Tolstoy had distorted Russian history, and felt affronted. Politically motivated younger critics desperate to push Russia further on the road to reform, on the other hand, reviled the conservative family values Tolstoy upholds in the novel, and in particular his celebration of the nobility. Even those with no particular axe to grind found Tolstoy’s lengthy digressions disconcerting. Many Russian prose writers, meanwhile, were simply consumed with envy, and dismissed War and Peace with a few withering comments.

Amongst the novel’s early critics was Turgenev, who had additional personal reasons to be galled by the greater success his younger contemporary seemed so effortlessly to achieve. But Turgenev was at heart a modest and generous man, and by the time the French publisher Hachette brought out the first French translation of War and Peace in 1879, their differences had been resolved. He now took every opportunity to promote Tolstoy to the French public, which was almost completely unfamiliar with his works. The appearance of the translation of War and Peace completed by ‘une Russe’ (Princess Irina Paskevich, born Vorontsova-Dashkova, who was a remarkable Petersburg grande dame in her own right)¹¹¹ gave Turgenev a felicitous opportunity to write to Edmond About, editor of the Paris newspaper Le XIXe Siècle. In his letter, which was published on 23 January 1880, Turgenev provides French readers with an introduction to the novel and its author which is superlative in its concision and objectivity, and deserves to stand in full as the last word on this chapter of Tolstoy’s life:

Dear Monsieur About,