Tolstoy

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1869, nearly the whole of Russia was engrossed in War and Peace and avidly awaiting its conclusion, according to a Petersburg newspaper.² Tolstoy still had to oversee the publication of the last chapters (which finally went on sale that December), but his mind was racing in all sorts of new directions. In truth, his interest in the novel was already beginning to recede by this time. He spent the following summer immersed in German philosophy, then embarked on an intense study of Russian fairy tales and folk epics, with a view to putting together books to help children learn to read. He read Shakespeare and Molière and started writing a play. He toyed with ideas for a novel about Peter the Great, and at the same time began contemplating another completely different novel about the predicament of a high-society woman in contemporary Russia. He also began learning ancient Greek. But he was happiest when his mind was not racing. In fact, in the weeks and months which followed the completion of War and Peace, Tolstoy was happiest when he did not have to think at all. Games of bezique with his aunt were a pleasant diversion on cold winter evenings, and a sign that he was unwinding (he generally switched to playing patience compulsively when he was at the start of a new work), but what he really enjoyed was cross-country skiing out in the woods, and skating on the big pond below his house. He gave lessons to his six-year-old son Sergey, and spent hours mastering complicated manoeuvres on his own.³ When summer arrived he worked in the garden, digging up nettles and burdock and tidying up the flowerbeds.⁴ He also took himself off to the fields to spend whole days mowing with the peasants. ‘I cannot describe to you not just the enjoyment but the happiness which I experience in doing this,’ he wrote to Sergey Urusov, whom he had met and become friends with during the defence of Sebastopol.⁵ He later did describe it, though, when he was writing Anna Karenina: the novel’s most lyrical passages are devoted to the ecstasies of scything rather than the blossoming of romance. With the return of autumn Tolstoy went hunting as usual, mostly for woodcock and hare, but the following year he shot two wolves while on an expedition with friends.⁶

When he was engaged in physical pursuits, Tolstoy could stave off the dark thoughts that threatened to encroach on him during what he called the ‘dead time’ between writing projects.⁷ It was a time of terrible uncertainty, he wrote in the first letter he sent to the Petersburg-based critic and philosopher Nikolay Strakhov, who was to become one of his closest friends and confidants.⁸ A priest’s son from the provinces, and a man of formidable intellect, Strakhov had spent the earlier part of his career teaching mathematics and natural science, but was now employed at the St Petersburg Public Library, where he remained until his retirement in 1885.⁹ He and Tolstoy, whom he idolised, were exactly the same age. Strakhov had been the first to recognise the magnitude of Tolstoy’s achievement in the three review articles he had written about War and Peace. After the last of them was published in the new Slavophile journal The Dawn in January 1870,¹⁰ he wrote to Tolstoy to invite him to become a contributor. Tolstoy declined, explaining that he was in an awful state, one minute conceiving wildly ambitious plans and the next succumbing to self-doubt. Perhaps this was the necessary prelude to a period of happy, self-confident work like the one which had just ended, he conceded, but perhaps it meant that was never going to write anything ever again.¹¹

Tolstoy always found the start of a new work of fiction mentally taxing, as he felt he needed to work out the different trajectories of the characters in his head before he could proceed, as if it were a game of chess. He described this complicated process in a letter he wrote to Afanasy Fet in November 1870:

I’m moping and not writing anything, and finding work torturous. You can’t imagine how difficult I find this preparatory work of thoroughly ploughing the field I have to sow. Thinking through and reflecting on everything that could happen to all the future people of my forthcoming work, which is going to be very big, and thinking through millions of possible combinations in order to choose 1/100000 is terribly difficult. And that’s what I am busy with.¹²

Far from being able to enjoy a sense of achievement having finished War and Peace, Tolstoy was plagued by fears that he himself was finished as a writer. But his anxieties went deeper, as Sonya later recalled. Occasionally his spirits lifted when he had flashes of inspiration, but he was more often morose, and convinced that ‘it was all over for him, that it was time for him to die, and so on and so forth’.¹³ He was forty-one. As it turned out, he had exactly forty-one more years to live.