Tolstoy

TOLSTOY HAD BEEN ITCHING to get back to fiction ever since he delivered the manuscript of the last part of his ABC to the printers in February 1872. This time there was none of the restless casting around for a subject as there had been at the end of War and Peace. Tolstoy now knew exactly where he was going, but his imagination was not yet captured by the unruly curls of a beguilingly beautiful society woman destined to become one of the greatest of literary heroines. His mind was instead occupied by the relentless energy and alcohol-fuelled sadism of a seven-foot-tall syphilitic buffoon who also happened to be Russia’s first great revolutionary: Peter the Great. To be fair, Tolstoy only uncovered these traits during the course of his painstaking research, but they led him to the realisation that he no longer wanted to write a novel about the ‘tsar-reformer’. It was this discovery which made him receptive to the chance flash of inspiration which then launched Anna Karenina, but it came at the end of a very serious engagement with the available sources on late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Russian history. Tolstoy tried to start his novel about Peter the Great thirty-three times.²

Tolstoy was not the only Russian artist interested in Peter the Great in 1872, for this was when the composer Musorgsky started to plan an ambitious new historical opera set at the time of Peter’s accession. But there was a particular reason why Peter I was in the public eye that year: it was the bicentenary of his birth. Nicholas I had actively encouraged the cult of Peter’s personality during his reign, and the anniversary was celebrated with due pomp and circumstance. A new battleship was named after Peter, a statue of him was put up in Petrozavodsk (St Petersburg was not the only city he founded bearing his name), and Tchaikovsky wrote a cantata in honour of the occasion, to name just some of ways in which the bicentenary was marked. There was also a flurry of new publications – 1,049 to be exact,³ and a great deal of eulogy from Russian historians, some of whom were still inclined to see Alexander II, the country’s next ‘great reformer’, as a latter-day Peter. Amongst those who idolised Peter the Great was the nation’s leading historian, Professor Sergey Solovyov, newly appointed as Rector of Moscow university. ‘Two hundred years have passed since the day that the great man was born,’ he intoned in the first of his twelve ‘Public Lectures about Peter the Great’ in 1872. ‘Everywhere one hears the words: we must celebrate the bicentenary of this great man; it is our duty, our holy, patriotic duty, because this great man is one of us, a Russian man.’⁴

Solovyov was a scholar of Tolstoyan industry who also published on a Tolstoyan scale. He had read the twelve volumes of karamzin’s pioneering History of the Russian State (1806–1826) at least a dozen times by the time he was thirteen, and then in 1851 he started publishing his own history of Russia – a project which would absorb him until his death in 1879. karamzin had covered Russian history up until the accession of the first Romanov tsar in 1613, but the twenty-nine volumes of Solovyov’s History of Russia from the Earliest Times extended the survey up to 1774, the year of the Pugachev Rebellion (which was brutally crushed by Catherine the Great). Tolstoy, of course, read Solovyov’s magisterial history very carefully, and particularly those volumes concerning the reign of Peter the Great. Solovyov sought to present a unified view of Russia’s evolution as a nation. As a pronounced Westerniser who believed in historical progress, he saw Peter’s reforms as a natural and inevitable development which had placed Russia on the path to the rule of law, and brought her closer to European civilisation. For Tolstoy, however, Solovyov’s history revealed pre-Petrine Russia as a country of ‘cruelty, theft, beatings, coarseness, and an inability to do anything’, and it signally failed in his opinion to acknowledge the contribution of the people in turning Russia into the great and united state that made such great strides in the eighteenth century. He was inevitably critical of yet another history which seemed to concentrate on the policies and actions of Russia’s rulers.⁵ Tolstoy shared Solovyov’s admiration for Peter’s down-to-earth tastes, but not much else.