Tolstoy

It took a while for Tolstoy to acquire paternal feelings for Sergey. He refused to hold him when he was very small,⁶¹ and only began to love his son when he was nearly two years old and very unwell. It was ‘a completely new feeling,’ he noted in his diary in March 1865.⁶² Nevertheless, it was with the birth of Sergey that the happiest years of the Tolstoys’ marriage began. Lev and Sonya’s relationship became stronger and more stable, leading him to declare in his single diary entry for 1864 that he and Sonya meant more to each other than anyone else in the world.⁶³ Sonya no longer had time to be bored or lonely, and as a mother she was now fulfilling her husband’s idea of womanhood, but she was doing more than that. By sitting up late at night to write out fair copies of her husband’s drafts, which gave her a sense of involvement in his creative life, she was also indispensable to his artistic productivity. This profound happiness in Tolstoy’s personal life was intimately connected to the extraordinary creative energy which was welling up inside him, and which would be expressed in the writing of War and Peace.⁶⁴ He wrote about this to Alexandrine in October 1863:

I’ve never felt my intellectual and even all my moral energies to be so free and so capable of work. And I’ve got work going on inside me now. This work is a novel about the period from 1810 to 1820 … I’m now a writer with all the power of my soul, and am writing and thinking as I have never written and thought before. I’m a happy and calm husband and father, with nothing to hide from anybody, and no wish except for everything to go on like this …⁶⁵

Two autumns later, in September 1865, Tolstoy noted in his diary that his happiness with Sonya was the sort of happiness enjoyed by one couple in a million.⁶⁶

The first parts of War and Peace started appearing in 1865 under the title ‘The Year 1805’. Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons had been published in its entirety in one journal issue in 1862, but it was a fraction of the length of War and Peace. It was more customary for substantial prose works to appear in instalments in the country’s top literary journals before appearing in book form. This is how Tolstoy proceeded, but given his propensity for changing tack and carrying out endless revisions, this was a risky venture. True to form, by the time he had published the first parts of War and Peace, which he had contracted to the Russian Messenger, Tolstoy had completely changed his ideas about where his novel was going. Even when he then started publishing the novel under his own auspices in book form, his thoughts were not fixed, and changes were also made to his text in the 1870s and 1880s, leading inevitably to much confusion. In the 1920s one Tolstoy scholar even felt compelled to write an article about the difficulties in establishing which was the canonical text of the novel.⁶⁷