Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s impulse to write on the events of 1805 had come from his interest in the Decembrists – the group of army officers who had staged an ill-fated uprising in December 1825 at the time of Nicholas I’s accession. Occupying Paris after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 had opened their eyes to a more enlightened system of government, and they returned to Russia full of hope that the liberal-minded Alexander I might now introduce political reform. When their hopes were dashed, they turned to conspiracy with the revolutionary aim of replacing Russia’s autocratic rule with a republic, or at least a constitutional monarchy. The mutiny they staged in St Petersburg’s Senate Square after Alexander I’s death was a dismal failure, however, and the leading Decembrists were punished with either execution or lifelong exile in Siberia. Fear of revolution marked the whole of Nicholas I’s reign. In 1856, as part of Alexander II’s liberalisation of Russian society after the death of his father, the new tsar amnestied those Decembrists still serving long sentences of exile in Siberia, and amongst them was Tolstoy’s distant relative Prince Sergey Volkonsky. It was Volkonsky, whom he met in Florence in 1860, that Tolstoy had in mind when he first began planning a novel about the Decembrists. He soon discovered, however, that he needed a larger cast of characters, and that he also needed go back in time to 1812 in order to bring their story to life. That in turn led him to the realisation that he really needed to go back to 1805, when Russia first went to war with Napoleon. As he explained in one of the many forewords he drafted, which reflect his changing views of the novel, ‘I was ashamed to write about our victory in the struggle with Napoleonic France without writing about our failures and our disgrace.’⁶⁸ Tolstoy’s initial plan, then, was to capture artistically the history of his nation over a fifty-year period and call it ‘Three Ages’. The first ‘age’ would encompass the events of 1805 to 1812, the second would focus on the 1820s, and in particular on the fateful uprising in 1825, while the third would bring the action into the 1850s, and incorporate the disastrous Crimean War, the unexpected death of Nicholas I and the amnesty of the Decembrists at a time of hope for reform. As we know, Tolstoy eventually ended up concentrating on the events leading up to 1812 and their immediate aftermath, and he never in fact went back to his early fragment about the ageing Decembrist returning to Moscow from Siberia in the 1850s. He had no idea, however, when he was starting out in 1863, of the dimensions his new novel would ultimately assume.