Tolstoy

If Tolstoy was able to sustain his concentration for six years and maintain an iron discipline, it was because of the hospitable environment in which he was able to work, living in his beloved ancestral home deep in the heart of the Russian countryside, supported by his devoted wife. For a while he even moved his study downstairs so that he was not distracted by family life. The old vaulted store room where old Prince Volkonsky had once hung his hams on the hooks still hanging from the ceilings, and where Sonya had stayed before their marriage, was also where he wrote the first chapters of War and Peace, after trying fifteen different openings. Isolated from the outside world (there was not even a railway connection to nearby Tula until 1867), with weeks and months going by during the winter when there were no visitors, Tolstoy could fully immerse himself in the hundreds of sources he gathered about Russian history during the Napoleonic Wars, and also draw deeply on his powers of imagination. Most of his fiction to date had an element of autobiography, but now he also found inspiration for his most memorable characters amongst his immediate family, with the vivacious and ingenuous Natasha, his most beloved character, reflecting aspects of the personalities of both his wife and his sister-in-law Tanya at different times.⁶⁹ Tolstoy also looked further back into his family’s past for raw material, projecting his aunt Toinette’s love for his father on to the hopeless devotion of Natasha’s adopted sister Sonya for her brother Nikolay. His knowledge of the habits of his epicurean grandfather Ilya Andreyevich gave substance to his portrait of Count Rostov, and he breathed life into the story of old Prince Bolkonsky and his daughter Maria at their Bald Hills estate by conjuring up in his imagination the secluded life led by his other grandfather Prince Volkonsky and his unmarried mother at Yasnaya Polyana. A few of his brother Sergey’s traits went into Prince Andrey,⁷⁰ and the desperate Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov was partially inspired by his distant cousin, the swashbuckling Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy. Sonya’s sister Tanya liked to flatter herself that the character of Natasha was modelled exclusively on her, but the truth is that real-life people merely provided Tolstoy with the necessary spark he needed to create. His canvas was huge, and it is not surprising to find Homer on the list of authors he acknowledged as having made an impact on him at this time, alongside Goethe, Victor Hugo and Stendhal.⁷¹

Numerous friends, relatives and acquaintances helped Tolstoy with the research for War and Peace, including leading historians and his doughty father-in-law Andrey Bers, who shared his personal memories of living through the events of 1812 as a child, and rounded up an army of old Moscow ladies ready to tell their story. Andrey Estafevich also enjoyed the task of tracking down contemporary newspaper cuttings for Tolstoy, as well as the correspondence of people who had lived in Moscow during Russia’s war with Napoleon.⁷² Tolstoy made regular research trips to Moscow, and profited particularly from a long visit he made in the autumn of 1864 after breaking his arm. He had been riding his horse Masha, accompanied by two of his borzois, and had fallen off while impulsively galloping over a ploughed field in pursuit of a rabbit one of them had spotted.⁷³ Old Dr Shmigaro did such a poor job of setting the arm in Tula that Tolstoy travelled to Moscow for a further operation, and he spent his convalescence researching early-nineteenth-century Russian history. Sometimes this meant sitting in the Rumyantsev Museum, poring over manuscripts about Russian Freemasons, and sometimes he took himself off to the Chertkov Library to read letters and memoirs and look at portraits of Alexander I’s generals.⁷⁴ These two public libraries had just opened in Moscow, and without them his task would have been much harder. Tolstoy had actually picked a wonderful time to write a historical novel.