Tolstoy

The decade of the 1860s was not only famous as the era of the Great Reforms. This was also a golden age for Russian literature, with Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky all at the height of their powers. It was an important time for music: Tchaikovsky became a student at the Petersburg Conservatoire when it was founded in 1862, and then was immediately appointed to teach at the even newer Moscow Conservatoire when he graduated; they were the first institutions in Russia set up to train professional musicians. The opening of the Mariinsky Theatre in 1860 paved the way for Russian opera and ballet to flourish, and the easing of censorship led to the publication of previously suppressed literary and historical works. These included the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, a persecuted leader of the Old Believer sect, published for the first time in 1861. It had been suppressed for two whole centuries, owing to fears that the spread of sectarianism could lead to popular rebellion. The opening of Moscow’s first public libraries was part of this great explosion in Russian cultural and intellectual life, and contributed substantially to it. In 1862 the refurbished Pashkov House, one of the many elegant Moscow mansions damaged in the fire of 1812, opened as the Rumyantsev Museum, home to a research library and important art and archive collections (Tolstoy’s own manuscripts were later deposited there for safekeeping).⁷⁵ The following year Alexander Chertkov’s son Grigory made available to the public for the first time his late father’s unique and rich collection of books and primary sources devoted to the history of Russia. The Chertkov Public Library was established in a specially built wing of the family’s spacious mansion in the centre of Moscow, and Grigory Chertkov proceeded to increase the holdings to about 20,000 items. The respected historian Pyotr Bartenev became the first librarian at the Chertkov Library, and, also in 1863, founder-editor of its journal Russian Archive. The latter performed a valuable service in publishing primary sources about eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Russian history, many of which were vital for Tolstoy when he was writing War and Peace. Bartenev also went out of his way to help Tolstoy with unpublished historical materials for his new novel.

By the end of 1864, Tolstoy delivered to the Moscow offices of the Russian Messenger what he believed would be the first part of his new novel, entitled ‘The Year 1805’. The thirty-eight chapters he submitted correspond roughly to the first two parts of what is now volume one of War and Peace, and they were published in the January and February 1865 issues of the journal. The day after the February issue appeared (actually in March), Andrey Estafevich wrote to the Tolstoys to let them know he had just been at a reception given by the Military Governor-General, and that Tolstoy’s latest instalment had been much talked about. This had been Dr Bers’ first social engagement after a long convalescence recovering from a tracheotomy (as a court employee he had to ask the Tsar for special permission to grow a beard).⁷⁶ He was obviously pleased to be out and about again, and reported that the subject of Tolstoy’s protracted negotiations over his royalties was also hot gossip in Moscow. Feeling he would be better placed to act for his son-in-law, Andrey Estafevich offered his services to Tolstoy, but the deal had already been done.