Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  In the finished version of the story, Tolstoy keeps this figure in reserve and he is not allowed to contribute to the initial discussions about Napoleon in Anna Pavlovna’s salon. While the St. Petersburg gentry discuss the question of whether Napoleon is Antichrist, this figure is made to keep quiet. At first we are not aware of his presence, but then he butts in and interrupts the conversation with a remark to us – the witty observation that Anna Pavlovna is like a mâitre d’hôtel serving up as a choice delicacy bits of food which, if we had seen them in the kitchen, we should not have cared to eat. ‘Even so Pavlovna dished up to her guests, first the Vicomte and then the Abbé as particularly choice morsels.’30 It is our old friend who proclaimed that bronchitis is a metal, the man who could be relied upon to bust up any of Turgenev’s dinners by shouting that Shakespeare or George Sand, or anyone else you might admire, was no good. It would be mistaken to identify this strand in Tolstoy with the narrator of War and Peace, for one of the extraordinary qualities of the book is that for seven-eighths of the time it does not feel as if it is being narrated at all. It is a Shakespearian, faceless presence who narrates all the most memorable scenes in the book – not just the big scenes but all the touching minor details which give it its greatness. Think of the older Countess Rostova giving Anna Mikhailovna money to pay for Boris’s uniform – a moment which makes both women weep – ‘because they were friends, and because they were kind-hearted and because they – friends from childhood – had to think about such a sordid thing as money, and because their youth was over. . . .’ At moments like these we feel the universe stamped with God’s signature.

  The Tolstoy who thought bronchitis was a metal would never have known that the Countess Rostova had pretended to her husband that she was in debt because she wanted to slip her old friend the money for her son’s uniform. If he had seen the two women crying, it would just have baffled him, but it would not have interested him. It would have annoyed him to think that we were eavesdropping on anything so trivial when we might have been listening to his views. What the views were did not matter much, so long as this hectoring bore is the only person in the room talking, and we are all listening, as the children had to listen to him in the schoolroom at Yasnaya Polyana. In those early years of marriage, when the novel was still a series of unfinished and unconnected chapters, this is just one voice among many. Tolstoy was happily, and selfishly, at work in the area which was so wholly his that he was right to deny it a category and right to say it was ‘not a novel’. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote insensitively to Sofya from Moscow – she was stuck in the country looking after the farm and the children – ‘I explained to Tanya why it is easier for me to bear a separation from you than it would be if I were not writing. Along with you and the children (I feel however that as yet I do not love them enough) I have a continual love or care for my writing. If this were not so, I really feel that I could not spend a day without you; this you will surely understand, for what writing is for me, the children must be for you.’31

  Sofya Andreyevna did understand: that was one of the most remarkable things about her. She was jealous, but she kept her jealousy under control, and did a great deal to nourish her husband’s literary genius. But there was a less equable character looking over Tolstoy’s shoulder as he wrote, and who detested, with an unconquerable jealousy, all the work of his imagination, all the figures who through the strange alchemy of art had, or were developing, a life of their own: all the Pierres, the Andreys, the Natashas, the Borises and the Dolokhovs. This figure was that belligerent bore insisting that bronchitis is a metal. For the moment, he bided his time. He was patient while Tolstoy dictated to his sisters-in-law, or while his right hand, gradually healed, passed to and fro across the page. But sooner or later he would grab the pen from Tolstoy the artist’s hand and have his say.

  * Hereafter I shall refer to Tatyana Bers as Tanya to avoid confusion with Tolstoy’s aunt Toinette, also called Tatyana.

  * The transposition of letters was a common device of Tolstoy’s when drawing one of his literary portraits. So Zaval-ishin becomes Labazov. The letters are reversed, and a ‘v’ becomes a ‘b’ as with his Volkonsky/Bolkonsky substitution.

  Chapter Ten

  War and Peace

  1865 – 1869

  Mes personnages, je ne suis aucun d’eux et je suis chacun d’eux.

  Montherlant

  ‘I’m very glad you love my wife,’ Tolstoy wrote playfully to Fet on January 23, 1865. ‘Although I love her less than my novel, still, you know, she is my wife!’1 The joke consists in a half truth. With one part of himself, an indolent amateur farmer who was perfectly happy to let the days pass in the company of his close friends and relations, Tolstoy was without zest for literary work. He was too happy. But with a deeper part of himself, the literary work was consumingly important. All unseen, as it ordered itself in his brain, it was setting into an acceptable shape his own past, absolving his own sins, and giving himself the sort of power as a chronicler which fortune had denied him as an administrator. His forebears – generals, ambassadors, equerries – had all exercised great influence in the state, as his distant relations continued to do. (Count Dmitry Tolstoy became Minister of the Interior in the following year.) Destiny had not allowed Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy the chance to be a man of affairs. But this did not prevent him, with his imagination, from fashioning, shaping and describing the whole story of modern Russia. Nothing less was his ambition as he planned the great epic history of 1805–12, of 1825 and of 1856. So, though there were periods of great idleness even during these, the most creative years of his life, such idleness should not be mistaken for literary indifference. A writer is not just at work when he holds a pen in his hand. He needs to allow the work to gestate; and when the work is of the proportions of War and Peace, the gestation will often be long and apparently idle indeed.

  Children could be born (the family had increased to four by the time the task was quite done, with the births of Ilya in 1866 and Lev in 1869). Kingdoms could rise and wane. Relations could marry and give in marriage. It was all secondary to the great literary task. As he confessed to Alexandrine that year, after a Polish rising had been put down with singular savagery by the Russians, ‘It’s a matter of complete indifference to me who suppresses the Poles or captures Schleswig-Holstein or delivers a speech at a zemstvo meeting. Butchers kill the oxen we eat, but I’m not obliged to accuse them or sympathise with them.’2 In years to come, he would take a very different line. He would devote pages of propaganda to attacking butchers, and to questioning everybody else’s right to eat meat, and to attacking governments for acts of violence against the innocent. As yet, however, as he candidly admitted to Alexandrine in the same letter, he was not a Christian, ‘and still far from being one; but experience has taught me not to believe in the infallibility of my judgement’. Again, how unlike the later Tolstoy. The belligerent, argumentative Tolstoy was largely silent for these years. The gambler kept his money in his pocket. The whoremonger was faithful to his wife and, in their periods of inevitable separation, they grew very tender towards one another. After a spring of minor family illnesses, and the sense, familiar to all young mothers, that she could never be alone, and never properly rested, Sofya Andreyevna contentedly told her diary,

  We are on good terms. Lyovochka is very busy with the dairy yard and is writing his novel without much enthusiasm. He is bursting with ideas, but when will he ever write them all down? He sometimes talks to me about his plans and ideas which is always a tremendous joy. I always understand him too.3

  Katkov, who had published The Cossacks in Russkii Vestnik, agreed to take on this new historical fiction, and the first part of 1805, as it was then called, was published in the issue of February 1865. (It is interesting to remember that Scott’s Waverley was separated by exactly the same distance in time from the events it describes.) Tolstoy’s wife worked all through Christmas and January copying and correcting three separate drafts of the book before they were deem
ed fit for submission to Katkov. When the proofs came back, Tolstoy made yet more corrections and additions, in a crabbed, illegible hand which blackened the page. Sofya Andreyevna alone could decipher his scribbles – truly, alone. Tolstoy himself was often unable to make out what he had written.

  Her brother Stepan calculated that by the time the book was finished, Tolstoy’s wife had written out the equivalent of seven fair copies of the whole work.4 Nor was she a mere copyist, for at every stage, after his return from convalescing in Moscow during 1864, she advised and commented upon the work, giving intelligent reflections not only upon the content, but also its manner of presentation and publication. All this was squeezed in between her duties, as she and her husband both conceived them, as a mother and housekeeper. It is one of the most impressive partnerships in literary history. Given Tolstoy’s habits of self-doubt and indolence, it is improbable whether, without his wife’s help and guidance, the work would ever have reached a conclusion.

  The chronology of the work, once it had begun regularly, was as follows.5 Once the agreement had been made with Katkov that 1805 would be published, the Decembrist part of the story was put on one side, and he devoted the latter part of 1864 and the beginning of 1865 to the passage which we now read as the opening part of War and Peace, though it did not yet have this title.

  The public was enthusiastic. Here were the legends they had been brought up on, and the memories of the very old, brought to life! Strangely enough it was precisely this fact which baffled the pedantic critics. ‘It is neither a novel nor a novella,’ wrote one fool, as though it matters what category you put a book into, ‘it is rather some sort of attempt at a military and aristocratic chronicle of the past.’6 This anonymous writer strongly objected to the aristocratic flavour of the whole piece, and complained – as did several other reviewers – about the amount of French in the text. ‘To read a book which has this mixture of French and Russian without the slightest need for it is indeed neither pleasant nor comforting; it might be all very well on the aristocratic pages of the Russian Herald, but in a separate edition the French texts should have been left out.’7 In his final revision of the novel, Tolstoy did indeed cut the French, thereby spoiling the comedy of scenes such as the opening chapter.

  It was inevitable that some ‘literary’ responses should be hostile, since Tolstoy had deliberately cut himself off from the literary set surrounding Nekrasov and Turgenev. Equally inevitably – any stick to beat a dog – they attacked him for being an aristocrat. Reviews did not mean much. Not surprisingly the power of War and Peace as mythology, as a reinforcement, like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, of a patriotic idea long outlasted the lifetime of its first audience. One sees this most clearly when contemplating the fate of the novel in Stalinist days. Intellectual Bolsheviks like Mikhail Olminsky, whose ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall in 1933, were probably right to dismiss War and Peace as a counter-revolutionary work. (Olminsky, like Tolstoy’s first reviewers, stressed its link with Katkov and the ultra-right-wing Russkii Vestnik.) And yet, War and Peace went on being read and it went on being allowed. Stalin would not allow it to be suppressed. As the Bolshevik paradise unfolded, and many literary reputations (notably Dostoyevsky’s) went underground, Tolstoy mysteriously survived.8 This was partly owing to the pertinacity of his first editor, and devoted disciple, Chertkov. But it was also because the straight Russianness of his largest epic was so big a part of everyone’s emotional fabric. Whether or not Sholokhov was the first great Soviet novelist or the plagiarist which his enemies believe, it is surely more than interesting that when the recent past came to be surveyed, in Quiet Flows the Don (1928), it was done in so Tolstoyan a pattern.

  As the 1930s progressed, and the Russian authorities became more old-fashionedly xenophobic, there was something positively reassuring about the modes of Tolstoyan realism. Karl Radek told the Writers’ Union in 1934 that James Joyce’s writings were ‘a heap of dung teeming with worms. . . .’ He went on to say that ‘as teachers, Balzac and Tolstoy are enough for us’.9

  In strictly Marxist terms, Tolstoy should not have been ‘enough’ at that point in history. One feels the paradox, even today, in visiting Yasnaya Polyana which, as one of his kinsmen has attractively observed, appeals partly because it is ‘the solitary, physical evocation of the old manorial way of life’: a way of life which Tolstoy himself yearned to escape and which the Revolution succeeded in destroying. Yet there it is, artificially preserved and ‘restored’ (in fact largely rebuilt after being gutted and burnt by the Nazis). The shrine handbooks do not lie when they speak of Tolstoy as if he were a national monument. A quotation from Gorky reminds the visitor that ‘Tolstoy is a profoundly national writer who with astounding fullness embodies in his soul all the peculiarities of the complex Russian psyche: he has the turbulent mischief of Vaska Buslayev and the gentle thoughtfulness of the chronicler Nestor, he burns with the fanaticism of Avvakum he is a sceptic like Chaadayev, no less of a poet than Pushkin and as clever as Herzen – Tolstoy is a whole world.’10

  It does not particularly matter that none of this is true (Tolstoy is not a better poet than Pushkin, and no one thinks he is): nor that the quotation invites anarchic parody. The list, after all, could go on for ever, assuring us of Tolstoy’s Russianness, telling us that he had the sexual voracity of Rasputin, the piety of St. Vladimir, the adventurousness of Yury Gagarin – all as true, or as untrue, as we care to make it. That is why, though Lenin fulminated against the falsity of Tolstoyan ideas (‘Tolstoyism,’ he wrote shortly before the Revolution, ‘should be fought all along the line’), this did no damage to Tolstoy as a national institution.

  He, and his national myth, were actually wheeled into service by Stalin as soon as Hitler broke the Nazi– Soviet axis. Within three weeks of the outbreak of hostilities, a hundred and fifty thousand copies of Sebastopol Sketches had been reissued, shortly followed by reprints of the 1812 passages in War and Peace. Relevant chapters, by Stalin’s special command, were even posted up in Moscow for people to read during the blackest days of 1941–2. Not only, by then, was Tolstoy the most published author in Russia (there were more of his works in print during the war than those of Lenin) but also he was given the title the Great (velikii), an adjective at that time reserved, in all official publications, for Stalin alone. Nor was it the patriotism of 1812 alone which made it popular. As the party intellectuals, now safely dead, had observed, War and Peace is counter-revolutionary. With the threat of the invasion, Stalin reintroduced into the army all the pre-revolutionary trappings which Lenin thought he had swept away for ever. Moscow in 1941 and 1942 sparkled with gilded epaulettes, scarlet and white jackets, smart tunics, trousers with piping, quite consciously modelled on the scenes in Tolstoy’s novel.11 If there is life beyond the grave, and the dead see what is happening on earth, Tolstoy could have known no worse purgatory than to witness – old pacifist anarchist as he was by the end – his work being used as part of Stalin’s effective war propaganda in the Glorious Patriotic War against the Fascists.

  In the course of 1865 Tolstoy began to revise all the battle scenes of his novel, then to add new ones; new chapters included those splendid ones at Schön Graben which do not appear in the earlier drafts. ‘Is it worthwhile noticing trifles?’ asks Prince Bagration at Schön Graben.12 The answer, if you are a novelist, is a triumphant yes. The scenes live so vividly precisely because he has laboured to build up and polish all the details with such punctilious observation: the chit-chat of the men in the mess interrupted by a whistle in the air and the firing of the first cannonball from the French lines; a horse, struggling to its feet on the battlefield when its rider has been shot dead; two soldiers dragging their comrade through the mud, his throat gurgling, his mouth dripping blood; Nikolay Rostov’s marvellously touching and believable thoughts when, wounded, he watches the approach of French soldiers – ‘Can they be coming at me? What for? To kill me? Me, whom everyone likes so much?’;13 Tushin, suddenly finding himself for no appar
ent reason weeping as he parts from Prince Andrey:14 all these details seem so natural that one might think that the scenes of Schön Graben wrote themselves. They are, indeed, highly literary devices. Tolstoy conceded that in writing them he owed much to the battle scene of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. But mere detail is not enough to explain their vigour, their unforgettable life. Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, which tries to imitate them, is just an accumulation of detail with no life at all; it shows what War and Peace would be like if it had not been written by a great genius. Tolstoy’s inner daemon and his wife’s tireless penmanship were the essential ingredients which made the book possible.

  But from April until November there was a silence while he rewrote and replanned the development of the epic. From the point of view of an editor, Tolstoy was not an ideal contributor, and nor was 1805 – magnificent as it is – an ideal serial novel. It is too stately in its sweep; there are too few cliffhangers – by the melodramatic standards of the nineteenth century – to guarantee that readers will buy the next issue to see what happens next. That is part of the interest of Tolstoy’s story. We all want to know who Natasha will marry, but we all know what happened to Napoleon. His story really is, in this sense, epic, a retelling of national myth, which is comparable, in Russian terms, with Homer.