by A. N. Wilson
The discovery meant a lot of extra work, both for his wife and himself. Tolstoy supervised the fields, the forest, the vegetable growing and the beehives. His wife was in charge of the house, the estate office, the barns, the cattle and all the hired labour. Given her initial revulsion to the filth of the cattle sheds and of the peasants themselves, her efficiency in these areas was not without heroism.
The experiment to let the peasants run the farm themselves was a complete failure.
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.21
Tolstoy would never learn this lesson and was always wasting his time in tomfool attempts to be like the peasants – which he wasn’t. Though his wife was prepared to hire labour to look after the cows, she drew the line at looking after the pigs – which were Japanese hogs. Having dismissed the swineherd for drunkenness, Tolstoy was left in charge of the hogs himself. He found the task so deeply uncongenial that it led him to idle cruelty far worse than that of the sot he had dismissed: ‘I would give the hogs as little food as possible to make them weak. It worked! If the next time I saw them, they were still squeaking, I gave them just a little food. Whenever they became quiet, I knew the end had come.’22
Tolstoy knew nothing about salting or curing a ham. In warm weather, all the hams rotted and had to be thrown out. Those which were sent to Moscow arrived in a putrefied state. So did the butter. In the fields, with Tolstoy in charge, things were in chaos. Tolstoy enlisted one of his pupils from the school, a fourteen-year-old boy, to help him tell the peasants what needed hoeing, digging or planting. Unsurprisingly, they took no notice either of Tolstoy’s instructions or those of the boy. When he realised what a mess he was making of everything, Tolstoy did not go back to his desk at once and start writing War and Peace. On the contrary, he would go visiting. He spent more and more time with his Bers relations in Moscow, often leaving Sofya behind at Yasnaya Polyana while he was in the bosom of the very family circle for which she pined. Or he would go out hunting.
In 1864, there occurred a happy accident which, from the point of view of War and Peace, concentrated Tolstoy’s mind wonderfully. In the September of that year, Tolstoy noted that he had written ‘about a hundred and twenty printed pages’ of his novel, but that he could not make progress. He was in a period of corrections and alterations. He was always an obsessive correcter and reviser, but it was only after Sofya came into his life that the evidence was kept. It was she who kept each scrap of manuscript, and bundled them into boxes, like the Apostles gathering up the fragments which remained after the feeding of the five thousand. The number of cases, too, was the exact equivalent to the number of baskets on that occasion: twelve. Twelve stout wooden cases of Tolstoy manuscripts were bound up at the time of the Revolution and sent to the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow. For those who find the Countess Tolstoy’s character unsympathetic, these twelve boxes should be held up as a peace offering. Without her, we would have no picture at all of the evolution of her husband’s masterpiece.
Meanwhile, back in September 1864, Tolstoy was neglecting his book and riding off to see a neighbour. He was not riding a hunter, but two of his dogs ran alongside him and, inevitably, they caught sight of a hare. Tolstoy knew that the horse was not used to jumping, but the excitement of his dogs instantly communicated itself to him. They were barking and chasing after the hare. Throwing caution to the winds, Tolstoy called out ‘Sick ’em!’ and gave chase. At the first jump the horse stumbled and Tolstoy was thrown. He lay in agony with his right arm broken. Sofya was heavily pregnant with their second child Tatyana, and Tolstoy felt that the shock of hearing about his accident would bring about premature labour. So when he was eventually discovered, he got himself taken to Tula without informing his wife, and had the arm set by a dud doctor there. For weeks his right arm was useless, and after the baby Tatyana’s birth, he went to Moscow to have it reset. For the remaining months of the year the Tolstoys lived with the Berses, and the novel was continued by dictation to Tanya and Liza.
The original book about the Decembrists, with its portentous theme (nothing less than Nekrasov’s ‘Who can be happy in Russia?’) had been conceived when Tolstoy was still on the fringes of St. Petersburg salons and what is known as intellectual life. The book may be said to originate and to end in primarily intellectual concerns; but, as with all great minds, Tolstoy’s questions were essentially simple ones – the kind which do not often interest ‘intellectuals’. He was not truly interested in anything so parochial as the fortunes of Russian liberals 1812–56. He was interested in the much simpler, deeper question – how do we come to be here? One way of answering this question is to examine our own personal inner histories, as he had tried to do all those years before in The History of Yesterday. Another was to turn to historians, who could tell us how society had evolved, how this ruler had succeeded that, and how one tyrant declared war on another.
Neither approach in the end satisfied Tolstoy. He was to be neither the Russian Darwin nor the Russian Macaulay. His approach to the question of origins was entirely distinctive and self-revelatory. It is of fundamental importance, however, that it emerged, not in an intellectual salon, but in a family. And it was after he broke his right arm, and was obliged to dictate and perform his work, that the importance of that family became clear to them all. In the early drafts, the family which will be the centre of his book are called the Tolstoys. This is later changed to Prostoy, which means simple, plain, ordinary, unaffected. Later they were to become the Rostovs (pronounced, not that pronunciation matters much, with the accent on the second syllable).
After some weeks of convalescence and dictation in Moscow, Doctor Bers arranged an evening at the house of his close friends and relatives the Perfilyevs. Tolstoy was to read aloud from his novel. At first he was shy. Never in the course of his whole life would he consent to read aloud in public. He was the reverse of Dickens; his public could only be reached by writing, and he was not one, either, for making public speeches about matters of contemporary concern. He was always a private person, and here, though he had an audience, it was essentially a private audience. It was also an audience of a very singular character. At first, his reading was muted, shy. But gradually, as he got confidence, he was able to act all the different parts, and to put different intonations and characters into them (‘do the police in different voices’). Here was the story of a young man bending to kiss Tanya’s doll Mimi, and receiving, instead, a kiss from Tanya herself. But it had become the story of Natasha Rostova kissing Boris. The more pages he read, the more vividly they all began to recognise themselves.
‘Why!’ exclaimed the daughter of their hostess artlessly, ‘Mama, Marya Dmitriyevna Akhrosimov is you; she resembles you exactly!’ They noticed more vividly than any later reader of the novel could possibly do that he had set up his easel among them and painted them to the life. But the static painting image is not a good one. For what we notice is the animation of the readings – Tolstoy throwing himself with equal vigour into all the parts as he reads them. A novelist is less like a painter than a puppeteer. The superficial resemblance of his characters to figures in ‘real life’ might be very noticeable to those characters themselves, but it is not this resemblance which gives them their life, their vigour. The imagined life comes from another source – from the artist himself. That is why the game of matching the figures in a novel to their ‘real life’ equivalents is at best only half satisfactory and, in the end, positively misleading. The biographers of Proust, for example, provide us with many interesting superficial parallels between the central figures of his novel, and actual figures in French society. But it would be a philistine reader, either of the novels or of the biographies, who concluded that Monsieur Swann was Charles Haas or the Baron de Charlus was Robert de Montesquiou. In each case, Proust has merely copied a shell. What gives the characters their haunting reality is the fact that Proust has apportioned to each his own passions and interests, temperament and backg
round. To Swann he gave his all-consuming aestheticism, his experience of a great love, his knowledge that his life would be cut short by ill health and, perhaps most important of all, his Jewishness. To the Baron de Charlus, he has given the characteristics of which he was more ashamed – his pride, his snobbery, his homosexuality. In a very analogous manner, we find that Tolstoy animates the figures of his imagination. Natasha’s excitement at the ball, for instance, owes quite as much to Tolstoy’s excitement that he was taking Tanya as it did to Tanya’s own animation. In writing his novel, he is drawing upon all the inchoate and disparate preoccupations which have existed at the back of his mind for the last thirty-five years. The immediate and superficial resemblances between the Prostoys or Rostovs to the Bers circle does not conceal from us, who have followed the story thus far, the truth which he revealed when he called them initially the Tolstoys: not the family Tolstoy, though they too, like the Berses, provided the artist with his models, but the multifarious Lev Nikolayeviches who had been strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage ever since 1828. ‘Lyovochka,’ Tanya said to him one day, ‘I can see how you are able to describe landowners, fathers, generals, soldiers, but how can you insinuate yourself into the heart of a girl in love, how can you describe the sensation of a mother – for the life of me I cannot understand.’23 She could not understand, but she had put her finger on the very heart of his secret, the thing which made it possible for him to ‘gore his own thoughts’ and ‘make old offences of affections new’. In Nikolay Rostov, as he was to become, we read all Tolstoy’s early experiences in the army, his vacillations between sentimental love of his family, and addiction to gambling and debauchery. But Nikolay is the innocent side of Tolstoy’s past. Into the less appealing characters, he can pour the memories of his darker nature – into Dolokhov and Pierre drinking themselves silly, and tying a bear to a policeman: into Anatole Kuragin, indulging in guilty love (in his case for his sister). He even pours himself into Helene herself, whose attitude to Pierre so closely resembles Tolstoy’s diary-self view of his own clumsy, stupid behaviour when out in society. . . . It all gets used.
So, too, does his preoccupation with his mother. All the chapters devoted to Princess Marya and her crusty old father Prince Bolkonsky (Volkonsky in early drafts) owe their origin to Tolstoy’s attempt to reconstruct what his own mother’s existence had been like at Yasnaya Polyana, before she married Nikolay Rostov/Prostoy/Tolstoy. It is surely revealing that while he shared the jollier Rostov passages with the Berses, it was to Sofya that he entrusted the much more intimate, almost sacred task, of transcribing the passages relating to Princess Marya.
‘How I like everything about Princess Marya!’ she wrote to him, when he was still in Moscow. ‘You see her so clearly. Such a splendid sympathetic character.’24 The strength and vigour of Marya as an artistic conception must have owed much of its origin to Tolstoy’s own guilty awareness of what, in the first year of marriage, he was doing to his own wife. He had buried her in the country, just as Marya was a prisoner in her father’s household at Bald Hills. He was perpetually irritable with her, as the old Prince Volkonsky was with his daughter, but beneath the irritability is a dependence on her which is one of the most touching things in the novel. He loves her, we are told, ‘more than himself’. One of the funniest scenes in the book is when the old prince fears that Anatole Kuragin is going to come and offer Marya a proposal of marriage. Even before the Kuragins have arrived, he has lost his temper with the steward for sweeping the snow from the drive, and then there takes place the wonderfully dotty exchange in which the servants are told to shovel the snow back.
‘The road’s covered up?’
‘Indeed sir. Thank God. Please forgive our singular stupidity.’25
What makes the old prince so angry and so irritable is that he is jealous of anything which threatens to separate him from Marya’s love. Tolstoy was no stranger to the wildest, silliest extremes of jealousy. In her memoirs Tanya records how both her brother-in-law and her sister ‘poisoned their lives with jealousy’. She tells the story of how a harmless social acquaintance of theirs, a young man called Pisaryov, once called at Yasnaya Polyana for a short stay. At tea, he happened to catch Tolstoy in the mood where anything could be interpreted in the wrong way. Pisaryov committed the cardinal sin of sitting by Sofya, who was dispensing tea from the samovar, and added insult to injury by helping her pass the cups around to the other members of the party.
‘I was watching Tolstoy,’ Tanya writes. ‘Pale, and very much upset, he would rise, pace the floor, leave the room, only to reappear again. In some way, his nervousness was contagious. Sofya became aware of it and was at a loss what to do.
‘The situation came to a sudden end the next morning when Tolstoy gave orders to get the coach ready and the manservant informed the young man that the horses were waiting. . . .’26
Transpose the ages of the people involved: make Tolstoy the jealous father instead of the jealous husband, and you have a scene of old Prince Bolkonsky and his daughter at Bald Hills.
In all the original versions, the old prince was simply a picture of his grandfather, and Princess Marya of his mother, solitary, as she had been in life. But as he meditated on the story, Tolstoy realised that he needed a hero to die at Austerlitz. Thus was Prince Andrey born. Sofya was not alone in the early stages in finding Andrey an unsatisfactory character. Fet, too, thought him static and tedious. ‘It is true,’ Tolstoy admitted, ‘he is tedious, monotonous, merely un homme comme il faut throughout the first part. But it is not his fault, it is mine.’27
Andrey, who begins as mere cannon-fodder – a hero who can be killed off at Austerlitz with maximum emotional effect, and who is also, in part, a portrait of Tolstoy’s brother Nikolay, and in part a portrait of their own father – becomes something much deeper: a vehicle for the self which Tolstoy might have become if he had shed his diffidence, cultivated the friendship of his cousin Alexandrine and her other friends ‘up the chimney’ and become, through Government or military service, a ‘somebody’. In Prince Andrey there is all the loftiness and pride which Tolstoy’s early St. Petersburg and army contemporaries noted in himself. Beneath the cynical exterior, however, there is hidden the soul of a profoundly sensitive man, who is alive to the agonies of love, and the deep mystery of existence. In part, Prince Andrey is a literary creation. He is like a hero of Pushkin’s or Lermontov’s imagination, and it is partly this fact which emboldened Tolstoy to give him some of his most hidden and most personal characteristics. Tolstoy was plagued all his life by a thoroughgoing scepticism which amounted to an incapacitating disease. By scepticism here we are not talking just about a Voltairean view of God or the universe, but a capacity to question the point of doing or feeling anything. It begins with Schopenhauerian pessimism. It can lead in the end to a sort of Hindu detachment. In Tolstoy’s personal writings, it is summed up by the untranslatable little shrug of a phrase, chto zh? – so what, what then? is implied by it. He is always asking it, often with devastating effect. When Sofya wrote that she found Prince Andrey’s character unsatisfactory we do not know whether he was still at this stage a figure half sketched out or whether she had begun to see in him this terrifying negativism. In no area of Prince Andrey’s life is it more upsetting than in his attitude to his little wife. In his early conversations with Pierre and with his own sister he reveals complete disillusionment not only with his wife, but with himself, and with the whole condition of matrimony. ‘If you get married expecting anything from yourself in the future, then at every step you will feel that everything is finished for you, everything is closed except the drawing room where you will be stood with a court lackey on one side and an idiot on the other. But what’s the use. . . .?’ he says to Pierre. And to his sister, ‘Know one thing, Masha, I can’t reproach my wife and I never have done so. Nor will I do so, I can’t even reproach myself for anything in relation to her; and that will always be the case, whatever the circumstances. But if you want to know the t
ruth . . . if you want to know whether I’m happy, or whether she is happy? No! Why not? I don’t know. . . .’28
It is this gloomy, pinched, and secretly tragic Tolstoy who comes into blossom as Prince Andrey. And it is not surprising that when the Prince is wounded in battle, Tolstoy cannot bear to kill him off. Instead, he leaves him staring at the sky, confronting the greatness and the nothingness of things, as Tolstoy was so often to do himself, loving Natasha even as Tolstoy loved Tanya, and as he had loved Sofya before she became his wife.
But this is not the whole of Tolstoy’s nature. For he is also, more obviously, to be found in the figure of Pierre – clumsy, awkward, sensual, vulnerable, consumed with a childish preoccupation with the great questions – why are we here? how should a man live? It is this much more blundering, rough-hewn side of Tolstoy’s nature that he himself preferred, and so he rewards it in the end by marrying it off to Natasha, and makes of Pierre’s and Natasha’s married love an idealised version of his love for Sofya. The book was still far from being what we read as War and Peace but, as 1864 came to an end, it was much closer to being the thing it was destined to be.
We have noted, with a clumsiness designed to emphasise the delicate process by which imagined beings turn into characters in fiction, the processes by which Tolstoy at the same time drew from life, and animated the characters with his own daemon. But there is one completely unforgettable character in War and Peace whom we have not mentioned yet and who must be brought forward before this chapter ends. It would seem as though he was there from an early stage. Here he is, in one of the drafts penned in 1863 or 1864, talking about Napoleon: ‘He kept on winning his battles, not because he was a genius (I am convinced he was very far from that) but on the contrary because he was more stupid than his enemies, could not be carried away by logical deductions and only bothered about seeing that his soldiers were well-fed, embittered, obedient and as numerous as possible.’29