$ Bartenyev had written that he especially admired Pierre Bezukhov's scene with his wife and the chapter at Lysya Gory.
• The Russians also countcd this battle as a national victory.
t September 7, 1812, according to the Gregorian calendar.
When he got back to Yasnaya Polyana, he plunged into the melee, with Prince Audrey, Pierre Bczukhov, Napoleon and Kutuzov. . . . And there were those accursed proofs to read. lie was "exhausted," he had a "horrible fog in the head." Would he hold out to the end? And the censor, what would the censor say? "I am terrified at the thought that it may play some dreadful trick on us, now that the end is in sight."25 He hoped the first three volumes might come out before the end of the year. But what name should he choosc? The Year 1805 would not do for a book that ended in 1812. lie had chosen All's Well That Ends Well, thinking that would give the book the casual, romantic tone of a long English novel, when he suddenly had an illumination. . . . On December 17, 1867, the Moscow News published the following advertisement: "War and Peace. By Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Four volumes (80 sheets). Price: 7 rubles. Weight parcel post: 5 pounds. The first three volumes delivered with a coupon for the fourth, by P. I. Bartenyev, Publisher."
Proudhon's tract, published in 1861 and translated into Russian in 1864, had given Tolstoy a title worthy of the scope of his subject. The first edition of War and Peace was sold out in a few days. In May 1868, when the fourth volume came out, the public acclaim was confirmed. Encouraged by the flattering echoes he heard on all sides, Tolstoy began to work still more quickly. He devoted the whole of 1868 to writing the next part of War and Peace and corrccting proofs, allowing himself only a few days' holiday during the summer. On sunny days he hunted or fished, as always. He also gave some time to his estate, which had expanded (he had bought more land), made frequent visits to his brother Sergey, did a great deal of haphazard reading of philosophers and historians, thought briefly of translating the Memorial de Sainte-Hetene into Russian and founding a review to be called The Non-Contemporary, as a gibe, which would conccrn itself with "whatever could not conceivably be successful in the nineteenth century but might be in the twentieth." His relations with his wife were so warm and simple that she wrote, "We still argue, but the causes of these quarrels are so deep and complex that they would not occur if we did not love each other as we do. I will soon have been married six- years, and my love continues to grow. Lyovochka often says that it is no longer love, but a fusion of souls so complete that we could not go on living without cach other. I still love him with the same anxious, passionate, jealous, romantic love as before. Sometimes his assurance and his self-possession annoy me."20
This assurance and self-possession were only apparent. In reality, Tolstoy was "hanging on" by his nerves. "The poet skims off the best
of life and puts it in his work," he wrote in a notebook. "That is why his work is beautiful and his life bad."27 Work on the proofs of the fifth volume was delayed by children's illnesses. In April 1869, the author was writing the second Epilogue. "What I have written there," he told his friend Fet, "was not simply imagined by me, but torn out of my cringing entrails."28 And at last, on December 4, 1869, the sixth and last volume of War and Peace appeared 011 the booksellers' shelves.
Suddenly severed from his characters after living in intimate communion with them for six long years, Tolstoy felt tragically bereft. Bewildered, disconnected, he went on dreaming of the phantoms he had let loose in the world, whose fate he could 110 longer alter. Would he ever be able to write anything else, after this huge book into which he had poured all that was best in him? "Now, I am simply marking time," lie confessed to Fet. "I don't think, I don't write, I feel pleasantly stupid."29 That same year, on May 20, a fourth child was born to him—a son, called Leo.
4. War and Peace
The success of the six-volume bound edition of War and Peace far surpassed Tolstoy's expectations, based on the lukewarm response to the first chapters in the Russian Herald. Readers swept bare the booksellers' shelves, gave the book to their friends, wrote letters from one end of Russia to the other defending their opinions of the characters. In the literary world, emotion was at fever pitch. Everyone was aware that an event of major importance had taken place. Like a meteor fallen from another planet, the huge mass of words intrigued and bothered people, and caused them to erupt in indignation.
Tolstoy's friend Fet was jubilant at the end of the final volume, although he disapproved of the author's "dcpoctization" of Natasha in the Epilogue. Botkin wrote to him: "Apart from the section on freemasonry, which is uninteresting and in fact boring, the novel is excellent from every point of view. What animation and depth! What a quintessential^ Russian work!"1 Goncharov wrote to Turgenev: "I've saved the most important thing for the last: the publication of Count Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The count has becomc a veritable literary lion."2 Another colleague, Saltykov-Shchedrin, ground his teeth: "The military scenes are all falsehood and chaos. Generals Bagration and Kutuzov arc made to look like puppets. . . ." Dostoyevsky, whose Idiot had just been raked over the coals by the critics, took offense at Strakhov (a critic) for comparing Tolstoy with "all that is greatest in our literature." "To arrive with War and Peace," he wrote, "is to arrive too late, after 'the new word' of Pushkin; and however far, however high Tolstoy may go, he cannot change the fact that that new word was uttered before him, and the first time, by a genius."3 As for Turgenev, after his fierce criticism of the opening of War and Peace, he let himself be swept away by the rest. "There arc scores of ceaselessly aston-
ishing pages in War and Peace, absolutely top quality; all the description, the customs and manners (the hunt, the troika race at night, etc.). The historical appendix, on the other hand, which has brought the readers to such a pitch of frenzy, is nothing but puppetry and charlatanism. . . . Tolstoy makes his readers' eyes bug out by telling them about the tips of Alexander's boots or Speransky's laugh, and makes them believe he knows everything about these people because he knows those specific things about them, when in fact that is all he knows. . . . However, there are things in the novel that nobody but Tolstoy is capable of writing, anywhere in Europe, things that made me shiver with a positive fever of excitement." (Letter to Annenkov, February 14 [26], 1868.) " There are passages in it that will live as long as the Russian language." (Letter to Borisov, February 27 [March 10], 1868.) "Tolstoy is a giant among his fellow writers, he makes me think of an elephant in a menagerie. "It's incoherent—absurd, even; but immense, and so intelligent!" (Letter to Borisov, February 12 [24], 1869.)