•An entry in the diary for 1878, dated April 17, reads: "After thirteen years I want to take up ray diary again." He had made a few notes in 1873.
say, is as happy as wc arc together."-' And she wrote, "Are there any couples more united and happier than we? Sometimes, when I am alone in my room, I begin to laugh and cross myself."3
True, they still quarreled frequently. Then Tolstoy would bluster, "You arc in a bad temper. Go write your diary." And she told herself he was nursing "a secret hatred" of her; she accused him of being "too old," or "too demanding"; she swore she was going to be more than the "Nanny" to a great man. But after the storm, how gratefully she fell into his arms! "Lyovochka came back, and everything seemed light and easy to me. lie smcllcd of fresh air and he himself was like a breath of fresh air."
Her greatest source of pleasure, however, was not her husband's embraces (she was never a passionate lover), but the manuscript he gave her to copy. And what a labor of Hercules it was, to decipher this sorcerer's spcllbook covered with lines furiously scratched out, corrections colliding with each other, sibylline balloons floating in the margins, prickly afterthoughts sprawled all over the page. Often the author himself could not make out what he had written. But Sonya, who was endowed with a remarkable sixth sense, deciphered the amputated words and finished off the half-sentences just as, once before, she had deciphered Tolstoy's thoughts from the initials he chalked on the green card-table cover. In the evening, after the child had been put to bed and the servants had gone up to their garrets and silence settled over the house, she sat down at her tabic in the round glow of a candle and made a clean copy of the drafts. Her beautiful curling script flowed across the page for hours. It was not uncommon for Tolstoy to hand the same sheets back to her the next day, disfigured by a swarm of microscopic corrections. Sometimes she had to use a magnifying glass to make them out. According to her son Ilva, she recopied most of War and Peace seven times. Fingers clutching the pen, shoulders tensed and eyes smarting, she never felt her fatigue. She was possessed by a poetic exaltation, as though she had established tclcpathic contact with another world. "As I transcril>e the work," she wrote, "a swarm of impressions pass through my mind. Nothing affects me as strongly as his ideas and his talent. This has only been true for a short time. Have I changed, or is the book really very good? I don't know which. I write quickly enough to keep pace with the action and not lose interest, and slowly enough to think over, feel, weigh and judge every one of Lyovochka's ideas."4 Tears came to her eyes, and she sighed, simultaneously stirred by the characters' sufferings and the author's genius.
He, however, was going through the throes of a difficult creation.
Slowly, by fits and starts, the plan of the work took form in his mind as he went along. Even the title, War and Peace—borrowed from Prou- dhon—did not come until late. His original idea had been to write a book 011 the 1825 uprising whose leaders were exiled to Siberia by Nicholas I and not allowed to return until 1856, when they were pardoned bv the new tsar, Alexander II. He had written three large sections of the book. What attracted him about the Decembrists was that nearly all of these pioneer Russian revolutionaries were officers of the Guards, noblemen, confirmed idealists. He felt related to them by his military experience and his love of high ideals. However, when he began to look more closely into their history, he discovered that most of them had taken part in the campaigns against Napoleon and their liberalism had been acquired during their stay in France with the occupation forces. To understand their revolution completely, therefore, he had to go back to 1812-14. "A period whose scent and sound arc still perceptible to 11s," he said, "but remote enough for us to contemplate it unemotionally." However, this so-called "patriotic" war that had been so glorious for Russia only took on full meaning in relation to the previous disaster of 1805. "I hesitated to describe our triumph over Bonaparte's France without first describing our defeat and humiliation. If the final victory was chic not to chance but to the spirit of the Russian army and people, then that spirit ought to stand out even more sharply, I thought, in moments of misfortune and defeat." Expanding this theme, lie became fascinated by the horizons that opened before him. The Decembrists were forgotten. The work, as he came to conceive it, would stop with "the first forewarning of the movement that led up to the events of December 14,1825." It would be a confrontation between the great events of history and family life in the upper ranges of society. He said, in a preface that was never published, "The lives of civil servants, tradespeople, seminarians and muzhiks do not concern me and are scarcely comprehensible to mc"—a view he was subsequently to modify. But from the start lie was certain of one thing: real people—Napoleon, Alexander, Kutuzov, Bagration, Speransky, Murat —would mingle with the fictional ones.
What a rich and variegated period! I low did it happen that no Russian writer had exploited it? There were enough eyewitnesses left for the author to question tliern directly. He himself, as a child, had heard episodes related by his family, friends and old servants that he would transpose in his book. Besides, customs had hardly changed in sixty years. Wherever his heroes went, Tolstoy was sure to feel at home. He had known military life in the Caucasus and Sevastopol, the Moscow- aristocracy, the life of the landed gentry at Yasnaya Polyana. And there was no shortage of models for his characters. His paternal grandfather, the weak-willed and erratic Ilya Andrcycvich Tolstoy, became Ilya Andrcycvich Rostov in the novel. Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy—Leo's father, who had married a fortune and retired to the country—lent his personality to Nicholas Rostov. To portray Natasha Rostov, the writer borrowed some features from his wife and others from his sister-in-law. "I took Sonya," he said, "ground her up in a mortar with Tanya, and out came Natasha." (Actually, Tanya posed almost exclusively for Natasha as a girl and Sonya for Natasha married). Old Prince Nicholas Bolkonsky, living as a tyrant on his estate, was a faithful copy of Nicholas Volkonsky, the author's maternal grandfather. The imaginary estate of Lysya Gory could easily be mistaken for Yasnaya Polyana. Marya Bolkonsky, a pure, pious and secretive girl who worshiped and feared her father, was Leo's mother, Marya Volkonsky, whom he had never known but blindly idealized. The French companion, Mile. Bourienne, was a fictional rcplica of Mile. H&iissienne; Dolokhov was a mixture of the partisan Dorokhov, his son Reuben, a distant relative of the author's called Tolstoy the American, and the partisan Rigner; Vasily Denisov owed much to Denis Davydov; Prince Andrey Bolkonsky and Pierre Bczukhov alone had no close counterpart in reality.
Tolstoy spent the entire winter of 1863-64 familiarizing himself with the period he wanted to recreate in his book. His father-in-law sent him original source material from Moscow. He himself bought up, pell-mell, an assortment of books on the Napoleonic wars: Mikhailov- sky-Danilevsky, Bodganovich, Zhikharcv, Glinka, Davidov Liprandi, Korf, the Documents historiques sur le sejour des Frangais <1 Moscow, en 1812, the Souvenirs de campagne d'tin artilleur, the Correspondance diplomatique of Joseph de Maistie, Marmont's Memoirs, Thiers' His- toire du Consulat et de lEmpire, etc. "You can't imagine the difficulties of this preparatory work, plowing the field I shall have to sow," he wrote to Fet toward the end of 1864. "Studying, thinking over everything that might happen to the future heroes of a very big book, devising millions of schemes of all varieties and selecting the millionth part of them, it's terribly hard work."