At first, the book was to be called The Year 1805. The first chapters had already been written when, on September 26, 1864, Tolstoy was out hunting for hare in the country' near Telyatinki and was thrown from his horse going over a ravine. He hit the gTOund so hard that he lost consciousness. When he came to his senses, a thought hit him like a thunderbolt: "I am a writer!" And joy welled through his mind, while he felt a searing pain in his shoulder. He realized that he had dislocated his right arm. But it seemed to him that the accident had occurred in some far-distant past and lie had been asleep for years without knowing what was happening. His horse had run away. With a superhuman effort, he clambered to his feet and, holding his right arm, dragged himself to the road, over half a mile away. There, at the end of his strength, he lay down on the bank. Some muzhiks going by in a telega found him and carried him to an isba. He did not want to go straight home, in order to spare Sonya, who was pregnant. When the news was diplomatically broken to her, she came running in alarm to fetch her Lyovochka home, pale and moaning. The country doctor she sent for proved utterly incompetent; eight times, he tried and failed to put the arm back in place, but he was so clumsy that he only made the pain worse. A doctor from Tula came to the rescue the next day. Tolstoy was chloroformed and two sturdy peasants realigned the bones according to the physician's instructions. When the operation was over, the doctor pronounced it a success. His patient did not agree; at the cud of the prescribed six weeks of rest, he fired a gun to test his arm and the recoil sent a blinding pain through his shoulder. Concluding that it was not properly healed, Tolstoy consulted his father- in-law. Dr. Behrs ordered him to come to Moscow without delay. Unfortunately, Sonya had just given birth to a daughter5 and was still too weak to travel.
He stayed with the Behrs in the Kremlin. The doctor convened a group of colleagues: some advised baths, others special exercises, still others favored surgery. Worried by the doctors' inability to agree among themselves, Tolstoy did not know what to do. On November 27, 1864, he let himself be dragged to a performance of Rossini's Moses at the Great Moscow Theater. Suddenly, the lively, colorful music, the rising swell of the singing and graceful turns and swoops of the dancers so filled him with light-heartedncss and the desire to live that he enthusiastically opted for the most radical alternative. The next day Mrs. Behrs' bedroom was scoured and prepared for use as an operating theater. Two surgeons, Popov and Haak, supervised the preparations. Tolstoy was very calm. It required a massive dose of chloroform to put him to sleep. Just as he was about to lose consciousness, he sat bolt upright and bellowed:
"My friends! We cannot go on living like this! ... I think ... I have decided . . ."
He fell back and did not utter another word. Was this his old "Rules of Life" coming back into his consciousness? Two male nurses wrenched apart the badly knit joints in his arm. Then the surgeons replaced the disconnected bones and enclosed the arm in a sort of cast. Tanva was present throughout the operation and could not take her eyes off the colorless face from which all life seemed to have fled. She and her mother sat up all night with 'I'olstoy. lie was rackcd by nausea from the chloroform. The next day he felt better and wanted to write. As he could not use his right hand, he asked Tanya to be his secretary. After this enforced interruption, his creative drive was so strong that he could have dictated non-stop for days on end. The girl could hardly keep up with him. He was not even aware of her prcscncc. With his arm in a sling, he paced up and down the room like one possessed. Ilis eyes stared through the walls. Sometimes he spoke slowly, sometimes in a staccato rush, unable to articulate the flood of words in his mouth. Suddenly he would Stop, furious:
"No, that's no good! ... It won't do! . . . Scrap all that!"
Tanya crossed out everything she had written and, frozen with awe, waited. "I felt," she later said, "as though I were prying, as though I had become an involuntary eyewitness to the events in that inner world he hid from us all." Then he would emerge from his trancc and see his sister-in-law's exhausted face, be pricked by an overdue pang of conscience and say:
"That's enough for today. I've worn you out. Go skating."
But sometimes he was not in the mood, and dictated without feeling. "And," he would say, "without feeling one cannot write anything decent." In addition to his dictation, he took advantage of his stay in Moscow to continue his search for sourcc material, pawing through bookshops, borrowing books from Professors Eshevsky and Popov, hounding the Rumyantsev Museum library, obtaining, by special favor, important documents from the palace archives, questioning old people on their rcminisccnces of 1812. The wealth of material both delighted and alarmed him. He was afraid of drowning under the ocean of detail. He was continually forced to tear himself away from historical data and return to his characters. "Napoleon, Alexander, Kutuzov and Talleyrand arc not the heroes of my book," he said. "I shall write the story of people living in the most privileged circumstances, with no fear of poverty or constraint, free people, people who have none of the flaws that are necessary to make a mark on history'."
One evening he read the opening chapters at the Perfilyevs' house. The drawing room in which his audience had assembled was plunged into darkness. On a little table stood lighted candlcs and a pitcher of water with a glass. Tolstoy began haltingly, then gained confidence, straightened up, began to changc voiccs for different characters. With his rusty beard, harsh, wrinkled face and eyes of steel, he was in turn a young girl, an old man, a Russian officer, a foreign diplomat, a servant in a great family. The faccs around him were stretched toward him, wearing expressions of intense curiosity. But was it his story that had captivated the Perfilyevs' guests, or simply their effort to identify their friends in his characters? Tanya wrote to Polivanov: "'llie opening scene is so delightful. I identified so many of our group. . . . People said the Rostovs were living persons. For me, in any case, they seem terribly close. Boris is much like you, in his external appearance and manners. Vera is Lisa to a T: her solemn ways, her behavior with us. . . . Countess Rostov is Ma man, especially in her attitude toward me. At Natasha's entrance, Varenka winked at mc, but I don't think anyone saw her. But wait a bit, now you'll laugh: my great doll Mimi has stolen the honors of the book. Do you remember how we married you to her, and I insisted that you kiss her and you didn't want to, and you hung her 011 the door and I complained to Maman? . . . Yes, you will recognize many things in this book; don't throw away my letter until you've read it. Pierre is the one the others liked least, but I liked him better than anyone else in the book. I am very fond of his type of person. The little princess was the ladies' favorite, but they couldn't decide who was Lyova's model for her. There was an intermission and everybody had tea. They were all, I think, delighted by the reading. Among the ladies all one heard were guesses as to whom Lyovochka had been describing, and one name after another was mentioned. All of a sudden Varenka said right out loud, 'Maman, I know—Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova is you! She's exactly like you.' 'I don't think so, Varenka; I'm not interesting enough to put into a book,' answered Nastasya Sergeyevna (Pcrfilyev). Lyovochka began to laugh and said nothing. Papa was in seventh heaven because of his son-in-law's success. It made me happy just to look at him. What a pity Sonya couldn't be there."0
After completing the first part of The Year 1805, Tolstoy negotiated with Katkov for the publication of the novel in the Russian Herald, at three hundred rubles per printed sixteen-page sheet. On Novemljcr 27, 1864 the publisher's secretary came to collect the manuscript. After he had gone, Tolstoy felt bereft, anxious, despoiled. As long as the pages were in his possession, he could go back and change them again. Now they were out of his power, they had become a piece of merchandise. His wife wrote, "I used to scold you for making too many corrections, but now I am sad because you have sold your work."