Tolstoy had not completely abandoned his Populist ways, and now he flatly refused to allow Sonya to take on a wet-nurse, despite mastitis making it impossible for her to breast-feed baby Sergey. Lyubov Alexandrovna found it exasperating that her daughter meekly followed her husband’s wishes, and must have been relieved when her own husband weighed in with some common sense. The crusty Dr Bers had already lost patience with his son-in-law’s unorthodox ideas on numerous occasions. He had been upset and offended by a pedagogical article Tolstoy had written the previous year condemning university education, for example, and had written and told him so.59 In August 1863 he wrote to Lev and Sonya from Moscow to tell them they had both gone mad. ‘You can be sure, Lev Nikolayevich, my friend,’ he wrote, ‘that your nature will never become that of a peasant, just as your wife’s nature cannot tolerate that which can be tolerated by the Pelageya who beat up her husband and the innkeeper at a tavern outside Petersburg (see Moscow Gazette, issues 165 and 166).’ Tolstoy, he remarked tartly, was skilled at writing and talking, but not always so smart when it came to practical things.60
It took a while for Tolstoy to acquire paternal feelings for Sergey. He refused to hold him when he was very small,61 and only began to love his son when he was nearly two years old and very unwell. It was ‘a completely new feeling,’ he noted in his diary in March 1865.62 Nevertheless, it was with the birth of Sergey that the happiest years of the Tolstoys’ marriage began. Lev and Sonya’s relationship became stronger and more stable, leading him to declare in his single diary entry for 1864 that he and Sonya meant more to each other than anyone else in the world.63 Sonya no longer had time to be bored or lonely, and as a mother she was now fulfilling her husband’s idea of womanhood, but she was doing more than that. By sitting up late at night to write out fair copies of her husband’s drafts, which gave her a sense of involvement in his creative life, she was also indispensable to his artistic productivity. This profound happiness in Tolstoy’s personal life was intimately connected to the extraordinary creative energy which was welling up inside him, and which would be expressed in the writing of War and Peace.64 He wrote about this to Alexandrine in October 1863:
I’ve never felt my intellectual and even all my moral energies to be so free and so capable of work. And I’ve got work going on inside me now. This work is a novel about the period from 1810 to 1820 … I’m now a writer with all the power of my soul, and am writing and thinking as I have never written and thought before. I’m a happy and calm husband and father, with nothing to hide from anybody, and no wish except for everything to go on like this …65
Two autumns later, in September 1865, Tolstoy noted in his diary that his happiness with Sonya was the sort of happiness enjoyed by one couple in a million.66
The first parts of War and Peace started appearing in 1865 under the title ‘The Year 1805’. Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons had been published in its entirety in one journal issue in 1862, but it was a fraction of the length of War and Peace. It was more customary for substantial prose works to appear in instalments in the country’s top literary journals before appearing in book form. This is how Tolstoy proceeded, but given his propensity for changing tack and carrying out endless revisions, this was a risky venture. True to form, by the time he had published the first parts of War and Peace, which he had contracted to the Russian Messenger, Tolstoy had completely changed his ideas about where his novel was going. Even when he then started publishing the novel under his own auspices in book form, his thoughts were not fixed, and changes were also made to his text in the 1870s and 1880s, leading inevitably to much confusion. In the 1920s one Tolstoy scholar even felt compelled to write an article about the difficulties in establishing which was the canonical text of the novel.67
Tolstoy’s impulse to write on the events of 1805 had come from his interest in the Decembrists – the group of army officers who had staged an ill-fated uprising in December 1825 at the time of Nicholas I’s accession. Occupying Paris after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 had opened their eyes to a more enlightened system of government, and they returned to Russia full of hope that the liberal-minded Alexander I might now introduce political reform. When their hopes were dashed, they turned to conspiracy with the revolutionary aim of replacing Russia’s autocratic rule with a republic, or at least a constitutional monarchy. The mutiny they staged in St Petersburg’s Senate Square after Alexander I’s death was a dismal failure, however, and the leading Decembrists were punished with either execution or lifelong exile in Siberia. Fear of revolution marked the whole of Nicholas I’s reign. In 1856, as part of Alexander II’s liberalisation of Russian society after the death of his father, the new tsar amnestied those Decembrists still serving long sentences of exile in Siberia, and amongst them was Tolstoy’s distant relative Prince Sergey Volkonsky. It was Volkonsky, whom he met in Florence in 1860, that Tolstoy had in mind when he first began planning a novel about the Decembrists. He soon discovered, however, that he needed a larger cast of characters, and that he also needed go back in time to 1812 in order to bring their story to life. That in turn led him to the realisation that he really needed to go back to 1805, when Russia first went to war with Napoleon. As he explained in one of the many forewords he drafted, which reflect his changing views of the novel, ‘I was ashamed to write about our victory in the struggle with Napoleonic France without writing about our failures and our disgrace.’68 Tolstoy’s initial plan, then, was to capture artistically the history of his nation over a fifty-year period and call it ‘Three Ages’. The first ‘age’ would encompass the events of 1805 to 1812, the second would focus on the 1820s, and in particular on the fateful uprising in 1825, while the third would bring the action into the 1850s, and incorporate the disastrous Crimean War, the unexpected death of Nicholas I and the amnesty of the Decembrists at a time of hope for reform. As we know, Tolstoy eventually ended up concentrating on the events leading up to 1812 and their immediate aftermath, and he never in fact went back to his early fragment about the ageing Decembrist returning to Moscow from Siberia in the 1850s. He had no idea, however, when he was starting out in 1863, of the dimensions his new novel would ultimately assume.