If Tolstoy was able to sustain his concentration for six years and maintain an iron discipline, it was because of the hospitable environment in which he was able to work, living in his beloved ancestral home deep in the heart of the Russian countryside, supported by his devoted wife. For a while he even moved his study downstairs so that he was not distracted by family life. The old vaulted store room where old Prince Volkonsky had once hung his hams on the hooks still hanging from the ceilings, and where Sonya had stayed before their marriage, was also where he wrote the first chapters of War and Peace, after trying fifteen different openings. Isolated from the outside world (there was not even a railway connection to nearby Tula until 1867), with weeks and months going by during the winter when there were no visitors, Tolstoy could fully immerse himself in the hundreds of sources he gathered about Russian history during the Napoleonic Wars, and also draw deeply on his powers of imagination. Most of his fiction to date had an element of autobiography, but now he also found inspiration for his most memorable characters amongst his immediate family, with the vivacious and ingenuous Natasha, his most beloved character, reflecting aspects of the personalities of both his wife and his sister-in-law Tanya at different times.69 Tolstoy also looked further back into his family’s past for raw material, projecting his aunt Toinette’s love for his father on to the hopeless devotion of Natasha’s adopted sister Sonya for her brother Nikolay. His knowledge of the habits of his epicurean grandfather Ilya Andreyevich gave substance to his portrait of Count Rostov, and he breathed life into the story of old Prince Bolkonsky and his daughter Maria at their Bald Hills estate by conjuring up in his imagination the secluded life led by his other grandfather Prince Volkonsky and his unmarried mother at Yasnaya Polyana. A few of his brother Sergey’s traits went into Prince Andrey,70 and the desperate Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov was partially inspired by his distant cousin, the swashbuckling Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy. Sonya’s sister Tanya liked to flatter herself that the character of Natasha was modelled exclusively on her, but the truth is that real-life people merely provided Tolstoy with the necessary spark he needed to create. His canvas was huge, and it is not surprising to find Homer on the list of authors he acknowledged as having made an impact on him at this time, alongside Goethe, Victor Hugo and Stendhal.71
Numerous friends, relatives and acquaintances helped Tolstoy with the research for War and Peace, including leading historians and his doughty father-in-law Andrey Bers, who shared his personal memories of living through the events of 1812 as a child, and rounded up an army of old Moscow ladies ready to tell their story. Andrey Estafevich also enjoyed the task of tracking down contemporary newspaper cuttings for Tolstoy, as well as the correspondence of people who had lived in Moscow during Russia’s war with Napoleon.72 Tolstoy made regular research trips to Moscow, and profited particularly from a long visit he made in the autumn of 1864 after breaking his arm. He had been riding his horse Masha, accompanied by two of his borzois, and had fallen off while impulsively galloping over a ploughed field in pursuit of a rabbit one of them had spotted.73 Old Dr Shmigaro did such a poor job of setting the arm in Tula that Tolstoy travelled to Moscow for a further operation, and he spent his convalescence researching early-nineteenth-century Russian history. Sometimes this meant sitting in the Rumyantsev Museum, poring over manuscripts about Russian Freemasons, and sometimes he took himself off to the Chertkov Library to read letters and memoirs and look at portraits of Alexander I’s generals.74 These two public libraries had just opened in Moscow, and without them his task would have been much harder. Tolstoy had actually picked a wonderful time to write a historical novel.
The decade of the 1860s was not only famous as the era of the Great Reforms. This was also a golden age for Russian literature, with Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky all at the height of their powers. It was an important time for music: Tchaikovsky became a student at the Petersburg Conservatoire when it was founded in 1862, and then was immediately appointed to teach at the even newer Moscow Conservatoire when he graduated; they were the first institutions in Russia set up to train professional musicians. The opening of the Mariinsky Theatre in 1860 paved the way for Russian opera and ballet to flourish, and the easing of censorship led to the publication of previously suppressed literary and historical works. These included the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, a persecuted leader of the Old Believer sect, published for the first time in 1861. It had been suppressed for two whole centuries, owing to fears that the spread of sectarianism could lead to popular rebellion. The opening of Moscow’s first public libraries was part of this great explosion in Russian cultural and intellectual life, and contributed substantially to it. In 1862 the refurbished Pashkov House, one of the many elegant Moscow mansions damaged in the fire of 1812, opened as the Rumyantsev Museum, home to a research library and important art and archive collections (Tolstoy’s own manuscripts were later deposited there for safekeeping).75 The following year Alexander Chertkov’s son Grigory made available to the public for the first time his late father’s unique and rich collection of books and primary sources devoted to the history of Russia. The Chertkov Public Library was established in a specially built wing of the family’s spacious mansion in the centre of Moscow, and Grigory Chertkov proceeded to increase the holdings to about 20,000 items. The respected historian Pyotr Bartenev became the first librarian at the Chertkov Library, and, also in 1863, founder-editor of its journal Russian Archive. The latter performed a valuable service in publishing primary sources about eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Russian history, many of which were vital for Tolstoy when he was writing War and Peace. Bartenev also went out of his way to help Tolstoy with unpublished historical materials for his new novel.
By the end of 1864, Tolstoy delivered to the Moscow offices of the Russian Messenger what he believed would be the first part of his new novel, entitled ‘The Year 1805’. The thirty-eight chapters he submitted correspond roughly to the first two parts of what is now volume one of War and Peace, and they were published in the January and February 1865 issues of the journal. The day after the February issue appeared (actually in March), Andrey Estafevich wrote to the Tolstoys to let them know he had just been at a reception given by the Military Governor-General, and that Tolstoy’s latest instalment had been much talked about. This had been Dr Bers’ first social engagement after a long convalescence recovering from a tracheotomy (as a court employee he had to ask the Tsar for special permission to grow a beard).76 He was obviously pleased to be out and about again, and reported that the subject of Tolstoy’s protracted negotiations over his royalties was also hot gossip in Moscow. Feeling he would be better placed to act for his son-in-law, Andrey Estafevich offered his services to Tolstoy, but the deal had already been done.
Tolstoy had driven a hard bargain with his editor Mikhail katkov. At the beginning of his career, back in 1852, he had been paid fifty roubles per printer’s sheet, but he now felt he could ask for more – a lot more. Nikolay Lyubimov, a retired professor of physics at Moscow university and katkov’s closest editorial associate (or favourite donkey as he was referred to disparagingly in some circles), was deputised to act as go-between, and in November 1864 he spent two hours trying to persuade Tolstoy to back down and accept a rate of fifty roubles for his new work.77 But Tolstoy knew his own worth, insisted on 300 roubles, and got it. This meant katkov paid his star author 3,000 roubles for the first section of the novel (ten printer’s sheets).78 This was a lot of money. As a concession, he managed to persuade Tolstoy to agree to a separate book publication of all the chapters which made up ‘The Year 1805’ after they had been published in the Russian Messenger, which then had about 3,000 subscribers. They agreed on a print run of 500 copies, with katkov as the beneficiary, and the book went on sale in June 1866, for a price of two and a half roubles.79 Working out exactly how much these figures would be at today’s values is a difficult and rather fruitless exercise, but one can gain a good sense of relative worth when comparing Tolstoy’s honorarium with the average manual worker’s wage at the time, which was about ten roubles a month – the eventual price of War and Peace when it was finally published as a book. Village teachers earned about twenty-five roubles a month, which was what Tolstoy paid the governesses who came to teach his children, on top of providing them with room and board.80