The year 1866 was something of an annus mirabilis for Mikhail katkov, as he found himself publishing Tolstoy’s novel and Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment on the pages of his journal at the same time. Dostoyevsky was not the easiest of authors, but on this occasion far more amenable than Tolstoy. He struggled to meet the deadlines for each of the monthly instalments of Crime and Punishment, but he kept to them, and the novel was complete by December 1866. (If Tolstoy read it, which is unlikely, he did not record what he thought about it.) With War and Peace, things were altogether trickier. By this point, Tolstoy had come up with a new title: ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, projecting a happy ending which was different from the one he had initially conceived, and different again from the ending of the final version of the novel. Tolstoy still believed he would finish his new work the following year, and that spring he began lengthy and ultimately disappointing discussions with an artist whom he commissioned to produce illustrations for the projected book publication.81
katkov wanted to continue printing the next sections of Tolstoy’s novel in the Russian Messenger in 1867, before producing it in book form. Accordingly, a new set of negotiations began in November 1866, but the following spring there was still no agreement, and in June 1867 Tolstoy took matters into his own hands. Deciding against first publishing the rest of the novel as monthly instalments in a journal in the time-honoured Russian fashion, he decided now to publish it in separate volumes as they were completed. He turned for help to Pyotr Bartenev. The eventual form of War and Peace changed radically as a result, and the nature of the changes can be roughly gauged by consulting the list of ‘distinguishing merits’ compiled by a commercial Moscow publisher of the so-called ‘first complete edition of the great novel completed in 1866, before Tolstoy reworked it in 1867–1869’:
1. Twice as short and five times more interesting.
2. Almost no philosophical digressions.
3. A hundred times easier to read: all the French text is replaced by Russian in the author’s own translation.
4. Much more ‘peace’ and less ‘war’.
5. Prince Andrey and Petya Rostov remain alive.82
Igor Zakharov, the publisher in question, drew on authoritative editions to compile the version of the novel he published in 2000,83 but he was pilloried for his popularising efforts on Russian television, and also by literary scholars anxious to preserve the integrity of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Zakharov was certainly disingenuous in claiming he was bringing to readers the ‘real Lev Tolstoy’ and the ‘real War and Peace’ as Tolstoy translated the French material in the novel into Russian later, for the 1873 edition.84 Nevertheless this ‘edition’, which appeared in English translation in 2007,85 is helpful in throwing into greater relief the impact which Tolstoy’s collaboration with Pyotr Bartenev had on the future evolution of War and Peace, which has everything to do with the greater number of historical sources he now consulted. Tolstoy once commented that turning to Bartenev with a research query was like turning on the tap of a samovar.86
Tolstoy drew up a contract with Bartenev and a Moscow printer to publish his novel in June 1867. He was now at last calling it War and Peace, perhaps under the influence of Proudhon’s 1861 tract of the same name, which had appeared in Russian translation in 1864. He was perhaps also acting under the influence of Herzen, who had written three articles under this title in 1859.87 Tolstoy and Bartenev agreed to an initial print run of 4,800 copies of six separate volumes, corresponding to the six parts the novel was then divided into, with a planned price of eight roubles. Fifteen per cent of the proceeds were to go to Bartenev for copy-editing the book and dealing with the censor, and twenty were to go to booksellers.88 Sonya’s father was clearly still keen to be involved, and he turned out to be very useful when Tolstoy experienced unexpected delays in receiving the first proofs. In the summer of 1867 Andrey Estafevich fired off regular bulletins to Yasnaya Polyana to report on what was going on in Moscow, telling Tolstoy when Bartenev was coming back from his dacha, what he said upon his return and so on and so forth. Tolstoy, meanwhile, realised that the first half of volume one was much longer than the second. While he started pruning the first part, which he believed improved it immeasurably, he requested Bartenev to take out as many indentations as possible in the first half and increase them in the second. This created some very long paragraphs.89
While Tolstoy was proofreading the early chapters for the publication of this new edition he was, of course, still writing and researching later parts of his novel. In September 1867 he did some research of a different kind. He was getting near to the crucial Battle of Borodino in his narrative, and in order to deepen his understanding of the movements of the 250,000 soldiers who took part in it, he decided to go and inspect the battleground, located near the town of Mozhaysk, about seventy miles west of Moscow. The Battle of Borodino was the decisive confrontation between Napoleon’s Grande Armée and the Russian forces led by General kutuzov in 1812, and accordingly it occupies a pivotal position in Russian history, and indeed in War and Peace, coming roughly at the halfway mark in the novel. The battle took place during the course of one long day, but it occupies twenty chapters in Tolstoy’s epic narrative, including discursive commentary from the author himself. Combining the lofty perspectives of both the historical figures of Napoleon and kutuzov with the ground-level viewpoint of fictional characters like Prince Andrey, in charge of a regiment, and Pierre, a civilian who unwittingly becomes caught up in the maelstrom, Tolstoy’s artistic tactics are equal to the most sophisticated and effective of military strategies, while his campaign against professional historians no less aggressive.
Napoleon’s troops had been marching relentlessly on Moscow since invading Russian territory in June 1812, and the speed of the French army’s advance led Alexander I to appoint the venerable Prince kutuzov as his commander-in-chief just days before the historic battle, replacing General Count Barclay de Tolly. kutuzov was sixty-seven years old, but greatly revered by all ranks in the Russian army. unlike Barclay de Tolly, the Lutheran descendant of a Scottish family which had settled in the German Baltic province of Livonia in the seventeenth century, kutuzov was thoroughly Russian. He established his defence of Moscow in the village of Borodino, and it was here, at dawn on 7 September 1812,90 that the two armies met for their bloody encounter. The fatalities were enormous, with the Russian army losing as many as 44,000 men, and the French 58,000. Technically the victory was Napoleon’s, as he was able to march on to Moscow after kutuzov withdrew, but his forces were fatally weakened. Tolstoy’s conclusion was that the Russians had scored a crucial moral victory at Borodino, the kind which ‘convinces the opponent of the moral superiority of his enemy, and of his own impotence’. He was unabashed about including in his novel authorial pronouncements to this effect: