The direct consequence of the Battle of Borodino was Napoleon’s groundless flight from Moscow, his retreat along the old Smolensk road, the defeat of the 500,000-strong invasion, and the defeat of Napoleonic France, on which had been laid for the first time the hand of an opponent whose spirit was stronger.91
Half a century later, when he came to visit the battleground, Tolstoy found accommodation in a local convent and spent two days wandering around the village and surrounding fields of Borodino, in the company of his brother-in-law Stepan Bers, then twelve years old, who was thrilled to be taken along. Tolstoy was disappointed not to be able to talk to a recently deceased veteran of the war who had worked as the custodian of the monument to the battle which stood in the middle of the field, but he used his eyes effectively instead. By sketching out a plan of the battlefield, and noting where the troops had been positioned, he was able to work out vital details such as exactly in whose eyes the sun had shone when it came up on that fateful day. Before heading back home, he got up at dawn and completed one last tour of the battlefield. Tolstoy’s skewed presentation of history in War and Peace has attracted criticism ever since it was published; indeed, some of his accounts of the battles in 1812 left some veterans apoplectic with rage at his manipulation of historical sources to suit his own artistic and ideological ends. There is nevertheless a general consensus on the authenticity of his portrayal of the events at Borodino.92
After coming back from Borodino, Tolstoy finished the part of the novel which culminates with Natasha’s seduction by Anatole kuragin. This comes at the halfway mark in the final version of the novel, at the end of volume two. Tolstoy regarded this episode as the crux of the entire work, since it functions as a kind of mirror of Napoleon’s ‘violation’ of Russia, with which it coincides, and he found it extremely difficult to write. This was also perhaps partly because he was reflecting the recent experiences of his sister-in-law Tanya, who had gone through something similar with an inappropriate suitor.93 At this point, Tolstoy decided it would be best to publish everything he had written so far rather than hold up publication until he had finished the next part (which covers the Battle of Borodino). The three volumes of the first book edition were accordingly published in December 1867, and sold for a price of seven roubles. One critic took exception to having to pay such an ‘indecent’ price for the three slim volumes with yellow covers which he claimed had a large typeface more suitable for old people and children. Nevertheless the books sold.94 The next volume went on sale three months later in March 1868, with a cunning advertising ploy: those who bought the first four volumes would receive the fifth free, while those who waited until the edition was complete would have to pay more, since the price would then go up. The books sold so well, however, that a second edition, incorporating certain new revisions, appeared that autumn.95 The Russian reading public was still relatively small, so this was no mean achievement.
By 1868 Tolstoy was working furiously to finish War and Peace. The further he got into the novel, the clearer its shape became to him, and the greater his inspiration and sense of purpose. He was anyway a person of extraordinary sensitivity, and now, in the middle of this enormous creative outpouring, his friend, the poet Afanasy Fet, likened him to a great bell made of the thinnest glass, liable to produce a sound at the slightest touch.96 It was this sensitivity which compelled him to respond to some of the early carping reviews by publishing in Pyotr Bartenev’s journal Russian Archive ‘A Few Words About the Novel War and Peace’ in March 1868. Long before he had finished writing his novel, he hoped he could thus anticipate any further misapprehensions, which he knew were inevitable. First he confronted the tricky question of the genre of his novel by offering his own oft-quoted, and not necessarily very helpful definition: ‘What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less a [narrative] poem, and even less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it was expressed.’ Justifying his apparent lack of reverence for conventional European literary forms, Tolstoy quite rightly argues that from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, ‘in the modern period of Russian literature there is not one artistic work in prose, even slightly better than average that could fully fit into the form of a novel, a [narrative] poem or a novella’. He also tackles other potential points of contention, such as the fact that not only the Russians but also the French speak a mixture of French and Russian in the novel. And as well as providing a robust defence of the artist’s right to diverge from historical accounts in evoking past events, he explains that his invention of names such as Bolkonsky and Drubetskoy, so similar to the well-known real-life aristocratic surnames of Volkonsky and Trubetskoy, was governed by a desire for his fictitious characters to have names which would sound pleasant and natural to the Russian ear.97
When he wrote his ‘Few Words’ about the novel he had been working on ‘continually and exclusively’ for the previous five years, Tolstoy openly acknowledged he had been able to take advantage of ‘optimal living conditions’. Presumably he had in mind not only his comfortable state of financial independence and all the fresh air and exercise he could want, but also the emotional and practical support provided by his wife. Sonya gave birth to four children during the six years Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, and also suffered at least one miscarriage (in October 1867). After the birth of Sergey, Tanya was born in 1864, followed by Ilya in 1866 and Lev in 1869. When she was not looking after their children, Sonya worked willingly as her husband’s scribe, and thus became intimately involved in his creative life. This sometimes required a good deal of patience, as she records in her autobiography:
Sometimes proofs which had been finally corrected and sent off were returned again to Lev Nikolayevich at his request in order to be recorrected and recopied. Or a telegram would be sent to substitute one word for another. My whole soul became so immersed in the copying that I began myself to feel when it was not altogether right; for instance, when there were frequent repetitions of the same word, long periods, wrong punctuation, obscurity, etc. I used to point all these things out to Lev Nikolayevich. Sometimes he was glad for my remarks; sometimes he would explain why it ought to remain as it was; he would say that details do not matter, only the general scheme matters.98
If her brother Stepan’s memoirs are to be believed, Sonya copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace seven times. unfortunately this supposition appears to have been wishful thinking on his part: Nikolay Gusev dismisses it as a myth in a footnote of his 900-page biographical study of Tolstoy’s life and works from 1855 to 1869. Conceding that some of Tolstoy’s chapters were indeed reworked and copied many times, he points out that others went straight to press.99 On the other hand, there were numerous chapters which Tolstoy rewrote endlessly, so Sonya’s contribution should not be underestimated. Deciphering his execrable handwriting, and then preparing a legible final draft of the manuscript, was a gargantuan task, and in 1866, during a particularly intense period of the novel’s composition, a clerk was also employed to help with the copying.100