Tolstoy was wise enough to know he needed sometimes to take a break from his literary activities, and his general custom was to concentrate on his writing from autumn through to spring, and then enjoy outdoor pursuits like shooting and riding during the warm summer months when Sonya’s sister Tanya and other friends and relatives would come to stay at Yasnaya Polyana. In 1865 he discovered an enthusiasm for Anthony Trollope, whose novel The Bertrams provided welcome light relief and a distraction from his immersion in Russian history.101 And during a stay in Moscow the following year, he also took up sculpture for a brief period (not surprisingly, it was the figure of a horse which he decided to tackle as his first subject).102 Tolstoy never lost his readiness to try out new pastimes, even in old age. He also began to use the newfangled mode of railway transport as soon as he had the chance: the construction of an extensive network of Russian railways in the 1860s is also the legacy of the era of the Great Reforms. The Moscow–kursk railway line was completed in 1867, while Tolstoy was working on War and Peace, and it cut his journey times in half.
When, a few decades later, Yasnaya Polyana became a site of pilgrimage for thousands of Tolstoy’s devotees, its sheer accessibility had a lot to do with it: the mainline station built in the village of Yasenki, south of Tula, was just four miles down the road from Yasnaya Polyana. A large number of the many Tolstoy followers who made the journey felt it was their duty to publish an account of their visit afterwards, but amongst the mountain of memoirs of personal meetings with Tolstoy, there is one which stands out not only by virtue of the fact that it was written a long time before all the other ones, but also because it happens to be well written. Its author was Eugene Schuyler, an American writer and diplomat who arrived in Moscow in 1868 to take up the post of consul.103 Schuyler was one of the very first Americans to receive a PhD, and had taken up Russian after meeting crew members of the Alexander Nevsky, the imperial navy’s last wooden frigate, when it was docked in New York. In 1866 he published the first American translation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and on his way to Russia the following year, he met the author in Baden-Baden. Despite the coolness in their relationship at that time, Turgenev gave Schuyler a letter of introduction to Tolstoy. Schuyler’s account of his visit to Yasnaya Polyana gives us a vivid glimpse into Tolstoy’s life in the autumn of 1868.
At five o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday 14 September, the twenty-eight-year-old Schuyler found himself getting on a train in Moscow, and nine hours later, at two in the morning, he got off at Yasenki to be met by Tolstoy’s carriage. Torrential rain meant that it took a further hour and a half to drive the four miles to Yasnaya Polyana. upon arrival, however, he was relieved to be told that ‘late hours were kept’ and that the usual time for morning coffee was eleven o’clock. The following day he joined the count and his young wife, plus their three young children, Seryozha, Tanya and Ilya, and their English governess, for breakfast. Tolstoy, he discovered, had in fact been up at dawn, and had gone off into the woods with his dogs and his gun. Schuyler was duly taken hare-hunting himself, and later came to have a particular appreciation for the exquisitely written chapters describing shooting parties in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He had before then only ever made botanical excursions into forests, in search of trees and shrubs, and had never held a gun, but he now acquired direct experience of one of Tolstoy’s greatest passions:
It was new to me to sit still and use my ears as well as my eyes; to appreciate the different noises of the wood; to know whether that was a twig or a leaf which fell – for the leaves were just falling … to distinguish between the noises made by the birds; to speculate as to the origin of unknown sounds, and to have one’s attention always strained for the patter-patter of the hare.104
Tolstoy did little work on War and Peace during the week in which he entertained Schuyler, but he got his American guest to help him sort out his ever-expanding library. At the end of his stay, Schuyler was granted permission to translate The Cossacks, a project which took a while for him to complete due to his professional commitments. After Moscow, he was posted to St Petersburg for several years, during which he made an intrepid and noteworthy journey to the new cities of Russian Turkestan, then created a storm during a posting in Constantinople by exposing atrocities committed by the Turks against the Bulgarians, thereby helping their nationalist cause. As a result, he was removed from his post in 1878 and appointed as American Consul in Birmingham, which he clearly found boring, as this is where he finally finished his translation of The Cossacks (he is game enough to admit in his memoir that Tolstoy did not rate it very highly).105 Schuyler and Tolstoy shared a great interest in Peter the Great, to whom Tolstoy turned as the possible subject of his next novel after completing War and Peace. In 1873, Tolstoy eventually abandoned his Peter the Great project to write Anna Karenina, but chapters of Schuyler’s study of the Russian tsar finally started appearing in 1886.
After a wonderful week of convivial outings and conversations about literature and education which continued late into the night, Schuyler returned to Moscow, leaving Tolstoy to get back to War and Peace. The novel’s fifth volume was published in May 1869, and the sixth and final volume appeared in December of that year (it was only when Tolstoy started to revise the novel a third time in 1873, in connection with a new edition of his collected writings, that he reduced the six initial volumes to the current four). It had been a long haul. Tolstoy worked phenomenally hard during the six years it took to write War and Peace, and Sonya had to bite her lip on the frequent occasions when he was late for dinner. As she records in her autobiography, she would tell herself on such occasions that being on time for meals was too petty a concern for geniuses like her husband.106 A great believer in gymnastics and vigorous exercise outdoors, Tolstoy was physically very robust and he certainly had the stamina required to complete such a gargantuan project, but he frequently endured periods of poor health during the writing of War and Peace. There were times, particularly towards the end, for example, when he suffered from terrible migraines,107 and others when he felt generally so unwell that he had to travel to Moscow for a consultation with Grigory Zakharin, one of Moscow’s leading clinicians.108
War and Peace was wildly popular with the public when it was first published, but it also provoked a storm of controversy.109 It was clear to everyone that what Tolstoy had produced was something exceptional, and the writer Ivan Goncharov was not exaggerating when he proclaimed that Tolstoy had now become a ‘real lion of literature’.110 Many members of the older generation, however, thought that Tolstoy had distorted Russian history, and felt affronted. Politically motivated younger critics desperate to push Russia further on the road to reform, on the other hand, reviled the conservative family values Tolstoy upholds in the novel, and in particular his celebration of the nobility. Even those with no particular axe to grind found Tolstoy’s lengthy digressions disconcerting. Many Russian prose writers, meanwhile, were simply consumed with envy, and dismissed War and Peace with a few withering comments.