Amongst the novel’s early critics was Turgenev, who had additional personal reasons to be galled by the greater success his younger contemporary seemed so effortlessly to achieve. But Turgenev was at heart a modest and generous man, and by the time the French publisher Hachette brought out the first French translation of War and Peace in 1879, their differences had been resolved. He now took every opportunity to promote Tolstoy to the French public, which was almost completely unfamiliar with his works. The appearance of the translation of War and Peace completed by ‘une Russe’ (Princess Irina Paskevich, born Vorontsova-Dashkova, who was a remarkable Petersburg grande dame in her own right)111 gave Turgenev a felicitous opportunity to write to Edmond About, editor of the Paris newspaper Le XIXe Siècle. In his letter, which was published on 23 January 1880, Turgenev provides French readers with an introduction to the novel and its author which is superlative in its concision and objectivity, and deserves to stand in full as the last word on this chapter of Tolstoy’s life:
Dear Monsieur About,
You were kind enough to place in the XIXe Siècle my letter about the opening of the exhibition of paintings by Vereshchagin. The success I dared to predict for it, and which even exceeded my expectations, has given me the courage to write to you again. I’m writing to you again about the work of an artist, but an artist who creates with a pen in his hand.
I have in mind the historical novel by my fellow countryman, Count Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace, a translation of which has just been published by Hachette. Lev Tolstoy is the most popular amongst modern Russian writers, and War and Peace, if I may be so bold, is one of the most remarkable books of our time. This expansive work is pervaded by an epic spirit; in it the private and public life of Russia in the first years of our century is recreated by a masterly hand. Before the reader passes a whole epoch, rich with great events and major figures (the story begins not long before the Austerlitz defeat and goes up to Borodino); a whole world unfolds with a multitude of characters belonging to all levels of society, taken directly from life. The manner in which Count Tolstoy develops his theme is as new as it is original; this is not Walter Scott, and, it goes without saying, this is also not Alexandre Dumas. Count Tolstoy is a Russian writer to the core of his being; and those French readers not put off by certain longueurs, and the oddity of certain judgements, will be right in telling themselves that War and Peace has given them a more direct and faithful representation of the character and temperament of the Russian people, and about Russian life generally, than they would have obtained if they had read hundreds of works of ethnography and history. There are whole chapters here in which nothing needs to be changed; and there are historical figures (like kutuzov, Rostopchin and others) whose characteristics have been etched for all time; this will never perish.
As you see, dear Monsieur About, I am expressing myself extravagantly, and yet my words do not fully convey my thoughts. It is possible that the deep originality of Count Lev Tolstoy will impede the foreign reader’s sympathetic and rapid understanding of his novel by its very power, but I repeat – and I would be happy if people trusted what I say – that this is a great work by a great writer and it is genuine Russia.
Please accept, dear Monsieur About, assurance of my devotion.
Ivan Turgenev.112
8
STUDENT, TEACHER, FATHER
Poetry is the fire burning in a person’s soul. This fire burns, warms and brings light… There are some people who feel the heat, others who feel the warmth, others who just see the light, and others who do not even see the light… But the true poet cannot help burning painfully, and burning others.
That’s what it is all about.
Diary entry, 28 October 18701
BY THE MIDDLE OF 1869, nearly the whole of Russia was engrossed in War and Peace and avidly awaiting its conclusion, according to a Petersburg newspaper.2 Tolstoy still had to oversee the publication of the last chapters (which finally went on sale that December), but his mind was racing in all sorts of new directions. In truth, his interest in the novel was already beginning to recede by this time. He spent the following summer immersed in German philosophy, then embarked on an intense study of Russian fairy tales and folk epics, with a view to putting together books to help children learn to read. He read Shakespeare and Molière and started writing a play. He toyed with ideas for a novel about Peter the Great, and at the same time began contemplating another completely different novel about the predicament of a high-society woman in contemporary Russia. He also began learning ancient Greek. But he was happiest when his mind was not racing. In fact, in the weeks and months which followed the completion of War and Peace, Tolstoy was happiest when he did not have to think at all. Games of bezique with his aunt were a pleasant diversion on cold winter evenings, and a sign that he was unwinding (he generally switched to playing patience compulsively when he was at the start of a new work), but what he really enjoyed was cross-country skiing out in the woods, and skating on the big pond below his house. He gave lessons to his six-year-old son Sergey, and spent hours mastering complicated manoeuvres on his own.3 When summer arrived he worked in the garden, digging up nettles and burdock and tidying up the flowerbeds.4 He also took himself off to the fields to spend whole days mowing with the peasants. ‘I cannot describe to you not just the enjoyment but the happiness which I experience in doing this,’ he wrote to Sergey Urusov, whom he had met and become friends with during the defence of Sebastopol.5 He later did describe it, though, when he was writing Anna Karenina: the novel’s most lyrical passages are devoted to the ecstasies of scything rather than the blossoming of romance. With the return of autumn Tolstoy went hunting as usual, mostly for woodcock and hare, but the following year he shot two wolves while on an expedition with friends.6
When he was engaged in physical pursuits, Tolstoy could stave off the dark thoughts that threatened to encroach on him during what he called the ‘dead time’ between writing projects.7 It was a time of terrible uncertainty, he wrote in the first letter he sent to the Petersburg-based critic and philosopher Nikolay Strakhov, who was to become one of his closest friends and confidants.8 A priest’s son from the provinces, and a man of formidable intellect, Strakhov had spent the earlier part of his career teaching mathematics and natural science, but was now employed at the St Petersburg Public Library, where he remained until his retirement in 1885.9 He and Tolstoy, whom he idolised, were exactly the same age. Strakhov had been the first to recognise the magnitude of Tolstoy’s achievement in the three review articles he had written about War and Peace. After the last of them was published in the new Slavophile journal The Dawn in January 1870,10 he wrote to Tolstoy to invite him to become a contributor. Tolstoy declined, explaining that he was in an awful state, one minute conceiving wildly ambitious plans and the next succumbing to self-doubt. Perhaps this was the necessary prelude to a period of happy, self-confident work like the one which had just ended, he conceded, but perhaps it meant that was never going to write anything ever again.11