War and Peace
For all his concerns about marrying, it is only once he takes Sophia as his wife that Tolstoy capitalises on his potential as a writer, beginning War and Peace in earnest in 1863. Perhaps his marriage delivers him psychological stability – indeed, he is so absorbed in the ambitious project that he stops keeping a diary of his own internal musings for more than a decade. Sophia gives him the freedom to concentrate, first taking over the management of the household, then the estate, then their finances and the education of the children. She is vigilant about him not being disturbed when he is in his ground floor study and takes on the substantial task of making clean copies of his work, which is often full of almost indecipherable corrections and scribbles. She is pregnant for most of the time but adores the work. (Sophia’s son Ilya said much later that she recopied the weighty tome seven times.)Tolstoy was originally going to write a novel about the Decembrists, a group of army officers from the aristocracy who, dreaming of a more democratic society, unsuccessfully tried to rise against the autocracy in 1825. They thought Russia was backward compared to Europe because of the deadening hand of the crown and this motivated their actions. Five of the ringleaders were hung and the remainder sent to Siberia. Tolstoy realises he has to go back further to understand the material: not just to France’s invasion of Russia in 1812, the burning of Moscow, and Napoleon’s subsequent retreat and defeat, but also to when the two countries are growling at each other at the turn of the century.
War and Peace is an extraordinary epic. It is a fictional account of daily life within five aristocratic families, set against Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Many of the 580 characters are heavily based on people in Tolstoy’s own life, others are national leaders and real-life officers, others are entirely fictional. Napoleon is judged very harshly in the book, in part because of his arrogant belief that he is in control of the military action; one of the leading characters, Pierre Bezukhov, seems to have a much better grasp of the truth of things when he is wandering the battlefields, despite his confusion. The novel represents the first time Tolstoy has turned to politics for his themes, rather than internally. The homecoming of the Decembrists in 1856 spurs on his interest in the subject.
The first part is sold to The Russian Herald for 25 roubles per printed page and appears in 1865 under the title 1805 (p237, Tolstoy, Wilson). The response is mixed. Other parts follow in the next year. Sophia pushes Tolstoy into holding back serialising the story and instead publishing the whole tome in six volumes. A deal is struck with a publisher and printer for 4800 copies, with Tolstoy advancing 4500 roubles to the printer in instalments as his share of the costs. The series sells for eight roubles, with the publisher getting 10 percent, the book sellers 20 per cent and Tolstoy the rest (p309, Tolstoy, Troyat). The whole novel takes six years to write and the last volume is on the shelves in 1869. The title was taken from a book about the philosophy of war by the French philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon, whom Tolstoy met in Brussels in 1861.
Anna Karenina
The body of work
Literary influences