War and Peace Notes
Tolstoy’s Biography and Genesis of War and Peace
Biography
Count Lev Niholayevich Tolstoy was born August 28, 1828 at Yasnaya Polyanya, the estate of his mother’s family, the Volkonskys, 130 miles southwest of Moscow.
It can be argued that Tolstoy is the highest ranking aristocrat to ever become a major literary figure. He could trace his ancesters back to 1353, and, because of the custom of intermarriage among the Russian aristocracy, Tolstoy could claim kinship with nearly every family of social consequence in Russia. The Russian social hierarchy at the time of T’s birth resembles an enormous feudal pyramid. Power is in the hands of the nobility, who alone could attend university, hold government positions, dictate social policies. They were supported by a vast slave system. The serfs would not be emancipated until 1861.
Tolstoy’s grandfather, Nikolay Volkonsky, was the model for Old Prince Bulkonsky in W&P, an 18th-century Enlightenment figure, who like Tolstoy’s character oversaw the education of his daughter, Marya, in geometry and physics. T’s father had been in the Russian army during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, had been captured by the French and was not released until the Russians entered Paris in March, 1814. T’s father married Marya Volkonski in 1822. [Note that the names of T’s mother and father, Marya and Nicholai, become important characters in W&P. Buried in the huge mass of the novel, therefore, is the suggestion that the coming together of Princess Mary and Nicholai Rostov enacts the marriage of T’s own parents and subsequent the birth of the author, in which he is contemplating the mystery of his own existence.] T’s mother gave birth to four sons, of whom Leo was the youngest. She died in 1830, after giving birth to a daughter when T was only two years old. T. could not remember what his mother looked like and had nothing but a cameo of her from childhood to recall her features. [Much psychological analysis has been given to T’s search for his mother as one of the motivating factors in his writing and philosophizing.]
The Tolstoy children were raised, following the death of T’s father when the author was eight, by their paternal grandmother and two aunts. T’s was an idealized childhood whose disruption by his father’s death would fuel T’s philosophical discontent and struggles to reclaim contentment. A sensitive child, Leo was given the nickname, “Leo Cry-Baby.” The four brothers formed a secret society that they called the Ant Brotherhood, in which T’s brother Nikolay claimed he had recorded the secrets of the universe, the source of ultimate happiness, on a little green stick that he buried somewhere on the estate. It can be argued that T. never stopped searching for that little green stick, finally becoming that stick, buried himself at Yasnaya Polyana. T’s grandmother would die when he was nine, so before he was ten-years-old death had taken his parents and grandmother. The persistence of death would become the fundamental question to haunt T’s for the rest of his life.
In 1841, the Tolstoy children were taken to Kazan to live with their aunt. T. would enter Kazan University in 1844, originally in the school of Oriental languages in order to pursue a diplomatic career. Later he switched to law. A capable but easily distracted student, T., with his own carriage and personal servant to carry his books for him to class, indulged in the dissolute life available to the young aristocratic males, including the brothels. There, the fourteen-year-old Leo was introduced to sex by his brother Sergei. T’s student years reveal the dominant dichotomy that would perplex him thoughout his life: a passionate indulgence in the sensual joys of life and a subsequent revulsion of the physical and a recognition of the equally strong claims of the spiritual. T. writing life began with his diary begun while he was recovery from a syphallitic cure. It is from his relentless study of himself that one can argue his career as a novelist truly began.
For the next 20 years, T. would wage an intense battle against his appetites in search of a mission in life. He left the university before earning a degree, likely to avoid failing his exams, to live for a time on his Yasnaya Polyana estate, which he inherited (Inheritance=estate of +4,000 acres & 330 “souls” or serfs, income of 4,000 rubles a year (ruble=$2.00), so how rich was Tolstoy? Considerably poorer than most in his class: if we use Pierre’s inheritance of 40,000 serfs and “millions” in rubles as the mark of one of the richest men in Russia, T. lagged far behind. Gentry family usually had 500 serfs; less than 100 would be considered impoverished. T. therefore “shabby genteel”?)
T altenated between his country estate and the fashionable life of Moscow and Petersburg before joining his brother’s regiment fighting the border tribes on the Caucasus. [Note that the same tribes are currently being battled in Russia today in Chechniya.] The Caucasus for a Russia is like the West and the Rockies for an American: breathtaking geography and a population more atuned to the natural. The life of the peasants fascinated T. who began to juxtapose in his mind their instinctive, passionate direct, unreflective response to existence with his own detached, intellectualized, superficial existence as a fashionable aristocrat. T. took a commission as an artillery officer and participated in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. T’s attitude to war and his remarkable ability to capture battlefield experiences comes from the years he spent there. It was during his army service that he was afflicted with a destructive gambling addiction that would cost him the main house at Yasnaya Polyana which was sold off to pay his debts, and when he began to write. His first books, interestingly from the perspective of W&P were his autobiographical recollection of his childhood and his brutally honest depictions of the fighting, i.e., peace and war. First book, Childhood, appeared in 1852, followed by Boyhood, and the Sevastopol Sketches. The works announced an original and powerful new force in Russian literature. Praised for freshness and directness, its eye for physical detail that animated experience.
Following the war, T. returned to Moscow and Petersburg where he mixed in literary circles and was taken up by Turgenev. Painfully shy in social situations, T. masked his insecurities in trying to dominant conversations with crude and outlandish opinions. He proved to be a very difficult companion, prone to take offense. In Kazan he was known as “the bear”; Turgenev called him “the troglodyte.” He quarreled with Turgenev and almost fought him in a duel. Cf. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway. T. on himself during this period: “Yes, I am not modest; and that is why I am proud at heart, but bashful and shy in society. Why am I? One of four sons of a retired lieutenant-colonel, left an orphan at seven years of age in the care of women and strangers, having received neither a social nor an academic education and becoming my own master at the age of seventeen, without a large fortune, without any social position, without above all, my principles.” T as outsider, a minority of a minority.
In 1857 T. travelled in western Europe where he witnessed an execution in Paris and saw Dickens give a reading from his works in London (Dickens read from Oliver Twist, but T. remembered it years later as a lecture on education, perhaps a reflection that T’s English was not up to the challenge.). Back at Yasnaya Polyana he devoted much time to establishing a school for peasant children.
When he was 34, T. fell in love with Sofya Andreevna Behrs, a spirited girl of 18, and they were married in 1862, the start of one of the most documented and tormented marriages of all time. Tolstoy’s early married life was happy and its appeal plays a dominant role in W&P as family life serves as the moral center for the entire novel. By his mid-30s then, T. had experienced everything he would need to create the grand panorama of life in W&P. Origins of W&P rests on two fundamental realities of T’s personal life=participation in the Crimean War + happy early days of his married life in Yasnaya Polyana.
Origin of War & Peace
T’s first conception of the novel he wanted to write after treating a fictional version of his background in Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, the depiction of war in The Sevastopol Sketches, and a fictional treatment of life in the Caucasus in The Cossacks (1863) was a “Novel about a Russian landowner,” the relationship between a landlord and his serfs that the imminent emancipation in 1861 had made a crucial topic. Political/ideological base that would be broadened to encompass the key moments of Russian history in which the essential qualities of the Russian character are defined.
By 1863, when T. sat down to begin a new work, emancipation had been in effect for two years and the consequences were not as drastic as anticipated. Tolstoy also shifted view from negative to affirmation of the world based on his experiences as a husband and father.
T. also in 1863 gave lessons in history to peasant children. The students did not respond to ancient events, so T. took up the Napoleonic Wars and tried to gain their interest by suffusing and transforming the facts by emotions. It has been speculated that T. attempt to teach history to the children was the true genesis for W&P as he began to meditate on the way the past has been abused by most historians. (T=History is nothing but a collection of fables, unnecessary trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names.). Underlying motive of W&P=contrast between the reality of history as people experience it and the unreal picture presented by historians.
T. began to consider writing a new kind of history that would consider all that historians left out of the history books in their emphasis on the great figures and events. T. would deal with the unwritten historical forces that he was convinced truly shaped an era.
T. had earlier considered a subject for a novel the Decembrist Revolution of 1825 that was for T. a watershed in Russian history: the first major rebellion against Russia’s autocratic rule that was led by noblemen, and gentry class: officers who had battled the French and been exposed to liberal ideas of reform after chasing Napoleon back to Paris. Rebellion short-lived and brutally put down with the organizers exiled to Siberia. Subject to be the part his own class played in the national life of the times. T. began to conceive a novel treating one of the Decembrists who has returned from exile in the 1850s as a lens to consider both the past and present. Protagonist=Petr Labazov, called Pierre who returns after 30 years in exile with his wife Natasha and their two grown children. “My Decembrist,” T. wrote in 1861, “is to be an enthusiast, a mystic, a Christian, returning to Russia in 1856 with his wife and his son and daughter, and applying his sterna and somewhat idealized view to the new Russia.”
Tolstoy in a draft intro to W&P (Norton, p. 1088), written in 1864:
In 1856 I started writing a tale with a certain direction, the hero of which was to be a Decembrist returning with his family to Russia. Without intending to do so, I moved from the present time to the year 1825, a period of error and unhappiness for my hero, and I abandoned what I had begun. But even in the year 1825 my hero was already a grown-up family man. In order to understand him, I had to move once again back to his youth, and his youth coincided with the period of 1812, so glorious for Russia. I abandoned for a second time what I had started and began to write about the year 1812. The odors and sounds of that time are still dear to us but also so remote from us that now we can think about them calmly. But for a third time I abandoned what I had started, not because it was necessary for me to describe the earliest days of my hero’s youth but, on the contrary, because among the half-historical, half-social, half-invented great characters of the great era, the personality of my hero was being pushed into the background, and the foreground was being occupied, with an equal interest for me, by old and young people and by men and women of that time. For the third time I turned back to an earlier period, guided by feelings that may seem strange to the majority of readers but which, I hope, will be understood by those whose opinions I value. I did it guided by a feeling similar to shyness that I cannot define in a single word. I was ashamed to write about our triumph in the struggle against Bonaparte’s France without having described our failures and our shames. Who has not experienced that concealed but unpleasant feeling of embarrassment and distrust when reading patriotic words about the year 1812? If the cause of our victory was not accidental, but lay in the essence of the character of the Russian people and army, then that character must be expressed still more clearly in the period of failures and defeat.
So returning from 1856 to 1805, I set out to guide not one but many of my heroines and heroes from that time onward through the historical events of 1805, 1807, 1812, 1825, and 1856. I do not foresee the outcome of these characters’ relationships in any one of those periods. No matter how much I tried to begin creating novel plots and denouements, I became convinced that this is not within my power, and I decided, in describing these characters, to yield to my habits and strengths. I tried only to give each part of my work its own independent source of interest.
Note that in 1864, T. still conceived a grander chronicle to cover the period 1805-1856. Note how his concern for his hero grows to his conceptions of multiple heroes and heroines, multiple historical figures. 1812 turned out to be in T’s mind not the starting point of his story but the climax. Then he needed the context of the previous Russian defeat in 1805. Conception grew in T’s mind from a satiric view of contemporary life from the perspective of a former revolutionary, the story of one man and his family, into a national epic to uncover the “essence of the character of the Russian people.”