War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [1]
The years from 1857 to 1862 were a time of restlessness and seeking for Tolstoy. He had left Petersburg, disgusted by the literary life there. He made two trips abroad. During the first, in 1857, he forced himself to witness a public execution in Paris, and the sight shook him so deeply that he vowed he would never again serve any government. At the beginning of the second trip, in September 1860, he visited his beloved brother Nikolai, who was dying of tuberculosis in the southern French town of Hyères. The death and burial of his brother were, he said, “the strongest impression in my life.” In 1861 he returned to Yasnaya Polyana, where he began work on a novel about the Decembrists, a group of young aristocrats and officers who, at the death of the emperor Alexander I in December 1825, rose up in the name of constitutional monarchy, were arrested and either executed or sent to Siberia. This novel would eventually become War and Peace.
Tolstoy himself later described the process of its transformation. At first he had wanted to write about a Decembrist on his return from Siberia in 1856, when the exiles were pardoned by Alexander II. In preparation for that, he went back to 1825, the year of the uprising itself, and from there to the childhood and youth of his hero and the others who took part in it. That brought him to the war of 1812, with which he became fascinated, and since those events were directly linked to events of 1805, it was there that he decided to begin. The original title, in the serial publication of the book, was The Year 1805; it was only in 1867 that he changed it to War and Peace, which he may have borrowed from a work by the French socialist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whom he had met in Brussels during his second trip abroad. All that remains of the Decembrists in the final version are some slight hints about the futures of Pierre Bezukhov and of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s son Nikolenka.
The book grew organically as Tolstoy worked on it. In 1865, partly under the influence of Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, he revised the battle scenes he had already written and added new ones, including one of the most important, the description of the battle of Schöngraben. Coming across a collection of Masonic texts in the library of the Rumyantsev Museum, he became interested and decided to make Pierre Bezukhov a Mason. He studied the people of Moscow at the theaters, in the clubs, in the streets, looking for the types he needed. A great many of his fictional characters, if not all of them, had real-life models. The old Prince Bolkonsky and the old Count Rostov were drawn from Tolstoy’s grandfathers, Nikolai Rostov and Princess Marya from his parents, Sonya from one of his aunts. The Rostov estate, Otradnoe, is a reflection of Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy spent two days on the battlefield of Borodino and made his own map of the disposition of forces, correcting the maps of the historians. He collected a whole library of materials on the Napoleonic wars, many bits of which also found their way into the fabric of the book. His memory for historical minutiae was prodigious. But above all, there is the profusion and precision of sensual detail that brings the world of War and Peace so vividly to life. In his autobiographical sketch, People and Situations (1956), Pasternak wrote of Tolstoy:
All his life, at every moment, he possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outline, as we see only on rare occasions, in childhood, or on the crest of an all-renewing happiness, or in the triumph of a great spiritual victory.
To see things like that, our eye must be directed