Читать книгу War and Peace: Original Version - Лев Толстой, Leo Tolstoy, Liev N. Tolstói - Страница 5

Ben Jonson is said to have criticized Shakespeare when told that ‘hee never blotted out line’, and Sir Walter Scott was similarly an author who wrote with extraordinary rapidity and accuracy. Leo Tolstoy, in contrast, regularly rewrote and restructured much of his work, on occasion spending years immersed in elaborate correction. It is not surprising, therefore, that War and Peace, the longest major Russian novel ever written, occupied the greater part of the decade 1863 to 1873. He had been mulling over the potential of an historical novel some years before that, but his earliest drafts for the book dating from 1863 show that it was then that he decided to write a work whose setting would be the dramatic events associated with Russia’s wars against Napoleon. Two years later he published the first section in the literary journal Russkii Vestnik under the title 1805, and the second entitled War appeared a year later in 1866.

Although Tolstoy’s prime concern lay with exploration of human character, he was fascinated by the grand drama of historical events. He had experienced war in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Crimea, and from a cheerfully unreflecting Russian patriot he became increasingly concerned to discover the underlying rationale of a phenomenon which perversely legitimated lying, spying, murder, cruelty, and rapine on a grand scale – vices which civil society is at pains to suppress. Conventional historians of the day recounted events in terms of grand strategy carried out by commanders executing complex manoeuvres, which proved successful or unsuccessful according to their talents and those of their adversaries. Tolstoy – who had known at first hand the smoke, din, fire, terror, and heady intoxication of battle – saw in contrast only the interplay of confusion, chance, and a multitude of disparate factors far beyond the capacity of individuals to control or even understand.

All this is well known: what is less so is the extent to which Tolstoy pursued painstaking researches as an historical novelist. His best biographer, the Englishman Aylmer Maude, suggested that War and Peace was not an historical novel in the true sense, since the age in which his story is set remained within the memory of his parents’ generation. But this is to do Tolstoy an injustice. His notes and correspondence illustrate the remarkable extent to which he sought to reconstruct the past, whether pacing the battlefield at Borodino or investigating recondite details ranging from the extent to which men still wore hair powder in 1805 to the fact that the copse in which Pierre Bezukhov and Dolokhov fought their duel was pine rather than birch.

One of Tolstoy’s major problems was that of establishing the precise nature of his genre. As he explained to Katkov, the editor of Russkii Vestnik, in January 1865: ‘the work is not a novel and is not a story, and cannot have the sort of plot whose interest ends with the dénouement.

I am writing this in order to ask you not to call my work a novel in the table of contents, or perhaps in the advertisement either. This is very important to me, and I particularly request it of you’.

Those sections which appeared in 1865 and 1866 were but the introduction to a much larger work, which by the end of 1866 he believed he had completed. Over the previous six months he had written 726 pages of manuscript, which he felt brought the work to a satisfactory conclusion. His pleasure in writing was intense, and as he explained later he ‘generally enjoyed good spirits’, and on days when his work had gone well, he would gleefully announce that he had left ‘a bit of my life in the inkstand’.

It is this version which comprises the present work, which was first made available to the Russian general reader seven years ago, and is here presented for the first time in English. The title Tolstoy proposed was All’s Well That Ends Well, from which it may be correctly inferred that it had a happy ending. There can be no doubt that he intended this version to be published, for which he engaged as illustrator a talented artist named Nikolai Sergeievich Bashilov. Tolstoy and Bashilov enjoyed a close and constructive collaboration. Thus when the author explained that he had based the character of Natasha in large part on his sister-in-law Tatiana, the artist’s task was the easier since he was her uncle. Sadly, Bashilov’s increasing illness made it ever harder for him to meet insistent deadlines imposed by the author and publisher, and at the end of 1870 he died while undergoing a health cure in the Tyrol. Consequently the early editions of the novel remain unillustrated, and it was not until 1893 that an able successor to Bashilov was found in the form of Leonid Pasternak, father of the novelist Boris.

War and Peace ‘as we know it’ was published in six volumes in 1868–69. By that time Tolstoy had extensively revised All’s Well That Ends Well, radically altering its conclusion and carrying the story forward in part as a reminder that life does not come to a gratifying halt with marriage. Two years later he wrote disparagingly: ‘I’ve stopped writing, and will never again write verbose nonsense like War and Peace. I’m guilty, but I swear I’ll never do it again’. However he had not reached the end of his creative activity, and in 1873 set about further extensive restructuring. ‘I’ve started to prepare a second edition of War and Peace and to strike out what is superfluous – some things need to be struck out altogether, others to be removed and printed separately’, he wrote to a literary friend in March. ‘And if you can remember, remind me of what is bad. I’m afraid to touch it, because there is so much that is bad in my eyes that I would want to write it again after refurbishing it’.

Even this was not the end of the story, for when his wife came to issue a fresh collected edition of his works in 1886 it was the 1868–69 version that she chose. Whether this was Tolstoy’s choice remains unknown, but he can scarcely have disapproved. This illustrates the extent to which he envisaged his creation as a living entity subject to continual modification, and confirms the desirability of making public the first version he completed. Whether the final ‘canonical’ edition represents an improvement must be left to readers to judge, and the present publication at last provides means of effecting the comparison.

Those who have never read War and Peace will be able to enjoy experiencing Tolstoy’s first heady production of that wonderful work, and those who have will undergo the stimulating experience of being able to compare it with its predecessor. Apart from the truncated conclusion, attentive readers will note many differences of detail and emphasis. My own interest was particularly aroused by subtle variations in the treatment of Dolokhov, the bold and on occasion cruel lover of Pierre’s faithless wife Hélène. Based on Tolstoy’s cousin, the noted duellist and adventurer Feodor Ivanovich Tolstoy, whose larger-than-life personality clearly fascinated the novelist, he erupts as another fictional counterpart into the marvellous short story ‘Two Hussars’, where in the space of twenty-four hours he turns upside down the sleepy life of a provincial town. The writer was fortunate in possessing a family and friends preeminently adaptable to the most exotic of fictive requirements.

As he wrote to his cousin Alexandra, a lady in waiting to the Empress, during the writing of All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘you possess that Tolstoyan wildness that’s common to us all. Not for nothing did Feodor Ivanovich have himself tattooed’. His words might have as aptly been applied to the larger-than-life author himself.

Nikolai Tolstoy, 2007