The history of the 1860s in Tolstoy’s literary biography is very largely the history of writing, re-writing and publishing War and Peace. By the middle of the decade, with the appearance of the first collected edition of his works in four volumes, he felt himself to be at the height of his powers as a writer and took a condescending attitude to work which was not ‘creative’, in marked contrast to the previous few years when ‘useful’ activity took pride of place, and writing was subordinated to teaching and farming. During the 1860s he seldom left his country estate except for reasons connected with his novel – the need to consult books and archives in Moscow, or to visit the site of the famous Battle of Borodino and talk to survivors. In the course of the decade four children were born to the Tolstoys, and life at Yasnaya Polyana was a ceaseless round of activity for both husband and wife. Writing apart, there were routine affairs of the estate to attend to: pig-farming, horse-breeding and harvesting the various crops. A lover of trees, Tolstoy planted a birch wood which was later to become very valuable. He acquired a passion for bee-keeping. He dabbled briefly with sculpture and continued to play the piano. And of course he read widely and discussed his work with poets, philosophers and historians, as well as with his wife whose opinion he greatly valued. One event which stands out in this period is his unsuccessful defence before a military court of a private soldier who had been charged with striking an officer. The man was found guilty and executed, and the unhappy experience served to strengthen Tolstoy’s growing hostility to the government’s military and judicial institutions, which reached its literary climax many years later in Resurrection.
War and Peace was completed in 1869 and, not surprisingly, Tolstoy told his poet friend Fet that the hours seemed dead after his prolonged labours of six years. But Tolstoy was incapable of relaxing for long, and he soon began to embark on an extensive programme of reading, while slowly rediscovering at the same time his vocation, as he thought, to teach children and to write for them. He studied in earnest the language and literature of classical Greece, particularly Homer, Xenophon and Herodotus. He re-read the plays of Molière, Goethe and Shakespeare and the classics of the Russian stage. He applied his mind enthusiastically to Schopenhauer, Kant and Pascal. Despite a temporary revulsion from fiction, especially his own, he resumed work on The Decembrists, long since laid aside, and began a historical novel about the life and times of Peter the Great. His list of books which made the deepest impression on him during the years 1863 to 1878 included not only the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Anabasis and the Russian byliny, but also Les Misérables and the novels of Trollope, George Eliot and Mrs Ward. His main efforts, however, in 1871 and 1872 were concentrated on writing his Primer for peasant children. Not only did he write many stories himself, whose narrative interest, brevity and simplicity were calculated to make a direct moral appeal; he also translated and adapted fables and folk-tales from Greek, Jewish, Oriental and Arabic sources, compiled a section on arithmetic and provided passages for reading from the natural sciences, the Russian chronicles and the Lives of the Saints. Among his own compositions for the Primer were A Captive in the Caucasus and God Sees the Truth but Waits, which he was later to value more highly than all the rest of his fiction. In 1873 he returned to belles-lettres and began work on what he insisted on calling his first ‘novel’ – Anna Karenina – the final instalment of which was published in 1877.
The main events in Tolstoy’s life during the 1870s were his visits to the Bashkir province of Samara, first to recover from illness, and later to spend summer holidays with his family on an estate he had bought there. He gave widespread publicity to the serious famine in the Samara province in the summer of 1873 by writing to the newspapers and setting up a Famine Relief Fund. In the following year he lectured on his educational theories in Moscow and wrote an article on the subject. As he neared the end of his work on Anna Karenina and Levin’s spiritual crisis, he became increasingly preoccupied with Christianity and the Orthodox faith, and for a while he resumed his long-abandoned practice of going to church. He sought and achieved a reconciliation with Turgenev, visited the most important Russian monasteries and had numerous conversations on religious matters with monks and laymen. In 1879 he began writing A Confession which, although completed in 1882, was not allowed to be published in Russia. It is the best introduction to the spiritual struggle he was to wage for the remaining thirty years of his life and in the words of a distinguished critic ‘is one of the greatest and most lasting expressions of the human soul in the presence of the eternal mysteries of life and death’. For the next few years he published no more fiction, but wrote A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and A Translation and Harmony of the Four Gospels, both of which, for censorship reasons, first appeared abroad, and his comprehensive statement of faith What I Believe.
In the course of the 1870s six more children were born to the Tolstoys of whom two died in infancy. Their tenth child was born in 1879, but by then their marriage was already showing signs of strain which were to be seriously aggravated in the next decade, when Tolstoy made his first attempt to leave home. Two more children followed in the early 1880s, the second being his daughter Alexandra, who died in America as recently as 1979.
In 1881 the Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. Tolstoy wrote to the new Tsar, asking him to pardon his father’s murderers, but to no effect. In 1882 he took part in a three-day Moscow census and made his acquaintance at first hand with the Moscow slums. His article On the Moscow Census was published the same year, when he also began work on the social treatise What Then Must We Do?, which grew out of the same experiences of urban squalor and destitution. In 1884 some fragments of The Decembrists were published; in 1885 several popular tales including the well-known Where Love is, God is, and in 1886 the powerful and harrowing story The Death of Ivan Ilich, with its strikingly modern, existentialist flavour.
In 1882 Tolstoy was persuaded reluctantly to move to Moscow for the sake of the children’s education and after first renting accommodation near the Arbat, he eventually purchased a large wooden house with an attractive garden in a quiet part of the town near the Moscow river. For most of the rest of his life the family were to move backwards and forwards between their two homes, but it was always with a sense of relief that Tolstoy returned to the house where he was born (even though the main building itself had long been sold to meet his gambling debts). It was in Moscow in 1882 that Tolstoy began to study Hebrew, and it was there in the following year that he first met Vladimir Chertkov, a wealthy aristocrat, who had been profoundly influenced by Tolstoy’s religious and ethical ideas and who became the dominant figure in Tolstoy’s life after 1883. The friendship and cooperation between the two men led to the establishment of a publishing house, The Intermediary, to provide the people with edifying and morally improving literature at a nominal cost. In the course of the 1880s Tolstoy’s increasingly unorthodox beliefs became more rigid and resulted in his refusal to do jury service, his conversion (though not at first complete) to vegetarianism, his renunciation of blood sports and alcohol and his serious attempts (initially unsuccessful) to give up smoking. He also took up cobbling as a sign of his determination to live a simple and useful life, although from all accounts he never succeeded in mastering the craft.
The diaries for the period 1863–87 are disappointingly meagre, and it should be observed that the comparatively long entries for 1884 were written at a time when relations between Tolstoy and his wife were at their lowest ebb.