Old debts still plagued him. Prior to his marriage he had lost a considerable sum of money at the gambling table and had to borrow 1,000 roubles as an advance for The Cossacks from Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the magazine Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik). At the end of the 1850s many authors disillusioned with Sovremennik had switched their allegiance to Katkov. A once moderate conservative who was gradually turning into a morbid reactionary, Katkov was no less successful and efficient as a publisher than Nekrasov. Katkov provided an alternative to radical journalism and was supported by the authorities. He gladly made the loan to Tolstoy and kept rejecting all attempts by the repentant writer to repay the debt in money. Having settled in Yasnaya Polyana with a young wife, Tolstoy rushed to complete an overdue story.
The most difficult task facing him was to decide a natural outcome of Olenin’s longing for Marianna. After numerous changes, Tolstoy came to a decision. Irritated by the constant womanizing of her suitor Lukashka, the bravest Cossack in the settlement, Marianna finally gives her consent to Olenin. After a quarrel with his bride, Lukashka loses his usual self-control and is mortally wounded by the Chechens. Full of remorse and hatred towards her unwanted admirer, Marianna throws Olenin out and he is left with no option but to go back to St Petersburg.
Katkov published The Cossacks immediately. The next issue of Russian Herald contained ‘Polikushka’, a short story mostly written abroad. The reading public welcomed the return of a favourite author. The critics admired The Cossacks and praised the vivid, nearly ethnographic portrayal of life in the settlement and the characters of Marianna, Lukashka and especially Yeroshka, the charismatic drunken old braggart and guardian of Cossack common law, lore and wisdom. Fet believed that The Cossacks was Tolstoy’s best work so far. Turgenev was equally ecstatic, though much less appreciative of Olenin’s spiritual quest. He recognized it as Tolstoy’s self-portrait, but felt no personal sympathy for the author. Still, Turgenev was happy to greet the return of a wayward son of Russian literature and thankful for the card loss that had compelled Tolstoy to pick up his pen again.
The only person who was dissatisfied was Tolstoy himself, as he wrote in his diary in January 1863: ‘Corrected the proofs of The Cossacks – it’s terribly weak. Probably for that reason the public will be pleased with it’ (Ds, p. 158). Though he had contemplated writing a sequel to the story if it were to be well received, Tolstoy never returned to The Cossacks, in spite of the public’s nearly universal enthusiasm. By adding a subtitle – A Caucasus Tale of 1852 – Tolstoy distanced himself from his narrative in time and placed it in the period preceding the Sebastopol stories. ‘Who is this person who wrote The Cossacks and “Polikushka”? And what is the use of discussing them?’ he wrote to Fet in early May 1863. ‘“Polikushka” is drivel on the first subject that comes into the head of a man who “wields a good pen”, but The Cossacks has some pith in it, though it is bad’ (Ls, I, p. 115). The ‘pith’ was Tolstoy’s passionate attempt to dissolve himself in a wild and natural environment. Describing Olenin’s fourteen-hour walks around the settlement, Tolstoy writes that no thought ever stirred in him during those strolls and he came home ‘morally fresh, strong and completely happy’ (CW, VI, p. 88).
In the same letter Tolstoy told Fet that he was working on the story of a horse known as ‘The Strider’. Most of it is told in the first person of the horse. Criticism of social conventions from a ‘natural’ point of view had been popular since the eighteenth century, and horses, with their proximity to humans, could serve as ideal observers of their habits. Nevertheless, ‘The Strider’ was not a satirical allegory. Instead it conveyed Tolstoy’s empathy with the plight of the animal and admiration for its calm acceptance of the order of life, decay and death. Tolstoy nearly completed the story, but did not publish it for more than twenty years until his wife rediscovered the manuscript in his papers. Work on ‘The Strider’ was halted when Tolstoy finally began writing his magnum opus.
Tolstoy drafted fifteen beginnings before he felt he could proceed. He was not yet sure of the plot, the names of the main characters, or the title of the book, but was certain that it was going to be a masterpiece. Never before, and arguably never after, was he so confident in himself. In October 1863 he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy:
I’ve never felt my intellectual powers, and even all my moral powers, so free and so capable of work. And I have work to do. This work is a novel of the 1810s and 1820s, which has been occupying me fully since the autumn . . . Now, I am a writer with all the strength of my soul, and I write and I think as I have never thought or written before. (Ls, I, p. 118)
Preparing the first chapters for publication, Tolstoy informed Fet, with his usual self-denigration, that the new book, although he ‘liked it more than his previous work, still seemed weak’, but could not resist adding that what was to follow would be ‘tremendous!!’ (Ls, I, p. 193).
Historians define the decade that started with the abolition of serfdom in 1861 as the period of Great Reforms. In order to deal with tens of millions of newly acquired subjects, the emperor introduced limited local self-government, in the form of zemstvos, elected assemblies that were responsible for schools and health care. The government granted new independence to the judiciary and introduced trial by jury for criminal cases. University enrolments were greatly increased. A relative relaxation of censorship increased freedom of the press. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions soared and their pages soon filled with ardent and highly partisan discussions. Writers wrote novels about the issues, a popular shorthand for the most pressing problems of the day. Never in its history had Russia experienced a period of such public excitement. Tolstoy as ever went against the current. Isolated in Yasnaya Polyana, he was imagining a heroic past, when nobles and peasants were tied by a bond and could understand each other, and at the same time trying to recreate it in his own estate in an entirely different epoch and social environment.
By the mid-1860s a story about the amnesty of the rebellious aristocratic rebels had become obsolete. Tolstoy went back in time to explain the self-sacrifice of his heroes. The Decembrists started to morph into War and Peace. Common wisdom connected the birth of the Decembrist conspiracies with the glorious campaign that had taken the victorious Russian army to Paris in 1814. Young officers had liberated Europe and, in the process, had exposed themselves to European liberties. For Tolstoy, who stopped his narrative at the expulsion of French troops from Russia, the spirit of emancipation did not originate abroad, but emerged from the immediate contact between nobles and the Russian soldiery, mostly comprised of peasants in uniform.
Unlike Olenin in The Cossacks, Pierre Bezukhov did not have to suppress the demands of his intellect to draw closer to the peasant Platon Karataev. Their conversations in French captivity became a spiritual revelation for an inquisitive aristocrat. Likewise, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky experienced a feeling of unity with the soldiers he led into battle at Borodino. Mortally wounded, he was deprived of the chance to join the Decembrist conspirators of 1825, but in the epilogue, his fourteen-year-old son Nikolenka has a prophetic dream in which he participates in the rebellion. Nikolenka wakes up in tears, assured that his father would be proud of him.