Sergei Tolstoy and Tatiana Bers at the time of their romance.
The catastrophe seemed to have broken these tortured relations, but in June 1865, having met Tanya in Yasnaya Polyana, Sergei once again fell under her charms and proposed, which was accepted. Marriages between in-laws were forbidden by the Orthodox Church, so the couple planned a secret wedding that could later be legalized with the help of Leo’s connections at court. These plans collapsed in less than two weeks. In spite of his proposal, Sergei was still not sure whom he should marry. He claimed that having seen Masha’s solitary prayer, he felt unable to leave his old partner, but also complained that Masha’s parents had blackmailed him by threatening to denounce his proposed marriage to Tanya as illegal. Both versions could have been true. Indignant and humiliated, Tanya released Sergei from his vows. Finally, she became repentant about the whole affair and ashamed of her role in it. More than a year after this, her health remained precarious.
Unable to return to Yasnaya Polyana, Tanya went to recover at the estate of Dmitry Dyakov, a man who had been a model of comme il faut behaviour and an object of homoerotic veneration for Tolstoy in his younger days. Dyakov also fell under the spell of Tanya’s charm. Once, in response to her desperate self-blame, he told her that, were he free, he would have immediately proposed to her. Dyakov’s wife died shortly afterwards, and he did as he had promised. Tolstoy strongly advised his sister-in-law to accept, probably hoping to keep her within his close circle of friends and relatives or in an attempt to bring actual life closer to the plot he devised, but Tanya chose Kuzminsky, who was still waiting for his chance. They married in August 1867. According to family legend, on their way to the church they encountered Sergei and Masha, also heading to their wedding.
A year earlier Tanya had sung before Fet and his wife at the Dyakovs’. Fet knew her story, knew that doctors had advised her against singing, as it was considered damaging to her lungs, and probably had in mind the suspected suicide of his own former love, Maria Lazich, also an excellent singer. Eleven years later, having again listened to Tatiana’s singing in Yasnaya Polyana, he recalled her earlier impressions in one of the most beautiful love poems in the Russian language:
You sang until the dawn, worn out to the point of tears, Now love means you, and you alone, no other love but you, And I then longed to live, my love, that all my living years, I could love you and embrace you and shed my tears for you.4
Tolstoy appreciated the poem, but not the feeling behind it, ‘Why does he want to embrace our Tanya, he is a married man?’ (Kuz, pp. 400–401), he asked, characteristically failing to discriminate between life and art.
Tolstoy ignored Tanya’s plea not to make her intimate life public. He needed the details he had witnessed as well as those she had confessed to him to achieve the verisimilitude he desired. He did not even bother to rename her first admirer. Tanya’s love, impatience, despair and repentance served as a model for the story of Natasha’s relations with Anatole Kuragin and Pierre’s reaction to her shame and sorrow. When, on the eve of publication in 1868, Kuzminsky found out that the illustrator had modelled the image of Natasha on his wife, he ordered his family to leave Moscow. He also wanted to sever ties with the Tolstoys, but Tanya refused, declaring that she owed ‘everything good and holy in herself to Levochka’ (Kuz, p. 444). She knew Tolstoy had created her as a person and her brilliantly written and perceptive, if not entirely reliable, memoirs show to what extent she had internalized the image of Natasha Rostova. Unfortunately the memoirs stop around the time of her marriage, though the Kuzminskys continued visiting Yasnaya Polyana for many years.
In his memoirs Tolstoy’s son Ilya confessed that he had often asked himself, ‘whether papa was in love with Aunt Tanya’, and finally became convinced that he was. Ilya rushes to explain that there was nothing impure in this love resembling a sort of ‘amitié amoureuse’,5 of which Tolstoy himself could have been unaware. Tolstoy’s wife, full of deep resentment towards her great husband, wrote in her late memoirs that his relations with his sister-in-law could have ended badly had it not been for her romance with Sergei. This is highly unlikely. For both Tolstoy and Tanya any sort of affair would have been more than unthinkable. At the same time Tolstoy, with his lifelong habit of introspection, could hardly be unaware of his feelings. War and Peace is arguably the longest and the most exquisite declaration of love ever written by any man to any woman. Tanya was present at the first reading of the opening chapters and wrote about her impressions in a letter to Polivanov, Sofia’s rejected suitor. Those listening, she told Polivanov, liked Pierre ‘less than all the others’, but she liked him ‘more than all the others’, because she ‘loved people like that’ (Kuz, p. 319). Clearly Tanya had understood the point.
The first two instalments of the novel appeared in the January and February 1865 issues of the Russian Herald under the title ‘1805’. It was clear to all that this title was bound to change and that the narrative would develop beyond that year. Tolstoy’s focus was not a set period, defined in the title, but the flow of time. These two instalments were followed a year later by three more, printed in the same issue as the first chapter of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. However, while Dostoevsky kept to the discipline and provided successive chapters until the end of the year, Tolstoy’s readers had to wait longer. Responding to readers’ interest, Tolstoy decided to switch from serial publication in a periodical to separate volumes: ‘1805’ was therefore republished in book form at the end of 1866. The first full draft of the novel was finished by the end of 1866, but then Tolstoy began revising or rather rewriting the text. It took another two years before four reworked volumes appeared in 1868, this time entitled War and Peace. The two final volumes completed the publication in 1869.
The narrative in War and Peace concludes in an open-ended way. In the epilogue, Pierre returns from St Petersburg, where he helps to launch a conspiratorial society, to enjoy marital bliss. The ordeals of the family seem to be over, yet every reader knew what awaited the characters in the near future. Months of captivity in the retreating French army, the Great Fire of Moscow and Count Rostov’s carriages full of wounded officers would pale into insignificance compared with the thirty years that Pierre would have to spend doing hard labour and as an exile in Siberia as a punishment for the Decembrist revolt in 1825, with Natasha sharing her husband’s hardships. History may have reached a lull that coincides with the last page of the novel, but it will return with a vengeance soon enough.
When preparing the first chapters for the Russian Herald, Tolstoy begged Fet for his thoughts: ‘I value your opinion, and that of a man whom I dislike all the more the older I get – Turgenev. He will understand’ (Ls, I, p. 193). Fet sent Tolstoy several letters full of glowing praise, complemented later by a poem in which he wrote that he ‘stood in holy awe before the elemental force’ of Tolstoy’s genius.6 Contrary to Tolstoy’s expectations, Turgenev at first failed to understand. He found ‘1805’ ‘positively bad, boring and unsuccessful’, and was especially irritated by Tolstoy’s ‘petty psychological observations’. He could not believe that the author ‘places this unfortunate product higher than The Cossacks!’ With the publication of new volumes, Turgenev gradually changed his opinion, but still could not forgive Tolstoy his ‘philosophizing’ and ‘Slavophilism’ (WP, pp. 1107–8).