War and Peace: Original Version. Лев Толстой

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СКАЧАТЬ whom there await all the greater pleasures of the longer text). Many familiar scenes – the Rostovs’ banquet, the hunt, the dancing, for example – are already here, although they will later be placed in settings of altogether grander, more universal proportions. Devotees and scholars (above all those unable to read the original Russian) will value this version meanwhile for the rare insights it offers into the ‘creative laboratory’ of a consummate artist. Close comparison will point to the scattered phrases in the one that blossom into major themes and characters (such as Platon Karataev) in the other. Or reveal how elements in the early draft are cast aside, redeployed, or amplified in the ruthless process of reshaping, refining and rearranging that duly occurs on the large scale and the small. Sympathies switch from one figure to another; attributes migrate; names are reassigned; a single character splits into two, while several meld into one; new faces enter, others depart. And while the storyline takes significant new turns, so the weave of its telling grows increasingly intricate. The creation of War and Peace, as R.F. Christian and K. Feuer have shown, was dynamic in process – there was no exact plan, it evolved in the writing: Tolstoy’s unfolding philosophy would shape his narrative as much as the narrative would shape his philosophy. After several false starts (which would all leave their traces), new ideas would be tried out continually as each draft was refashioned. The difference in treatment is most apparent in the endings, where the hastily outlined ‘happy’ ending of this first full version gives way to closing scenes that subtly recapitulate the grand themes which resonate throughout the mature work – life and death, peace and war, and so on – and suggest continuity rather than conclusion. This early draft, then, catches the work at a crucial stage in its development, just when Tolstoy was poised to expand his core text into what would finally emerge as the War and Peace that we know.

      In accordance with the convention of the day Tolstoy, even before his draft was complete, had already submitted the opening parts for publication, and three instalments, under the overall title 1805, appeared in 1865 and 1866 in the journal Russkii Vestnik (Russian Herald). However, conceiving his work as a single entity, Tolstoy abandoned serial publication. The end of his first full draft was reached in December 1866, but dissatisfied with its scope, Tolstoy withdrew to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, took a break over the new year holidays and then embarked on three further years of intense research and rewriting, during which he would gradually transform what was now more or less a family chronicle (and which he considered calling All’s Well That Ends Well) into the monumental epic that would be entitled War and Peace. Over the next few years Tolstoy travelled to battle sites, devoured memoirs and histories, and talked with old soldiers who could still recall the events of their youth. His finished text, amplified and elaborated, would be almost twice its original length.

      Although the full-length version was initially published in six volumes between 1868 and 1869, it would undergo yet further extensive revision before appearing in 1873 as the single, four-volume set that Tolstoy had originally envisaged. This second edition of 1873 is regarded by some as the most authoritative. However, Tolstoy continued to make changes in subsequent editions, adjusting details of style, translating the many passages of French into Russian, rearranging the text and removing the more intrusive of his philosophical digressions to a separate section at the end. The divisions into volumes, parts and chapters differed with each edition. Moreover, by the 1880s, Tolstoy had lost interest in the publication of his own work and handed his copyrights to his wife, Sofia, and she failed to ensure that earlier amendments were incorporated into later editions. Thus among the six editions that came out between 1868 and 1886, no two are alike, and a consensus has never been reached as to which of them is best or definitive.

      Further complications dog the question of an ‘authorised’ version. Tolstoy’s wife had copied the entire work out seven times in the course of its composition, but along the way had acted as editor, making her own changes, and censoring and suppressing whatever could be deemed offensive or dangerous. Others had a hand in this too, but – odd as it may seem today – this was done with Tolstoy’s agreement.

      His attitude should be placed in context. In Russia, because political and philosophical ideas were denied open public debate, they found expression in literature and poetry, and while this resulted in a uniquely rich body of work freighted with powerful allusions, the poets and writers themselves were turned into potential subversives with state censors routinely scrutinising their every word. Hence we find Tolstoy telling his editor P.I. Bartenev on 6 December 1867: ‘I give you carte blanche to cross out everything that strikes you as dangerous. You know better than I what is possible and what is not.’ And again on 8 December 1867: ‘… I am beginning to fear that censorship or the printers could give us nasty trouble. I place my only hope about these two matters in you.’

      Tolstoy’s very earliest attempts, during the 1850s, at what would become War and Peace were clearly engaged with the politics of his own day. His initial central figure was an ageing Decembrist revolutionary (an older Pierre Bezukhov) returning to Russia from exile after serving his sentence for participating in the unsuccessful uprising of December 1825 (from which came the name ‘Decembrist’). To portray him in depth, however, Tolstoy saw that he needed to understand his hero’s youth. This had been shaped by the year 1812, when Russia had rejoiced at the disaster of Napoleon’s failed invasion. Yet that year could not be separated from 1807 and 1805, when it had been Russia’s turn to be shamed by Napoleon, this time in direct military defeat. Thus Tolstoy’s focus had kept pushing ever further back from his own time to that of his grandfather, and in the end his narrative would deal with those early years alone. What came to concern him were not historic events in themselves so much as the continuity, the cyclicity, of ideas: although centred on Russia’s confrontation with Napoleon, the book’s main sweep of action is framed by the unseen French revolution which has taken place before the story opens and the Decembrist uprising which will take place after it ends. Both are signalled in the ardent aspirations of the young: first in Pierre who has returned from post-revolutionary Paris, then in Andrei’s young son, who eagerly eavesdrops on political talk that heralds the forthcoming change. Tolstoy’s contemporaries (as well as the censors) could easily catch these implications and read this apparent work of history as a comment on their own times. In his great transformation, Tolstoy’s point of departure had become his point of arrival.

      The more he researched the intricacies of the past, the more Tolstoy came to distrust accepted histories with their false view of great men and great events. As his perspective lengthened, so it widened from the life of a single individual to encompass the interwoven fates of whole families and the destinies of nations. The scope likewise broadened beyond his own social class of princes and emperors to include all Russian society down to the peasants and common soldiers, whom he would duly regard as the bedrock of wisdom and patriotism. With his mass of personal evidence and detailed reminiscence, Tolstoy blended fact with fiction until the two could barely be told apart: mythic figures from history were brought to life as convincingly as his imaginary inventions, all invested alike with well documented words and actions and animated by incisive psychological insight. Tolstoy taught lessons in reading as well as in life: what looks significant here will be insignificant there, what seemed trivial before seems important after. In the teeming tumult of life, in the unstoppable onrush of events no one can ever know or determine his or her place or fate.

      These philosophical reflections were shaped into essays and discursive digressions that were initially incorporated into the flow of the narrative (but were later amended or removed). Yet War and Peace is more than just story and lecture: the texture itself embodies the philosophy that it expounds. Keen to free himself from novelistic constraints, Tolstoy turned his creation into what Henry James would disparage as a ‘loose baggy monster’, a vast web of the ‘accidental and the arbitrary’. But apparent inconsistencies turn out to be continuous threads that form and reform in a stream of flux and inconsequence: the lives of central figures are revealed at significant moments in sharply observed episodes; bystanders are briefly caught by the limelight, then vanish for ever in the flow of the text. Even the central characters flourish and fade as we turn the pages. The reader thus turns spectator, immersed, watching, puzzling, remembering, the process of reading akin to living itself. What strikes us as strange – some unexplained personage here, СКАЧАТЬ