Then came a third, an eighteen-year period which may be the least interesting of all (from my marriage to my spiritual re-birth) and which from a worldly point of view may be called moral: that is to say, that during those eighteen years I lived a correct, honest, family life, not indulging myself in any vices condemned by public opinion, but with interests wholly limited to selfish cares for my family, for the increase of our property, the acquisition of literary success, and all kinds of pleasure.
(In the one place he speaks of 'fifteen years,' and in the other of 'eighteen years'; but that is his way, and chronological exactitude is not the important matter here.)
After the Emancipation, in many parts of Russia the landlords had more or less serious difficulty with the peasants, among whom stories were rife to the effect that the Tsar intended to give them all the land, but had been deceived by the officials into only giving half; and, for a time, riots were not infrequent. There was no serious trouble of this sort on Tolstoy's estate; but his sister (whom I met at Yásnaya in 1902, long after her husband's death and when she, a nun, had been allowed out of her convent to visit her brother, after his very serious illness) told me that on one occasion the peasants refused to make the hay; and to save it from being lost, Tolstoy, his wife, the members of the family, and the masters from eleven neighbouring schools, all set to work with a will, and by their own strenuous exertions saved the crop before the weather changed.
On settling down to married life, Tolstoy formed the plan of writing a great novel, and the epoch he at first intended to deal with was that of the Constitutional conspiracy which came to a head on the accession of Nicholas I to the throne in December 1825. That quite premature military plot was quickly snuffed out. So little were things ripe for it, that many even of the soldiers who shouted for a 'Constitution' (Konstitútsia) thought they were demanding allegiance to Nicholas's elder brother Constantine, who having married a Polish lady of the Roman Catholic faith had renounced his right to the throne. While considering the plan of his work, Tolstoy found himself carried back to the scenes amid which his characters had grown up: to the time of the Napoleonic wars and the invasion of Russia by the French in 1812. Here was a splendid background for a novel, and putting aside The Decembrists he commenced War and Peace, a work conceived on a gigantic scale, and that resulted in a splendid success.
1864
His attention, as we have already seen, was however not wholly absorbed by literature, but was divided between that and the management of his property. He had during his stay among the Kirghiz in the Province of Samára, noticed how extremely cheap and how fertile was the land in those parts. He therefore wished to purchase an estate there, and visited the district in the autumn of 1864, probably with that end in view. How long he stayed there I do not know, but from a letter he wrote to Fet on 7th October, saying, 'We start for home to-day and do not know how we shall make our way to happy Yásnaya,' we know when he returned. In November he again wrote to Fet, and mentioned the laborious preparations he was at that time making for War and Peace:
I am in the dumps and am writing nothing, but work painfully. You cannot imagine how hard I find the preliminary work of ploughing deep the field in which I must sow. To consider and reconsider all that may happen to all the future characters in the very large work I am preparing, and to weigh millions of possible combinations in order to select from among them a millionth part, is terribly difficult. And that is what I am doing....
Late in that month he wrote again to Fet:
This autumn I have written a good deal of my novel. Ars longa, vita brevis comes to my mind every day. If one could but make time to accomplish a hundredth part of what one understands—but only a thousandth part gets done! Nevertheless the consciousness that I can is what brings happiness to men of our sort. You know that feeling, and I experience it with particular force this year.
The year 1864 saw the publication of the first collected edition of Tolstoy's works, and though they have been already mentioned, it may be as well to give a complete list of those twenty 'trials of the pen' which preceded the appearance of War and Peace, and had already sufficed to place Tolstoy in the front rank of Russian writers. The following are their titles, with the years in which they were first published. They suffice to fill four very substantial volumes.