[6] Letter to Fet, 1863 (Vie et Oeuvre).
[7] Confessions.
[CHAPTER VIII]
MARRIAGE
At first he rejoiced in the new life, with the passion which he brought to everything.[1] The personal influence of Countess Tolstoy was a godsend to his art. Greatly gifted[2] in a literary sense, she was, as she says, "a true author's wife," so keenly did she take her husband's work to heart. She worked with him—worked to his dictation; re-copied his rough drafts.[3] She sought to protect him from his religious dæmon, that formidable genie which was already, at moments, whispering words that meant the death of art. She tried to shut the door upon all social Utopias.[4] She requickened her husband's creative genius. She did more: she brought as an offering to that genius the wealth of a fresh feminine temperament. With the exception of the charming silhouettes in Childhood and Boyhood, there are few women in the earlier works of Tolstoy, or they remain of secondary importance. Woman appears in Family Happiness, written under the influence of his love for Sophie Bers. In the works which follow there are numerous types of young girls and women, full of intensest life, and even superior to the male types. One likes to think not only that Countess Tolstoy served her husband as the model for Natasha in War and Peace[5] and for Kitty in Anna Karenin,[6] but that she was enabled, by means of her confidences and her own vision, to become his discreet and valuable collaborator. Certain pages of Anna Karenin in particular seem to me to reveal a woman's touch.
Thanks to the advantages of this union, Tolstoy enjoyed for a space of twelve or fourteen years a peace and security which had been long unknown to him.[7] He was able, sheltered by love, to dream and to realise at leisure the masterpieces of his brain, the colossal monuments which dominate the fiction of the nineteenth century—War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenin (1873-77).
War and Peace is the vastest epic of our times—a modern Iliad. A world of faces and of passions moves within it. Over this human ocean of innumerable waves broods a sovereign mind, which serenely raises or stills the tempest.
More than once in the past, while contemplating this work, I was reminded of Homer and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different spirit and period of the work. Since then I have discovered that at the period of writing these books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact nourishing his mind upon Homer and Goethe.[8] Moreover, in the notes, dated 1865, in which he classifies the various departments of letters, he mentions, as belonging to the same family, "Odyssey, Iliad, 1805,"[9] The natural development of his mind led him from the romance of individual destinies to the romance of armies and peoples, those vast human hordes in which the wills of millions of beings are dissolved. His tragic experiences at the siege of Sebastopol helped him to comprehend the soul of the Russian nation and its daily life. According to his first intentions, the gigantic War and Peace was to be merely the central panel of a series of epic frescoes, in which the poem of Russia should be developed from Peter the Great to the Decembrists.[10]