An Essay: War And Peace "The Original Version"
Last April, the UK imprint Fourth Estate published War and Peace: The Original Version by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Andrew Bromfield. Ecco will publish this version in the US in September (coinciding with a new Knopf translation--as noted by PW). In the months preceding its release, Mitzi Angel, editorial director of Fourth Estate, wrote an essay detailing the historical relation of this draft to the 1,300 page juggernaut that many of us first encountered as undergraduates. She kindly allowed me to reproduce the essay here. As you'll see, it's an interesting story.
War & Peace
The Original Version
By Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
By Mitzi Angel
In September 1865 Dostoevsky, wrote a letter to a publisher in Moscow outlining his plans for the story of Crime and Punishment, suggesting that the monthly journal Russkii Vestnik publish his prospective novel in installments. It is perhaps the most famous pitch in literary history. ‘This will be a psychological study of a crime,’ he wrote; ‘It will be a novel of contemporary life and the action takes place this year.’ It so happened that Katkov, the publisher, was in a position to be able to accept – new installments of Leo Tolstoy’s 1805, later War and Peace, were slow to appear, and he was grateful for some new material. Dostoevsky, paralyzed by gambling debts, having lost the money that Turgenev had lent him, close to starvation and unable to pay his hotel bill in Wiesbaden, had begun his work on the novel. ‘Later I found out’, Dostoevsky wrote of Katkov’s purchase of the serial rights (the money incidentally was not enough to keep his creditors away) ‘that he was only too glad to accept my offer because he had nothing else for that year. Turgenev has not written anything and he has quarreled with Lev Tolstoy.’
So it is that one journal, in one year, nurtured the messy beginnings of two masterpieces whose lives were to extend well beyond their monthly incarnations. The first part of Crime and Punishment was published in January. It was then followed by some more installments of Tolstoy’s 1805, published in February, March and April of that year. More of Crime and Punishment then appeared. Tolstoy wrote a letter to his friend, the poet Afanasij Vet, and explained that he was thinking of a new title for this work in progress – All’s Well That Ends Well. That year he also began to explore the possibility – urged on by his wife Sofya Andreyevna – of publishing the novel in volume form, which was to cause consternation for the journal’s publisher, who was by now well aware of the public’s enthusiastic response, and reluctant to see the work appear in any other form.
There were other reasons for the strain in the relationship between Tolstoy and Katkov, his publisher. The fact is that whatever this novel was finally to be called, it was still work in progress. Despite publication of the initial sections in February 1865, he had begun extensive revisions to the book. From April to November, he had temporarily withdrawn his involvement with the journal and was busy reworking vast swathes of it, unresponsive to the journal’s demands. Life too, and history with it, provided its own interruptions. In 1866, there was a birth – of his son, Ilya – and a death. The death was that of a young soldier whom Tolstoy had agreed to defend against being court-martialled and executed for slapping a bullying battalion commander. His attempt, which he later looked back on with regret and embarrassment, failed, and the boy was sent to the firing squad. He visited the battlefield at Borodino, and no doubt had cause to reflect on one of his greatest themes in the novel; the ordinary confusion of human affairs and its complicated and problematic relationship to the making of history. This was to culminate in one of Tolstoy’s greatest scenes in War and Peace; Pierre Bezukhov wandering about on the field, looking futilely amongst the chaos for a scene which might capture history in the making.
And just as pinning down history in the making proves so elusive, so perhaps is the genesis of War and Peace. More than any other writer before or since, Tolstoy was living through the novel as it developed, adapting and changing it as his ideas matured, the book undergoing transformation for a period of 6 years, until it was finally published in 1869, in a four-volume set. What had originally been envisioned as a book about the Decembrists, the members of the nobility who had staged a revolt on the death of Alexander 1 in 1825, evolved over time into the historical epic we know. War now demanded more attention; the half-centenary of Borodino in 1862 had given rise to debate among the Russian intelligentsia about the nature of history. Tolstoy, a man thoroughly engaged with the ideas of his time, was by the late 60s struggling to reconcile a sense of historical purpose with the simultaneous conviction that the truth was likely to be found in haphazard and untidy human behaviour. The book arose from ceaseless questioning; a restless mind grappling with problems which were gaining in urgency for Tolstoy as the years went by and as the Napoleonic wars were being replayed and endlessly discussed in Russian society.
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