Tolstoy and the Genesis of "War and Peace"

By Kathryn B. Feuer

Edited by Robin Feuer Miller and Donna Tussing Orwin

Cornell University Press

304 pp.; $29.95

In the early 1960s America and the Soviet Union embarked upon a cultural exchange meant to signify a "thaw" in their relations. The person credited for this was the prime mover behind so much of the reformation taking place at the time in American politics, our elegant and aristocratic young president, John F. Kennedy. His counterpart in Russia, Nikita Khrushchev, a stumpy peasant given to banging tables with his shoe, somehow acceded to the idea.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky arrived in New York and began declaiming their poetry from American stages. Our literary Johns, Cheever and Updike, shy of the Slavic school of declamation, gravely met functionaries and gave readings in Russia and its Iron Curtain satellites, as they were called then. Vladimir Ashkenazy performed at Carnegie Hall, and Kathryn B. Feuer appeared at Yasnaya Polyana, the ancestral estate of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.

Feuer, a Ph.D. candidate in 1963, seems an unlikely candidate for this stellar constellation, yet the result of her research has an enduring tang. As spotlights beamed in on the headliners of the thaw, who were trailed everywhere by reporters, Feuer sat in Tolstoy's library, leafing through the handwritten pages of War and Peace.

What she was feeling, as her book Tolstoy and the Genesis of "War and Peace" communicates in the heat of its prose, was the kind of awe that makes one's knees give. This emotion can transform the most ordinary mind into an omnivorous steel trap, and Feuer's mind was by no means ordinary. Her intellect was formidable, scintillating, tending toward the formulaic, and freighted with an uncanny sense of intuition. She was, besides, ironlike in her decisions and formulations, as if she drew confidence itself from Tolstoy's spiky and absolutely unwavering hand.

Feuer had originally hoped to write fiction but chose the route that such hopefuls more commonly do nowadays, graduate study, and never returned to her original love--as all such hopefuls should note. It may be that as she sorted through the 4,000 pages that make up the early drafts of War and Peace, she found her ambitions not dashed but fulfilled so presciently it was impossible to move from the massed clouds of Tolstoy's mind to creative constructs of her own. We may never know.

Once Feuer completed her dissertation, she published several articles on Slavic studies over the years, but in the first entry to "Other Works by Kathryn B. Feuer" at the back of Tolstoy and the Genesis of "War and Peace," we read, "Strike for the Heart. New York: Doubleday, 1947 (Winner of the Mademoiselle College Fiction Award)"--a novel? a short story collection?--and realize she never published another book. Her timely dissertation from the sixties has only now been published by Cornell University Press.

It doesn't seem Feuer was marginalized by the academy's old-boy network. She taught at Berkeley and the University of Virginia and was chair of the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Toronto for a decade. Indeed, her trip to Russia, bestowed on a scholar who had published very little, was quite a plum.

Feuer's editors, her daughter Robin Feuer Miller and Donna Tussing Orwin, both in Slavic studies, are remarkably elliptical about her life--as the begetter of these scholars, Tolstoy, would not be, and as Feuer never is in her own work. We learn only that Feuer's dissertation, after gaining an underground reputation, was scheduled for publication in the eighties, and that she began rewriting it but never finished before her "untimely death." The date and cause are not disclosed, nor will you find (except perhaps by inference) even the institution for which she wrote her dissertation.

Feuer's gift is her ability to enter so fully Tolstoy's mind that the reader participates in his thinking. The rumbling, breathing presence of Tolstoy bulks so eerily in the background, weaving his way through the difficulties of War and Peace, that it's as if Feuer has added a further character who will always be present when one rereads the novel. In a sense, her Tolstoy is more potent than the Tolstoy of the biographers--Troyat, Wilson, et al.--because she has been scrupulous to trace Tolstoy's creative process, following his mind as it moves in loops and backtrackings and seismic bursts of insight as he seeks a way merely to begin War and Peace.

It wasn't an easy process, as Feuer traces it, but a struggle that lasted five years (not counting Tolstoy's apprentice years, if we may call them that) before Tolstoy got his first glimpses of the book-to-be. In his diary and on manuscript pages he adjures himself, as he had for years, "No digressions!" But the first four openings of War and Peace were historical essays, and when he began drafting scenes he packed them with philosophical or historical or polemical paragraphs, besides commentary on characters. One of the most dramatic elements of Feuer's reconstruction of his work is to watch him battle his own worst inclinations, and finally win.

According to Feuer, War and Peace originated in a novel Tolstoy began in 1856, The Decembrists, which had grown out of a corollary tale, "The Far Field," the idea for which seems to have originated in yet another story, "The Two Hussars." This is how Tolstoy the writer worked, in interlinked networks of accretion.

When he wrote the autobiographical Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, he promised another volume on young manhood, and at times saw The Cossacks as that volume, and even said it was. But he also viewed The Cossacks as the first of a trilogy on military life. He also planned a book or series of them dealing with four epochs in the life of a landowner, and some of these crossed into what he had written.

And then history hit home. Tolstoy had taken part in the battle of Sevastopol in 1855 and had written largely as a reporter about the Russian defeat (part of the trilogy on military life?). And in the aftereffects of the humiliation suffered by the Russian army, he sensed a malign foreign influence begin to enter Russian culture.

Part of the reason was that in August 1856 the czar granted amnesty to the "Decembrists," as they were called--a group of Russian military officers who, after a tour in Europe during the reign of Alexander I, and a view of its democracies, felt it was time to undo the feudal and czarist regime of Russia with a coup. This was mounted in December 1825, and failed. Some of the fomentors were executed, others sent into exile, and still others continued to carry on in the government because of the way its bureaucracy worked. Allegiance prevailed only among those at the top; the rest were flunkies and time-servers, as depicted by writers as early as Gogol. When the time came, the Russian bureaucracy merely changed the hangings on its walls and became Soviet.

But after the defeat at Sevastopol, as if to acknowledge there was indeed something wrong with Russia, or at least with its humbled military, these earlier "reformers" were granted amnesty and began to return from exile. Besides, only a few months earlier, Alexander II "called upon landowners to cooperate in the emancipation of the serfs 'from above.'"

To Tolstoy, serfdom was a dilemma the landowners had to resolve, a moral stain they could not be cleared of by fiat. Businessmen started organizing serfs to profit from their release, and this irked him, to say the least. He was opposed to serfdom but felt he had to work through its upheavals with the serfs he had inherited at Yasnaya Polyana. He offered them land at a pittance, and they grumbled, expecting it for nothing. That was the rumor current, due to the czar's declaration. Tolstoy walked away in disgust, set up a school at Yasnaya Polyana, and began to educate the serfs' children. And he did grant them freedom.

All this took place in 1856. Other situations and influences were also at work on Tolstoy, who had recently returned from a European tour himself, but these were primary, and he was frightened by what he saw. As Feuer traces it through his letters and diaries, he feared for the demise of Russia as he knew it and became, as our reductive pop psychology would put it, paranoid.

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 17

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