A Russian count pens what may be the largest book manuscript ever created, but his wife is the only one capable of deciphering the furiously written script, and she helps him transcribe as may s seven drafts until they reach the final version that is more than half a million words long. Many critics call is the greatest epic novel in world literature.
Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) labored for years on a literary work set in the days before he was born, starting during the reign of Tsar Alexander I in 1805 and ending in 1813 shortly after Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812.
The Russian master conducted painstaking research in archives and other sources and incorporated details from his own military experience in the Crimean War to make the actions as realistic as possible. He also created an elaborate fictional narrative about five aristocratic Russian families who became engulfed in actual events of the bloody Napoleonic war.
The work put the author’s large cast of invented characters into interaction with as many as 160 real ones, including Napoleon. Part historical chronicle and part novel, his fine poetic writing also included discussions of his own unique philosophy with some passages in French as well as Russian.
But Tolstoy’s atrocious handwriting was often so illegible that even he couldn’t read it. The only person who could was his inexhaustible wife, Sophia Tolstaya (1844-1919), who served as copyist and editor. The biographer Henri Troyat later described her “labor of Hercules” as she struggled to “decipher this sorcerer’s spellbook covered with lines furiously scratched out, corrections colliding with each other, sibylline balloons floating in the margins, prickly afterthoughts sprawled over the pages. “ It was she who transcribed each page of the manuscript into draft, working with him along the way to incorporate countless changes.
The first draft was completed in 1863 and the first excerpt appeared two years later in a periodical under the title “1805.” More installments followed, but Tolstoy was not satisfied with the story and he wanted an uninterrupted version, so he and Sophia rewrote the entire novel several times between 1866 and 1869 – a monumental task.
At last the final version was published in 1869 as War and Peace. Its appearance was hailed as a masterpiece by Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo and other major writers of the day, although some critics didn’t like it at first. Its stature grew with age.
Upon his death in 1910, Tolstoy left behind a gargantuan cornucopia of papers, including 165,000 sheets of manuscripts and 10,000 letters. His greatest masterpiece, War and Peace remains one of literature’s grandest tomes and it has been brought to stage and screen numerous times.
