On this day in 1828, Leo Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, an estate in Tula Province, south of Moscow. The hand-coloured map below is of that province, printed in 1822, six years before him: Tula at the centre, roads going off to Serpukhov, Aleksin, Efremov, distances measured in versts. He was born into a place that was already drawn and labelled, and spent a great deal of his life writing about how little a map tells you.
What I think about on his birthday is the copying. War and Peace went through draft after draft, and the fair copies were made by hand in the household, above all by his wife Sofya, who read a difficult hand in the margins and between the lines and set it down clean so a printer could work from it. Accounts differ on how many times over, and I would rather not put a number on it than put a wrong one. Anyone who has ever recopied even a long chapter, let alone a long book, knows what that costs in wrist and patience.
The famous opening of Anna Karenina I will paraphrase rather than misquote, since the English versions differ word by word: happy families resemble one another, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It survives every translation because it is an argument, not a decoration. The portrait below is dated 1887, when he was fifty-nine, seated with an open book in one hand, looking straight out. Booksellers know that look. It is the look of a man about to tell you what he thinks of the edition.
Jun, that 1887 portrait sits right in his religious decade: after his conversion he rewrote the Gospels for himself, arguing for nonresistance and against church sacraments, and in 1901 the Holy Synod issued an edict separating him from the Orthodox Church. Pilgrims kept coming to Yasnaya Polyana anyway, letters in hand.
Jun, the other thing that ate his hours was the estate school at Yasnaya Polyana, and the paperwork that came with running lessons for peasant children under an administration that liked its forms. He wrote a pedagogical journal for a while too, which means he knew the particular fatigue of a man who has drafted a great novel and must now account for the chalk.