Masterpieces in the Making

In this chapter I explore the many and varied influences which motivated Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy to produce works concerned with events occurring at the beginning of the century in which they were living, the lengthy processes involved in the production of their masterpieces, and the difficulties critics experienced in allocating them to a particular genre.

Early Influences

Tolstoy, who was born twelve years earlier than Hardy in 1828, was closer in time to the events of the Napoleonic Wars and his father, Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy, actually took part in the campaigns of 1813 when the Russian army marched through Europe towards Paris. Hardy's paternal grandmother, Mary Head Hardy, was in her thirties when the southern coast of England was under constant threat of invasion by Napoleon's forces and her husband was a private with the Puddletown Volunteer Light Infantry. She was an important influence in Hardy's early life and told him many stories of events occurring in Dorset and further afield during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite being further removed chronologically from events, Hardy had more reminders of Napoleon's threatened invasion in his immediate surroundings than Tolstoy, who grew up in the vast rural area south of Moscow untouched by Napoleon's army as it advanced and retreated in 1812. Hardy was very familiar with the countryside surrounding his home in Higher Bockhampton and would have climbed to the top of Rainbarrow, an ancient burial mound, on which a beacon was kept ready to be lit in the event of an invasion by Napoleon. In The Dynasts he shows two beacon-keepers on Rainbarrow Beacon who mistakenly light the beacon on receiving a false invasion alarm. The beacon-keepers look westward from Rainbarrow to the beacon on Blackdown and it is here that the monument to Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson's flag-captain at Trafalgar, now stands. Millgate notes that Hardy liked to believe that he was distantly related to Captain Hardy but Hardy is a common name in Dorset and there is no evidence of a direct relationship. In a footnote to this scene he notes that 'the remains of the lonely hut occupied by the beacon-keepers ... are still visible on the elevated spot referred to'. In his Preface to The Trumpet Major Hardy mentions other relics to be found:

worm-eaten shafts and iron heads of pikes for the use of those who had no better weapons, ridges on the down thrown up during the encampment, fragments of volunteer uniform, and other such lingering remains, brought to my imagination in early childhood the state of affairs at the date of the war more vividly than volumes of history could have done.

Tolstoy would not have seen such physical reminders of the Napoleonic wars during his childhood in Yasnaya Polyana, for even if these had existed his family circumstances would have made it very unlikely that he would have wandered freely in the surrounding countryside as Hardy did. Henri Troyat in his biography of Tolstoy points out that the grounds of his family estate 'were so vast that the children found some ne