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“Swarm Life” and the Biology of War and Peace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Thomas Newlin
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Abstract

In the spring of 1863, Lev Tolstoi, newly married and soon to be a father, began to conceive of the work that would eventually become War And Peace. That same spring he also took up beekeeping. While in practical terms his “bee passion” proved relatively short-lived, it was an exceptionally intense engagement with a miniaturized and uniquely observable biological and social universe. In this article, Thomas Newlin explores how Tolstoi's dual enmeshment in “swarm life”—that is, in the biologically fraught realms of marriage and beekeeping—influenced both the unconventional form of War and Peace and its equally unconventional ideas (in particular Tolstoi's linked conceptions of the nature of history and of consciousness). The implications of a “swarm” model of history ultimately troubled Tolstoi, however; his doubts about the imperatives of biology do not play themselves out fully in War and Peace but instead lurk just beneath its surface.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , Summer 2012 , pp. 359 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2012 

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References

Oberlin College generously provided me with the funding to travel to Russia to do research for this article and with the leave time that allowed me to write it. I am indebted to Jane Costlow, Rosamund Bardett, Michael Denner, Cindy Frantz, Isabel Newlin, Mark D. Steinberg, and Jane T. Hedges for their astute comments and their encouragement; my thanks as well to Robin Feuer Miller and the other (anonymous) reader for dieir thoughtful and helpful suggestions. I am grateful to my dear friend Eleonora Tsvetkova of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg for her kind help in tracking down various nineteenth-century treatises on bees.

1. Tolstoi, Lev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928-1958 Google Scholar; hereafter PSS). Translation (slightly amended) from R. F. Christian, ed. and trans., Tolstoy's Diaries (New York, 1985), 1:176. References to Warand Peace will be by book, part, and chapter. In quoting from War and Peace, I use the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, 2007), precisely because it is the most literal; at times, however, I have made slight emendations.

2. N. N. Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k biografii s 1855po 1869god (Moscow, 1957), 597.

3. Tolstoi, PS5, 61:7.

4. Ibid., 16:7.

5. Henry James, preface (1908) to The Trag.cM.use (New York, 1908), l:x. Rimvydas Silbajoris has suggested that “we … can see the novel growing and rising in our mind's eye like some giant organism that was born, so to speak, in the grass, down among the simplest family events where all things must start” and that “the novel can be regarded as an organism that has embedded in each of its detailed substructures the whole DNA code, as if it were a body cell.” Rimvydas Silbajoris, War and Peace: Tolstoy's Mirror of the World (New York, 1995), 36, 37. Caryl Emerson has likewise noted that in Tolstoi's novels “Nature and natural processes of maturation play a prominent role; die novels spread out in a biologically rooted way.” Emerson, “Anna Karenina in the Literary Traditions of Russia and the West: Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky and Bakhtin's Ethics of the Classroom,” in Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker, eds., Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (New York, 2003), 105.

6. Orwin, Donna Tussing, Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-1880 (Princeton, 1993), 103.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 104. My own interpretation is closer to that of Gary Saul Morson, who equates “swarm life” with the “countless, small daily actions, hidden in plain view” that according to Tolstoi “make history.” See Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials TO War and Peace (Stanford, 1987), 126-27.

8. Tolstoi writes: “There are two sides to each man's life: his personal life, which is the more free die more abstract his interests, and his elemental swarm life, where man inevitably fulfills die laws prescribed for him.” War and Peace, 3:1:1.

9. Notebook No. 3, 25 October 1868, PSS, 48:107-8.1 discuss this notebook entry in greater detail later on.

10. Tolstoi's sex life up until his marriage had been with prostitutes, demimonde grizetki, and various gypsy, Cossack, and peasant women; this history is recorded, elliptically, in his early diaries. See V. A. Zhdanov, Liubov v zhizni L'va Tolstogo (1928; reprint, Moscow, 1993), 12-38; McLean, Hugh, “Buried as a Writer and as a Man': The Puzzle of Family Happiness,” In Quest of Tolstoy (Boston, 2008), esp. 15-20.Google Scholar

11. Matich, Olga, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Steele (Madison, 2005), 29.Google Scholar

12. Pchelinaia okhota is the term diat Tolstoi uses for Levin's newfound fascination with bees at the end of Anna Karenina; the scenes dealing with bees are clearly autobiographical.

13. Morson, Gary Saul, “Contingency and Freedom, Prosaics and Process,” New Literary History 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 676 Google Scholar; and Morson, , “Narrativeness,” New Literary History 34, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 65-67.Google Scholar As far as I know, Morson is the first scholar to note the striking affinities between Darwin and Tolstoi (who would later vigorously distance himself from the English scientist). The history of Tolstoi's testy and often ill-informed views on Darwin has until recently received scant attention. Hugh McLean's bracing and wide-ranging “Claws on the Behind: Tolstoy and Darwin,” In Quest of Tolstoy, 159-80, goes a long way toward rectifying this neglect and trenchandy summarizes the more direct ways diat Darwin's ideas filtered into Russia and the Russian consciousness after 1859. McLean focuses most of his attention, legitimately enough, on the period from the 1870s on, when Tolstoi began making frequent and unambiguously hostile pronouncements about Darwin. The impact (direct or indirect) that Darwin's ideas might have had on Tolstoi as he wrote War and Peace in the 1860s still awaits further investigation.

14. Tolstoi, War and Peace, 4:3:15. See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London, 1859), chap. 3, “Struggle for Existence.” See also his comments on the “inextricable web of affinities” in nature in chap. 13 (“Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings“). For a provocative discussion of the “tangled bank” metaphor and Darwin's notion of a “web of affinities,” see Beer, Gillian, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), 156-59, 19.Google Scholar Like Darwin, Tolstoi relied extensively on metaphor and analogy to create his own more “natural” (and inherendy unstable) version of history; Beer's penetrating comments strike me as very relevant for understanding War and Peace. Beer, “Analogy, Metaphor and Narrative in The Origin,” Darwin's Plots, 73-96.

15. Miller, Robin Feuer, “Tolstoy's Peaceable Kingdom,” in Orwin, Donna, ed., Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge, Eng., 2010), 66.Google Scholar

16. “Tolstoi v pis'makh rodnykh i blizkikh,” Iasnopolianskii sbornik (Tula, 1976), 158.

17. Tolstaia, S. A., The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, trans. Porter, Cathy (New York, 1985), 16.Google Scholar Tolstoi himself first mention his bees in a letter to Afanasii Fet in the first week of May 1863: “I have bees, sheep, a new orchard, and a distillery. It's all going along well enough, though of course poorly compared with the ideal” (PSS, 61:17); translation (amended) from Tolstoy's Letters, vol. 1, 1828-1879, ed. and trans. R. F. Christian (New York, 1978), 180.

18. S. A. Tolstaia, Moia zhizn', from excerpts published in Novyi mir, no. 8 (1978): 39; translation (substantially amended) from Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, My Life, ed. Andrew Donskov, trans. John Woodsworth and Arkadii Klioutchanski (Ottawa, 2010), 91. A complete Russian edition of Moia zhizn’ is forthcoming.

19. Tolstaia, Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, 18 (19 April 1863). See also 8 May: “It's a cruel truth that a wife only discovers whether her husband really loves her or not when she is pregnant. He has gone to the beehives and I would give anything to go too but I will not, because I have been having bad palpitations and it is difficult to sit down there, and there will be a thunderstorm any moment, and my head aches and I feel bored, and I do not want him to see me in this tedious and unpleasant state, especially as he is ill too” (18). Sonia's younger sister Tania, who spent much of that first spring with the newlyweds, provides corroborating evidence of the obsessive nature of Tolstoi's “bee passion,” recounting that he “devoted a great deal of time to the apiary” and would “put on a net over his head and spend hours on end studying the life of bees.” Pavel Ivanovich Biriukov, L. N Tolstoi: Biografiia (Moscow, 1908), 2:14. See also Tolstaya, My Life, 100, for another vivid passage detailing his intense involvement with bees.

20. The term Capuanvtas Tolstoi's own neologism and could be roughly translated as “sybaritic.” Levin uses the term in Anna Karenina (pt. 5, chap. 15); see the commentary on the word in L. N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v 22 tomakh (Moscow, 1982), 9:451-52.

21. Eikhenbaum, Boris, Tolstoi in the Sixties, trans. White, Duffield (Ann Arbor, 1982), 111.Google Scholar While I do not agree with him in all details, Eikhenbaum's reading of the letter is extremely perceptive. Tolstoi's letter (addressed to Tania Behrs, but meant for the whole Behrs family) is dated 23 March 1863. PSS, 61:10-13.

22. Diary entry, 2June 1863, PSS, 48:54: “Chitaiu Gete, i roiatsia mysli.” On Tolstoi's difficulties in starting War and Peace, see Feuer, Kathryn B., Tolstoy and the Genesis o/War and Peace, ed. Miller, Robin Feuer and Orwin, Donna Tussing (Ithaca, 1996), 39.Google Scholar

23. Tolstoi, PSS, 48:54-55; Diaries, ed. and trans. Christian, 178.

24. Kuzminskaya, T. A., Tolstoy as I Knew Him: My Life at Home and at Yasnaya Polyana (New York, 1948), 178-81Google Scholar (translation of Moiazhizn’ doma i vIasnoiPoliane, 1927).

25. Diary entry, 23 July 1863. Tolstaia, Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, 22.

26. Tolstoi, PSS, 48:56; Diaries, ed. and trans. Christian, 179.

27. In die drafts to part 2 of the Epilogue of War and Peace, Tolstoi notes the lack of freedom of “a family man” relative to a bachelor. PSS, 15:249. For “swarm life,” see Tolstoi, War and Peace, 3:1:1.

28. Nikitina, Nina, Iasnaia Poliana: Puteshestuie s L'vom Tolstym (Tula, 2002), 97-99, 151-53.Google Scholar

29. Biriukov, L. N. Tolstoi, 14: “He was interested in two things at that time: hunting woodcock and the apiary.“

30. Kuzminskaya, Tolstoy as I Knew Him, 178. On Nikolka, see Tolstaia, Moia zhizn', excerpts published in Oktiabr', no. 9 (1998): 148; Tolstaya, My Life, 117.

31. The concept of the “distant field” seems to have been a touchstone of Tolstoi's artistic imagination. The term served as the tide of a novel that he toyed widi both in 1857 and then again, very briefly, in 1865; this work had close thematic and philosophical ties, as Kathryn Feuer has noted, with War and Peace. Feuer suggests furthermore that the phrase ot“ezzhe pole, while “primarily a hunting term, meaning a site so far from home that one has to spend the night there,” at the same time implied “a spiritual removal from worldly concerns” and links it to Tolstoi's treatment of the “participation-withdrawal opposition.” Feuer, Tolstoy and the Genesis o/War and Peace, 38-39.

32. Tolstoi, PSS, 34:386.

33. Eikhenbaum, Boris, O proze: Sbornik statei, ed. Iampol'skii, I. (Leningrad, 1969), 431-38.Google Scholar On the ant brotiierhood and Tolstoi's fascination with social insects, also see Feuer Miller, “Tolstoy's Peaceable Kingdom,” 57-59. Tolstoi showed an interest in various popular-utopian tracts on bees and social insects. He read Jules Michelet's breathless and highflown volume L'insecte (Paris, 1858) when it was still hot off the press; the latter third of the book focuses on termites, ants, and bees. Tolstoi's reaction was tersely negative: “Finished L'insecte. Saccharine and fake [Pritorno i pritvorno].” Diary entry, 21 and 24 March 1858, PSS, 48:10-11. In 1864, at the very height of his bee obsession, he had his sister-in-law Elizaveta Behrs translate parts of the essay “Bienenstaat” (1859), basically a political tract masquerading as popular science, by the German naturalist Karl Vogt, and tried unsuccessfully to get Mikhail Katkov to publish the translation: “The essay in its original form is marred by political illusions. There remains in the translation only an unusually lively disquisition on the natural history of bees, remarkable from both an artistic and a scientific perspective.” PSS 61:57-58. Dmitrii Pisarev had already penned his own free rendition of the essay (“Pchely“) in 1862 (first published in 1868); Pisarev sharpened (rather than excised) the original essay's political message.

34. Tolstoi, PSS, 34:386-87.

35. See my essay “Pisat’ zelenoi palochkoi: Tolstoi v poiskakh estestvennoi istorii,” forthcoming in Damiano Rebecchini and Laura Rossi, eds., Saggi su Tolstoj (Milan, 2012).

36. For a detailed general history of beekeeping, see Eva Crane's massive World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New York, 1999), esp. 226-37 (on traditional beekeeping in the northern forest zone, including Russia), and 405-23 (on the “rational improvements” that led to the moveable frame hive). The only detailed account in English of Russian beekeeping is Dorothy Galton's A Survey of a Thousand Years of Beekeeping in Russia (London, 1971); it is particularly useful for making sense of Russian beekeeping terminology. A. Pokorskii-Zhoravko's pioneering Opyt istoricheskogo obzora razvitiia pchelovodstva v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1843) still contains a great deal of pertinent information on premodern and early nineteenth-century beekeeping in Russia, as does N. Vitvitskii's fascinating Prakticheskoe pchelovodstvo, 2d ed., 5 vols, (originally published in the 1830s-1840s; St. Petersburg, 1861), 3:1-40 and 4:95-143.1. A. Shabarshov's Istoriiarusskogopchelovodstva (Moscow, 1996) gives comprehensive accounts of traditional and rational beekeeping in Russia but unfortunately lacks any sort of scholarly apparatus.

37. Dorothy Galton, “Tolstoy and Beekeeping” (tape-recorded lecture, December 1984, Leeds Russian Archive, Brotherton Special Collection, Leeds University Library, MS 927/3).

38. Tolstoi, PSS, 4:159-61. Vol. 3, Arts agricoles, of Maison rustique du XIX siecle: Encyclopedic d'agriculture practique, ed. M. Malepeyre aine (Paris, 1839) contains a 20-page chapter on bees (“Education des abeilles“). Evidently Nekhliudov (that is, Tolstoi) had in mind die box hives with rudimentary dividers described on pp. 161-62 of this volume. The old beekeeper's views on “bee education” and who should teach whom would seem to prefigure Tolstoi's conclusions in his 1862 essay “Who Should Learn to Write from Whom: The Peasant Children from Us, or We from the Peasant Children?“

39. “Three have swarmed. Need more frames, the more the better. I'm sending ones that haven't been glued up…. I have four empty frames, but not a single sheet of glass. My head aches. Send a horse or come fetch me before lunch.” Diary entry, mid-May to early June 1863 or 1864, PSS, 83:34-35.

40. Tolstoi, PSS, 61:18.

41. Dolinovskii, Ioann, Nachala pchelovodstva, primenennye k ustroistvu ramochnogo ul'ia (St. Petersburg, 1861).Google Scholar Since this book is not listed among the books preserved in the library at Iasnaia Poliana, perhaps he lent it out after all. It is likely that the two other bee books there are the volumes he passes off as ‘junk“: Mikhail Sergeevich Novlianskii, O razvedenii i soderzhaniipchelpo metodeProkopovicha (Moscow, 1856); and Vil'gel'm Ivanovich Krauze, Rukovodstvo k teoreticheskomu i prakticheskomu pchelovodstvu (Moscow, 1860). See Biblioteka L'va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo v lasnoi Poliane, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1972), 387 (no. 1594) and vol. 2 (Moscow, 1975), 69 (no. 2179); also I. Shabarshov, “Eti knigi chital L. Tolstoi,” Pchelovodstva, no. 5 (May 1971): 45-46. Shabarshov appears to be the first person to note that Tolstoi used the Dolinovskii hive system in addition to log hives; see his earlier article, “Mir pchel v zhizni L'va Tolstogo,” Pchelovodstvo, no. 11 (November 1960): 57. Tolstoi seems to have been unaware of Vitvitskii's magisterial and unconventional Prakticheskoe pchelovodstvo. Vitvitskii advocated an updated version of treetop apiculture (bortnichestvo); his traditional yet presciently ecological approach to beekeeping would probably have resonated with Tolstoi. See Vitvitskii, Prakticheskoe pchelovodstvo, 4:144-76, 179-207, and vol. 5.

42. Though it was considered poor beekeeping, it was common to exterminate whole hives by smoking or drowning just to obtain the honey.

43. From the first English translation of Francois Huber, Neiv Observations on the Natural History of Bees (Edinburgh, 1806), letter 1. On Huber's hive, see Crane, , World History of Beekeeping, 381-82.Google Scholar

44. Dolinovskii, Nachala pchelovodstva, i, ii-iii, xii-xiii, 144. See also 60, 61-62, 78-79.

45. “I am drawn now to writing a free work de longue haleine—a novel or the like.” Letter to T. A. and E. A. Behrs, October 1862, PSS, 60:451; Letters, ed. and trans. Christian, 170. “The epic mode is becoming the only natural one for me.” Diary entry, 3 January 1863, PSS, 48:48; Diaries, ed. and trans. Christian, 174.

46. On “lyrical daring,” see Orwin, Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 54-55, 132-40.

47. 18-20 October 1857, PSS, 60:228-31; Letters, ed. and trans. Christian, 1:108-10.

48. Richard Gustafson discusses Tolstoi's 1857 letter in Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton, 1986), 219, 291; also see Orwin, Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 23-24.

49. Dolinovskii, , Nachala pchelovodstva, 196-203.Google Scholar Dolinovskii, who was probably a Catholic pastor, goes out of his way to emphasize that a beekeeper engaging in “artificial swarming” was not playing God, and he claims that the practice is not in fact “artificial” (217-18).

50. Kh. N. Abrikosov, “Dvenadtsat’ let okolo Tolstogo,” in N. N. Gusev, ed., L. N. Tolstoi: K 120-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (1828-1948) (Moscow, 1948), 2:415. Abrikosov himself became an accomplished beekeeper and published a number of books (mostly for a peasant audience) on beekeeping in the 1920-1940s. It is probably on the basis of this passage that Galton (“Tolstoy and Beekeeping“) asserts that Tolstoi believed “artificial swarming to be an outrage.” Abrikosov published another, more specialized account of his apicultural encounters with Tolstoi the same year (1948) that his “Dvenadtsat’ let okolo Tolstogo” appeared; at several points these two pieces repeat each other verbatim. See Abrikosov, Kh., “Moi vospominaniia o L. N. Tolstom,” Pchelovodstvo, no. 9 (September 1948): 57-60.Google Scholar This second memoir reveals that while Tolstoi showed little interest in the apiary that had been established near the main house at Iasnaia Poliana in the late 1890s, he still had strong views about beekeeping and was well versed in apicultural history and literature (59). According to Abrikosov, Tolstoi took a dim view of the “low and wide” hive system of French-American beekeeper Charles Dadant, preferring instead Prokopovich's “narrow and tall” (60) frame hives, which more closely resembled natural tree (bort’) and log (kolodd) hives.

51. Tolstoi, PSS, 14:124-25 (draft of 3:2:28).

52. Ibid., 48:107-8. Emphasis in the original.

53. Ibid., 48:109-10. Emphasis in the original.

54. Ibid., 48:108, 109.

55. Tolstoi, War and Peace, 3:2:9.

56. Tolstoi, PSS, 48:109-10.

57. 19 March 1870, PSS, 61:231-34; Letters, ed. and trans. Christian, 228-29. Tolstoi continued to work out these views in Anna Karenina.

58. Tolstoi, PSS, 27:23-24, 30.

59. Tolstoi, PSS, 25:333.

60. P. A. Bibikov, “Zhizn’ i trudy Mal'tusa,” in Robert Mal'tus, Opyt o zakone narodonaseleniia (St. Petersburg, 1868), 1:75-88.

61. Inessa Medzhibovskaya has suggestively referred to the phrase in this particular context as a “salvation valve” rather than a “safety valve.” Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845-1887 (Lanham, Md., 2008), 101.

62. Tolstoi, War and Peace, 4:3:12.

63. Ibid., 4:3:14.

64. Ibid., 3:3:9. The verb Tolstoi uses is sopriagat'.

65. Ibid., 4:3:15.

66. Ibid.

67. Tolstoi, PSS, 16:14; written December 1867. In referring to “bees killing one another in the autumn,” Tolstoi is evidendy referring to the annual slaughter of die drones by die worker bees before the onset of cold weadier. See also die following passage from die variant drafts to War and Peace, 3:1:1: “It makes sense mat diere could be a zoological human law, like die zoological law of bees that makes diem kill each other and male animals kill each odier, and history even confirms die existence of such a law, but for a single man to order millions to kill each odier, diis makes no sense, because it is incomprehensible and impossible.” Tolstoi, PSS, 14:12. Tolstoi was working on die first half of Book 3 in the autumn of 1867; see E. E. Zaidenshnur, “Istoria pisaniia i pechataniia Voiny imira,” PSS, 16:110.

68. Silbajoris, War and Peace: Tolstoy's Mirror of the World, 131.

69. See Orwin, Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 12: “Tolstoy extended his definition of nature to include peoples as well as individuals, and he went to extraordinary lengths to justify every universal and therefore natural human activity, including war.“

70. See, for instance, his note to Sonia on 16 June 1867 (PSS, 83:138), which attests to his continued fascination with swarming as he was writing the second half of War and Peace. Tolstoi mentions bees several times in What Then Are We to Do? but his take on them is strangely inconsistent: on the one hand he presents bees as a model of Utopian cooperation that humans should emulate, but then on the other hand he suggests that it is specious to justify the economic and social status quo—the existing class and labor divisions among humans—on the basis of the example of bees, with their differentiation between workers, drones, and the queen. PSS, 25:293-94, 316, 335. In an odd passage (one of many) in The Kreutzer Sonata, Pozdnyshev ascribes a Utopian sexlessness to bees and suggests (somewhat contradictorily, using Darwinian language) that humans need to follow the bees’ example: ‘“In order to defend its interests in its struggle with the other animals, the highest form of animal life—the human race—has to gather itself into a unity, like a swarm of bees, and not reproduce infinitely: like the bees, it must produce sexless individuals, that's to say it must strive for continence, not the excitement of lust, toward which the entire social organization of our lives is directed.'” PSS, 27:30-31; The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff (Penguin 1985), 55. Pozdnyshev is of course referring to the worker bees, but Tolstoi knew perfectly well that in a beehive not all bees are “sexless individuals” and that the sole function of the queen and the drones is in fact procreation.

71. Tolstaia, Moia zhizn', excerpt in Novyi mir, no. 8 (1978): 38. Emphasis in the original.