The Last Station

14 Sofya Andreyevna

It’s not that I don’t like it here at Yasnaya Polyana. Would I have stayed for nearly half a century if I’d wanted to leave? Yasnaya Polyana was once magnificent – in the days of old Count Volkonsky, Lyovochka’s grandfather. That house would have suited me fine. But Lyovochka gambled it away. One wing had become a schoolhouse for peasant children – an attempt to put Rousseau’s idiotic theories of education into practice. The heart is naturally wicked, as the Scriptures say. The other wing is where I was asked to live. It was barren, with floors of polished oak mixed with dimpled pine and no carpets. The windows had no curtains to subdue the harsh light teeming in from the fields. Except for the odd portrait of an illustrious ancestor, the white walls were devoid of ornament. My husband of only a few days led me into a bedroom that was more like a barracks, without wardrobes or chests of drawers. The miserably hard bed was simply a pad of tightly woven straw, and Lyovochka insisted that we use an old red-leather pillow that had been his grandfather’s. I was expected to sleep in felt slippers to keep my feet warm, or to get a pair of bast shoes of the kind worn by peasant women!

I had been through the most trying week of my life. Lyovochka turned up at the church in the Kremlin an hour late for the wedding ceremony, saying he could not find a clean shirt!

After the service, through which I wept like a ninny, we bade everyone good-bye and set off into the future. We went by coach to a little village outside of Moscow called Birulyevo, where we stayed at an inn. Lyovochka behaved like a rabid dog, but I had expected this, after reading his diaries. It took me years to understand why he gave me those diaries. Lyovochka wanted a reader, not a wife. Someone to devote herself to his language, his vision. And now he wants other readers: Chertkov, Sasha, Bulgakov, Dushan Makovitsky. So I am useless.

I feel as forlorn now as I did then, forty-eight years ago, when we drove through the gates of Yasnaya Polyana on a hot, dusty day in late September. I was swimming in my own perspiration, overdressed for the occasion in a blue silk dress. Aunt Toinette, wizened and skeptical, stood on the front stoop with an icon in her hands. The stony look in her eye contradicted her welcoming words.

‘She is preparing to suffer,’ Lyovochka whispered in my ear.

I genuflected before the icon, kissed it, and greeted everyone politely. Sergey Nikolayevich passed around a tray of stale bread and salt. I was eager to get inside, where it was cool. We sat opposite one another in the front hall, and tea was passed around from the antique samovar. It was lukewarm and tasted of burnt metal.

‘We are delighted to welcome you,’ Sergey said. He seemed short of breath and deeply uncomfortable in the presence of his younger brother’s new wife – though he would soon enough fall in love with my sister Tanya. Aunt Toinette nodded heavily, looking a thousand years old. I was introduced, one by one, to the three servants who were living behind the kitchen. Only three servants for a house of that size!

That night, after another round of animalistic sex, Lyovochka fell into a snoring slumber, but I lay awake, my nerves tingling, wondering what I had done. Lyovochka woke halfway through the night and shouted ‘Not her! Not her!’

‘Darling,’ I said, shaking him. ‘What on earth is wrong?’

‘I must have been dreaming.’

‘About me?’

‘No.’

‘About what?’

‘Do I always have to confess my dreams? Is that what marriage means to you?’

I apologized and let him drift back to sleep in my arms. But I know now that, yes, that is what marriage is about. Or should be about.

During those first lonely months, I kept thinking about Mama, wondering what the first months of her married life were like. Her marriage was not perfect. Papa was something of a flirt, which did not make life easy. She, of course, had her own flaws. I have since learned, through Lyovochka, about her dalliance with Turgenev, that they were lovers. What a literary family we have turned out to be!

Mama was fifteen when she met Papa. She had been ill for several weeks at her parents’ country house in Tula. A mysterious fever had consumed her, and the prognosis was not good. In desperation, her father turned to a famous young doctor from Moscow, Dr Andrey Behrs, who at age thirty-three was making a name for himself at court. This handsome young doctor was a friend of Turgenev, who had a summer estate in the nearby district of Orel.

Once Papa set eyes on Lyubov Alexandrovna, his heart was no longer free. Her pale skin and dark eyes, her black hair and clean, broad forehead obsessed him. He remained at her bedside for a month, sitting up with her through the night when her fever rose. His courtly manners impressed Alexander Islenyev, my grandfather, though he buckled when his daughter announced, at the end of the doctor’s supposedly medical visit, that she wished to marry her physician.

‘My dear, he’s eighteen years your senior!’ he said.

‘I love him,’ she said flatly.

‘Impossible!’ her mother cried. ‘You’ve been at death’s door. You’re not fit to make such a decision.’ She had bigger plans for her daughter. A physician was not – after all – a gentleman.

Most horrified of all was my great-grandmother, who said, ‘I would sooner have Lyubov marry a musician – or die!’

My somewhat indelicate grandmother also pointed out that Dr Behrs was not a Russian at all; he was German. ‘Possibly even a Jew,’ she whispered in her granddaughter’s ear.

Mama, typically, would not budge. Her family knew, or should have known, that once she had decided on a course of action the argument was closed.

I don’t know exactly what went wrong with Mama’s marriage, nor why she took up with Ivan Turgenev, who broke her heart.

‘Turgenev was a rascal and a fop,’ Lyovochka says, all too frequently. ‘His novels bore me. They are French novels written in Russian.’ It is not enough for a writer to succeed; his friends must fail.

I talk about the marriage of my parents glibly now, but it hurt me to discover the extent of their misery. At least, during my first lonely months at Yasnaya Polyana, I had the myth of their happiness to aid and abet my spirits. I had the story of their life together, which I told and retold to myself.

Now even that story has deserted me.