Tolstoy

2. A Few Fake Starts

Perhaps, all the while Tolstoy had been disparaging depraved France, soulless Switzerland and vulgar Germany, he had actually been letting himself be contaminated by their Western ways; for upon his return, after seven months abroad, certain injustices in his native land struck him more forcibly than before. It was as though his skin had grown thinner while he was away, or bccomc infected with that sickly European sensitivity. "Yasnaya Polyana is a miracle," he wrote 011 the evening of his arrival (August 8, 1857). "It is sweet and sad to be here, but Russia definitely disgusts mc. I am beginning to feel hemmed in by the crude and hypocritical atmosphere here. . . . Beatings and floggings! . . ." The next day, after a trip to Pirogovo: "The wretchedness of the people and sufferings of the animals are atrocious." Every day some new incident confirmed his feeling that things were going wrong around him and that everyone was powerless to stop them. In less than a week he saw a woman striking a servant with a stick in the street, a civil servant half-killing a seventy-year-old muzhik whose telega had caught on his coach, the village elder at Yasnaya Polyana thrashing a gardener and sending him barefoot across the limefields to watch the herds, a landlord at Ozerki entertaining himself by getting his peasants drunk, the district commissioner exacting a cart of hay in return for issuing a passport to one of the count's servants . . . "In Petersburg and Moscow everybody is shouting about something," he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy, "everybody is up in arms waiting for a miracle to happen, while out here in the country, patriarchal barbarism, theft and arbitrary rule go on as before. . . . For a long time I had to fight against a feeling of aversion for my country; now I am beginning to accustom myself to all the horrors that make up the human condition. . . . Fortunately, there is one salvation: morality, the world of the arts, poetry and human relations. There, nobody bothers me, policeman or town councillor. I am alone. Outside the wind howls, outside all is mud and cold; I am here, I play Beethoven and shed tears of tenderness; or I read the Iliad, or I create my own men and women and live with them, covering sheets of paper . .

Sometimes, of course, in a fit of temper, all this virtuousncss went flying out the window and, "relapsing into a deplorable habit," as he put it himself, he would strike one of his serfs or have him flogged by the country police. Afterward, he sometimes begged the culprit's pardon and slipped him three rubles in compensation, which left the muzhik utterly bewildered, and the master unsatisfied as well.² They contemplated each other across a chasm. While waiting for the day when he would be able to impose happiness upon mankind, Tolstoy decided to reforest his estate. He bought two thousand fir trees, five thousand pines and two thousand larches, and supervised their planting.

This done, he set off with his sister Marya to spend the winter in Moscow, took a furnished apartment on Pyatnitskaya Street and plunged back into the literary world. His spirits were at a low ebb. "I was not able to leap over contingencies as I had done in the past," he wrote to Botkin on October 21, 1857, "and I saw to my horror that the painful, senseless and dishonest reality I lived in, far from being an accident, a regrettable incident affecting only myself, was in fact the law of all life. . . . Farewell, youth!" In this unhappy frame of mind, Moscow soon became hateful to him. At Aksakov's, he detected the stink of "base literary intriguing"; the "extremely man-of-lcttcrs" side of Fet's "conceited and empty" personality disappointed him; his childhood playmate Lyubov Bchrs was "dreadful, balding and debilitated"; and when he looked in the mirror he could not recognize himself, either: "Good God, how old I have become! Everything bores me, I don't feci anything, even about myself. ... I am prepared, within the limits of my powers, to bear this sad burden of cxistcncc."³

A trip to St. Petersburg only added to his dejection. Talking to Nekrasov and the other writers on The Contemporary, he managed to persuade himself that his popularity was 011 the wane. His latest works had been all very well, no doubt, but they disappointed the admirers of the Sevastopol Sketches and Youth, who were expecting another thunderclap of truth from him, while he was wasting his time and talent in trivia.

"At first Petersburg gave me a feeling of bitterness, then it disgusted me completely," he wrote on October 30, 1857. "People have already forgotten about me, or are beginning to, and that made me very sad at heart. But now I feel better, I know I have a lot to say and the ability to say it forcefully."

In spite of this proudly penned declaration, he was not overconfident about the future. He soon realized that the literary fashion in Russia had changed. Since Alexander II's accession to the throne, the public, aroused by his promises of reform, were clamoring for books reflecting the social problems of the time. Panaycv, the champion of "art for art's sake," reported to Botkin on June 28, 1857 that "According to my observations, borne out a millionfold by the facts, the Russian public is now demanding more serious reading matter. . . . Yes, yes, my dear old Vasily Petrovich, the time has come when the most fragrant, the most nobly inspired work of art will go unnoticcd if it does not deal with the problems of the day, the living, essential concerns of the present. Sad, but true."

As though he had read the letter, Tolstoy himself wrote to Botkin, from Moscow, on November 1, 1857: "I must tell you that as a result of the new trend in literature most of our old acquaintances, including yours truly, no longer know what they stand for and are going around looking as though they had been spat upon from head to foot. Nckra- sov and Panayev do not even dream of writing their own things any more, and content themselves with handing over piles of money to Melnikov and Saltykov.* Saltykov, by the way, has explained to mc that the golden age of belles-lettres is at an end (not only for Russia, but in general) and that nobody in Europe will ever read Homer or Goethe again. This is all tripe, of course, but it is enough to drive you out of your senses to hear the entire world suddenly proclaiming that the sky is black when you see it blue, and in the end you begin to wonder whether there is something the matter with your eyes."

Tolstoy's anxiety about his future as a writer was so acute that he was expecting to see the day when, outdistanced by his young colleagues and unable to adapt to their form of social art, he would simply have to give up writing: "Thank God I did not listen to Turgenev when he told me an author must be an author and nothing else," he wrote in the same letter to Botkin. "Literature must not become a crutch, as Walter Scott said. . . . Our literature, that is, poetry, is a phenomenon outside the law, if not positively aberrant, and that is why it would be unjustifiable to base one's entire life on it."

Turgenev, to whom Botkin showed this letter, wrote straight back to Tolstoy on November 25 (December 7), 1857: "No matter how I cudgel my brains I cannot make out exactly what you are, if not an

• Melnikov-Pechersky (1819-1883), author-ethnographer; wrote In the Forests. Saltykov-Shchcdrin (1826-1889), novelist; wrote The Golovlyw Family.

author. Philosopher? Founder of a new religion? Civil servant? Businessman? Do be kind enough to help me out of my predicament by informing me which of the alternatives I propose suits you best. I am joking, of course, but joking aside, I would like to sec you sail out into the open at last, full speed ahead." And Botkin himself, worried by Tolstoy's state, begged him to consider that it was natural, after such a cruel war and humiliating defeat, for the public to want books denouncing the flaws of Russian society: "Is it possible," he went on, "that you can lose your faith in poetry and want to abandon it because of this, when your heart is already inside the gates of the kingdom? I resent your being upset by the vulgar rant of common mortals who deny the powers of poetry and art because they are incapable of experiencing them."⁴

It was poor psychology on the part of Botkin and Turgenev to imagine that Tolstoy honestly intended to put down his pen. His fur)' and despair were principally designed to alarm his friends, and subsided in direct proportion as their anxiety mounted. At the same time as he was threatening to abandon literature, he was also making plans to found a literary magazine whose aim would be to protest against the invasion of the rightful territory of Art by legislation and sociology. His friends in Moscow and St. Petersburg eventually dissuaded him from this venture, but he still could not find himself. On the one hand, he was passionately interested in the emancipation of the serfs and aspired to serve the people by his writing; on the other, he claimed allegiance to pure acstheticism and lived in terror lest the new novel become a weapon of political propaganda.

'llie battle was raging all around him. People were rabidly in favor of emancipation, or dead against it. The selfishness of the propertied classes was clashing with the ideology of those who had nothing to lose. "Ninety per cent are against emancipation, and all for different reasons," Tolstoy wrote to Botkin. "Some arc panicky and nervous and don't know whom to trust because they are rejected by people and government alike; others—the hypocrites—hate the very thought of emancipation but are in favor of the form: still others—the ambitious, the empire builders—are the nastiest of all, because they refuse to understand that they arc citizens and as such have no more or fewer rights than their neighbors; and others—the majority—are simply bull- headed and cowed. They say: we do not want to discuss the matter and we shall not; let them do as they like, take everything away or leave us as we are. There are also a few English-type aristocrats, and there are the Westerners and the Slavophils. . . . But there is no one acting out of sheer goodness, anxious to win over and reconcile people to each other in a happier world. As for belles-lettres, it has become plain that there is no place for them. But don't imagine this will stop me from loving them: more than ever."⁵

When Russia learned, from the cdict of November 20, 1857 to the districts of Kovno, Vilna and Grodno, that 'I'sar Alexander II approved the action of committees of aristocrats wishing to adopt measures preparatory to the emancipation of their serfs, the liberals' hopes soared again. "I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart 011 this great event," Kolbasin wrote to Turgenev. And Annenkov, also to Turgenev: "The day is approaching when we shall be able to say as we die, 'I believe that now at last I have become a decent man.'" And Turgenev to Tolstoy: "The event so long awaited is now at hand, and I am happy to have lived to see it."

On December 28, 1857 Tolstoy, who was still in Moscow, went to a banquet held by Professor Kavelin to unite all the literary factions in favor of the abolition of serfdom. Instead of running to join in the fraternal accolade, the Slavophils stayed home and sulked. Even so, there were one hundred and eight persons present, and numerous speeches were made. All those toadying words about enlightened authority, selfless nobles and honest muzhiks filled Tolstoy with insurmountable nausea. "I am tired of conversation and discussion and haranguing," he said. "What is useful to the State is harmful to men." For him, a man bitten by politics was lost forever to the empire of pure thought. The artist should concern himself with eternal problems, not those of the moment. "There cannot be art in politics, for politics, whose goal is to prove, can only be partial."⁶ Nekrasov and his group disagreed. Reading the text of Albert, which Tolstoy had submitted to him, the director of The Contemporary was exasperated by such "reactionary" sentences as "Beauty is the sole and incontestable good of this world." ITe wrote to the author at once to express his displeasure: "I feel bound to tell you that your story is no good and must not be published. . . . Not only has the theme been worked to death, but it is an unpopular one, and so difficult that it is virtually impossible to handle. . . . Ah, write more simple stories."⁷

Chilled by this admonition, Tolstoy returned to Albert, revised it, and noted grimly 011 December 25, 1857: "I shall publish it." He had previously formed an association, with Turgenev, Grigorovich and Os- trovsky, which gave The Contemporary exclusive rights to its members' writings. But lately he had begun to disapprove of the review's radical tendencies. Nekrasov's criticism of Albert tipped the scales, and he deserted to the art-for-art's-sake camp led by Druzhnin and Botkin. On February 17, 1858 he notified Nekrasov that he was repudiating the agreement which, he said, was "invalid." As a parting offering he proposed cither Three Deaths or the revised version of Albert. Nekra- sov unwillingly agreed to release his chief contributor and publish the latter story, which he still disliked. The critics were severe. The contemporary press claimcd that "the observations of a half-demented man" were not a fit pretext for a work of art, and that the "unfinished psychological study" made "no impression" on the reader.⁸ Tolstoy went on working, in spite of this drubbing—as usual, on several stories at once: Three Deaths, which he was continually revising, Family Happiness, based on his relationship with Valerya Arsenyev, and The Cossacks,f which he hoped to make into something as sweeping and luminous as an epic by Homer. "The Iliad has forced me to revise my whole concept of the story," he had written on his return to Russia.®

Living with him in Moscow were his sister—who, separated from her husband, had grown bitter and difficult—his brother Nicholas, his nephews and his dear Aunt Toinette; but family life was not enough for him. He wanted action. His first outlet for his excess energy was the gymnasium on Dmitrovka Street. "It was worth tire trip," wrote Fet, "to see Tolstoy's fierce concentration, trying to leap over a vaulting-horse in his gymsuit." A large portion of his time was also devoted to music: he arranged concerts and even drew up the regulations for a chamber music orchestra to 1>e directed by his former rival for Va- lerya's affections, the French pianist Mortier de Fontaine; the project fell through for lack of funds. The lights of the theaters, drawing rooms and ballrooms drew him out almost every evening. He dressed with particular care, tied his white cravat, put on his new coat from Sharmer, his beaver-collared overcoat and a top hat, took up a silver-pommeled stick and strode resolutely toward the door. "He had an imposing bearing," Mrs. Sytin wrote in her memoirs, "there was something attractive in his very ugliness. His eyes were full of vitality and energy'. . . . He always spoke in a strong, clear voice and with great feeling, even on trivial subjects. At his arrival, everything suddenly sprang to life." Did he realize how attractive he was? Far from it. As always, women fascinated and troubled him, he was enamored of four or five at once and could not make up his mind to love any.

First, he suffered a relapse for Dyakov's sister—his childhood sweetheart, the charming Alexandra Obolensky; "so lovely," he wrote, "dancing the lancers with her little head tilted to one side." He was furious because she was married, he hung around her, making veiled allusions to his condition which she pretended not to understand. "Beyond any

f He callcd the novel variously The Caucasian Story, The Fugitive, The Cossack and The Cossacks.

doubt, this woman tempts me more than any other." (November 6, 1857.) "She can do what she likes with me and I'm grateful to her. Some evenings I am passionately in love with her and come home full of joy or sorrow, I can't tell which." (December 1, 1857.) "1 love her and become idiotic in her presence." (December 4, 1857.) That day, however, he also noticed that Katcrina Tyutchcv, the poet's daughter, had been particularly sweet to him. On New Year's Eve: "Miss Tyutchcv is imperceptibly beginning to make an impression on me." January 1: "Katcrina is very sweet." January 7: "Miss Tyutchcv—nonsense!" January 8: "No, not nonsense! Little by little, this feeling is taking hold of me entirely." January 19: "Miss Tyutchev is continually in my thoughts." January 20: "I feel that all I want is her love, but I have no compassion for her." January 26: "Went to see Miss Tyutchev, prepared to love her: she is cold, trivial, aristocratic. Nonsense!" March 8: "Went to see Miss Tyutchev: so-so." March 31: "I dccidcdly do not like Miss Tyutchcv." A few months later he found her "ugly and cold," but wondered whether he ought not "marry her without love."¹⁰ While he was following the twists and turns of this unrewarding idyl, he continued to sigh after Princess Lvov, whom he had loved a great deal in Paris and rather less in Dresden. He was also keeping a close watch on Princess Sherbatov, of whom lie wrote that it had been a long time since he had seen "anything as fresh as she."¹¹

But all the while he was fluttering back and forth between the matrons and the maidens, his heart really belonged to a spinster: aunt- grandmother, babushka Alexandra Tolstoy. She was in Moscow for a few days. Leo called on her often, chatted with her, found her "delicious," "unique," even dreamed of marrying her, then sobered up in a flash and noted, with chilling cruelty: "She has grown old and ceased to be a woman for mc."¹² This did not, however, prevent him from seeing her the next day with renewed pleasure. They even set out together for Klin, where they spent a few days with a relative of theirs, old Princcss Volkonsky. After Alexandra had gone back to St. Petersburg, the fire her presence had dampened was rekindled in a flash. On Easter Monday, March 24, 1858, he wrote to her: "Christ is risen, beloved friend and babushka. Although I did not take communion . . . T feel so light-hearted that I cannot refrain from sitting down for a chat with you. When all is chaos inside me, you make mc feel ashamed of myself, even when you're not there. . . . Where does it comc from, that warmth of yours that gives happiness to others and lifts them up above themselves? How happy it must make you to be able to dispense joy to others so easily, so freely. . . . When I look at myself, I see I am still the same: a daydreaming egotist, incapable of becoming anything else. Where is one to look for love of others and self-denial, when there is nothing inside oneself but love of self and indulgence? . . . My ambition is to be corrected and converted by you my whole life long without ever becoming completely corrected or converted."

Rare clear-sightedness: he knew that after confessiong his sins to his babushkd Alexandra he would receive a scolding, that the scolding would thrill him as a proof of her love, that he would not mend his ways, and that the next time it would give him a double thrill to proclaim himself doubly guilty.

With the first harbinger of spring his gloom vanished, and he became an impetuous child again, tipsy with completely unmotivated high spirits. Turning his back on drawing rooms, young maidens and writers alike, he could think of nothing but Yasnaya Polyana: he left on April 9, 1858, and less than a week later his confidante received this blast of victory full in the face:

"Babushka! It's spring! It is so good to be alive on this earth, for all good people and even for such as I. Nature, the air, everything is drenched in hope, future, a wonderful future. . . . When I think about it more soberly, I know perfectly well I am nothing but an old frozen potato, rotten, cooked and served up with a tasteless sauce full of lumps, but the springtime has such a powerful effect on me that I sometimes catch myself imagining I am a plant that has just opened and spread its leaves among all the other plants and is going to grow up simply, peacefully and joyfully on the good Lord's earth. When this happens, such a fennentation, purification and orchestration goes on inside me that anyone who has not experienced it himself could not imagine the sensation. Away with all the old worn-out things, all the conventions, the laziness and selfishness and vice and all the vague and mixed-up relationships and regrets and remorse, to the devil with them all! Make way for the wonderful plant that is filling out its buds and growing in the spring."

At Yasnaya Polyana it seemed to him, as it did every time he returned to the scenes of his childhood, that he laid his finger on the truth. The weather was chilly and damp, the sun feebly stroked at the patches of snow that cracked and melted between tufts of new grass. At the end of the avenue of lime trees there was a hole where the old house had been; but the larch saplings planted in the rubble the previous year were taking hold and flourishing. The furniture and family portraits had been removed to the stone pavilion which was now the master's dwelling. There, Prince Nicholas Scrgeyevich Volkonsky— black eyebrows, powdered wig, lace jabot and red caftan; Count Peter Andreyevich Tolstoy—full-checked and bright-eyed beneath a mop of curly hair; Count Ilya Andreyevich, who was so extravagant and so plaintive; blind Prince Nicholas Ivanovich Gorchakov, with lowered eyelids; and all the others welcomed Leo Tolstoy from their tarnished gilt frames. In the study, the scion of this great family cast a sentimental glance around at the book-laden shelves, the plain table, old armchair, hunting trophies and pictures of friends and writers hanging on the walls. A pious hand had slipped a branch of silvery pussy-willow behind the icon on Palm Sunday. The recent holiday was still in evidence everywhere, along with the promise of fine weather to come. Even the muzhiks looked clean and happy, standing outside their thatched isbas. Tolstoy embraced a few of them on the day after his return, and observed that "in the springtime their beards have a surprisingly sweet smell." He drank birch sap, played with his sister's children, galloped over the countryside, ogled the girls and was tongue- tied afterward, inspected the sprouting buds, watched the snowdrops pushing through the ground and heard, with a solemn thrill, the first nightingale. The air warmed, a vegetal mist shrouded the rough carpentry of the trees, the ground was dotted with pink and yellow blossoms. In the evening Tolstoy lingered on the terrace listening to the noises of the country, or played chords on the piano to attract the nightingales. "I stop playing, they stop singing, T start again, they start again. I spent nearly three hours at this pastime; the terrace is open to the warm night, the frogs arc busy at their work and the night watchman at his. What a wonder!"¹³

One night this communion with nature suddenly brought him to his knees. Coming out of his ecstasy, he wrote in his diary: "I prayed to God in my bedroom, in front of the Greek icon of the Virgin. The vigil lamp was burning. I went out onto the balcony. Black night, swarming with stars. Faint stars, bright stars, a maze of stars. Sparkle, dark shadows, silhouettes of dead trees. He is there. Kneel to Ilim, and be silent."¹⁴

These surges of vague and intense piety recurred frequently, and he never tired of analyzing his reactions to the divine enigma. He increasingly felt that the Church degraded and dishonored God by trying to make him comprehensible to human minds. How could God be conceived of as a kind of general administrator, always ready to lend an ear to supplications from below? "What sort of God is it that can be seen clearly enough to be prayed to, entered into relations with?" he wrote. "If I even try to imagine him like that, he loses all his grandeur in my eyes. A God who can be prayed to and served is a proof of our spiritual weakness. lie is God exactly because I cannot conceive his whole being. Besides, he is not a being; God is Law and Power."¹⁵

Since God was beyond the reach of reason, he must be grasped with the heart. It was not the mind that led to him, but the senses, 'l he best way of approaching the Creator was to become one with nature. All atrcmblc with this discovery, Tolstoy wrote impassioned letters to his babushka Alexandra, telling her about it. Extremely devout, she replied that she was very unhappy to sec him turn away from the Orthodox faith. He was deeply hurt, and wrote back: "Do not despair, babushka, I am filled with Christian sentiment to the highest degree; I have a true concept of Christianity, and I cherish it: it is in my feeling for truth and beauty."¹⁰ Or, "I have looked in the Gospels and found neither God, nor the Redeemer, nor the sacraments, nor anything. . . . To be sure, I love and rcspcct religion and I think that men cannot be cither good or happy without it. . . . But I have no religion myself and I do not believe in it. For mc, religion comes from life, not life from religion. You scoff at my nature and nightingales. But in my religion, nature is the intermediary."¹⁷ Yes, now he was certain: it was by uniting with the animals and plants that he would penetrate the great mystery, by descending the stages of creation that he would mount toward heaven, by giving up intelligence that he would receive the light. Admiration was already a form of prayer. The Beautiful led to the Good. The Good led to God. Alexandra's faith ended in the same truth as that of her nephew; but Alexandra relied upon Scripture for support, and he upon his love of the earth. And wasn't that the very thing that was so wonderful, this diversity of routes and identity of goals? There were as many ways to the Lord as there were beings. "Every individual," he wrote, "has his own unconscious way, felt only in the depths of his soul." He was not even disconcerted by the contradictions that filled him: "How can they all live together inside me? I do not know and could not explain it; but it is ccrtain that dog and cat sleep together in the same hovel."¹⁸ As a matter of fact, this particular dog and cat were singularly fond of a good spat. With these two animals warring in his breast, how could Tolstoy be otherwise than eternally preoccupied with his internal upheavals? Pagan in every fiber of his body, he wanted to be Christian by thought. A sybarite with pretensions to apostlehood. A billy-goat pining for purity.

His short story Three Deaths was intended to illustrate this pantheistic Christian faith. The "worldly lady" in the story was "contemptible and pitiful" because although she believed in life after death she was afraid to die, and just when her Christian faith should have stood her in good stead, she received no comfort from it. The muzhik, on the contrary, died contented precisely because he was not a Christian in the eyes of the Church, because nature was his religion and it seemed natural to him, having lived out his time, to return to the earth which had nourished him. "A brute, you say?" wrote Tolstoy to Alexandra. "Where is the harm in that? A brute implies happiness and beauty, harmony with the whole universe, whereas in the life of the lady there was nothing but discord." And lastly, the third death, that of the tree: it expired with dignity, in silence and beauty. "In beauty because it did not prevaricate or protest, it felt neither fear nor regret."¹⁹ After explaining the story to his babushka, Tolstoy added: "There is my idea; you assuredly do not agree with it, but it cannot be contested." How he missed having her by his side, so that he could talk to her for hours, of religion, literature, friendship, perhaps of love. He filled his letters with protestations of affection which must have thrown the old maid of honor into palpitations, at the Marya Palace in St. Petersburg, in her stiff ceremonial gown with a diamond monogram on the shoulder. He told her she was his "Madonna," he begged her to come to the country (knowing she would not), he urged her to write to him in French if that was more comfortable for her: "A woman's thoughts are more easily comprehensible to me expressed in French."²⁰

Then, after sealing his letter, he would wander pensively into Aunt Toinette's room, sit down in the battered tapestry armchair, exchange a few words with the wrinkled little old lady who took the place of a mother for him, watch her begin to nod over her sewing basket, turn the pages of a book, read, daydream. . . . Suddenly she would raise her head and mumble a few trivial words: "Sergey went to Pirogovo a few days ago. ... I think Nicholas is going to stay on in Moscow with Mashenka. . . ." Or she would ask him how the telegraph worked and, after listening to her nephew's explanation, comment: "That's odd. I watched it for a whole half-hour and I didn't see a single letter going along the wire."²¹

Tolstoy appreciated these soporific family evenings all the more because he was exhausted by the end of the day. To preserve the excellent physical condition he had worked so hard to achieve in Moscow, he had a bar fixed to the wall of his study in front of the window and worked out on it every morning, to the mystification of the passing muzhiks. "I come to the master for orders," the steward said, "and I find him hanging upside down by one leg on a bar. There he hangs, swinging back and forth with his head down. His hair is all on end and goes flying to and fro, and his face is purple. ... I don't know whether to listen to his orders or watch him perform."²² IIow was one to pay any heed to the exhortations of a country gentleman who behaved like a circus acrobat? And what a frightful spectacle for the maids! One girl told Marya Tolstoy, who wanted to send her to work at her brother's house, "I won't go there, Madame. He runs about the place stark naked, turning somersaults."²³

The master progressed from bar to plow. He wanted to share in the work of the muzhiks, in order to understand them better. One in particular, Yufan, impressed him enormously by his strength and skill. The ever-ironic Nicholas Tolstoy told Fct that "I.eo was enchanted with the way Yufan spreads his arms when he plows. And lo and behold, Yufan has now become a symbol of peasant vitality to him. . . . Following his example, he spreads his elbows apart, seizes the plow ... and Yufan izes."²⁴ Tolstoy liked scything best of all—the rhythmic strokes, the mind a blank and sweat pouring down, taking care to remain on a line with the rest of the men. lie often shared their meal, sitting on the ground in the shade of a copse. One day on a visit to Yasnaya Polyana Turgenev saw him carrying bales of straw on his back and concluded that he was "lost to literature." Tolstoy himself wrote in his diary, "I am not writing, or reading, or thinking. I am completely absorbed in the farm. The peasants hem and haw and dig in their heels. Those from Grumond look gloomy, but are silent."²³

Once again he realized how incompetent he was when it came to running a farm or managing the muzhiks. Haying with them was a joy, arguing a torment. There were times when he hated them: "I am afraid of myself. I am beginning to feel a desire for revenge, which is something I have never known before."²⁸

However, on September 1, 1858 he attended an assembly of the nobility of the entire province held to elect rq^resentatives to the provincial committee at Tula, and, with one hundred and four other gentry, signed a request for the abolition of serfdom, whereby every peasant was to receive a piece of land and every owner a fair sum in payment. Most of the landowners in his district refused to endorse the project: liberals and conservatives showed equal selfishness where their own interests were concerned. "The Cherkasky gang are no less a bunch of low-down scum than their opponents," he wrote on September 4 when the deliberations were over. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana with the feeling that the grand idea of emancipation would never overcome the resistance of the local aristocracy. His neighbors accused him of "going over to the peasants." That was too much: for the time being, he confined his treason to having an affair with one of their women. She was married, her name was Axinya Bazykin, she was twenty-three years old and lived in a hamlet seven miles from the master's house. He saw her often, and her husband, an understanding type, did not take umbrage. "In love all day long. . . . Saw her for a short while. . . . She is very nice. ... I am in love as I have never been before. . . . Thought of nothing else. . . .^W2T These sentences in his diary punctuate the phases of a healthy, straightforward and undramatic passion. He saw few people other than those at home, and had no desire to go out. After visiting Turgenev at Spasskoyc he noted, "Ivan Turgenev is impossibly difficult. ... lie is behaving badly toward Marya. The pig!"²⁸ The truth was that Turgenev's feelings for Marya Tolstoy had cooled; he now thought her ugly, aging and dull, but he continued to court her, just to pass the time, with mincing gallantry, vocal tremolo and poetic glances. Irritated by this play-acting, which was keeping the poor girl on tenterhooks, Tolstoy seized every pretext for quarreling with his colleague. And, "I'm through with Tolstoy," the latter wrote to Botkin. "He has ceased to exist for me. May God grant him every blessing, to him and his talent, but I who was first to say 'Hail' to him now have an irresistible desire to tell him 'Farewell.' We arc from opposite poles. If I cat soup and like it, I know by that very fact and beyond the shadow of a doubt that Tolstoy will not like it, and vice versa."²⁹

The widening gap between Tolstoy and Turgenev coincided with the former's growing affection for Fet. It was Fet who arranged for Tolstoy and his brother Nicholas to be invited to a bear hunt in December 1858, 011 the estate of a friend of his who lived near Volochck in the government of Tver. The first day (Deceml>er 21), all went well. But the next day Tolstoy, who had neglected to trample down the snow in order to have room to move about in, suddenly saw the she- bear, maddened by gunfire, charging toward him down the narrow path. The huge shape, dark, soft and powerful, came straight at him. He took aim and fired, missed and fired again when the animal was almost on top of him. The bullet went into her mouth, she gave a roar of pain and threw herself full tilt upon him. He saw the open jaws dripping foam, and beyond, "a bit of brilliant blue sky between purple clouds piled on top of each other." He instinctively lowered his head and flung his arm over his eyes. The bear tore at his facc. He thought the end had come. But a beater cainc running up with a stick in his hand, shouting, "Where arc you going? Where are you going?" and the frightened bear released him and ran off into the forest. Tolstoy looked at the blood-spattered snow and put a hand to his burning face. His left cheek was torn below the eye and a strip of flesh had been gouged from his forehead.I He bore the scars for the rest of his life. That evening's entry in his diary reads simply, "Went bear hunting. The twenty-first I killed one; the twenty-second, the animal took a

t Tolstoy based his essay Desire Is the Worst Sla\'ery of All on this episode.

piece out of mc. Spent a lot of money." Two weeks later he went out hunting again; this time they killed four fine specimens, including the bear that had attacked him. lie received her carcass as a trophy and had it made into a rug for his study.

He returned to Moscow and Family Happiness, which had been a struggle to write from the start; after all, it was tempting fate to describe the crcation and subsequent disintegration of a couple at a time when social problems were all the readers cared about. He was elected to Moscow University's Society of Friends of Russian Literature at the same time as Turgenev, and decidcd to defend the theory of "art for art's sake" in his address to his colleagues. He was admitted to the society on February 4, 1859 and, rising to speak with a spark of defiance in his eyes, denounced the increasing tendency of the public to regard literature solely as a means of "arousing civic spirit in contemporary society." Some people went so far as to pretend that Pushkin would soon be forgotten and "pure art" was an impossibility. Before an audience stony with disapproval, he forcefully concluded: "However important a political literature may be, a literature that reflects the passing problems of socicty, and however necessary to national progress, there is still another type of literature that reflects the eternal necessities of all mankind, the dearest and deepest imaginings of a whole race, a literature that is accessible to all and to every age, one without which no people has been able to grow powerful and fertile."

Khomyakov, the president, replied that it was a man's duty to condemn the vices of society and that because of his exceptional sensitivity the writer unconsciously became a public prosecutor of his time, even if he hoped to be only a pure artist. "Yes," he said, turning to Tolstoy, "you, too, will be a prosecutor, whether you like it or not. Follow, by the grace of God, the wonderful path you have chosen . . . but do not forget that in literature the transient, the momentary, arc heightened by becoming part of the artistic and eternal, and that in the end all the individual human voiccs blend to form one harmonious whole."

Tolstoy certainly did not dream then that one day he would be repeating the words of this Slavophil theorist almost verbatim, becoming the opponent of pure art after being its most ardent champion.

As soon as he had finished Family Happiness, he became more strongly convinced than ever of its worthlessness. However, at Botkin's insistence he sold it to Katkov's Russian Herald. On May 3, 1859 he was at Yasnava Polyana when the proofs arrived: "What shameful offal! What a blotch!" he wrote to Botkin. "You have made a fool, an utter fool of mc by advising me to publish it. . . . Now I'm done for as a writer and as a man. ... If you have any compassion for my suffering and if you want to be my friend, do persuade Katkov not to print the second part and let me return the money to him. ... I have kept my part of the bargain and corrected the proofs, with a revulsion which I find it hard to describe. Not one living word in the lot. And the hidcousness of the language—stemming from the hideousness of the thought—is unimaginable. ... I was so right to want to publish it under a pseudonym. . . . The last chapters have not been and must not be sent to me. It is agony to see the book, read it, remember it "

Botkin, who had found a "chill glitter" about Family Happiness when he first read the novel, and had said it moved "neither mind nor heart," went over the proofs with a critical eye and replied, on May 15, 1859:

"To my amazement, the result was entirely different from what I had expected. Not only did I like the second part, but I find it beautiful in all respects. In the first place, it has dramatic appeal; in the second, it is an excellent psychological study; the descriptions of nature are most life-like; and in short, the whole thing is admirable, profoundly talented and meaningful." By and large, the critics were of the same opinion. Northern Flowers hailed it as a "poetic idyl," the St. Petersburg News set the book 011 a level with Childhood, Native Son declared that the characters' psychology was portrayed with "prodigious accuracy" and that the author was established as an exceptional "connoisseur of the human heart."

Tolstoy had in fact put a good deal of both himself and Valerya Arscnycv into the book. Sergey Mikhailovich, the hero, was also older than his fiancee, his estate was a mirror-image of Yasnaya Polyana, his looks and his views on life were those of the author: "He had a simple, open, honest expression, coarse features, alert, intelligent, gentle eyes, a childlike smile," we read in Family Happiness. And also: "Everything he felt was reflected immediately and intensely in his face. . . ." "He spoke with fervor, warmth and simplicity. . . ." "He had occasional bursts of wild enthusiasm. . . ." "Ilis handshake was vigorous and frank, almost painful." Ever)' notation accentuates the likeness of the portrait. It was the painter himself, standing in front of a mirror drawing his own picture, line for line. The description of Masha, the heroine, was equally true-to-lifc: like Valerya Arsenyev, she was attracted to the glitter of high society, whereas Sergey Mikhailovich abhorred "the dirt and idleness of this imbecilic class." Disillusioned with marriage after years of being misunderstood, the young wife finally transfers her former affection for her husband to her children. Tolstoy was not able either to dominate or to say anything really new about the relatively trite theme of the transmutation of conjugal love into maternal love, and the story, a novella rather than a novel, was uneven, clumsily constructed and lacking in originality. But it was permeated by a remarkable feeling for nature: the reapers staggering under the sun, the monotonous movement of the telegas through the yellow dust, the smell of gardens at the approach of autumn, the red ashbcrrics among leaves blackened by the first frost, the little church through which the priest's voice resounded "as though there were no one else alive in the whole world," the winter sky, glowing with "the ringed moon of the season of the frosts"—all these descriptions illuminate the inferior pages and save them from mediocrity.

Despite the book's success, Tolstoy continued to l)e dissatisfied with it and returned to his Cossacks, begun six years before. Would he have enough determination to see them through to the end? He no longer believed he could. He was suddenly filled with a mighty loathing for himself and the world. A series of disenchanted notes filled the pages of his diary. At one point, he considered Octave Feuillet a better writer than himself: "Read Feuillet. Terrific talent. I am depressed when I think of myself. This year nothing can awaken any response in me. Not even sorrow. My one impulse is to work and forget, but forget what? There's nothing to forget." (May 9, 1859.) "I am not pleased with myself. I am simply drifting." (May 28, 1859.) His nerves were on edge, he often lost his temper. There were quarrels with his sister and the neighbors, outbursts against the muzhiks. "I am being ground in the mill of domestic problems again, with all their stinking weight." (October 14-16.) How ridiculous to waste his time inventing stories, when life was surging about him on all sides, dragging him into the currcnt. Writing stories was a game for children, not a fit occupation for a man. Man had been created to work with his hands, help his neighbor, and teach the young. Down with pure art, and social art, too! He wrote to Fet in a moment of anger, solemnly forswearing literature: "I shall write no more fiction. It is shameful, when you come to think of it. People are weeping, dying, marrying, and I should sit down and write books telling 'how she loved him'? It's shameful!"³⁰

And to Druzhnin, who had asked for a story for his review The Reading Library: "I'm not much use as a writer any more. I have written nothing since Family Happiness and I don't think I shall ever write again. At least, I am presumptuous enough to believe that. . . . Now that I have become mature, life is too short for me to fritter it away making up books like the ones I write, which are a source of embarrassment to me afterward. ... If at least there were some subject that was really nagging at me, demanding to take shape, impelling me to be bold, proud and strong. Then, yes! But really, to write novels that are charming and entertaining to read, at thirty-one years of age! I gasp at the thoughtl"³¹

Tolstoy put the education of the people at the top of his list of occupations that were worthy of a man. He had already opened one school at Yasnaya Polyana in 1848, but had been forced to close it when he went to the Caucasus. He decided to try again. However, by educating these primitive beings, would he not arouse desires in them that could not be satisfied afterward? Would he not be condemning them to lives of frustration, by trying to force his form of happiness upon them? The master was apprehensive, but his serfs were even more so, although for different reasons. As always, they thought only of what he could be trying to gain for himself from his scheme. Perhaps he wanted to turn their sons into foot-soldiers so he could send them to the army and be paid by the tsar. Long palavers were required to allay their fears. At last Tolstoy managed to collect twenty-two children, whom he led into a converted bedroom on the third floor of the house and, scarcely containing his joy and pride, began to chalk the letters of the Russian alphabet on a blackboard.

Of course, there were recurrences of the parental misgivings. One muzhik did not want his son to continue at the school because no floggings were administered there and he would lose the habit of being beaten. Another was persuaded that the master was withholding something from his pay for his son's lessons. Forccd to control his anger, Tolstoy told himself that his peasants' thickheadedness was providing him with an opportunity to learn evangelical forbearance. His educational system was founded on total freedom—of the teacher in relation to pupils, and the pupils in relation to their teacher. Only those came who wanted to learn. If they did not feel like working, nobody forccd them. The teacher's moral authority should be enough to keep the class under control. No lessons to be memorized at home, no written work to prepare, no surprise quizzes to dread. "The pupil brings nothing to the classroom but himself, his rational mind and his certainty that school will be as much fun today as it was yesterday."³² In this schoolboy's paradise Tolstoy taught spelling, arithmetic, religious history, history and geography, all mixed up together. The children listened distractedly, retained an occasional word; but their faces were becoming more alert every day. The enrollment rose from twenty-two to fifty, whereupon Tolstoy decided to publish an educational periodical. "I am working at something that comes as naturally to me as breathing and, I confess with culpablc pride, enables me to look down on what the rest of you are doing,"⁸³ he wrote to Chicherin.

And to Borisov: "I am swamped with work, and fine work it is. A far cry from writing novels!"³¹ His friends hid their smiles and shrugged their shoulders: their Leo had clcarly gone off his head! The eternal about-face, another new craze, words thrown to the winds. "Leo Tolstoy is continuing his nonsense," Turgenev wrote to Fct. "It must be in his blood. When will he turn his final somersault and land on his feet at last?"³⁵

During the warm weather, all the pupils at Yasnava Polyana had to work in the fields and the master shut down the school. Besides, he did not have a free moment himself. He rose at four in the morning to help his muzhiks with the heaviest chorcs: "After sweating blood and tears, everything seemed beautiful to mc, I began to love mankind,"³⁸ he wrote. Then, broken with fatigue, radiant, ravenous, he went off to meet his serf-mistress Axinya Bazykin. As time passed, he had grown so fond of her full white peasant flesh that he could no longer do without it. "I am afraid when I see how attached to her I am," he wrote in his diary. "The feeling is no longer bestial, but that of a husband for his wife." What to do? lie did not want their liaison to bccome official, and yet he did not have the courage to break it off. The best solution, he thought, would be to go away for a while. Conveniently, his brother Nicholas, who was suffering from tuberculosis, was planning a trip to Soden, a little German town whose waters were said to be very effective in pulmonary cases. Sergey and the patient set out together in the last days of May, and in spite of the summer work which should have kept the master at Yasnava Polyana, Leo decided to follow them. Too bad for Axinya. school and harvest! This time, he would travel en famille; he took his sister Marya, who was ill herself, and her three children, Nikolenka, Varya and Lisa.

On July 2, i860 they sailed from St. Petersburg on the Prussian Eagle, a paddle steamer bound for Stettin. Tolstoy was seasick. Since Dmitry's death he had been haunted by the fear of tuberculosis. When he stepped ashore at Stettin after a very rough two-dav crossing, his mind was full of dire forebodings and his jaw swollen with toothache.

From Stettin Leo and Marya Tolstoy and her children went directly to Berlin to consult a lung specialist, Professor Traube. He reassured everyone: there was not the slightest trace of tuberculosis in the lungs of the distinguished foreigners who had comc to him for auscultation. However, to give weight to his reputation, perhaps, and to justify his fees, he advised Marya to take the waters at Soden, recommended sea baths for Varya, who was delicate, and treatment at Kissingen for Leo's dental neuralgia. On the orders of this leading light of medicine, the family separated. Leo stayed on in Berlin. When he thought of poor Nicholas coughing out his lungs at Soden, he told himself that lie ought really to be there by the side of his dearly beloved elder brother. But the memory of his last interview with Dmitry was so chilling that, without admitting it to himself, he was afraid of another ordeal of the sort. With the unconscious selfishness of the healthy, he invented a thousand reasons for putting off a meeting which could give him nothing but grief. And to begin with, was it not his duty as an educator to acquaint himself with foreign teaching methods? He visited museums, went to the University to hear Droysen the historian and Du Bois-Rcymond the physiologist; he toured the famous Moabit Prison, where the American practice of solitary confinement had been introduced, with Fraenkel, the student, as his guide, and he attended evening classes for workingmen. There, the students—all adults—asked whatever questions they liked by means of a question box, and classes took the form of an informal dialogue. In the children's classes, on the other hand, rigid discipline prevailed, at which the traveler was incensed. Leipzig, Dresden—everywhere he found the same teaching by rote, the same brutal punishment. "Summer in school is awful," he wrote. "Prayer for the king, cuff on the head, everything by heart, children terrorized and benumbed."¹

From Stettin Leo and Marya Tolstoy and her children went directly to Berlin to consult a lung specialist, Professor Traube. He reassured everyone: there was not the slightest trace of tuberculosis in the lungs of the distinguished foreigners who had comc to him for auscultation. However, to give weight to his reputation, perhaps, and to justify his fees, he advised Marya to take the waters at Soden, recommended sea baths for Varya, who was delicate, and treatment at Kissingen for Leo's dental neuralgia. On the orders of this leading light of medicine, the family separated. Leo stayed on in Berlin. When he thought of poor Nicholas coughing out his lungs at Soden, he told himself that lie ought really to be there by the side of his dearly beloved elder brother. But the memory of his last interview with Dmitry was so chilling that, without admitting it to himself, he was afraid of another ordeal of the sort. With the unconscious selfishness of the healthy, he invented a thousand reasons for putting off a meeting which could give him nothing but grief. And to begin with, was it not his duty as an educator to acquaint himself with foreign teaching methods? He visited museums, went to the University to hear Droysen the historian and Du Bois-Rcymond the physiologist; he toured the famous Moabit Prison, where the American practice of solitary confinement had been introduced, with Fraenkel, the student, as his guide, and he attended evening classes for workingmen. There, the students—all adults—asked whatever questions they liked by means of a question box, and classes took the form of an informal dialogue. In the children's classes, on the other hand, rigid discipline prevailed, at which the traveler was incensed. Leipzig, Dresden—everywhere he found the same teaching by rote, the same brutal punishment. "Summer in school is awful," he wrote. "Prayer for the king, cuff on the head, everything by heart, children terrorized and benumbed."¹

He had great admiration for the German novelist Berthold Auer- baeh, author of Schwarzwdlder Dorfgescliichten (Scenes of Village Life in the Black Forest), who, judging from his books, shared Tolstoy's ideas about education. One morning Auerbach saw a short, stocky, bearded stranger, with little steely eyes beneath thick, bushy brows, enter his drawing room, bow and say, "I am Fugcne Baumann!"—the name of one of Auerbach's characters. The author froze, thinking that this determined-looking individual was intending to sue him for defamation. But a smile flitted across his guest's thick lips and he added, "I am Eugene Baumann by nature, not by name." And he introduced himself: Count Leo Tolstoy, author and schoolteacher. Relieved, Auerbach invited the Russian to sit down. They understood each other from the first word. "All methods are sterile," said Auerbach. "Anybody can be a great teacher. It's the children who crcatc the best teaching methods, together with their teachcr."² Tolstoy scarcely had time to nod his head.

At Kissingen, where he went next for his teeth, he met Julius Froe- bel, nephew of the originator of the kindergarten and himself the author of The System of Social Politics. His impression of the German pedagogue was of a "liberal-aristocrat" and a "chatterbox," utterly "emptied" by politics. He even went so far as to call him, disdainfully, "nothing but a Jew." Further, Frocbcl was unwilling to admit that all constraint in the education of the people was harmful and that education in Russia would ultimately progress faster because Russian children were still unspoiled, whereas the German children had been contaminated by retrograde methods. Despite these areas of disagreement between tlie two, Froebel introduced Tolstoy to the European systems of education and advised him what to read, recommending the economist Wilhclm Riehl's Kulturgeschichte in particular.

Now and then, for a change of scenery, Tolstoy went off on trips into Thuringia or the Ilarz Mountains. He went to Wartburg and saw the room in which Luther began his translation of the Bible, but it did not occur to him to go to Sodcn, only a short distance from Kissingen, where Nicholas was quietly dying. The sick man was saddened by Leo's delay: "Uncle Leo lingers on at Kissingen, five hours from Soden, but he does not come to Soden, and so I have not seen him," he wrote to Fet on July 20 (August 1), i8fo.

What was going on in Tolstoy's mind? Nothing very specific; he put off the painful duty of seeing his brother from one day to the next, he was playing for time, holding his anguish at bay, out of cowardice, because it was easier. But it suddenly became impossible for him to feign ignorance any longer: his other brother, Sergey, stopped at Kissingen

on his way back to Russia. He had lost all his money at roulette and had to return to Pirogovo, where Marya Shishkin—the gypsy with whom he had now been living for some ten years—was waiting for him. According to Sergey, their brother's condition had deteriorated considerably. 'l he news affected Tolstoy, but not enough to drag him out of his apathy. He remained at Kissingcn, sighing over his elder brother's fate and ruminating a scheme for the abolition of roulette.

On July 28 (August 9), i860, Sergey left for Russia and Nicholas arrived in Kissingen in person, exhausted by a five-hour train trip under a leaden sky. He could not bear his younger brother's silence any longer. Since Leo refused to comc to him, it was lie, summoning his last remaining strength, who went to Leo.

Although he had long since left the army, Nicholas was still wearing a faded artillery tunic. I lis hands were large, dirty and diaphanous. Great intelligent eyes burned with fever in his hollow scarlct-chccked mask. He breathed as little as possible, for fear of starting a coughing fit. Alcohol and tuberculosis had consumed his body, but the same sadly ironic smile twisted his lips when lie looked at his brother. He admired Leo's talent as a writer and teased him about his worldly escapades, flings with the peasant girls, turnalxnit moods and bouts of breast- beating, which were often nothing but disguised bursts of self-love. "The attitude of humility that Leo Tolstoy cultivated in theory," Turgenev said, "was actually applied by his brother Nicholas. He always lived in some impossible slum in a remote part of town, and was ready- to share whatever he had with the poor."

Stricken with remorse at the sight of the condemned man, Tolstoy swore not to leave his side again. lie wrote in his diary on July 31 (August 12): "Nicholas is in a dreadful state. Extremely intelligent, clcar-headcd. At the same time, has a will to live but no vital energy." But the next day he let Nicholas go back alone to Soden. His selfishness had triumphed over his conscience. And by staying where he was, lie spared his sensitive soul. Besides, he had no talent for nursing: "Nicholas has left. I don't know what to do. Marya is also unwell. I am being no use to anyone." (August 1 [13], i860.) He complained of his uselessness for another two weeks, but it never occurred to him that by going to Soden lie would be making himself useful. lie continued to see Froebel, became more and more fascinated with the subject of education, wrote to Aunt Toinette for news of the Yasnaya Polyana school, which had just been reopened by a teacher³ he had hired before he left. . . . Suddenly, he wanted to be back among his muzhiks, wearing the same dress as they, instead of wasting his time abroad. In the night of August 10-11 (22-23) he had a nightmare that left him perplexed: "Dreamed that I was dressed as a peasant and my mother did not recognize mc,"¹ he wrote. Did this mean that "going over to the people" was just a hollow pretense and his mother, whom he adored but had never known, was rejecting him from on high? His most noble thoughts were soured by a sneaking sense of self-dcccption, and he had caught cold, which made him even gloomier. "All day long I was obsessed by fear for my lungs."⁵ He saw a doctor, who told him he was suffering from a "vasomotor" disturbance. This diagnosis abruptly tipped the scales: he took the train for Soden, to undergo treatment himself.

The welcome he received from Nicholas, so cheerful and confident in spite of his extreme feebleness, stirred him to the core, but he found his sister Marya "boring and bored." He felt better and quite forgot about his own treatment. Besides, the weather was turning bad, it rained all the time, a damp chill was creeping into the rooms. At Soden, and then at Frankfort, the doctors advised Nicholas to try the South of France. Leo, Marya and her three children accompanied him, and they all arrived together at Hyeres, 011 August 24 (September 6), i860. The two men stayed in town, at Mme. Senequier's pension on the rue du Midi, and Marya and her children rented a villa a few miles away.

The long train and coach trip had worn Nicholas out. He smiled up at the blue sky and sun and felt his strength ebbing away. When lie had a coughing fit, which was usually in the morning when he awoke, he was ashamed to be seen spitting blood into the basin and refused to have anyone in the room. Although the slightest effort exhausted him, he dressed and undressed himself out of discipline, and to keep up his dignity. But one day, in his toilet, he had to call his brother because lie was too weak to straighten his clothes by himself. "Help mc," he murmured. And afterward said, "Thanks, friend." These words moved Tolstoy far more than a searing lament or an avowal of love. "Friend. ... Do you realize what that meant, between us?"^fl he wrote to Sergey.

Nicholas no longer doubted that his end was at hand, and accepted defeat with equanimity. Seated by his bed, Tolstoy looked at the bloodless face, listened to the shallow breathing and thought back to their children's games at Yasnaya Polyana, the drinking bouts with the officers, the hunts with Uncle Epishka in the Caucasian forest and the green stick bearing the secret of happiness that Nicholas said was buried in the forest of Zakaz. Was it possible that this cherished vessel of memory, this lively intelligence, this warmth of thought were about to dissolve forever? What was the point of living, what was the point of work, if evcr> thing must end in this horrible slithering toward an abyss?

On September 20 (October 2), 1S60 Tolstoy saw that his brother would not live through the day. Marya had just gone back to her villa outside Hydres. Nicholas sank into unconsciousness. Then his eyes opened wide, his face winced in terror, he blurted out, "What is it?" and died.

Eight years earlier Tolstoy had written to Aunt Toinette from the Caucasus: "As God is my witness, the two greatest misfortunes that could befall me would be your death or that of Nicholas, the two people I love more than myself."⁷

For once he had not been wrong in his predictions. He was literally astonished by an event he refused to understand. Death as he had seen it on the battlefield was brutal, heroic, awful, but the very strangeness of the sight distorted its meaning. Besides, one was quaking so hard with fear for one's own skin that one had no time to ponder over metaphysical problems. But here in Mine. S^ndquier's pleasant family pension, death was not a sudden blow, but a long, slow wearing- down, an ineluctable advance of l>cing toward nothingness, the most abominable destruction in the most intimate and commonplace setting, between basin and bedpan. "Terrible though it is," Leo wrote to his brother Sergey, "1 am glad it all happened before my eyes and affected me as it should have done. It is not like the death of Mitenka [Dmitry], which I learned of 3t a time when my mind was completely taken up with other things. ... I was bound to Mitenka by childhood memories and a feeling of kinship, but that was all. But he [Nicholas] was, for you and for me, the man we loved and respected more than anything in the world. You know the selfish thought that was in our minds toward the end: the sooner the better—now, it is terrible to write that and remember that one could think it. ... lie died without suffering, visibly at least. The next day I went down to his room. I was afraid to uncover his face. I thought it must be even more anguished and frightening than during his illness, but you cannot imagine how attractive it was, how good, cheerful and calm."⁸

During the burial at the cemetery at Hy&res, Tolstoy thought of writing "a practical Gospel, a materialist life of Christ."⁹ But it was not, he was convinced, literary vanity that inspired this project. He was no longer interested in art. After the ordeal he had just been through, his sole aim was to tear off the absurd masks that religions had plastered onto the face of God, one on top of the other, down through the centuries: "When one really comes to think that death is the end of everything, then there is nothing worse than being alive. Why care, why work, since there is nothing left of what was Nicholas Nikolayevich? Strange idea of a joke! Be useful, virtuous, happy, people tell cach other; but we and our usefulness, our virtue, our happiness, it all boils down to this simple truth which I have understood after thirty- two years of life: the situation in which we are placed is atrocious. . . . No doubt, so long as one has the desire to discover the truth and say it, one goes on trying to discover it and say it. That is all that remains of my idea of morality. That is the only thing I shall do, only not in your form of art. Art is a lie, and already I am no longer able to love a beautiful lie."¹⁰ And he wrote in his diary, on October 13 (25): "It is almost a month since Nikolenka [Nicholas] died. This event has detached me terribly from life. Again the same question: why? I am no longer very far myself from the crossing-over. Over where? Nowhere. I try to write, I force myself, and I can't do it, for the simple reason that I cannot attach enough importance to work to muster up the strength and patience it demands. . . . Nikolenka's death has hit mc harder than anything I have ever experienced."

But man is so made that the consciousness of the nothingness lying in wait for him paradoxically spurs him on to build. With his prodigious powers of recuperation, Tolstoy drew a strength from his grief that happiness could not have given him. "Read my fortune in the cards," he wrote on October 16 (28), i860. "Shilly-shallying, idleness, depression, thoughts of death. Must get out of this. Only one way: make myself work. It is already one o'clock in the afternoon and I have not yet done a thing. Finish the first chapter before dinner, then write letters." And a little later, "For the last three days I have been invaded by a host of images and ideas, such as I have not had for ten years."¹¹

After casting away art ("Art is a lie, and already I am no longer able to love a beautiful lie"), he turned and clung to it as though it were the most precious thing in the world. He even began a new novel, The Decembrists, the opening pages of which described the homecoming of one of the heroes of Russian liberalism after being exiled by Nicholas I for his part in the uprising of December 14, 1825.* In his portrait of Russian society as seen through the eyes of this ghost from the Siberian prison camps, he abandoned himself, in spite of his mourning, to a mordant irony and grim gaiety in which the joy of crcation could be detected. He might have left Hyeres and broken away from the sad memories there, but lie preferred to stay until the end of the year, and moved into the villa "Touche" with his sister. The little provincial town was full of tuberculosis patients. "Wherever one goes," wrote Marya Tolstoy, "there are the sick, and what sick! A congrcss of dying consumptives! Every minute one goes by in a chair, or held up by the

• Tolstoy abandoned this novel after a few chapters.

arms by someone on cither side, or dragging along alone with a cane; all their faces arc livid, exhausted and dismal. In a word, this is an outdoor hospital. Hardly anyone has only a mild case; only those for whom all hope has been abandoned come here!"'² And Tolstoy himself confessed to his babushka Alexandra that since his brother's death he could not look at the Hyeres invalids without feeling that they were all "part of the family," that they all "had some power over him."¹³ When he was too downhearted, his nephews helped him to combat his despair. Their candid eyes, laughter and questions revived his taste for life. With them and a little nine-year-old neighbor, Sergey Plaxin, who "had a weak chest," he went for long walks up the Montagne Sainte, or over to the castle of the Trou des Fees (Fairies' Hole) or to Porquerol- les to watch the men working in the salt flats. He told them fairy talcs as they went; the story of the golden horse, the story of the giant tree from the top of which one could see all the cities and seas of the world. When Sergey Plaxin was tired, he lifted him onto his shoulders, and the little boy might pretend he was at the top of the magic oak. Back at the house, Tolstoy organized games: lie hung a rig between the doors and did gymnastics with the children, or gathered them around him and asked them to write a composition on the theme, "What distinguishes Russia from all other countries?" For one, the most striking thing about Russia was the blinis they ate during Lent and the painted eggs at Easter; for another, it was all the snow that fell there; for another, it was troikas.¹⁴ Tolstoy was delighted with their replies. He felt his professorial calling stirring again.

To complete his documentation on the subject dear to his heart, he went to Marseilles one day and visited eight State schools. As in Germany, he found an atmosphere of stifling discipline in the classrooms. The children's talent for duplicity was cultivated by over-harsh treatment, and their memories were developed at the expense of their intelligence by forcing them to learn their lessons by heart. They gave the visitor the right answers as long as he asked his questions on the history of France in the order they occurred in the textbook, but when he began to skip from one chapter to another they told him that Ilcnri IV had been slain by Julius Caesar. The orphanage he visited next was, to his mind, a prison for little children. "At the sound of the whistle," he wrote, "four-year-olds revolve around their benches like soldiers, raising and crossing their arms on command, and in strange, quavering voices, sing hymns to God and their benefactors."

And yet, in the streets, the personalities of the most ordinary people, their conversation and repartee, proved that they had all the wit they needed. "The French arc nearly all the things they believe they are: ingenious, intelligent, sociable, open-minded and, it is true, civilized. Look at a thirty-year-old town laborer: he can write a letter with fewer mistakes than the children in school can, sometimes without any at all; he has some notion of politics, history and modem geography. . . . Where has he learned it all?"¹⁵ The answer, for Tolstoy, was simple: the Frenchman did not get his education at school—where the instruction was preposterous—but in his life, reading the newspapers and novels (among others, those of Alexandre Dumas), going to museums and theaters and the cafes, and to the guinguettes (country inns where people went to dance). He estimated that twenty-five thousand souls passed daily through each of the two huge cafes-concerts of Marseilles, where one could drink for ten sous. That made fifty thousand a day, watching comic sketches, listening to poems and songs. . . . There were two hundred and fifty thousand people in the city and so one- fifth of the entire population, according to Tolstoy, could be said to l>c informed every day "as the Greeks and Romans were in their amphitheaters." He called this "spontaneous education," the kind that would "put compulsory schooling out of business." True, he could hardly open a cafe-concert at Yasnaya Polyana, but there, as here, education must be a joyful pursuit. On October 13 (25) he wrote in his diary: "School is not at school, but in the newspapers and cafds."

Toward mid-December, feeling that his pedagogical research was still incomplete, he went to Italy: Florence, Livomo, Naples, Pompeii— where he came unawares upon "an image of Antiquity"—and Rome, where he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the ruins and the treasures in the museums; but what he was really in search of as he journeyed from one town to another was man, not works of art. One day at the top of the Pincio, the hill with the finest view of the city, he heard a little boy crying for a toy. Suddenly the Villa Medici, the gardens and far-off ruins vanished. The only thing that existed and mattered in the world was the unknown child with the shrill voice. Thirty- eight years later, thinking back to Rome, it was not the celebrated monuments that came into his mind, but a dirty, tear-stained little face with eyes as black as olives and a scrcaming mouth: Date mi un baloccol"^ie

In less than two months he had exhausted Italy's stores of tourist and academic attractions and returned to Hyfcrcs. At the beginning of February' 1861 he went to Paris, which had left such an unpleasant taste in his mouth because of its women of easy virtue and its guillotine. In the capital he met Turgenev again, and was delighted with him, bought quantities of books on education, visited more schools and entertained himself by observing the French people in public buses.

All the passengers seemed copied out of a book by Paul de Kock! On February 17 (March 1) he wrote to his brother that the reason he was prolonging his long trip abroad was "so that nobody in Russia could tell [him] anything about what was being done abroad in the field of education." That day he left for London and arrived, once again, with a toothache.

The moment the pain subsided, he dressed himself up as a dandy- top hat and palmerstonf— and went out to mix with the people, in order to learn and criticize. The foggy, smoky town, with yellow gas- lamps glowing here and there, impressed him by its orderliness, discipline and tedium. Not one curious glance in the street, not one over- hasty movement, not a cry, not a smile. Nothing but measured, sober citizens hiding their souls and going about their business with 110 concern for that of others. Although London instilled in him "a loathing for modern civilization," he was fascinated by the cockfights and boxing matches, by a sitting in the House of Commons during which Lord Palmerston spoke for three solid hours, and by a lecture on education given by Dickens. The memory of Dickens also pursued him as he toured the English schools—no more alluring than those of Paris, Rome, Geneva and Berlin. But with what joy and pride, on the other hand, he went to call on Herzen, the revolutionary, who was living in a comfortable little cottage with his daughter Natalya. The fiery editorialist of The Bell had had a hard time recovering from the series of misfortunes that had befallen him in recent years. His mother and his son had perished in the shipwreck of the Marseilles-Nice mailboat off the Hyeres Islands; his wife had died in childbirth, after being unfaithful to him. However, instead of the monument of woe he was preparing to greet, it was a paunchy, bearded, jovial little man who came into the room. Herzen's eyes were alight with intelligence. He exuded a kind of electricity. They complimented one another, talked of Russia, freedom, the Decembrists, popular education, the peasant problem—and literature, too. . . . On February 23 (March 7), 1861 Herzen wrote to Turgenev: "I am seeing a lot of Tolstoy. We have already quarreled. He is stubborn and talks nonsense, but is naive and a good man." And, five days later, "Count Tolstoy often oversteps the limits. His brain does not take time to digest the impressions it absorbs."

On March 5 (17) Tolstoy read in the newspapers of the publication in Russia of the imperial manifesto of February 18 (March 3), 1861 abolishing serfdom. He was deeply moved, no doubt, but did not have

f A long coat fashionable in 1860.

time to share his impressions with Ilcrzcn, for lie was leaving that day for Belgium. I low had the muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana reacted to the news? Had someone managed to explain the terms of the proclamation to them? Would there not be some hardheads among the people who would demand their freedom immediately and without payment? Tolstoy should have hurried home, to spare his beloved muzhiks any doubts or fears; yet once he reached Brussels, he showed no inclination to leave. After all, the abolition of serfdom did not concern him. Ah, if the government had only let him free his muzhiks first, with what zeal he would have rushed home to urge other landowners to follow his example! But as he had not been the instigator of the movement, his desire for social justice was frustrated. A man of his temperament could not be expected to display the same ardor in obedience as in apostlehood. He was made to storm the citadel alone, not to follow in the anonymous flood of foot-soldiers. Since the manifesto, published in every newspaper and posted on every church door, had bccome the law of the land, he would conform to it, certainly, but lie was not going to break his neck over it.

However, the news that reached him from Russia was not reassuring; the manifesto was written in a complicated and pompous style, and the people had not understood it. It stated that for a period of two years the serfs—whether attached to the master's land (krepostnye) or to his person (dvorovye)—would be required to obey their owner as before, but the owner would not have the right to sell them, transfer them to another estate or dispose of their children in any way. During the period of transition they would be required to pay a tithe of thirty rubles per man and ten rubles per woman, and in 1863 they would be released from all obligations to their former master. The dvorovye, who were not attached to the land, might seek employment wherever they liked but would receive no land. The krepostnye would have the use of their enclosure (pen, croft, etc.) and a measure of arable land, to be calculated according to detailed scales varying with local conditions. This land would be ceded to the muzhiks in return for two kinds of payment to the owner: the obrok (payment in money, ranging from eight to twelve rubles per person per year) and the barshina (payment in labor, equal to forty days a year for men and thirty for women). The implementation of these measures was to be supervised by "arbiters of the peace," appointed among the nobility in each district of each government. If the muzhiks wished to purchase the land they worked, the State would lend them the necessary amount to pay off their former master, and they would repay the loan over a period of forty-nine years, by annual installments representing 6 per cent of the obrok, amortization and interest included. From these liberal and complicated provisions the muzhiks retained only three things: the land was not to be theirs at once, they were not to be free for two years, and if a dispute arose between them and their master, it was to be settled by the gentry.

From Yasnava Polyana Sergey wrote to Tolstoy on March 12, 1861: "These are fascinating days. The emancipation manifesto was read out to the people, who did not pay close attention, and it seems to me that the)' are all rather dissatisfied. The main thing is that they don't understand a word of the document and appear not to carc. I offered to explain it all to the peasants at Yasnava Polyana while I was there, but nobody seemed to want me to do so."

Thus informed, Tolstoy wrote to Hcrzen:

"Have you read the exact terms of emancipation? To my mind it is utterly futile verbiage. I have received two letters from Russia telling mc that the muzhiks arc all dissatisfied. Before, they could hope that everything would turn out all right; now they know for certain that everything will be all wrong, at least for the next two years, and after that there will be more delays, and the whole tiling is the work of the masters."¹⁷

But although he was justifiably anxious about the future, he still made no change in his plans for the present. He had conic to Brussels with two letters of introduction from Ilerzcn—one to Joachim Lclcwel, the Polish revolutionary historian who had been forced to flee the country after Nicholas I had quelled the insurrection of 1830, and the other to Proudhon. Knowing that the Russian police kept paid emissaries abroad, it required a certain amount of daring for Tolstoy to call on these illustrious political refugees.

He found Lelewel in a dust-carpeted attic cluttered with books, talked to him of the legitimate aspirations of martyred Poland and withdrew full of respect for the withered, forgotten, poverty-stricken old man who had preserved his faith in liberty intact despite the passing years. Proudhon received him next, in his little apartment at Ixelles. He was just completing a philosophical work on armed conflict between nations: War and Peace; Tolstoy was struck by the title, and it remained engraved in his memory. The French publicist, very curious to learn what was going on elsewhere, questioned his guest about the state of opinion in Russia. Tolstoy did not dare to tell this stranger what he really thought of the recent emancipation measures and the deplorable conditions of public education. Patriotic first and foremost, he stressed the fact that the serfs were not being freed empty-handed and that all cultivated Russians knew that the education of the people was essential to the construction of a strong state.

"If that is true," cried Proudhon, "the future belongs to you Russians."¹⁸

Tolstoy's pride thrilled to this prophecy. Ilis host, with the air of a rough-hewn peasant, shaggy beard and spectacles, struck him as a man of consequence who had "the courage of his convictions." Proudhon, in turn, wrote to Gustave Chaudey after this visit: "Russia is jubilant. The tsar proclaimed his emancipation decree in agreement with the boyars and after consulting all concerned. The pride of these ex-nobles must be seen to be believed. A highly educated man, Mr. Tolstoy, with whom I have been talking the past few days, said to me, 'That is what is called a real emancipation. We are not sending our serfs away empty-handed, we are giving them property along with their freedom.' "¹⁹

Tolstoy found life in Brussels "calm and home-like" after London; this sense of comfort and familiarity was due chiefly to the fact that he was a daily guest in the home of Prince Dondukov-Korsakov, vice- president of the Acadcmy of Science. "An old man, an old woman, two daughters ill and another aged fifteen; as you can see, there is no material for matrimony here," he wrote to his brother Sergey on March 12 (24), 1861. "Besides, I don't have much hope left on that score, because my last remaining teeth are crumbling to bits. But my spirits are high!"

Finding no prospect of a fiancee in the Dondukov-Korsakov family, he remembered that one of their nieces, Katcrina Alcxandrovna, who lived with her aunt, Princess Golitsin, in Hy6rcs, had charmed him by her grace and distinction. True, he had not given a thought to her during the three and a half months since he last saw her; but should that stop him from contemplating marriage? The fever had seized him again: a wife—any wife—but quick, quick, a family, children! Without further ado he wrote to his sister Marya, who was still at Hyeres, informing her of his project. Her reply was judicious:

"If it were to work out, wouldn't you suddenly begin asking yourself, 'Why did I do it?' Wouldn't you, one fine morning, quietly begin to hate your wife, thinking, 'If only I hadn't married . . . ?' That is what I fear. If you have really made up your mind to let yourself be harnessed, then you certainly could not find a better girl. She could be happy with you and you could be happy with her. But can you be happy at all, as a married man? That is the question."

Indignant cry of protest from Leo: how could Marya believe he was not certain of his mind? He loved Katcrina with all his soul. It had simply taken him a while to realize it. Convinced by his protestations, Marya then advised her brother to propose without further delay: "If you begin to think about it," she wrote, "all is lost. . . . Put everything else out of your mind and come to Hycrcs."

All Tolstoy required was to be told to put everything else out of his mind: he promptly put anything else into it. Just as the jaws of the trap were about to snap shut on him, he jumped back. Tic himself down for life to some young person whom he knew nothing about, who might be an utter nuisance? Never! He wrote an apology to his sister, another to Katcrina Alexandrovna's aunt, and thought no more of all the little Tolstoys who might have issued from this union.f

Restored to bachelorhood, he redoubled his intellectual activities. During the three weeks he spent in Brussels, he continued his tour of schools, wrote an article on education, ordered banks of large type to use in children's primers and began to write his story Polikushka, based on an incident in Russian peasant life told to him by one of Prince Dondukov-Korsakov's sons. It was strange to be writing about the serfs when their independence had just been proclaimed. Overnight, the everyday, ordinary present had become history. One had to write about them in the past tense. Really, it was time he went back to Russia to see the faces of these new free men.

On March 27 (April 8), he started out. But instead of going straight through Germany he stopped at Eisenach, Weimar and Jena, doubled back to Weimar where he was presented to the grand duke, "surrounded by idiotic court ladies," and received permission to visit Goethe's home, still closed to the public. In every town and hamlet he rushed to tour the schools and kindergartens. He would often walk into classrooms unannounced, with the high-handed manners of the boyar. Once he appropriated all the notebooks of the pupils of the German schoolteacher Julius Stoetzer, for his personal documentation. When their master respectfully pointed out that their parents, most of whom were poor, might not be overjoyed to have to buy new notebooks, he rushed away, bought out a stationer's shop and came back with his arins full of fresh white sheets of paper 011 which the pupils recopied their lessons for him. Then he identified himself with a flourish: "I am Count Tolstoy of Russia," collcctcd the papers and handed them to a servant who stood waiting in the courtyard.

At Jena he met a long-necked student named Keller, who had just finished his studies in the Department of Science and, in a surge of comradeship, took him on as instructor for the Yasnaya Polyana school

I Marya Tolstoy's still unpublished letters are preserved in the Tolstoy Museum.

at a salary of two hundred rubles a year, traveling expenses paid. "I think I have made a lucky find in Keller," he wrote in his diary.²⁰ But he had misgivings two days later when he met the young man's mother: "When I first saw the lady I realized that by taking her son away with mc, I had become responsible for him."⁸¹ Well, come what may! He sent Keller on ahead and went back to Dresden. Passing through Berlin he rejoiced to see Auerbach again ("the most admirable man alive") and met Professor Diesterweg ("unbending, heartless pedagogue, who imagines he can guide and cultivate children's minds with rules and preccpts")He was told at the hotel that "young Keller," who had passed through a few days before, had l>ccn drinking Rhine wine at his expense. This annoyed him "bccausc of the exchange," and also bccausc he was afraid he had misplaccd his confidence.

At last he strapped his bags shut, piled his latest acquisitions—more books—into crates, and, as St. Petersburg could not be reached by water at that time of year, decided to go home by rail, via Warsaw. Crossing the frontier on April 12 (24), 1861, he noted, "Frontier. Health good. Am happy. Scenes of Russia go by unnoticed." Sitting "among Jews" in an ice-cold railway car, his head lulled by the rocking train, he dreamed of opening schools, publishing an educational review and, having failed to be the first liberator of the serfs, becoming at least their first instructor.

[i ] Nicholas Tolstoy, father of Leo Tolstoy

[2] Tolstoy as a student (by an unknown French artist)

[4] Tolstoy at St. Petersburg in 1856

5] Sofya Bchrs

[6] Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya, 1881

[7] Tolstoy and his family in 1887

4. "Arbiter of the Peace' arid Schoolmaster

Russia, for Tolstoy, was neither St. Petersburg nor Moscow, but Yasnaya Polyana. Nevertheless, he took advantage of his presence in the two cities to see Druzhnin, who was also suffering from tuberculosis, Nckrasov, Katkov, his babushka Alexandra and one or two of the young ladies he had thought he might be in love with. This time Katerina Tyutchcv seemed "a ravishing girl, but too much of a hothouse plant, too well schooled in every refinement, too nonchalant," to share his life and work. "She is accustomcd to concocting moral bonbons, and I deal in earth and manure."¹ Lisa, the eldest Bchrs daughter (aged nineteen), on the other hand, quite appealed to him, although he did not dare "to think of taking her for my wife."²

He carricd this vague regret away with him to the country; but for the present, his mind was more taken up with friendship than with love. As soon as he put into port at Yasnaya Polyana, he received a letter from Turgenev, also home from abroad, inviting him to Spasskoye, "while the nightingales are still singing and the spring smiling down." From there they might go to Stcpanovka, the nearby residence of their friend Fet. "Excellent program!" opined Tolstoy, who was ravenous for some literary conversation.

On May 24, 1861 he was at Spasskovc. After dinner, Turgenev settled him in the drawing room on his famous couch, nicknamed the sarno- son³ ("on which one goes to sleep automatically"), set out cigarettes and cool drinks for him and placed in his hands the manuscript of the novel he had just finished: Fathers and Sons. Was it travel fatigue, digestion after a heavy meal or the dullness of overpolished prose? Whatever the cause, after skimming a few pages, Tolstoy's eyes refused to focus and he drifted off to sleep. "I awoke with a most peculiar sensation," he later said, "and saw Turgenev's back retreating into the distance."⁴ His young colleague's lack of interest in his work rankled, but Turgenev did not let it show. Tolstoy, on the other hand, felt guilty at being caught in the act of inattentiveness and fumed because he could not justify himself by saying frankly that he did not like Fathers and Sons. No explanations were given. The book remained on the table by the samo-san. And the next day the two men left for Stepanovka, fifty miles away, as though nothing had happened.

Fet and his wife Marya Petrovna gave them such a cordial welcome that their malaise rapidly vanished. The following morning, May 27, they sat down with their hosts in the dining room, around the samovar. Knowing that Turgenev attached great importance to the education of his illegitimate daughter Paulinctte, Marya Petrovna asked him whether he was satisfied with his English governess, Miss Hinnis, who was looking after the girl in Paris. Turgenev immediately became defensive. He suspected his friends of criticizing him behind his back for allowing Paulinctte to be brought up in the Viardot home, with the result that she knew hardly a word of Russian and, so to speak, had neither family nor country. He boasted that the governess was "a real pearl" and employed British methods at all times. As an example, he told how, at Miss Hinnis' demand, he had been required to fix the amount Paulinctte might spend every month "for her poor."

"Now," he added, "the governess insists that my daughter go in person to collcct the clothcs of the needy, mend them herself and take them back to their homes."

"And you think that is a good thing?" asked Tolstoy, his thick brows beetling over a piercing glare.

"Of course! That way the benefactress is put into direct contact with real poverty."

"Well! What I think," growled Tolstoy, "is that a little girl sitting in a fancy dress with dirty, foul-smelling rags on her knees is putting on a hypocritical, theatrical farce!"

Turgenev turned pale. His nostrils flared. His beard shook.

"I will ask you not to speak like that!" he cried.

"Why shouldn't I say what I think?" answered Tolstoy.

"So you think I am bringing up my daughter badly?"

"I am saying what I think, without any personal allusions."

Fet tried to intervene, but it was too late. Tolstoy sat stonily in his chair, petrified with anger. Then Turgenev clutched his head in his hands, rose from the table and rushed into the next room. A moment later he came back and said to Marya Petrovna:

"I beg you to forgive this scandalous behavior, which I deeply regret."*

He muttered a few words of apology to Tolstoy, and returned to Spasskoyc. Before fifteen minutes had elapsed Tolstoy had also taken leave of his hosts and gone. He intended to head for Nikolskoye, an estate he had inherited from his brother Nicholas. But on the way his rage, far from diminishing, swelled to the proportions of an obsession. He could not go 011 living, soiled from head to foot by this affront. Upon reaching the first stopping-place, Novosyelky, which belonged to I. P. Borisov, a friend of his, he wrote a challenge to Turgenev and dispatched a servant to deliver it at a headlong gallop; in it, he demanded an apology that he could "show to Fet and his wife," or else Turgenev must come in person to give him satisfaction at Bogoslovo, the next relay, where he would wait for him. To this peremptory epistle Turgenev, who had recovered his self-possession, replied, "I can but repeat what I felt it my duty to say at the Fets': carried away by an involuntary animosity which this is not the time to explain, I offended you, without the slightest provocation on your part, and I apologized to you for doing so. I am ready to repeat my apology in writing and I again ask your forgiveness. What happened this morning proves beyond all doubt that any attempt to reconcile two such conflicting personalities as yours and mine is doomed to fail. I perform this duty all the more willingly because this letter will probably be the conclusion of our relationship. I hope with all my heart that it will give you satisfaction and declare in advance that you have my consent to do whatever you wish with it."

These lines might have appeased their addressee had they reached him, but Turgenev sent the note to I. P. Borisov at Novosyelky, thinking Tolstoy was still there, instead of to Bogoslovo, where he was awaiting the reply at the posthouse. The hours passed, and no messenger came, and Tolstoy's anger continued to mount. lie wrote a second letter demanding a duel then and there; not one of those parodies of a duel with "two authors bringing along a third" to fire at each other from a safe distance, taking good care to miss, and then falling into each other's arms and "ending the evening drinking champagne." No, no—a real fight, alone, face to face, with no seconds; a fight to the finish. lie wanted blood, Turgcncv's blood! He chose the place for their final meeting (on the edge of the forest of Bogoslovo), asked his offender to l>c there the next morning, with pistols, and sent to Nikolskoye for his own. He did not sleep all that night. At dawn a messenger arrived bringing Turgenev's answer to his first letter, and then another, gasping for breath, with a reply to the second. Turgenev accepted the challenge: "I shall say, in all sincerity, that I would willingly stand up to your pistol-fire if I could thereby erase my ludicrous words. It is so contrary to the habits of a lifetime for me to have spoken as I did that I can only attribute it to the irritation caused by the excessively intense and perpetual clash of our opinions on every subjcct. That is why, in parting from you forever—events like this cannot be forgotten—I believe it my duty to say once again that you are in the right in this affair, and I in the wrong. I add that the question is not for me to show courage or lack of it, but to acknowledge your right to call me onto the field, presumably in accordance with the generally accepted rules of dueling (that is, with seconds) and also your right to pardon me. You have made the choice that suited you, I submit to your decision."

Tolstoy crowed with victory. He wrote back: "You are afraid of me, I despise you and want no more to do with you."⁰ Then he sent Turgcncv's two letters to Fet, with a caustic commentary. Fet tried to reconcile the adversaries, but encountered a snarling refusal on cither side.

As the weeks went by, however, Tolstoy came to regret his hot- headedness. Although he continued to resent Turgenev's insulting remarks at the Fets', he admitted that he had wittingly provoked him by contradicting him 011 a point as dclicatc as his daughter's education. "With Turgcncv, full-scale and final blow-up," he announced in his diary 011 June 25. "lie is a thoroughgoing scoundrel. But I think that as time goes by I shall be unable to keep myself from forgiving him." On September 23 he could hold out no longer, and wrote: "I have offended you, forgive me; it is unbearable to have you as my enemy."⁷

But it was ordained that luck would always be against this pair in their epistolary relations. Turgcncv had gone back to Paris, and Tolstoy, not sure of his address, asked Davidov, a Petersburg bookseller, to forward the letter. But Davidov, although continually in touch with Turgcncv on business matters, forgot the letter, which lay in a drawer for months. In the meantime Turgcncv heard from Kolbasin, a mutual friend and lover of gossip, that Tolstoy was spreading offensive remarks about him and giving out a false account of their quarrel, with supporting documents. Without questioning for one moment the accuracy of this information, he wrote to the person he regarded as his mortal enemy:

"I have learned that you arc showing a copy of your letter around Moscow, the one in which you call me a coward because I supposedly refused to fight you, etc. After all I have done to make amends for those words that escapcd from my mouth, I regard your conduct as offensive and disloyal and I warn you that I shall not let it pass. When I return to Russia next spring, I shall demand satisfaction."⁸

Even though Tolstoy realized that his letter of apology of September 23 must not have reached its destination, the challenge came as a blow. Instead of becoming angry, however, as he might justifiably have done, he yielded to a wave of Christian charity. Perhaps, that day, he had made some new "rules of life." Or perhaps he wanted to use the incident as a springboard to saintliness. Or perhaps, contemptuous of Turgenev for his concern with the opinion of others, he wanted to prove that when one's name was Leo Tolstoy, public opinion did not exist. At all events, the man who had previously been roaring for a duel without seconds and blood on the grass, now dipped his pen in milder ink:

"Sir, you have called my letter and my conduct disloyal; you have also said that you would punch me in the head. And I offer you an apology, admit my guilt and refuse your challenge to a duel."

Oh, the morbid joy of turning the left cheek after being struck on the right! One knew nothing of the soul's strivings after virtue until one had known that. Now it was the other fellow who must be feeling like a fool, storming around in a vacuum.

Having obtained satisfaction, Turgenev wrote to Fet, asking him to inform Tolstoy that he, too, was giving up any thought of a duel, but still had not received the letter of apology from Davidov. "From this day forward, de profundis on the whole business!"⁹ he concluded. Fet thought it would be diplomatic to inform Tolstoy of the terms of this conciliatory letter—rue the day! Tolstoy's angelic disposition vanished as quickly as it had come, and after his burst of indulgence, he reverted to his former humor, violent, stormy, demanding. He was not going to allow that higli-castc fop with the graying beard and effeminate nerves to pass judgment 011 him in letters to mutual friends. And everybody who corresponded with him should get the same treatment. Traitors all, phrase-makers, mere products of civilization! ... In a frenzy of exasperation, he wrote to Fet:

"Turgenev is a scoundrel who deserves to be thrashed; I beg you to transmit that to him, as faithfully as you transmit his charming comments to me, despite the fact that I have asked you never to speak of him again. ... I also beg you not to write to me any more, for I shall not open your letters any more than Turgenev's."

On January 7, 1862, Turgcnev read the famous letter of apology which Davidov the bookseller had so long neglccted to forward. He wrote to Fet forthwith:

"Today, at last, I received the letter Tolstoy sent in September via Davidov the bookseller (admirable punctuality of our Russian businessmen!), in which he states that he had insulted me intentionally and apologizes, etc. And almost at the same moment, owing to certain gossip I think I told you about, I challenged him to a duel. All one can concludc from this is that the conjunction of our constellations in the heavens is decidedly unfavorable and it is therefore preferable—as he suggests, moreover—that we do not meet again. But you can write to him, or tell him if you see him, that I, at least (sincerely, and with no hidden meaning), am very fond of him, respect him and follow his progress with keen interest, from afar, whereas at closc range, the results are exactly the opposite. What can we do? We must act as though we lived on different planets or in different centuries."

For seventeen years the two men neither met nor corresponded. Tolstoy's falling-out with Fet, on the other hand, lasted only a few days. In January 1862, Tolstoy saw the poet in a Moscow theater, walked up to him, looked him in the eye, held out his hand and said, "No; I do not want to be angry with you."

When he thought back to this incident it seemed to him like a bad dream he had been living through, with grotesque aftereffects in his waking life. One moment it was he who was demanding an apology and, after receiving it, was sorry he had demanded it; and the next it was Turgenev who, after admitting he was in the wrong, considered himself insulted and insisted upon satisfaction gun in hand. As in a circus act, they leaped 011 and off of their high horses, one in front of the other, in counterpoint. Letters crossed in the mail; clumsy friends botched everything up; the devil take all men-of-lettersl The muzhiks were the only people one could live with!

It was for them and no one else that he had come home. Throughout his row with Turgenev, moreover, he had never ceased thinking of them. The emancipation proclamation had not changed them. The same rags, the same coarse faces, the same suspicious eyes, the same subservient bowing and scraping. Upon reaching Yasnaya Polyana at the beginning of May 1861, the master had called them together to explain, in his own way, the provisions of the manifesto of February 19, 1861. Determined to be more liberal than anyone else, he allowed them the maximum under the administrative regulations for his region —3 desyatins (just over 8 acres) of land per person. This left him 628.6 desyatins (just under 1700 acres) at Yasnaya Polyana and 48.15 desyatins (130 acres) in the village of Gretsovka. But were the peasants grateful to him for giving them so much land, and all in single plots? Probably not. For them, the land they cultivated had become their property generations ago, bought by their labor. The master was making them a present of what already belonged to them. At most, they conccdcd that he was not robbing them, like some of the oilier gentry in the district.

Tolstoy was still in Brussels when the governor of Tula appointed him "arbiter of the peace" to settle disputes between landowners and peasants in the fourth precinct of the district of Krapivna. This decision raised a storm of protest among the local aristocracy, for whom the author was a dangerous literal who would support the serfs against the landowners. Under the pressure of the opposition, V. P. Minin, marshal of nobility of the province, had even written to Valuyev, the minister of the interior, asking him to have the appointment revoked. But Lieutenant-General Daragan, the governor of Tula, had spoken to the minister in Tolstoy's defense, calling him "a highly educated man, entirely committed to the task at hand . . . and much respected." Despite the opposition of his peers, the new arbiter of the peace remained in office.

It required great courage and perseverance on his part to perform his duties in the climate of hatred that surrounded him. He took every case seriously, as a matter of principle. Naturally inclined to favor the underdog, he did not want to be unfair to the landowners, whose position might become perilous after the emancipation. In sharing out the land, owners who wanted to salvage their privileges tried to foist off the poorest plots onto the muzhiks or extort illegal payment from them. The muzhiks, on the other hand, were convinced that they should have everything, complained of the arbiter's rulings and said he was not defending their interests energetically enough. Whatever decision his sense of equity led him to adopt, Tolstoy was sure to cause dissatisfaction on both sides. Mrs. Artukhov, a local landowner, had lodged a complaint against her manservant Mark, who wanted to leave her on the grounds that he was now a free man. "The arbiter of the peace Count L. Tolstoy" ruled as follows: "By my order, Mark shall leave immediately, with his wife, and go wherever he pleases. As for you, I have the honor to ask you (1) to pay him three and one half months' wages for the period since the publication of the Emancipation Act, during which he has been illegally detained by you; (2) to pay him damages for the beating still more illegally inflicted upon his wife." Furious at being treated like a common criminal, Mrs. Artukhov appealed to the Assembly of Arbiters of the Peace, which was composed of aristocrats opposed to Tolstoy, who unhesitatingly reversed his decision. But the chancellery of lands, which was the court of last resort, confirmed the original ruling; Mark and his wife received damages and were allowed to go.

Shortly after, Tolstoy had a struggle to prevent the landowner Mi- khailovsky from exacting excessive compensation from some peasants whose horses had destroyed his crops. lie unmasked another landowner, Kostomarov, who was trying to keep his land from the peasants by alleging that they were house-servants and not farmers. He attempted to defend a group of unfortunate peasants whose isbas had burned down and who were without money to rebuild them. He investigated every difficult case in person, negotiated with the villagers and the lord, urged both parties to accept the new situation without vain regrets and useless hopes. One day a delegation of muzhiks came to him and explained that their master had treated them unfairly by giving them a field instead of the pasturcland they coveted. Tolstoy calmly examined the shares of the allocation and concluded:

"I am very sorry I cannot give you satisfaction, but were I to do so, it would be unfair to your landlord."

The peasants looked at each other and scratchcd their heads. Then they began to whine:

"Do something, little father. . . . Have pity on us. . . . If you wanted to, you could fix it. . . ."

Tolstoy turned away to hide his exasperation, and said to the steward standing near him:

"It would be easier to be Amphion and move mountains and forests like Amphion than to make a peasant see reason!"¹⁰

However, the landowners determined to have their revenge upon the man they regarded as a traitor to their cause. Not a day went by without some complaint against the arbiter of the peace of the fourth precinct of the district of Krapivna being lodged with the marshal of the nobility, the governor, the minister of the interior or the chancellery of lands. "My activities as arbiter of the peace have furnished little useful material," Tolstoy wrote on June 25, 1861. "They have secured me the undying hatred of all the landowners and ruined my health." And he wrote to Botkin a few months later, "Quite unexpectedly, I have become an arbiter of the peace. And although I have been conscientious and unbiased at all times in the discharge of my duties, I have incurred the fell fury of all the nobility against me. They would like to flog me or drag me up before the judge, and can do neither."¹¹ If only he didn't have to be a bureaucrat, too! But every new case raised a tempest of paper. He was submerged by reports, memoranda, lists, replies to questionnaires. In February 1862, after ten months in office, he asked the chancellery of lands to investigate the complaints against him. Then, on April 30 of that year, he submitted his resignation, for reasons of health. It was acccptcd by a senate decree dated

May 26, and the local landowners heaved a sigh of relief. But their trials were not yet over. Although Tolstoy was no longer directly concerned in their litigations, his attitude toward the muzhiks, which was held up as an example, prolonged his nuisance value. Even his pedagogical activities were suspect—he was probably training a generation of malcontents in that school of his at Yasnaya Polyana!

The school, which he had reopened with a few young teachcrs selected and paid by himself, was now located in a small, two-story building next to their own house; two rooms for classes, two for the teachers, and one used as a study. A bell and bell-rope hung under the porch roof. Gymnastic apparatus had been installed in the downstairs vestibule; in the upstairs hall, there was a carpenter's bench. A schedule- purely symbolic, since the motto of the establishment was "Do as you like!"—was posted 011 the wall.

At eight in the morning a child rang the bell. Half an hour later, "through fog, rain, or the slanting rays of the autumn sun," the black silhouettes of little muzhiks appeared by twos and threes, swinging their empty arms. As in the previous years, they brought no books or notebooks with them—nothing at all, save the desire to learn. The classrooms were painted pink and blue. In one, mineral samples, butterflies, dried plants and physics apparatus lined the shelves. But no books. Why books? The pupils came to the classroom as though it were home; they sat where they liked, on the floor, on the window- ledge, on a chair or the corner of a table, they listened or did not listen to what the teacher was saying, drew near when he said something that interested them, left the room when work or play called them elsewhere—but were silenced by their fellow pupils at the slightest sound. Self-imposed discipline. The lessons—if these casual chats between an adult and some children could be called that—went on from eight- thirty to noon and from three to six in the afternoon, and covered every conceivable subject from grammar to carpentry, by way of religious history, singing, geography, gymnastics, drawing and composition. Those who lived too far away to go home at night slept in the school. In the summer they sat around their teacher outdoors in the grass. Oncc a week they all went to study plants in the forest.

As a disciplc of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Tolstoy wanted to believe that human nature was basically good, that all evil was a product of civilization and that the teacher must not smother the child under the weight of learning, but must help him, little by little, to shape his own personality. He was even tempted to believe that the stonier the ground, the more chance there was of a rich harvest. Thus Russia, being backward, would inevitably produce more geniuses in the years to come than more advanced countries. There might well be a Lomonosov, Pushkin or Tolstoy among the schoolboys at Yasnaya Polyana, asking only to be brought to life. One must take heed, when planting seeds in these virgin minds—meditate upon the teachings of Montaigne, who said that the main goals in education were "equality and freedom." At all times, start at the opposite pole from the German, French and English methods. Innovate, Russianize! . . .

However hard Tolstoy tried to keep him down, the man of letters kept pushing through the pedagogue. In his inspirational form of teaching, with no curriculum, no punishment and no rewards, he tried to put himself on the level of his young audience, marveled at their every word and solemnly noted, "Should the muzhiks' children learn to write from us, or should we learn to write from them?" He proposed that the group improvise a tale on the theme of a Russian proverb: "He feeds a man with a spoon and then pokes the handle in his eyes." Hie children stared at him blankly. "Suppose," he explained, "a peasant gives shelter to a pauper and then tries to hold his good deed over the other man's head. He will have fed him with a spoon and poked the handle in his eyes." Then, to show them how a story was told, he wrote out the beginning himself. The children leaned over his shoulder and began to dictate: "No, not like that! . . ." "Make him just an ordinary' soldier! . . ." "It would be better if he stole them! . . ." "There has to be a wicked woman in it! . . ." The two most gifted boys were Syomka and Fyodka. Taking down their dictation, Tolstoy felt that he was drinking from a well of truth. This exalting collaboration continued from seven until eleven o'clock in the evening. The children spent the night in Tolstoy's study. Fyodka, overexcited, his eyes feverish and his hands trembling, could not go to sleep. "I cannot describe the emotion, the joy and fear I felt that evening," wrote Tolstoy. "I saw a new world of delight and suffering rising up before him [Fyodka]: the world of art. It seemed to me I had witnessed what no one has the right to see: the opening of the mysterious flower of poetry. ... I felt such joy because, all of a sudden, by sheer chance, 1 saw unveiled before my eyes that philosopher's stone I had been seeking in vain for two years: the art of learning to express one's thoughts. I felt fear because that art created new demands, a flood of desires foreign to the world in which, I believed at first, the pupils lived."¹²

To interest them in the history of their country he told them his version of the campaign of 1812. The boys' patriotism awoke immediately. They interrupted him with vengeful exclamations: "Alexander'll show that Napoleon!" "Not so hot, Kutuzov; what's he waiting for?"

The burning of Moscow was unanimously approved, there was applause at the retreat of the Grande Armee. It was all Tolstoy could do to wrest a crumb of compassion from his audience for "the frozen French." He probably did not insist upon it, moreover. That evening the German teachcr Keller, who had been listening, reproachcd him for his chauvinism. Tolstoy conceded that he had taken a few liberties with historical truth in order to capture his pupils' attention; but after all, it was no crime to heighten the colors a little, sound the trumpets and the drums. ... lie was better inspired when, on walks in the country, he described the customs of the Caucasians and Cossacks, their merciless combats, Shamil's exploits and the wiles of Hadji Murad. Fyodka gripped two fingers of Tolstoy's hand inside his own and stammered, tripping over his feet, his eyes fixed on his teacher, "Again! There! That's the way!" Occasionally, an argument broke out. "What good is singing or painting?" "What good is a tree if you don't cut it down?" Leo Tolstoy explained, like God the Father, that the good of a tree consisted first of all in its beauty. Another question suddenly dropped into the group like a brick into a pond: "What good are the classes of society?"

The children pondered together and, after a moment, Tolstoy delightedly recorded the following reply:

"Peasants till the soil, house-servants serve their masters, merchants do business, soldiers do their scrvice, coppersmiths make samovars, priests say mass, and gentlemen do nothing!"

Enchanted by the quick wits of his young disciples, Tolstoy tried to interest them in Russian literature. Pic read Pushkin and Gogol to them. Alas, the simple, harmonious verse and rich prose left them cold. Their master should have concluded that they were not ready to savor their country's great authors. But he instinctively wanted the people to be right and the upper classes wrong. If anyone was wrong, it could not be the peasant who was pure by definition; still less a peasant's child, purest of the pure. "Perhaps they do not understand and do not want to understand our literary language," he wrote, "simply because our literary language is not suited to them and they are in the proccss of inventing their own literature."¹⁸

Once he had formulated this idea, he could not get it out of his head. It suddenly became clear to him that literature, music, painting and sculpture were nothing but an amalgam of errors, false notes and dandified sophistication, bccausc they had not been demanded and endorsed by the masses. With iconoclastic zeal he set out to revile the works he had adored, solely and simply bccause Fyodka and Syomka

were unable to appreciate them. Instead of elevating the muzhiks to the level of art, he decided that art must immediately be brought down to them. What was the good of Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Rembrandt and Mozart if they bored the village idiot? "I became convinced," he wrote, "that a poem such as 'I remember the Marvelous Moment,'¹⁴ or a piece of music such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, is less worthy of admiration than Vanka's song or the lament of the Volga boatmen, and that we do not like Pushkin and Beethoven because they are expressions of absolute beauty but because they flatter our hideously overstimu- lated sensitivities and our weakness. . . ." And further on: "Why are the beauty of the sun, the beauty of a human face, the beauty of a folksong, the beauty of an act of love or self-denial intelligible to all, without any special training?"¹⁰ Tolstoy saw a blinding proof that art, as defended by the aesthetes, was nonsense, in the following arithmetical observation: "We arc thousands and they arc millions."¹® The artist must obey the law of the greatest number. Write what they want. And not write at all, if they do not want anything. After all, one could live perfectly well without writing. The people, whose very dirt was sacred, were sufficient unto themselves. They needed no one to satisfy their aspirations for work, pleasure, thought and creativity. Then what was the good of the Yasnaya Polyana school? Ah, but wait a minute! lie was not committing the sacrilege of teaching the children. They were simply being encouraged, with all due caution, to become aware of themselves. Future peasants were being taught the poetic significance of the peasantry. Tolstoy himself sometimes dreamed of abandoning his house and building himself an isba, of tilling the soil and marrying a village girl. "To marry a woman of society," he told his staff of teachers, "is to swallow all the poison of civilization."¹⁷ Ilis pupils, to whom he also announced his plan, took him quite seriously and began to look for a suitable fiancee among the girls of Yasnaya Polyana.¹⁸ Smiling tenderly, he made no effort to stop them; after all, he had already wanted to marry a Cossack maid, for love of the simple life.

On Shrove Tuesday 1862, blinis were served to all the children, followed by bonbons; for Easter they received lengths of brightly eolored cotton cloth, pencils and harmonicas and hats. Encouraged by his success, he opened more schools in the neighboring villages. Soon there were fourteen of them in the Krapivna district, which had a population of ten thousand. New teachers had to be recruited to guide all these souls: most of them were famished students who flocked in from Moscow with their heads full of revolutionary ideas. But Tolstoy was immovably opposed to politics. He wanted to reveal the people to themselves, not Herzen or Proudhon to the people. In a few hours of

conversation he converted the new arrivals to his theory of spontaneous learning. After listening to him, they went off and burned the subversive tracts they had brought along.¹⁹ "Civilization," he told them, "perverts healthy minds. And even though we are all products of civilization, we must not contaminate the common people with this poison; instead, we must purge ourselves through contact with them."-'⁰

To do this, each young man moved into a village in the heart of a rural community. The school was an isba, with lynches, a table and a board hut in which the teacher slept. Wages: fifty kopecks a month per pupil. General rule: love of children and hatred of constraint. Additional obligation: keep a diary. Tolstoy demanded that every teacher confess his faults, from time to time, in writing; he considered it an excellent exercise for the soul. After all, he had been practicing it all his life. Without much succcss, he did admit. But the habit had stayed with him. Setting the example, he wrote: "Bccamc confused. . . ." "I am the worst of all—I lose my temperl . . ." "Have tried to discover the rule for progress and could not."

Every Saturday he convened a meeting of the teachers at Yasnaya Polyana and discussed their experiments and results with them in such a relaxed manner that they were all perfectly at ease with him, and some felt something akin to veneration for him. They were subjugated by the forcefulness of his look and the heat of his voice. "The school is my whole life, my convent, my church," he said. Impossible to remain indifferent to this devil of a man! You arrived intending to pick up a few rubles without straining yourself and you found yourself ensnared in the devotional rule of a priesthood. The little peasants pried your affection, your strength, your very life out of you, merely by interrogating you with their candid eyes. When Tolstoy went to Moscow for a few days, Scrdobolsky, a student, wrote to him:

"You may rest assured that your cause has now become ours. . . . We are all impatient for you to come back. Without you, it isn't the same. It seems to me that our common task cannot go on without you to lead it, it needs the fire of your dedication. ... I do not know whether all the teachers love their work now, but I am convinced they all will come to love it as I do if they are capable of appreciating the poetry and enthusiasm that emanate from you when you are engaged in it. Therefore, do not deprive us of your presence for too long."

Forty years later, remembering his stay at Yasnaya Polyana, Markov, another of the teachers, wrote: "I have never met a man capable of firing another mind to such white heat. I11 the course of my spiritual relationship with him I felt as though electric sparks were striking into

the depths of my soul and setting in motion all kinds of thoughts and plans and decisions."

To gain a wider audience for his ideas Tolstoy founded a monthly review, Yasnaya Polyana, whose publication was authorized by the censor beginning in January 1862. The epigraph of this periodical was Goethe's aphorism: Glaubst zu schieben und wirst geschoben (You think you're leading and it's you being led).* Tolstoy filled the twelve issues of its existence, defrayed by him, with articles on his theory of education, accounts of the activities of the schools, and reading matter for children. The first number proclaimed the following noble principle: "In order to determine what is good and what is not, he who is being taught must have full power to express his dissatisfaction or, at least, to avoid lessons that do not satisfy him. Let it be established that there is only one criterion in teaching: freedom!"

Having dropped his bomb, he waited for the explosion. . . . There was none. A few Slavophil newspapers praised the new educationist for his confidence in the Russian people, a few liberal papers criticized him for allowing illiterates to choose their form of education; but on the whole, this woolly and inconsistent theory did not stir the public. But in official circles, important persons were pointing out the dangers of propaganda such as this. On October 3, 1S62 Valuycv, the minister of the interior, wrote to his colleague Golovin, the minister of education: "A close perusal of the educational review Yasnaya Polyana, published by Count Tolstoy, inclines me to think that by advocating new teaching methods and principles for the organization of schools for the common people, this periodical is spreading ideas which are not only false but dangerously biased. . . . The continued publication of the periodical would seem undesirable, especially as its author, who has remarkable and persuasive literary powers, is above all suspicion of criminal intention or dishonesty. What is harmful is the inaccuracy and eccentricity of his views which, set forth with exceptional eloquence, may be convincing to inexperienced teachers and may thus orient education in the wrong direction."

Upon receiving this letter the minister of education instructed one of his minions to look into Tolstoy's activities. A few days later he found a detailed and on the whole favorable report on his desk: 'To establish a simple, easy and independent relationship between master and pupil; cultivate mutual affcction and trust; free lessons from constraint and learning by rote; transform the school into a kind of family in which the teacher acts as parent: what could be better, more desirable and

* Spoken by Mephistopheles in Faust.

more profitable for all?" However, the anonymous author of this study criticized Tolstoy for dispensing the children from all work—work being "our whole life"—for relying upon their unformed taste as a criterion of quality in literature, and for flatly stating that Pushkin and Beethoven, for example, were inferior to ballads and old folk tunes.

After reading the report the minister of education transmitted it to the minister of the interior with the following comment: "I am bound to say that Count Tolstoy's educational activities command our respect and that it is the duty of the ministry of education to help and encourage him, although it does not share all of his ideas—which, moreover, he will undoubtedly abandon after more thorough investigation."

But lie did not know Tolstoy—although he soon stopped publishing the review and lost all interest in the school, his views on education never changed. In every field, he was determined to oppose administrative coercion. But oddly enough, although he clamored for liberal reforms, he did not stop to think that it was thanks to the existence of aristocratic prerogatives in Russia that he was able to carry out his educational experiments, and that if education were exclusively State- run, it would be impossible for him to teach the children of Yasnaya Polyana according to his own theories.

He was in Moscow when the first issue of the review came off the press. But it was not to complete his educational archives that he had gone there: the emulator of Rousseau, friend of the poor and spurner of civilization had suddenly felt a need to divert himself, to inhale the foul breath of the city. Besides, there were a few decent souls even among the pharisecs. On January 13, 1862 an unknown lady wearing a veil had come to his hotel and offered him a thousand rubiest for the relief of the poor. Moved to tears, lie thanked the donatress and sent the money to Yasnaya Polyana to be distributed among the needy- peasants—and a good thing it was, too, for a few days later he succumbed to his old weakness for gambling and lost exactly the same amount, to a penny, trying his luck at Chinese billiards with a passing officer. What would he have done had the veiled lady's thousand rubles been in his pocket at that moment? Better not think about it! His creditor gave him two days, on his word of honor, to pay his debt. Tolstoy went to Katkov, director of the Russian Ilerald, and offered him the rights to his forthcoming but still unfinished novel, The Cossacks, for 011c thousand rubles. He had been fussing over the manuscript for ten years, adding three lines here and cutting a chapter there. Cross his heart, it was a good story. It could be bought with com-

t Or $2830.

pletc confidence. 'I"he author undertook to deliver the corrected text toward the end of the year. Katkov accepted, the sum was paid over to the creditor, and Tolstoy wrote to his friend Botkin: "When all is said and done, this solution suits me down to the ground, for the novel, of which I've written over half, would otherwise have been left to rot and finally been used to stuff the cracks in the windows."

When Tolstoy told this tale to his friends the Behrs, the doctor's three daughters (Lisa, nineteen; Sonya, eighteen; Tatyana, sixteen) protested that it was madness, that the editor had certainly taken advantage of him. They flounced up and down the room and tears of indignation shone in their eyes. The oldest was quite pretty, serious, passionately interested in intellectual questions. Tolstoy had wondered several times whether it would not be sensible of him to many her. It seemed to him that she took special pains with her dress when he was coming to call. As for the parents, they were already regarding him with worried benevolence, as though they sensed a potential "fiancЈ" in him. Once again, when the idea of marriage assumed concrete form before his eves, he shied away: just then his nerves were more ragged than usual, his health was poor, his labors as teacher and arbiter of the peace had taxed him heavily, the air of Moscow was bad for him. He took an awkward leave of the Behrs family and fled to Yasnaya Polyana.

lie was relying on the country, the school and the children to restore his love of life, but in the spring his health grew worse, he started to cough blood. The specters of his two dead brothers began to haunt him. Tuberculosis! He went to Moscow to consult Dr. Behrs, either because he had confidence in him or, possibly, bccause he wanted to remove all doubt as to his desirability as a son-in-law. After examining him, Dr. Behrs agreed that his lungs were weak and advised him to go to Samara for a kumys treatment. Kumys—fermented and mildly carbonated mare's milk—was highly esteemed in Russia as a tonic. It was made by the Bashkir nomads. Those who went to take the cure lived on the steppe like the nomads, in felt tents or caravans. The idea of a change of scenery delighted Tolstoy: "I shall read no more newspapers, receive no more letters, forget what a book looks like, wallow on my back in the sun, drink kumys, gorge myself on mutton until I turn into a sheep myself, and then I'll be cured!"²¹ he told his intimates.

On May 19 he left Moscow by rail with his manservant Alexis and two of his pupils who had suspicious-sounding coughs. At Tver they boarded a ship and steamed down the Volga: it was the same trip Tolstoy had made ten years before, with poor Nicholas. Seeing the broad river again, its banks of green mist soaked by the spring floods, he should have felt old at the memory of his first trip. But the air was so bracing, the sun played on the wavelets, at night the stars shone pensively above the water, at every stop a crowd of passengers—dusty-faced pilgrims, bearded monks, muzhiks, Tatars—surged up the gangplank, and it was all so animated, variegated, so "Russian," that lie was unconsciously filled with joy. After a short stop at Kazan—to kiss old Uncle Yushkov —the travelers resumed their voyage in that state of contemplative serenity procured by detachment from the land.

On May 27 they disembarked at Samara and set off again by tarantas for Karalyk, over eighty-five miles across the steppe—an undulating prairie, crossed by little streams, punctuated by ponds, bristling with rocks and bushes. At last, Tolstoy was back in the wilds he so loved. Tic adopted the customs of the Bashkirs, moved into a round felt tent, ate mutton and dried horsemeat, steeped himself in kumys and "brick tea."$ With the old Bashkirs, he talked of times gone by, of different faiths, God, Christ and Mohammed; and with the young ones, he ran and leaped and wrestled. He was so strong that only one of the nomads could match him. 'The days and weeks sped past. His spirits high and his mind at peace, he sadly thought that he would soon have to return to civilization. But had he known what was going on at home during his absence, he would have left by the first dogcart.

On July 6 at dawn, while lie lay sleeping in his tent on the banks of the Karalyk, three swift troikas, their bells jangling for all they were worth, swirled up to the door of Yasnaya Polyana. The gaping peasants watched as a few grim-visaged officers climbed out of the coaches: Durnovo, colonel of the constabulary, who appeared to be directing operations; the chief of police of the Krapivna district, the chief of the rural police, constables. . . . Hearing the rackct, old Aunt Toinette and Marya Tolstoy, who was visiting at her brother's house, rushed into the hall, half-awake and half-dressed, and stopped short in amazement in front of the body of armed men. Colonel Durnovo curtly announced that he had come to search the house, "on orders from my superiors." The two women were thrust protesting back into their rooms. Police encircled the house and the search began. Cupboards, dressers, tables, chests, everything was turned upside-down. 'They had a wonderful time in the study, leafing through Tolstoy's manuscripts, reading his private diary and letters out loud, noting down the names of his correspondents, tapping the walls and floors in search of a secret hiding- place, breaking locks and ripping open the curtain linings. They pried up the flagstones in the stable. They also dragged the ponds, but netted only carp and crayfish, instead of the diabolical instruments they

t A primitive form of tea compressed into bricks and broken apart before boiling.

were undoubtedly hoping to find. Furious to end their search empty- handed, they rushed around the schools, seized the books and the pupils' notebooks and arrested the nine students who were teaching the young muzhiks in the master's absence. Suddenly they fetched up short in front of a camera—almost an unknown object in Russia at that time.

"What's being photographed around here?" asked the officer in charge of the detachment.

"Herzen himself," a student retorted.

His witticism nearly cost him his freedom. Fortunately, everyone's papers were in order. They would not be detained. But just in case, a constable added the names of those present to his list of suspects. Meanwhile, Aunt Toinette and Marya Tolstoy had managed to lay their hands 011 a few forbidden books and some letters from Herzen; Peterson, one of the teachers, was instructed to hide them in a safe place. The police were already on their way back to Yasnaya Polyana, where they demanded food and drink and ordered their horses to be looked after.

They camped in the house for two days, treating everyone as a suspect, coming into rooms without knocking, pawing over the library books and linen and accounts, prying into the family secrets, peering into wastepaper baskets, under the lid of the piano and behind the toilet, talking in loud voices, guffawing and slamming doors. From Yasnaya Polyana they moved 011 to Nikolskoye, where all they found for their pains were the private diaries of the deceased Nicholas. Slim pickings after forty-eight hours of searching.

Colonel Durnovo was not happy. This whole business had been cm- barked upon too lightly. The police had been watching Tolstoy for a long time; although his activities were not actually illegal, his fondness for the muzhiks was overconspicuous and he proclaimed his love of freedom altogether too loudly. Many landowners, vexed by his hostility toward them during his term as arbiter of the peace, had vowed his downfall. It was undoubtedly one of them who had written to Voykov, colonel of the Moscow police, accusing Tolstoy of harboring at Yasnaya Polyana a student known to have circulated anti-government tracts. Shipov, a police stool-pigeon who was sent to have a look around a short time later, had certified that Tolstoy was paying "a score of students," all liberals, out of his own pocket, that he had ordered and received printing equipment, and that they were preparing to send out a subversive manifesto in August, for the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Russia. "There are secret doors in his house," wrote the spy, "and hidden staircases, and at night the residence is guarded by a large number of sentinels." Of course, Sbipov himself had just been arrested for "indiscretion and drunkenness" at the time he was making these remarkable allegations, but the authorities could not be certain there was no truth in what he said. Prince Dolgorukov, national chief of constabulary, consulted Alexander II and then instructed Colonel Dur- novo to lead the investigation in person. At all costs, they must loeate that secret printing equipment, those lithographic stones and those stacks of proclamations.

When Colonel Durnovo had been convinced of his error, he apologized to Aunt Toinette and assured her that she could relax, but advised her to see that her nephew stayed well away from politics, for they had their eye 011 him. Besides, they might need to come back in a little while. . . . The peasants and house-servants were terrified by this invasion of blue uniforms on their master's estate, and wondered what dreadful crime he had committed. Overnight, he had ceased to be infallible. Ought they to go on sending their children to a school of which the tsar disapproved?

Unconcerned by the crisis he had just provoked, Colonel Durnovo wrote to Prince Dolgorukov, on July 14, 1S62. "A search of Count Tolstoy's house revealed it to be very modestly furnished, containing no sccret doors, hidden staircases or lithographic stones or telegraph. . . . I found 110 compromising papers, either at Yasnaya Polyana or at Nikol- skoye. . . . Count Tolstoy is very haughty with his neighbors and has made enemies of the local landowners by systematically defending the muzhiks during his term as arbiter of the peace. . . . His relations with the peasants are remarkably simple and he is on very friendly terms with the children at the school."

Upon reaching Moscow on July 20, 1862, in the best of spirits after his kumys treatment, Tolstoy learned of the search: his manuscripts, letters, his private diary subjected to the lewd prying of a bunch of cops! His hearth profaned, his integrity challenged before every peasant on his estate—he was not going to stand for that! hilled with a truly lordly wrath, he wrote to his aunt, babushka Alexandra Tolstoy, who represented the court in his eves:

"A nice lot, your pals! All those Patapovs and Dolgorukovs and Arakcheyevs—they are your pals, aren't they? . . . One of your friends, some stinking colonel, has read the letters and private diaries I intended to leave at my death to the person dearest to me in the world. ... It was my good fortune, and that of your friend, that I was not home at the time—I would have killed him! ... If only there were some way to avoid these brigands, who wash their checks and hands with perfumed soap and smile so benevolently. If I am to live much longer, I

shall have to shut myself away in a monaster)', not to pray to God—a waste of time, in my view—but in order not to see any more of the moral ignominy of these people swollen with conceit and this society with its epaulettes and crinolines. IIow can you, a decent human being, go on living in St. Petersburg? ... Do you have cataracts, is that why you don't see?"

On July 31, 1863, he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana and heard all the details from Aunt Toinette. He let his rage accumulate for a week. When it had reached boiling point, he wrote a second letter to Alexandra Tolstoy:

"I will not and cannot let the matter rest. Everything that was a source of joy and satisfaction to me has been ruined. Already the peasants have ccascd to regard me as an honest man—a reputation it took me years to acquire—and are treating me as a criminal, an arsonist or counterfeiter who had to finagle his way out of a tight spot. . . . 'Aha, old boy, they've caught you!' they think. 'That's enough of your speeches about honesty and justice. You almost got sent up yourself.' . . . And the landowners, I need hardly add, are chortling with glee. After consulting Pcrovsky, or Alexis Tolstoy or whomever you will, write to me, I beg you, as soon as you can. Tell me how to draft my letter and through whom I should send it to the tsar. I have only one choice: cither I must obtain reparation, as public as the offense (it's already too late to patch up the matter quietly), or else leave the country, which I am firmly resolved to do. I shall not join Herzcn. He has his life and I have mine. I shall not hide, and I shall make it known to all that I am selling my property in order to leave Russia, where nobody can be sure one minute that he will not be thrown into irons and flogged the next, along with his sister and wife and mother."

He concluded with a vague threat of suicide or murder, well calculated to terrify the old spinster:

"There arc loaded pistols in my room. I am waiting until the matter is decided one way or another."²²

'Hie insinuation that she was no better than the infamous brutes of the tsar's police force simply because she was a maid of honor at court pierced Alexandra Tolstoy to the quick, but she mastered her hurt feelings and wrote a tender and dignified reply to her impossible nephew:

"Your first letter causcd me grief enough, my dear Leo, but the one I received yesterday made me weep bitter tears. . . . My blood boils when I think of them prying and snooping about in your sanctuary."²³

She promised to take steps to see that he received satisfaction and assured him that the emperor, and even the chief of police, had no knowledge of the methods employed by "their deputies." There were, she said, too many plots, too much "democratic ferment" in Russia, the police no longer knew where to turn. "Hence these investigations 011 all sides, and these—grant me the adjective—involuntary injustices, which often fall upon the heads of innocent and honest people." The number of suspects was mounting all the time, so it was no dishonor to be accused of harboring evil thoughts against the authorities. The chief thing was to have a clear conscience and subdue one's wounded vanity. "In the name of all you hold most holy, I beg you not to do anything rash. ... It is a strange thing that we do not hesitate to commit a thousand iniquities and injustices against the Lord, but the first one to strike our person appears monstrous and intolerable." How could her nephew write that although he did not want to compromise her, he hoped she would rise above such petty considerations and give him the support of her friendship? "It has never occurred to me to fear being compromised by your letters, and I am amazed that you could even think such a thing. I am what I am—openly—and I shall never even understand what you mean by 'petty considerations.' ... I bless you from afar, with a mother's tenderness. May Cod inspire your steps."

But it was the Behrs family, not God, who inspired Tolstoy's next steps. He had returned to Moscow where, facing the three daughters who implored him to be reasonable, his anger melted away. On August 22, 1862 he wrote a very deferential letter to the emperor, asking that the names of his accusers be revealed and that His Majesty kindly make amends for the injury done to him. Count Shcrcmctyev, an aide-decamp, transmitted the request to the tsar, who was in Moscow for the autumn maneuvers.

While awaiting the results of his appeal, Tolstoy felt, in his own words, like a man "whose feet have been stepped on, who is absolutely determined to find out whether it was done on purpose; if so he demands reparation for the injustice, if not, simply that somebody say, 'Excuse me' to him."*⁴ Alexandra Tolstoy pulled every string she had, the tsar deigned to recall that he had once been given a liberal education, and on his order Prince Dolgorukov, the chief of police, asked Daragan, the governor of Tula, to assure Count Tolstoy that despite the subversive writings found in the possession of some of the students living under his wing, charges would not be preferred and he would suffer no further inconvenience. Coming from the emperor, such conciliator}- terms were tantamount to an apology. Tolstoy accepted it. For some time his mind had been occupied elsewhere, and on September 7, 1862, in a burst of heedless cruelty, he wrote to his aunt Alexandra, who had gone to so much trouble to see that lie got his "public reparation," the words that could cause her the sharpest and most un- avowable pain of all: "And a third catastrophe—or blessing, judge for yourself—has just befallen me: I, aged, toothless fool that I am, have fallen in love."

PART IV

Sonya

1. Betrothal

With the Behrs family, Tolstoy had the double sensation of reliving his past and committing his future. Mrs. Behrs, nee Lyubov Alexandrovna Islavin, belonged to the past: only three years older than lie, she had been his childhood sweetheart, the very girl he had injured by pushing her off the balcony in a fit of jealousy; and the daughters of the house belonged to the future. Lyubov Alexandrovna's father was Alexander Mikhailovich Islcnycv, libertine and irrepressible gambler, who had been Leo's fellow-roisterer on more than one occasion and who appeared, under the name of Irtenycv, in Childhood. Alexander Islcnyev had had a checkered domestic career: his secret marriage to Sofya Petrovna Zavadovsky, who was separated from her first husband, Count Kozlovsky, had been extremely fruitful—but the count had had the marriage annulled, and the six children born of it, among whom was little Lyubov, were technically illegitimate. Officially, they were not even called Islenycv, but Islavin. After their mother died, their father observed a respectable period of mourning and then married a famous beauty of the day, Sofya Alexandrovna Zhdanov,¹ by whom he had three more daughters. This addition to his family and responsibilities had not deterred him from gambling away what remained of his immense fortune. Nine-tenths bankrupt, but still waggish and vivacious, he retired to the estate of his second wife, at Ivitsi in the district of Odoycv, thirty-five miles from Yasnaya Polyana.

At the age of sixteen his daughter Lyubov Alexandrovna married a young doctor of German extraction, Audrey Estaficvich Behrs (or Bers), with whom she had fallen in love while he was treating her for "brain fever." The practitioner was eighteen years older than his patient, and the family also disapproved of his German ancestry—a forlx:ar of his had been one of the four officers whom the King of Prussia sent to

Tsarina Elizabeth to act as military' experts. But that had been long ago and, with the passing of generations, only a fraction of the blood in the doctor's veins was German. As for the difference in age, it did not prevent him from siring thirteen children, eight of whom survived: five boys and three girls.

A family man with a sense of duty and a love of scholarship, Dr. Behrs was the physician of the administrative staff of the Imperial Palace in Moscow, and lived in a cramped, sunless apartment in the Kremlin. The rooms all opened into one another, the office was so tiny that a patient could hardly be squeezed into it, and the children slept on sofas with sagging springs. But no caller could remain insensitive to the gaiety and high spirits of the inmates, dominated by the shrill laughter of children. Students and cadets, attracted by the three daughters—aged twenty, eighteen and sixteen in 1862—flocked to the Behrs', where the door was always open and the table always set, according to the old custom of Russian hospitality. Here, as in all the better homes of Moscow, a large company of servants, underpaid and underemployed, loitered about in the hall, ate the leftovers from the meals and slept in the doorways and closets. The chairs and tables were stout and massive and upholstered casually, indifferently; their purpose was functional, not decorative. Poor relations or strays, blown in by the wind like seeds, took root between a screen and a leather sofa and stayed for years, or for life. In those days, Moscow was still a patriarchal, unsophisticated city in which formal invitations might be issued to a supper or a ball, but the old custom of "tapers" was still in use for all other occasions. Those wishing to receive callers set lighted candles in a window looking out on the street, and any acquaintances happening to pass that way knew from the signal that they would be welcome, and rang the bell. When a couple was bored with their own company, they sent out a servant to see if there weren't any "tapers" in the neighboring windows, and when the servant returned and recited a list of names, all that remained was to choose with whom they would spend the rest of the evening. The streets were muddy, with a lantern flickering here and there. Water was brought to the door in perspiring barrels on carts. As a measure of economy, tallow candles were used for light in the Behrs household; tallow was also used as a remedy, in pommades or poultices, for coughs and colds. But the girls melted real wax in secret, to tell their fortunes in the strange shapes formed by the drops as they congealed.

With the first warm days, the family moved to their country house at Pokrovskoyc-Strcshncvo, only eight miles from town—near enough for the faithful swains to continue paying their calls. Starry nights,

singing nightingales, fragrance of hay and flowering lilacs—everything was ideal for setting hearts on lire. Each of the three girls—Lisa, Sonya and Tanya, entertained her own private fantasies and held those of the other two in utter contempt. When the young men came they played four-handed piano, danced, rehearsed plays and exchanged languorous glances; afterward, the overexcited young ladies tossed and turned in their beds for hours before falling asleep.

The most animated gatherings took place on Saturday evenings in the winter in Moscow. The drawing room was lighted, the samovar steamed amidst cream "cutlets" and heavy dough cakcs. At eight o'clock, the cadets and students who were friends of the family camc trooping in, their noses scarlet and their coats covered with frost. The girls, both they and their hair dressed for the occasion, came toward them with a swirl of wide skirts, but their governess stopped them with a cry: "They're all cold! Don't go near them yet!"

Their mother brought her daughters up strictly and kept a close watch over them, but according to Fet all three possessed "that particular form of appeal the French call du chien" (a rather knowing allure). The eldest, Lisa, had lovely, regular features and pretended to be as aloof as a statue, accepting admiration without ever provoking it; she was interested in literature and philosophy and smiled condescendingly when her sisters teased her, calling her "the scholar." At the other extreme was Tanya, the youngest, all bright mischief and emotion. One moment she would be sighing over the novel she was reading in hiding, and the next she would be giggling in front of her mirror at some new grimace she had invented. Two jet eyes, glittering with mettle and wit, flashed in her narrow face with its full lips and big nose. One day she wanted to be a dancer, the next a singer, the next a mother. She had a pleasant contralto voice and, with clownish deference, Tolstoy nicknamed her "Mine. Viardot." Sonya, more pliant than Lisa, less mercurial than Tanya, boasted a graceful carriage, lovely complexion, dark hair, a smile of dazzling whiteness and large, dark, somewhat myopic eyes whose attentive and wondering expression was as disturbing as a confession. She was withdrawn, willful and melancholy and seemed, as Tanya wrote in her memoirs, "to be suspicious of happiness, never really able to grasp or enjoy it fully." She read a great deal, cultivated herself, wrote stories, painted in watercolor, played the piano and had chosen the education of children as her life work. At seventeen she had received her teacher's certificate: the student who helped her to study for her examination had also tried to convcrt her to atheist materialism, but she speedily recovered her faith. Like her sisters, all her hopes were centered on love and marriage.

The young horse guardsman Mitrofan Polivanov, a friend of her brother's, was already courting her assiduously. Would she become Mrs. Polivanov and end her days as the wife of a general? The idea did not horrify her, but neither did it thrill her. Her older sister Lisa would have a more exotic fate should she, as was likely, marry Count Leo Tolstoy. He was coming to the house more and more often, but could not make up his mind to propose. And to tell the truth, Lisa was so cool and haughty that she was not making it any easier for him. Sonya thought to herself that in her sister's place she would have spared no effort to elicit his impassioned avowals. She was awed by Tolstoy's talent, his fame, his legend. She remembered that in 1854, when she was ten,* he had come to call on her parents at their apartment in the Kremlin. He was in uniform then, about to join the Army of the Danube. After he left she had tied a ribbon around the low mahogany chair, upholstered in ccrise, on which he had sat. She learned whole passages of his works by heart and had copied out a few lines of Childhood which she kept as a talisman inside her schoolgirl shirtwaist. He had reappeared in 1856, still in uniform, full of war stories and plans for novels. Now he had left the army, but seemed no happier than before. He wrote less, traveled, gave all his time to his village schools. True, he was not handsome. Average height, stocky, bony and brawny, his face overgrown by a bushy chestnut beard, thick lips planted in the midst of all that hair, a crooked nose and iron-gray eyes with a piercing glint. A muzhik, with calloused hands and a mystic's stare. His body was used to the unconstraint of country life, and was uncomfortable in the elegant attire he wore in Moscow. He looked as though he were in disguise and hating it. Thirty-four years old—an old man! And to top it off he had lost nearly all his teeth. The girls must have discussed this detail among themselves, ruefully. But Lisa was not going to marry a man for his teeth. For her, marriage meant founding a home, making a distinguished entrance into the world: Countess Leo Tolstoy . . . Her sisters, who did not like her very much, teased her because when the count was there her expression changed, she warbled and coocd and, they said, played the "sweet almond." Sonya sometimes felt that she would know better than Lisa how to make a great author happy. To whom could she turn in her dilemma? No one would understand. Before going to bed, she spent ages in prayer before the icon. Little Tanya surveyed her out of the corner of her eye, and one evening, when the two had just gotten into bed and blown out the candle, asked in a low voice:

•Sofya Andreycvna Behrs was born on August 22, 1844.

"Sonya, do you love the count?"

"I don't know," she answered.

Then, after a pause, she sighed:

"Oh, Tanya, two of his brothers died of consumption."

"What of it?" said Tanya. "I lis complexion is not at all like theirs. Believe me, Papa knows better than anyone else."-

Sonya lav awake a long time. In the ensuing days she wrote a story to ease her aching heart. The heroine was Helen, a charming girl with black eyes and a passionate temperament; she had two sisters: Zinaida, the elder, who was fair and distant, and Natasha, the younger, who was petite, spritely and sweet-natured. Although a young man of twenty- three (alias Mitrofan Polivanov) was courting Helen, she had eyes only for a friend of the family, a middle-aged man of unprepossessing appearancc named Dublitsky. Dublitsky, who was about to become engaged to the fair-haired and disagreeable Zinaida, was being increasingly drawn to the dark-haired and charming Helen. Torn between love and duty, the girl planned to enter a convent. . . . She read this transparent tale to her younger sister, who thought it splendid, but she did not dare to show it to "the count."

July was almost over when Tolstoy, dreadfully upset by the police search in his house, next saw the Behrs, in Moscow. Pale and tense, his eyes flashing lightning, he talked of leaving the country if the government did not make amends to him. Seated at the end of the table, Sonya never took her eyes from him, and silently prayed that he would Stay in Russia. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana, and a few days later Lyubov Alexandrovna Behrs was suddenly inspired to visit her old father at Ivitsi and take her three daughters and her son Volodya with her. Now, Ivitsi was not far from Yasnaya Polyana, where Leo's sister Marya, an intimate childhood friend of Lyubov Alexandrovna's, was sta\-ing. By all means, Mrs. Behrs would call on her old friend. Indeed she was looking forward to the meeting; also, by bearding the lion in his den, she hoped to force his hand, overpower him and compel him, after so many months of indecision, to propose to Lisa. Her thoughts full of this subtle maternal stratagem, she persuaded her husband that the trip was absolutely essential and ordered new gowns for the girls. A coach for six was hired from Annenkov the coachmaker, baggage was piled onto the roof until the springs groaned, and, leaving the anxious doctor waving his handkerchief behind them, they drove away in a cloud of dust.

After spending a day in Tula, the travelers set out in the direction of Yasnaya Polyana, quivering with anticipation. The cornfields rolling away to the horizon, the forest of Zasyeka, crowded and dim, the bright

village of Yasnaya Poly-ana with its thatched huts, village pump and little church—Sonya loved it all, and saw the owner's reflection in everything: the bearded count with the shining eyes. Evening was coming on as the coach passed between the two whitewashed brick towers at the entrance to the grounds. Leaning out over the door, the girls watched as two rows of birches followed by lime trees, lilacs, tousled bushes and a meadow of tall grass strewn with buttercups rolled by in a joggling phantasmagoria. Here the vegetation seemed to explode in riotous rejoicing. In the midst of a tangle of green stood the white house with its Greek pediment and covered veranda. The carpenter had cut out a series of figurines in the wooden railings—a rooster, a horse, a woman with outstretched arms. Heavy linen curtains hung at the windows.

Lyubov Alcxandrovna had announced her arrival, but not the exact day. At the sound of the harness bells the house, drowsing in the dusk, awoke with a start. While the servants were bustling about with the baggage, Mrs. Behrs fell into the arms of her girlhood chum, Marya Tolstoy. Then old Aunt Toinette hobbled out and welcomed the travelers in French. Behind her stood her companion and attendant, the faithful Natalya Petrovna, in a pelerine and white pique bonnet. The girls curtsied. Everyone talked at once:

"Sonya looks just like you. . . . Tanya is very like her grandmother. . .

At that point Leo 'Tolstoy appeared, so gay that Sonya thought he looked positively young.

After a tour of the orchard, where the wide-eyed young urbanites picked raspl>errics, their mother sent them to unpack in the vaulted ground-floor room that was to l>e their dormitory. Plain wooden cots lined the walls. '1 he extremely hard mattresses were covered with blue and white striped ticking. The stout birch table had been made by the village carpenter. Iron hooks protruded overhead, from which harnesses, saddles and hams had hung in Prince Volkonsky's day. Dun- yasha, the chambermaid, "rather imposing and not too ugly," made up the beds on the couches. But there were only three cots and, with Volodya, there were four children. Tolstoy solved the problem by proposing to add a footstool at the end of a deep armchair. 'This arrangement amused Sonya, who gaily said:

"I want to sleep in the armchair."

"And I shall make your bed," said 'Tolstoy, in a tone that allowed no argument.

He awkwardly unfolded and spread the sheet. Sonya helped him, laughing to hide her confusion. "It did seem a little embarrassing," she

wrote later,⁸ "to be making a bed with Leo Nikolayevich, but it was very nice and delightfully intimate."

When she and Tolstoy had finished arranging her bed, she went back up to the drawing room where her sister Lisa gave her a cold, questioning look. Her emotions in a whirl, she went out to sit on the veranda. 'Ihere, staring into the night, she floated off into an insane and happy fantasy. "Was it the effect of the country air, nature, space? Was it a premonition of what would happen six weeks later, when I returned to this house as its mistress? Or was it simply my farewell to my girlhood and my freedom? ... I do not know. ... I felt solemn, and happy, and something I had never known before, something infinite."⁴

Tolstoy came to call her in to dinner, but she would not go:

"I'm not hungry. It is so lovely out here."

Reluctantly, he left her. Behind her back she heard voices and laughter and the clink of china. Lisa must be trying to regain her lost ground. A board creaked under a footfall. Sonya turned around. It was Tolstoy, abandoning his guests at the table, coming back to her. They exchanged a few words, softly, in the darkness. Suddenly he whispered:

"How simple and clear you are."

And so she was, but what unconfcssed scheming, what unconscious hopes lay behind that candor! She lowered her eyes, for fear of being discovered. It was late. Lyubov Alexandrovna sent the girls to bed. Sonya went down to the vaulted hall, cherishing, deep in her heart, the words Tolstoy had spoken to her on the tcmicc. She repeated them over to herself as she curled up in her nightgown between the arms of the uncomfortable armchair. Sleep would not come. She listened to her sisters' breathing, tossed and turned and smiled in rapture at the thought that it was the "count's" big hands that had made her bed.

She awoke at dawn, radiant. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. The air was exhilarating. "I wanted to run everywhere, look at everything, talk to everybody,she later wrote. Just the thing: Tolstoy had planned a picnic in the forest of Zasycka. Baraban, a chestnut, and Strelka, were harnessed to a sort of primitive charabanc that could carry twelve people seated back to back. Sonya admired the gray Bye- logubka, wearing an old side-saddle, and Tolstoy asked whether she would like to ride him. She had on her pretty yellow dress with the black velvet buttons and belt.

"How can I? I didn't bring a riding habit," she frowned.

"Never mind that," lie laughed. "We're not in society here. There's nobody to see you but the trees."

And while Lisa stood by biting her lips, he helped Sonya up onto Byelogubka's back. She wrapped her yellow skirt tightly around her legs to cover them down to the ankle, arched her back and strove to appear elegant. lie straddled a magnificent white stallion and they cantered off side by side under the low branches. The wagon followed with the rest of the group in a medley of hats and parasols, jolting with ever)' turn of the wheels. Neighbors and friends had joined the outing. The entire company gathered in a clearing with a haycock in the center. Lyubov Alcxandrovna Behrs and Marya Tolstoy spread out the cloth on the grass and set the places, opened hampers and lighted the samovar. After tea, Tolstoy led his guests in games, climbing up the haystack and sliding down again. In the midst of the shouting and laughter Sonya—her yellow dress all crumpled and her hair full of straw —was in heaven, but Lisa was beginning to glower. Toward evening the whole party sat on top of the haystack and sang in chorus: "The brook flows over the pebbles . .

The next day the Behrs family went on to Ivitsi. Sonya left with a heavy heart, but was soon cheered by the sight of her grandfather Islenyev. He was so comical; a little, close-shaven, bald old man with a black skullcap, an aquiline nose and mischievous eyes glinting between wrinkled lids. Pinching the girls' cheeks between thumb and forefinger, he called them "the young ladies from Moscow," questioned them about their love affairs and uttered antiquated gallantries that brought a scowl to the face of his second wife, Sofya Alcxandrovna—the erstwhile beauty with the bewitching black eyes, who had become a gaunt, toothless crone who smoked a pipe from dawn to dark, which distended her lips and muddied her skin. To make certain that his young guests would not be bored in his home, the old man had planned a series of outings and dances for them, to which all the local young bloods were invited. But Sonya was not to be jarred from her dream world by the chatter of such provincials. Two days after their arrival at Ivitsi, she was in her bedroom with Lisa when little Tanya opened the door, eyes bulging and cheeks 011 fire, and cried out:

"The count!. . . The count has come to see us!"

"It's not true!" exclaimed Lisa, blushing.

"Is he alone or with his sister?" asked Sonya faintly.

"Alone! On horseback," Tanya answered. "Hurry!"

They clattered down the stairs and stopped outside the door, paralyzed, in front of Leo Tolstoy, who was heavily dismounting from his white horse. He was covered with dust, his forehead shone with sweat and his eyes showed shy delight. Sonya did not dare hope he had traveled the thirty-five miles between Yasnaya Polyana and Ivitsi just for the pleasure of seeing her again. The entire household had already assembled to congratulate him. Grandfather clapped him on the shoulder and asked:

"How long did it take you?"

"A little over three hours," Tolstoy answered. "I didn't hurry. It was very hot."

Suddenly, at that instant, Sonya wanted to love him, and just as suddenly she was afraid of becoming attached to him. She thought of Lisa, whom she was betraying, and of the young and amiable horse guardsman Mitrofan Polivanov who would one day ask for her hand, and she felt guilty, but she could not think of anything particular that she had done wrong. In the evening, after a walk, all the young people in the neighborhood—officers from the nearby garrison, country squires, students on vacation—gathered in the big drawing room at Ivitsi. Parlor games were followed by dancing. Volunteer musicians took turns at the piano, pounding the keys and pumping at the pedals. Sonya wore a thin white woolen dress with a lilac-colored rosette on one shoulder, from which trailed down long ribbons known as Suivez- moi jeune homme (Follow me, young man).

"IIow elegant you arc, here," said Tolstoy.

"Aren't you dancing?" she asked.

"No. What's the use? I'm too old."

She demurred. After supper the guests began to leave. But someone wanted Tanya to sing a romance. She was not in the mood, so she hid under the piano to avoid being forced to perform, and was forgotten there. And thus she became an involuntary witness to a strange sccnc. The house had grown quiet again, when Tolstoy and Sonya came into the room. Both very intent, they sat down by a card table that had been left open.

"And so you'll be leaving again tomorrow?" said Sonya. "Why so soon? What a pity."

"My sister Marya is all alone and will soon be going abroad."

"Will you go with her?"

"No. I should have liked to go, but now I can't."

Unaware of her younger sister's presence in the room, Sonya never took her eyes from the doleful and supplicating face of the man leaning toward her. As the silence began to lengthen, she murmured:

"We had better be getting back to the dining room. Otherwise they'll begin looking for us."

"No," he said. "Wait a moment. It's so nice here."

And, taking up a piece of chalk, he wrote something on the baize.

"Sofya Andreyevna," he resumed, "can you decipher what I have written there? I put only the first letter of every word. . . ."

"I can," she confidently said.

He went on writing. "I watched his big reddish hand," she later wrote, "and felt my entire soul, all my energy and attention, focused on that piece of chalk and the hand guiding it." She read: "y.y.a.y.t.f.h.r.m.c.o.- m.a.a.t.i.o.h.f.m." She felt suddenly inspired. The blood hammered in her temples. No mystery could resist her love. With only occasional prompting from Tolstoy, she read, "Your youth and your thirst for happiness remind me cruelly of my age and the impossibility of happiness for me."

Amazed at her intuitiveness, he said:

"Then do this too."

And he wrote: "y.f.i.m.a.m.a.y.s.L.II.m.t.d.m.y.a.T." She translated:

"Your family is mistaken about me and your sister Lisa. Help me to defend myself, you and Tanya."

It was not a proposal. Nor even a declaration of love. But Sonya was too clever not to realize that this correspondence in code assumed a communion of minds between her and her partner that meant more than any protestation. Cutting through her exaltation, she heard her mother's voice crossly ordering her to bed. Before lying down she lighted a candle, sat on the floor and propped her notebook on a chair, and copied into her diary the words Tolstoy had initialed in chalk on the card table cover. Coming out of her hiding place, Tanya joined her a few moments later and confessed that she had heard and seen all, and was afraid there would be trouble ahead. Sonya was too happy to worry.

Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana the next day, but not before he had extracted a promise from the Behrs family to call again on their way back to Moscow. Behind him, he left a girl of eighteen quivering with hope, a girl of twenty smarting with jealousy, and a girl of sixteen moping because she was only a confidante. One day Lisa took Tanya aside and told her, with tears in her eyes: "Sonya is trying to take Leo Nikolayevich away from mel . . . The way she dresses and looks at him and goes off alone with him, it's as clear as day." Tanya tried to comfort her—in vain. The atmosphere was strained, as the young ladies prepared for the return trip.⁸

As agreed, they spent a night at Yasnaya Polyana. Marya Tolstoy had decided to take advantage of their coach as far as Moscow, before continuing abroad. Her departure saddened Aunt Toinette and the entire household. Leo was glum. At dawn, Anncnkov's big coach rolled up to the door and the farewells began. Suddenly, Tolstoy, dressed in

his traveling clothes, strode into the circle of weeping women, who were embracing each other and crossing themselves. His valet Alexis followed him with a suitcase.

"I am going to Moscow with you," he announced. "IIow could I stay on at Yasnaya now? It would seem so dull and empty."

Suffused with joy, Sonya struggled to keep her face under control as her mother watchcd her intently.

There was room for four inside the coach and two outside, behind the box. It was decided that Tolstoy would take one of the two outside places and Lisa and Sonya would take turns sitting beside him. The post horses trotted smartly along. Now and then the coachman blew his horn. The hours Sonya spent inside, with her mother and Tanya and her little brother Volodya and Marya Tolstoy, seemed endless. She envied Lisa out there in the open air, conversing freely with the writer. To while away the time, the travelers nibbled at bonbons and fruit, but Sonya refused all such treats. Leaning out, she countcd the striped mile-posts. At last, the relay! Her turn to mount beside Tolstoy. Evening was coming on. It grew cold. Nestled against her big friend's shoulder, she listened to his tales of the Caucasus, Sevastopol, the war, the savage Circassians, the French, the English, the Germans. ... lie had seen so many countries, known so many people, gone through so much! She felt very ignorant and vulnerable next to him. Light-headed with fatigue, she closed her eyes and dropped off, awoke at a sudden jolt and thrilled to find the warmth of a male body next to her, and the sound of a deep, gentle voice mixed with the jingling bells. They drove on like that all night. Inside, the family slept. Except for Lisa, perhaps, awaiting her turn. . . .

At the last relay before Moscow, when it was again Sonya's turn to sit beside Tolstoy, Lisa asked her to give up her turn on the pretext that it was too stuffy inside and she could not breathe. Sonya was enraged at this maneuver, but at her mother's command, she climbcd inside.

"Sofya Andrej'evna," Tolstoy cried out, "it's your turn to sit behind."

"I know," she said reluctantly, "but I'm cold."

Lisa was already settled triumphantly on the empty outside seat. Tolstoy stood a moment, hesitating, in the posthouse courtyard; then, without a word, he climbed up beside the driver and Anncnkov's coach rolled away with the girl sitting behind, alone and humiliated, offering her tears to the wind.

Tolstoy and Marya left them in Moscow and the Behrs went 011 to their country house at Pokrovskoye-Strcshncvo, where the doctor was waiting for them. Fresli quarrels broke out between the two sisters,

so violent that their parents could no longer pretend not to understand. The doctor, who was a man of principle, held that if a proposal were forthcoming Sonya, as the younger sister, should decline in favor of Lisa. Lyubov Alexandrovna, who was a woman of common sense, would have preferred to give priority to her children's hearts. Tanya felt sorry for the stiff and haughty Lisa, but sided openly with Sonya. Even the brothers became involved in these feminine complications. However, by tacit agreement, no one presumed to ask "the count" point-blank what his intentions were. He was too important a person, too intimidating. He must be allowed to reach his decision in his own good time, without being hurried in any way.

After Marya left for Europe, Tolstoy rented an apartment from a German bootmaker in Moscow, but he could not feel comfortable in it. He was obsessed by Sonya. One thing was certain: she, and not Lisa, was now his favorite among the three Behrs daughters. But should he propose to her, in spite of the difference in their ages? Would it not be better for a man like him to preserve his independence at all costs? He had never regretted breaking off with Valerya. But on the other hand, he had never felt for her what he felt for Sonya. If he disappeared from the scene and she were to marry someone else, he would regret it his whole life long. What to do? He was exhausted by his own indecision. He read his fortune in the cards, looked for good and evil marriage omens, and hiked almost daily the eight miles to Pokrovskoye- Streshnevo. He would reach the house at twilight, covered with dust, his throat dry and his heart thumping. The girls' bright-colorcd dresses, high voices and the charming nonsense they chattered rewarded him for his long walk. "When I am empress, I shall issue my commands and orders—like this!" Sonya said one evening, sitting in an unharnessed cabriolet in the courtyard. Tolstoy seized the shafts, set the heavy vehicle in motion with one heave of his back, and trotted off, crying:

"And this is how I shall take my empress for a drive!"

"No, no! It's too heavy! Stop!" implored Sonya, clasping her hands.

But she was delighted. "This incident shows how strong and healthy he was," she wrote in her memoirs. Of course, the count must stay to supper; a bed was prepared for him. Ah, those dangerous folds of comfort in which the parents of a marriageable daughter can swathe an undecided bachelor! At Pokrovskoyc-Strcshnevo nature itself conspired to concentrate the suitor's mind on thoughts of romance. The nights were so beautiful, the moon shone in the nearby pond, the grass in the meadow shivered as though covered with silver powder, the earth, which had drunk in the heat of the sun all clay, exhaled its perfumes in the lengthening shadows. Sitting under the arbor with the girls,

Tolstoy lalked of this and that, forgot his worries and strove to make himself agreeable. A rival had appeared on the scene of late, a certain Popov, professor of Russian history at the University of Moscow, who kept looking intently at Sonya and then turning away and heaving sighs. Rut he proved no more dangerous than the horse guardsman Mitrofan Polivanov, whom the girls were expecting any week. Twenty times Tolstoy's declaration was on his lips, and twenty times he bit it back. When the feeling became too strong for him, lie would lean 011 the wooden railing of the balcony and murmur, "Nights of madness!"

Consumed with anxiety, lie returned to his diary. "Slept at the Behrs'," he wrote on August 23, 1862. "A child! Or certainly looks like one. And yet, what utter confusion. Oh, if only I could put myself in a clear and honorable position. . . . I'm afraid of myself: what if it is only the desire for love again, and not love itself? I try to see only her weaknesses, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. A child! Or certainly looks like one."

Three days later he asked the child whether she kept a diary. Ilcr answer was evasive, but she admitted that she had written a story. He insisted upon seeing it. What went on in her mind in that moment? She knew Tolstoy might be offended by the unattractive personality she had given Dublitsky in her autobiographical tale. But hurt feelings or even an open conflict would be better than this stagnation in her love life. Since they were both too shy to speak out, and since lie had made one confession to her with the initials chalked on the table cover, why shouldn't she do as much through her thinly disguised characters? Burning with embarrassment, she handed him her notebook, staking everything on one throw of the dice.

He took the story home with him to Moscow and raced through it, and it was as though he suddenly saw his own face in the mirror, after forgetting how ugly and eroded it had become. Wounded vanity was his first reaction. Then he reflected that even though the heroine found Dublitsky ugly, old and moody, she was nonetheless in love with him. This observation only half-consoled him. "She gave me her story to read," he wrote on August 26. "I low furiously she insisted upon truth and simplicity. Anything unclear torments her. I read it all without a twinge, without a glimmer of jealousy or envy. Even so, expressions like 'unattractive outward appearance' and 'inconsistent in his opinions' hit mc hard." So hard that two days later, August 28—his birthday—he concluded that he was "too great" for the common path of matrimony. Wounded in masculine pride, he sought refuge in his author's pride: "I am thirty-four years old. . . . Cot up with my usual

feeling of depression. . . . Ugly mug. Give up any thought of marriage. Your vocation is elsewhere, that is why much has been given to you."

But work could no longer content him. Little Sonya had played the right card when she showed him her story. Now, every wriggle he gave to shake the hook loose only drove it deeper into his flesh. He went back to Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo, saw her again, hesitated, hoped, filled his diary with conflicting entries: "It is no longer love as before, or jealousy or even regret, but something similar I cannot name, very sweet; something like a bit of hope (that must not be). Pig! A little regret and sorrow too. Delicious night. Good, comfortable feeling. . . . I was confuscd. She too." (August 29.) "I am not jealous of Popov when he is with Sonya, I cannot believe she doesn't prefer me. I think the time has come, but it is night now. Her voice, too, is sad, peaceful. We took a walk. In the arbor. Back at the house, supper—her eyes. What a night! Dolt, this is not for you; yet you're in love, like with Sonya Koloshin or Alexandra Obolensky—but no more than that. Spent the night there, could not sleep, her again! 'Ilavc you never loved, then?' she says, and I want to laugh, I am suddenly wildly gay." (August 30.) "Never have I imagined my future with a woman as clearly, as joyfully and calmly. . . . Memento: Dublitsky, loathsome creature!" (September 3.) "Did not sleep all night, so clear was the picture I was painting of my happiness. In the evening we talked of love. From bad to worse." (September 5.) "Dublitsky, don't go poking your nose into youth and poetry and beauty and love. There are cadets for that, old man. . . . The monastery—work, there's your vocation, and from that summit you can look calmly and contentedly down upon the love and happiness of others. I have lived in that monastery and shall go back to it." (September 7.) After writing that sentence Tolstoy had a second thought and noted above it: "My diary is not truthful. Underneath, I am thinking that she will be here beside me one day, reading, and . . . and this is for her."

The next day the Behrs moved back to their apartment in the Kremlin, and Tolstoy rang at their door once again: "Sonya opened. . . . She looks thinner. There is nothing in her of what I have always seen in the others: neither false soulfulness nor the conventional tricks of allure. I am irresistibly drawn to her." (September 8.) "She blushed, she was deeply disturbed: 'O Dublitsky, do not dream! . . .' 1 cannot, I cannot tear myself away from Moscow. . . . Sleep impossible until three in the morning. Dreamed, and worked myself into a state like a kid of sixteen." (September 9.)

That night he resolved to abandon all hope of the joy he deemed impossible, and wrote a long letter of explanation to Sonya, telling her

that her parents were wrong to believe that he was in love with the fair Lisa, but that he was not wrong to identify himself with the horrible Dublitsky:

"When 1 read your story I recognized myself in Dublitsky and that unfortunately reminded me of what I really am and all too often forget: Uncle Leo, an old, exceedingly unsightly devil who needs to work, alone and unremittingly, at what God has given him to do, and not to think of any other felicity than that afforded by the knowledge of work well done. ... I am gloomy when I look at you, because your youth reminds me too vividly of my age and the impossibility of happiness for me. ... I am Dublitsky, but to marry simply liecause one must have a wife is something I cannot do. I demand something terrible, impossible, of marriage. ... I demand to be loved as I love. ... I shall not come to see you any more."

What a relief to have written that letter! Such a relief that he popped it into a drawer and promptly forgot all about it.f On September 10 he awoke with cramped muscles but renewed optimism. His resolution not to see Sonya again vanished with the day. He hardly took time to dress before rushing over to her home: "To the Kremlin. She wasn't in. . . . Then she arrived, severe, serious. I left, discouraged again, and more in love than ever. Underneath everything else, hope lives on. I must, I absolutely must free myself. I am beginning to hate Lisa, and pity her at the same time. Lord, help me, tell me what to do! Another cnicl, sleepless night coming, I can feel it; T who scoffed at lovers' agonies! I shall perish by the sword I have wielded! How many times I have planned to tell her, or Tanya, but in vain. . . . Help me, Lord, teach me what to do. Holy Virgin, help me!" (September 10.)

He was frightened by the fullness of his love as by a disease. The sole activity of which his mind was capable was obsessive thought about this soft-skinned little girl. The older and uglier he felt himself, the more desirable she seemed. On September 11 lie forced himself to stay at home and spent the day in prayer. On the twelfth he called on the Behrs and arrived in the midst of a party of friends, whose chatter made him dizzy. Sonya was inaccessible among all those trivial, fluttering people. He wanted to pick her up bodily and carry her away, bear her off to the country. ... "I am in love as I did not believe it possible to be," he wrote that evening. "I am insane, I shall put a bullet through my head if this goes on much longer. There was a party at their place. She is delightful in every respect. And I am the repugnant old Dublitsky. I should have taken my precautions sooner. Now I cannot stop.

t He gave the letter, dated September 9, 1862, to Sofya Andreyevna after their marriage.

Dublitsky, so be it; but transfigured by love. Yes, I'll go tomorrow morning. There have been propitious moments, and I have not taken advantage of them. I was afraid, when I should simply have told her. I feel like going back now and saying it in front of everybody. Lord, help me!"

On September 13, having broken his promise to himself again, lie renewed it: "Tomorrow I shall go and speak out, or else I shall kill myself." On second thought, he crosscd out the last part of the sentence. He would not kill himself. Nor would he speak out. He would present his proposal in writing. After all, it was easier that way. What despair if she were to refuse! What dread if she were to accept! Not a sound in the house; a candle burned on the table. lie let his pen slide across the paper. When he had finished, he wrote in his diary: "Four in the morning. I have written her a letter which I shall give to her tomorrow, that is, today, the fourteenth. God, I am afraid I shall die! Such happiness seems impossible. Help me, my God!" Then he closed his notebook, picked up the letter and calmly read it over:

"Sofya Andreyevna, the situation has become intolerable to me. Every day for three weeks I have sworn to myself: today I shall speak; and every day I leave you with the same anguish, the same regret, the same terror, the same joy in my heart. ... I am bringing this letter with me, to give to you in case I lack the opportunity, or the courage, to speak. . . . Tell me, tell me truthfully, do you want to be my wife? But do not answer yes unless you can do so fearlessly, from the bottom of your heart. If you cannot, if you have the shadow of a doubt, then it is better to answer no. For the love of God, be certain! If you say no, it will be awful for me, but I am expecting it and shall find strength to bear it. For if I were your husband and were not loved as much as I love, it would be more awful still."

He did not give his letter to Sonya on either the fourteenth or the fifteenth of September. But on the fifteenth, he whispered to her that he had something important to tell her. She looked up at him with her great dark astonished eyes. Did she really not understand, or was she pretending not to understand? He felt the letter in his pocket, did not say another word, and beat a retreat.

When he returned to the Kremlin after dinner the following day, September 16, he found Sonya at the piano playing "II baccio," an Italian waltz. She was so nervous that her fingers caught on the keys. To hide her confusion, she asked her sister Tanya to sing. After a bit, as she was getting the notes all wrong, Tolstoy took her place at the piano. He vowed that if Tanya sang the last note well, which was very high, he would give Sonya the letter. If not, he would conclude that

God counseled him to wait. The end of the song drew near. The note welled out of the girl's throat, pure, crystalline, imperative. Tolstoy felt as though he had received a blow on the head, and put his hand to his pocket. Tanya went to make tea. As though diving off the top of a tower, he murmured:

"I wanted to speak to you but I was not able to. Here is the letter I have been carrying with me for several days. Read it. I shall wait for your reply here."

Sonya snatched the letter, pounded along the hall and shut herself into the room she shared with her two sisters. Her heart was beating so hard that she scarcely understood what she read. Just as she reached the sentence: "Do you want to be my wife?" someone knocked at the door. It was Lisa.

"Sonya!" she cried out. "Open the door! Open the door immediately! I must speak to you!"

Sonya opened the door a crack.

"What has the count written to you?" Lisa said in a choked voice. "Tell me! Tell me!. . ."

"lie has proposed to mc," answered Sonya in French.

Lisa's eyes grew wider, the tears spilled over and her mouth twisted into a sob:

"Refuse! Refuse right away!"

Sonya, petrified with joy, said nothing; alerted by Tanya, her mother came running. She scolded Lisa, ordered her to take hold of herself and show a little dignity, and pushed Sonya forward by the shoulders, saying:

"Go give him your reply."

Bome on a gust of wind, she flew into the room where Tolstoy was waiting, pale, backed up against the wall. He took her hands in his and said weakly: "Well?"

"Yes, of course!" she burst out.

At her words, fear and joy surged through him so violently that he felt faint. Two minutes later the whole household had heard the news and he had to submit to the avalanche of congratulations. But Lisa stayed away, weeping in her room, and Dr. Bchrs sent word that he was not feeling well and also failed to appear. He thought it highly improper of Tolstoy to choose his second daughter, when he had intended him to many the eldest.

After the fiance's departure, Mrs. Behrs set out to win over her husband. She pointed out that with their large family and slender resources they had no right to reject a rich, talented and noble suitor on a mere point of order, that they would gain nothing by trying to oppose true love and that, furthermore, the important thing was not principle but Sonya's happiness. Mastering her resentment, Lisa joined her mother in pleading the cause of the future couple. Together, they won the doctor over; he blessed Sonya with the family icon and everybody cried.

Meanwhile, back in his apartment, Tolstoy, worn out by emotion and incapable of articulating his thoughts, wrote down these few words in his diary: "I told her. She: 'Yes.' Like a wounded bird. No point in writing. Impossible to forget or to relate."

The next day, September 17, Mrs. Behrs was entertaining in honor of her nameday. Her two oldest daughters, Lisa and Sonya, were dressed alike, according to custom. Lilac and white woolen dresses with round necklines and rosettes of lilac ribbons at waist and shoulder. Both were pale, there were shadows under their eyes and beneath their pilcd-up hair their faces were drawn. The table groaned under the weight of the victuals and all the vases were full of flowers. At two in the afternoon the room began to fill. Every time a guest came up to wish Lyubov Alcxandrovna many happy returns, she smiled graciously and said, "You may also congratulate us upon our daughter's engagement." Before she had time to say which daughter, the new arrival was bearing down on Lisa, who blushed, forced a social half-smile and indicated Sonya, who blushed in turn. And to make matters worse, a magnificent horse guardsman suddenly strode into the midst of the crowd: Mitrofan Polivanov, coming to pay his respects to the mistress of the house and give his regards to the young woman whom he already regarded as a sort of fiancee. Sonya drew herself up stiffly to hide her discomfort. Her brother Sasha quickly took the young man aside. After a whispered explanation, Mitrofan Polivanov came up to Sonya and muttered between clenched teeth:

"I knew you would betray me. I could feel it coming. . . ."

Tolstoy anxiously observed this uniformed fop whispering to the girl who was soon to bear his name. Lisa stood a little way off, her head high and her lips pinched together. "Fiancd, gifts, champagne," wrote Tolstoy that evening. "Lisa pitiful and difficult. She ought to detest me; she embraces me."

It remained to set the date. Like most people who can never make up their minds, once he had reached his decision Tolstoy could not bear a moment's delay. Leaving Sonya's parents flabbergasted, he demanded that the service take place on September 23, 1862, one week after the engagement had been announced. Lyubov Alexandrovna objected that the trousseau had to be prepared.

"Why?" he said. "She is perfectly well dressed the way she is! What more docs she need?"

With a sigh, Mrs. Behrs acquiesced. Having gotten his way on this point, Tolstoy then asked his fiancee whether she wanted to take a honeymoon trip abroad or go immediately to Yasnaya Polyana. She opted for Yasnaya Polyana, in order "to begin real life right away, family life." He was grateful to her for this. Of course, they would not be alone in the big house, Aunt Toinette was part of the furniture. But Sonya already dearly loved the old spinster and was sure to find an ally in her. Only six days left! The girl was suddenly caught up in a whirlwind of calls, letters, seamstresses, shopping, invitation lists. . . . Tolstoy disapproved of all this futile agitation, motivated by coquetry. Souls, not dresses, were what counted in marriage. It was wrong to try- to appear more handsome than one really was, to the person in whom one had placed one's faith; 011 the contrary one must stand before him naked. Naked in all one's ugliness. If love could survive this trial by tTuth, then a family could be born. If not, better to separate, each to his own.

It was in this spirit of sincerity that he decided to give his fiancee his private diaries to read. She had thought to portray him, in her Dublitsky of the unprepossessing outward appearance? He would show her that Dublitsky's interior was even more spine-chilling. His wild ambitions, his absurd rules of life, his intellectual acrobatics, his somersaults, his toothachc, his rages, his diarrheas, his erotic dreams, his false engagement to Valerya, his real affairs with the peasant women, she would know it all. In his wedding basket he would deposit this bundle of dirty linen; if she did not turn up her nose at the smell, then she could understand anything. He reveled in debasing himself thus, in the true Russian manner, in the eyes of the person whose respect was most essential to him. A few day's before, he had held her in his arms for the first time, there between the wall and the piano, and she had given him a clumsy kiss. He had been so excited by this that he wrote, when he came home, "Apparition of Satan. Jealousy of her past. Doubted her love and thought she was deceiving herself about her own feelings."⁷ Let her read that, too! He was as tense as though he were staking his entire fortune on a single card.

Sonya accepted the notebooks with misgivings, and spent a whole night reading them. As she turned the pages, the image of her future husband became steadily blacker. Revelations that an experienced woman of the world might have found it hard to pardon horrified the eighteen-year-old girl raised by her mother in total ignorance of the "nasty side" of life. She did not understand how a man who spoke so wonderfully of virtue, sacrifice and courage could be a weakling and profligate at the same time. And all those sudden about-faces, in politics, art, love! What avid fascination with everything relating to his own person! If he were so concerned with himself, would it ever occur to him to pay any attention to her? If he laid down such stem principles for himself, would he not demand a degree of moral perfection of her that was beyond her reach? If he changed his mind so rapidly, would he not tire of her the morning after the wedding? The most contradictory nature in the world, a two-faced fanus, one side of light and the other of darkness. Terrible sentences leaped to her eyes: "Regard the company of woman as a necessary' social evil and avoid them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indolence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? . . ." "Felt voluptuous desires . . "Went home with a girl . . ." The abbreviated style of the diary accentuated the air of cynicism it exuded. Sonya began to cry. "How stricken I was by those pages he insisted, in his excessive honesty, that I read before we were married!" she later wrote. "Wasted honesty! I shed many tears over that look into his past."