Tolstoy

2. A Terrifying Happiness

Sonya was so young; he could not get over it. He watchcd her "playing grownup" and continually wanted to carry her off to their room and smother her with kisses. "I lived for thirty-four years without knowing it was possible to love so much and be so happy," he wrote on September 28, 1862, to his beloved Alexandra Tolstoy. "I keep feeling as though I had stolen some undeserved, illegal happiness that was not meant for me." He was even delighted by his first quarrel with his wife. After weeping as he consoled her in his arms, he went to write in his diary, "She is exquisite, I love her more than ever." Later, seeing her writing to her sister Tanya, he leaned over her shoulder and added a postscript: "My dear Tanya, pity me, I have a stupid wife." Sonya then added: "He's the stupid one, Tanya!" Whereupon he continued: "You must be deeply chagrined to learn that we arc both stupid, but there is a good side to everything: we are very happy in our stupidity and would not wish to be otherwise." "But I would like him to be a little more intelligent," concluded Sonya.

And they burst out laughing, delighted by this tomfoolery that showed the depth of their love. Yet Sonya was nothing less than a child- woman. She soon made up her mind that the house was going to be run her way. She did not like some of her husband's habits. For instance, he preferred to sleep like the muzhiks, rolled up in a blanket with his head on a leather cushion. She insisted that he sleep between sheets and use a pillow, like city folk. And the servants, who had been sleeping on the ground, in the corridors or hall or wherever they liked before she came, were each instructed to repair to a designated place for the night. How was one to teach obedience to this ignorant, immovable and slovenly horde? 'Iliere was the cook: Nicholas Mikhailovich, the one who had played the flute in Prince Volkonsky's serf-orchestra.⁰ When asked why he had traded his flute for a cookstove he sullenly replied, "Because I lost my mouthpiece." Often, he was too drunk to prepare the meal, and his feeble-minded helper Alyosha Gorshok took his place at the stove. Another remarkable character was Agatha Mikhailovna, the housekeeper, who was forever knitting a stocking as she walked and was so fond of animals that she could not swallow one bite of meat or step on a cockroach, and she gave milk to the mice and flics to the spiders. One of her duties was to bring up the innumerable litters of Tolstoy puppies, which she kept in her own revoltingly filthy room; she covered them with her own clothes to keep them warm and, if one was sick, lighted a candle for it before the icon of St. Nicholas. Then there were Dunyasha, the buxom chambermaid, Alexis the valet, the laundress and her daughters, Vasily Ermilin the village elder, the redheaded coachman Indvushkin and all manner of assistants, apprentices, errand boys, sewing-women and charwomen, whose faces and names were hard to remember. Mild old Aunt Toinette had given them free rein for years; Sonya took them in hand with stern authority. Her furious pulls on the bell-rope roused them from their apathy. She scolded Dunyasha, Alyosha Gorshok and even Agatha Mikhailovna. Tolstoy was startled by the loud voices that penetrated the walls of his study, but he did not yet begin to worry. He could not imagine that his wife— so young!—might be difficult or hard to live with. Yet he did see that Aunt Toinette, dispossessed of her prerogatives as mistress of the house, was withering and fading away at the side of her inseparable companion Natalya Petrovna. The woman who had brought him up from infancy, known and pardoned all his youthful follies, jealously guarded his privacy when he grew up, was now withdrawing into the shadows, feeling that her work was done. "Aunt's face has suddenly begun to age, to my sorrow," he wrote in his diary.¹

Although Aunt Toinette had shriveled away almost to nothing, the mere fact of her presence maintained an odor of debility and decrepitude about the house. Coming from her big, boisterous, jolly family, Sonya soon liegan to suffer from the tedium of life at Yasnaya Polyana. When the joy of discovery had worn off, she suddenly found herself very much alone. Her husband, preoccupicd with the management of his estate, spent much of his time away in the country. The moment lie was out of sight, she fell into a state of torpor. She took up her diary again; perhaps Tolstoy even encouraged her to do so. Naturally, she only felt like writing in moments of melancholy, so her recital spins out

⁰ Like old Tikhon, who had been a footman in the time of Tolstoy's father.

like an unfinished tapestry, from which the light threads arc missing that would give relief to the pattern. "This solitude weighs upon me terribly,'' she wrote. "There was so much animation at home and here, when Leo is gone, everything is so colorless. He has almost always lived alone and does not understand what I feel. . . . There is never a joyful shout in this house. It is as though everyone were dead. . . ." "I feci guilty toward Aunt. I should have more consideration for her, if only bccause she cared for my husband when he was little and will care for my own children later. . . "I do not think I love Aunt, and that disturbs inc. I am irritated by her age rather than touched by it. . . ." "Aunt is sweet and good-tempered, but I find it hard to be around her: she is old. . .

Sensing her difficulties, Aunt Toinette looked on in silence and pitied her. One evening when Tolstoy was away she came up to the young woman, took her hand and kissed it. "Why?" wrote Sonya. "I believe she has a kind heart, and it pains her to sec me alone."

To combat this stultifying atmosphere, Sonya threw herself into her work. With a bunch of heavy keys dangling from her belt, she sped from basement to attic, toured the farmyard, kept an eye on the milch-cows' yield, presided over the cucumber-pickling and kept the account books. And Tolstoy, after dismissing his stewards, decided he would manage the eighteen hundred acrcs that were left to him alone. Always eager to try any new-fangled agricultural gadget, he launched out into beekeeping, setting up his hives over by the Zasyeka forest, planted apple trees in his orchard, tried growing cabbage on an industrial scale, built a distillery, had a go at sheep-farming, and imported some Japanese pigs he had seen at Shatilov the stockbreeder's. When the first consignment arrived, he exclaimed, "What snouts! What an exotic breed!" and entrusted the precious specimens to the care of an old drunkard, one of his proteges whom he naively hoped to reform through work. But the swineherd did not appreciate the great favor that had been bestowed upon him, it offended him to be asked to take care of pigs, and he took his revenge by letting them starve to death. Tolstoy attributed their demise to an epidemic, and turned to new fields of exploration. "My sole preoccupations are money and commonplace, pedestrian comfort," he confessed.⁸ And Sonya echocd, "Can it be that he cares for nothing but money, managing the estate and running the distillery? When he is not eating, sleeping or being silent, he is loping al>out on business, running, running, always alone."⁴

Fet, the poet, called at Yasnaya Polyana one day and found the master of the domain directing a team of men who were seining the pond for carp. Completely absorbed in the delicate business of placing

the nets, Tolstoy greeted his guest distractedly and called to his wife, who came running dressed all in white, with her heavy keys jangling at her waist. To gain time, she leaped over a hedge.

"What arc you doing, countess?" cried Fet. "You must be careful!"

"It's nothing, I'm used to it," she answered.

And when Tolstoy ordered a sack brought from the storehouse, she detached a key from her ring and gave it to a boy who sped away like an arrow:

"There!" said Tolstoy. "You see our method at work: keep the kc>-s on one's person and send the youngsters to do the work."

The youngsters were particularly easy to come by, since the village schools had been closed. On October 1, 1862, immediately after his return to Yasnaya Polyana, lie wrote: "Have said good-bye to the students and the common people." And a fortnight later: "Decided to give up the review; the schools too." Surprising decision from a man who, a short time before, had been claiming that the education of the peasants was the supreme goal of his life. Once again, without the slightest hesitation, he took a stand directly opposed to his previous position. Ilis passion for teaching was followed by utter indifference to education in any form. He allowed his associates to continue for a few weeks, but without any supervision or counscl, and then he dismissed them. "The students are going away," he wrote 011 December 29, 1862. "And I feel sorry for them." Tlicy had all scented the danger, moreover, when they saw Tolstoy arriving with his child-bride dressed in city clothes. They could not understand how he had married an upper-class girl after declaring that "to marry a woman of society is to swallow the whole- poison of civilization." Sonya immediately felt their animosity, and was on her guard. To her the school, the muzhiks, the long-haired students with their equalitarian theories were just so many sworn enemies of her love. Since her husband was attracted to tlicm, she must fight them. With remarkable intuition she wrote in her diary, two months after her marriage: "lie makes me sick, with his 'people'! I feel he is going to have to choose between the family, which I personify, and those people he loves so passionately. It's selfish of me? Well, too bad. I live for him and by him and I want it to be the same for him. If I am not interesting to him, if I'm only a plaything, not a human being, then I neither can nor will go 011 living like this." To force him to choose between her and his muzhiks, she ran away and hid in the garden. "One feels so free outdoors! ... lie has comc out, he's looking for me, he is worried." After winning the battle of the students' dismissal, she began to be alarmed by the case of her victory. Would he remain faithful to her, if he could so readily abjure what he had once worshiped? "He loves me

just as he has loved the school, nature, the people, perhaps literature as well, one after the other. Then the craze passes and he becomes enamored of something else."⁵

To justify this latest switch in his own eyes, Tolstoy now affirmed that his interest in popular education had been nothing but "an exaggerated impulse of youth, no more nor less than exhibitionism" and that he could not continue it now that he had "come of age." lie added: "She has done it all. She does not know, she does not understand that she has changed me far more than I have changed her."^tt

After disposing of the schools, Sonya's next move was to sweep out the sentimental cobwebs that clung to her husband. She had read his diary, she knew about his past, and she did not like to inhale the reminders of it that eddied around her. To begin with, she could not abide Leo's tender affection for his dear aunt, his little grandmother, his babushka Alexandra Tolstoy. The more he praised the noble soul, sensitivity, piety, intelligence and culture of the old maid of honor, the more he annoyed his wife who felt inferior to this paragon of all the virtues. "She does not want to write to the aunts at court," he sorrowfully noted on October 1, 1862. And he added, marveling at her perceptiveness, "She senses everything." Four days of persuasion were required to induce the bride to produce her letter of convention, written in French:

"Leo has spoken to me about you so often that I have already grown to love you and I treasure your affection for my husband. . .

The sentences followed each other with artificial elegance. Ilcr heart was clearly not in it. She signed: "Countess Sofya Tolstoy." Upon reading over this classroom theinc, Tolstoy felt how cold it was and added a postscript in his own hand, by way of apology:

"I am not at all happy with the letter Sonya has written to you, my dear friend Alexandra, and I know your personal relationship will be a very different matter. . . . You understand that I cannot tell you the truth about her now, for fear of being carried away and lending fuel to the skeptics' fire. I can only say that her most striking feature is that of a 'man of integrity'—I mean what I say: both 'integrity' and 'man.' . . . What a dreadful responsibility it is to live with another person! . . . She is reading what I write to you and understands nothing- refuses to understand (Besides, she doesn't need to understand!) that state we men reach after wrestling with a long, laborious and painful series of doubts and sufferings. . . ." Whereupon Sonya intcrnipted, and wrote:

"I cannot let that pass, dear Aunt. He is wrong, I understand every-

thing, absolutely everything that has to do with him, and his letter is gloomy because he has a headache and is in a bad mood."

At the bottom of the page Tolstoy merely commented, "There, you see!" And the missive went off as it was, bittersweet, evasive, odd. Reading it, Alexandra understood that the bride had determined to clear the air around her husband, and did not need to be told twice. She wrote an amiable, formal letter in reply and signed it, "Your old Aunt"

Reassured on that scorc, Sonya conccded a few months later that Alexandra was a remarkable person. "I would not mind if they continued to correspond," she wrote, "but I should hate Alexandra to think that Leo's wife had nothing more to recommend her than an easygoing nature, barely competent to be a children's nursemaid. No matter how jealous I am of Leo, jealous of his heart, I know Alexandra cannot be nibbed out of his life. Besides, she must not be removed from it. She has played a pretty part, one I am incapable of playing. ... I should so like to know her better! Would she find me worthy of him? . . . Since reading Leo's letters to her, I have been thinking about her constantly. I might even like her. . . ."⁷

Tolstoy's letters to Alexandra, of which he kept the drafts, were not the only ones Sonya read. In his effort to be completely honest, he let her explore all his correspondence to her heart's content. She liorc his name, she shared his bed, and so she was entitled to know everything about him. Thus she renewed her acquaintance with Valerva Arsenyev, of whom she had already had a glimpse in her fiance's diary. She immediately saw that this was not a dangerous rival. "Pretty but insignificant," she noted. And she applauded Tolstoy's moral exhortations to the girl: "I recognize him in every line. The same principle, the same striving after the good. . . . Reading those letters I felt no jealousy at all, as though Valerya were not some other woman he may have cared for, but myself. ... It was not Valcrya he loved, but love and goodness."⁸ Her indulgence toward this harmless specter of the past vanished, however, when it encountered Axinya, the peasant who had been Tolstoy's mistress for three years before his marriage. An illegitimate child, Timothy, had been born during their affair, and it was the general opinion that he greatly resembled Tolstoy. The mother and her boy lived in a hamlet close to the main house. Every time Sonya passed them, she felt a fresh surge of protest and depression. How had her husband been able to find pleasure in caressing that blowsy and probably unclean female? Was the animal instinct in men so powerful that anybody would do to satisfy them? To think that Leo had written about the creature in his diary! And in flattering tenns, too! "She is

very fine. ... I am in love as I have never been before. . . . The feeling is no longer bestial, but that of a husband for his wife."⁹ Countess Tolstoy, stepping into the shoes of a village trollop! One day Sonya recognized Axinya among the women scouring the floor in the house. Choking with rage, she drowned Tolstoy in reproaches, and wrote that evening, with trembling hand: "I believe I shall kill myself one day out of jealousy. Tn love as I have never been before!' And with whom? A fat peasant, a vulgar woman with white skin. It's ghastly! The sight of the sword and gun comforted inc. Just one shot, it's so easy! As long as I have no children! . . . And to think the woman is there, a few steps away from us! I am quite simply losing my mind. I shall go for a drive. Maybe I shall meet her. How he loved her! If only I could burn his diary and his past with it."¹⁰

Axinya and her child pursued Sonya even in her nightmares. One night she dreamed she was having an argument with the insolent woman, who had put on "a black silk dress" to provoke her. A murderous wave swept over her brain. In her dream she indulged the lust for vengeance which she knew she could not satisfy awake. The scene was so horrible that when she awoke the next morning, she rccordcd it in her diary in all its gory detail. "Suddenly I was in such a rage that I seized her child and tore it limb from limb," she wrote. "I tore off its legs, its arms, its head. I was in a frenzy of anger. And at that moment, Lyovochka arrived.¹¹ I told him they were going to deport me to Siberia, but he picked up the scattered limbs and comforted me, telling me it was only a doll. I looked, and lo and behold, instead of a body I saw nothing but a few strips of deerskin and lumps of cotton wadding. I was very cross."¹² Sonya wrote of her hatred of Axinya several times in her diary: "It upsets me dreadfully whenever I think of her."¹³ "That disgusting woman again. How does she dare to keep turning up in front of mc all the time?"¹⁴ Then, obsessed by jealousy, she persuaded herself that her husband could not look at a peasant without sleeping with her. To test him, she disguised herself as a common woman, tied a scarf down over her eyes, and ran after him on the road. She was certain he would take her for someone else and motion her to follow him into the bushes. But she could not find which way he had gone and came home worn out and embarrassed by her getup.

Besides, she did not need a flesh-and-blood rival to arouse her jealousy. She had only to read Tolstoy's lwoks for her wifely dignity to feel offended by the sensuality of some of his descriptions. The words of love, the kisses exchanged by his characters made her flush with shame as though Lyovochka had put on an obsccnc exhibition of himself in front of a crowd. She was tormented by the thought that the

sexual joy he attributed to one or another of his heroes was merely an echo of the pleasure he had himself known with someone else. "I read the beginning of his book," she wrote on December 16, 1862.¹⁵ "Every time he speaks of love or women I have such an awful feeling, such loathing, that I could burn the whole thing. I want nothing to remind me of his past! And 1 would not even spare his writing, for jealousy has made me terribly selfish." And she ended her confession with this chilling sentence: "If I could kill him and create another new person exactly like him, I should do it with pleasure."

And yet, by a strange inconsistency in her nature, the intensity of her jealousy of the other women in her husband's life was equaled only by her indifference to his passion for herself. She was flattered to sec that she aroused such powerful desire in him. But when he took her in his arms, she tunied to stone. Passive and attentive, she followed the signs of amorous disarray on his panting countenance with a mixture of curiosity and terror. At the end of the struggle, she felt bruised and soiled; he was happy. "When he embraces me," she wrote, "I think that I am not the first woman he has crushed to him in the same way. . . . It is bitter and painful to think that my husband is like the rest of the world. . . ." (October 8, 1862.) "All this commerce of the flesh is repellent." (October 9,1862.) "The physical side of love plays a very big role for him, and none at all for me." (April 29, 1863.) At first, though shocked by his ardent virility, she kept her revulsion to herself. A shrewd feminine instinct warned her that by showing a semblance of pleasure she might increase her hold over Lyovochka. The inconvenience of being mauled about now and then was a small price to pay for the satisfaction of dominating a man.

He, however, was not unduly worried by his wife's bashfulness. On the contrary, everything that was young and virginal about her excited him. The master subduer of farmgirls was presumably having his first taste of the delights of profaning more refined flesh. His confidences to his diary were becoming a hymn to wedded bliss: "I love her when, at night or early in the morning, I wake up and find her looking tenderly at me. Nolwdy—and I less than anyone else—can prevent her now from loving me in her own way, the way she wants to. I love her when she is sitting close to me and we are both feeling that we love cach other with all our strength. She says, 'Lyovochka,' and adds, after a pause, ^Vhy are stovepipes set 011 straight?' Or, 'Why do horses have such a hard life?' ctc. I love her when, after we have been silent together for a long time, I finally say, 'Well, Sonya, what shall we do now?' And she laughs. I love her when she is angry with me and suddenly widens her eyes and tries to look mean and nasty and snarls, 'Leave me alone!

You're bothering me!' And the next minute she is smiling shyly at me. . . . I love her when, a little girl in a yellow dress, she shoves her chin forward and sticks out her tongue at me. I love to see her head thrown back, her face solemn and frightened, her passionate child's face. I love her when . . ."^I6

Sometimes his exultation was so intense that he became worried, as though God had given him a gift by mistake and were about to snatch it away from him: "Just lately, we felt that there was something terrifying in our happiness. . . . We started to pray." (March 1, 1863.) And a little later: "I love her more and more. Today, after seven months, a feeling of humility that I had not had for a long time came over me in her presence. She is ineffably pure, and good, and virginal in my eyes. At those times I feel that I do not possess her, even though she gives all of herself to me. I do not possess her because I dare not, I do not feel worthy. I am anxious; that is why my happiness is not complete. Something keeps tormenting me: I am jealous of the man who could be entirely worthy of her. I am not." (March 24, 1863.) Sonya's youth and grace made him over-sensitive. She was afraid she would lose him because of his excessive sexual demands, but he was afraid lie would lose her because of her predilection for flirting. One day he had been alarmed because she was paying too much attention to young Erlen- wcin, one of the student teachers at Yasnaya Polyana. Another time a young man named Pisarev came out from Moscow to spend some time with them; Leo found him over-assiduous in his attentions to Sonya and suddenly announced, without any explanation, that his carriage was at the door to take him back to the city.

The fact was that Tolstoy, who claimed to be so broad-minded, was extremely old-fashioned when it came to women. A champion of freedom outside the home, he applied the principles of tyranny under his roof. According to him, a wife should abandon all interest in her appearance, turn her back on the "futilities of society" and devote herself to running the household, educating her children and distracting her husband. The very qualities that had attracted him to Sonya unwed— her gaiety, spontaneity, elegance, eagerness to amuse herself and please others—now seemed incompatible with the position she had acquired at Yasnaya Polyana. If she changed her dress or did her hair differently, he accused her of frivolity. Tin's made her rebellious; she felt like "flirting with someone," "losing my temper with a chair," "going to a ball," or "kicking up my heels, instead of going upstairs to bed." "I am surrounded by decrepitude. Everyone I see is old. I try to restrain every sign of youth because it seems so out of place in this staid and sedate atmosphere. . . . Lyovochka's only occupation in life is to tell me

That's enough!'"" At such moments she was sorry she had left Moscow. "Dearest Maman, dearest Tanya, how sweet they were! Why did I abandon them? I made poor Lisa suffer horribly and now I feel guilty when I remember."¹⁸ She callcd her husband a "kill-joy," she complained that she was growing "numb," she wrote: "I have a wild desire to escape from his influence, which I sometimes find oppressive, and not to care about him any more."¹⁹ And yet, as soon as he left to inspect the farm or attend to some business in Tula, she was lost. A thousand wild ideas tormented her: he no longer loved her, perhaps he was being unfaithful to her, she was not worthy of him, he was not worthy of her. . . . But he came back. Ecstasy: "He still loves me! His expression is so gentle, so humble, the eyes of a saint!" She had hardly finished purring over him, though, when she began moaning over her fate again. Her lightning changcs of mood were enough to astonish Tolstoy, himself a sufficiently unstable character. To balance the impetuous side of his own nature, he thought, a forbearing and even- tempered partner was what he needed. And here he was with a wife who delighted in analyzing herself, discussing herself, pitying herself, switching from anxiety to effcrvcscencc, love to loathing, tears to laughter with hair-raising speed, provoking thunderstorms in order to bask in the ensuing lull. Sometimes she wanted to be "more permeable to her husband's influence," and sometimes she was afraid she 110 longer saw anything "except through his eyes," which put her in "a position of inferiority"; sometimes she insisted how happy she was to live in the shadow of a great man, and sometimes she cxclaimcd, "I have a senseless and involuntary' desire to test my power over him; that is, I want to make him obey me"; sometimes she found him too cold, and at others too forward; sometimes he seemed "old," "odious," "boring," "selfish," and at others she confessed, "There are moments—and they are not rare—when I am sick with love of him. ... It hurts me to look at him or hear him or be near him, as it must hurt a devil to be near a saint."²⁰

The rhythm of their periods of love, suspicion and resentment was unfortunately syncopated, which gave rise to tempestuous outbursts. What complicated their relations was that each had given the other permission to read his diary, and thus their private confessions unconsciously turned into arguments of prosecution or defense. All too often, they set down on paper what they had not dared to say out loud. Then, with their own conscience at rest, they awaited results with morbid curiosity. "Lyovochka has said nothing and has not made the slightest allusion to my diary. Has he read it? I don't know. What I wrote is vile and I don't like to read it over."²¹ The result of this practice was that the couple lived on two levels, one of speech and the other of writing. Decisions won by one of them in the lower court were appealed by the other in the upper. They could hardly have striven more mightily to bare their naked souls if their chief object had been to become thoroughly disgusted with each other. The miracle is that their marriage stood the strain of this continual rivalry to See which could be most truthful.

As Sonya complained of being lonely Tolstoy agreed, after three months of marriage, to go to Moscow with her. She was very eager to sec her family again, but to avoid tension with Lisa it was decided that the young couple would not stay at the Behrs', but at the Hotel Chev- ricr on Gaz.etnaya Street behind the University. The moment Sonya arrived, on December 23, 1862, her enthusiasm collapscd. Oh, she was glad to see her parents and brothers again, and her mischievous Tanya whom Tolstoy cheerily addressed in the familiar form, and even Lisa, who showed nothing of her chagrin; but she no longer felt at home among these people who had previously been her whole world. Her hopes and cares were elsewhere. Back in her childhood circle, she had the impression that she was wasting time. "Maman is right, I have grown dull," she wistfully wrote. "I miss my former liveliness." Parties and society no longer interested her. She often let Tolstoy go off by himself to visit his friends, and waited for him in their hotel room, dreaming of Yasnaya Polyana in the snow. "Let us hurry back to Yasnaya Polyana, where Lyovochka lives more with me and for me, and where I am alone with Auntie and him," she wrote. "I adore that life and would not change it for any other."²² And Moscow was a disappointment to him, too. Everything irritated him. lie was jealous because Sonya had seen handsome Mitrofan Polivanov again, who had almost been her fianc<5. Of course, after his tantrum, he begged her to forgive him. "We patched things up as best we could," he wrote. "I am always annoyed with myself on such occasions, mostly because of the kisses, which are just false plaster. . . . After dinner the plaster cracked. Tears, fits of nerves. The best proof that I love her is that I was not angry. It is hard for me to stay home with her alone. I sec that she is unhappy, but I am still more unhappy myself and can say nothing to help her; besides, there is nothing to say."²³ But if he came home late, it was her turn to attack: "It will soon be three o'clock and he is still not back. Why did he promise? Is it fair for him to be so unpunctual?"²⁴ And: "Lyovochka has seen fit to impress upon me that he cannot be content with family life, he needs other distractions."²* And as she was writing this in her diary, he tiptoed into the room, took the pen out of her fingers and added in his own hand, "I need nothing and no one, except you." That was enough to keep her smiling for the rest of the evening, but the next day her doubts and fits of temper and anxiety returned. She did have some excuse: for the last few weeks she had known she was pregnant. A feeling of mingled pride and fear took root in her heart.

On February 8, 1863 she set out with her husband for Yasnaya Polyana and the unvarying routine of country life, poorly lighted, half-heated rooms, slovenly servants, whining Aunt Toinette, and the blank, interminable hours spent waiting for Lyovochka, who was out looking after the estate or beating the forest, gun in hand. In Moscow the writer's friends had reproached him for neglecting his writing. After some hesitation, he finished Polikushka, which he had started in Brussels, and began the tale of a horse—a piebald gelding named Kholstomer (Stridcr). The idea for the story had been given to him by his friend Alexander Stakhovich, whose brother Michael owned a stud farm and used to listen to the tales of a doting groom. This long story proved so difficult to write that the author abandoned it and did not finish it until twenty- two years later.²⁶ The final version bore the stamp of Tolstoy's subsequent spiritual development: at first the author had only wanted to pierce the secrets of the soul of an animal; but afterward, when he returned to the piebald gelding who tells the story of his life, he sought and achieved a brilliant analysis of the problem of the interdependence of all beings, the master's rights over the slave, the injustice implicit in any form of ownership, and the ultimate imperatives of every individual. The piebald cannot grasp the fact that he is regarded as a piece of property: "The words 'my horse,' spoken in relation to me, a living horse, seem as strange as it would be to say 'my earth,' 'my air,' 'my water.' . . . Men have agreed among themselves that a single object can be called 'mine' by one person only. And, under the rules of this game, he who can say 'mine' of the largest number of objects is counted the most fortunate." But for the horse, as for Tolstoy, every creature of God belongs to God alone. Suffering from his menial position, his ugliness, age and frustrated ambition, Kholstomer nevertheless leads an exemplary existence in comparison with his master. Even the poor old nag's death serves some purpose—a she-wolf and her cubs eat his carcass—while the man, after spending his life in total idleness, continues to be a general nuisance even as he breathes his last: a grotesque, debauched, fatuous figure who will be dressed up in a fine uniform and put into a wooden box, then in a coffin of lead, and a great deal of money will be spent on a mass in his memory. "Neither his skin nor his flesh nor his bones could be used for anything," wrote Tolstoy with tragic savagery.

Having given up the idea of publishing the first version of Khol-

stonier, he turned his energies to correcting the proofs of The Cossacks, the first part of which he had promised to deliver to Katkov.t "Abysmally weak," he noted. "But it will please the public for that very reason." His mind was whirling with projects, but none succeeded in capturing his fancy entirely. He toyed with the idea of describing the fate of a young pro-Western professor vitiated by his false culture; or a husband with high ideals of marriage, whose wife could not resist the appeal of "waltzes and tinsel and the poesy of the passing moment." 'liven, just to amuse himself, he dashed off two little plays, The Nihilist and The Infected Family. The first was produced in the family circle at Yasnaya Polyana, and all the parts were played by women. The audience howled with laughter at Marya Tolstoy, dressed up as an old bigot, contorting her features and making signs of the cross while the hero spewed revolutionary slogans. She invented lines and added them to her part, to the author's delight. He hoped his second play, The Infected Family—a rather heavy satire on nihilism and feminism—might be produced by the Moscow Little Theater, but the managers turned it down the following year.J

At Yasnaya Polyana, the first warm days brought a flock of visitors: charming Tanya Behrs, old friend Dyakov, Fet the poet and his wife Marya Petrovna, Samarin, Bibikov, Sergey Tolstoy on a neighborly call from Pirogovo. . . . Improvised theatricals, musical evenings, picnics, charades, readings ... In spite of all the movement and laughter in the house, Sonya was bored, with her heavy stomach, drawn face and frayed temper. She cursed her pregnancy for preventing her from going to look at the bees or walk in the forest with Lyovochka. "Lyova resents my weakness, as though it were my fault that I am pregnant," she wrote in her diary. Or, "My condition is intolerable to me, both physically and emotionally. . . . And I have ccascd to exist for Lyova. ... I can give him no joy, since I am pregnant."²⁷ She thought of him crouching in front of a hive with the net over his head, or striding down a path, or bantering with a peasant woman leaning over a fence, and every moment he spent away from her seemed torn out of her own life. Even the thought of the child she was carrying could not reconcile her to her fate. A lot of good it would do her to become a mother if she were to lose her husband as a result! Sometimes, wild with frustration, she wanted to get rid of her encumbrance: "Yesterday I ran through the garden, thinking I would surely have a miscarriage," she wrote. And concluded with cold regret: "But nature is as strong as steel."²⁸

t This "first part" was the only part Tolstoy wrote.

t Ostrovsky, the dramatist, to whom Tolstoy read the play in 1864. wrote to Nekrasov: "It is such a piccc of filth that my ears'blenched during the reading!"

Although he sympathized with her, Tolstoy found her tears, her persecuted smiles and senseless chatter hard to bear. It seemed to him that it was somehow her fault if he could not settle down to write. When he could take no more, he fled to nature to be alone with his problems. He anxiously questioned himself: he had never had any friend or confidant other than himself, and now he was suddenly supposed to share everything, his thoughts, his freedom, his life, with the being least calculated to understand him: a woman. Even though lie tried to put Sonya temporarily out of his mind, he could not forget that she would reproach him for bolting out of the house with his dogs, would be waiting for him, weeping, with her forehead pressed against the windowpane, and that he would feel guilty afterward. Was he going to disintegrate completely—mind, will, talent—in this paralyzing conjugal atmosphere? "Where is it—my old self," he wrote on June 18, 1863, "the self I loved and knew, who still springs to the surface sometimes and pleases and frightens me? I have become petty and insignificant. And, what is worse, it has happened since my marriage to a woman I love. Nearly every word in this notebook is prevarication and hypocrisy. The thought that she is still here now, reading over my shoulder, stifles and perverts my sincerity. ... I must add words for her because she will read them. For her I write not what is not true, but things I would not write for myself alone. ... It is appalling, dreadful, insane, to allow one's happiness to depend upon purely material things: a wife, children, health, wealth . . ."

When Sonya read these lines, intended for her ey es, they probably sent her into a fresh paroxysm of despair. Why suffer all these months of fatigue and nausea, missing all the fun of life, if Lyovochka did not even want the child she was preparing to bring into the world? On June 27, in the dead of night, the first pains came. Tolstoy ran to fetch the midwife from Tula. When he returned, Sonya was pacing up and down in her bedroom, "in a peignoir open over her lacc-insct gown, her black hair in disorder, her face afire, her dark eyes shining with extraordinary intensity'." How beautiful she was, with her expression of suffering, shy reserve and majesty! lie helped her to stretch out on the leather couch on which he himself had been born. T ouching her half- naked body gave him a feeling completely unlike any he had ever known in other circumstances: not desire, but compassion, and incisive attention to every detail, the curiosity of a professional writer eager to learn something new. But when the pains began to come more quickly, he lost his self-possession. He could not rccognizc Sonya in this "scrcaming and writhing" female. She pressed his hand weakly between contractions. The midwife, the Polish doctor sitting in the

corner smoking cigarettes, the candles burning in their sockets, the smell of vinegar and eau-de-Cologne, the twisted sheets, rags, basins, it was all part of a nightmare. Suddenly there was a terrible heaving and thrashing around the leather couch. The midwife and doctor were bending over a slaughter. A sharp cry cut through the jerking gasps of the mother. 'Hie doctor said, "It's a boy!" Tolstoy saw a tiny creature, "strange and reddish," with a big soft head. Remembering the scene, he wrote in Anna Karenina, "Levin had to make an enormous effort to believe that his wife was still alive, that she was all right, that this wailing baby was his son. . . . Why this child? Who was he? Where did he come from? He had great difficulty in accepting the idea. It took him a long time to get used to it."

When Tanya Behrs was allowed into the room, she saw Tolstoy "white-faced and red-eyed with weeping," and Sonya "appeared tired, but happy and proud."²⁹ Champagne was drunk. They decided to call the child Sergey, after his uncle. Receiving his family's congratulations, Tolstoy was surprised to find that he felt neither joy nor pride but a sort of apprehension, as though from that day on there were "another area of vulnerability" in his life. Wouldn't this added source of care drive him still farther away from himself and his work? The only good thing about the birth, he thought, was that Sonya, filled with the new joy of motherhood, would become even-tempered and cheerful once more. He was prepared to worship her, if only she would behave like a proper wife again.

It was he, however, who started their first quarrel. As befits a true disciple of Rousseau, he believed that all mothers should nurse their babies. Sonya herself agreed, although paid wetnurscs were more the custom in her circle. But from the beginning, she suffered excruciating pain. Ilcr breasts were soon fissured and the doctors ordered her to stop. Tolstoy protested vehemently, in the name of nature, against "official pretexts" that allowed a young mother to shirk her obligations; he asserted that his wife was spoiled and soft, her mind perverted by civilization, and he demanded that she fulfill her role as givcr-of-life to the bitter end. When Sonya, exhausted, engaged a nurse, he refused to enter the nursery because he could not bear to see the heir to his name suspended from the breast of a strange woman. Why must a common girl be able to perform what Countess Tolstoy considered beyond her strength?

Exasperated by his son-in-law's irrational obstinacy, Dr. Behrs wrote to the couple: "I see you have both lost your wits. ... Be reasonable, dear Sonya, calm yourself, don't make a mountain out of a molehill. ... As for you, dear Leo Nikolayevich, rest assured that you will never

be transformed into a real muzhik, any more than your wife will be able to endure what a Pelagya can endure. . . . And you, Tanya, do not let your mad sister out of your sight for one moment, scold her as often as possible for her crazy notions that are enough to try the patience of the Lord, and pitch the first object that comes to hand straight at Leo's head, to knock some sense into it. lie is a great master at speechifying and literature, but life is another matter. Let him write a story about a husband who tortures his sick wife by forcing her to nurse her baby. He will be stoned by every woman alive."

Neither Dr. Behrs' letter nor Sonya's tears nor the gentle remonstrances of Tanya made any dent in Tolstoy's dogged disapproval. He could not look at his wife without finding fault with her. In his diary —which she read—he sarcastically called her "the countess":

"I arrive in the morning, full of joy and gladness, and I find the countess in a tantrum while Dunyasha, the chambermaid, is combing her hair; seeing her thus I mistake her for Mashenka* on one of her bad days, everything collapses, and I stand there as though I had been scalded. I am afraid of everything and I see that there can be no happiness or poetry for me except when I ain alone. I am kissed tenderly, out of habit, but then the quarrels resume immediately, with Dunyasha, Auntie, Tanya, me. . . . One o'clock in the morning already, and I can't sleep at all, much less in her room with her, when I have such a weight on my heart; she will begin to whine and moan as soon as she knows there is someone to listen; just now she is snoring peacefully away. She will wake up absolutely convinced that I am wrong and she is the most unfortunate woman alive. . . . And the worst of it is that I must hold my tongue and sulk, however much I cxccratc and despise such a situation."³⁰

And, pen in hand, Sonya exhaled her despair:

"It is monstrous not to nurse one's child! Well, who says it isn't? But what can I do in the face of a physical impossibility? ... He would banish me from the earth because I am suffering and not doing my duty, and I cannot bear him because he is not suffering and he is writing. . . . How can one love a fly that will not stop tormenting one? . . . I shall take care of my son and do everything I can, but not for Lyova, certainly, because he deserves to get evil in return for evil."

After letting off steam, she melted, and ended: "It's starting to rain. I am afraid he will catch cold. My irritation has vanished. I love him. God protect him."³¹ Sincere statement or subtle maneuver? As soon as he had read these lines Tolstoy, deeply touched, wanted to

• Maiya, Tolstoy's sister.

retract what he had written and added, below her entry: "Sonya, forgive me ... I was cruel and crude. And to whom? To the person who has given me the greatest joy in my life and the only one who loves me. . . . Sonya, my darling, I am guilty, but I am wretched too. There is an excellent man in me, but sometimes he is asleep. Love him, Sonya, and do not criticize him." A fresh quarrel broke out immediately afterward, he snatched up the notebook and furiously crossed out what he had just written. And at the bottom of the desecrated page Sonya, the tears welling in her eyes, added: "I had deserved those few lines of tenderness and repentance, but in a moment of anger lie took them away from me before I had even read them."

Nursing his resentment, Tolstoy sought a pretext—any pretext—for getting away from the house. An insurrection had broken out in Poland and he already had visions of himself taking up arms to put down the rebels whom France, England and Austria had the effrontery to support. "What do you think of the Polish business?" he wrote to Fet. "It looks bad, doesn't it? Maybe you and Borisov and I shall have to take down our swords from their rusty nails."³² It little mattered to the future anti-autocrat that Marion Langiewicz's rebels were idealists ready to die for independence. As a loyal subject of the tsar, lie put his faith in the wisdom of the government. The fact was that he wanted to enlist less to exterminate the Poles than to get away from his wife. He later made Prince Andrey say, in War and Peace, "I am going to the war because the life I am leading here—does not suit me."³³ And elsewhere, "Marry as late as possible, when you're no good for anything else. Or else everything good and noble in you will be lost. You will be submerged by triviality. ... If, now, you expect anything from the future, then you will feel at ever}' step that all is finished, that for you it's all over."³⁴

Keeping these thoughts to himself, he set out to convince Sonya that he should go. But—whether out of utter absent-mindedness or arch fiendish cruelty—he selected the eve of their first wedding anniversary to inform her of his designs. Stupefied, she burst into dire imprecations, first to him and then to her diary: "To war. What is this latest whim? Irresponsibility? No, not that, sheer instability! . . . Everything in him is whim and passing fancy! Today he gets married, the idea appeals to him, he has children. Tomorrow he has a hankering to go off to war and he abandons us. All I can do is hope the child will die, for I shall not live after Lyova. I do not believe in such enthusiasm and love of the fatherland in a man of thirty-five. As though children weren't the fatherland, as though they weren't Russian too! He is ready to neglect them because he thinks it's fun to go galloping about on a horse and admire the war and hear the shells whistling past."⁸⁵

The mere act of imagining that he would soon be engaged in battle was enough to bring Tolstoy back to earth. Having thrown Sonya, Aunt Toinette and all his friends into a dither, he felt better. Besides, there wasn't going to be any war. While the Western powers were still planning their campaign, the uprising had been quelled. They were already hanging the instigators. Reassured, the future apostle of universal peace contemplated his married life and concluded that it was not so bad as he had thought: "It is over," he wrote on October 6, 1863. "There was nothing true in it. I am happy with her; but I am dreadfully unhappy with myself. . . . My choice has been made for a long time: letters, art, education and family."

Contrary to his affirmations, Tolstoy was not giving education a thought, having closed the schools and let most of the teachers go. And as for his family, he hoped he would not be required to do much about it, and Sonya would supervise the household. But art and literature were calling him once again.

The publication of The Cossacks, early in the year, had revived his desire to write. He had filled the book with all his memories of his years in the Caucasus. Like the author, its hero, Olenin, was a disoriented young nobleman who found a renewed taste for life among more simple people. Like the author, he fell in love with a Cossack girl, deeply enough to contemplate marriage. Like the author, he was surrounded by rustic and picturesque companions: Eroshka the hunter, Lukas the dzhigit. . . . Like the author he left, sore and disappointed, having failed to integrate himself into the primitive life whose charms had so long held him in sway. The character of the young man who leaves the city to discover the joys of a profound union with nature after the artificiality of civilization does, it is tnie, bear some resemblance to Aleko in Pushkin's Gypsies or Pechorin in Lcr- montov's A Hero of Our Time. But despite their attempt at sobriety, both those authors' works arc still draped in romanticism. Their Caucasus was wreathed in operatic mists, whereas Tolstoy stuck to the truth. His description of life in a stanitsa was a valid ethnological document. The slightest detail, whether referring to the Cossacks' morals, dress, weapons, hunting or fishing customs, or their songs or the behavior of their girls and women, was drawn from life and striking in its accuracy. And the large proportion of description did not detract from the swift-moving action of the story. One felt the narrator's youth, his appetite for life, the remarkable vivacity of his eye and breath. The manuscript had been fussed over for ten years, started

twenty times, successively entitled Caucasian Novel, The Fugitive, The Fugitive Cossack, The Demoted, The Terek Line and The Cordon, amputated of a final romantic passage in which Lukas was seen fleeing to the mountains and Olenin wedding Maryanka; by what miracle did the finished product acquire that air of a quickly written, smooth and flawless book?

Contemporary reaction was reticent, at first. Alexandra Tolstoy wrote to her nephew: "My friends, Boris and others, were enchanted; others criticized The Cossacks for a certain crudeness which, they say, inhibits the aesthetic response. ... I personally said to myself, with a small sigh, that what is lacking in your scenes is the sun, for all that is light in them comes from yourself. While one is reading, the book is satisfying, a very accurate and truthful photograph, but when one has finished, one is left thirsting for something bigger, 011 a more elevated level. It is as though your universe were nailed to the floor, as someone said. Well, that may come one day."

Some of the critics, too, were rather starchy. In The Times, Polon- sky praised the author for capturing "the very breath of the Caucasus" in his story, but thought the hero, Olenin, only a "pale copy of the characters of Pushkin's day," and said that several episodes, such as Abrek's death at the hands of Lukas or the repurchase of the corpse or the skirmish between Cossacks and mountaineers, were "stories within a story." Golovachev, in The Contemporary, thought Tolstoy was a "good storyteller, not lacking in skill," but a superficial observer and no thinker at all. In Fatherland Notes, Mrs. Salias de Tournemir expressed her indignation at Tolstoy for daring to "romanticize drunkenness, piracy, theft and blood-lust" and allowing Olenin—"the representative of civilized society"—to be "debased, degraded, defeated . . ."

In the St. Petersburg News, on the other hand, Annenkov declared Tolstoy's work "a capital achievement in Russian literature, able to sustain comparison with the greatest novels of the last decade," and said that "a score of ethnographical articles could not give a more complete, exact and colorful picture of this part of our land."

In the meantime, Ivan Turgenev was writing to Fet from Paris: "I have read The Cossacks and was carried away. . . . The character of Olenin is the only thing that detracts from the overall impression, which is magnificent. To mark the contrast between civilization and primitive, unspoiled nature, there was no necessity to trot out this individual who is incessantly preoccupied with himself, boring and unhealthy."

Fet himself was in raptures: "How many times I mentally hugged you as I read The Cossacks, and how many times I laughed at your derogatory remarks about the book," he wrote to Tolstoy. "You may write other books that arc very fine, but The Cossacks is a sort of mastcqjiece. After The Cossacks it is impossible to read a book on the life of the people without bursting out laughing, 'lbe ineffable superiority of talent!"

Although he claimed to be impervious to the opinions of others, such high praise encouraged Tolstoy to show what he could do in a larger work. For some months his thoughts had been occupied by a subject that was not yet clearly defined. On October 17, 1863 he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy, "I have never felt my mental and even moral powers so free and ready for work. And the work is there in front of me: all this autumn I have been completely taken up with a novel about the years 1810 to 1820."

3. The Creat Labor

At first, Sonya was skeptical: Leo changed his mind too often for her to believe he would continue the big historical novel he was working on. "Story about 1812," she wrote on October 28,1863. "He is very involved with it. But without enjoyment." And three weeks later: "He is writing about Countess So-and-So, who has been talking to Princess Whosit. Insignificant." But soon afterward, seeing him persevere, she instinctively realized that her role was beginning. She was filled with reverence for her husband's talent, and did not, of course, try to exert a direct influence on the book. She did express her opinion 011 the pages he gave her to copy. He listened to her suggestions, as he did to Tanya's and those of his friends and critics, and, most of the time, paid no attention to them. But although Sonya may have contributed nothing to the novel, she contributed a great deal to the novelist. In the past, he had always thrown himself headlong into all kinds of different activities, skipping from one to another as the mood took him, blowing hot and cold for religion, gymnastics, high society, soldiering, agriculture, art for art's sake, sociology, pedagogy—writing several books at once, dropping the admirable Cossacks to dash off a mediocre play. And in spite of his success in the literary world, he liked to think of himself as an amateur. Whatever the object he coveted, his passion did not seem able to outlast the possession of it. "Inconstancy, hesitation, laziness, those are my enemies," he wrote on the eve of his great decision. And suddenly, this prodigious dilettante plunged into a project that held him fast for six full years. If lie was able to muster the determination and patience to undertake such a task, the reason, beyond any doubt, was that Sonya had succeeded in creating the atmosphere of peace and quiet that was necessary for the work to mature in him. Had she not kept such jealous guard over his peace of mind and body, he might have abandoned War and Peace by the wayside. After all, he was not forced to write by material necessity. Unlike Dostoyevsky, he did not live 011 the income from his books; no publisher was hounding him for his copy at fixed deadlines. Being without constraint made it all the more difficult for him to resist the temptations that drew him away from his work.

One by one, ruthlessly, Sonya eliminated them. To relieve her husband of the burden of domestic affairs, she took over the management of the estate; she did not want him to clutter up his mind with money matters, so she also appropriated the household accounts; and she took on the education of their offspring single-handedly. No one, children, parents, friends or servants, must disturb the master when he was in the study he had arranged for himself on the ground floor. With the schools shut down, the teachers dismissed, the ledgers never out of sight and a bunch of keys at her waist, Sonya found herself, at twenty, responsible for everything that affected, directly or indirectly, the daily life of Leo Tolstoy. She was the buffer state between him and the outside world. When he raised his eyes from his manuscript, she was what he saw. Everything he knew of the world came to him through her. Dedicating herself body and soul to her role of warden, she was satisfying a twofold desire: to help her husband in the immense task he had undertaken, and to put him completely in her power, to bury him, far from foreign eyes, deep in the family thicket. More or less consciously, she relieved her jealousy by serving the cause of Literature.

The total understanding that the couple had been unable to achieve by themselves, even after repeated explanations, both written and oral, was created for them by fictional characters. Absorbed in the fate of his heroes, Tolstoy became less conccrncd with himself. By distributing his contradictory emotions among a cast of imaginary characters, he forged his own unity and thereby his balance. Significantly, as soon as he began work on the book, toward the end of 1863, the entries in his diary became shorter and less frequent. He no longer had either the time or the inclination to analyze himself. Imaginary joys and sufferings occupied all his thoughts. In 1865, he closed the notebook in which he had made a habit of relating his life and did not reopen it for more than thirteen years.* But before doing so, he recorded this statement: "My relationship with Sonya has grown stronger and steadier. We love each other, that is, we arc more precious to each other than any other human being and we face each other with equanimity. We have no secrets and no shame."¹ And later, "Not one person in a million, I dare

•An entry in the diary for 1878, dated April 17, reads: "After thirteen years I want to take up ray diary again." He had made a few notes in 1873.

say, is as happy as wc arc together."-' And she wrote, "Are there any couples more united and happier than we? Sometimes, when I am alone in my room, I begin to laugh and cross myself."³

True, they still quarreled frequently. Then Tolstoy would bluster, "You arc in a bad temper. Go write your diary." And she told herself he was nursing "a secret hatred" of her; she accused him of being "too old," or "too demanding"; she swore she was going to be more than the "Nanny" to a great man. But after the storm, how gratefully she fell into his arms! "Lyovochka came back, and everything seemed light and easy to me. lie smcllcd of fresh air and he himself was like a breath of fresh air."

Her greatest source of pleasure, however, was not her husband's embraces (she was never a passionate lover), but the manuscript he gave her to copy. And what a labor of Hercules it was, to decipher this sorcerer's spcllbook covered with lines furiously scratched out, corrections colliding with each other, sibylline balloons floating in the margins, prickly afterthoughts sprawled all over the page. Often the author himself could not make out what he had written. But Sonya, who was endowed with a remarkable sixth sense, deciphered the amputated words and finished off the half-sentences just as, once before, she had deciphered Tolstoy's thoughts from the initials he chalked on the green card-table cover. In the evening, after the child had been put to bed and the servants had gone up to their garrets and silence settled over the house, she sat down at her tabic in the round glow of a candle and made a clean copy of the drafts. Her beautiful curling script flowed across the page for hours. It was not uncommon for Tolstoy to hand the same sheets back to her the next day, disfigured by a swarm of microscopic corrections. Sometimes she had to use a magnifying glass to make them out. According to her son Ilva, she recopied most of War and Peace seven times. Fingers clutching the pen, shoulders tensed and eyes smarting, she never felt her fatigue. She was possessed by a poetic exaltation, as though she had established tclcpathic contact with another world. "As I transcril>e the work," she wrote, "a swarm of impressions pass through my mind. Nothing affects me as strongly as his ideas and his talent. This has only been true for a short time. Have I changed, or is the book really very good? I don't know which. I write quickly enough to keep pace with the action and not lose interest, and slowly enough to think over, feel, weigh and judge every one of Lyovochka's ideas."⁴ Tears came to her eyes, and she sighed, simultaneously stirred by the characters' sufferings and the author's genius.

He, however, was going through the throes of a difficult creation.

Slowly, by fits and starts, the plan of the work took form in his mind as he went along. Even the title, War and Peace—borrowed from Prou- dhon—did not come until late. His original idea had been to write a book 011 the 1825 uprising whose leaders were exiled to Siberia by Nicholas I and not allowed to return until 1856, when they were pardoned bv the new tsar, Alexander II. He had written three large sections of the book. What attracted him about the Decembrists was that nearly all of these pioneer Russian revolutionaries were officers of the Guards, noblemen, confirmed idealists. He felt related to them by his military experience and his love of high ideals. However, when he began to look more closely into their history, he discovered that most of them had taken part in the campaigns against Napoleon and their liberalism had been acquired during their stay in France with the occupation forces. To understand their revolution completely, therefore, he had to go back to 1812-14. "A period whose scent and sound arc still perceptible to 11s," he said, "but remote enough for us to contemplate it unemotionally." However, this so-called "patriotic" war that had been so glorious for Russia only took on full meaning in relation to the previous disaster of 1805. "I hesitated to describe our triumph over Bonaparte's France without first describing our defeat and humiliation. If the final victory was chic not to chance but to the spirit of the Russian army and people, then that spirit ought to stand out even more sharply, I thought, in moments of misfortune and defeat." Expanding this theme, lie became fascinated by the horizons that opened before him. The Decembrists were forgotten. The work, as he came to conceive it, would stop with "the first forewarning of the movement that led up to the events of December 14,1825." It would be a confrontation between the great events of history and family life in the upper ranges of society. He said, in a preface that was never published, "The lives of civil servants, tradespeople, seminarians and muzhiks do not concern me and are scarcely comprehensible to mc"—a view he was subsequently to modify. But from the start lie was certain of one thing: real people—Napoleon, Alexander, Kutuzov, Bagration, Speransky, Murat —would mingle with the fictional ones.

What a rich and variegated period! I low did it happen that no Russian writer had exploited it? There were enough eyewitnesses left for the author to question tliern directly. He himself, as a child, had heard episodes related by his family, friends and old servants that he would transpose in his book. Besides, customs had hardly changed in sixty years. Wherever his heroes went, Tolstoy was sure to feel at home. He had known military life in the Caucasus and Sevastopol, the Moscow- aristocracy, the life of the landed gentry at Yasnaya Polyana. And there was no shortage of models for his characters. His paternal grandfather, the weak-willed and erratic Ilya Andrcycvich Tolstoy, became Ilya Andrcycvich Rostov in the novel. Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy—Leo's father, who had married a fortune and retired to the country—lent his personality to Nicholas Rostov. To portray Natasha Rostov, the writer borrowed some features from his wife and others from his sister-in-law. "I took Sonya," he said, "ground her up in a mortar with Tanya, and out came Natasha." (Actually, Tanya posed almost exclusively for Natasha as a girl and Sonya for Natasha married). Old Prince Nicholas Bolkonsky, living as a tyrant on his estate, was a faithful copy of Nicholas Volkonsky, the author's maternal grandfather. The imaginary estate of Lysya Gory could easily be mistaken for Yasnaya Polyana. Marya Bolkonsky, a pure, pious and secretive girl who worshiped and feared her father, was Leo's mother, Marya Volkonsky, whom he had never known but blindly idealized. The French companion, Mile. Bourienne, was a fictional rcplica of Mile. H&iissienne; Dolokhov was a mixture of the partisan Dorokhov, his son Reuben, a distant relative of the author's called Tolstoy the American, and the partisan Rigner; Vasily Denisov owed much to Denis Davydov; Prince Andrey Bolkonsky and Pierre Bczukhov alone had no close counterpart in reality.

Tolstoy spent the entire winter of 1863-64 familiarizing himself with the period he wanted to recreate in his book. His father-in-law sent him original source material from Moscow. He himself bought up, pell-mell, an assortment of books on the Napoleonic wars: Mikhailov- sky-Danilevsky, Bodganovich, Zhikharcv, Glinka, Davidov Liprandi, Korf, the Documents historiques sur le sejour des Frangais <1 Moscow, en 1812, the Souvenirs de campagne d'tin artilleur, the Correspondance diplomatique of Joseph de Maistie, Marmont's Memoirs, Thiers' His- toire du Consulat et de lEmpire, etc. "You can't imagine the difficulties of this preparatory work, plowing the field I shall have to sow," he wrote to Fet toward the end of 1864. "Studying, thinking over everything that might happen to the future heroes of a very big book, devising millions of schemes of all varieties and selecting the millionth part of them, it's terribly hard work."

At first, the book was to be called The Year 1805. The first chapters had already been written when, on September 26, 1864, Tolstoy was out hunting for hare in the country' near Telyatinki and was thrown from his horse going over a ravine. He hit the gTOund so hard that he lost consciousness. When he came to his senses, a thought hit him like a thunderbolt: "I am a writer!" And joy welled through his mind, while he felt a searing pain in his shoulder. He realized that he had dislocated his right arm. But it seemed to him that the accident had occurred in some far-distant past and lie had been asleep for years without knowing what was happening. His horse had run away. With a superhuman effort, he clambered to his feet and, holding his right arm, dragged himself to the road, over half a mile away. There, at the end of his strength, he lay down on the bank. Some muzhiks going by in a telega found him and carried him to an isba. He did not want to go straight home, in order to spare Sonya, who was pregnant. When the news was diplomatically broken to her, she came running in alarm to fetch her Lyovochka home, pale and moaning. The country doctor she sent for proved utterly incompetent; eight times, he tried and failed to put the arm back in place, but he was so clumsy that he only made the pain worse. A doctor from Tula came to the rescue the next day. Tolstoy was chloroformed and two sturdy peasants realigned the bones according to the physician's instructions. When the operation was over, the doctor pronounced it a success. His patient did not agree; at the cud of the prescribed six weeks of rest, he fired a gun to test his arm and the recoil sent a blinding pain through his shoulder. Concluding that it was not properly healed, Tolstoy consulted his father- in-law. Dr. Behrs ordered him to come to Moscow without delay. Unfortunately, Sonya had just given birth to a daughter⁵ and was still too weak to travel.

He stayed with the Behrs in the Kremlin. The doctor convened a group of colleagues: some advised baths, others special exercises, still others favored surgery. Worried by the doctors' inability to agree among themselves, Tolstoy did not know what to do. On November 27, 1864, he let himself be dragged to a performance of Rossini's Moses at the Great Moscow Theater. Suddenly, the lively, colorful music, the rising swell of the singing and graceful turns and swoops of the dancers so filled him with light-heartedncss and the desire to live that he enthusiastically opted for the most radical alternative. The next day Mrs. Behrs' bedroom was scoured and prepared for use as an operating theater. Two surgeons, Popov and Haak, supervised the preparations. Tolstoy was very calm. It required a massive dose of chloroform to put him to sleep. Just as he was about to lose consciousness, he sat bolt upright and bellowed:

"My friends! We cannot go on living like this! ... I think ... I have decided . . ."

He fell back and did not utter another word. Was this his old "Rules of Life" coming back into his consciousness? Two male nurses wrenched apart the badly knit joints in his arm. Then the surgeons replaced the disconnected bones and enclosed the arm in a sort of cast. Tanva was present throughout the operation and could not take her eyes off the colorless face from which all life seemed to have fled. She and her mother sat up all night with 'I'olstoy. lie was rackcd by nausea from the chloroform. The next day he felt better and wanted to write. As he could not use his right hand, he asked Tanya to be his secretary. After this enforced interruption, his creative drive was so strong that he could have dictated non-stop for days on end. The girl could hardly keep up with him. He was not even aware of her prcscncc. With his arm in a sling, he paced up and down the room like one possessed. Ilis eyes stared through the walls. Sometimes he spoke slowly, sometimes in a staccato rush, unable to articulate the flood of words in his mouth. Suddenly he would Stop, furious:

"No, that's no good! ... It won't do! . . . Scrap all that!"

Tanya crossed out everything she had written and, frozen with awe, waited. "I felt," she later said, "as though I were prying, as though I had become an involuntary eyewitness to the events in that inner world he hid from us all." Then he would emerge from his trancc and see his sister-in-law's exhausted face, be pricked by an overdue pang of conscience and say:

"That's enough for today. I've worn you out. Go skating."

But sometimes he was not in the mood, and dictated without feeling. "And," he would say, "without feeling one cannot write anything decent." In addition to his dictation, he took advantage of his stay in Moscow to continue his search for sourcc material, pawing through bookshops, borrowing books from Professors Eshevsky and Popov, hounding the Rumyantsev Museum library, obtaining, by special favor, important documents from the palace archives, questioning old people on their rcminisccnces of 1812. The wealth of material both delighted and alarmed him. He was afraid of drowning under the ocean of detail. He was continually forced to tear himself away from historical data and return to his characters. "Napoleon, Alexander, Kutuzov and Talleyrand arc not the heroes of my book," he said. "I shall write the story of people living in the most privileged circumstances, with no fear of poverty or constraint, free people, people who have none of the flaws that are necessary to make a mark on history'."

One evening he read the opening chapters at the Perfilyevs' house. The drawing room in which his audience had assembled was plunged into darkness. On a little table stood lighted candlcs and a pitcher of water with a glass. Tolstoy began haltingly, then gained confidence, straightened up, began to changc voiccs for different characters. With his rusty beard, harsh, wrinkled face and eyes of steel, he was in turn a young girl, an old man, a Russian officer, a foreign diplomat, a servant in a great family. The faccs around him were stretched toward him, wearing expressions of intense curiosity. But was it his story that had captivated the Perfilyevs' guests, or simply their effort to identify their friends in his characters? Tanya wrote to Polivanov: "'llie opening scene is so delightful. I identified so many of our group. . . . People said the Rostovs were living persons. For me, in any case, they seem terribly close. Boris is much like you, in his external appearance and manners. Vera is Lisa to a T: her solemn ways, her behavior with us. . . . Countess Rostov is Ma man, especially in her attitude toward me. At Natasha's entrance, Varenka winked at mc, but I don't think anyone saw her. But wait a bit, now you'll laugh: my great doll Mimi has stolen the honors of the book. Do you remember how we married you to her, and I insisted that you kiss her and you didn't want to, and you hung her 011 the door and I complained to Maman? . . . Yes, you will recognize many things in this book; don't throw away my letter until you've read it. Pierre is the one the others liked least, but I liked him better than anyone else in the book. I am very fond of his type of person. The little princess was the ladies' favorite, but they couldn't decide who was Lyova's model for her. There was an intermission and everybody had tea. They were all, I think, delighted by the reading. Among the ladies all one heard were guesses as to whom Lyovochka had been describing, and one name after another was mentioned. All of a sudden Varenka said right out loud, 'Maman, I know—Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova is you! She's exactly like you.' 'I don't think so, Varenka; I'm not interesting enough to put into a book,' answered Nastasya Sergeyevna (Pcrfilyev). Lyovochka began to laugh and said nothing. Papa was in seventh heaven because of his son-in-law's success. It made me happy just to look at him. What a pity Sonya couldn't be there."⁰

After completing the first part of The Year 1805, Tolstoy negotiated with Katkov for the publication of the novel in the Russian Herald, at three hundred rubles per printed sixteen-page sheet. On Novemljcr 27, 1864 the publisher's secretary came to collect the manuscript. After he had gone, Tolstoy felt bereft, anxious, despoiled. As long as the pages were in his possession, he could go back and change them again. Now they were out of his power, they had become a piece of merchandise. His wife wrote, "I used to scold you for making too many corrections, but now I am sad because you have sold your work."

It was the first time the couple had been separated for so long. Their respective grievances faded with distance. Each idealized his love to the point of frenzy, as the other was not there to disappoint him. True, their almost daily letters were cluttered with trivial reminders and discussions of nursing bottles, diapers and diarrhea, but this drear)' domes-

tic fare was perpetually transfigured by love. "Without you, I am nothing," wrote Sonya. "With you, 1 feel like a queen." He answered, "1 he bell rang during dinner. It was the newspapers. Tanya ran to the door. The bell rang a second time. It was your letter. They all asked me to let them read it, but I did not want to give it to them. . . . And they did not understand. It affected me like a piece of good music: made me feci both happy and sad, pleasant and wanting to cry." On December 2, 1864, four day's after the operation, he dictated a letter for his wife to Tanya, and painfully added in his own hand, "Good-bye, my darling, my dove. I can't dictate everything. I love you very much, with every kind of love. And the more I love you, the more frightened I am."

"Your letter has just come, my dear Leo," she replied on December 5. "What joy to read the scribble you added with your own sick handl Every kind of love, you say? And I can't tell any more what kind of love I love you with!"

And two days later, "I went into your study and everything came back to me: how you dressed, over by the cupboard that contains your hunting clothes; how excited Dora was [the dog], bounding around you; how you wrote, sitting at your desk, when I peeped fearfully through a crack in the door to see whether I was disturbing you. And then, feeling how intimidated I was, you would say, 'Come in!', which was what I wanted."

He finally left Moscow on December 12, restored to health, his spirits high, ardently eager to sec Sonya again and resume the patriarchal life at Yasnaya Polyana that was so bcncficial to his work. Guests were usually rare in winter, because of the snow-blocked roads; but on Twelfth Night that year (January 6, 1865), Tolstoy organized a costume ball. The house, decorated with paper flowers and hung with green cloth, was transformed. Neighbors and relatives and friends, the Bibikovs and the Dyakovs, drove up in sledges. Sergey brought his illegitimate children! and trunks stuffed full of material for costumes. The house-servants also took part, of course. Dunyasha, the chambermaid, was dressed as an old army major and sat astride a charger formed by two muzhiks under a piece of brown cloth; the cook was dressed as a nursemaid, the coachman's wife as a lord, and the children as Algerians, Harlequins, Pierrots, shepherdesses and pages. Peasant musicians played the violin and the bandura.t They drew lots for the king's crown and ate the cake, and then there were fireworks, fights with bags full of water, and Bengal lights. Suffocated by the smoke, a few guests withdrew to vomit in the corners. But those with more solid stomachs

f Those he had had by Marya Shishkin.

$ A type of round guitar.

sang and danced on until dawn. Tolstoy was as frantic as the youngest of his guests. Echoes of the party were to appear in the book he was writing.* lie was so fashioned that sooner or later his whole life had to go into his work. A few days after this colorful party, he jokingly wrote to his friend Fet, "I am glad you love my wife, although I love her less than my book. Of course, as you know, that is my wife. Someone is coming! Who? My wife!"⁷

Formerly indifferent to the opinion of others, he suddenly became very anxious to know what his friends thought of The Year 1805. "I set great store by your opinion," he wrote to Fet in the same letter, "and by that of a man I love less and less as I grow up: Turgcncv. I regard the books I have published thus far as mere cxcrcises in penmanship."

Publication of the first part of the book (Chapters I to XXVT1T) began in February 1865, and at first even the most indulgent readers were disappointed by the slowness with which the story moved, the plethora of detail, the author's digressions and excessive use of conversation in French. His friend Botkin could scarcely hide his disappointment: "This is Only a preface, the background of the picture to come," he said. Borisov told Turgenev, "I think Fet was not very impressed by it." And Turgenev, whose verdict Tolstoy was so impatiently awaiting, told Borisov in reply, "The thing is positively bad, boring and a failure. ... All those little details so cleverly noted and presented in baroque Style, those psychological remarks which the author digs out of his heroes' armpits and other dark places in the name of verisimilitude—all that is paltry and trivial, against the broad historical background of a novel. . . . One feels so strongly the writer's lack of imagination and naivctdl . . . And who arc these young ladies? Some kind of affected Cindercllas . . ."*

Although he had yet to learn the public's reaction to the opening chapters of his book, Tolstoy guessed by a thousand indefinable signs that he had not been understood. But he had gone too far out into midstream to lose heart now. Sometimes the world of his characters seemed closer to him than the one he inhabited with Sonya. He discussed them with his wife as though they were flesh-and-blood people. "I write, I cross out," he wrote on March 7, 1865. "It is all clear in my head. But the immensity of the task ahead is frightening." Knowing how unstable he was, he vowed to make himself work every day, whatever the results. Simply, as he said, "in order to keep in the habit." His friend Dyakov came to Yasnaya Polyana to see him on March 11. Tol-

⁰ See, in War and Peace, the description of the ball at the Rostovs', in Book VII, Chapters IX to XI.

stoy was looking forward to his visit, but that evening he wrote with annoyance, "Dyakov was here. One day wasted."

With Sonya, on the other hand, lie was more comfortable than before. Their meeting, after the long separation, had been very sweet. Even the children, in whom he had previously shown no interest, began to delight him. "I am beginning to be very fond of him," he wrote of his son Sergey. "This is a new feeling for me." His new passion for his family coincided with the more intimate scenes of his book. Was it because he loved this atmosphere of calm and quiet that he described it so well in his book, or was it bccausc some of his charactcrs had found that kind of happiness in the book that, by mimicry, he sought it for himself in his life? At his present stage of spiritual maturity, he felt a need to lighten his palette, to paint simple figures of noble dimensions, as "unoriginal" as possible, but capable of affecting the reader by the warmth that flowed from them.

Toward Easter, his zeal for work began to flag. Every year when spring came, he felt the call of rebirth and laid down his pen to return to the land. He sorted camellia and azalea seeds, made improvements in the farmyard, planted birch trees, fished for pike, hunted hare and snipe. "Only the hunter and landowner have any real feeling for the beaut)' of nature,"⁹ he was wont to say. For some time, although he claimcd to be fully contented by his relationship with his wife, he had been missing his sister-in-law, the fantastical, mischievous Tanya. In February he had written her a singular epistle, confessing that he was as enthusiastic "as a boy of fifteen," that he felt "surges of emotion" on any and every occasion, that he missed her and that she must not show his letter to anyone, "or people will think I am out of my mind."

She arrived with the first raj's of sun, to spend the entire spring and summer with her sister; Marya Tolstoy and her children also moved to Yasnaya Polyana.f Other guests appeared, turning up for a few clays or staying for weeks: Sergey, Prince Gorchakov's daughters, the author Sologub and his two boys, Prince Lvov, Dyakov, Bibikov. . . . Tolstoy was still working, but intermittently. Sometimes his family saw him emerge from his study wearing a far-off expression, absent-minded and happy—it was hard for him to get his bearings in real life after spending hours in the company of his heroes. "Leo was always tense," Tanya later wrote, "he had a 'high spirit' as the English say, bold and gay and full of energy." When he was pleased with himself his eyes gleamed, he rubbed his hands together and said, with a grimace of gleeful ferocity, that he had left "a piece of his life in the inkwell." In the evenings, to

f Valerian, Maiya Tolstoy's husband, bad died on January 6, 1865, and his widow was living in a "free union" with Viscount Hector de Kleen, a Swede.

relax, he played solitaire with Aunt Toinette and attached great importance to the outcome; if he won, that meant the next part of the hook would go well. lie often read aloud what he had written during the day. His voice was warm and winning; as soon as he spoke his listeners were under a spell; Sonya had to steel herself afterward to venture a criticism: the story dragged here, too much repetition there, that passage was too raw for her taste. . . . She did not carc much for the military sccnes and was not afraid to say so. But he seldom took any notice. Ilis confidence in his craft was growing. His concept of litcra ture was becoming clearer. According to him, the "novelist's poetry-" lay "first, in the interest created by juxtaposed events; second, in the portrayal of customs and manners against a background of historical fact; third, in the beauty and vividness of situations; fourth, in the characters of the people."¹⁰ Now a thousand leagues away from the theories of ideological art he later claimed to champion, he wrote to his young colleague Boborykin, in July 1865, "The aims of art are incommensurable (as the mathematicians say) with the aims of socialism. An artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told I might write a book in which I should demonstrate beyond any doubt the correctness of my opinions on every social problem, I should not waste two hours at it; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years from now by people who arc children today, and that they would weep and laugh over my book and love life more because of it, then I should devote all my life and strength to such a work."

His reading during that period confirmed his views. He admired Victor Hugo's Les MLserahles, an epic, sweeping, rushing novel in which imaginary people also came face to face with real ones. Nor was he insensitive to the intelligence and sobriety of Merimee's Chronique du rdgne de Charles IX, although he considered its author "devoid of talent." But he hated Consuelo, "a heap of rubbish, crammed full of scientific, philosophical, artistic and moral phrases, a pastry made of sour dough and rancid butter, stuffed with truffles, sturgeon and pineapple."¹¹ His dream was to make 1805 as broad in scope, as serene and profoundly graceful as the Iliad and Odyssey. "I am transported by joy at the thought that I can crcate a great work," he wrote.

This feeling of plenitude was deflated, however, when he emerged from his study—a cool, vaulted room that had been used as a storeroom in Prince Volkonsky's day—and saw the wretchedness of the peasants. Tliat year (1865) there was a terrible drought in the land. Nothing would grow in the rock-hard, glaze-cracked fields. The live-

stock were gaunt, the anxious muzhiks had little to eat and were praying for rain. "We have pink radishes on the table, beautiful yellow butter, plump golden bread on a white tablecloth," wrote Tolstoy to his friend Fet. "Our ladies in their muslin gowns are so happy, sitting among the green plants in the garden, because it is hot and they are in the shadow. But beyond, the evil devil famine is already hard at work, covering the fields with weeds, crazing the arid soil, tearing the soles of the peasants' calloused feet and splitting the animals' hoofs, and will so shake and agitate us all that we, too, under the shade of our lime trees, with our muslin gowns and our lumps of butter on our flowered plates, will get what's coming to us."¹²

As summer drew near, he began to fear an uprising. Under the merciless sky, he imagined the poor coming to demand justice from the rich, the panic-stricken ladies hiding behind drawn shutters, the doling- out of surplus food under the threat of scythes and pitchforks. Although he loved the muzhiks, he could not forget that he was a lord. Their friend, to be sure, but not their equal. Haunted by such grim forebodings, he told his father-in-law what was in his mind, and received an immediate answer: "God preserve us from such a catastrophe as that! It would be more dreadful than the Pugachev uprising. But I think everything will turn out all right, there will be nothing but minor, local expressions of discontent and a few cases of suffering from famine, which will take the form of an unjustified resentment of the nobility."¹³

As Yasnaya Polyana was not bloodied by revolution in the ensuing weeks, Tolstoy grew calm again and began to consider the question from a theoretical point of view. In the night of August 12-13, 1865 he had an illumination, and upon waking, he wrote in his notebook:

"The formula Property equals theft will remain true longer than the English constitution, as long as there are men. It is an absolute truth, but there arc relative, accessory truths arising from it. The first of these concerns the attitude of the Russian people toward property. They deny the most tangible form of property, that which is least dependent upon work, that which creates most obstacles to the acquisition of property by others—namely, land. . . . This is not fancy, it is fact, borne out in the Cossack communities. It is understood equally well by the Russian scholar and the muzhik who says, 'Enlist us in the Cossacks, but let the land be free.' There is a future for such an idea. The Russian revolution can be built upon nothing else. The Russian revolution will not be directed against the tsar and despotism, but against the ownership of land."

Three days before, on August 10, 1865 to be exact, this enemy of

land ownership had purchased seventy-five acres from his neighbor Bibi- kov, in the village of Telyatinki, for the very attractive price of 280 rubles.t His pleasure was as intense, one may suppose, when he was dreaming of a socialist republic in which meadows, fields and woods would belong to all, as it was when he was riding over the property of which he had just become sole owner. To add to one's worldly goods while sighing after holy equality—wasn't that the essence of modern man? The main thing was to feel guilty now and then. After his profession of faith on the abolition of property, Tolstoy set down the following sentence, undated: "Every man lies twenty times daily."

When he tired of manipulating serious thoughts, he looked at his wife and children and sister-in-law and felt rejuvenated. With her sparkling eyes, black curly hair, large expressive mouth and slender waist, Tanya was the life of the family. A funny word or an affectionate glance from her could calm her sister's tantnun or bring to her brother-in- law's lips one of those broad smiles that suddenly made him so attractive. In the evening she sang, accompanied by him at the piano. Their mutual friend Fet, moved by the purity of her voice, dedicated a poem to her: "You Sang Until Dawn."

Tolstoy often took Tanya riding with him in the forest, while Sonya moped at home. At the side of the nineteen-year-old girl, he savored the coolness of a mountain spring; but all the time he was basking in the ambiguous pleasure of her company, the novelist in him was not forgotten. During their halts under the shade of the big trees, he questioned his sister-in-law about her adolescent loves. Flattered by his interest, she told him of her first crushes, her wild schemes, her passion for her cousin Alexander Kuzminsky, followed by a more intense attachment to a bold and glamorous hothead named Anatol Shostak. He listened, his mind vibrant. Unwittingly, Tanya was injecting life into the veins of Natasha Rostov, and in the novel Anatol Shostak became Anatol Kuragin, the man who wanted to elope with Natasha.*

At Yasnaya Polyana, however, the forsaken spouse took umbrage at these long rambles by her husband and sister. "I am angry with Tanya, she is taking up too much space in Lyovochka's life," she wrote as early as May 3, 1865. "They arc inseparable. Going to Nikolskoye, hunting, on horseback or on foot, always together. Yesterday, for the first time, I felt jealous of Tanya and today I am suffering because of her. I let her take my horse, which I think was very good of me. . . . And

J Or $790.

• Tolstoy often let the characters in his books keep the first names of their leal- life models, changing only their family names.

they have gone off hunting in the forest, alone. . . . Gocl knows what is going through my head. . . ."

The only thought that could allay her suspicions was that although Tanya admired Lyovochka, she was really in love with his brother Sergey. True, she was only nineteen and Sergey thirty-nine, but he was not unattractive, with his world-weary air, blue eyes and casual elegance. lie was said to have "lived" a great deal. Looking into the distance, he would sigh, "The only good things in life are the song of the nightingale, love, moonlight and music." Tanya found him extremely attractive. Their idyl had gone on for two years and, despite the difference in their ages, the Behrs were not opposed to the idea that their youngest daughter should also marry a Tolstoy. Sonya, at any rate, was wildly in favor of the scheme. Was Tanya's happiness uppermost in her thoughts, or was it her own peace of mind? She decided that the marriage must be consummated before the end of the summer. Under pressure from her, the couple let themselves be convinced. "The fate of Tanya and Sergey was decidcd the day before yesterday," she wrote on June 9, 1865. "They will marry! What a pleasure to see them, to sec their happiness, I can enjoy it more than I did my own. They arc out walking in the garden. . . . The wedding will take place in four or five weeks. . . ." After a month of negotiation, kissing, daydreaming on the balcony and planning for the future, coup de theatre! Sonya, foaming with rage, flung herself upon her diary, her pen scorching the paper: "July 12, 1865. It's all off. Sergey has let Tanya down and behaved like the lowest of cowards. ... I shall do everything in my power to get even with him!"

She ought, however, to have known what was coming. For years Sergey had been living at Pirogovo with Marya Shishkin, the gypsy, and had several children by hcr.f Tins disreputable liaison did not count in Sonya's eyes, and she was convinced that her brother-in-law, being a man of honor, would find some way of disposing of the wretched woman before the wedding. But Sergey—the fool!—had a last-minute attack of conscience. When he was with Tanya, nothing was too great a sacrifice for her, but when he went back to Pirogovo, he did not have the heart to evict his companion of such long standing, a gentle, humble and defenseless woman. He entrusted Leo with the task of explaining his compunctions to the young lady. Listening to her brother-in-law's halting speech, Tanya was so ashamed and miserable that she wanted to die. That evening, out of pity for Marya Shishkin and her children, she wrote to her fiancЈ to release him from his troth. He replied, "You

f Three daughters, already grown up in 1865, and a son, who died of tuberculosis on Maicli 16 of that year. "Sergey's son is dead," wrote Sonya that day. "I cried all morning long. It made me so sad." gave a beggar a million, and now you take it back." But in the end he resigned himself. When announcing the break to his wife's parents, Tolstoy paid emphatic tribute to the noble soul of his little sister-in- law: "Before, admiring her gaiety, I already sensed the quality' of her soul. Now she has proved it with this act, so fine and generous that tears come to my eyes when I think of it. He is certainly guilty, utterly unpardonable. ... I would feel better if he were a stranger and not my own brother. . . . She has suffered atrociously, but she can tell herself—and that is the greatest consolation in life—that she has behaved nobly."

Pale, disconsolate and red-eyed, Tanya stared through many sleepless nights, dragged from room to room, refused to eat and confided in no one. To distract her, Leo and Sonya took her with them to their property at Nikolskoye, then to Marya Tolstoy's home at Pokrovskoye. Wherever she went, she thought of Sergey. "There arc three doctors nursing mc here," she wrote, "but pills and drops will not cure me. God! Why can't anyone understand that? Leo is the only one who Understands."

And Tolstoy did lavish such solicitude upon her that she slowly began to recover, and her laughter and lovely contralto voice filled the house again. Sometimes she said she could not go on living with her sister, she must return to her parents in Moscow. Tolstoy blustered: "What nonsense! Surely you don't suppose you arc not paying for your keep? Why, you arc posing for your portrait, my dear. I am putting down everything I know about you, black on white." While commiserating with his sister-in-law's sorrow, the author in him was also busily digesting it. He could only thank God for having staged this sentimental drama before his eyes.

To the extent that he was preoccupied by his characters, he forgot his own worries. But he did not lose interest in himself altogether: physical considerations took the place of moral ones, that was all. In his diary reports of his basest bodily functions now took precedence over accounts of his most lofty processes of thought. While, with masterly clairvoyance, he was describing the war of 1805 through the eyes of Prince Andrey, Captain Denisov and cadet Nicholas Rostov, the pages of his intimate notebook bore witness to his acid stomach and flatulence. "The humming in my cars has stopped, I feel better, but I am still belching and my tongue is coated, especially in the morning." (October 30.) "Same rigorous hygiene, slept well, did not urinate or defecate, tongue still white and headache." (October 31.) "Dry mouth, tongue coated . . . Good stool in the evening." (November 2.) "Supper brought on pleasant slumber, gas and slight humming in the ears." (November 3.)

'l'he holidays were dreary. Tanya had gone back to her parents in Moscow. After long months of work Tolstoy, too, felt a desire to dip into life in the capital again, in order to refresh his "memory of society," which he needed to continue his book. "I must be able to judge people accurately, since I am trying to describe them," he wrote in a letter to Alexandra Tolstoy.¹⁴

At the end of January 1866 he left for Moscow with his wife, who was pregnant again, and their two children. They rented a six-room furnished apartment, 011 the "right floor," on Dmitrovka Street. The rent was one hundred and fifty rubles a month, "heat, samovar, water, dishes, everything included!" Sonya, suddenly enamored of music, attended numerous concerts, and Tolstoy corrected proofs, saw friends and worked out at the gymnasium. He read a few more unpublished chapters of his book at the Perfilyevs' house and commissioned Bashilov, the painter, to illustrate a bound edition of The Year 1805. Then, Bashilov having revived his interest in the fine arts, he decided to attend classes in sculpture. After modeling a horse in clay he became discouraged and stopped. I lis heart wasn't in it. He was worried about his wife: even pregnant, she could be attractive. In Moscow they had met Sonya's former suitor, Mitrofan Polivanov. She had been clumsily kittenish with him, and he had been exceedingly impertinent with her. Stung by jealousy, Tolstoy heatedly berated his wife. "Lyova is too severe and harsh in his judgment of me," she wrote. "Even so, I am glad of it; it proves he cares for me."¹⁵

When they returned to Yasnaya Polyana the tables were suddenly- turned, and it was she who complained of being forsaken and made to appear ridiculous. She had just given birth (at the end of May 1866) to her third child, a boy called Ilya, and was nursing him herself, despite the pain she suffered at every feeding. For reasons of convenience, she and her husband were sleeping apart for the first time. Wrapped up in his book, he had less and less time to devote to the estate. Besides, he had been forced to concede that the direct management system he had advocated was a failure, so he hired a new steward. And as luck would have it, the steward had a wife. And the wife was pretty. Worse yet, she was an intellectual, she read, she had ideas about things! A real nihilist! And Lyovochka, the idiot, spent hours talking to her! And, of course, the little schemer was bubbling over with conceit! "It is wrong of him to show so much interest in talking to Marya Ivanovna," Sonya wrote on July 19, 1866, in her diary. "One in the morning soon and still I cannot get to sleep. I have dire premonitions. This nihilist.

our steward's wife, is going to become the bane of my existence." And on July 22, "Why has he gone over there, and in the rain, to boot? lie is attracted by the woman, that's plain. It's driving me out of my mind. I wish her every possible evil, which docs not keep me from being as sweet as honey to her. If only her husband would quickly turn out to be incompetent, then they would both go away . . ." A fortnight later her jealousy subsided and she herself admitted that it was "almost unfounded."

It would indeed have been petty of her to harbor suspicions of her husband just then, for he had his hands full with a far more serious matter. Early in July 1866 two officers, Lieutenants Kolokoltsov and Stasulevich, had come to call 011 him in a state of great agitation; they were friends of the Behrs family and were serving in the 65th Moscow Infantry Regiment, which was on maneuvers in the vicinity of Yasnaya Polyana, and they had come to tell him about Quartermaster Sergeant Shabunin, who was accused of having struck his captain. According to Stasulcvich, Shabunin was a drunkard, rather weak in the head, and was convinced that he was persecuted by his commanding officer, who not only had him regularly put into prison for intemperance or misconduct, but also compelled him to copy documents over and over again, on the pretext that his writing was illegible or his lines crooked. It was because his sarcastic, frigid superior made him feel continually at fault that the poor wretch had resorted to violence. The case was serious, for under the Russian military code his offense was punishable by death. The two lieutenants had been appointed to sit on the court-martial with Colonel Yunosha, commander of the regiment, and they wanted Tolstoy to defend the accuscd. Tempted by the challenge, he accepted.

The next day he went to the village of Ozerki and obtained permission to interview Shabunin in the isba in which he was being detained, lie found a stocky redhead who answered "Quite so, quite so!" to every question, glassy-cycd, his little finger pressed against his trouser-seam. Nevertheless, this imbecilc was a human being and, as such, worth 110 less than Colonel Yunosha himself in the eyes of God. Could one man be deprived of his life as punishment for striking another? There was a shocking disproportion between the crime and the punishment. Tolstoy spent the night preparing his brief on the basis of the meager information he had been able to glean. He tactfully agreed that it was necessary to set an exemplary punishment for crimes such as that committed by Shabunin, but lie asked the judges to note that the accused was covered by the provisions of Articles 109 and 116, whereby the penalty might be reduced if the criminal was not of sound mind. He argued that not only was the accused mentally retarded, but

also, under the influence of alcohol, his condition bordered on insanity. Did one have the right to sentence a madman to death? At the close of his speech Tolstoy declared, "The court must let itself be guided by the spirit of our entire legislation, which ever weights the scales of justice on the side of clemency."

The court-martial sat on July i6_f in a nobleman's home in the village of Yasenki. A government-appointed judge made a special trip from Moscow. Tolstoy was intimidated, and read out his speech without conviction. At one point the tears came to his eyes. The quartermaster sergeant listened, gaping, to all these big words being used about his small self. The judges withdrew to deliberate. Tolstoy was certain his speech would move them to indulgence, especially as he thought he could count on the support of Stasulcvich and Kolokoltsov, the assistants. But when they l>cgan to deliberate, Stasulevich alone favored partial irresponsibility. Colonel Yunosha held out for the unqualified application of Article 604, i.e., the death penalty. Shaken by his intransigence, Kolokoltsov weakened, even though he had been the one to ask Tolstoy to defend Shabunin, and voted with his superior for fear of displeasing him. This shift settled the issue. "He was," said Tolstoy, "a good lad, light-hearted and completely absorbed at that time by his Cossack horse, on which he loved to caracole." Shabunin was sentenced to go before the firing squad.

Tolstoy immediately decided to appeal for an imperial reprieve. As always, when anyone in high places was involved, he called on his babushka Alexandra. The old maid of honor took her nephew's request to Milyutin, the minister of war. But in his haste, Tolstoy had neg- lectcd to mention Shabunin's regiment. Using this as a pretext, Milyutin replied that he could not submit an incomplete appeal to his emperor. Informed of this development, Tolstoy rushed to Tula and telegraphed the information: too late. The time limit for lodging an appeal had expired.

Shabunin was executed on August 9, 1866 in front of a mass of peasants from the neighboring villages. Throughout his imprisonment they had brought eggs and cakes to his cell. They crossed themselves when he was led out, pale and calm; they obscurely sensed that the man's punishment was out of proportion to his crime, and the Russians have always sympathized with the victims of official justice. Shabunin kissed the cross held out by the priest and let them covcr his eyes and tie him to the post. Twelve soldiers raised their guns and took aim. The drums rolled. When the salvo rang out, the peasants fell to their knees and began to pray. According to the military custom of the day, the regiment, led by its band, paraded past the trench. Later, when

the quartermaster sergeant's tomb had become a landmark for pilgrims, the authorities had it leveled and posted guards to prevent people from gathering at the scene of the execution.

Tolstoy felt doubly guilty for this death: first, because he had failed to sway the judges, and then, because he had made an unpardonable oversight in his appeal. Forty-two years later he said his plea to the court had been "stupid and shameful"; he should have spoken out, affirmed that capital punishment was a revolting practice, "contrary to human nature," and challenged the right of uniformed magistrates to dispose of the life of one of their fellows; he should have asked Alexander II, not to pardon the unfortunate man, for that was beyond the power of any human, but to pray for his own soul, "in order to extricate himself from his dreadful position as accomplice to every crime committed in the name of the law."¹⁶

It is not likely that this approach would have prevailed over cither judges or tsar and, far from furthering Shabunin's cause, it would probably have destroyed his last chance of survival. But that way, at least, Tolstoy's conscience would have been clear. As he grew older, his theories' tangible results mattered less to him than the moral satisfaction they offered.

In 1866, he had not yet realized the role he was to play in the world, and he was thoroughly demoralized by this setback. After condemning the French and their guillotine, he could now condemn the Russians and their firing squad. Corruption, hence, was not a question of nationality, but of the period he lived in. To cast it off, one must cast off "civilization."

After such a cruel bout with rcalitv, Tolstov returned to his fictional

/' *

visions with a sigh of relief. The engaging characters of 1805 soon hid Shabunin's bloody corpse from view. And as an encouragement to turn his mind to other matters, Bashilov, the painter, submitted his first drawings. The author experienced a childish delight when he saw his heroes' portraits: as though they were real people. He knew them so well that he began writing to the artist to suggest that he retouch this feature or that in order to obtain "a better likeness." lie could not have been more precise in his suggestions had he been writing about his own family: "Can't Ilclenc be given more bust (beauty of form is her main characteristic)? . . . Pierre's face is very well done, but his forehead should be made more thoughtful by adding a furrow, or two bulges above the eyebrows. . . . Prince Andrcy is too tall and his attitude should be more casual, scornful, gracefully negligent . . . Princess Bolkonsky is remarkably successful. . . . Hippolvte's portrait is perfect, but it would be better to lift his upper lip slightly and cross his legs

higher up—in short, to make him more ridiculous, more of a caricature."¹⁷ Later, he asked Bashilov to retouch Natasha: "In the kissing scene, could she not be made to look more like Tanya Behrs?"¹⁸

Another confirmation of the relationship between Natasha and his sister-in-law. Her broken heart had mended, and she was in the best of spirits on September 17, 1S66, Sonya's name-day. t Dinner was served on a new terrace. The cloth was heaped high with flowers, and Venetian lanterns glowed among the leaves. Suddenly the sounds of a joyful march were heard: La Muetle de Portici.* Sonya turned in astonishment to look at her husband, who was chuckling into his beard. At the end of the drive, a military band appeared in full-dress uniform. As a surprise for his wife, Tolstoy had asked Colonel Yunosha to lend him his band—the same colonel who, hardly two months before, had sentenced Quartermaster Sergeant Shabunin to death. Decidedly, this barrister-writer was without malice toward the judge who had refused to listen to him. Ah, well, feelings are one thing and social life another: Colonel Yunosha in person opened the ball. His two assistants, Stasulcvich and Kolokoltsov, were also there, so the entire military tribunal found itself dancing in the home of counsel for the defense. The musicians who had marched in front of Shabunin's body now played dances for the young ladies dressed in white muslin, whose eyes were devouring all the cocky young officers. "I can see Lyova's animated and charming face; he had taken such pains to give us a good time and was 1>eing so successful at it," wrote Sonya. "To my utter surprise, un- frivolous as I am, I enjoyed the dancing immensely." Tolstoy, flushed and hilarious, was the wildest of them all. He whirled his wife around in his arms, and his sister-in-law and a few of the guests. For the sixth figure in the quadrille the band broke into the kamarinskaya, a folk- dance.

"Get out there!" cried Tolstoy to Kolokoltsov. "How can you stand still to a rhythm like that?"

Kolokoltsov circled around and stopped in front of Tanya. After a moment's hesitation she set off, one fist 011 her hip and the other hand swinging loosely back and forth in the manner of the Russian peasants. Someone tossed her a handkerchief, which she caught in mid-air. Tolstoy delightedly watched his sister-in-law and noted her every gesture with the deliberate intention of using her in his book. And so Natasha Rostov did a country- dance, too, in War and Peace. "Where, when, how, simply through the air she breathed, had this little princess, brought

t September 17, according to the Orthodox calendar, is the day of the Blessed Martyrs Vera, Nadczhda, Lyubov (Faith, Hope, Charity) and their mother, Sofya.

• An opera by Auber.

up by an emigree Frenchwoman, imbibed so much of the national spirit that should have been obliterated long ago by the pas de chdle?"¹⁹

Unfortunately, soon after this most successful party, Tanya fell ill with a dry, racking cough. "Be still! Be still!" begged Tolstoy, watching her with tense affection. He had fresh visions of consumption. Once before, when she had been in a wildly gay mood, lie had said to her, "T anya, do you know you will die one day?" And she had cried back, "Die? Me? Never!" He could still hear her words as he watched her now, breathing in spasms with her hand over her mouth. He decided to take her back to Moscow and, at the same time, complete his documentation in the libraries there. On November 10, 1866 Sonya, who was obliged to stay behind and nurse her latest baby, blessed her husband and sister as they set out. Tolstoy insisted that Tanya hold an "inhaling mask" in front of her face to protect her lungs from the cold air as they rode through the rain in a post-chaise.

In Moscow the doctors called in for consultation by Dr. Behrs agreed that her lungs were weak and advised her to give up vocal exercise, diet and go abroad for a rest in the sun, after which she would soon be well again. Reassured, Tolstoy returned to his labors as ferreting historian.

For once in her life, Sonya was not jealous at the thought of his being far away with Tanya. She missed him, the nights were long, and she thought back to the evening of September 17 when he had danced with her and looked lovingly at her. "The house is so sad and empty when he is away," she wrote on November 12. "A meeting of minds closer than ours seems impossible to mc. We arc terribly happy in our relations with each other, with our children and with life." He had left her a mountain of sheets to transcribe and she settled eagerly down to work. Mailing the copy off to him, she wrote, "Now I feel that it is your child and consequently my child and, as I send off this package of paper to Moscow, I feel I am abandoning a baby to the elements; I'm afraid something may happen to it. I like what you are writing very much. I do not think I shall care as much for any other book of yours as this one."*⁰

From Moscow he kept her informed of his progress. He was living with his in-laws in the Kremlin, and every morning he went to the library of the Rumyantsev Museum, where he dug into manuscripts on freemasonry—which had been outlawed in Russia after the Decembrists' aborted coup d'dtat in 1825—and became fascinatcd by them. His hero, Pierre Bczukhov, would be a freemason. But how they depressed him, all those yellow pages attesting to a puerile aspiration to

virtue! "The sad thing about these Masons," he wrote to Sonya, "is that they were all imbeciles."²¹ He wanted to know every detail of his characters' daily lives. To get a clearer picture of the world they lived in, he thought of buying a complete set of the Moscow News, which was already in existence in 1812, and advertised for it in the newspapers, offering two thousand rubles.

On November 18, 1866 he was back at Yasnaya Polyana, where he began to write again and did not stop all winter. He was so excited by the furious intensity with which he was working that his eyes would suddenly fill with tears. Sonya shared his emotion and she, too, wept when he read aloud the chapters he had just finished. He complained, increasingly often, of violent headaches. "For the past two weeks my brain has been congested and I have such a strange pain that I fear an attack," he wrote to his brother in February 1867.

Irritable, tired and overwrought, he welcomed his sister-in-law with open arms when she returned to Yasnaya Polyana after a restorative trip to Baden-Baden and Paris. But gloom redescendcd upon him soon afterward: his friend Dmitry Dyakov had just lost his wife, and Elizabeth Andreyevna Tolstoy, Alexandra's sister, also died that year. Tolstoy was obsessed by these deaths, he was afraid for himself and those around him; he wrote to his babushka: "There arc times when one forgets it, it, death, and then there are others, like this year, when one keeps very quiet around those one loves, for fear of losing them, and watches in terror as it strikes here and there, cruel and blind, sometimes those who are best and the ones you need most."²²

Sonya thought she was pregnant again. She had engaged an English nurse, Hannah Tracey, a clean, energetic, cultivated woman, with whom Tolstoy himself could find 110 fault. The children were growing up, handsome and healthy. And yet, at the slightest pretext he became giddy with dread. One day in May, when Sonya was sitting on the floor of her room sorting and arranging the drawers of a chest, he came in, looked at his wife and suddenly, without reason or warning, felt a wave of rage sweep over him. "Why are you sitting there on the floor?" he shouted. "Get upl" "Right away! I must just finish putting these away." "You are to get up at once!"

He went out and slammed the door. Stupefied, Sonya wondered whether she had unwittingly done something to offend him or whether he was angry because she was working in her condition. She went to his study and gently asked: "Lyovochka, what's the matter?" lie exploded:

"Go away! Go away!"

As she began to draw nearer, he hurled a tray holding a coffeepot and cup to the floor, tore a thermometer off its hook and smashed it against the wall. Tanya, who was in the next room, came running when she heard the noise. Sonya had already left the room. Tolstoy was standing there, his arms hanging down limply, his face white and staring, his lower lip trembling.

"I was afraid of him and sorry for him," Tanya later wrote. "Never had I seen him in such a state." He himself was alarmed by this moment of insanity and decided a few days later to go to Moscow and consult a specialist.

Distance had its usual effect, and on June 18, 1867, overflowing with tenderness, he wrote to his wife:

"Coming into Moscow yesterday, as soon as I saw the dust and the crowds, felt the heat and heard the din, I was so terrified that I wanted to run back and hide beneath your wing as quickly as possible. I always love you even more when I leave you!"

And on June 20:

"I have just read your letter and I cannot describe the tenderness —to the point of tears—I feci for you, not only this minute, but every minute of the day. My little soul, my dove, the best in all the world!"

lie had promised her to see Dr. Zakharin. He went. The physician thumped and poked and prodded him with "pedantic thoroughness" and then announced that his nerves were overstrained and he had gall stones. As he refused to take any medicine, a cure at Carlsbad was proposed as an alternative. But he had no intention of doing even that. At most, he might go on a special diet. Reassured on the score of his health, the question of the publication of his book remained to be settled. On Sonya's advice, he had decided to discontinue the installments in the Russian llerald. The lukewarm response of both critics and readers, when the second part came out in 1866, had convinced him that the essence of a work of this type was in its totality and tli3t by releasing it bit by bit in a periodical, he was distorting its meaning and weakening its impact. Now, therefore, he wanted to publish the book as a whole, and sell it directly through the bookshops.

After a number of unsuccessful attempts, he agreed on terms with a publisher, P. I. Bartenyevf and a printer, Riss. The first printing, without illustrations (Too bad for Bashilov and his drawings! "There is something missing from them—the nerve of life!"), was to be 4800 copies. The book would be published as it was set up, in six volumes.

\ Publisher of Russian Archives.

The series would sell for eight rubles. Tolstoy would advance 4500 rubles to the printer,$ in installments, as his share of the printing costs. He allowed Bartcnyev 10 per cent of the selling price, 20 per cent went to the booksellers, and he took the rest. If the book was a success, the enterprise would be highly profitable for him. Of course, now he would not only have to go on writing the book, he must also revise the two parts which had already come out in the magazine, in preparation for their publication in bound volumes. According to his contract with Bartenyev, the publisher would have the proofs checked over after the author had finished with them, to correct "any mistakes in language or grammatical errors."

He arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, highly pleased with his contract, to learn that Tanya was about to become engaged to her cousin Alexander Mikhailovich Kuzminsky, a good-natured, dull young magistrate. The engagement was nearly broken off because the girl—who was decidedly under her brother-in-law's influence—had the rash idea of showing Kuzminsky her diary, containing her account of her misfortunes with Sergey Tolstoy. But everything worked out in the end. Leo would have preferred Tanya to marry his friend Dmitry Dyakov, who had been much attracted to her since the death of his wife, but was prevailed upon to side with the others." Sergey, moreover, had just legalized his situation by marrying his mistress, the gypsy Marya Shishkin.f On their way to find a country priest to celebrate their respective unions, the two couples had met in their coaches outside Tula. Tanya and Sergey exchanged embarrassed greetings and the horses bore them off to their separate destinies.

Tanya was married on July 24, 1867, and Tolstoy, "patron of the ceremony," made an effort to appear pleased by the event, which was depriving him of his sister-in-law. But although he was losing her in real life, she still belonged to him in his work. Nobody could deprive him of Natasha Rostov. Unfortunately, he was now forced to Stop writing while he corrected the proofs of the first part of the book. He received the galleys of the opening pages in mid-July. He scored out and revised in so many places that Bartcnyev wrote back indignantly:

| Or $12,700.

f On June 7, 1867.

' n an intimate of the Dyakov family, went abroad with

"Cod alone knows what you are doing! If you go on like that we will be correcting and resetting forever. Anyone can tell you that half your changes are unnecessary. But they make an appreciable difference inthe typesetting costs. I have asked the printer to send you a separate bill for corrections. . . . For the love of God, stop scribbling!"²³

"It is impossible for me not to scribble the way I scribble and I am firmly convinced that my scribbling is most useful," retorted Tolstoy. "Therefore, I am not afraid of the typesetter's bills which will not, I trust, be exorbitant. Those passages you say you liket would not have been as good if I had not scribbled all over them five times."²⁴

In the chapters telling of Pierre Bezukhov's initiation into a masonic lodge (Volume I, Book V, Chapters III and IV), he made so many changes that he doubted whether the corrector would be able to make them out and demanded a new set of proofs. Even so, the work went quickly. On September 23 Tolstoy returned to Moscow for another interview with his publisher, and also to visit the battlefield of Borodino, seventy-five miles away. His young brother-in-law Stepan Behrs (then twelve years old) went with him; Dr. Behrs lent them his hunting wagon.

For two days they drove back and forth in a driving rain across the vast, muddy, misty plain, punctuated by hummocks and potholes, where, fifty years before, the most devastating of all Napoleonic battles had been fought. Victory of Borodino for the Russians, victory of the Moskva for the French: this hopelessly entangled encounter between the two armies came back to life in Tolstoy's eyes with frightening clarity.* He had studied the movements in books, but everything took on a new light at the actual scene of the battle. He questioned old peasants, who muddled everything up in their memories, took notes, consulted maps, verified troop movements, imagined his characters in different settings. The drizzly fog of September 26, 1867 dissolved in the sunlight of August 26, 1812.t Fields of rye sprang from the bare earth. The landscape became peopled with phantom regiments, nightmare faces wavered past in the fog, flags snapped in the wind, the voice of the cannon thundered through the ground. Lost in his vision, Tolstoy told his inattentive little companion everything he saw. They spent the night in a convent inn and returned to Moscow the following morning after a final tour of the neighborhood of Borodino. "I am very, very pleased with the trip and the way I endured it, regardless of lack of sleep and inadequate food," lie wrote to his wife on September 27. "God grant me health and peace and quiet, and I shall describe the battle of Borodino as it has never been described before."

$ Bartenyev had written that he especially admired Pierre Bezukhov's scene with his wife and the chapter at Lysya Gory.

• The Russians also countcd this battle as a national victory.

t September 7, 1812, according to the Gregorian calendar.

When he got back to Yasnaya Polyana, he plunged into the melee, with Prince Audrey, Pierre Bczukhov, Napoleon and Kutuzov. . . . And there were those accursed proofs to read. lie was "exhausted," he had a "horrible fog in the head." Would he hold out to the end? And the censor, what would the censor say? "I am terrified at the thought that it may play some dreadful trick on us, now that the end is in sight."²⁵ He hoped the first three volumes might come out before the end of the year. But what name should he choosc? The Year 1805 would not do for a book that ended in 1812. lie had chosen All's Well That Ends Well, thinking that would give the book the casual, romantic tone of a long English novel, when he suddenly had an illumination. . . . On December 17, 1867, the Moscow News published the following advertisement: "War and Peace. By Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Four volumes (80 sheets). Price: 7 rubles. Weight parcel post: 5 pounds. The first three volumes delivered with a coupon for the fourth, by P. I. Bartenyev, Publisher."

Proudhon's tract, published in 1861 and translated into Russian in 1864, had given Tolstoy a title worthy of the scope of his subject. The first edition of War and Peace was sold out in a few days. In May 1868, when the fourth volume came out, the public acclaim was confirmed. Encouraged by the flattering echoes he heard on all sides, Tolstoy began to work still more quickly. He devoted the whole of 1868 to writing the next part of War and Peace and corrccting proofs, allowing himself only a few days' holiday during the summer. On sunny days he hunted or fished, as always. He also gave some time to his estate, which had expanded (he had bought more land), made frequent visits to his brother Sergey, did a great deal of haphazard reading of philosophers and historians, thought briefly of translating the Memorial de Sainte-Hetene into Russian and founding a review to be called The Non-Contemporary, as a gibe, which would conccrn itself with "whatever could not conceivably be successful in the nineteenth century but might be in the twentieth." His relations with his wife were so warm and simple that she wrote, "We still argue, but the causes of these quarrels are so deep and complex that they would not occur if we did not love each other as we do. I will soon have been married six- years, and my love continues to grow. Lyovochka often says that it is no longer love, but a fusion of souls so complete that we could not go on living without cach other. I still love him with the same anxious, passionate, jealous, romantic love as before. Sometimes his assurance and his self-possession annoy me."²⁰

This assurance and self-possession were only apparent. In reality, Tolstoy was "hanging on" by his nerves. "The poet skims off the best

of life and puts it in his work," he wrote in a notebook. "That is why his work is beautiful and his life bad."²⁷ Work on the proofs of the fifth volume was delayed by children's illnesses. In April 1869, the author was writing the second Epilogue. "What I have written there," he told his friend Fet, "was not simply imagined by me, but torn out of my cringing entrails."²⁸ And at last, on December 4, 1869, the sixth and last volume of War and Peace appeared 011 the booksellers' shelves.

Suddenly severed from his characters after living in intimate communion with them for six long years, Tolstoy felt tragically bereft. Bewildered, disconnected, he went on dreaming of the phantoms he had let loose in the world, whose fate he could 110 longer alter. Would he ever be able to write anything else, after this huge book into which he had poured all that was best in him? "Now, I am simply marking time," lie confessed to Fet. "I don't think, I don't write, I feel pleasantly stupid."²⁹ That same year, on May 20, a fourth child was born to him—a son, called Leo.

4. War and Peace

The success of the six-volume bound edition of War and Peace far surpassed Tolstoy's expectations, based on the lukewarm response to the first chapters in the Russian Herald. Readers swept bare the booksellers' shelves, gave the book to their friends, wrote letters from one end of Russia to the other defending their opinions of the characters. In the literary world, emotion was at fever pitch. Everyone was aware that an event of major importance had taken place. Like a meteor fallen from another planet, the huge mass of words intrigued and bothered people, and caused them to erupt in indignation.

Tolstoy's friend Fet was jubilant at the end of the final volume, although he disapproved of the author's "dcpoctization" of Natasha in the Epilogue. Botkin wrote to him: "Apart from the section on freemasonry, which is uninteresting and in fact boring, the novel is excellent from every point of view. What animation and depth! What a quintessential^ Russian work!"¹ Goncharov wrote to Turgenev: "I've saved the most important thing for the last: the publication of Count Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The count has becomc a veritable literary lion."² Another colleague, Saltykov-Shchedrin, ground his teeth: "The military scenes are all falsehood and chaos. Generals Bagration and Kutuzov arc made to look like puppets. . . ." Dostoyevsky, whose Idiot had just been raked over the coals by the critics, took offense at Strakhov (a critic) for comparing Tolstoy with "all that is greatest in our literature." "To arrive with War and Peace," he wrote, "is to arrive too late, after 'the new word' of Pushkin; and however far, however high Tolstoy may go, he cannot change the fact that that new word was uttered before him, and the first time, by a genius."³ As for Turgenev, after his fierce criticism of the opening of War and Peace, he let himself be swept away by the rest. "There arc scores of ceaselessly aston-