ishing pages in War and Peace, absolutely top quality; all the description, the customs and manners (the hunt, the troika race at night, etc.). The historical appendix, on the other hand, which has brought the readers to such a pitch of frenzy, is nothing but puppetry and charlatanism. . . . Tolstoy makes his readers' eyes bug out by telling them about the tips of Alexander's boots or Speransky's laugh, and makes them believe he knows everything about these people because he knows those specific things about them, when in fact that is all he knows. . . . However, there are things in the novel that nobody but Tolstoy is capable of writing, anywhere in Europe, things that made me shiver with a positive fever of excitement." (Letter to Annenkov, February 14 [26], 1868.) " There are passages in it that will live as long as the Russian language." (Letter to Borisov, February 27 [March 10], 1868.) "Tolstoy is a giant among his fellow writers, he makes me think of an elephant in a menagerie. "It's incoherent—absurd, even; but immense, and so intelligent!" (Letter to Borisov, February 12 [24], 1869.)
However, although 'Turgenev knelt before 'Tolstoy's art, he could not swallow his philosophy. "It is a great misfortune," he wrote, once again to Annenkov,4 "when a sclf-cducated man of Tolstoy's type sets out to philosophize. He invariably climbs onto any old broomstick, invents some universal system that seems to provide a solution to every problem in three easy steps—historical determinism, for instance—and forward march! When, like Antaeus, he comes down to earth again, his strength is renewed: the death of the old prince, Alpatich, the peasant uprising, all that is remarkable."
Old Pogodin was no less effusive: "I melt, I weep, I rejoice," he wrote to Tolstoy on April 3, 1868. And he went on, the next day: "Now look here, what is this? You've done for me. . . . You have turned me, in my dotage, into—Natasha! . . . And Pushkin not here to sec it! I low he would have applauded, how happy he would have been, how he would have rubbed his hands with glee!"
It is true that a few months later, on second thought, the same Pogodin expressed a far more critical view of the same novel in an article in The Russian: "What the novelist absolutely cannot be forgiven is his offhand treatment of figures such as Bagration, Speransky, Rostopchin and Ermolov, who belong to history. To study their lives and then judge them on the basis of evidence is all well and good; but to present them, without any reason, as ignoble or even repellent, mere outlines and silhouettes of men, is in my opinion an act of unpardonable irresponsibility and provocation, even in an author of great talent."
This criticism was typical of the views of the conservative writers' clique, headed by Vyazemsky and Norov. Prince Vyazcmsky, an old friend of Pushkin and Gogol, was incensed by Tolstoy's rabid determination to knock the national heroes off their pedestals. "In atheism, heaven and life after death become meaningless," he wrote. "In historical free-thinking, earth and life itself become meaningless, through belittlement of the events of the past and contempt for the idols of popular imagination. . . . This is no longer skepticism; it has become literary materialism."5 And Norov, who had fought in the battle of Borodino in his youth, admitted that the author had portrayed the battle scenes with praiseworthy respect for detail, but bemoaned the fact that "our generals, whose names are inseparable from our military history, and are still heard in every mouth in the new generation of officers, were presented as a set of blind and incompetent tools of fate."8 The reactionary critic of Action, curiously enough, attributed this deflation of the official embellishments of war to a perverted sense of patriotism in the author—even though, said the critic, judging by his family name, he was a true Russian. "Some ascribe this phenomenon," he went on, "to the influence of the environment in which the author grew up; during his childhood or youth, he was undoubtedly surrounded by Jesuit-trained French governesses, whose views of the year 1812 penetrated so deeply into the impressionable mind of the baby or boy that even in his adulthood Count Tolstoy has been unable to divest himself of this muddled, unintelligent and Roman Catholic interpretation of events."®
The monarchists heaped abuse on Tolstoy's head because he had flaunted national values, and the liberals wanted to send him to the stake because he had flaunted the people. In the progressive paper The Affair, Bervi stated that for Tolstoy, "honor and elegance exist only among the rich and famous," that all the characters in the novel were "base"; that Prince Audrey, for one, was nothing but a "dirty, vulgar, unfeeling automaton," that the author "let no opportunity pass to glorify passion, vulgarity and inanity," and that in reading the military passages "one continually got the impression that a narrow- minded but garrulous corporal was boasting of his exploits in some remote hamlet to a group of gawping hicks."
This virulent attack set the tone for other radical writers. In the Illustrated Gazette, an anonymous critic reviled the characters of War and Peace, who were "all infamous products of the age of serfdom" and held the entire book to be "an apologia for gluttonous aristocrats, sanctimony, hypocrisy and vice." Tongue-in-chcck, The Spark congratulated Tolstoy 011 his appetizing rendition of the battle scenes,
• A singular commcnt on a novel in which patriotism in epic proportions looms out of every page, and the French can scarcely be said to be flattered!
proving that "it was a pleasant and easy thing to die for the Fatherland." And Shelgunov, taking over from Bcrvi in The Affair, raised the tone of the debate by solemnly declaring that "Tolstoy's philosophy could have no European significance," that the author was preaching "Eastern fatalism against Western reason," that lie and his ideas were "throttling all energy, initiative and desire in the individual to improve his social condition and achievc happiness," and, in short, that the teachings he was propagating were "utterly opposed to those of modern thinkers, and chiefly Auguste Comte." "Fortunately," concluded Shelgunov, "Count Tolstoy is not a great writer. ... If, with his lack of emotional maturity, he had the genius of a Shakespeare or a Byron, the direst curse on earth would not be too strong for him."
The liberals' mistrust of Tolstoy could be explained by the fact that in those days, with his title of nobility, his estate at Yasnaya Polyana and his military background, he still appeared to a portion of the young intellectuals as an aristocrat playing at being a friend of the people. None of his novels dealt with the issues that inflamed public opinion: emancipation of the serfs, freedom of the press, reorganization of the courts, women's rights, government reform. It seemed as though, by- living in retirement on his estate, he were trying to ignore the present. True, there had been the Sevastopol Sketches. But since then . . . ? The novels of Goncharov, Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin aroused impassioned debate because they were blows struck in a battle; for many people, those of Leo Tolstoy were mere works of art "Although everyone read War and Peace with great enjoyment," wrote Lystscv in his reminiscences, "I must confess that wc were not very stirred by it because the period the great author was writing about was too remote from the problems which were tormenting Russian society at that time."
Ilooted at by left and right, Tolstoy received his just measure of praise from the moderate critics and what is commonly called the general public. In Fatherland Notes Pisarev spoke of "truth, unadorned and unadulterated"; Mrs. Tsebrikova, writing in the same periodical, praised the ruthless and unerring simplicity with which he transposed life in his novel; in the European Ilerald Annenkov devoted a substantial article to the book, "which can be compared with nothing on earth"; Suvorin, in the Army and Navy Gazette, confessed that he was left at a loss by qualities he could not define: "Nothing spectacular, nothing strained; this gifted writer has not resorted to a single trick. This is a smooth-flowing epic, by a painter-poet"; and in The Dawn, Strakhov wrote the following lines, which filled Tolstoy to bursting with pride: "What mass and balance! No other literature offers us anything comparable. Thousands of characters, thousands of scenes, the worlds of government and family, history, war, every moment of human life from the first mew of the newborn babe to the last gush of sentiment of the dying patriarch. . . . And yet no person is hidden by any other, no scene or impression is spoiled by any other, everything is clear, everything is harmonious, in the individual parts as in the whole. . .
The avant-garde found this dithyrambic praise very offensive. "Stra- khov is the only one to believe that Tolstoy is a genius," said the St. Petersburg Gazette. And in the St. Petersburg News, Burenin affirmed that The Dawn must have been attempting to compete with the humorous newspapers when it said that Tolstoy's novel had "universal significance." Satirical verses were circulating, in which Tolstoy was qualified as the "world's greatest genius."7
Amused by this critical controversy raging over War and Peace, the novelist Leskov wrote, in the Stock Exchange News (1869-70), that "Long periods elapse between the publication of each volume of the scries, during which, as the saying goes, rccds are broken on the author's back: he is callcd this and that, a fatalist, an idiot, a madman, a realist, a troll; and he, in the following installment, remains what he is and intends to be. . . .He paces along, a massive charger borne up by solid legs, and iron-shod. . . ."
In general, Tolstoy paid no attention to the critics. "Pushkin was greatly troubled by critics," he said. "One is better off ignoring them."8 However, he could not resist the pleasure of reading and rereading Strakhov's flattering articles, and he was subsequently to say, with regal assurance, that in his study of War and Peace Strakhov had perceived "the lofty significance the book has acquired and can never lose again."
In a postscript to War and Peace Tolstoy said the book was not a novel, even less a poem, and still less a historical chronicle; it was a new form of expression, "designed to suit what the author had to say." Thus proclaiming his independence from every literary form, he invited his readers to abandon their old habits, too, and reach beyond the characters and plot to discover the overall structure of the work for themselves. And indeed, it is only when the eyes cease to focus on the thousand details in the picture that the grandeur of the whole becomes apparent. Then, far above the scramble and swarm of individual human destinies emerge the eternal laws that govern the universe. Birth, death, love, ambition, jealousy, anguish, vanity: the deep, calm respiration of mankind strikes us full in the face.
First we see the cream of Russian society in the last days of peace in 1805. Drawing-room conversations, fluttering of butterflies, pettiness of spcech and intention. Among this little menagerie of insignificant, silly, dcccitful, debauched, idle people, a few souls ring more deeply. Pierre Bezukhov, oafish and soft-hearted; Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, tense, sardonic and proud; Princess Marya, exuding sweetness and resignation in the shadow of her tyrannical father; the Rostov children, whose liveliness, spontaneity and youthful appeal are like a fresh, cool breeze blowing through the book; and among them, Natasha—passionate, devil-may-care, willful and tender Natasha, a mixture of Tanya Behrs and Sonya Tolstoy.
War breaks out. The problems of each are swept away by the problem of all. History puts an end to stories. The Russian army invades Austria. Bloody battles are fought, as futile as they are inevitable. The real leaders arc not the men who plot stratagems, like Napoleon, but those who, like Kutuzov, submit to "circumstances, the will of their subordinates and the whims of chance." In action, Prince Andrey feels strangely relieved to be borne along by a flood over which he has no control. While he searches for the meaning of this tempest raging over whole nations, Pierre Bezukhov, far behind the lines, is contaminated by the artificiality of his circle and marries the lovely Elena Kuragin; and Elena's brother Anatol is refused by Princess Marya, whom he does not love. The war continues. Wounded at Austerlitz, Prince Andrey has a revelation of the absurdity and purposclcssncss of life. Lying on his back, he sees above him "a sky that was somehow vague, but very far and high, immensely high, in which gray clouds were drifting." And he says to himself, "How calm and peaceful, how majestic . . . Everything is vain, everything is false, except this l>oundless sky. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, except that. . . ." Life resumes its course, however, for him and for the others, with its honors and errors and fruitless striving. Pierre Bezukhov suspects Elena of faithlessness, wounds his rival Dolokhov in a duel, separates from his wife, contemplates his existence with disgust, becomes involved in freemasonry, plans to emancipate his serfs. Prince Andrey, back home, finds his wife, the "little princess," about to give birth. He has scant affection for her and treats her as a child herself; but she dies in childbirth, almost under his eyes, and her death depresses him. He seeks another source of affection and begins to grow fond of Natasha Rostov. She is moved, attracted; but, out of respect for family conventions, the marriage is put off for a year. For her, the delay is fatal: forgetting Prince Andrey, she becomes enamored of handsome Anatol Kuragin and plans to elope with him, but the attempt ends ignominiously in scandal and dishonor. And once again the dreadful threat of cataclysm rises and towers over the frog-pond: 1812—war breaks out again. Napoleon's troops invade Russia. Borodino. Prince Andrcy is badly injured. On the table next to him in the field hospital, a leg has just been amputated—the leg of the person he hates most in the world: Anatol Kuragin. ITis hatred melts on the spot, into trembling pit)'. He weeps "for all men, for himself, for their errors and his." He thinks of Natasha. He dreams of seeing her again. Miraculously, he does see her again, during the retreat, and then he dies. But what is that one death among all those others that litter the Russian soil these days? Moscow in flames. National union. Napoleon hesitant, worried. Pierre Bezukhov schemes to slay the tyrant. He is arrested and deported by the French. In his convoy he meets a Russian muzhik, Platon Karatayev, a pious and resigned man who smiles at suffering. Partisans heckle the fleeing French. One of them is Petya Rostov, who is killed. But Pierre Bezukhov is liberated by the Cossacks. Back in Moscow, he meets Natasha Rostov again and, after a long struggle with his conscience, realizes that he loves her and finds the courage to propose. The couple appears again, older, more staid and sedate, in 1820, in the Epilogue. Pierre is still excitcd by liberal ideas. He joins a small political club that aspires to reform ever)' institution; a few years more, and we will probably find him among the ranks of the Decembrists. The story stops before the heroes reach the end of their road—with the next wave swelling behind them, the young, thirsty for love and battle.
When he began his book, did Tolstoy know what adventures lay in store for his characters from the first line to the last? Everything inclines us to believe he did not: their destinies as well as their personalities were dccidcd as he went along. And yet their behavior corresponds to their personalities at every turn. The wildest schemes seem as matter-of-fact as if they were proposed by living beings. That is the miracle of Tolstoy: this gift of life that he transmits to hundreds of creatures, all different, lightly yet unforgettably sketched: soldiers, peasants, generals, great noblemen, young maidens and women of the world. He moves from one to the other, effortlessly changing age, sex and social class. He gives each a particular way of thinking and talking, a physical apj>earance, a weight in live flesh, a past, even an odor. There would be nothing so remarkable in it if these were exceptional people, whose features were etched in acid. But no: the protagonists of this drama are standard issue, who might not arouse our curiosity if we were to meet them on the street. Here, however, they are identified and animated with such skill that they continue to live and move in our memories after we have closed the book. We would recognize her in a thousand, Natasha Rostov, "not pretty, black-eyed, with a wide, ex- pressivc mouth . . . narrow shoulders, bare arms full of childish grace." She dreams of Boris Drubetskoy, inflames Vaska Denisov, falls in love with Prince Andrcy Bolkonsky and becomcs engaged to him—which does not prevent her from being swept off her feet by Anatol Kuragin and ultimately marrying Pierre Bezukhov. Thus, as she pursues her hectic course toward happiness, she acts as a link between all the main characters of the book. Every one, at some point, draws near to her, is lit up by and glows in her flame. "Whatever she did, she threw herself into it, body and soul," wrote Tolstoy. Whether caring for the wounded, sitting with Prince Andrey on his deathbed, singing, dancing, dashing through the country or loving the fatuous, absurd Kuragin—she abandons herself utterly to her joy or duty or danger or sorrow. Not over- intelligent, perhaps, or very cultivated, but instinct does duty for wit in her. In his remarks Tolstoy noted, "Prodigal . . . Self-confident . . . Loved by all . . . Proud . . . Musical . . . She needs a husband, two husbands, she needs children, she needs a bed. . . ." The war and the deaths of her brother and Prince Andrcy make brutal inroads on the girl her intimates used to call the "graceful little imp." Badly shaken, she contemplates the world with new seriousness. In the Epilogue we see her happily married, basking in a fairly obtuse sort of felicity. "She had grown so round and broad that it was hard to recognize the slender, quicksilver Natasha of old in this stout matron. . . . Talk and argument on women's rights or the relations between married couples not only did not interest her, she did not understand them." In the author's scale of values it was not wrong for a wife to be concerned exclusively with housekeeping and children. Unlike the avant-garde writers of his time who were preaching emancipation, he considered that women must remain in their rightful place, obedient to their husbands and tied to hearth and cradle, if the very structure of the family and hence of society were not to collapse.
And yet, as though to disprove his own theory, he created Princess Marya Bolkonsky, ugly and awkward but sensitive, dignified, devout, capable of total abnegation, who, far from losing her own personality in marriage, remained as before, her soul turned "toward the infinite, the eternal, the perfect."
Among the men, the two heroes, Andrey Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov, are the two parts of Leo Tolstoy. Into one he put his appetite for life, his pragmatism, his brutality, and into the other his aspirations toward ideal peace and charity, his naivete, his awkwardness, his hesitation. He brings them together in conversation at Bogucharovo, by the side of a lake, and at Lysya Gory—and it is Tolstoy conversing with himself in his private diary. Prince Andrey has a skeptical turn of mind;
lie mistrusts his heart and hides his feelings in irony. Ambitious, he sees the war as a means of proving himself in action. But his thirst for glory vanishes on the battlefield of Austerlitz, under the vast sky filled with drifting gray clouds. After his wife's death he determines to improve the lives of his peasants, but not at all out of compassion for their wretched lot. "An excellent intention, to free the serfs," he says to Pierre. "But it will not be a good thing for you—who have never, I suppose, had anyone flogged or sent to Siberia—and still less for them. Besides, if they are beaten and flogged and deported now and then, I don't believe they are any the worse for it. In Siberia they go on living the same animal existence, the marks of the whip will be scarred over, and they will be just as happy as before."
In a burst of patriotic enthusiasm in 1812, he momentarily forgets his sorrow and disgust at Natasha's betrayal. But it takes a fatal wound at Borodino to bring about the moral rebirth he has been hoping for. The sky he had believed was empty leans down over him at last, the inner peace he had been seeking in vain logins to grow in his heart as his strength gradually fails. He, the atheist, suddenly thinks, "Love is God, and to die means that I, a part of that love, shall return to the great whole, the eternal source of things. . . ."
Opposite him is Pierre Bczukhov—massive, ungainly, short-sighted —made of such permeable stuff that the wildest schemes pass through him without leaving a trace. His good-will is equaled only by his boundless naivete. He plunges head-first into debauchery', marriage, duels, freemasonry, patriotism, heroism in civilian dress, schemes to murder Napoleon, communion with the people and love of Natasha. I Ie says, "We must love, we must have faith . . ." But he doesn't know in what or whom. In the end it is he—uncertain, shifting, bewildered Pierre—who finds happiness on earth, just as the somnolent Kutuzov triumphs over the most wily strategists. Pierre's revelation docs not come in a bolt of lightning on the battlefield, but in listening to the peasant Platon Karatayev. Thereafter, in moments of doubt, he need only think of the humble muzhik, killed by the French, to be reconciled with the world.
Tolstoy put much of himself into Pierre Bczukhov and Andrey Bolkonsky, but he also allotted a few of his features to Nicholas Rostov: his strength and health, his pagan love of nature, his exaggerated sense of honor and his passion for hunting. But Nicholas Rostov is a boy of very average intelligence, anxious above all to avoid doing anything contrary to the established rules. He wants to belong to his time and his circle. Natasha, who knows him very well, says, "Nicholas has one fault: he cannot like a thing unless everyone else likes it first!"
Alongside these stars of the first magnitude, mention should be made of little Sonya, Anatol Kuragin, Dolokhov, Petya Rostov, old Prince Bolkonsky, Dcnisov, and so many others! . . . When, how, did Tolstoy describe them? Impossible to tell exactly. Each of their portraits is composed of a thousand separate strokes scattered throughout the book. The author docs, it is true, have occasional recourse to internal monologue to document his characters' states of mind, but most of the time he suggests their thoughts by an attitude or gesture, or the play of facial expressions caught on the wing. Ilis people never merely smile, they do so "with sudden good-will," "condescendingly," "with a touch of melancholy." The word "shade" is often found in his writing, and proves the importance he attaches to the exact translation of an emotion. After his father's death, Pierre is received by Anna Pavlovna "with a shade of mournfulncss," Prince Andrey speaks of happiness "with a shade of bitterness and irony," in Nikolenka's love for his uncle there is "a barely perceptible shade of contempt."
In spite of the monumental dimensions of the book, this preoccupation with detail never deserts Tolstoy for one moment. When lie shows the surgeon coming out of the operating tent, he notes that "he held his cigar carefully, between thumb and little finger, for fear of staining it"; Kutuzov, talking to the tsar, has "a trembling of his upper lip"; when Anatol talks to Princess Marya, he "slides one finger through the buttonhole of his uniform." Minor characters arc identified by some external feature that recurs whenever they appear. The first thing the author notes about the little Princess Bolkonsky* is "her short upper lip, slightly down-shadowed." This "short lip" is mentioned four or five times, and after the young woman's death the angel on the monument over her grave is also given "an imperceptibly raised upper lip." The lovely Elena, Pierre's wife, always appears with "her smile," "her plump hand," "her marble shoulders and throat." Dolokhov is identified by his light blue eyes and the lines of his mouth, the upper lip of which "came down far over the large lower lip, forming an acute angle." Vercshagin, a Moscow merchant turned over to the mob by Rostopchin, has for distinguishing marks his "fox fur jacket," his "shaved skull," his "long thin neck" and "frail hands." Bilibin the diplomat is noteworthy for the mobility of his face: "Sometimes his brow would be grooved by broad wrinkles and his eyebrows would rise, and sometimes they lowered and deep furrows formed in his checks."
One must not conclude that Tolstoy freezes his characters into immobility by this process. On the contrary, believing that human personality is multiple, dynamic and changing, he contrives to show his people in different lights according to their surroundings. Prince
Andrey is not the same in "society" as when he is alone with Pierre, or with Bilibin the diplomat, or among the officers of his regiment, or in his father's presence, or escorting his sister, or with Natasha. Each time we see him through the eyes of the people with him, and discover a new side of his character. But these psychological fluctuations do not affect the rock on which the individual's entire personality is built, always perceptible beneath the waves that occasionally engulf it. Even when the foundation contradicts itself, it docs not cease to exist. What gives so much life to the protagonists in War and Peace is that they are all defined in terms of each other.
"Returning to Moscow from the army," writes Tolstoy, "Nicholas Rostov was welcomed by his close relativesf as the best of sons, a hero, the irreplaceable Nikolenka; by the other members of his family as a pleasant, easy-going and wcll-manncrcd young man; by his friends as a good-looking lieutenant of hussars, a first-rate dancer and one of the most eligible young men in Moscow."
Prince Andrey, on the other hand, is much sought-after by the high society of St. Petersburg: "The pro-reform party opened their doors wide to him—first, because he was noted for his intelligence and culture, and then, becausc by freeing his serfs he had acquired tire reputation of being a liberal. The discontented old men sought his favor because, for them, he was first and foremost his father's son and as such, they thought, he must disapprove of the reformers. The ladies welcomed him with open arms because he was an eligible bachelor, rich, notorious and surrounded by an aura of romance because he had been thought dead at the front and had just lost his wife."
Among Kutuzov's staff officers, "Prince Andrey had two conflicting reputations. Some—a minority—realized that he was an unusual person and cxpected great tilings from him, listened to him, admired and imitated him. . . . Others—a majority—did not like him and considered him insufferably haughty-, cold and unfriendly."
Through a thousand observations of this type Tolstoy creates a definite atmosphere around each of his characters. Each one is caught up in an extremely subtle net of sympathies and antipathies. His slightest gesture resounds in several other consciousnesses. Prince Andrey, Pierre, Natasha and Princess Marya are not flat images, always seen from the same side; the reader moves around them and feels their interdependence with all the other characters. They all obey the law of relativity.
The historical figures are painted "in motion" like the fictional
f Italics in this and the following two quotations by the author.
ones. For them, too, the author chooses a few physical traits that recur, rather like a leitmotiv, and assist in their rapid identification: Napoleon—his rounded belly and "plump hands"; Kutuzov—his sleepiness, his fat neck, his one eye and his scar. But although Tolstoy remains remarkably impartial toward the products of his own imagination, he loses every semblance of self-control when Napoleon enters the scene. The rage he felt long ago in the crypt at the Invalides in Paris pours into his brain. Unconsciously, the veteran of Sevastopol is wreaking his vengeance on the French, pen in hand. His descriptive method serves him admirably in this work of demolition. To clear himself of the chargc of partiality, he protests that lie "invented nothing," that he gleaned "every detail" from contemporary memoirs. No doubt; but the only details he selected from the memoirs were those that would make the emperor of the French appear ridiculous. The description of Napoleon performing his toilette, for example, is exact: his "fat and furry chest," his "snorting," his "yellow, bloated" face, his expression, "Go to it!" "Harder!" while his manservant is rubbing him with cologne water—all arc confirmed by Las Cases, but the scene took place during the sinister period of idleness of St. Helena, not on the eve of Borodino. Never mind! At all costs, the Latin tyrant, the profaner of Russian soil, must be made to appear grotesque. These few strokes, artfully applied, make him into an aging, fatuous creature whose allegedly statesmanlike stratagems misfire because of a head-cold, who never forgets for one moment to act out his little play before his aides-de-camp, his soldiers, his mirror. No psychological intuition, no military genius, nothing but nervous twitches. The fate of the world hanging upon one man's digestion. "An insignificant tool of history who never, anywhere, even in exile, displayed any human dignity," one reads in War and Peace. And what he didn't put in his book, Tolstoy found room for in his diary—there, he calls Napoleon a "poor rider," a "robber of paintings and statues" who delights in strolling through battlefields, where he "thrills at the sight of the corpses and wounded men." "He is not interesting, but the crowds around him are, those he affects. At the beginning, he is narrow-minded but fair, in comparison with Murat and Barras; then groping, complacent and happy; and finally, insane: wanting to take the daughter of the Caesars into his bed. Total madness, senility and incompetence at St. Helena. The false grandeur simply because the field of action was so great, but as soon as it began to shrink —incompetence. And a shameful death!"1' Next to this bloodthirsty monster, Alexander appears an angel of light: intelligent, kindly, sensitive, from the height of his great power he is seeking his way, he has set out in quest of virtue.10 Where, in this portrait, is the scheming, weak and fickle prince of whom Pushkin wrote, "In appearance and in action, he was a clown"?11
The person who profited most by this patriotic distortion of the truth was not Alexander I, as it happens, but Kutuzov. The superiority of the old one-eyed general drowsing through his staff meetings lies in the fact that, unlike Napoleon, he does not take himself for a genius, he is not eternally posing for the historians of future generations, he never makes a plan, he never gives an order; he lets himself be carried along by events. "He plainly had no patience with book-learning and intelligence, he had some other and more decisive form of knowledge," wrote Tolstoy. And he possessed that "decisive" knowledge because he was Russian and therefore had a sense of fatality. At the opposite pole from Napoleon, he is not a "strong personality," but an incarnation of the people; hence his modesty, his habit of taking his time, his superhuman sixth sense. "The people, by strange ways, chose him [Kutuzov] because they rccognizcd that the old man who had fallen out of favor possessed this sense; they chose him against the will of the tsar, and made him their representative in a people's war. It is this sense alone that raised him to the position of supreme power, in which, as commander-in-chief, he strove with all his might, not to slay and exterminate, but to save and spare." Here the writer, the great exponent of the "shade," is abruptly transformed into a hagiographcr. Chauvinism gives him a heavy hand. Everything is rose-colored 011 the Russian side, black on the French.
But he regains his stride when he turns from his critique of great men to describe great events. His battles are not observed and commented upon by a placid historian; they arc lived—by three, five, a score of frightened, exhausted, uncomprehending participants. On all sides, the fearful din, death, helplessness, incoherence. Orders are lost on the way or arrive too late. The fate of an engagement hangs on one battery which may or may not hold out, a bridge which may or may not blow up, an officer who will or will not dare to lead his men out under fire. One bridgehead resists and another gives way, by chance. Nothing ever happens according to plan. And after it is all over the generals invent logical causes for the uncontrollable movements of their men. The truth is that victory and defeat are determined by the morale of the army, that is, the people. And the Russian people are fighting to defend their desecrated soil. Therefore, they cannot help but prevail over their enemies: "Pierre saw that the latent heat—as they say in physics—of patriotism animated everyone he saw and explained why they were calmly and almost gaily going about their preparations to die."
Thousands of soldiers file past the reader over the ruined roads—the wounded on their stretchers, limping infantry', straying cavalry, peasant militiamen in white blouses with a cross on their caps: the people on the march, countless, unconscious, obscure, overpowering. It should l>e noted, however, that they do not appear until late in the book. Throughout nine-tenths of it, Tolstoy is hardly aware of their existence. Guided by caste, he chooses his heroes among the aristocracy: senior officers, socialites, landowners. And, on the whole, his people arc not tormented by democratic aspirations. The daydreams of Prince Audrey and Pierre Bezukhov are mild stuff in comparison with the liberal passion that was agitating some men's minds in Russia as early as the beginning of the nineteendi century. Well might Tolstoy say, "A work can not be a success unless one loves its governing idea, and the idea I loved in War and Peace was the people": of its two thousand pages, only two hundred arc concerned with commoners.12 It is as though the author had suddenly been reminded of their existence at the last moment. 'They burst upon the scene, a thick gray flood: the townspeople of Moscow, soldiers, peasants, heroic partisans. . . . Pierre Bezukhov, as a prisoner, meets the real Russia, the Russia of the eternal muzhik, in the remarkable Platon Karatayev. And even Platon Karatayev did not exist in the first two versions of Book IV of War and Peace. lie sprang to life in the third draft—patient, laughing, tireless, talking in proverbs, "able to do everything, neither very badly nor very well." 'Through him Pierre realizes that there is "an inner freedom that is not controlled by circumstance." Earlier, wandering through the deserted streets of Moscow, he had told himself that "wealth, power, life, all the things men organize and protect with such care, are valueless except for the joy with which one is able to abandon them." The Russian people strengthened this conviction. Another expression of their force is the partisan, Tikhon Sherbaty, robust, brave and skillful, able to split a wooden post with one blow of his ax or whittle a graceful spoon. Moral and physical resistance combined. An alloy stronger than bullets and bayonets.
The heroes whose names have gone down in history seem so tiny, alongside these unsung warriors. Inspired by this thought, Tolstoy turned his back upon the romanticism of Alexandre Dumas and Walter Scott and proclaimed himself the enemy of all great men. 'Throughout the book he scattered challenges to the idol-makers: "The history- book hero does not command the mass; he is constantly commanded by them." (Volume III, Book XIII, Chapter I.) "In historical chronicles, the so-called great men are mere labels used to designate events but having no closer relation to them than labels do." (Volume I, Book IX, Chapter I.) "The king is history's slave." (Volume II, Book IX,
Chapter I.) "Throughout this entire period Napoleon was like a child holding a pair of ribbons attached to the inside of a coach and imagining that he is driving the horses." (Volume II, Book XIII, Chapter X.)
In his determination to debunk traditional history, Tolstoy was edging back to the ideas he held in his University of Kazan days. As the historian Shcbalsky has said, this is "historical nihilism." But since individuals have no control over events, how does one explain war? After all, the people are not the ones who arc lusting to cut each other's throats! An embarrassing question for the novelist. To admit that Napoleon is capable of setting a massacre in motion is to admit that he possesses some power over history, and the attractive theory of the total ineffectiveness of the hero no longer holds water. To insist that a lone man cannot "compel five hundred thousand to die" is to admit that the five hundred thousand have determined, more or less consciously, to invade a neighboring country; and so another, no less attractive theory —that of the fundamental goodness of the people—must also fall by the wayside. Tolstoy took the easy way out of his dilemma in his article, Some Words about War and Peace: fatality. "Why did millions of men kill each other, when everyone has known since the beginning of time that it is morally and physically wrong to do so?" he writes. "Because the thing was so inevitable that in doing so they were obeying the same elementary zoological law as the bees when they kill cach other in the autumn, and all male animals who exterminate each other."
Having thus disposed of one problem, the author fails to see that another danger is lurking in its place. His opposition to personality worship drives him into apersonality worship. In refusing the unqualified deification of a man, he is forced to accept the unqualified deification of the people. The attention to shading, so dear to him in his study of character, is utterly lacking in his study of ideas. Suddenly, with the turn of a page, the novelist becomes a polemist, a moralist, a strategist. But the moment he forgets his dissertations and returns to his story, the spell that was momentarily snapped begins to work again ... a "Russian spell," in his own words. It would be interesting to count the number of times the word "Russian" occurs in War and Peace. The army marches "with a murmur of Russian voiccs and Russian thoughts," Natasha danccs "Russian-style," the diplomat Bilibin describes the campaign in French, "but with that essentially Russian candor that allows room for pitiless self-criticism and mockery."
Tolstoy was deeply attached to the ideas in War and Peace. But it is not his ideas that have guaranteed the posterity of the book; it is the fact that, in spite of the historical, military and philosophical considerations that encumber it, the book is a hymn to man and nature whose like lias not been seen in the literature of the world. If lolstoy could give such a convincing portrayal of Natasha's delight at the ball, the discussions of the German generals, Prince Andrcy's luminous musings as he lies on his back under the infinite sky, the jokes of soldiers on bivouac, the night-whisperings of young girls in front of an open window, the exuberant bounds of hunting dogs on the scent, the peasants' rebellion, the heroic thoughts of Nicholas Rostov, the somnolence of Kutuzov at staff meetings, Pierre's wedded bliss, Speransky's artificial laugh, a masquerade party in the country, a hair-raising troika race, the face of a little girl painted with a burnt-cork mustache, the icerie rites of the masons, Moscow in flames or the countryside under the snow, it is because his overwhelming love of life enabled him to experience every expression of it with equal intensity. And he treasures this many-faceted existence even more deeply when it is simple: to him, everything that is close to nature is good. lie respects the attraction between man and woman, he respects marriage and the family. He admires ordinary people, soldiers and peasants, with their danccs and dirt, their own peculiar speech and their bravery. The person in the book who best understands the sense of human destiny is not a scholar or philosopher but the illiterate Platon Karatavev. And the farther one strays from this bucolic reality, the more deeply enmeshed one becomes in the artificial and lecherous coils of the lords of society. There, in the glimmer of the candclabras, souls do not ring true. Tolstoy has nothing but contempt for these empty-headed puppets. "Man was built to be happy," thinks Pierre Bezukhov; "he carries his happiness inside him, in the satisfaction of his natural desires. . . . There is nothing really terrifying in life. . . . There is no situation in which man cannot be perfectly happy and free."
Begun as a novel of the aristocracy and completed as a national epic, the gigantic and disparate work seems unfinished in some places.! Even though it was read over a hundred times, by the author, his wife and professional proofreaders, the text bristles with errors. It is a little
t At the provocation of the critics who had complained of his digressions, Tolstoy deleted all the philosophical considerations at the head of each section of War and Peace, when preparing the third edition in 1873. The chapters on the theory of warfare were relegated to an appendix at the end, the long passages in French were replaced by Russian translations, and the hook was divided into four parts instead of six. This order was maintained in the fourth edition (1880), hut for the fifth (1886), Countess Tolstoy, with Strakhov's assistance, rcplaccd all the deleted or displaced passages and the conversations and letters in French: it had become clear that the style of the work, and even its meaning, had suffered from such brutal cutting. Thus, except for the division into four parts, which was retained, the book reverted to its 1868-69 form. Four more editions were published during Tolstoy's lifetime.
silver icon that Princess Marya gives her brother Andrey as he is going off to war, but it is a little golden icon that the French soldiers remove from his neck when they pick him up wounded at Austcrlitz. Natasha Rostov is thirteen years old in August 1805, fifteen in 1806 and sixteen in 1809. After gambling away his money late in December, Nicholas Rostov leaves Moscow in mid-November. Minor characters change their first names from one chapter to the next. Pierre Bczukhov sees the comet of 1812 in February 1811. . . . But the very fact that most readers fail to notice these lapses proves the power of Tolstoy's art as a storyteller.
His style is perfectly suited to his purpose. As his sole aim is to seize life in all its fullness and diversity, he pays no heed to the harmony of his sentences: he spins them out, cripples them with adjectives, loads them down with subordinates. His superabundant conjunctions are by no means a result of carelessness, but rather of a painstaking search for exactitude. By piling up his modifiers, the author laboriously but inevitably approaches the impression he wants to produce. He is like a painter trying to cover a wall with a three-haired miniaturist's brush. Nose to the canvas, he lays on his infinitesimal strokes with myopic doggedness, covcrs them over, sharpens them, scratches them out, puts them in again; and when he has finished, the myriad dots of color converge, at a distance, into a fresco. The margins of his drafts are full of trial adjectives, as a painter mixes trial colors on the edge of his palette. To portray Napoleon giving the order to begin the battle of Austerlitz, he writes on a sheet of paper: "firm, refreshed, intelligent and light- hearted"; "healthy, gay, refreshed"; "light-hearted, happy, bright"; "with something like a reflection of well-earned contentment on his face." Then, with the help of these guidelines, he builds his sentence: "Feeling refreshed and light-hearted, in that happy mood in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds, he [Napoleon] mounted his horse and rode out on the field. . . .His cold face expressed the confident and merited happiness of young lovers whose passion is requited."13 Or he may jot down impressions on the wing, lest he forget the turn he wants the chapter to take later on: "Sonya, the blood rushing to her face. Her dark eyes of a faithful dog, thick braids wound around her face like a hound's ears . . . The old lackey . . . The old birch with drooping, motionless branches . . . Sound of the hunting horn . . . Baying of the dogs . . ." And from these gropings emerge the admirable pages of the Rostovs' hunt.
In the dialogue, every character's language corresponds to his social position, temperament, associates and age. The landscape is never set up behind the characters like a cyclorama, but reflects their moods and takes part in their action. rlTie impact of heart on heart, army on army: when he looks up from the last page of the book, the reader feels lost, as though the thread of his own life had been cut. And yet he is not blinded, he has had no revelation, heard no prophecy. Here, Tolstoy is not a visionary; he is not waving a torch above the abyss, like Dostoyev- sky; lie does not turn his people inside-out like gloves, he does not scare us with our own shadows. Ilis exploration never goes beyond what is directly perceptible to ordinary mortals. But he responds more intensely than ordinary mortals to the appeal of beings and things. Instead of bringing us closer to the Beyond, he brings us closcr to the Ilere-and- Now. Men and plants, stones and animals are 011 the same plane for him. He observes a piece of carrion as attentively as a flower. The fatigue in the eyes of an aged horse is as significant to him for the comprehension of the universe as the fatuous conceit shining in die captain's face. The paradox is that this pantheistic process of creation, binding together pure and impure, great and small, beautiful and ugly, animate and inanimate, suffuses the entire work with the majesty of a second Genesis.
5. The Night at Arzamas
The long and laborious convalescence l>cgan: after being delivered of War and Peace, Tolstoy started reading gluttonously. Ilis meditations in the course of writing his book, on human destiny, the role of the individual in history and the comparative merits of reason and instinct naturally turned him in the direction of the philosophers. He devoured Kant and Schopenhauer—and was blinded by the latter, then little- known in Russia. How could Fet dare to say that the German thinker was only "so-so"? Never had anyone written anything more profound or true about the sufferings of man, struggling with all his "will to live" against the forces of destruction—or about chastity, the negation of the species, as the means to perfect happiness. Ah, the bitter vigor of this Teuton, his savage pessimism, his aspirations to oriental serenity.
"Do you know what my summer has been?" Tolstoy said to Fet. "One continuous roar of approval of Schopenhauer, a series of spiritual joys such as I have never known before. I wrote awav for his complete works and I have read them and am reading them again. Certainly, no student ever learned as much in his entire course of study as I have in this one summer."
And, true enough, he was rather like an old student who had fallen behind in his work and was filling in the gaps in his education, a chunk at a time, first-come-first-served, in greedy gulps. He momentarily thought of translating Schopenhauer into Russian so that his compatriots could discover him, too, and even asked Fet to help him with this labor of love; but in the end, he contented himself with buying a portrait of the great man and hanging it up in his study.* Now that
•Thirteen years later, in 1882, he made a violent attack upon Schopenhauer's pessimism in Confession. "Pessimism, and that of Schopenhauer in particular, has always seemed to me to be not only a sophism, but a form of nonsense, and a vulgar form at that," he wrote, in 1889, to Edward Rod.
his own characters had abandoned him, he was thinking more and more of the mystery of lifc-aftcr-dcath. "lie engaged in long and laborious meditations," wrote Sonya. "Often he said his brain hurt him, some painful process was going on inside it, everything was over for him, it was time for him to die."1
His mind had become habituated to such sornl>cr preoccupations: there had been the death of his brother Nicholas nine years before, which he still remembered with mixed feelings of grief and horror; there were the more recent deaths of Dyakov's wife, of Elizabeth Tolstoy (Alexandra's sister), of his father-in-law, Dr. Behrs, in 1868; and lastly, of course, there were the deaths of the characters of War and Peace—such as Prince Andrey, into whom he had put a great deal of himself. Had he been worn out or in poor health, he might have accepted the idea of his destruction more readily. But at the peak of physical and intellectual power he had now reached, his whole being shuddered at the thought of the gaping void. His expanding lungs, the powerful, regular thud of his heart, his iron muscles, the amorous resources of his loins, his keen mind, the success of War and Peace, the land he owned and the land he planned to buy, Sonya, the children, the house, the dogs, horses, peasants, trees, everything conspired to make him unable to accept death. To be sure, there were his headaches and his stomach pains, but these were the minute crcakings of a prodigiously well-functioning machine. What was there to worry about? Of coursc: the very fact that he had nothing to worry about! He was afraid of being stabbed in the back. I lis fear was animal, visccral, chilling. It came upon him all of a sudden—he began to tremble, sweat broke out on his forehead, he felt a presence behind his back. Then the jaws of the vise loosened, the shadow passed on, life tumbled in upon him, the tiniest vein in his body rejoiced at the new surge of blood. But he knew that one day it would come back.
Perhaps it was in order to fortify his defenses against this peril that he determined to buy still more land—as though by enlarging his domain, increasing his fortune, sending his roots down yet deeper into the world of the living, he might find security against death. He read a notice in a newspaper of an estate for sale in the government of Penza, and suddenly decided to go there and negotiate the purchase. He had a little money 011 hand from the sale of War and Peace. On August 31, 1869 he took the train to Moscow (a line had recently been put through from Tula to the capital), and from there he set out, still by train, for Nizhny-Novgorod, where he arrived on September 2. For the remainder of the trip, some two hundred and thirty miles, he had to hire a coach. His favorite servant, Sergey Arbuzov, was with him—a cheer- fill boy, whose excitement at the sights of the country they were crossing communicated itself to his master. Looking out and laughing together, they rolled southward all day long.
At dusk, 'l'olstoy began to doze. His head was heavy, yet he was not sorry to have set out on this long ramble: "I was very anxious," lie later wrote, "to increase our property, and to do so in the cleverest way possible, that is, better than anyone else. ... I had made up my mind that income from crops or sale of timber ought to cover the purchase price, and so the farm itself should cost nothing. I was looking for a seller who was an imbecile with no business sense and it seemed to me that I had found one." As he was calculating his coup, he was suddenly frozen by dread. The night, the jolting, the ghosts of ragged trees along the road. Yasnaya Polyana at the other end of the earth: five hundred miles away! What was he doing here? And what if he fell ill? Far from his home, his family, Sonya! To keep up his spirits, he exchanged a few- words with his servant. But the boy laughed at everything, and his youth and excitability merely deepened Tolstoy's gloom. lie suddenly wanted to be indoors, sec a lighted lamp, a samovar, faces. . . . They were coining into Arzamas. He decided to spend the night there.
The entire town was asleep—a silent, compact, inhospitable wall. The horses' bells rang out harshly between the crowded white houses. At last the inn, with its signpost, big dusty courtyard, dark windows. Sergey leaped out, pounded on the door, woke a servant snoring in the entry- way. "The man," wrote Tolstoy, "had a spot on one cheek and this spot seemed somehow horrible to me."t He asked for a room. The doorkeeper showed him the only one in the establishment. He was checked in the doorway by an uneasy foreboding. It was a large room, square and white. "I recall that I was particularly disturbed by the fact that it was square." The doors and woodwork were painted dark red, a color of dried blood. A table in Karelian birch, an old imitation- leather divan, not very clean, two candles with smoking wicks. While Sergey busied himself with the samovar, Tolstoy stretched out on the divan, a traveling pillow under his head and a rug over his legs. Through the fog in his head he heard the boy calling him to drink his tea, but he no longer wanted to get up or talk or drink; his eyes closed, he let himself drift off to sleep.
lie awoke a short time later, in an empty, black, unfamiliar room, full of the rancid smell of burnt-out candles. "Where am I? Where am
t Eleven years Infer, in 1880, Tolstoy described this night in an unfinished story from which most of the auotations in this chaptcr have been taken. Hut fearing his readers' incredulity, he did not dare to present the text as a description of an actual experience, and entitled it Notes 0/ a Mad/nan.
1 going? What am I running away from?" The questions fell upon him like a flock of ravens. He went out into the hall. Sergey was asleep on a bench, with one arm hanging down, next to the doorkeeper with the sinister spot on his cheek. "I had hoped to get rid of the thing that was tormenting me in the room," wrote Tolstoy. "But it came out behind me and everything turned black. I became more and more frightened." He usually managed to calm himself by making a conscious effort to think rationally. But this time all the tricks he tried in order to regain his self-control only increased his terror.
" This is ridiculous/ I told myself. 'Why am I so depressed? What am I afraid of?'
" 'Of me,' answered Death. 'I am here.'
"A cold shudder ran over my skin. Yes, Death. It will come, it is already here, even though it has nothing to do with me now. . . . My whole being ached with the need to live, the right to live, and, at the same moment, I felt death at work. And it was awful, being torn apart inside. I tried to shake off my terror. I found the stump of a candle in a brass candlestick and lighted it. The reddish flainc, the candle, shorter than the candlestick, all told me the same story: there is nothing in life, nothing exists but death, and death should not be!"
He tried to think about his project, his money, Yasnaya Polyana, his wife, his four children, War and Peace, what he would write next—but they all seemed utterly pointless to him. Horror spread over him, mixed with a deep despair, "as though I were about to vomit." A geometrical horror, implacable, "a square, white and red horror," the horror of the box. What else is a room but a big coffin?
He went back into the hall, where he heard the regular breathing of the two sleepers, and was amazed at their indifference. How could they sleep with Death among them? He was the only person awake on a sinking ship. The boat was going down and the crew were snoring. "I was in agony, but I felt dry and cold and mean. There was not one drop of goodness in me. Only a hard, calm anger against myself and what had made me. . . ." He went back to the room and lay down again. "But what made me? They say God did. . . . God. ... I remembered my prayers. ... I began to pray. ... I invented orisons. ... I crossed myself, I fell on my face, looking sideways for fear that someone might see me. . . ." As he muttered, "Our Father which art in Heaven," he imagined death entering him through every pore of his skin, weakening and rotting his organs, binding his tongue, darkening his brain. No more! ... He rushed out, shook his servant and the doorkeeper; ordered the carriage harnessed. He would not stay one minute longer in that cursed inn for all the money in the world!
While Sergey stumbled out to the stable, he let himself fall onto the couch, closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep. When he awoke it was broad daylight. Sergey, seeing him asleep, had not dared to disturb him. The white and red room had lost its mystery. Tolstoy, rested and calm, could hardly believe he had had his nightmare. A glass of scalding tea and he was himself again.
On the road his dread returned, but with less force; he managed to control it. "I felt that some misfortune had befallen me; I might forget it for a moment, but it was always there, at the back of my mind, and it had me in its power. ... I went on living as before, but the fear of this despair never left mc again."
On September 4, when he arrived at Saransk, he wrote to his wife, "How are you and the children? Has anything happened? For the last two days I have been wild with worry. . . . Something extraordinary happened to me at Arzamas. It was two o'clock in the morning, I was very tired, I was sleepy, but I felt perfectly all right. And suddenly I was seized by a despair, a fear, a terror such as I have never known before. I shall tell you the details later. . . ."
He looked at the property for sale and thought it very handsome, but did not have the courage to buy it after his ominous revelations at Arzamas. Everything he saw was tinged with ash. lie had only one thought, to hurry home to Yasnaya Polyana. There, at least, on his own land, with his own furniture and family around him, his life would recover its meaning, or so he trusted. That was his home port, his haven of hope. When he saw the two entrance towers, he felt saved. Sonya rushed into his arms.
Some time afterward he learned that his old friend Vasfly Pctrovich Botkin, the publicist, had died at his home on October 4 during a soiree musicale to which he had invited a great many people. How strange it was—all those preparations, the invitations sent out all over town, the orchestra, the gilded chairs, the baskets of flowers, decisions to make about the buffet, the wines, one's clothes, the seating arrangements, and, all of a sudden—blackout. And how would he die? Leafing through his notebook, he found some lines he had written four years before: "I was expecting some people I was fond of. . . . They arrived and were exactly as I had hoped they would be. I was happy. That evening I went to bed. I was in that half-waking state in which superficial agitation dies away and the soul begins to speak clcarly. My soul was striving toward something, wanting something. 'What can I want?' I asked myself in surprise. 'My friends arc here. Isn't that what I needed to regain my peace of mind? No, that is not it. . . . What, then?' I
went through everything in my mind. . . . Nothing could satisfy this desire in me. And the desire persisted, it still persists and indeed it is the most important and strongest thing in my soul. I desire what does not exist in this world. But it exists somewhere, since I desire it. Where . . . ? 'I'o be reborn, to die. That is the peace I yearn for, we all yearn for. . . Yesterday he was courting death, today he was running away from it. But isn't that the very essence of man, in every circumstance, to put hope in his fear and fear in his hope? For the rest of his life, he was to live like a man who had been hit by a bullet that cannot be extracted. It is always there, lodged in one's head. Impossible to forget it, although one hardly feels it at all.
Winter came, snow enveloped the house, the family huddled together around the glowing stoves and, little by little, Leo Tolstoy regained his confidence in the future.
PART V
Conflict
1. Interim
"All this winter," Tolstoy wrote in February 1870, "I have done nothing but sleep, play bc/.ique, ski, skate and run, but mostly lie in bed."1
This vision of vegetation was not strictly accurate. At forty-two as at twenty, Tolstoy was incapable of doing nothing for a week on end. Between whirls around the frozen pond, where he made S-turns and cut figure-eights, gliding gracefully along with his beard streaming in the wind, he began reading again. That year the objcct of his curiosity was the theater: he read and reread Shakespeare—for whom he had scant affection—Goethe, Moliere, Pushkin and Gogol, and planned to write a play on the reign of Peter the Great. However, when he began to look into the period more deeply, in Ustryalov's History of Peter the Great, he realized that a novel would give him greater scope. He immediately started making notes and drafting outlines, and even dashed off a chapter. But with the first ray of sunshine he dropped his pen and fled outdoors. His place was with the peasants. There was so much to be done on the estate in the springtime! "I received your letter," he wrote to Fet 011 May 11, 1870, "as I caine in from work, covered with sweat and carrying my ax and spade, and thus a thousand miles from any thought of art." A month later, "Thanks be to God, this summer I am as stupid as a horse. I work, chop, spade, mow and, luckily for me, do not give one thought to that awful lit-tra-tyure or those awful lit-try folk." Nor did he give a thought to politics. The noise of the world died away at his doorstep. Neither the Franco- Prussian war of 1870 nor the Commune of Paris troubled his meditations. He did occasionally open his notebook, but only to inscribe philosophical maxims or make childish drawings to illustrate his Reader. Sonya, distressed by his inability to concentrate, blessed the return of the rainy season that drove him back into his study. She so
wanted to relive those arduous years of the creation of War and Peace.
That autumn, she thought her prayers had been answered. "Now our life has become very sober, we work all day long," she wrote to her brother. "Leo sits behind a stack of lx)oks, portraits and pictures, frowning and reading, examining, taking notes. In the evening, when the children are in bed, he tells me his plans and what he wants to write. . . . He has chosen the period of Peter the Great."2 And a month later, "I think he is going to write another epic like War and Peace."3
She was wrong. Tolstoy suddenly abandoned his charactcrs, almost before they were born. He didn't feel them, he couldn't see them, it was hard for him to imagine the world in which their story unfolded. To Strakhov, who was pressing him for the beginning of his next novel to publish in The Dawn, he sadly replied that he could not promise anything: "I am in a most exasperating state of mind, with wild schemes, doubts of myself and hard mental labor all intermingled. Perhaps this is the prelude to a period of happy and confident work, and perhaps, on the contrary, I shall never write another word!"4
A strong feeling of intellectual companionship had bound him to this correspondent after Strakhov's glowing article on War and Peace. Also, he was delighted with a study Strakhov had just published in The Dawn on the position of women. According to its author, woman was entitled by her physical and moral beauty to be considered the queen of creation, as long as she did not forsake her mission. Bom to give delight and bear children, she became a monster the moment she turned aside from the path God had traced for her. Feminism was a crime against nature and it was man's duty to see that his helpmeet did not succumb to this temptation. Tolstoy was ready to enlist in Stra- khov's cause, but pointed out that some women might be useful to society even though they were not wives or mothers: nurses, nannies, maiden aunts, unoccupied widows, "all those who look after other people's children," and even "loose women!" Tie had not yet developed his theory of prostitution as an attack upon human dignity. In 1870, the man who was to fulminate a few years later against the ignominy of paid love (in Resurrection) calmly wrote to his new friend Strakhov that "prostitutes" were necessary for the safeguard of the family. Without them, in the cities, where large numbers of bachelors congregated, "few- wives and daughters would remain pure." Without them, most husbands would eventually be unable to put up with their wives. "These poor creatures have existed since time immemorial and they always will," he said, "and in my opinion it would be impious and unintelligent to pretend that God was wrong to tolerate this state of affairs and Christ had been wrong to pardon one of them." When he read his letter over, how-
ever, his claims did not seem quite .so self-evident, and he decided not to send it.
While he was thus meditating upon the role of women in general, his own wife was watching for the rebirth of his inspiration. "1'oday, for the first time, he began to write," she noted in her diary on Decernl>er 9, 1870. "I cannot understand what is going on in his head during his hours of inactivity. His lack of direction is a great trial to him. He is ashamed of it, not only with me but with the servants and everyone else. . . . Sometimes he thinks he is losing his mind, and his fear of insanity is so intense that I am terrified when he tells me about it afterward." Tiptoeing back and forth before his study door, she yearned, as though for manna from heaven, to see the pages that illustrious hand would pass out to her to copy. She was eager to do something useful but she did not dare to interfere, for fear of disturbing the work in gestation. Days passed, nothing camc, she grew impatient. Suddenly, instead of handing her the opening chapters of a novel, he announced that he was going to learn Greek. She thought he was joking. But he meant it. He sent for a theological student from Moscow to tcach him the rudiments of the language. From the first day, the forty-two-year-old pupil threw himself into Greek grammar with a passion, pored over dictionaries, drew up vocabularies, tacklcd the great authors. In spite of his headaches, he learned quickly. In a few weeks he had outdistanced his teacher. He sight-translated Xenophon, reveled in Homer, discovered Plato and said the originals were like "spring-water that sets the teeth 011 edge, full of sunlight and impurities and dust-motes that make- it seem even more pure and fresh," while translations of the same texts were as tasteless as "boiled, distilled water." Sometimes he dreamed in Greek at night. He imagined himself living in Athens; as he tramped through the snow of Yasnaya Polyana, sinking in up to his calves, his head was filled with sun, marble and geometry. Watching him changing overnight into a Greek, his wife was torn between admiration and alarm. "There is clearly nothing in the world that interests him more or gives him greater pleasure than to learn a new Greek word or puzzle out some expression he has not met before," she complaincd. "I have questioned several people, some of whom have taken their degree at the university. To hear them talk, Lyovochka has made unbelievable progress in Greek."5 He himself felt rejuvenated by this diet of ancient wisdom. "Now I firmly believe," he said to Fet, "that 1 shall write 110 more gossipy twaddle of the War and Peace type."
He sententiously proclaimed to Sonya, whose eves bulged at his words, "Writing is easy. The hard thing is not to write." "He wants to write something pure and elegant, from which not one word could be- removed," she noted, "like the works of ancient Greek literature or art."8 He had half a mind to write directly in the language of Homer; after all, at the end of a few months of study he had held his own in an argument with Professor Leontyev of the University of Moscow and had even convinced him that he had made mistakes in translation. But in the end, such an undertaking, carricd out at such a pace, could only add to his fatigue, and Tolstoy's constitution began to suffer from his love of Greek. Sonya was pregnant, but he was the one who had dizzy spells, bouts of melancholy and irrational despair. She was more impatient to see him begin a new book than he was to see her delivered of her fifth child.
On February 12, 1871 she gave birth, after a difficult labor, to a deli- catc little girl with pale blue eyes, who was baptized Marya. Puerperal fever set in; the doctors feared for the mother's life. Tolstoy was badly frightened. Then her temperature fell, the pain diminished, and Sonya got up out of bed. Reassured to see her back on her feet again, Tolstoy returned to his worries over the state of his own health: rheumatism in one knee, a little hacking cough. ... He was not quite a hypochondriac, but he was always ready to believe himself seriously ill. It seemed to him that death was assuming all kinds of mysterious disguises in trying to worm its way into his body. "I am ill," he wrote to Fet, "but I don't know what's the matter with me; at any rate, it looks bad, or good, depending on one's attitude toward the end of it all."7 And to Urusov, "My health is poor. I have never been so depressed in all my life. I have lost all joy in living. . . "8 Persuaded that his hour was at hand, he began to treat his wife with increasing coolness. He had lost his appeal for her as well. "Something in us has broken," she wrote. "I have lost my faith in happiness and life. ... I am afraid of the future." And to drag him out of his apathy, she begged him to follow the doctors' advice and return to Samara for another kumys treatment, like the one he had had in 1862. Flattered to see that someone took his symptoms seriously, Tolstoy condescended to go. But, dreading a repetition of the nightmare of Arzamas on the way, lie took along his sixteen-year-old brother-in-law Stcpan Behrs, who had accompanied him to Borodino, and a manservant.
From Moscow they went to Nizhny-Novgorod by train, then down the Volga by steamboat. To reach the village of Karalyk they still had to travel eighty-five miles by road, from Samara. Upon reaching the Bashkir settlement, he was delighted to find that everyone remembered him, after nine years. He rented a felt tent from a mullah, which leaked at every seam. Their bed was a layer of hay, their furniture a chair, a table and one rickcty buffet. Hens cackled and pecked at the ground in the doorway, and tethered horses whinnied. 'ITie diet was strict. No vegetables, no ccrcals, no salt. They ate nothing but mutton, tearing it apart with their hands, and drank kumys. The fizzy, invigorating milk was brewed in leather vessels by the women of the tribe. There were a few Russian summer visitors, in more or less acute states of decline, trying to convince themselves of the rejuvenating powers of the beverage. Consumed at the rate of six bottles a day, it produced a mild and pleasant state of inebriation. At first, however, Tolstoy was sorry he had come. Around slx o'clock every evening, the mortal oppression of the night of Arzamas settled down on him. He could not repress the feeling, and relieved himself by describing it to his wife, with the perverse desire of tormenting her: "It is like a fever, a physical feeling of dread, a sensation I can only describe by saying that the soul becomes separated from the body. As for my mental anguish on your account, I
refuse to let it raise its head. I never think about you or the children,
* *
I forbid myself to think aljout them, for if I did I should head for home the next minute. I don't understand my condition at all: either I caught a cold in the kibitka the first chilly nights, or else this kumys is bad for me."0
His consolation was the discovery, among the "patients," of a professor of Greek at a theological seminary, with whom he read his beloved ancients in the original. Thanks to them, in spite of his discomfort, he began to find "a touch of Herodotus" about the Bashkirs. "If you keep slaving away at your Greek you'll never get well," was Sonya's irritated reply. "That is the cause of your anxiety and indifference to life here and now. It's not for nothing that Greek is a dead language: it puts the mind in a coma."10
Tolstoy was touched by her naive concern. Once again, at a distance, his wife seemed a priceless pearl. "Your letters do me more harm than my Greek, they disturb me so," he wrote. "I cannot read them without shedding tears, my whole body trembles, my heart begins to pound. You write anything that comes into your head, but for me every single yvord" is important, I read them over and over again. Right now I love you so much that I want to cry."
I Iowcvcr, when she had the curious idea of sending him a photograph of herself wearing a kerchief (her head had been shaved after the puerperal fever), he could not hide his disappointment: "You looked old, too thin, and pitiful. Besides, after a separation, a portrait, even of the face of the person one more than loves (as I do you) is always a disillusionment. In my imagination I see you the way you are,
• Tolstoy's italics.
only better. But reality is never perfect. However, now I am reconciled to your picture and it is a great source of comfort to me."
Was it the kumys, the open air or the rough life in a tent? Little by little, he regained his balance. The heat was debilitating, but it was good to sweat under his shirt. He became friendly with his neighbors; urged on by him, the Greek professor became a devotee of rope-skipping; a surrogate judge told him law-court anecdotcs; a young landowner entertained him with hunting stories. His old love revived, he bought a dog and a horse and began to amuse himself shooting bustard and wild duck—the steppe was full of them.
Then, with Stcpan Behrs, he toured the surrounding villages and went as far as Buzuluk, where a fair was l>cing held. All the tribes in the region were pouring into the trading post. Tolstoy mingled with Russian muzhiks, Cossacks, Bashkirs and Kirghiz in tribal costume, and talked to them all. Not far from there he met the members of a religious sect, the Molokhans, or milk drinkers; he also went to sec an old hermit who lived in a cave and talked interminably about Holy Scripture. Suddenly he decided to buy a piece of property in the district of Samara. The land was dirt-cheap, and the climate was so bracing! The whole family would come, every summer. And there just happened to be a 67co-acrc tract for sale. Price: twenty thousand rubles.! The temptation was too great. Tolstoy notified his wife that he was about to make a very good deal and gave instructions to the notary.!
Invigorated by the kumys and the option he had taken on the land, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana on August 2, 1871; but at the sight of his wife and children, all the good effects of his treatment seemed to go up in smoke. He was enveloped in tragic indifference. Confronted by his lifeless mask, Sonya did not know what to do. "Lyovochka keeps saying that everything is finished for him," she wrote to her sister on September 15, 1871, "that he is soon going to die, nothing gives him pleasure any more and he wants nothing more out of life."
But then someone appeared to boost his morale: his admirer Strakhov arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, and Tolstoy blossomed anew under his shower of praise. This visit marked the beginning of an exalted correspondence between the two. "A spirit of light radiates from you as from everything you write," said Strakhov to Tolstoy. "It is my only wish to know you are well and happily writing." And, "The more I see you, the fonder I grow of you. ... Be assured that even if you never write another word, you will still be the most original and profound author in all Russian literature. When the Russian empire is no more, new
♦ Or $56,600.
JThc sale was concluded on September 9 that same year (1871).
nations will learn what the Russians were by reading War and Peace." Or, "You will not often meet another man who loves and understands you as I do." He said that for him, Yasnaya Polyana was "like Mecca."11 Tolstoy, however, did not always agree with his admirer's theories. For Strakhov, who had just published a philosophical work entitled The World as a Totality, man was the center of creation and the most highly developed product of nature. "The zoological perfection of man, on which you lay such stress," wrote Tolstoy, "is extremely relative, for the very reason that man himself is the judge of it. The housefly is just as much the center and pinnacle of creation." Also, he could not agree that the goal of man was a sort of organic supremacy, as Strakhov claimed. In his opinion, man's purpose on earth was to strive to elevate his soul by obeying ethical laws, practicing the great religions (Christian or Buddhist) and seeking the good.
It was undoubtedly these ideas that led him back to his pedagogical schemes, which he had abandoned since 1863. While in Moscow in 1868, he had met Skyler, the American Consul there, who had told him about the teaching methods employed in his country and given him some textbooks: The First, Second and Third Readers. From 1870 to 1872, using them as a basis, Tolstoy worked on a series of Readers of his own. This work, seven hundred and fifty-eight pages long, is divided into four parts and contains two hundred short, casy-to-undcrstand stories (anecdotcs about Tolstoy's dogs, adaptations of Chinese and Persian tales, translations of Aesop's Fables, folk legends, episodes based on Les Mistrables, sample pages from Plutarch, ctc.). As a supplement to the literary section the author presented a new method for learning arithmetic. ("The last few days I have worn myself out trying to finish the section on arithmetic. I have finished multiplication and division and am almost done with fractions."12) He even developed a passion for astronomy, and spent whole nights examining the stars. This titanic labor in an unfamiliar field exhausted him. "If these articles have any merit, they will owe it to the simplicity and clarity of the drawing, the line—that is, the language,"13 he wrote to Strakhov. And to his aunt Alexandra, "As for the Reader, my ambitious dream is as follows: for two generations every Russian child, imperial prince or muzhik, should learn with this book, should receive his first impressions of poetry from it, and I, having written it, should be allowed to die in peace."14 As a friendly gesture, Strakhov offered to correct the proofs. Tolstoy hoped the Reader would bring in more money, which he needed to consolidate his family's position and buy more land. But he was afraid that professional teachers would be exasperated by the book.
which was so contrary to all their traditions. If he did not sell 3600 copies by the end of the year, it would be a "financial fiasco."
"When I brought out War and Peace," he wrote to Strakhov, "I knew the book was full of faults, but I was sure it would be exactly as successful as it was; now, publishing my Reader, I know it has hardly any faults and is far superior to every other textbook of the same type, but I am not expecting it to have anything like the success a textbook ought to have."16 He was right. Most critics were opposed to the "aberrant" educational system he advocated. His daring to condemn phonetic reading, which was just beginning to become popular in Russian schools, causcd much indignation. P. M. Polevoy, in the St. Petersburg News, said it was criminal to affirm that a pupil who was sincerely convinced that the earth was held up by "water and fish" showed sounder judgment than one who knew the earth turned on its axis but was incapable of understanding or explaining the phenomenon. "It is a pity," he wrote, "that the talented author of so many admirable works, the pride of Russian literature, should waste his energy composing a Reader such as this, which must have taken him a long time and will certainly not be used in our schools." Other journalists were scornful of the false simplicity of the subject matter, the lack of style, the moralizing pretentiousness of the whole book. However, public, tutors and families gradually began to take an interest in it, new printings followed in rapid succession and, when he was taking stock at the end of his life, Tolstoy found that nearly a million copies of this much-maligned book had been sold.
Before he had even completed his Readers, he wanted to try out his new system of education 011 his usual guinea-pigs: the little muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana. He opened a school, this time inside the main house instead of the nearby pavilion. Thirty-five local children attended. The teachers were himself, his wife, his son Sergey (age eight) and his daughter Tanya (age seven). The countess soon produced another son (June 13, 1872), Petya. Tolstoy had become a habituЈ of the delivery room and was quite unmoved by this succession of births—he told the news to Strakhov between parentheses: "I am deep in my papers and would have finished today except for my wife's confinement (she gave birth yesterday, a boy). I shall send you the manuscript, etc., in the next few days."16
No mere family occurrence seemed able to tear him away from his teaching. The flock of peasant children gathered anywhere, in the hall, the dining room, under the stairs, in the new study the author had built for himself. A characteristic odor of greased leather and damp goatskin rose from the squirming little group. As he had done ten years before, the count reigned in wide-eyed wonder over his covey of chcrubim with runny noses and dirty hands. The same lack of constraint as in the past, the same familiarity in relations between teacher and pupils. They all talked at once, answered at random, laughed and enjoyed themselves, and learned like birds peeking seeds. "When I see these tattered, underfed, unwashed youngsters with their candid eyes from which the soul of an angel often shines out, a feeling of apprehension and horror comcs over me, as though I were watching someone drown," he said.
To demonstrate the virtues of his method, he invited a dozen schoolteachers to spend a week at the school. A group of totally illiterate children were imported for the test from the hamlets of Telyatinki and Grumond. The object was to see how long it would take them to learn to read and write, using the Reader, and the results were apparently conclusive. Encouraged, Tolstoy began to think seriously of founding a sort of secondary school for peasant children who wanted to continue their education without changing their way of life—a laptis university, was the expression he used:0 higher mathematics and foreign languages for every farmhand. The only thing he lacked was capital. The marshal of nobility of the province, D. F. Samarin, whispered in Tolstoy's ear that the local zemstvo had a grant of thirty thousand rubles for educational purposes. Allured by the prospcct of a subsidy, the author-teacher, who had hitherto strenuously avoided all administrative functions, stood for and was duly elected to the zemstvo. But the actual amount of the grant was only ten thousand rubles and the majority voted that it should be used for fellowships for pupils at the Tula Girls' School in homage to Catherine the Great, civilizer of Russia.f
Tolstoy was undaunted by this setback. Going over his opponents' heads, he dccidcd to defend his educational system before the Moscow "Society for the Education of the People." On the day of the debate he marched into the committee room, where thirty-one professors were seated, as though it were the lion's den; the lions, however, were an elderly and, for the most part, affable lot. After a few growls of protest at the disturbance, they decided that his method would be "tried out" on illiterate factor)' workers in a Moscow school. But it was so hot on the day of the test that the laborers, dripping with perspiration, remained deaf to all their instructor's exhortations. This experiment hav-
• Laptis arc shoes made from woven linden baik, worn by Russian peasants.
I Tolstoy's first biographer, Birvukov, was mistaken when lie sai d the sum of thirty thousand rubles coveted by tfie author had been used for a statue commemorating one of the empress's edicts.
ing proved inconclusive, two factory schools were then selected; the phonetic method was taught in one and the Tolstoy method in the other. At the end of seven weeks a special committee found that the first group was, on the whole, "more advanced" than the second. But no decision was taken, the question was left in mid-air, and Tolstoy resigned himself to continuing his crusade in the press. His "Open Letter to Chairman Shatilov," affirming that "freedom is the sole criterion in pedagogy'," appeared in Fatherland Notes and provoked the ire of some and the admiration of others. At the same time, he was working on a second Reader, the purpose of which, as he stated in the preface, was to "give the pupils, for the smallest price, the greatest quantity of comprehensible material, arranged progressively . . ." He felt as though he were waging a single-handed battle with every bureaucrat in the empire. In 1872 he had time for only a short trip to Samara, to inspect the farm he had bought the previous year and gulp down a few IjowIs of foaming kumys.
Upon his return, there was a fresh collision with the administration. While he was away, a Yasnaya Polyana shepherd had been killed by a young bull. Thereupon, some little greenhorn "who pretended to be an examining magistrate" came to interrogate Tolstoy on the circumstances of the incident and even 011 the particulars of his identity and marital status. Tolstoy took 011 a rather haughty tone, whereupon the greenhorn had the effrontery to ask him whether he was the legitimate son of his parents and presented him with a statement to sign, to the effect that he promised on his honor not to leave Yasnaya Polyana until the investigation was over. To hear this underling talk, it was the owner of the bull who was responsible for the shepherd's death. The judge's deputy was to decide within a week whether to maintain or drop the charge. Tolstoy saw red. A week! Everyone knew that that week could go on for months, years! He, Count Leo Tolstoy, confined to his estate for years! Or, worse yet, dragged into court! lie already saw himself in a tattered shirt lying on the straw pallet in his cell. A miscarriage of justice. A scandal. A crime against humanity! I11 his fury he forgot all about the dead shepherd. If anyone was to be pitied in this business, it was he, Leo Tolstoy, and he alone. As usual, Alexandra Tolstoy, as representative of the court, was the first to hear his grievances.
"With my gray beard and my six children," he wrote, "with my consciousness of living an industrious and useful life, with my firm conviction that I am not guilty, with a contempt I cannot hide for the modem form of justice, with my sole desire to be left in peace as I leave others in peace, I consider it impossible for me to remain in
Russia. . . . You will read the whole story in the press; I shall die of rage if I cannot relieve myself by making it public. ... If I do not die of rage and grief in the prison into which they are undoubtedly going to throw me (I have had proof of their hatred for me), I have decided to emigrate to England for the rest of my days, or at least for as long as personal liberty and honor are not safe here. My wife approves of my plan. She loves everything English. It will be ideal for the children. I shall have enough money: if I sell everything, I shall have nearly two hundred thousand rubles."!
And he enlarged upon his scheme, in deadly earnest: first, the family would settle near London; then they would choosc some pleasant little town by the sea and buy land somewhere in the vicinity, as in Russia. English peasants would do the farming, just as the muzhiks did here. The main tiling was to have an entry into the aristocracy. "For that you can be very useful to me," he went on to Alexandra. "Two or three letters of recommendation would suffice to open the doors of English high society to us. It is essential for the children, who will grow up there."17
To impress the pious Alexandra, he added that he was suffering from his own anger and had just tried to calm himself by reciting a paternoster and thirty-seven psalms, but to no avail. Knowing her nephew's penchant for exaggeration, the old maid of honor did not attach too much importance to his fulminations. Besides, she had little time to act, for a second letter from Tolstoy arrived four days later, announcing that everything had been cleared up: lie had l>ecn given assurance that the charge would not be pressed, the president of the court had apologized for the incident and, in short, everything was back to normal; Russia had become habitable again. "Forgive me if I have worried you," he wrote to Alexandra, "but it wasn't my fault. This month I have been tormenting myself as never before in my entire life and, with proper male selfishness, I wanted everybody else to be tormented along with me."18 A few months later a second shepherd was fatally injured at Yasnaya Polyana, by a mad bull. Tliis time Tolstoy himself nursed the man for three days, but in vain, and he confessed that the man's death weighed on his conscience.
When the shepherd had been buried, the bull sacrificed, and the matter was at an end, lie went back to his Reader and his pupils. At first, Sonya also showed an interest in the education of children. After all, she had received her teacher's certificate before she married, and she personally was teaching her sons Leo and Ilya and her daughter
t Or $566,300.
Tanya to read and write; they learned foreign languages from the English Miss Ilannah and Mr. Rey, a Swiss, and Tolstoy himself was to instruct them in arithmetic and Greek. But although he was a paragon of mildness and patience with the little muzhiks, he became exacting, irritable and unfair where his own progeny were concerned. What was endearing in ignorant creatures destined to oblivion became intolerable in the descendants of Count Tolstoy.
Sonya deplored her husband's sternness, but her chief source of anxiety lay in the fact that he was now totally immersed in his pedagogical experiment and was increasingly neglecting literature. At first she was touched by his concern for the education of the poor, but then it began to exasperate her to see the author of War and Peace frittering away his time on the three Rs. "I am sorry," she wrote to her brother Stepan Behrs, "that Lyovochka is wasting his energy on such occupations instead of employing it to write books. I do not sec the point of all this, since his efforts must be confincd to one tiny corner of Russia, the district of Krapivna."19 It would be a different matter if the publishers would leave her Lyovochka alone; but he was receiving the most mouth-watering proposals from all sides for the publication of a new book: ten thousand rubles in advance and five hundred rubles per sixteen-page sheet.0 A fortune! And he was playing deaf. "It isn't so much the money," she wrote to her sister Tanya, "but the main thing is that I love his literary works, I admire them and they move mc. Whereas I despise this Reader, this arithmetic, this grammar, and I cannot pretend to be interested in them. Now there is something lacking in my life, something I loved—it is Leo's work I am missing, that has always given me so much pleasure and filled me with such respect. You see, Tanya, I really am a writer's wife, I take his work so much to heart."20
She clung all the more fiercely to her mission as "writer's wife" because she was afraid she had failed in her role of just plain "wife." There was no doubt about it; after singing her praises as an ideal helpmeet, capable of satisfying both spirit and flesh, Tolstoy was now discovering that she was "separate" from him. Apart from brief moments of physical pleasure, no fusion was possible between two such strong characters. Both, walled up in their own natures, felt alone and misunderstood. Obsessed by his own work and worries, Tolstoy refused to l)clieve that Sonya, too, might be having difficulties. lie saw her as a fertile mother, secretary, manageress, housewife; he loved her out of habit, because he needed her, because lie had chosen her to play a cer-
• Or 528,300 in advance and $1400 per sheet.
tain role; he did not even notice her any more. And she was scarcely thirty. All those pregnancies! Year after year, she wrote in her diary: "I am pregnant. . . "I am afraid I am pregnant again. . . "I wish I were not pregnant. . . ." What had she got out of life, apart from housework and childbearing? A pitiful coquetry awoke in her. Hiding in her study, her eyes full of tears, she wrote, "I need gaiety, idle chatter, elegance. 1 would like to be liked, to hear people tell me I am beautiful, and I would like Leo to see and hear them too. He ought to abandon this isolation—sometimes he wearies of it—and live with me the way ordinary mortals do."
A look in the mirror turned her to stone: an aging woman with thickened waist and a double chin, her hair parted in the middle, her weary eyes. . . . Oh, no! She was not beautiful! "I never thought I was before, and time is growing short. Besides, what good would it do mc to be beautiful? My darling Petya loves his old nursie as much as he would have loved a great beauty, and Lyovochka would have grown accustomed to the ugliest facc alive, provided that his wife were obedient and contented herself with the life he had chosen for her. . . . I feel like curling my hair. Nobody will see, but it will be pretty all the same. Why should 1 need people to see mc? I like ribbons and bows. I should like a new leather belt; after writing that, I feel like crying."21
With the birth of the sixth Tolstoy child, Petya, the house had become too small. A wing was added, in which the master installed his study. When he withdrew to this book-filled room, the children were ordered to ccase all noise. For them their father was a mysterious, remote and powerful being; they did not really understand what it was he did in there with a pen in his hand. One day Uya asked his mother who had written the poetry she had just recited to him, and she replied that it was by a great author named Pushkin. The child was miserable because he was not the son of an author, but his mother told him that his father was also a famous writer, and then Ilya cheered up again. For him and his brothers and sisters, the most important person in the house was Maman. Everything depended upon her. She was tireless. She was forever nursing "some little one," and she was on the go from dawn to dark, ferreting al)Out and organizing things: she bullied the servants, laid in stores for the winter, cut and sewed shirts for her husband and sons, told the cook Nicholas Mikhailovich what to prepare for dinner, sent everyone out for a walk or ordered them to stay indoors becausc it looked like rain, insisted that they speak French at table and come with clean hands, and administered "the King of Denmark's drops" when they had sore throats. When someone wanted a "treat" he went to see Dunyasha, the steward's wife, who would give him jam in a thin, battered old silver spoon. "We knew why the spoon was like that," wrote Ilya.22 "It had been thrown in the garbage pail and a sow had chewed on it." Even more highly prized as sweets were the hot, sugary pastries concoctcd by Mikhai- lovich. To make them nice and round, he injccted air into them through a little hole, but he could not be bothered to use a straw and simply puffed away with his mouth. They were called "Nicholas' sighs." He was very dirty and drank hard. The children adored him.f They were also fond of Agatha Mikhailovna, tall and scrawny, with white witches' locks and a sour smell in her clothes, surrounded by every dog on the estate; and old Aunt Toinette, who was almost always in bed in her room, in which there was an imposing silver-sheathed icon that gleamed; and Hannah the nurse, and Natalya Pctrovna. . . . Papa, of course, was the most severe. "He almost never punished us," wrote Ilya. "But if he looks me straight in the eyes, he guesses everything I am thinking and I feel uneasy. I can lie to Maman but not to Papa. He knows all our secrets."
And yet sometimes he could be so jolly, this dreaded father! He told his children wonderful tales, about his dogs, Bulka, Malish and Sultan, or a horse he had trained, or the grouse he flushed over by the bog. He took them out sledding and ice-skating in the winter and bathing in the Voronka in the summer, played football and croquet with them. He took them hunting with the hounds and on foot, dressed himself up in disguises and composed charades that made them laugh. Or he read to them: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Grant's Children, The Three Musketeers. He skipped over the "love scenes" in the latter, which made the story incomprehensible. 'ITiere were no pictures in Around the World in Eighty Days, so he illustrated it himself; his young audience crowded around him as he sketched, tumbling to the floor and crawling over the round table. And he invented new games that immediately caught their childish fancy. For example, he would stuff one of them into the laundry basket and drag it all over the house, making him guess at every stop which room he was in. Or, seeing the family bored at tea-time, he would leap up from his chair, raise one arm as though holding a pair of reins, and gallop around the table. 'I"hat, he said, was "the charge of the Numidian cavalry." The children, dizzy with laughter, clattered after him under their mother's mournful, tender gaze.
Every year at Christmas a part)- of friends gathered around the
t After his death he was replaced by his son Simon, who prepared vegetarian meals for Tolstoy.
lighted tree, presents were distributed and a masquerade held. On one of these festive occasions a gypsy arrived, leading a bear and a goat; the goat was Leo Tolstoy.
One great source of delight was the weekly steambath. This took place in a wooden cabin with a thatched roof. Every Saturday the floor was covered with fresh straw. A servant heated the stove red-hot and then threw buckets of water over it to make steam. The children waited until they were dripping with sweat, then rushed outside to roll in the snow and came running back to the cabin. Sonya believed this was an excellent "health-building" activity for the young. Besides, there was no running water in the house. Whenever anyone wanted to take a bath a servant had to fetch water from the river in buckets.
It was forbidden to buy toys in the shops, for, said Tolstoy, they stifled a child's imagination. (TTiose they made themselves out of three scraps of wood were so much more precious and fun!) To spare their tender souls from humiliation, no punishment was ever administered. Even if the offense was serious, nobody forced the culprit to apologize; he came to see the error of his ways himself, by observing that his parents were treating him coldly. Consideration for the servants was compulsory, as well as continual striving for simplicity, culture and cheerfulness.
Vigilance relaxed a little with the arrival of summer guests—pretty Aunt Tanya and her husband, the boring Kuzminsky. There were picnics, hikes, croquet tournaments, bathing. . . . They played "postbox." The postbox sat on the staircase landing near the clock, and everybody, grownups and children alike, contributed what he had written during the week: poems, caricatures, anecdotes, comical accounts of happenings at Yasnaya Polyana. On Sundays the box was opened in the presence of the entire family and Tolstoy read out the notes; none of them were signed, but all could be identified by the style or the handwriting. At one point in the game, it was decided to make a survey of "the ideals of the inhabitants of Yasnaya Polyana." Some of the anonymous replies were noteworthy. Tolstoy's ideal was expressed as follows: "(1). Poverty, peace and concord. (2). Bum everything he had worshiped and worship everything he had burned." Sonya's was "to have one hundred and fifty children, who never grow up." Tanya's was "eternal youth, and freedom for women."
Another question to which everyone had to reply was, "What is the raison d'etre of the people at Yasnaya Polyana?" Replies: "For Sofya Andreyevna [Countess Tolstoy], it is to be the wife of a famous man and to find enough trivia over which she can wear herself out." "For Tatyana Andreyevna [Tanya], it is the ability to please, entertain and be loved." "For Leo Nikolayevieh [Tolstoy], it is to believe he has found a solution to life." A series of comic portraits entitled "Distressing register of the mentally deranged inmates of Yasnaya Polyana" made a great hit with the family: "Patient No. i. Leo Nikolayevieh Tolstoy. Sanguine temperament. His delusion is that he can change others' lives with words. General symptoms: dissatisfaction with the present scheme of things; blames everyone except himself; voluble irritability, no consideration for his listeners; often goes through phases of manic excitement, giving way to exaggerated and lachrymose sentimentality. . . . Particular symptoms: indulges in irrelevant activities: polishes and repairs shoes, mows hay and so forth." "Patient No. 2: Sofya Andreyevna Tolstoy. Her delusion is that everybody is in continual need of quantities of things, and that she doesn't have time to satisfy them all. . . . Treatment: hard work." "Patient No. 6: Tanya Kuzminskava. Causes
• 4
of illness: popularity in her youth, being accustomed to having her vanity flattered; but no moral foundation in either case. Symptoms: fear of imaginary personal demons, inability to withstand all sorts of temptations: luxury, maliciousness, idleness. . . . Prescriptions: truffles and champagne, gowns entirely covered with lace; three changes of dress ever}' day."
These comments are so perceptive that Tolstoy might as well have signed his name to them; moreover, he carried the game into the open one day by sending a long letter to his babushka Alexandra, in which, with mocking affection and indulgent pride, lie sketched the characters of his six children.23 Sergey, the eldest, was rather a pretty lad, clever, with a penchant for daydreaming, attracted to the arts; he was said to be like his dead uncle Nicholas ("That would be too much to ask!"). Behind an engaging fagade, Ilya, "pink, blond, glowing," had a passionate, violent and sensuous nature ("When he cats currant jelly it tickles his lips"); Tanya ("They say she resembles Sonya and I believe it!") was good behavior personified, she loved to take care of the younger ones and would make an excellent mother; Leo, graceful and clever with his hands, had a natural elegance ("Whatever clothes they put on him look as though they were made for him"); Marya, with her milk-white skin and big blue eyes, displayed a keen and restless mind ("All her life she will suffer and try to rcach the inaccessible"); Petya, the big fat baby, only a few months old, was appetizing and incomprehensible. "I do not care for children until they are two or three years old; I don't understand them," wrote Tolstoy. "There are two types of men: hunters and non-hunters. Non-hunters love babies and can pick them up and hold them in their arms; hunters are terrified, sickened and filled with pity at the sight of a baby. I know of no exception to that rule."
In June 1873 Tolstoy decided to transport his entire family to the vast tract of land he had bought eighty miles from Samara. Governesses and servants would follow the family. The wooden house was tumbledown, inconvenient and ill-furnished. The wind from the steppe blew through the cracks between the boards. Kisyak—dried horse-dung—was used for fuel in the stoves, and its sharp tang impregnated the rooms. Clouds of blue flies droned beneath the cciling, and at night, scurrying regiments of rats kept Sonya from sleeping. She did not like this wild place and, ever concerned for the health of her children, complained that there was no doctor within rcach. But Tolstoy was cntranccd with their primitive way of life, and dcclarcd it was far more healthy than all the contraptions invented by civilized peoples. In order to give them all a kumys treatment without leaving the farm, he hired a Bashkir, who arrived with wives, marcs and foals, and pitched his tents just outside the farm. The foals were tethered during the day so that they could not drink their mothers' milk, which was reserved for the distinguished summer visitors. Morning and evening, the veiled women milked the mares. Then, hidden from the men behind cotton curtains, they prepared the kumys. Tolstoy and his sons entered the tent and sat cross-legged on cushions across from the smiling Bashkir. Soon a woman's arm parted the curtains and thrust out a leather jug. The Bashkir stirred the liquid with a whisk and ladled it into cups made of Karelian birch. Tolstoy and his eldest son smacked their lips over the sourish brew, but the other children grimaced.
The only thing that seriously marred their otherwise happy stay on the steppe was the great poverty around them. A dreadful famine had devastated the province that year. The ruined peasants were selling off their emaciated livestock and going to hire themselves out elsewhere. Women and old people begged by the roadside. The administration was helpless to cope with a disaster of such magnitude, and did not know where to begin. With Sonya's approval, Tolstoy investigated the situation in the neighborhood, toured farms and villages, evaluated the remaining food supply and calculated requirements. Then he published an appeal on behalf of the victims in the Moscow papers. His article, written in the simplest terms, had a considerable impact: a donation from the empress headed the list, and nearly two million rubles were collected within a few months.
The next year only Sergey went to the Bashkir country with his father, but in 1875 Tolstoy took the whole family again, this time to set up the stud farm. He soon had four hundred head: English thoroughbreds,
Rostopshins, Kabardian trotters. To establish good relations with the natives, he organized a race meet. The track was circular, three and three-tenths miles long. First prize: a shotgun; second: a gown of Chinese silk; third: a watch bearing the emperor's portrait. Bashkirs and Kirghiz flocked to the race. A motley encampment sprang up around the farm. Beside every tent the natives dug a hole in the ground— their oven—and drove stakes to tether their horses. The festivities continued for two da^: singing, dancing, banquets. Incredible quantities of kumys were drunk, fifteen sheep eaten as well as one horse and an "English colt that had bad legs." In the evening the veiled women disappeared into the kibitkas and the men, in multicolored costumes and embroidered bonnets, gathered to wrestle. Tolstoy beat them all in the club pull: the two opponents, sitting opposite each other on the ground with the soles of their feet together, tugged at a club until one forced the other to his feet. A large body of spectators assembled along the track for the horse race, the women in closed wagons and the men on horseback. Twenty-two riders started, uttering hoarse cries. The wind ballooned in their clothes and sharpened their profiles; whiplashes rained down. The count's horse won second prize.
Tolstoy returned to Samara every summer for seven years, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife, children and friends. But the herd was not kept up and deteriorated from year to year. The last Kabardian horses were shipped to Yasnaya Polyana, where they ended their days ingloriously, working in the fields.
After finishing his Readers, Tolstoy remembered his plan to write a historical novel. He went back to his notes and books and tried once more to take up with the ghosts of the past. Every morning he left his corner room on the second floor and came downstairs in a dressing gown, with his beard in a tangle and his hair on end, to dress in his study on the ground floor of the new wing. He soon reappeared, neat and clean, wearing a gray blouse, and went to the dining room to eat with the family. A light breakfast, and he was back on his feet. With one hand stuck through his leather belt and the other holding a glass of tea in a silver stand, he exchanged a few words with his wife and children and went back to the study, while the brood lowered their voices in order not to disturb him. The little ones retreated to their rooms, or to the garden in the summer, and Sonya, alert to every sound, stayed behind sewing shirts or copying manuscripts in the jam-scented dining room.
Around three or four in the afternoon the master emerged, weary and morose, and climbed on his horse or set off on foot with a gun slung over his shoulder and a dog at his heels. At five, the bell hanging from an old elm rang to call the family together. The children ran to wash up. Everyone waited for the paterfamilias before going to dinner. He came in late, apologized, poured a measure of vodka into a silver goblet and tossed it down with a gulp, heaved a sigh, made a face and went to the table. His walk had whetted his appetite, and he tore into his food. Sonya told him not to "stuff himself on porridge" because the "meatballs and vegetables" were coming afterward.
"You're going to upset your liver again," she would say.114
After dinner he returned to his study and did not come out until eight o'clock, for tea. After that, the grownups conversed among themselves, read aloud or played the piano, while the children, crouching in the corners, hoped they would be forgotten. But the clock on the landing struck ten in its rusty voice, and the young ones were ruthlessly ordered to bed. Sometimes Tolstoy went back to his "lair" to pore over some history book. He was fond of the room, which Sonya had lovingly furnished for him. Book-filled cabinets supported by cross- bracing cut the room in two. Behind the desk, littered with papers and pamphlets, stood an old barrel chair. Hie walls were decorated with stag-antlers brought back from the Caucasus, and the antlers of a stuffed reindeer-head served as clothes hooks. Beside them hung portraits of Dickens, Schopenhauer and Fet. A bust of Nicholas stood in a reccss, sculpted abroad from his death mask. Opposite it was a photograph, dating from 1856, of the contributors to The Contemporary: Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Goncharov, Grigorovich, Druzhnin, and Lxo Tolstoy in uniform.
Despite the comfort and charm of his surroundings, Tolstoy still did not feel ready to begin his book. "Thus far I am not really working," he wrote to Strakhov on December 17, 1872. "I am surrounded by books on Peter I and his period, I read, I take notes, I want to write, and I cannot. But what a period for a painter! Everywhere you look— a mystery, which can only be penetrated by poetry. The whole secret of Russian life is there. I begin to feel that nothing is going to come of all my preparations: I've been trying and fretting for too long now! Besides, I wouldn't care if nothing did come of them."
In one notebook he methodically recorded everything relating to the customs, dress, manners and dwellings of the people; in another, everything connected with the tsar and his court; in a third, the characters, general ideas, crowd scenes, the crucial episodes. . . . "It's like making a mosaic," noted Sonya. "He is going into the most minute details. Yesterday he came back from hunting early and tried to find out from various documents whether it was not wrong to say that high collars were worn with short caftans [tunics with long, hanging sleeves]. He thinks they were only worn with long caftans, especially among the common people."20
Every book he read about Peter the Great made him want to read another one. He had them shipped out from Moscow by the carload. But the more deeply he delved into the period, the more he was afraid of getting lost in it. "I have now reached the point in my research at which I am beginning to go round in circles," he wrote to Golokhvas- tov, the historian, 011 January 24, 1873. And a week later, to Fet, "I am in a very bad mood. Making no headway. The project I have chosen is incredibly difficult. There is 110 end to the preliminary research, the outline is swelling out of all proportion and I feel my strength ebbing away." The very figure of Peter the Great, whom he so admired when he began, had become repulsive to him. It was perfectly plain that his famous reforms, copied after the tyrannical grand duke of Saxony, had not been inspired by a concern for the salvation of the State, but by a desire to add to his own comfort. He had not founded St. Petersburg in order to escape from the plotting of the boyars, but in order to lead an immoral life with his fellow rakes. He had disfigured Russia by introducing decadent Western manners. lie had made the Church subservient to the State, undermined tradition, ordered the boyars to cut off their beards. Tolstoy, a Slavophil in his heart of hearts, sided staunchly with the boyars and the beards. Then, too, he could not forget that the man had had his son Alexis put to death for the crime of not sharing his ideas. If he had to describe the monster, he would give him the same treatment as Napoleon. lie was a past master at the sport of shattering pedestals and upending idols. But this time the idol was Russian, and in spite of everything, it hurt him to demote a national hero. Perhaps he would have better luck with Peter's successors: Catherine II and her favorites. How about taking the officer, Mirovich, as his hero—the one who had tried to free the dethroned tsar Ivan VI? He had looked so hard that he was growing desperate. "The period is too far removed from mc," he said. "I can't put myself inside the people, they have nothing in common with us." During the month of March 1873, he tried seventeen times to begin the book and seventeen times he gave it up. "My work is not progressing," he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy. "Life is so beautiful, so light, so short, and a representation of it is always so ugly, so heavy and so long."2®
Suddenly lie had an illumination. He remembered an occurrence that had deeply affected him the previous year. A neighbor and friend of his, Bibikov, the snipe hunter, lived with a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a tall, full-blown woman with a broad face and an easy-going nature, who had bceome his mistress. But he had been neglecting her of late for his children's German governess. He had even made up his mind to marry the blond Fraulein. Learning of his treachery, Anna Stcpanovna's jealousy burst all bounds; she ran away, carrying a bundle of clothcs, and wandered about the countryside for three days, crazed with grief. Then she threw herself under a freight train at the Yasenki station.! Before she died, she sent a note to Bibikov: "You are my murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like, you can see my corpse 011 the rails at Yasenki." That was January 4, 1872. The following day Tolstoy had gone to the station, as a spectator, while the autopsy was being performed in the presence of a police inspector. Standing in a corner of the shed, he had observed every detail of the woman's body lying on the table, bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed. How shameless, he thought, and yet how chaste. A dreadful lesson was brought home to him by that white, naked flesh, those dead breasts, those inert thighs that had felt and given pleasure. He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death.
Her image haunted him for a long time, but not specifically as material for a book. But in 1870, he had had an idea for a novel about an upper-class woman guilty of adultery. Sonya had even made a note in her diary, on February 23, 1870: "He told me that the whole prol> lem, for him, was to make the woman pitiable but not contemptible, and that when this creature came into his mind as a type, all the masculine characters he had previously invented immediately grouped themselves around her." Yet when Anna Stcpanovna's suicide occurred two years later, lie did not immediately link the incident to the story of the unfaithful wife. For over a year the two subjects—infidelity and violent death—had co-existed in his mind without connecting. Then, by some mysterious process, each began to round out the other. The real-life woman gave her tragic ending and her name to the fictional one. At the very moment Tolstoy was brooding over Peter the Great, Tsarcvich Alexis and the boyars, men and women in modern dress were flitting through his historical visions: the figures who became Anna Karenina, Vronsky, Levin, Kitty, Oblonsky. . . .
Although he refused to follow literary fads, Tolstoy could not remain oblivious to the vogue for the psychological novel abroad. World opinion was all agog with the problems of marriage and women's rights. In France, Alexandre Dumas fils, who had become famous in 1852 with the resounding success of La Dame avx Camelias, had just published a
t The little station of Yasenki was on the Moscow-Kursk railway line that passed through Tula.
study of conjugal infidelity: L'Homme-Femme. On March 1, 1873 Tolstoy wrote to Tanya Kuzminskaya: "Have you read L'Homme-Femme? I was staggered by it. One would not expect a Frenchman to have such a lofty concept of marriage and relations between men and women in general."
A few days later, on March 18, he went into his son Sergey's room and noticed a book lying 011 a table, which the boy had started to read: Pushkin's Byelkin Tales. He leafed through it and was as charmed as ever by that lively prose. The story called Loose Leaves began with the sentence, "The guests were arriving at the country house . . ." For Tolstoy this leap into the heart of the matter was the summit of artistry. He thought of it in relation to his own characters, and his desire to write returned at last, after months of indecision—irresistible, dizzying, painful as thirst. He rushed into his study, seized a pen and wrote down the first words of an opening chapter, "After the opera, the guests reassembled at the home of the young Countess Vraski."*
The next day, March 19, Sonya wrote in her diary, "Yesterday evening Lyova suddenly announced, 'I have written a sheet and a half and I think it's coming all right.' Assuming he had been trying once more to write something 011 the period of Peter the Great, I did not pay much attention; but then I learned that he has begun a novel on the private lives of contemporary people." That day she let her joy overflow in a letter to her sister: "Yesterday Leo suddenly started to write a novel on contemporary life. The subject is the unfaithful wife and all the ensuing tragedy. I am very happy."
The first chapters were dashed off in a state of elation. As with War and Peace, he took his models from the people around him. He gave some of Sonya's features to Kitty, put a great deal of himself into Levin, borrowed from various friends to portray Oblonsky, Koznyshev, Va- renka, Mikhailov; he made Levin's brother a replica of his own brother Dmitry, who had died of tuberculosis. Vronsky probably owed a good deal to Sonya's first suitor, Mitrofan Polivanov, and Karenin was compounded of the minister of finance Valuycv, Tanya's husband Kuzmin- sky, and Sukhotin the chamberlain; physically, Anna Karenina herself was said to resemble Marya Alexandrovna Hartung, the poet Pushkin's daughter. The Karenins were actually called Pushkin in the first draft. Tolstoy had met Mrs. Hartung at General Tulubyev's home in Tula, and had been impressed by her beauty, "her smooth gait," "the
• In the final version this sentence, somewhat altered, appears at the beginning of Chapter VI of Part II. It W3s a long standing and erroneous family tradition that Tolstoy had begun his book with the sentence, "Everything was topsy-turvy in the Oblonsky house."
Abrabian ringlets that betrayed her ancestry." There was African blood in her father's family, her mother was Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharov, the most beautiful woman in Russia. Fascinated by this handsome creature, Tolstoy looked for a soul to put inside her. Anna's personality was thought to be based on that of another woman famous for her learning and intelligence: Countess Sofya Tolstoy, wife of the poet Alexis Kon- stantinovich Tolstoy and friend of the philosopher Vladimir Solovyev. Other details of the novel he was to find around him, in the story of his friend Dyakov's sister, for one, who had remarried after divorcing S. M. Sukhotin. lie also made use of the open liaison between Kisclev and Princess Golitsin, who had deserted her husband and caused a scandal in high society.
He worked so quickly that on May 11, 1873, eight weeks after starting to write, he announced to Strakhov: "I am writing a novel that has nothing to do with Peter the Great; 1 started it over a month ago and have finished the first draft, lliis is my first real novel and I am taking it very much to heart. I am completely wrapped up in it. . . . I wrote to you about it in a letter I never sent, telling yon how it came upon me in spite of myself, thanks to the divine Pushkin, who fell into my hands quite by accident and whom I have reread in toto, with renewed admiration. ... I beg you not to repeat this to anyone!"
His draft was far from finished though, and Tolstoy knew it. Early in June he stopped work to go to Samara with his family. When he returned, on August 22, his first gust of energy had spent itself and fresh doubts assailed him. Sonya was copying again, as in the days of War and Peace. For the children, she was the writer in the family.
He was still not quite back in his stride when the painter Kramskoyc, who had vainly begged for the honor of being allowed to paint him on several occasions, made another attempt. The portrait was to go into the Gallery of Famous Russians, founded in Moscow by the Tretyakov brothers. Tolstoy protested that he had no time to waste in posing, which was a useless occupation and unworthy of a solitary and studious man such as he. But Kramskoye came to Yasnaya Polyana to talk to the master in person and argued that if he did not let himself be painted during his lifetime, strangers would make portraits of him afterward, from photographs; but this was not enough to weaken Tolstoy. Kramskoye then offered to paint a second portrait, for a very low price, that he could keep himself. Sonya was delighted and undertook to persuade her husband. They talked money. Without batting an eyelid, Sonya proposed two hundred and fifty rubles.t Kramskoyc usually
f Or $700.
asked one thousand rubles for a commission. Canvas, paint and frame alone cost fifty rubles. Nevertheless, he agreed. Sonya turned victoriously to her husband. Surely he would not refuse now. Pecuniar)' considerations triumphed over principle, and Tolstoy consented for the first time in his life to sit for his portrait. Kramskoye painted him seated, his gray full-sleeved blouse buttoned down the front, his head cocked slightly, with a full beard, imposing brow and a calm, clear, keen expression under his frowning eyebrows. "The two portraits are remarkably alike; it almost frightens me to look at them," Sonya wrote to her sister on September 14. During the sittings the two men chatted amicably about art, morality, politics and religion. Kramskoye did not dream that while he was painting the portrait of the author of War and Peace, Tolstoy was doing as much for him, and that he would reappear in Anna Karenina as the painter Mikhailov. As usual, Tolstoy was making capital out of everything that crossed his field of vision. Nothing could happen to him that would not in some way be essential to his work, he thought.
And yet, on November 9, 1873 a tragedy occurred that almost made him forget literature for a while. His youngest son, Pctya, the pink and blond baby, was carried off in two days by the croup. Grief-stricken, Sonya wrote in her diary: "He died peacefully. I nursed him fourteen and one-half months. He lived from June 13, 1872 to November 9,1873. A gay, healthy child. The darling, I loved him too much! They buried him yesterday. What an emptiness now. I cannot reconcile the images of Petya living and Pctya dead. They are both precious to me, but what is there in common between that being full of life, light and affection, and this other, motionless, solemn and cold. He was very attached to me. Did it hurt him to leave me?"
Tolstoy managed to restrain his emotions; he had said that Petya was too young to interest him. After the burial, while his wife was wandering tearfully about the silent house, he wrote to his brother Sergey:
"Petya is dead and has just been buried. . . . This is something new for us, and very painful, particularly for Sonya. I have just received a letter from the typesetters, telling me that the edition [of my works] will come out on the twelfth of this month. The Dyakovs arrived today. Dyakov is going to Moscow and will leave Masha [his daughter] and Sofya [her governess] with us. I think I ought to go to Moscow too; Sonya would not be completely alone in the house. If you can manage it, let us go the day after tomorrow, the twelfth. Will that l>e all right? Let me know."27
Two lines on the death of his son, the rest on the publication of his books and a forthcoming trip. To Ix: sure, the death of a child was a common occurrence in those days and it was natural for a mother to be more deeply afflicted by the sight of an empty cradle than a father. But how is one to explain the fact that this model head-of- family, this vast compassionate heart, open to all the sufferings of mankind, had only one thought after the funeral: to get away from the house, out of earshot of his wife's lamentations? Two day's later he was in Moscow, supposedly in order to see his publisher; but what really drove him away from Yasnaya Polyana was the fear of death. Death had entered his house; he must wait until the noxious vapors of its passage- had been dispelled. Ever since the night at Arzamas, he had been playing hide-and-seek with death. A sneeze, a pimple on his nose, and he was a doomed man. As soon as he returned to Yasnaya Polyana he wrote to Fet to explain:
"This is the first death in the family in eleven years, and the thing is extremely hard for my wife. There is some consolation in the fact that of the eight of us, his death was certainly the easiest for us all to bear; but the heart, and especially the heart of a mother—that astonishing, sublime manifestation of the divine on earth—cannot reason, and my wife is plunged into grief."28
All tilings considered, he told himself, there was another consolation in this bereavement: death could not strike the same family twice in succession. They would be left in peace for a while. Tolstoy went back to work and Sonya "wore out" her grief through the long nights, copying manuscripts that were black with corrections.
The first part was finished in March 1874. "I like the book," he wrote to Alexandra, "but 1 doubt that others will, because it is too simple." Nevertheless, he was in such a hurTy to publish it that he took the beginning (seven sixteen-page sheets) to Katkov, editor of the Russian Herald. While the proofs were being set up in Moscow, the author, after being eager to see them, suddenly lost interest in his characters. His teaching mania had taken hold of him again, and he began to neglect Anna Karenina and Vronsky and Levin for the little muzhiks at Yasnaya Polyana. "I love them again, as I did fourteen years ago, these thousands of youngsters I work with," he wrote to Alexandra. "The only reason why I want the people to be educated is in order to salvage the Pushkins, Ostrogradskys,! Philaretuses* and Loinonosovst in the lot. Every school is crawling with them. ... I have promised my book to the Russian Herald, but I simply cannot tear myself away from living
| M. V. Ostrogradsky, a mathematician (1&01-61).
• Philarctus, son of a deacon who became metropolitan of Moscow.
fLoinonosov, author and scholar (1711-65).
beings to bother with imaginary ones."29 And to Strakhov, "My novel has gone to sleep. Katkov's typesetter is about as speedy as a turtle. One sheet a month—which is fine with me, I'm delighted!"30
On April 22, 1874 Sonya, still in mourning for little Petya, gave birth to a fifth lx)y, Nicholas. A ray of joy crept into the house. But there were fresh alarms early in June. Old Aunt Toinette was at death's door. She was seventy-nine, and had long been confined to her bed; her faithful servant Axinya had preceded her into the grave. Half-deaf and half-blind, she had begun to mix up past and present together. When Leo sat down at her bedside, she mistook him for his father, whom she had loved so deeply and yet refused to marry. She smiled at him in senile flirtatiousness, she called him Nicholas; obscurely frightened, he beat a retreat. Some days he could not bring himself to go to her at all. Did she realize that her end was near? She asked if she might leave her room on the upper floor and move to a wood-paneled recess on the first floor. "I don't want to spoil your lovely upstairs room with my death,"31 she said. Then she began to suffer, complain, struggle. . . . She died on June 20, 1874. Tolstoy felt remorse, at having too often shown his irritation or been inconsiderate of her, and also relief, because he could not bear the presence of sickness under his roof. But both feelings were dominated by a third: sorrow at the loss of another witness of his childhood. Who would love him as she had done? In the end, it was himself he felt most sorry for. Moved as he had not been by his son Petya's death, he wrote to Alexandra:
"She ceased to exist for me about three years ago. So (right or wrong? I cannot say) I avoided her, and could not look at her without suffering. Now she has really ceased to exist (her death-agony was long and painful, as a long labor in childbirth), and my heart goes out to her more strongly than ever before. She was an admirable person. . . ."a2 A little later, he told his sister:
"When death came, her features cleared, and all my memories of her returned; I miss her; one of my most important tics with the past has been broken. You and Sergey are all I have left."33
Mourning, travel, work on the sccond Reader—Anna Karenina suffered from this irregular life. Tolstoy already had a new project in mind: to found a primary teacher training school in his home. He had desks and benches put into the pavilion in which the Kuzminskys usually spent the summer holiday: "Instead of your dear faces," Sonya wrote to her sister, "we shall be seeing unknown muzhiks and theological students." But the local administration showed little interest in the project, there were few applicants (a dozen) and Tolstoy abandoned the idea.
Anna Karenina was no consolation for his academic fiasco. He was fed up with the book and wanted to rewrite the beginning, "everything that has to do with Levin and Vronsky." Strakhov, who had read the opening chapters, begged him not to be too severe: "I can't get your book out of my head. Every time you write something I am stupefied by the freshness, the utter originality of your creation, it is as though I leaped from one period of literature into another. The growth of Anna Karcnina's passion is a divine miracle! . . ."
Chapters I to XIV came out at last in the Russian Herald of January 1875. Willy-nilly, Tolstoy had to sit down and produce the rest, for which Katkov was clamoring. 'Ilie public was enthusiastic. "It's nothing less than delirium!" Strakhov wrote to the author. "I have seen solemn old bodies hopping up and down in admiration: 'Ah, how beautiful! Ah, how beautiful!' they said. 'How can he write like that?' And it's true, the story is pure as crystal."34 With this incitement, Tolstoy redoubled his speed, but did not give up his educational activities. "Not only did I not expect [Anna Karenina] to be a success," he wrote to Strakhov, "but, I must confess, I was afraid I would lose my name as a writer forever 011 account of the book. . . . This winter I am very- busy. ... I am directing the seventy schools that have opened in our district; all are working to perfection. I am continuing the educational research I wrote to you about, teaching my older children myself, supervising the printing of the book, correcting the proofs of the second Reader and going through a family crisis to boot."
The crisis was the illness of their last-bom, Nicholas, who had water 011 the brain.
"In the last four months he has gone through ever)' phase of this incurable disease," Tolstoy continued. "My wife is feeding him herself. Part of the time she is in despair at the thought that he is going to die, and part of the time she is in terror lest he live and remain an idiot."
And with devastating frankness he went straight on, without transition:
"As for myself, it is curious, but I have never wanted to write as intensely, as joyfully as I do now."35
Four days later, 011 February 20, 1875, the child died in dreadful
agonies.!
"I am deeply upset because of my wife," Tolstoy wrote to Fet; "for her, after nursing the child, it was awful. You speak highly of Anna Karenina, and that is music to my ears; the book is a success, from what
t It was on this death that Tolstoy based his shoit story, The Prayer (1905).
I hear on all sides; but I am sure there has never been a writer more indifferent to success than I am, if it is success."3®
Still stunned by this latest death, Sonya had to continue caring for several of the other children, who had whooping cough. They all recovered, but she caught the disease from them, and peritonitis followed. And she was pregnant. Utterly exhausted, she gave birth prematurely, on October 30, 1875, to a baby girl who died after half an hour. Tolstoy was terrified by this new onslaught of death in the family. Why was fate dogging his heels like this? He felt as though he were skirmishing with some animal—intelligent, powerful and vindictive— that had been trained to snap at him. In a moment of abandon, he wrote to Fet: "Fear, horror, death, the children laughing and gay. Special food, agitation, doctors, lies, death, horror—it was torture!"37 Death was there; and he had to eat and sleep, teach the children, tell them to keep their voices down, command them to learn their lessons, write letters, read proofs, cut his nails, brush his beard. . . .
Soon after Aunt Toinette died ha former rival, Aunt Pelagya Ilin- ishna Yushkov, left the convent in which she was perishing of boredom and moved in, bag and baggage, to Toinette's little wood-paneled room. In spite of her seventy-six years, the new arrival was alert, sharp-witted and dictatorial. She had been nursing her dream of usurping Aunt Toinette's place in her nephew's home for twenty-eight years; but her triumph was short-lived. A few months after moving in, she fell ill. Aches and pains everywhere, legs, chest, stomach. The vast piousness that had sustained her throughout her life suddenly fled. Terrified at the thought that she, too, was about to disappear, she struggled, refused to see a priest, accused the family of not knowing how to take care of her. She whined, in French: "I am so happy with you! I don't want to die!"38 Sonya, still extremely weak from her latest deliver)', had to nurse her as though she were a child.
Pelagya Ilinishna Yushkov passed away on December 22, 1875. The same men who had delivered a miniature coffin for the dead baby seven weeks before returned with a larger one for the old woman who lay waiting for them, stiff and white, with an aristocratic pout on her lips and her hands clasping an icon. And once more there were the hymns, the odor of incense, the trip to the cemetery, the muzhiks baring their heads in their doorways. In three years, 1873 to 1875, Tolstoy had lost three children and two dearly loved aunts.
"It is a strange thing," he wrote to Alexandra, "but the death of that eighty-year-old woman has affected me more than any other; I was sorry to see her disappear, to see disappear the last memory to recall my father's and mother's generation, and also sorry to see her suffering; but there was something else in this death that I cannot describe. . . And to his brother, "This winter has been very hard for me emotionally; Aunt's death has depressed me terribly. ... It is time to die! 'lhat is not true. What is true is there is nothing else to do in life but die. I feel it every instant. I am writing, I'm working very hard, the children are healthy, but there is no happiness for me in any of it."40
In the meantime his sister-in-law Tanya had lost a daughter, Dasha, five years old, and his brother Sergey a two-year-old son, Alexander.0
Sonya was a long time recovering from her deaths, deliveries and illness. She had lost weight; she suffered from migraines; she coughed and spat blood. Yet she would not give up her role as mistress of the household, and scurried about, ordering and scolding from morning to night. More than ever, she needed to feel her husband beside her, but it bothered him to see her so tired. "There is no worse situation for a healthy man than to have a sick wife," he said.41 One night young Sergey, who slept downstairs, heard a cry in his sleep: "Sonya! Sonya!" His father's voice. Frightened, he got up and opened the door. The hallway was pitch dark. The anguished cry rang out again: "Sonya! Sonya!" She appeared at the top of the stairs, holding a candle, and asked:
"What's wrong, Lyovochka?"
"Nothing," he answered. "I don't have any matches. I got lost in the house."
Sonya was so startled that she had a coughing fit and stood there, gasping and wheezing. Afterward, her husband explained that when lie came out of his study to go to his bedroom, he suddenly could not remember where he was. What were those walls? Where did those steps lead? Panic gripped him to the roots of his hair. "I can give no explanation of this event other than a pathological condition," his son Sergey later wrote. "In my opinion the terror he felt that night was the same as what he used to call the anguish of Arzamas.'" No one in the family dared to pronounce the word hysteria but Sonya must have thought it at the time. She was increasingly worried by her husband's condition. Moreover, she was not in a normal state herself. "I don't sleep, I eat almost nothing, I choke back my tears or hide and cry," she wrote in her diary on September 16, 1876. "I have a low temperature every day and chills in the evening. I am so tense that I feel my head will burst."
At the beginning of 1877 she was no better, and went to Moscow
• Tanya's daughter died on May 3, 1873, and Sergey's boy in January 1873.
to be examined by Dr. Botkin, a court physician.t He reassured her. The cause of all her troubles was her nerves, nothing serious. Back at Yasnaya Polyana, she resumed her secretarial duties with renewed zeal. She hoped Leo would finish the book in the next few months. But he was writing slowly, in snatches, and without real conviction. "I'm sick and tired of my Anna K." he wrote to Alexandra. And to Strakhov, "Don't praise my book! Pascal had a nail-studded belt he used to lean against every time lie felt pleasure at some word of praise. I should have a belt like that. I ask you, be a friend; either do not write to me about the book at all, or else write and tell me everything that is wrong with it. If it is tTue, as I feel, that my powers are weakening, then, I beg of you, tell me. Our profession is dreadful, writing corrupts the soul. Every author is surrounded by an aura of adulation which he nurses so assiduously that he cannot begin to judge his own worth or see when it starts to decline."42
However, he labored away at his manuscript, full of mistrust, anger and weariness. He made revision after revision. He felt that he was taking two steps backward for every stqj ahead. "There are days when one gets up feeling refreshed and clear-headed," he said. "One begins to write; everything is fine, it all comes naturally. The next day one reads it over, it all has to go because the heart isn't there. No imagination, no talent. That quelque chose is lacking without which our intelligence is worthless. Other days one gets up hating the world, nerves completely on edge; nevertheless, one hopes to be able to get something done. And indeed, it doesn't go too badly; it's vivid, there is imagination by the carload. Again, one reads it over: meaningless, stupid; the brains weren't there. Imagination and intelligence have to work together. As soon as one or the other gets the upper hand, all is lost. There is nothing to do but throw away what you've done and start over."
One evening he told Strakhov in anger, "Ah, if only somebody else could finish Anna Karenina for me."43
The summer of 1876 was especially sterile: "Summer has come, wonderful! I go out for a walk, I admire, I don't understand how I was able to sit there and write last winter."44 Toward autumn his energy finally returned and on December 9, 1876 Sonya triumphantly announced to her sister: "At last, we are writing Anna Karenina for good, that is, without interruption. Lyovochka is tense and excited; he writes another chapter every day; I am copying feverishly."
When the children were in bed and the house fell silent, she sat
t It was on this trip that she made the acquaintance of Alexandra Tolstoy, of whom she received, she said, an excellent impression.
down at her little mahogany writing desk and, with loving pen, neatly copied out the pages her husband had left for her, still smoking with the heat of creation. One day he came up to the desk, leaned over her shoulder and said, pointing to the notebook:
"Oh, let me hurry and finish this book so I can start another. Now I see it clearly. If a book is to be any good, you have to love the central idea it expresses. In Anna Karenina I love the idea of the family, in War and Peace I loved the idea of the people, in my next book I shall love the idea of the Russian nation, as a rising force."45
When the proofs of Anna Karenina began to come back in the mail, Tolstoy forced himself to read every word, and in every line a mistake leaped up before his eyes. He was disgusted by his carelessness. "In the margins," Ilya Tolstoy later wrote, "the proofreader's corrections appeared first—punctuation, letters omitted; then my father began to change words, then whole sentences; he crossed out one line and put in another, and in the end the proofs were smudged all over and some passages were so black that it was impossible to return them in that state, since no one except Maman could dcciphcr them. Maman spent whole nights copying over the corrections. In the morning the new- pages, covered with her fine, clear writing, were laid, carefully folded, on his desk, to be sent off in the mail when Lyovochka got up. Papa would pick them up for one last glance. But when evening came it was the same thing all over again: everything altered, even-thing crossed out and written over.
" 'Sonya, darling, forgive me; I've spoiled all your work again; this is the last time,' he would tell her, shamcfaccdly pointing out the places lie had changed. 'Tomorrow well send it all off.'"
Sometimes, after the proofs had already gone he would remember a sentence that was wrong or a weak adjective and have to telegraph the correction.
He went to Moscow several times that winter, and met Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, who had l)ecn worshiping him from afar. "I was frightened and self-conscious when I found myself face to facc with him," the composer wrote in his diary. "It seemed to mc that none of the filth that lies hidden in the heart of man could be kept secrct from this great authority on the subject. . . . But . . . his manner was very straightforward and open and showed little of that omniscience I had feared. With me, he only wanted to talk music, in which he was very interested at that time. He liked to l>clittlc Beethoven and was skeptical of his genius." Tchaikovsky asked Rubinstein to arrange a recital for his favorite author at the Conscrvatory, and was most flattered to see the author of War and Peace shedding tears when the orchestra played the andante of his D Major Quartet.
Tolstoy had always been sensitive to music. It acted on him like a drug. It unstrung his nerves and made him lose control of his reactions. Sometimes he even grew angry with the artist for destroying his peace of mind. Stepan Behrs observed that when his brother-in-law was listening to his favorite melodies, he would suddenly turn "very pale," and "he winced, almost imperceptibly, in a way that seemed to express fear."4® When he returned to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy sent Tchaikovsky a series of folksongs and asked him to arrange them "in the style of Mozart or Haydn."
Soon afterward, however, the composer's ardor coolcd toward the novelist, whose theories on music were really too outlandish. Tchaikovsky accused Tolstoy of saying "very commonplace things, not worthy of a genius." He did not even like Anna Karenina, of which he had read the opening chapters. He wrote to his brother, "Aren't you ashamed to admire this disgusting non-entity, who pretends to be performing profound psychological analyses? . . . What value can there be in this aristocratic babbling . . ."
On the whole, however, readers and critics alike continued to rave over Tolstoy's new book. He was sincerely amazed at this, and wrote to Strakhov 011 January 26, 1877: "The success of the last section of Anna Karenina pleased me greatly, I must confess. It was so unexpected: I am astonished to see that something as ordinary' and insignificant as that can please the public."
In March of that year Strakhov sent him two articles praising his book to the skies and, proudly testing himself, Tolstoy burned them. "I was too afraid," he wrote to Strakhov, "that those articles would turn my head."47 Whereupon the good disciple chortled, "I admire you for burning the reviews by Markov and the anonymous critic. That is not what Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Stasov would have done. They read every line written about them and take up their own defense if no one else will."48
While the final chapters of Anna Karenina were being published, the public was badly shaken by news of the uprising of the Serbs and Montenegrins against the Turks. Could the tsar turn a deaf car to this, could he abandon his traditional role as protector of the faithful in the Balkans? Aroused by the journalists' call to arms, scores of Russians volunteered to serve under General Chernayev and defend their "little Slavic brothers." Collections for the downtrodden rebels were taken up at church doors. The officers of the guards had visions of a short military tour through the land of the miscreants, complete with distributions of the St. George Cross. Tolstoy, who was writing the Epilogue to Anna Karenina, dared to express his disapproval through the mouth of his hero Levin, who said the volunteers for the front were "misguided . . . hotheads," always itching for a fight on the first pretext that came along; nothing could be more scandalous than "these ladies in sable capes and trains behind their chesses going to extort money out of the peasants, when their total collection amounts to less than the price of their train"; he even proclaimed that "the good of society is dependent upon scrupulous obedience of the moral law engraved in every human heart" and that "110 one, therefore, should desire or advocate war, whatever generous aim it purports to serve."40
On April 12, 1877, after much beating around the bush, Russia declared war 011 Turkey. Tolstoy's dismay was equaled only by the enthusiasm of most of his fellow countrymen. Katkov, director of the Russian Herald, was a confirmed partisan of the Russian intervention on behalf of Serbia and Montenegro. He would not publish the Epilogue in his magazine without revision and he told Tolstoy so, to the latter's surprise and indignation. "Leo has a strange attitude toward the Serbian war," Sonya wrote to her sister three days after war was declared. "I don't know why, but he does not sec it as we do; it is a personal, religious question for him. He says he is very worried about this war."
At Katkov's insistence, he made several unsuccessful attempts to rewrite the end of Anna Karenina; then, on Strakhov's advice, he decidcd to publish the Epilogue separately. The editors of the Russian Herald prevaricated about the real reason for the change, and printed the following notice in the July issue: "The installment of Anna Karenina in our last issue was followed by the words To be concluded in the next issue.' But the novel itself ends with the hero's death. According to the author's plans, there is to be a short epilogue—some thirty-five pages —informing the reader that Vronsky, feeling lost and miserable after Anna's death, leaves for Serbia as a volunteer; all the other characters live on in good health, and Levin remains on his estate and condemns the Slavic Committee and the volunteers. The author may expand this chapter in a special edition of his book."
Indignant at this maneuver, Tolstoy sent a telegram to Katkov demanding the return of the manuscript of the Epilogue and announcing that he would have nothing further to do with the Russian Herald. The Epilogue came out in booklet form in January 1878. As Tolstoy expected, the Panslavists called him unpatriotic. Dostoycvskv, in his Diary of a Writer, went so far as to express his regret that an "author of his stature should so deviate and cut himself off from the rest of the
Russian community in a matter of such importance." It was, he said, "a mental aberration" and "vulgar sentimentality," and a "crime against nature" to be afraid of killing a Turk who was about to impale a child on his sword. Ignoring these appeals to his patriotism, Tolstoy continued to be tormented by the war. "As long as it lasts," he told his wife, "I shall not be able to write. It is as though the city were burning. One doesn't know what to do. One can think of nothing else."50
lie followed events in the newspapers and gradually, unconsciously, began to side with Russia. Still hating the war, he came to rejoice at a Turkish defeat; the officer of Sevastopol began to stir within the apostle. "Thank God Kars has been taken," he wrote to Fet on November 12, 1877. "I have ccascd to feel ashamed." A few days later (December 6), a new source of joy, non-military this time: Sonya gave him another son—Andrey. "Even though it has come to be a sort of routine for me, I am stirred and moved and filled with happiness every time," he wrote to V. Islenyev. At his feet, his children were playing war with lead soldiers in Russian and Turkish uniforms and collecting the pictures of generals printed on candy wrappers. Some Turkish prisoners had been transferred to Tula, and he wanted to show them to his sons. They entered the courtyard of an abandoned sugar refinery, which was filled with tall, handsome men with mournful faces, all wearing blue trousers and red fczzes. A few of them spoke Russian. Tolstoy gave them cigarettes and money and asked them about themselves, and was surprised to learn that every one carried a Koran in his pack. As he left lie said, "What splendid fellows, gentle and charming." His sons, for whom the Turks were slayers of Christians, stared at him in bewilderment.
During the summer of 1877 Strakhov, who was staying at Yasnaya Polyana, helped to prepare Anna Karenina for hard cover publication. It was agreed that he would read the text, corrcct the most obvious errors and mark questionable passages, and Tolstoy would then take over and adopt or reject his proposals. But the author quickly became so involved in the work that lie caught up with his corrector and they continued working side by side. At four o'clock in the afternoon—an hour before dinner—the master emerged from his study and the disciple from his, and they set off together for a walk. With his big head planted on top of his narrow shoulders, his sparse beard and prominent forehead and wide-set eyes, Strakhov did not seem real—a being nourished on ink and paper—alongside the stocky, robust and red-chcekcd lord of Yasnaya Polyana, who breathed through flaring nostrils and looked around him with a proprietary eye. As they walked, they talked about the book. Strakhov, paralyzed with admiration, would sandwich a timid criticism between two enormous compliments. Tolstoy listened and usually objected; but occasionally he was converted to his guest's opinion and, following his advice, rewrote a few pages and deleted ccrtain episodes.
"With regard to my corrections, which almost always related to questions of language," wrote Strakhov, "1 found . . . that Leo Niko- layevich would defend his choice of words to the death and refused to make the slightest alteration. I could see from his remarks that he cared a great deal about what he had written and that in spite of the seeming carelessness and awkwardness of his style, lie had weighed every word and phrase as carefully as the most exacting poet."
The final version was published in three volumes at the lieginning of the following year. The chorus of praises redoubled around him. The booksellers' stocks shrank; every woman in society felt some tie with the hapless Anna. But her scowling creator would grumble to all and sundry:
"What's so difficult about describing how an officer gets entangled with a woman? There's nothing difficult in that, and above all, nothing worthwhile. It's bad, and it serves no purpose."51
2. Anna Karenina
At first, Tolstoy thought of calling his novel Two Couples or Two Marriages, since in an early version Anna Karenina was supposed to get her divorce and marry Vronsky. Then, when the characters began to impose their own wills on the author, the theme veered off in another direction. But it was a theme of the utmost simplicity. Oblonsky, the bon-vivant, has had a stupid affair with his children's former French teacher, and appeals to his sister, Anna Karenina, to try to patch things up between him and his wife. And Anna, who is grace, sweetness and integrity personified, manages to reconcile the couple. She herself is married to Karenin, an important government official in St. Petersburg, twenty years her senior, a dry, self-satisfied man and a slave to etiquette. At her brother's house she meets a swashbuckling officer, Count Vronsky, with whom Kitty, Mrs. Oblonsky's sister, is infatuated. Levin, a sober, introspective young man who is deeply in love with Kitty, goes off in despair to live on his estate when he sees that the girl has eyes for no one but the dashing soldier. Vronsky, however, pays scant attention to Kitty: it is Anna who attracts him. And she, despite her steadfast heart, cannot resist.
After the deed is done, she confesses to her husband. His first thought is to save appearances at all costs, and when his wife falls ill, he is even ready to forgive her. But she recovers and leaves the country with her lover. Then, when the novelty has worn off, her sufferings begin. Vronsky misses his military carccr, which he had to abandon to follow her. And she is miserable at having left her son in Karenin's care. She returns to see the boy in secret. Far from pacifying her, their meeting only sharpens her despair. She goes from disillusionment to disillusionment and in the end her life becomes intolerable and she throws herself under a train. Vronsky is consumed with remorse and enlists to fight the Turks. In counterpoint to this dark, violent story, there is the light-flooded relationship of Kitty and Levin. After rejecting her suitor Kitty returns to him, won over by his integrity and strength, l hey marry, settle down in the country and enjoy the perfect happiness of simple souls, in accordance with Tolstoy's golden rule.
In War and Peace the author had created so many characters, invented so much action and debated so many ideas that one might reasonably fear he had exhausted the psychological resources of a normal artist's entire career in that one work. But with prodigious ease, never once repeating himself, he created a new galaxy of characters in Anna Karenina, all as alive and convincing as those in his historical cpic. This great power of self-renewal was undoubtedly due to the fact that he himself was continually being enriched by life as it passed him. Had he been less open to the world, less changeable and diversified, the range of his imagination would have been smaller. Once again, he had made good use of meetings with friends, current events, his own sensations, in brewing the "juice of fiction."
His attitude toward Anna Karenina, moreover, changed in the course of the book, almost as though the creator had gradually been seduced by his creature. Behind the love story of Anna and Vronsky lay the love story of Tolstoy and Anna. At first, Tolstoy did not like his heroine: he condemned her in the name of morality. He saw her as an incarnation of lechery and, oddly enough, did not even make her beautiful. His first notes on the woman who has bccomc the quintessence of charm and elegance for generations of readers describe her in the following terms: "She is unattractive, with a narrow, low forehead, short, tumed-up nose—rather large. If it were any bigger, she would be deformed. . . . But, in spite of her homely face, there was something in the kindly smile of her red lips that made her likable." So much for appearance. Her personality is that of a man-killer. One whole chapter in one of the early drafts of the book, devoted to a description of Anna, is entitled "The Devil." She is the agent of evil in the world. Both husband and lover are her victims. Ilcnce Karcnin, the government official, is initially portrayed as a warm, sensitive soul, cultivated and kind. His main fault is sentimentality. When he suspects his wife of infidelity, he tells his sister, "I feel like sobbing, 1 want sympathy, I want to be told what to do!" And the first model of Vronsky is "firm, kind- hearted and sincere." In a word, two choice characters, in contrast to whom the diabolical Anna stands out blacker than ever.
However, Tolstoy unconsciously begins to be intrigued by his sinner. She moves him, disturbs him, disarms him. He is on the verge of declaring his love. Suddenly he can no longer deprive her of beauty. Plas-
tic surgery is called for: the operation is a resounding success. The troll with the turncd-up nose emerges a sylphide: 'Vronsky was drawn, not by her beauty, although she was a very beautiful woman, nor by the unobtrusive elegance she radiated, but by the expression of utter sweetness in her charming face. . . . For an instant her gray keen eyes, which seemed darker than they were because of her thick eyelashes, paused to give him a friendly glance, as though she recognized him. Then she began looking for someone in the crowd. . . . Her eyes and her smile revealed vast stores of repressed vitality." Further on, the author tells us of "her brisk step, which gave a curious air of lightness to her full body." Little Kitty was enamored of her, "as inexperienced girls often become enamored of older married women." "There was nothing in Anna that betrayed the society matron or the mother of an eight-year-old-boy; from the relaxed case of her movements, her fresh complexion, the spontaneous shifts of her expression and smile, one would not have believed her to be more than a girl of twenty, were it not for the serious, even melancholy light in her lovely eyes. This feature was what struck and attracted Kitty." Even the children fall under her spell and quarrel over who is to be allowed to touch her hand or play with her wedding ring. At the ball she outshines everyone else. Tolstoy describes her arrival with a lover's eyes: "A very low-cut black velvet gown revealed her bosom and ivory sculptured shoulders, and her fine rounded arms and slender wrists. ... A delicate garland of pansies crowned her black hair, all her own; another just like it was pinned on the black ribbon of her belt, in the middle of a white lace rufHe. Her hair was dressed very simply, the only thing one noticed were the little ringlets escaping at the nape of her neck and temples. She wore a necklace of pearls around her full throat." From this moment on, there can be no more doubt. Anna's appeal owes nothing to the artifices of coquetry'. A charm she is unaware of radiates from her body. "'Yes,' Kitty said to herself as she watched her dancing, 'there is something strange in her, wonderful, demonic.'"
But Anna Karenina is not the conscious cause of the tragedies brought about by her implacable beauty: she was born under an evil spell, and at a moment chosen by fate, the spell simply begins to work. As the author continued, with infinite pains, to model each contour of this lost soul, he became increasingly irritated by the healthy, ordinary mortals around her. In the beginning she was the assassin and Karenin and Vronsky her victims. Now the tables were turned. Neither of the two men was worthy of her. With cold rage Tolstoy divested them, one by one, of the qualities he had freely bestowed upon them. He debased them in order to elevate and justify Anna.
Karenin bccomes a dried-up, self-centered, narrow-minded man, a pure product of Petersburg bureaucracy. Life is hidden from him by administrative regulations; ever)' gesture he makes is an expression of the law, of convention; he paralyzes and disfigures everything he touches; for him, his wife is simply one item of his establishment. Not until the storm is about to break does he actually concede that she "might have her own destiny, thoughts, desires," and as this possibility terrifies him, he prefers to dismiss it from his mind, just as some people hate the countryside and can only walk on concrete pavement, so Karenin, when life rushes in upon him in all its brutal nakedness and no longer in the form of an official report, utterly loses his grip. "What she feels, what goes on in her soul, is no concern of mine," he tells himself. "That is between herself and her conscience, it is a question of religion." And further on, "I made a mistake when I linked my life to hers; but there was nothing shameful in my mistake and therefore I do not need to be unhappy." A mixture of sham dignity, official piety, self-righteousness, cowardice, rectitude and sanctimoniousness, the reactions he causes in people are the cxact opposite of those aroused by his wife. The mere sight of Anna warms people's hearts; he, involuntarily, chills them. At a dinner at the Oblonskys, 'lie was the chief reason for the pall that fell over the party."
Faithful to his style of "contrasts," however, Tolstoy refuses to cut any character out of a single piece of cloth. When his wife is ill, Karenin suddenly bccomes human. Ilis carapace cracks. He becomes drunk with sympathy, dazzled by his own generosity-. He even allows Anna's lover inside his house. "Remorse at having wished for Anna's death, the compassion she inspired in him and, more than anything else, the joy of forgiving had transformed his moral torments into a profound sense of peace." The lull is short-lived. As soon as Anna recovers, he bccomes as hard as before. What was sublime at the bedside of a dying woman is ridiculous in the presence of a healthy one. As a member of society, lie does what society demands. Thus he can have nothing to reproach himself with afterward. But she wants "to tear apart this spidcrwcb, sticky with lies, in which lie was keeping her prisoner." "Whatever happens," she says, "anything is better than dissimulation and deceit."
She believes that in Vronsky she has found an ally as well as a lover. But he, whose heart was crystal-pure in the first draft, is subjected to the same process of degradation as Karenin, in order to highlight the figure of Anna. Tolstoy's dislike of his hero grows with his infatuation for his heroine. True, lie is not just a handsome, vain and foolish officcr, he belongs to the "gilded youth" of the capital for whom amorous in-
trigue is closely akin to the pleasures of the hunt "In his Petersburg universe," wrote Tolstoy, "people were divided into two totally different types. The lower type was composed of vulgar, stupid and ridiculous people who believed that a husband should sleep only with his wife, a maiden should l>e pure, a married woman chaste, one must bring up one's children, make money, pay one's debts and other nonsense of that sort." On the other side there was "a world in which the rule was to appear elegant, handsome, free with money, bold and high-spirited, to abandon oneself without scruple to every passion, and to laugh at everything else." Vronsky, a bachelor, feels much more at home in the second. But when he meets Anna his self-assurance falters; he is gripped by a passion of unwonted violence. Even after the charm of novelty has worn off, he sometimes feels a superstitious fear of her grace and elegance and the intensity of the emotions that course through her. The thing he is least able to understand is her aching love for the son from whom she is separated. lie refuses to think of her as a mother, and she is so aware of this that she prefers to hide from him the almost physical pain she suffers after seeing her little Sergey again. Vronsk/s failure to understand this condemns her to solitude. "Her sorrow was all the greater for being unshared," Tolstoy wrote. "She could not, nor did she wish to confide in Vronsky. . . . She knew he would never be able to understand the depth of her anguish; she knew a cold commcnt would be his only response to any allusion to her distress and she knew she would hate him for it, and was afraid. . . ."
With clinical exactitude, Tolstoy observes the slow poisoning of their liaison. Every phase of the disease is exhaustively described. More than their relations as lovers, the very structure of their personalities is infected, unable to withstand the trial of living together. They are ostracized by society, which will not forgive them for flaunting its rules, and they float in an artificial vacuum, with nothing to support them, no friends, nothing to plan for. Though she was strong enough to brave public opinion, Anna feels that a moral structure she has possessed sincc childhood is bending and giving way beneath her, and she had never realized how useful it could be. Of her two sources of support, her son and her lover—the first has been taken away from her and she may lose the second as well if she is not careful. She becomes anxious, she convinces herself that Vronsky must be pining for his carefree life of old, she accuses him of secretly seeing people whose doors are closed to her; she begins to think he has tired of her and is being unfaithful; she is tortured by jealousy; soon her only aim in life is to keep her hold over her lover, and as her fear that he will desert her increases, her efforts become more and more strained, nagging, awkward. Before long,
her beaut)' and the physical pleasure she gives him arc all she can rely upon to hold him. But Vronsky- is no longer affected, even by her beauty. When he looks at her, magnificently attired on her way to the theater, a shudder of repulsion runs through him. "He raised his eyes," wrote Tolstoy, "and saw her beauty and the adornment that set it off so well; but just then it was her very beauty and elegance that irritated him." And later, "There was no longer anything mysterious in the feelings her beauty aroused in him; and so, although he was more aware of her appeal than ever before, he was almost offended to see her so beautiful." Sensing that this weapon, too, will soon be useless to her, Anna begins to flirt with other men, but she cannot arouse Vronsky from his apathy. Then she grows desperate: she has nightmares, takes drugs, finally sees that death is the only way out. "Why all these churches and bells and lies?" she thought. "To hide the fact that we all hate each other like those scrapping cab-drivers!" Her inner monologue continues, jerky, compulsive, relentless, until the moment she throws herself under the train.
When shading his vast composition, Tolstoy wanted to save the brightest light for the legitimate couple, Kitty and Levin. Kitty is a pure, ardent and secretive girl in whom marriage suddenly reveals practical qualities of the highest order. Her husband is flabbergasted by her. "I low can this poetic, admirable Kitty, in the first weeks and even the first days of our married life, cope with tablecloths and furniture and mattresses for guests, and trays, and the cook, and the dinner?" This cry of wonderment was not uttered by Konstantin Levin, but by- Leo Tolstoy. As always he had great respect for a woman's virtues as a housewife. A wife's universe should be bounded by bed, kitchen stove and cradle.
As he progressed in life, he identified himself more and more with his own characters. After disguising himself as Nicholas Irtenyev, Nekhlyudov, Olenin and Pierre Bezukhov,* here he was again, body and soul—and with what gusto!—in Konstantin Levin. lie shamelessly attributed to him the events of his own life, fed him with his ideas, the books he read, his own blood. The relationship between Levin and Kitty—the declaration scene using the first letters of words, the wedding ceremony, including the last-minute hesitation and the incident of the forgotten shirt in the trunk, the young couple's first days in their country home, the birth of their first child—were one and all transposed from the author's past. Sonya must have been deeply moved as she copied over the passages in which the early days of her life with
• I Icrocs of Youth, A Landlord's Morning, The Cossacks and War and Peace, respectively.
Lyovochka were described with such accuracy and delicacy-. Similarly, the death of Levin's brother is an exact replica of the death of Dmitry Tolstoy. Levin's relations with his muzhiks are drawn directly from Tolstoy's experience at Yasnaya Polyana.
Levin personifies the quandary of the landowner. With his democratic turn of mind, it seems only fair to him that the peasants should have the land, "since the lord does nothing and his muzhiks work- thereby eliminating one unproductive element from the soil." But the aristocrat in him will not die and it hurts him to sec the great estates breaking up, the nobility fleeing to Nice and abandoning priceless fields and forests behind them in the heart of Russia for a mere pittance, and crafty stewards speculating at both their employers' and the farmers' expense, as, "inexorably, on all sides, the impoverishment of the nobility pursued its course." He seeks to reconcile the interests of both parties, for he has "the love of the muzhik in his blood." "The entire agricultural system must be reorganized, and the living conditions of the people changed in every respect," he thinks. "In place of poverty, prosperity for all; in place of mutual animosity, understanding in the interest of all. In a word, a revolution, bloodless but on a grand scale, beginning in the little circle of our district and widening to include our government, then Russia, then the whole world."
However, it is a far cry from theory to practice. When more and more flesh and blood beings lean with all their weight against the current of ideas, the stream is finally blocked; piled on top of each other, one hundred exceptions ultimately disprove a rule. In spite of his enormous effort, Levin fails to give his peasants a share in their master's profits.
In addition to his problems as a landowner, there arc his metaphysical doubts. In the early days of his marriage he thinks he has gone beyond the reach of sorrow and fear. But love is a frail bulwark against the specter of death. After witnessing his brother's death agony, Levin becomes obsessed by his own ignorance of the most urgent problem of all, the end of life on earth. The birth of his child renews his fascination with the unfathomable mystery. It seems to him that, by living like other people, he is neglecting the essential for the trivial. "Like a man who trades a warm fur coat for a muslin shirt in midwinter," Tolstoy wrote, "Levin felt naked, not in his mind but in his whole being, and condemned to perish miserably." He read the Bible and the philosophers and hovered between doubt and prayer, and added to his distress by attempting to explain it. While everyone else sees him as a strong, wcll-balanced man and a happy father, he turns away at the sight of a piece of rope and leaves his gun behind when he goes walking, for fear
of yielding to the temptation of suicide, 'l'o escape from such depressing meditations, there is only one remedy: manual labor, and he hurls himself into it. Fatigue prevents him from thinking. "Now, against his will, he sank deeper and deeper into the ground like a plowshare, until he could not pull himself out without first plowing his furrow," Tolstoy went on. From associating with the peasants, Levin gradually absorbs their wisdom. One of them say's to him, "Some people live only for their bellies, and others live for God and their soul." These simple words strike the young lord at his sorest point, and all his doubts are dispelled. What no philosopher or Church Father had been able to accomplish, a humble peasant docs unwittingly: he brings a lost soul back to God. To what God? Levin doesn't know: "Just as the conclusions of the astronomers would be useless and inaccurate," he thinks, "if they were not reached through observation of the visible sky in relation to a fixed meridian and a fixed horizon, so would all metaphysical deductions be absurd if I did not base them on this knowledge of the innate goodness of every human heart which Christianity has revealed to me and of which I shall always be able to find proof in my own soul." At this point, he believes he has attained the inner peace he has so long aspired to, but the ambiguity of his religious feelings is a warning of fresh storms ahead.
During the four years (1873-77) it took him to write Anrw Karenina, Tolstoy debated every one of the questions that were bothering him in his book. On the slightest pretext the novelist hands over the pen to the essayist, and the action halts to let the author express his views on rural husbandry, the meaning of life, the education of children or the relations between psychology and physiology. In the world of Levin and Anna, as in Tolstoy's own world, conversation ccnters on Gustavc Dora's illustrations of the Bible, the novels of Daudet and Zola, the physicist Tindall's theories on radiant heat, the teachings of Spencer and Schopenhauer, tassalle's scheme for workers' unions. Anna dips into Taine's Ancien Regime, her husband reads an article by Br6al in the Revue des Deux Mondes, there is a debate at Princess Betsy's on compulsory military service. . . . Tolstoy might be said to have used the novel as an outlet for his own intellectual preoccupations. In fact, he said as much himself twelve years later, in a letter to Rusanov: "Sometimes I still have a desire to write, and, do you know, what I would like to write is a big, loose novel like Anna Karenina, one in which I might easily find room for all the tilings I have understood in an original way and that might be useful to others."
Unlike War and Peace, however, where the author intercedes directly to present his view of some point of history, strategy or politics, in
Anna Karenina, he hides behind his characters and attributes to them the opinions he holds himself. For the sake of impartiality, he even invents contradictions for them. One day, telling a friend of the difficulties he was encountering in his work, lie said he had rewritten the conversation between Levin and the priest (Part V, Chapter I) four times, so that it would be impossible to tell which of the two he favored. "I have found," he said, "that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on."1 He also became increasingly aware of the interdependence of the parts of the book. In a mass of such dimensions everything hung together, the glitter and the tarnish were equally essential. As to the progression of the sccnes, he believed it was the result of some mysterious process over which the author had no control. "I had proof of tin's," lie wrote to Strakhov, "with Vronsky's suicide. I had never clearly felt the necessity for it. I had begun to revise my rough draft and suddenly, by some means that was totally unexpected but ineluctable, Vronsky determined to put a bullet through his head, and it later became dear that that scene was organically indispensable."2 To his close friends he also said, "Do you know, I often sit down to write some specific thing, and suddenly I find myself on a wider road, the work begins to spread out in front of me. That was the way it was with Anna Karenina."3
It is precisely this "spreading out," these digressions, this profusion of gratuitous ideas that an impatient judge might hold against Tolstoy. Some passages are definitely too long: the descriptions of the Levins' life in the country, the debates on serfdom and emancipation, die rut in which the peasants live and their unwillingness to change, the county justices of the peace. But the author's skill as a storyteller is so great that just when the reader is about to lose paticncc, he is caught up and delighted anew. Scenes such as the hay mowing, drenched in sunlight and pagan joy, or the race and the fall of the marc Froufrou, or Anna's secret meeting with her son, or the death of Nicholas, or the suicide in the little railway station, are marvels of precision, fullness of design and controlled emotion.
Here, as in War and Peace, it is accuracy of psychological observation combined with a felicitous choice of detail that carries conviction. Returning to St. Petersburg after first meeting Vronsky, Anna suddenly notices that her husband's ears are very big, and she is annoyed because his habit of cracking his knuckles seems to be growing worse. On her wedding day, Kitty's friends find her "much less pretty than usual" in her white dress. Under the strain of her false position after she has left her husband, Anna acquires a habit of screwing up her eyes slightly when she speaks. Oblonskv has a disarming smile that appears
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