Tolstoy (29 page)

Marriage diverted Tolstoy from the path taking him closer to the peasantry that he had started out on. He now embarked on the lengthy but productive detour which just happened to result in him writing
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy's changes of direction may no longer have been as frequent as when he was in his twenties, but they were no less violent when they took place. For two and a half years he had turned his back on art while he had thrown himself into his revolutionary educational activities and worked as a Justice of the Peace. Now he was preparing to turn his back on working for the peasantry and leave this life behind to return to the cultural milieu of his class. But before he could proceed, he needed to fulfil his obligation to his publisher Mikhail Katkov, who had lent him 1,000 roubles back in February 1862 to pay a gambling debt. This was the last time Tolstoy gambled. Under the terms of the deal, Katkov was to have the right to publish Tolstoy's 'Caucasus novella' in his journal the
Russian Messenger.
It was nowhere near finished, however. Tolstoy tried vainly to persuade Katkov to allow him to send money now rather than a manuscript, but eventually he knuckled down and pulled his various drafts into shape.

Tolstoy had been working on this novella for ten years — longer than for any work he ever published — and it had undergone many changes as he read and absorbed works such as
The Iliad.
³⁸
What was ultimately published in the January 1863 issue of the
Russian Messenger
was a novella entitled
The Cossacks,
³⁹
but because Tolstoy had submitted his manuscript so late, the issue in fact only physically appeared at the end of February. He had planned to write a sequel, and he continued to toy with this idea, but really his mind was on other things.
The Cossacks
is a kind of Rousseau-inspired metaphor of Tolstoy's spiritual journey in the decade before his marriage. It tells the story of Olenin, a young Russian officer from Moscow, who is stationed with some Cossack villagers during his period of service in the Caucasus. He envies them their freedom, perceiving in them a natural grace and nobility, and he falls hopelessly in love with a particularly alluring Cossack girl. Ultimately, however, Olenin realises he cannot overcome his aristocratic, metropolitan background and become one with nature like the Cossacks, and he realises he has to go back to his old life. Something similar happened to Tolstoy when he married, and he openly acknowledged that his views on life had changed when writing to his closest confidante, Alexandrine.
⁴⁰
He was now ready to go back to writing fiction for an educated audience about members of his own class.

In January 1863 Tolstoy announced in the Moscow press that his journal
Yasnaya Polyana
would cease publication.
⁴¹
Later that year his schools would also close, causing the student teachers to disperse. Sonya did not regret their departure, as the dense fumes of tobacco smoke during the meetings she had attended in their small drawing room had made her nauseous while she was pregnant.
⁴²
She came to hate the students' presence on the estate as soon as she began to feel at home at Yasnaya Polyana, inasmuch as the students came from an alien social background, and took her husband away from her.
⁴³
But Tolstoy still had to publish the December 1862 issue of his
Yasnaya Polyana
journal, and he completed his last article for it on 23 February 1863. Two days later Sonya wrote to her sister Tanya to tell her her husband had started a new novel.
⁴⁴
This was
War and Peace.
Over 5,000 manuscript pages, numerous false starts, several different titles and six years later, it was finished. In the exhilaration which overcame Tolstoy soon after marrying he declared that he wished to have the freedom to work on a long-term project ('
de longue haleine
'),
⁴⁵
but even he could not have imagined the life he would breathe into this novel would be quite as long drawn-out as this.

Just as it took the newly married couple several months to acclimatise to each other, it took the best part of the year for Tolstoy to find his focus with this new novel, but there was no question that he wanted to harness this new surge of creative energy to the composition of a substantial work of fiction. First he tinkered with an idea for a story he had been given back in 1856, about the fate of an old piebald gelding that had once been renowned for its speed. 'Kholstomer', usually translated as 'Strider', is one of his most remarkable stories. Tolstoy later adopted a third-person narrator, but much of the story is told from the horse's point of view. One summer when he had been visiting Turgenev, and they were returning home from an evening walk, they encountered an emaciated old horse standing in a pasture with strength only to swish its tail at the flies buzzing round it. Tolstoy went up to stroke the horse and commented on what it must have been thinking, prompting Turgenev to tell him he must have been a horse in a former life. Tolstoy was not happy with the story in 1863, so he put it aside, and resumed work on it some twenty years later at the instigation of his wife.
⁴⁶

Work on the estate also distracted Tolstoy from his purpose initially, especially with the approach of spring. Filled with new energy, Tolstoy bought cattle, sheep, birds and pigs, and tried vainly to interest Sonya in milking and butter-churning. Apart from being pregnant, she was also a city girl, and she found she could not tolerate the smell of manure in the cattle-sheds.
⁴⁷
For a while Tolstoy took an interest in a distillery which he built with his neighbouring landowner and friend Alexander Bibikov.
⁴⁸
Sonya tried to dissuade Tolstoy from pursuing this project on moral grounds, but he argued that he also needed grain for his pig-breeding.
⁴⁹
In any event, it only operated for about eighteen months. Far more rewarding was the planting of about 1,000 apple trees at the Nikolskoye estate,
⁵⁰
and an orchard of about 6,500 trees at Yasnaya Polyana. Each spring they produced clouds of exquisite pink and white blossom, which always seemed to Tolstoy to be about to float up into the sky.
⁵¹
This was on a much larger scale than Tolstoy's animal husbandry, which was never terribly profitable; indeed, it was believed that the Yasnaya Polyana orchard was the second largest in Europe. By the mid-1870s, Tolstoy had increased its size from ten to forty hectares.
⁵²
Sonya was actually keen to help with tree planting — this was one aspect of farming she did not find too distasteful. That autumn she for the first time experienced the air on the estate filling with the dense, sweet smell of thousands of ripening apples. By May 1863, when she was weeks away from giving birth, it became physically impossible for her to do very much, but that did not stop Tolstoy chastising her for being idle.
⁵³

Tolstoy also became passionately interested in bees after he got married. He bought some hives from Sonya's grandfather, and installed them in a distant part of the estate, about a mile from the family home in the lime and aspen wood beyond the Voronka river.
⁵⁴
Sonya tried and failed to share this passion as well. As she later wrote in her autobiography:

The whole of Lev Nikolayevich's passionate nature was revealed in this enthusiasm. He developed enthusiasms for the most diverse things throughout his life: games, music, [ancient] Greek, schools, Japanese pigs, pedagogy, horses, hunting - too many in fact to count. And that's not including his intellectual and literary interests: they were most extreme. He was madly passionate about everything at the height of his enthusiasm, and if he could not convince whomever he was talking to of the importance of the activity he was caught up in, he was capable of being even hostile to that person.
⁵⁵

While she was growing up in Moscow, Sonya had never had time on her own. Now when Tolstoy pursued his enthusiasms, she was left by herself at home, and she became very lonely, as she recorded in her diary. Sometimes during the early summer of 1863, when her husband spent whole days with his bees, she walked through the fields to take him his lunch or a glass of tea in the evening, and would find him with a net over his head arranging the combs in a hive, or capturing a swarm.
⁵⁶
After sitting there and getting stung, she would face a solitary walk back home. As well as reading about beekeeping, Tolstoy spent hours observing the patterns of behaviour of his bees, assisted by his beekeeper, an old man with a long grey beard. During the summer he was also helped by Nikolka, the gardener's young son.
⁵⁷
His absorption with the Yasnaya Polyana apiary abated after about two years, but his enthusiasm for beekeeping left its mark in his writing. Firstly, there is the famous epic simile in
War and Peace,
borrowed from Virgil's
Aeneid,
in which Moscow in 1812 is compared to a queenless hive. Conversely, Tolstoy thought of a busy hive when conveying the atmosphere of the ball in
Anna Karenina,
and a little later in the novel he describes bees on their first spring flight after the relocation of their hive for the summer. The precision of his vocabulary, overlooked by most translators, tells us a great deal about the rigour he applied to his study of apiculture.
⁵⁸

Apart from the prolonged visit to Yasnaya Polyana of Sonya's sister Tanya and brother Sasha, plus two of their cousins, Tolstoy had one other major distraction from the writing of fiction in the summer of 1863. In the middle of June, husband and wife temporarily stopped writing and reading each other's diaries, and for a short period at least, Sonya was able to claim Tolstoy's full attention: on 28 June their first child was born. In her autobiography Sonya does not describe the birth of Sergey as a joyous event. This was not only because he arrived in the world over a week early, and caught everybody unawares. Lyubov Alexandrovna just managed to arrive in time, but the set of baby clothes she had sent from Moscow did not. The newborn had to be wrapped in one of Tolstoy's nightshirts before being placed in the crude limewood cradle that had been made by the family carpenter. Both the midwife, Maria Ivanovna Abramovich, and Dr Shmigaro, the chief doctor at the Tula armaments factory, were Polish exiles, whose number in Russia had exponentially increased after the government had brutally suppressed the Polish uprising that January. Compared to the thousands of Poles deported to Siberia, the Tolstoys' doctor and midwife had a much easier fate. Over the next twenty-five years Maria Ivanovna would make many j'ourneys from Tula to Yasnaya Polyana — she assisted Sonya at all except one of the births of her thirteen children, five of whom did not live to adulthood.

Tolstoy had not completely abandoned his Populist ways, and now he flatly refused to allow Sonya to take on a wet-nurse, despite mastitis making it impossible for her to breast-feed baby Sergey. Lyubov Alexandrovna found it exasperating that her daughter meekly followed her husband's wishes, and must have been relieved when her own husband weighed in with some common sense. The crusty Dr Bers had already lost patience with his son-in-law's unorthodox ideas on numerous occasions. He had been upset and offended by a pedagogical article Tolstoy had written the previous year condemning university education, for example, and had written and told him so.
⁵⁹
In August 1863 he wrote to Lev and Sonya from Moscow to tell them they had both gone mad. 'You can be sure, Lev Nikolayevich, my friend,' he wrote, 'that your nature will never become that of a peasant, j'ust as your wife's nature cannot tolerate that which can be tolerated by the Pelageya who beat up her husband and the innkeeper at a tavern outside Petersburg (see
Moscow Gazette,
issues 165 and 166).' Tolstoy, he remarked tartly, was skilled at writing and talking, but not always so smart when it came to practical things.
⁶⁰

It took a while for Tolstoy to acquire paternal feelings for Sergey. He refused to hold him when he was very small,
⁶¹
and only began to love his son when he was nearly two years old and very unwell. It was 'a completely new feeling,' he noted in his diary in March 1865.
⁶²
Nevertheless, it was with the birth of Sergey that the happiest years of the Tolstoys' marriage began. Lev and Sonya's relationship became stronger and more stable, leading him to declare in his single diary entry for 1864 that he and Sonya meant more to each other than anyone else in the world.
⁶³
Sonya no longer had time to be bored or lonely, and as a mother she was now fulfilling her husband's idea of womanhood, but she was doing more than that. By sitting up late at night to write out fair copies of her husband's drafts, which gave her a sense of involvement in his creative life, she was also indispensable to his artistic productivity. This profound happiness in Tolstoy's personal life was intimately connected to the extraordinary creative energy which was welling up inside him, and which would be expressed in the writing of
War and Peace.
⁶⁴
He wrote about this to Alexandrine in October 1863: