Tolstoy

Tolstoy was wise enough to know he needed sometimes to take a break from his literary activities, and his general custom was to concentrate on his writing from autumn through to spring, and then enjoy outdoor pursuits like shooting and riding during the warm summer months when Sonya’s sister Tanya and other friends and relatives would come to stay at Yasnaya Polyana. In 1865 he discovered an enthusiasm for Anthony Trollope, whose novel The Bertrams provided welcome light relief and a distraction from his immersion in Russian history.¹⁰¹ And during a stay in Moscow the following year, he also took up sculpture for a brief period (not surprisingly, it was the figure of a horse which he decided to tackle as his first subject).¹⁰² Tolstoy never lost his readiness to try out new pastimes, even in old age. He also began to use the newfangled mode of railway transport as soon as he had the chance: the construction of an extensive network of Russian railways in the 1860s is also the legacy of the era of the Great Reforms. The Moscow–kursk railway line was completed in 1867, while Tolstoy was working on War and Peace, and it cut his journey times in half.

When, a few decades later, Yasnaya Polyana became a site of pilgrimage for thousands of Tolstoy’s devotees, its sheer accessibility had a lot to do with it: the mainline station built in the village of Yasenki, south of Tula, was just four miles down the road from Yasnaya Polyana. A large number of the many Tolstoy followers who made the journey felt it was their duty to publish an account of their visit afterwards, but amongst the mountain of memoirs of personal meetings with Tolstoy, there is one which stands out not only by virtue of the fact that it was written a long time before all the other ones, but also because it happens to be well written. Its author was Eugene Schuyler, an American writer and diplomat who arrived in Moscow in 1868 to take up the post of consul.¹⁰³ Schuyler was one of the very first Americans to receive a PhD, and had taken up Russian after meeting crew members of the Alexander Nevsky, the imperial navy’s last wooden frigate, when it was docked in New York. In 1866 he published the first American translation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and on his way to Russia the following year, he met the author in Baden-Baden. Despite the coolness in their relationship at that time, Turgenev gave Schuyler a letter of introduction to Tolstoy. Schuyler’s account of his visit to Yasnaya Polyana gives us a vivid glimpse into Tolstoy’s life in the autumn of 1868.

At five o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday 14 September, the twenty-eight-year-old Schuyler found himself getting on a train in Moscow, and nine hours later, at two in the morning, he got off at Yasenki to be met by Tolstoy’s carriage. Torrential rain meant that it took a further hour and a half to drive the four miles to Yasnaya Polyana. upon arrival, however, he was relieved to be told that ‘late hours were kept’ and that the usual time for morning coffee was eleven o’clock. The following day he joined the count and his young wife, plus their three young children, Seryozha, Tanya and Ilya, and their English governess, for breakfast. Tolstoy, he discovered, had in fact been up at dawn, and had gone off into the woods with his dogs and his gun. Schuyler was duly taken hare-hunting himself, and later came to have a particular appreciation for the exquisitely written chapters describing shooting parties in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He had before then only ever made botanical excursions into forests, in search of trees and shrubs, and had never held a gun, but he now acquired direct experience of one of Tolstoy’s greatest passions:

It was new to me to sit still and use my ears as well as my eyes; to appreciate the different noises of the wood; to know whether that was a twig or a leaf which fell – for the leaves were just falling … to distinguish between the noises made by the birds; to speculate as to the origin of unknown sounds, and to have one’s attention always strained for the patter-patter of the hare.¹⁰⁴