Tolstoy

Sonya was only twenty-seven when Masha was born, so must have been filled with dread at the thought of complying with her husband’s wishes: the intransigence of his views would lead to her having eight more children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. Quite apart from the health risks, each new pregnancy bound her more tightly to Yasnaya Polyana, and meant she had to postpone yet again her hopes of having a life outside the nursery. ‘With every child you have to give up a life for yourself even more, and resign yourself to the burden of cares, worries, illnesses and years,’ she noted in her diary in June 1870.³¹ Sonya was a devoted mother, and she loved living at Yasnaya Polyana, but she was a young woman who had grown up in a city, and after a while she began to long for a change of scene, some company, and the chance to go to the occasional soirée. She found the solitude depressing.³² The custom for Russian families from their milieu was to spend the winter in the city, and retreat to the country estate or a dacha during the summer months, but the Tolstoys lived the country life all year round. At the beginning of their marriage Tolstoy had dreamed of having a pied-à-terre in Moscow – a flat on Sivtsev-Vrazhek, a quiet back-street in the heart of the city favoured by the well-to-do, where his cousin Fyodor Ivanovich ‘the American’ had lived. He confided in Sonya’s father that he imagined transferring their Yasnaya Polyana life to Moscow for three or four months each winter, complete ‘with the same Alexey, the same nanny, the same samovar’, in order to be able to enjoy stimulating conversation with new people, visit libraries and go to the theatre.³³ That plan was stymied by lack of funds, however, and by the time the income from War and Peace had made Tolstoy an affluent man, he no longer had the inclination. He became more reclusive as he got older, preferring to be at home for long stretches, when he could work undisturbed. City life soon chafed him, so he was always happy to leave, but he did have the freedom to come and go more or less as he pleased. He did not particularly appreciate hearing operas like Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto and Gounod’s Faust, but at least he had the opportunity to go to the theatre while he was writing War and Peace. Opera was Sonya’s great passion – what would she have given to be able to dress up occasionally for a night at the Bolshoi Theatre!³⁴ She went to Moscow a handful of times during these years, but for the most part she was at home in the countryside: the highlight of the year for her was the summer, when her sister Tanya and other relatives came to stay. ‘If all my intellectual and emotional capacities were awakened, and most of all my desires, I would be crying until kingdom come,’ she wrote to Tanya in November 1871, and a few months later she wrote to her again about the ‘lonely, monastic’ life at Yasnaya Polyana.³⁵

Tolstoy also had the freedom to undertake trips elsewhere. Apart from his nightmare experience in Arzamas, he had enjoyed lifting his gaze to the tops of the tall pine trees as he travelled through the dense forests of the Penza region in the autumn of 1869. After crossing the Sura river, teeming with sterlet, he also relished the region’s distinctive pebbled black earth. Like the local population, it reminded him of the mighty ploughman of Russian folklore Mikula Selyaninovich, the traditional peasant symbol of Russian strength and the hero of the medieval epics he had been reading.³⁶ In the summer of 1871 Tolstoy went further afield and lived like a Bashkirian nomad again out on the steppe east of Samara. The plan was that Sonya would go too the following year, but by autumn she discovered that she was pregnant again. Writing despondently to tell her sister Tanya about it that October, she spoke about the mud and the monotony, and how having a sixth child would mean having to stay put the following summer: ‘it will be impossible to go to Samara, it will be impossible to come and visit you, we’ll have to take on another nanny, and so on and so forth’.³⁷ By copying out War and Peace, Sonya felt she was involved, and was contributing to her husband’s creative work, albeit in a very minor way, so it is understandable that she was keen for him to start writing a new book. But a 700-page ABC book was not exactly what she had in mind.