Tolstoy

All in all, February 1875 was not a good month for Tolstoy. If he felt completely indifferent to all the accolades he was receiving for Anna Karenina, it was because there had been another death in the family.⁷⁷ This time it was Nikolay, their ten-month-old baby, who passed away after three weeks of harrowing illness. It was particularly agonising for Sonya, who was still breast-feeding. Instead of the sunshine which had accompanied Petya’s funeral, the day of Nikolay’s burial was one of the coldest that winter – minus twenty degrees, with fierce, biting winds which tore at the muslin he was wrapped in and the crown on his head, traditionally a part of Orthodox funerals. Sonya told Tanya that she felt as if she had turned to stone.⁷⁸ Three months later, she was pregnant again.

There were further instalments of Anna Karenina in March and April 1875, but Russian readers then had to wait eight months for the next chapters to be published. The reason for the delay was simple: Tolstoy had not finished them. It was unprecedented for the serial publication of a novel to be interrupted in this way, and only a writer of Tolstoy’s stature could have got away with it. He could not back out of his deal with katkov, but he found it hard to muster the necessary enthusiasm to carry on. He was still wrapped up in his educational ideas, and preoccupied with the publication of his New ABC, which won immediate acclaim as soon as it appeared in June 1875. He was also becoming very depressed and needed distraction.

That summer the whole family returned to Samara, accompanied by Sonya’s brother ‘uncle Styopa’, their English governess Emily Tabor and Jules Rey, the bespectacled but athletic Swiss tutor who had arrived at Yasnaya Polyana that January.⁷⁹ He was a spruce, neatly turned out young man of twenty-three with a secret drink problem, and he made a bee-line for Emily.⁸⁰ At the beginning of August Tolstoy organised a traditional Bashkir horse race – five laps of a three-mile circular course marked out on his land – for which he offered prizes.⁸¹ Tents sprang up all around it in the days leading up to the race as Bashkirs arrived with their horses, and Tolstoy offered a lame foal and a few sheep for the feasting that went on beforehand. It was thrilling for the Tolstoy children, who had never encountered throat singing or the traditional dancing that accompanied the songs performed on the quray, the long Bashkir flute. Thirty-two riders took part in the race, which drew hundreds of spectators. A handful were local Russians, including Tolstoy on a mount he had bought specially for the occasion, but the rest were Bashkir and kirghiz horsemen, one of whom claimed the top prize of a rifle. It was a far cry from the horse races in Anna Karenina, attended by the court. Tolstoy was hatching a plan to start breeding horses, and he brought home some kirghiz horses, prized for their speed and stamina, as well as two donkeys christened Bismarck and MacMahon after two opponents in the Franco-Prussian War.⁸²

Back in Yasnaya Polyana at the end of August, rested and sunburnt, Tolstoy declared that the experience of witnessing first-hand the clash of sedentary Russian and nomadic Bashkir lifestyles, and putting up with flies and dirt out on the steppe, was infinitely superior to listening to speeches in the English Houses of Parliament, which he regarded as a dubious privilege. He had not picked up a pen for two months.⁸³ He forced himself to return to ‘boring, banal’ Anna Karenina in the autumn of 1875, but both he and Sonya were soon in low spirits again. On 12 October Sonya wrote in her diary that their excessively isolated country life was now unbearable, and that the monotony of her routine over months and years had led to an overwhelming apathy and indifference to everything which she could no longer fight. Her husband’s gloom was infectious: ‘He sits miserably and despondently for days and weeks on end without doing anything, without work, without energy, without joy and seems to have reconciled himself to this state of affairs. It is a kind of moral death, but I don’t want to see it in him, and he himself can’t go on living like this.’⁸⁴