At the end October Sonya fell gravely ill with peritonitis, and then went into labour. Varvara, born three months premature, died a few hours after she was born.85 ‘Fear, horror, death, children cavorting, eating, fuss, doctors, falsity, death, horror’ was how Tolstoy defined the situation at Yasnaya Polyana in a letter to his correspondent Fet.86 A further source of stress was that the house was full of people just at that time. After Toinette’s death the previous summer, Tolstoy’s other aunt, seventy-eight-year-old Polina, had moved to Yasnaya Polyana from her Tula convent, and she took over running the household while Sonya was ill, but there were also lots of guests: Sonya’s brother Sasha and his wife, her uncle kostya Islavin, Pyotr Samarin and his wife and another family friend. On the most critical day of Sonya’s illness, Jules Rey’s sister arrived from Geneva to become the children’s new governess.87
Tolstoy found some solace in writing a very long letter to Strakhov about philosophy, but ended up confronting the meaning of life and the inescapable truth that his own life was just an ‘empty and stupid joke’. He had just turned forty-seven, and he felt he was entering old age – a time when there was no longer anything in the ‘outside world’ that interested him, and all he could see ahead was death. He had now started the long descent back to where he had originated, he wrote, aware that whatever his desire – breeding a particular kind of horse, shooting ten hares in one field, learning Arabic – it could not bring him any true satisfaction. His only hope was that he had understood the meaning of life wrongly.88 Meanwhile, to be on the safe side, he went hunting without a gun, so that he could not turn it on himself, and boasted to his brother Sergey that he had managed to bag six hares with his dogs without firing a shot.89
Sonya did not have the luxury of contemplating the meaning of life. usually she was too busy with household chores, and now, not the first time, she was actually close to death. Her long convalescence was immediately beset by new problems. Jules Rey’s sister was not a success as a governess, and there was friction: soon Sonya could no longer bear her.90 And then, in December 1875, came the slow, painful demise of
Tolstoy was greatly saddened, as the last living link with his parents had now been irrevocably sundered. As he wrote to Alexandrine in March, the death of this old woman had affected him profoundly – more than any other. Despite feeling as fed up with
I’m in such an appalling moral state, loneliness is affecting me so
Maria’s ‘constant worry’ was Elena, the illegitimate daughter she had given birth to in September 1863, months after the Tolstoys’ first child Sergey was born.97 In 1876 Elena turned thirteen, and Masha, as a widowed single woman, was still too ashamed to bring her to Russia.