Tolstoy

Tolstoy would get up most days around eight in the morning, and his children would usually run out to greet him as he headed downstairs to get dressed. Sometimes he would do a few turns on the parallel bars in the hall before returning upstairs for coffee in the small drawing room, next to the main family dining room. This is when Tolstoy and Alexeyev usually got into conversation, and Sonya was now sometimes alarmed by what she overheard her husband talking about while she was dressing. Having acquired the habit of staying up until the small hours to copy out manuscripts, Sonya tended to get up later, and since their bedroom was next to the drawing room, she could not help overhearing the constant conversations about religion and ethics. She was longing to hear Tolstoy talk about literature again. Writing on religion was never going to be a good earner, even for a writer of Tolstoy’s fame. Sonya was unstinting in her praise of Alexeyev as a teacher in her autobiography, and she was happy to declare that Tanya never learned as much from anyone else as she had from him. She recollected Alexeyev’s love of hard work, and his warm-hearted, simple nature,³⁶ but in time she would see him as a threat to the family’s emotional and financial stability.

At around eleven o’clock every morning Tolstoy would head back downstairs with a cup of tea to go and work in his study, sometimes picking up the first bit of paper which came to hand even if it was an old envelope, in his desire to set down as quickly as possible whatever thought he had in his mind. He would not emerge again until four, which was his time to go riding or for a walk, sometimes breaking off a stalk of sweet-pea by the house to sniff at as he strode along in the summer months, as he loved the scent. At some point he began to take his daily constitutionals with Alexeyev, who often had difficulty keeping up with him. But Tolstoy needed Alexeyev by his side, as he one day confessed to his young friend that he was wildly attracted to a tall young woman called Domna who worked in the servants’ kitchen. Her husband had been recruited into the army, and Tolstoy had been following her around and softly whistling to her to catch her attention. Finally he had struck up a conversation with her, and had arranged a rendezvous on a shady path under some nut trees in a distant part of the garden. Tolstoy confessed to Alexeyev that he had set off from the house only to be called back by Ilya, shouting from the window to remind him about his Greek lesson. After that bracing reality check, Tolstoy ensured that Alexeyev always accompanied him on his walks, and took steps for Domna to be ‘removed’ from view.³⁷ He found that praying was not much help when it came to battling his feelings of lust, but he certainly repented. The incident was to find reflection in a story he wrote in 1889 called ‘The Devil’, which also drew on his experiences with his peasant ‘wife’ Aksinya. For obvious reasons, Tolstoy stuffed the manuscript down the back of an armchair to keep it hidden from Sonya, and it was not published until the year after he died.

A new French tutor arrived at Yasnaya Polyana a few months after Alex-eyev in January 1878. Hiding behind the false identity of ‘Monsieur Nief’ was the militant young anarchist Vicomte Jules Montels, who had served as colonel of the 12th Federated Legion in the Paris Commune in 1871. After its two-month reign of power came to an end, Montels had fled to Geneva, where he became an active member of the French exile group of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), its ‘propaganda and socialist-revolutionary action section’ to be precise. In 1877, after six years of living with a death-sentence on his head, he found himself in Moscow getting on a train to Tula, disguised as ‘Monsieur Nief’. He had been recommended to the Tolstoys by the wife of the Russian priest in Geneva. Sonya had some justification for later exclaiming to her husband, ‘You found me two nihilists!’ Yasnaya Polyana was beginning to turn into a hotbed of radical left-wing politics.