Tolstoy

When the peasant heard that there is a country where the people interpret the Scriptures for themselves, have no bishops, and consider the veneration of Icons as idolatry, he invariably listened with profound attention and when he learned further that in that wonderful country the parishes annually send deputies to an assembly in which all matters pertaining to the Church are freely and publicly discussed, he almost always gave free expression to his astonishment, and I had to answer a whole volley of questions. ‘Where is that country?’ ‘Is is to the east, or the west?’ ‘Is it very far away?’ ‘If our Presbyter could only hear all that!’⁵⁵

When he was out in the steppe, Mackenzie Wallace also enjoyed the hospitality of the Bashkirs in a kibitka, and his description of the way dinner was prepared and consumed may partly explain why the fastidious Frenchman Jules Montels, who had accompanied Tolstoy’s sons Ilya and Lev on their trip in 1878, did not terribly enjoy his time on the steppe. It was a long way from the bistros of Paris:

A sheep was brought near the door of our tent, and there killed, skinned, cut up into pieces, and put into an immense pot, under which a fire had been kindled. The dinner was not less primitive than the method of preparing it… There were no plates, knives, forks, spoons, or chop-sticks. Guests were expected all to eat out of a common wooden bowl, and to use the instruments with which Nature had provided them… The fare was copious, but not varied – consisting of boiled mutton, without bread or other substitute, and a little salted horse-flesh thrown in as an entrée.⁵⁶

Sonya had planned to stay behind that summer while Sergey took the annual end-of-year school exams (to ensure he was on target for university entrance), but the telegraphist missed out the crucial words ‘do not’ from Tolstoy’s telegram: ‘House, water, horses, carriages good; but dung, flies, drought; [do not] advise you come.’ She duly arrived with the rest of the family. Strakhov also came out to the steppe for the first time that summer, and he greatly enjoyed the ‘oceans of wheat and endless herds of horses and flocks of sheep’, but could not help noticing Tolstoy was restless and out of sorts.⁵⁷

On 8 August, two days after everyone arrived back at Yasnaya Polyana, Turgenev arrived for his first visit in nearly twenty years. He had never met Sonya, let alone any of the six children, who now ranged in age from fifteen down to nine months, and it was a joyous reunion. Meeting the tall, white-haired writer with the sad, kind eyes was very exciting for the children, and Sonya made him play chess with Sergey, so her son would have a story to dine out on later (he was soundly beaten).⁵⁸ Turgenev’s second visit a month later, when he was on his way back to Paris from his estate in Oryol province, was less euphoric. Despite his new Christian-inspired humility, Tolstoy could only deal with Turgenev in small doses. He still felt riled that Turgenev only ‘played at life’, and realised that they would never be fully reconciled. That summer Tolstoy had built himself a hut in the woods so he could work in peace and quiet; one day Sonya found them both there arguing heatedly with each other. The usually mild-mannered, urbane Turgenev was gesticulating wildly, red in the face. After so much time apart, Turgenev had no real inkling of the changes taking place in his friend’s spiritual life, and the biggest shock for him was encountering Tolstoy’s new, dismissive attitude to his own published fiction. The Tolstoy he knew, after all, was the peerless writer who effortlessly outclassed his entire generation, and he was bewildered by this uncompromising new stance.⁵⁹

Tolstoy’s decision to move his study to another room in the house that autumn was perhaps a symptom of his changing outlook during this time. He was still trying to get his novel about the Decembrists off the ground, but he derived more enjoyment from reading Dickens (Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son). In February 1879 he eventually gave up with the Decembrists, just as he had with his Peter the Great novel. He had produced seventeen different versions of an opening chapter, and twelve of them were set in a peasant environment, but his heart was not in it. The problem, he found, was not so much that the Decembrist movement owed its origins to Russian officers coming into contact with French ideas during their occupation of Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, but that so many of the Decembrists were in fact French Catholics who had escaped to Russia after the 1789 Revolution.⁶⁰