Tolstoy

In the tense atmosphere that was exacerbated by peasant riots and student unrest around the time of the emancipation, the publication of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons in March 1862 was like the explosion of a bomb. In his young university graduate hero, the ‘nihilist’ Bazarov, Turgenev had created the first fictional raznochinets, but both the ‘fathers’ and the ‘sons’ felt they had been ridiculed, and the novel created a storm of controversy. As its first English translator commented a few years later, ‘passionate criticisms, calumnies, and virulent attacks abounded … Of course the more the book was abused, the more it was read. Its success has been greater than that of any other Russian book.’⁸⁶ Tolstoy was probably the only person in Russia who found it boring. His mind was on other matters that spring. The stress caused by other Justices of the Peace obstructing all his initiatives and the mounds of paperwork generated by his job were debilitating, and had started to make him ill. To the rejoicing of all the vindictive landowners who wanted revenge on the man who had ruined their corrupt livelihoods, Tolstoy resigned his post in April 1862. Shortly afterwards he set off for the steppes beyond Samara, taking with him two of his favourite pupils and his servant Alexey. He planned to undergo a koumiss cure, hoping to restore his frayed nerves.⁸⁷ Tolstoy’s hostile neighbours wreaked their greatest revenge on him later that summer. In July 1862, soon after the government had shut down The Contemporary, Chernyshevsky was arrested for spreading revolutionary propaganda and exiled to Siberia. That same month the tsarist secret police descended on Yasnaya Polyana, where they conducted a two-day search of the estate, hoping to find seditious material connected with his schools. Aunt Toinette was so traumatised by the intrusion of the police into the tranquillity of her home that she became ill, and Tolstoy’s sister Masha, who was staying at Yasnaya Polyana and sleeping in his study, had to endure tsarist gendarmes rifling through her brother’s papers and reading everything he had ever written. The police ransacked the entire house, including the cellars and the water-closet, and placed Tolstoy’s twelve student teachers under arrest, but were forced to go away empty-handed.⁸⁸ Tolstoy was livid when he discovered what had happened upon his return from Samara at the end of July, and he vented his fury and anguish in a passionate letter to Alexandrine. ‘It was my whole life, my monastery, my church, in which I found salvation, and saved myself from all the worries, doubts and temptations of life,’ he wrote, describing how important his school work was to him.⁸⁹ Fearing that the police action had irreparably damaged his reputation for probity amongst the peasants, he decided he should close his schools down, and by the following spring all the teachers had left (Gustav Keller, the young German mathematics teacher, went to tutor Sergey Tolstoy’s son Grisha). But there was another reason why Tolstoy suddenly lost interest in his schools: he had finally found the woman he wanted to marry.

7

HUSBAND, BEEKEEPER AND EPIC POET

The epic genre is becoming the only one natural to me.

Diary entry, 3 January 1863¹

AT SOME POINT in the autumn of 1862 Tolstoy received a surprise visit from the father and grown-up daughter of a large family he had helped to evacuate during the siege of Sebastopol. His visitors were themselves surprised to discover that Tolstoy had married, and they were to encounter a further surprise. When Tolstoy’s wife came running into the drawing room to meet the visitors, the beautiful, tall young lady she was introduced to could not help staring at her. ‘What, Lev Nikolayevich,’ she blurted out, ‘this young girl is your wife?’ Sofya Andreyevna was indeed very young – she had just turned eighteen, and would have looked even younger, as she was wearing a short brown cotton dress rather than the elegant gown the guests were clearly expecting the new Countess Tolstoy to be wearing. Tolstoy had specially ordered and purchased it for her, on the grounds that he would never be able to find his wife under the steel-hooped crinolines and dresses with long trains fashionable at that time. He also did not believe that such formal attire was suitable in the countryside anyway. Sonya had become pregnant almost immediately after their wedding, and the dress was loose-fitting as well as very plain.² Her husband’s own preferred attire in the countryside was a baggy grey flannel shirt, belted around the waist, worn loose over trousers tucked into boots.³