Tolstoy

Yasnaya Polyana was now also Sonya’s domain, and she would barely leave it for the first eighteen years of her marriage. Aunt Toinette put Sonya in charge of running the house straight away, handing her an enormous bunch of keys on a ring, which she later hung from the belt round her waist. Sonya had not grown up in luxury, but she was nevertheless taken aback by the austerity (‘almost poverty’) of her new surroundings. Her husband was used to sleeping on a grubby dark red leather pillow without a pillowcase,²⁶ and there was no bath anywhere in the house. Sonya was determined to change that. When her trousseau arrived, her silverware replaced the ancient metal cutlery and a silk eiderdown replaced the cotton one, which, much to her husband’s amazement, she lined with a sheet.²⁷ She embroidered ‘L.T.’ in red on his underwear.²⁸ After finding an unpalatable species of vermin in her soup one day, Sonya also tackled the lack of hygiene in the kitchen. White chef’s jackets and hats soon materialised, and Sonya took over responsibility for the daily menu. Over time she built up a Yasnaya Polyana cookery book consisting of 162 recipes, for everything from ‘Partridge in Herring Sauce’ and ‘Duck with Mushrooms’ to ‘How to Cook a Pike’. Then there were recipes for traditional Tolstoy dishes such as almond soufflé, and black bread pudding, or the special Bers recipe for apple pie, and Marusya Maklakova’s lemon kvass (comment: ‘very good’).²⁹ Sonya came to be very fond of Nikolay Mikhailovich the cook, even if he was too drunk to turn up to work sometimes, and had to be replaced by his breezy wife. He had once played the flute in old Prince Volkonsky’s serf orchestra, and had turned to cooking when he lost his embouchure, as he recounted to her with a sad, wry smile.³⁰

The first few days and weeks, while Lev and Sonya were setting up house together, were a mixture of wild happiness and the inevitable friction caused by the differing habits and expectations of two people who in reality barely knew each other. Tolstoy wrote to Alexandrine soon after arriving back at Yasnaya Polyana to tell her that he had not known that it was possible to be so happy, and that he loved his wife more than anything else in the world.³¹ He also commented on experiencing ‘unbelievable joy’ in his diary, but just a few days later he recorded having an argument with Sonya, and expressed his sadness at discovering their relationship was no different from that of any other couple.³² By this time, Sonya had resumed the diary she had started keeping two years earlier, and she now turned to it whenever she began to sense she was losing her husband’s affections. She was certainly beginning to lose his attention. Tolstoy could occupy himself with domestic matters and marital bliss up to a point, but after a while the prolonged distraction from intellectual pursuits began to be irksome. Three weeks into their marriage, he confided to his diary: ‘All this time I have been busy with matters which are termed practical. But I’m finding this idleness difficult. I cannot respect myself. So I am not satisfied with myself and not clear in my relationships with others … I must work …’³³

First of all, Tolstoy was behind with the August and September issues of his journal Yasnaya Polyana. His heart was no longer in it, but there were two articles for it that he needed to finish, one of which typically put forward the Tolstoyan idea that the peasant children actually had more to teach their supposed teachers than the other way round. At the end of September Sonya’s spurned elder sister Liza sent in the brief article about Luther she had been commissioned to write by Tolstoy. It was conceived as one of the popular historical sketches he hoped would interest peasant children. Whether it was due to her suddenly being elevated to a countess, or just plain jealousy of anything which took her husband away from her, Sonya resented and disliked Tolstoy’s involvement with the peasantry. Having grown up in the city, peasants were alien beings to her, and neither then nor later did she understand her husband’s deep devotion to them. She certainly never came to share his love of the muzhik, much to his chagrin. But there was an additional reason for her jealous resentment: she had read with horror the entries in his diary about his romantic liaison with the peasant girl Aksinya Bazykina, such as the one in which he claimed that he was in love ‘like never before’. Sonya knew she might run into her any day, because Aksinya had not, of course, moved away and was still working on the estate. ‘I’ve been reading the beginnings of his works,’ she wrote now in her own diary on 16 December 1862, ‘and I’m disgusted and sickened by everywhere where there is love, where there are women, and I’d like to burn absolutely all of it. So that I don’t have to be reminded of his past.’³⁴