Tolstoy

The whole of Lev Nikolayevich’s passionate nature was revealed in this enthusiasm. He developed enthusiasms for the most diverse things throughout his life: games, music, [ancient] Greek, schools, Japanese pigs, pedagogy, horses, hunting – too many in fact to count. And that’s not including his intellectual and literary interests: they were most extreme. He was madly passionate about everything at the height of his enthusiasm, and if he could not convince whomever he was talking to of the importance of the activity he was caught up in, he was capable of being even hostile to that person.⁵⁵

In Moscow while she growing up, Sonya had never had time on her own. Now when Tolstoy pursued his enthusiasms, she was left by herself at home, and she became very lonely, as she recorded in her diary. Sometimes during the early summer of 1863, when her husband spent whole days with his bees, she walked through the fields to take him his lunch or a glass of tea in the evening, and would find him with a net over his head arranging the combs in a hive, or capturing a swarm.⁵⁶ After sitting there and getting stung, she would face a solitary walk back home. As well as reading about beekeeping, Tolstoy spent hours observing the patterns of behaviour of his bees, assisted by his beekeeper, an old man with a long grey beard. During the summer he was also helped by Nikolka, the gardener’s young son.⁵⁷ His absorption with the Yasnaya Polyana apiary abated after about two years, but his enthusiasm for beekeeping left its mark in his writing. Firstly, there is the famous epic simile in War and Peace, borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Moscow in 1812 is compared to a queenless hive. Conversely, Tolstoy thought of a busy hive when conveying the atmosphere of the ball in Anna Karenina, and a little later in the novel he describes bees on their first spring flight after the relocation of their hive for the summer. The precision of his vocabulary, overlooked by most translators, tells us a great deal about the rigour he applied to his study of apiculture.⁵⁸

Apart from the prolonged visit to Yasnaya Polyana of Sonya’s sister Tanya and brother Sasha, plus two of their cousins, Tolstoy had one other major distraction from the writing of fiction in the summer of 1863. In the middle of June, husband and wife temporarily stopped writing and reading each other’s diaries, and for a short period at least, Sonya was able to claim Tolstoy’s full attention: on 28 June their first child was born. In her autobiography Sonya does not describe the birth of Sergey as a joyous event. This was not only because he arrived in the world over a week early, and caught everybody unawares. Lyubov Alexandrovna just managed to arrive in time, but the set of baby clothes she had sent from Moscow did not. The newborn had to be wrapped in one of Tolstoy’s nightshirts before being placed in the crude limewood cradle that had been made by the family carpenter. Both the midwife, Maria Ivanovna Abramovich, and Dr Shmigaro, the chief doctor at the Tula armaments factory, were Polish exiles, whose number in Russia had exponentially increased after the government had brutally suppressed the Polish uprising that January. Compared to the thousands of Poles deported to Siberia, the Tolstoys’ doctor and midwife had a much easier fate. Over the next twenty-five years Maria Ivanovna would make many journeys from Tula to Yasnaya Polyana – she assisted Sonya at all except one of the births of her thirteen children, five of whom did not live to adulthood.

Tolstoy had not completely abandoned his Populist ways, and now he flatly refused to allow Sonya to take on a wet-nurse, despite mastitis making it impossible for her to breast-feed baby Sergey. Lyubov Alexandrovna found it exasperating that her daughter meekly followed her husband’s wishes, and must have been relieved when her own husband weighed in with some common sense. The crusty Dr Bers had already lost patience with his son-in-law’s unorthodox ideas on numerous occasions. He had been upset and offended by a pedagogical article Tolstoy had written the previous year condemning university education, for example, and had written and told him so.⁵⁹ In August 1863 he wrote to Lev and Sonya from Moscow to tell them they had both gone mad. ‘You can be sure, Lev Nikolayevich, my friend,’ he wrote, ‘that your nature will never become that of a peasant, just as your wife’s nature cannot tolerate that which can be tolerated by the Pelageya who beat up her husband and the innkeeper at a tavern outside Petersburg (see Moscow Gazette, issues 165 and 166).’ Tolstoy, he remarked tartly, was skilled at writing and talking, but not always so smart when it came to practical things.⁶⁰