It’s not that the novel is autobiographical here and that details of Dolly’s life fit into the Tolstoys’ lives; but Tolstoy is completely sympathetic to Dolly’s hard-earned thoughts. Sofia also saw the parallels between her situation and Dolly’s, and she knew that even if, as she would complain, her husband didn’t understand her and wasn’t particularly or correctly sympathetic to her, he at least understood her plight via his fictional characters. He could sympathize, on paper, with the conflicts and miseries of motherhood.
Sofia recalled about the summer of 1875: “Life with its complications, deaths, and illnesses threw both Lev Nikolaevich and myself into a state of total apathy, and we began to fear that our country life was completely degrading us both morally and physically.”LXXVII (This may have been true for Sofia, but Tolstoy never expressed a belief that “country life” could degrade him or others.) She continues:
We needed to go off somewhere, either abroad or {at least} to a city. But our lives at the time were totally under the control of Lev Nikolaevich, and we continued living at Yasnaya Polyana and taking trips to an even more difficult life, on the Samara steppes. […]LXXVIII
She now concludes that he wasn’t listening to her concerns about not wanting to go to Samara.
We know that he took her to the doctor in Moscow just before the trip, and that the doctor assured them that she was in good enough health to go. If he agreed with her and believed that country life was degrading, why would he have left Yasnaya Polyana for a much more rustic life in Samara? This was a family debate that Sofia lost, and then, in recollection, she confounded the story. Simply, he wanted the whole family to go to Samara; she wanted a different kind of trip. She narrates:
On the 4th of June Lev Nikolaevich went off to Moscow, and the whole family was supposed to leave for koumiss on the 6th. Lev Nikolaevich would meet us in Moscow, from where we were to go on all together. […]
We hadn’t planned to stop overnight in Moscow, but, upon meeting us [on June 6], Lev Nikolaevich announced that we would be spending a day there, stopping over at the Obolenskijs’ flat on the Arbat, and that Professor Zakhar’in would be coming by that evening to give me advice on how to cope with my ill health over the summer.LXXIX
Sofia was put out about Tolstoy’s arrangements, but on the other hand he did listen to her complaints and arranged again for a doctor to see her. The doctor, Sofia notes, scolded Tolstoy, “But you haven’t been taking care of her!” and insisted that she stop transcribing this summer, due to her nerve-damaged right shoulder. Tolstoy had to have agreed easily to that, because, as was his summer habit, he had no intention of writing:
Apparently, Lev Nikolaevich got a little frightened, and became very kind toward me, and took care of me as best he could. This was difficult for him—he wasn’t accustomed to it.LXXX
Oh, Sofia! While giving Tolstoy credit for taking care of her, she also has to mention that he didn’t know very well how to do so.
In Moscow, she remembered, the children went to the zoo—some of them for the first time—and to the Kremlin “with their new tutor.” This tutor, in the position Tolstoy had long been striving to fill, was Jules Rey, who had just arrived from Switzerland.
Everywhere, Sofia remembered, Tolstoy was lauded for Anna Karenina. On June 7, the entire Tolstoy family, joined by Sofia’s little brother Stepan Bers and the tutor, departed from Moscow. Sofia recalled: “The trip to Samara was quite difficult and not a joyful venture this time. At Nizhnij Novgorod we boarded a wretched little steamer which was very cramped and rocked quite a bit, so that Tanja and I were nauseous the whole time. Seeing my poor condition, the captain took pity on me and gave me the executive cabin upstairs, where Tanja and I settled in.”LXXXI
8 Summer, Fall, Winter 1875
I. Samara: June–August
On June 11, “The carriages were already waiting for us at Samara,” recalled Sofia. “We spent the night there, and twenty-four hours later we were already at our homestead.”
A week later, she wrote her sister Tatyana: “Levochka is sipping up the koumiss, he walks the precipices. He’s healthy, tanned to black; of course, he writes nothing and spends days either on the steppe or in the tent of the Bashkir Mukhamed Shakh… Today Levochka, Monsieur Rey, and the children went to the fair in Pokrovka. Levochka bought a very frisky horse for racing. The races will be on August 6 [Lev’s Saint’s Day].”I
Tolstoy may have seemed half-Levin, half-Vronsky to Sofia. He was pleased to renew his friendship with Shakh and keen to buy a fancy horse. Tolstoy would continue having a fine vacation: two months of pursuing horses, games, and exotic forms of farming—and no writing. Son Sergei remembered: “The untrammeled, wild life of the semi-nomadic Mongol tribes, with their special habits and customs, the wide horizon, the expanse of the steppes carpeted with soft feather grass, the special breed of Kirghiz horses with their thick manes and tails—all this attracted Tolstoy. He liked the mettle, the strength and the spirit of these horses of the plains, and he even considered setting up a stud farm on his estate to crossbreed them with racehorses.”II
As she was recalling that summer, Sofia may have been shaking her head. “Life on the steppes was exactly the same as during our previous stay,” she wrote.III But the children were happy, apparently, and Sergei remembered this summer fondly: “On June 29 there was always a fair in Busuluk. My father went there partly to buy mares for the stud farm he intended to start, partly because he liked to see new places. My mother, [Uncle] Stepan, and we three older children went with him. My impressions of this trip were: a bad hotel with bedbugs, brown ewes with funny crinolines on their backs, herds of untrained horses… Behind Busuluk was a monastery where a hermit, a simple peasant, lived in a cave he had dug himself. My father was very much interested in him and talked to him at length.”IV
Tolstoy had sponsored horse races in 1873, but this summer he planned a grander festival at his farm. Having already promised the contestants prizes, and not wanting to disappoint them, he wrote his niece’s husband on July 4 to ask him to buy and send, as soon as possible, a rifle and a silver watch. He suggested prices that Nagornov should or could pay for them and expressed “a new debt of thanks.”
We’re living well here, praise God, only my wife is still a bit sick. The harvest promises to be good, but for me it’s been very little.
Ever since we left Moscow, soon a month now, we haven’t received a single piece of news and we know nothing of what’s happening beyond the region and, mainly, with all those close to us. When you write and have Varya write, don’t spare the ink and write a lot about both of you.V
After Nagornov answered him, Tolstoy wrote again on July 22 to instruct him further about promoting the New Azbuka, and added: “We’re living just as we were when I wrote the last letter, that is, well, except for the health of my wife, which is still threatened.”VI
Besides worrying about Sofia, Tolstoy was enjoying long days of not writing a word and scarcely reading.
On July 24 or 25, he wrote to Strakhov the only surviving wholly non-business letter of the summer. Tolstoy was persisting in suggesting that if Strakhov would just be more candid, more revealing, more trusting, less shy, their friendship would be greater. He himself was relaxed and content:
I drink koumiss with the Bashkirs, buy horses, choose land to plow, I hire reapers, I sell wheat and sleep. Around August 15 we will be, God willing, at Yasnaya, and then, looking around, I’ll write you and will await our seeing each other.VII
This letter and other details of Tolstoy’s life make me question my belief in Confession and Tolstoy’s claims about the depths, duration, and totality of his depression in this period. How depressed could he have been if he was organizing with apparent excitement a race and festival?
Perhaps Tolstoy had more vitality while depressed than most of us do when we’re fine. Sofia, on the other hand, was depressed and restless, perhaps in the way that Anna is when she, out of place in the countryside, waits for Vronsky to sow his w
ild oats in politics. This summer Tolstoy felt cheerful on the steppe, free of Yasnaya Polyana’s demands and of his writerly responsibilities.
We know, but he didn’t, that he was going to crash-land into stupefaction, if not full-on depression when they returned home.
For now, he celebrated one of the happiest public activities in which he ever participated. In her role as a biographer, his daughter Alexandra, who wasn’t even born until 1884, writes: “On the appointed day people began to arrive from all quarters with their sheep, their camp equipment, kettles, tubs of koumiss: the local peasants, Kirghiz, Bashkirs in quilted coats, in clean white shirts and loose trousers, sheepskin caps, in fezzes and soft leather boots. Four distinguished Mohammedan women, who normally would have remained in seclusion, were driven to the races in the Count’s carriage.
“The crowd of several thousand persons spread out their rugs, installed themselves in picturesque, colorful groups and orderly fashion along the heights from where they could see the races. Plaintive Oriental songs were intoned, bagpipes were played and dancing alternated with wrestling.”VIII
Son Sergei, who was there, describes a game of “fight and tug with a stick,” a contest that Tolstoy won every time except when “a fat man” out-tugged him. As for the race, Sergei describes it fondly and clearly:
On an even place in the steppe a circle of five versts was marked out with a deep furrow, which had to be raced round ten times. Thirty-two horses were in the race, among them one of ours, four or five belonging to Russian peasants, and the rest were Bashkir horses. The jockeys were young boys [Stepan Bers says they were about ten years old and rode saddlelessIX] who were distinguished by the various colored kerchiefs they wore round their heads.
The organization of the race was not very efficient. When the horses had already started, my father moved the finish to a considerable distance from the start (so that the distance should be exactly fifty versts) and this upset the calculations of the participants. Then the mounted Bashkirs who were not in the races dashed about the circle, encouraging their horses and bewildering the others. Only seven horses reached the end, the others having moved out of the circle. The first prize was won by a Bashkir horse that had raced the distance in one hour thirty-nine minutes; the second winner was our horse; the other prizes were won again by Bashkir horses and only one Russian horse got a prize. The Russians were disgruntled and said that the Bashkirs had upset their horses.X
Stepan Bers adds: “The festival lasted two days, and passed off very gaily, and in the most perfect order. What, probably, pleased the Count most was the complete absence of the police.”XI
We can wish Tolstoy had described the two-day party of racing and drinking with native peoples himself, but he never did, and he never again tried to put on a public festival.
What we can enjoy imagining, I think, is Tolstoy being Stiva-like: that energetic person who gets things started, who likes to create a jolly community event. (I wonder if the latter-day pacifist ever regretted the gift of the rifle?) On the other hand, Tolstoy so loved horses that he never renounced them, even when he renounced everything else later in life. In the novel the only character who resembles Tolstoy in his passion for horses and racing is Vronsky.
But as I stumble along in my role as biographer, let me wonder if Tolstoy was as skilled a rider as Vronsky is. In the race in Samara, all the jockeys were young boys. Tolstoy was, like Anna at Vronsky’s race, a spectator. Did anyone watch him spectating the way Karenin watched Anna?
Alexey Alexandrovitch took no interest in the race, and so he did not watch the racers, but fell listlessly to scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested upon Anna.
Her face was white and set. She was obviously seeing nothing and no one but one man. Her hand had convulsively clutched her fan, and she held her breath. He looked at her and hastily turned away, scrutinizing other faces.
“But here’s this lady too, and others very much moved as well; it’s very natural,” Alexey Alexandrovitch told himself. He tried not to look at her, but unconsciously his eyes were drawn to her. He examined that face again, trying not to read what was so plainly written on it, and against his own will, with horror read on it what he did not want to know.
The first fall—Kuzovlev’s, at the stream—agitated everyone, but Alexey Alexandrovitch saw distinctly on Anna’s pale, triumphant face that the man she was watching had not fallen. When, after Mahotin and Vronsky had cleared the worst barrier, the next officer had been thrown straight on his head at it and fatally injured, and a shudder of horror passed over the whole public, Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that Anna did not even notice it, and had some difficulty in realizing what they were talking of about her. But more and more often, and with greater persistence, he watched her. Anna, wholly engrossed as she was with the race, became aware of her husband’s cold eyes fixed upon her from one side.
She glanced round for an instant, looked inquiringly at him, and with a slight frown turned away again.XII
We remember, even from the earliest drafts, that Vronsky was not going to win his race. Vronsky’s first big disappointment in life is, like Anna’s fate, built into the novel. This means that Tolstoy did not discover this scene in the heat of writing the novel, as his contemporaries Dostoevsky and Trollope often did. Instead Tolstoy repeatedly refined this race into another one of the unsurpassable scenes in literature.
* * *
As tough a year as 1875 was and would be for Tolstoy, it was a harder year for Sofia. She spent more than two months that summer far from comforts and friends. She remembered: “Around the 15th of August we went home to Yasnaya Polyana, which my brother Stepa and I especially were happy about.” Those two, the non–koumiss drinkers, had been “very bored,” she recalled (though Stepan never said so in his memoir):
I recall the difficult journey, the cold and the rain. The carriage was pulled by six horses, while Lev Nikolaevich, the older children, Monsieur Rey, Stepa, and the servants froze and shook on the tarantasses. By the time we were approaching [the town of] Samara, it had already got so dark and dirty that Lev Nikolaevich had to walk the four versts on foot, pointing out the way and keeping us from harm. How we travelled to Syzran’ I don’t remember, but for some reason we stopped in Syzran’ at a rather wretched hostel or simply at someone’s house, where there was nowhere we could make do for ourselves properly and the children ended up sleeping on the floor. It was cold, there were no warm clothes, and the children started to cough. […]
It was pretty bad on the steamer to Syzran’ too; it was a long voyage—we were beset by rain and fog the whole way, and we felt such a huge relief upon getting home to Yasnaya Polyana. […]XIII
I don’t think Sofia ever forgave Tolstoy for this vacation.
* * *
II. Yasnaya Polyana, August–December
The family arrived back at Yasnaya Polyana on August 22 or 23.XIV
Tolstoy, reinvigorated, immediately got back to work, but not on the novel. He was taking care of business and catching up on correspondence. He anxiously queried Nagornov: “What about our Azbuka business? I’m afraid by your silence that it’s bad.”XV But all was better with the New Azbuka than Tolstoy could have dreamed possible.
He wrote inviting his brother Sergei to come to see them and hear their summer stories. As a preview, he mentioned, “The harvest in Samara was worse than average, so I again had no profits. I’m content that even so there will not be a loss. I heard about you from Bibikov in outline but the details I don’t know. How is your farming business and family doings? In any event, it’s soon time to die, which I completely agree with you about.”XVI
Was Tolstoy suddenly glum? Why was Sergei in the dumps? Had Sergei announced, “My problems will be over soon, as it’s getting time to die”? There’s no saying, but, being brothers, perhaps neither needed to elaborate to the other.
Beyond returning to business, promoting and directing the promotion of the New Azbuka, taking on school board duties,
and running the estate, Tolstoy seems to have been aggrieved that his return home meant that he was expected to work on Anna Karenina. In his letters of August 25 he immediately complained about that task to Strakhov and Fet. First he rather condescendingly complimented Strakhov on his personal unveilings and, as usual with his declarations of intimacy to Strakhov, he became unconscious of his images:
[…] What with this and your last letters [these letters of Strakhov have not survived], you have told me everything you can and wish to say about yourself, and I confess I’ve learned a great deal that is new.
Above all I learned from your story what I have always guessed, namely that your sympathy for me, and mine for you, is founded on the exceptional affinity of our spiritual lives. I hope that this severance of the umbilical cord, this indifference to one side of life, is only the sign of another umbilical cord through which stronger juices are flowing, and I hope that neither you nor I would want to change places with the people we so envied some 20 or 25 years ago. […]XVII
What was Tolstoy thinking with all those juices flowing?
He did not say such things to his other friends.
We arrived safely the day before yesterday. I didn’t take up my pen for two months and am very pleased with my summer. Now I’m settling down again to dull, commonplace Anna Karenina and I pray to God just to give me the strength to get it off my hands as quickly as possible in order to clear a space—I need the leisure very much—not for pedagogical activities, but for others which are taking more and more a hold on me. I love my pedagogical activities just as much, but I want to force myself not to pursue them. […]
Creating Anna Karenina Page 23