That being said, he asked Fet about three more stallions that he would like to buy. Whatever could raise his spirits was what he wanted.
He wrote and told Golokhvastov, who (to Tolstoy’s satisfaction) had returned to Russia, that he was now interested in Sofia going abroad for the “waters.” Sofia, however, didn’t want to because her sister Tatyana was coming, so Tolstoy would be taking Sofia to a Moscow doctor “in two weeks,” and in the early part of June he would be going to the Voronezh district. He invited the Golokhvastovs to Yasnaya Polyana anytime, except not right then while everything was so undetermined. “I wrote you in Venice and wrote that I was very glad about the finishing of your work. Unfortunately, I can’t say that about the work of Ol’ga Andreevna [Golokhvastov’s wife, the romance author]; I feel that I have unfounded prejudice against drama—historical and in verse—and in this matter there’s no judging.”CIV He did, however, cringe and indeed judge it, both at the time and slightly disguised in What Is Art?
On or about the same day as his letter to Strakhov, he wrote to Fet about his full house and how he felt “low and dull-witted.”CV
10 From Idle to Full Steam Ahead: June–December 1876
At the beginning of June, Tolstoy and Sofia were in Moscow to see a doctor about her health,I and on June 6, Sofia’s sister Tatyana arrived in Yasnaya Polyana for the summer. She and her children stayed almost three months.
Tolstoy wrote both Strakhov and Fet. “A beautiful summer has come,” he told Strakhov, “and I love it and I wander around and can’t understand how I wrote in the winter.”II Similarly to Fet: “This summer something has strongly happened to me, and if I were you, I would only write verses. Everything’s very beautiful this year.”III
But it was only to Fet (to whom he was sending the payment for Hamlet) that he mentioned a family matter: “Three days ago from abroad my sister Maria Nikolaevna came, whom I hadn’t seen in 3 years, and I’m very glad to see her.” Fet, I presume, knew Maria’s story, while Strakhov, a more recent friend, may not have.
But where was Anna Karenina? Where was Anna? It and she seem to have gone on vacation.
Tolstoy wrote Strakhov about how pleased he was that Strakhov would visit. Tolstoy warned him that he would be going various places on magistrate duties within three hours away, so when Strakhov arrived in July, he was to telegraph him and Tolstoy would hustle back: “I’m not saying that right now I have especially much to tell you, because I always have a whole world of thoughts which I know only you understand, and a whole world not of questions but of topics about which I need to know your views.” Meanwhile, “My wife’s health this summer is fair, but not good; this is my only but large misery.”IV
It was a light summer for letter-writing, although when he had been in Samara two of the last three summers, it had been even lighter.
His next two surviving letters, nearly a month later, went to Fet.
He wanted to see Fet and travel with him; it would be best in the first half of August. Then Tolstoy inquired about three stallions, followed by news of Sofia: “My wife’s health (I’m afraid even to believe in this happiness) in the middle of summer became significantly better, and about our trip abroad, which was already decided on, we have begun to speak doubtfully.” Tolstoy had plans now for going to Samara in September with his nephew, Maria’s twenty-five-year-old son, Nikolai, and he invited Fet and Fet’s brother to join him and D’yakov “to see the Kirgiz and their horses.”V Strakhov’s July visit, he told Fet, was spent philosophizing to weariness, and he was constantly remembering and bringing up him, Fet. The main thing now on Tolstoy’s mind seems to have been Samara. That trip, from September 3 to September 20, would end up including only Tolstoy and his nephew.
On July 28, Tolstoy arranged through a short note to go see Fet on the 12th of August. He remarked, by the way, that nobody understood anything about the Herzegovina and Serbian war, and “it’s impossible to understand anything” about it.VI
This was the summer of dueling friendships.
If he was more confidential to Fet in the letters, he was more exuberantly affectionate to Strakhov. In the July 31 letter to Strakhov, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t love making plans,” and immediately made plans that he would see Strakhov instead of Fet if the time that Strakhov had would be conflicting with the plans he had made with Fet. He also asked if Strakhov still wanted to go to the Optina Monastery. (At this point, Tolstoy thought he was leaving for Samara on the 25th of August, but a surprise wedding would keep him around until September.)
Weary with the planning and contingency arrangements, Tolstoy sighed to Strakhov: “Now we’ll soon die. But in that world it’s still unknown what our relations will become. You shortly but so well described your lifeVII that I became envious.—If only you instead of reading Anna Kar would finish it and save me from this Damocles torture.” Again with the teasing of Strakhov that Strakhov finish the novel for him! “Yesterday I tried to do it, but I without fail want to force myself to work.”VIII There’s nothing to show that Tolstoy did any work on it.
I try to imagine him trudging to his desk. Was he reluctant to sit down at it? Trollope, over in London, believed inspiration for novel-writing came from gluing one’s bottom to the chair every morning. Did Tolstoy open a folder of drafts? Did he reread a page or two and give up? Did he write a sentence off the top of his head to see if it would spark a new chapter?
In Tolstoy’s second to last (known) letter before his trip to Samara, he regretted that Fet wouldn’t sell him the horse Favorita, but in the meantime he would like to buy Gunib.IX With all the horse-dealing with Fet, it’s surprising that there never seems to have been a dispute or misunderstanding about money or the quality of a horse. When Tolstoy’s passion for buying horses cooled in the 1880s, though, their friendship seems to have cooled off, too.
The last surviving letter of the summer went to Tolstoy’s brother Sergei: “After the parted guests and commotion, our usual life has restarted.” He asked Sergei to send him two female dogs to take with him to Samara.
Despite her shaky health, Sofia probably enjoyed that summer of 1876 more than Tolstoy. He was raring to get away now as soon as possible, although his five letters to her during this trip September 4–20 reveal him as a loving husband and father. He knew that she loved him; he told her details that only a loving wife could care about. He was happy to be away but anxious because he was away. He was free of home and responsibilities; his imagination glowed with nostalgia.
On Saturday, the 4th, at noon, he wrote from a steamer on the Volga. Before leaving Moscow, he and his nephew Nikolai went and said farewell to Nikolai’s mother, Maria Tolstaya, and then they left from the Nizhegorod station, which station Anna Karenina also leaves from, before she gets out at her stop and kills herself. “Even though we took places in second-class, we slept excellently.” At Nizhegorod, there was a mix-up before they could get on a ship: “I didn’t write from Nizhe from all the confusion; but I not only remembered but thought and think of you every minute […]”X
His letters were loving and considerate:
I know that you’re downcast and suffering, but I see that strength which you have in yourself to not bother me and, if it’s possible, I love you even more for this. […] My plan, despite being very undetermined, is this: when I get to Samara, find Bull and ask him to bring me to Buzuluk; from there I’ll go to the farm, and if possible, from Buzuluk go as far as Orenburg […]
If there was enough money, he would get a couple of men to help him drive the horses. His postscript: “I kiss all the children and ahead of time thank them for listening to you and trying to be happy.” (The children in September 1876: Sergei, Tanya, Ilya, Lev, and Maria.)
The next day, September 5, now in Kazan, he wrote Sofia again: “Weather superb, health good. You’re probably mushroom-hunting. Please don’t ride on Sharik.” Sharik was one of the Kirgiz horses. Was it too spirited, too unpredictable?
Again he announced to Sofia a plan: t
o have a local man help him buy horses in Orenburg. He would try not to be gone two weeks. “Kazan excites in me my memories of unpleasant sadness. Oh, if only you and the children, mainly you, were well and at peace.” He sent kisses to her and to the children. His postscript contained a realization that seemed to have surprised Tolstoy himself: “It’s as if I very much want to write.”XI This unexpected stirring petered out. He didn’t start writing Anna Karenina again until the end of November.
While Tolstoy was gone, Sofia’s brother Stepan helped her before his return to law school in St. Petersburg. In her memoir, Sofia narrated Tolstoy’s September adventure in her own way:
On the 3rd of September of that year, 1876, my sister left us once again to go back to the Caucasus with her whole family, and Lev Nikolaevich made plans to go to Samara and Orenburg. He thought of using our Samara estate to raise English purebred horses, which he had already bought, along with Kirghiz steppe horses, which he intended to purchase presently in Orenburg.
Crossing these two breeds—English and Kirghiz—was aimed at developing a special type of horse at our Samara stud-farm. And Lev Nikolaevich got it started, to be sure, but like all his ventures in life, this one, too, as they say, came to nought. The best stallion purchased was drowned along the way by the peasant set to fetch it, or at least that is what he said, but I didn’t believe him. He simply sold it. Other horses had died, and I can’t recall now exactly how Lev Nikolaevich got out of this business.XII
As she wrote her memoir, much of it after her husband’s death in 1910, Sofia was not only a proud widow, who more than anyone else helped preserve the work of the world-famous author, she was also a wife who knew her husband’s faults (“like all his ventures in life, this one… came to nought”) and was open about it.
She remembered that he “wrote me touching letters on his trip,” and she offered quotations from a couple of them:
“I think that since I am terribly in love {with you}, I am transported back into the past—Pokrovskoe, that lilac dress, that sense of sweetness, and my heart pounds.”
And again:
“Every minute on this trip I think about you tenderly and am ready to fill my letter with tender words.”
And again:
“I take such delight in the feeling I have for you, and for your existence in the world.”XIII
Was she shy to quote more? He did write more, so I don’t know why she pared and paraphrased. I suspect that she did not want her readers to grant him some additional points on the husband chart. He wrote her on September 7 from the ship on the Volga, and in it made that last declaration about his “delight”:
I write this letter on the 7th at 2 in the afternoon, still on ship, and I’ll post it in a box in Samara, where we’ll be, God willing, at 7 this evening. […] My runny nose has passed, and thanks to grapes and watermelon, my stomach [is better?], and so my state of mind is in order. I hope that I’ll write often and that I, even just once, receive letters, and I will know about you in various periods. You so frightened me, reluctant to let me go, that it seems I am afraid more than before for all of you, and mainly for you alone. [No particular details about his farewell are provided by either Tolstoy or Sofia, but we might remember this awkward, disturbing departure when we get to the February 1877 installment of Anna Karenina wherein “there had been almost a quarrel between Vronsky and Anna over this proposed expedition.”XIV]
Sometimes when writing you, I don’t say anything about my feelings, because at the moment when I was writing I was not in such a situation, but [the italics of what follows are the phrases Sofia chose to quote in her memoir] on this trip I think about you tenderly and I am ready to fill my letter with tender words. Farewell, sweet darling. I take such delight in the feeling I have for you, and for your existence in the world.
If only you were healthy, and so as you are. From Orenburg I’ll telegraph you.XV
He wrote her a short note that evening, “As promised, I write you two words from Samara.” He had found Bull and they were leaving on the train for Orenburg right away.XVI
Sofia also wrote him, on September 7, a good newsy letter regarding the fine weather and Jules Rey’s hunting.XVII
Is it possible that she did not sense her husband’s depression? And if she didn’t, what does that mean about that dark cloud that by his own account never left him? Does it mean that when we’re depressed, we see the dismal weather everywhere, but others, even those who love us, can’t see the clouds socking us in?
In her memoir she recalled:
At that time nothing had yet ruined our happiness and love. We were of one mind and agreed on everything: the raising of the children, life in the country, all our beliefs—about religion, about life. [Such declarations as this, which she makes throughout My Life, remind us to be skeptical about her scrupulousness. Even when they were happy, they almost never seemed of one mind. Perhaps it was simply that the disputes seemed mild to her compared to those ahead?] If Lev Nikolaevich entertained any doubts or questions in his heart, they didn’t interfere with our lives, and Lev Nikolaevich treated us with love and compassion and he himself became ever better and more meek. Our approach to the raising of our children, too, was the same. Lev Nikolaevich decided we would prepare Serezha at home for university entrance and then, when he got in, we would all go live in Moscow.
“By that time Tanja will have grown up, and we’ll have to help her with her coming out,” Lev Nikolaevich added, and I agreed, and everything went along nice and smoothly in our family. [Our sympathy for her nostalgia does not require us to believe her.]
It would be quite a different story when {later} he turned away from the church, his family and duties all at once, and began to malign everything on the basis of his new faith—his new views on life—meanwhile explaining it all away by citing Christianity and its principles!
But about that later.
Back then in 1876 it was hard for us to part and to break, even temporarily, that tie which so lovingly bound us all together; to the point where any separation, even a short one, was effected only with great effort. [Well, the “effort” to get away was all his. See Sofia’s September 15, 1876, diary below.]XVIII
She said that he was going to stop over in Kazan, “but he was still haunted by certain past memories which caused him nothing but anguish, as he himself wrote me.” What exactly haunted him? If she knew, she never said what he meant (in his September 5 letter) by “memories of unpleasant sadness.”
She recalled:
They [i.e., Lev and his nephew Nikolai] informed us that while the railway didn’t officially go as far as Orenburg just yet, they wangled permission to travel on a service (or workers’) train. Somewhere at the station Nikolen’ka started to head over to the other side, which necessitated climbing under a railway carriage. No sooner had he crawled under the train than the train began to move, and Nikolen’ka just barely managed to get out of the way in time, which was a bad fright for both of them.
Crawling under the train! Can we help fearfully thinking of Anna?
He telegraphed Sofia from Orenburg that he was well (not mentioning Nikolai’s near accident on the train track) but had been delayed two days.XIX
Sofia resumes the story:
In Orenburg Lev Nikolaevich got together with his old acquaintance and army chum, now the governor-general of the Orenburg Territory, Kryzhanovskij, which was very pleasant for him. Overall, he found the trip quite successful. He had purchased some steppe horses there and sent them to his Samara estate, still dreaming of instituting a new breed of horses.XX
Sofia wrote in her diary only three times that year and those three entries occur during Tolstoy’s absence; they start on September 15 and end September 18. Sofia unselfconsciously poured out her complaints. In writing her memoir, she was variously motivated and skipped over some of the diary’s raw details, if she even looked at them at all. Perhaps she was unhappy with what they revealed:
We live in such isolation, and here I am
again with my silent friend, my diary. I intend to write it every day without fail from now on. Lyovochka went off to Samara, and from there to Orenburg, a town he had always wanted to visit. I got a telegram from him there. I miss him a lot and worry even more. I try to tell myself I am pleased he is enjoying himself, but it isn’t true. I am hurt that he has torn himself away from me just when we were getting along so well and were such good friends, and has sentenced me to two sad, anxious weeks without him.XXI
Her diary catches her conflicted feelings: Why should he go away if he’s happy? Why does he need to chase down exotic horses?XXII
Why wasn’t Sofia enough for Tolstoy; why isn’t Anna enough for Vronsky?
Why do these men find themselves happy and relieved to be away from their loving partners?
Sofia described in the second paragraph of that first entry her poor health and her impatience with the children.
She announced in her diary on September 17 (she right away had missed a day) that it was her name day:
One more day has passed without Lyovochka, or so much as a word from him. This morning I got up feeling lazy and unwell, plagued by minor worries. The children went off with Styopa [Sofia’s brother Stepan] to fly the kite, and ran back, red-faced and excited to beg me to go and watch. But I didn’t go, for I had ordered all Lyovochka’s papers to be fetched out of the gun-closet and was immersed in the world of his novels and diaries.
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