1862
Tired of and dissatisfied with his work, and thinking he detected in himself signs of the malady that had carried off two of his brothers, he set off in May 1862 (accompanied by his servant Alexis and two of his pupils) to undergo a koumýs (soured and fermented mares' milk) cure in the Samára steppes east of the Vólga.
He went first to Moscow, and his friend Raévsky has told how Tolstoy came up to him in the Club there, and mentioned with great indignation and vexation that his brother was playing cards and had lost Rs. 7000 in a few hours. 'How can men do such things?' said Tolstoy. Half-an-hour later Raévsky saw Leo Tolstoy himself playing Chinese billiards (a game something like bagatelle, played on a board with wire impediments) and learnt that he had lost Rs. 1000 to the stranger with whom he was playing! This was, I believe, the last occasion on which Tolstoy played any game for stakes he found it difficult to pay. The occurrence led to the premature publication of his novel The Cossacks, which he had had in hand for several years, but to which he still intended to add a second part. Not having Rs. 1000 (then about £150) available, he let Katkóf, the well-known publicist, editor of the Moscow Gazette and of the monthly Russian Messenger, have the story for that sum paid in advance. This 'Tale of the Year 1852,' as the sub-title runs, is based on Tolstoy's Caucasian experiences. The circumstances which led to its premature publication made the work repugnant to him, and he never completed it.
Among those to whom he mentioned the occurrence were the Behrs, of whom Miss Sophie was already so interested in him that she wept at the news. At their home he was always a welcome and intimate guest, and as time went on he saw more and more of that family.
From Moscow he proceeded to Tvér by rail, and thence by steamer down the Vólga to Samára.
At Kazán he stopped to visit his relation V. I. Úshkof: and from Samára he wrote to Aunt Tatiána:
27 May 1862.
To-day I shall start to drive ninety miles from Samára to Karalýk....
I have had a beautiful journey; the country pleases me very much; my health is better, i.e. I cough less. Alexis and the boys are alive and well, as you may tell their relations. Please write me about Sergéy, or let him do so. Greet all my dear comrades [probably the masters in the schools] for me, and request them to write me of what goes on, and of how they are getting on....
In another letter, dated 28th June 1862, he wrote:
It is now a month since I had any news of you or from home; please write me about everybody: first, our family; secondly, the (University) students [who acted as masters in the schools] etc. Alexis and I have grown fatter, he especially, but we still cough a little, and again he especially. We are living in a Tartar tent; the weather is beautiful. I have found my friend Stolýpin—now Atamán in Ourálsk—and have driven over to see him; and have brought back from there a secretary; but I dictate and write little. Idleness overcomes one when drinking koumýs. In two weeks' time I intend to leave here, and I expect to be home by St. Elijah's day [20 July, old style]. I am tormented in this out-of-the-way place by not knowing what is going on, and also by the thought that I am horribly behind-hand with the publication of the magazine. I kiss your hand....
Just when Tolstoy was leaving Karalýk a most unexpected event was occurring at Yásnaya, where his sister Mary was staying with Aunt Tatiána. Owing to the denunciation of a police spy who, among other lies, pretended to have discovered a secret door in Tolstoy's house, the police authorities decided to search his estate; and one morning—to the immense astonishment of the neighbouring peasants—police, watchmen, officials, and gendarmes, under the command of a Colonel, appeared upon the scene! In the school-house a photographic apparatus was found: a thing sufficiently rare in a Russian village in those days to evoke the suspicious inquiries of the gendarme officer, to whom one of the student-teachers chaffingly volunteered the information that it was kept to photograph Herzen (the celebrated exile, then living in London); but nowhere were any secret doors found.
The floors of the stables were broken up with crowbars to see if anything was hidden there. The pond was dragged, but nothing more incriminating than crayfish and carp was found. All the cupboards, drawers, boxes and desks in the house were opened and searched, and the ladies were frightened almost to death. A police-officer from Toúla would not even allow Tolstoy's sister to leave the library till he had finished reading aloud in her presence and in that of two gendarmes, Tolstoy's Diary and letters, which contained the most intimate secrets of his life and which he had kept private since he was sixteen years old.
Finding nothing incriminating at Yásnaya, the representatives of law and order next betook themselves to the other schools working in conjunction with Tolstoy, and there also they turned tables and cupboards upside down, seized exercise-books and primers, arrested the teachers, and spread the wildest suspicions abroad among the peasants, to whom school education was still a novelty held somewhat in suspicion.
On receiving news of this event Tolstoy at once wrote to his aunt, the Countess A. A. Tolstoy, asking her to speak to those who knew him well and had influence, and on whose aid he could rely. Said he:
I cannot and will not let this affair pass. All the activity in which I found solace and happiness, has been spoilt. Aunty is so ill from fright that she will probably not recover. The peasants no longer regard me as an honest man—an opinion I had earned in the course of years—but as a criminal, an incendiary, or a coiner, whose cunning alone has enabled him to escape punishment.
'Eh, man, you've been found out! Don't talk to us any more about honesty and justice—you've hardly escaped handcuffs yourself!'
From the landed proprietors I need not say what a cry of rapture went up. Please write to me as soon as possible, after consulting Peróvsky [Count V. A. P.] and Alexéy Tolstoy [Count A. T., the dramatist and poet] and any one else you like, as to how I am to write to the Emperor and how best to present my letter. It is too late to prevent the injury the thing has done, or to extricate myself, and there is no way out except by receiving satisfaction as public as the insult has been; and this I have firmly resolved on. I shall not join Herzen; he has his way, I have mine. Neither will I hide.... But I will loudly announce that I am selling my estate and mean to leave Russia, where one cannot know from moment to moment what awaits one....
At the end of an eight-page letter he mentions that the Colonel of gendarmes, on leaving, threatened to renew his search till he discovered 'if anything is hidden'; and Tolstoy adds, 'I have loaded pistols in my room, and am waiting to see how this matter will end.'
He also remarked: 'I often say to myself, How exceedingly fortunate it was that I was not at home at the time! Had I been there, I should certainly now be awaiting my trial for murder!'
Soon after this, Alexander II spent some time at Petróvsky Park, near Moscow. There Tolstoy presented a letter claiming reparation, which an aide-de-camp undertook to give to the Emperor; and some weeks later the Governor of Toúla transmitted to Tolstoy the Emperor's expression of regret for what had occurred.
It is easy to imagine the effect such an outrage as this police-search would have on a man of Tolstoy's acute self-esteem, and how it would intensify his hatred of Government.
After his return from Samára, he saw more of the Behrs than ever. Fet, whom he introduced to them, thus records his impressions of the family:
I found the doctor to be an amiable old gentleman of polite manners, and his wife a handsome, majestic brunette who evidently ruled the house. I refrain from describing the three young ladies, of whom the youngest had an admirable contralto voice. They all, notwithstanding the watchful supervision of their mother and their irreproachable modesty, possessed that attractive quality which the French designate by the words du chien [lively, full of go]. The service and the dinner were admirable.
Madame Behrs was on very friendly terms with Tolstoy's sister, the Countess Mary; and before he went abroad Tolstoy had frequently, at the house of the latter, played with the children of both families. In 1862 he often visited the Behrs at Pokróvskoe-Glébovo, where they lived in a dátcha (country house) they occupied every summer. He nearly always walked the eight miles from Moscow, and often took long rambles with the family besides. The girls had been educated at home, but Sophia Andréyevna, the second daughter, had passed a University examination entitling her to the diploma qualifying to teach both in private and in State schools.
We may judge of Tolstoy's state of mind at this time by an entry in his Diary, dated 23rd August: 'I am afraid of myself. What if this be only a desire for love and not real love? I try to notice only her weak points, but yet I love.' And again, 'I rose in good health, with a particularly clear head, and wrote easily, though the matter was feeble. Then I felt more sad than I have done for a long time. I have no friends at all. I am alone. I had friends when I served Mammon, but have none when I serve truth.'
On 26th August he notes that Sónya (Miss Sophia Behrs) gave him a story to read, written by herself, and her description of the hero as a man of 'unusually unattractive appearance, and changeable convictions' hit him hard; but he was relieved to find that it was not meant for him.
On his thirty-fourth birthday, 28th August 1862 (old style) he jotted down in his Diary the words: 'Ugly mug! Do not think of marriage; your calling is of another kind.'
About this time the Behrs paid a two weeks' visit to Madame Behrs' father's estate of Ívitsa, some thirty miles from Yásnaya, and en route they stopped a couple of days at Yásnaya to visit the Countess Mary. The day after their arrival a picnic party was arranged with some neighbours. It was haymaking time, and there was much haystack climbing by the picknickers. The general impression was that Tolstoy was in love with Lisa, the eldest Miss Behrs: this opinion being fostered by the idea, then common in Russia, that an elder daughter should be disposed of before a younger daughter may be courted.
A few days later Tolstoy followed the Behrs to Ívitsa; and here the scene occurred which he has utilised in Anna Karénina when describing Lévin's proposal to Kitty—a scene in which something approaching thought-reading takes place.
Sitting at a card-table with Miss Sophia Behrs, Tolstoy wrote the initial letters of the sentence:
'In your family a false opinion exists about me and your sister Lisa; you and Tánitchka should destroy it.'
Miss Sophia read the letters, understood what words they stood for, and nodded her head.
Tolstoy then wrote the initial letters of another sentence:
'Your youth and need of happiness, to-day remind me too strongly of my age and the impossibility of happiness.'
The nature of the Russian language (with its inflections instead of particles, and the absence of articles) somewhat diminishes the miracle; but the test was a very severe one, and again the girl guessed the words aright. The two understood one another, and their fate was practically sealed.
The Behrs returned to Pokróvskoe-Glébovo in September. Tolstoy accompanied them on the carriage-journey back to Moscow and visited them every day, bringing music for the young ladies, playing the piano for them, and accompanying the youngest—whom he nicknamed 'Madame Viardot' after the famous singer.
On the 17th of that month (the name's day of Sophia) Tolstoy handed his future wife a letter containing a proposal of marriage, which she gladly accepted. Her father, displeased that the second daughter should be preferred to the eldest, at first refused his assent. But Tolstoy was strenuously insistent—I have even heard that he threatened to shoot himself—and the doctor soon yielded to the united persuasion of daughter and suitor.
The bridegroom's sense of honour led him to hand his future wife the Diary, in which, mingled with hopes, prayers, self-castigations and self-denunciations, the sins and excesses of his bachelorhood were recorded. To the girl, who had looked upon him as a personification of the virtues, this revelation came as a great shock; but after a sleepless night passed in weeping bitterly over it, she returned the Diary and forgave the past.
To get married it was necessary first to confess and receive the eucharist. Tolstoy's own experiences in this matter are narrated in Chapter I of Part V of Anna Karénina, where they are attributed to Lévin.
The marriage took place within a week of the proposal, namely on 23rd September 1862, in the Court church of the Krémlin, the bridegroom being thirty-four and the bride eighteen years of age. When the ceremony was over the couple left Moscow in a dormeuse (sleeping carriage), and drove to Yásnaya Polyána, where Tolstoy's brother Sergéy and Aunt Tatiána were awaiting them.
Tolstoy in 1862, the year of his marriage.
Fet records the letter in which Tolstoy informed him of his marriage:
Fétoushka [an endearing diminutive of Fet] Uncle, or simply Dear Friend Afanásy Afanásyevitch!—I have been married two weeks and am happy, and am a new, quite a new man. I want to visit you, but cannot manage it. When shall I see you? Having come to myself, I feel that I value you very, very much. We have so many unforgettable things in common: Nikólenka, and much besides. Do drive over and make my acquaintance. I kiss Márya Petróvna's hand. Farewell, dear friend. I embrace you with all my heart.
In another letter belonging to the same period he writes:
I am writing from the country, and while I write, from upstairs where she is talking to my brother, I hear the voice of my wife, whom I love more than the whole world. I have lived to the age of thirty-four without knowing that it was possible to love, and to be so happy. When I am more tranquil I will write you a long letter. I should not say 'more tranquil,' for I am now more tranquil and clear than I have ever been, but I should say, 'when I am accustomed to it.' At present I have a constant feeling of having stolen an undeserved, illicit, and not-for-me-intended happiness. There ... she is coming! I hear her, and it is so good!... And why do such good people as you, and, most wonderful of all, such a being as my wife, love me?
It did not much disturb his happiness, when, before Tolstoy had been married a fortnight, an event occurred which might easily have led to very disagreeable consequences. On 3rd October the Minister of the Interior called the attention of the Minister of Education to the harmful nature of the Yásnaya Polyána magazine. This is what he wrote:
A careful perusal of the educational magazine, Yásnaya Polyána, edited by Count Tolstoy, leads to the conviction that that magazine ... frequently propagates ideas which apart from their incorrectness are by their very tendency harmful.... I consider it necessary to direct your Excellency's attention to the general tendency and spirit of that magazine, which often infringes the fundamental rules of religion and morality.... I have the honour to inform you, Sir, of this, in the expectation that you may be inclined to consider it desirable to direct the special attention of the Censor to this publication.
Fortunately the decision of the matter did not lie with the Minister of the Interior, but with the Minister of Education, who on receiving this communication had the magazine in question carefully examined, and, on 24th October, replied that he found nothing harmful or contrary to religion in its tendency. It contained extreme opinions on educational matters, no doubt, but these, he said, should be criticised in educational periodicals rather than prohibited by the Censor. 'In general,' added the Minister:
I must say that Count Tolstoy's educational activity deserves full respect, and the Ministry of Education is bound to assist and co-operate with him, though it cannot share all his views, some of which after full consideration he will himself probably reject.
Other things besides the suspicion in which he was held by the Minister of the Interior, tended to discourage Tolstoy. His magazine had few subscribers and attracted but little attention. The year's issue was causing him a loss of something like Rs. 3000 (say about £450)—a larger sum than he could well afford to throw away. So he decided to discontinue it after the twelfth number. The month after his marriage he also closed the school, which was too great a tax on his time and attention.
It has often been said that the obstacles placed in his way by the Government turned him aside from educational work, but in speaking to me about it Tolstoy remarked that really the main factor was his marriage, and his preoccupation with family life.
Both he and his wife were absorbed by their personal happiness, though from time to time small quarrels and misunderstandings arose between them. So impulsive and strenuous a nature as Tolstoy's was sure to have its fluctuations of feeling, but on the whole the ties binding the couple together grew stronger and closer as the months passed into years.
The Countess's parents used to say: 'We could not have wished for greater happiness for our daughter.' The Countess not only loved Tolstoy dearly as a husband, but had the deepest admiration for him as a writer. He on his side often said that he found in family life the completest happiness, and in Sophia Andréyevna not only a loving wife and an excellent mother for his children, but an admirable assistant in his literary work, in which, owing to his careless and unmethodical habits, an intelligent and devoted amanuensis was invaluable. The Countess acquired remarkable skill in deciphering his often extremely illegible handwriting, and was sometimes able to guess in a quite extraordinary way the meaning of his hasty jottings and incomplete sentences.
One drawback to their almost complete happiness lay in the fact that though active and possessed of great physical strength, Tolstoy seldom enjoyed any long periods of uninterrupted good health. In his correspondence we find frequent references to indisposition. In early manhood, he seems to have distended his stomach, and, especially after the hardships he endured during the war of 1854-5, he was subject to digestive troubles for the rest of his days.
Town life did not attract him. He had never felt at ease in what is called high society; nor were his means large enough to enable him to support a wife and family in a good position in town. Still, towards the close of the year of his marriage, he and the Countess spent some weeks in Moscow.