1863
They were however soon back at Yásnaya. In February Fet visited them there, and found them overflowing with life and happiness.
On 15th May, after the Tolstoys and Fet had by some chance just missed meeting at the house of a neighbouring proprietor, Tolstoy wrote to his friend:
We just missed seeing you, and how sorry I am that we did! How much I want to talk over with you. Not a day passes without our mentioning you several times. My wife is not at all 'playing with dolls.' Don't you insult her. She is my serious helpmate, though now bearing a burden from which she hopes to be free early in July. What won't she do afterwards? We are ufanizing[48] little by little. I have made an important discovery, which I hasten to impart to you. Clerks and overseers are only a hindrance to the management of an estate. Try the experiment of dismissing them all; then sleep ten hours a day, and be assured that everything will get along not worse. I have made the experiment and am quite satisfied with its success.
How, oh how, are we to see one another? If you go to Moscow with Márya Petróvna and do not come to visit us, it will be dreadful offensive. (My wife, who was reading this letter, prompted that sentence.) I wanted to write much, but time lacks. I embrace you with all my heart; my wife bows profoundly to you, and I to your wife.
Business: When you are in Orél, buy me 20 poods [720 lbs.] of various kinds of twine, reins, and shaft-traces, if they cost less than Rs. 2.30 per pood including carriage, and send them me by a carter. The money shall be paid at once.
Fet soon availed himself of the invitation, and after driving past the low towers which mark the entrance to the birch alley leading to the house, he came upon Tolstoy eagerly directing the dragging of a lake and taking all possible care that the carp should not escape. The Countess, in a white dress, came running down the alley, with a huge bundle of barn-door keys hanging at her waist. After cordially greeting the visitor, she, notwithstanding her 'exceedingly interesting condition,' leapt over the low railing between the alley and the pond. It will however be better to quote Fet's own account of his visit:
'Sónya, tell Nestérka to fetch a sack from the barn, and let us go back to the house,' said Tolstoy—who had already greeted me warmly, without losing sight of the carp-capturing operations the while.
The Countess immediately detached a huge key from her belt and gave it to a boy, who started at a run to fulfil the order.
'There,' remarked the Count, 'you have an example of our method. We keep the keys ourselves; and all the estate business is carried on by boys.'
At the animated dinner table, the carp we had seen captured made their appearance. We all seemed equally at ease and happy....
That evening was one truly 'filled with hope.' It was a sight to see with what pride and bright hope Tatiána Alexándrovna, the kindest of aunts, regarded the young people she so loved; and how, turning to me, she said frankly, 'You see, with mon cher Léon of course things could not be otherwise.'
As to the Countess, life to one who in her condition leapt over fences, could not but be lit up with the brightest of hopes. The Count himself, who had passed his whole life in an ardent search for novelties, evidently at this period entered a world till then unknown, in the mighty future of which he believed with all the enthusiasm of a young artist. I myself, during that evening, was carried away by the general tone of careless happiness, and did not feel the stone of Sisyphus oppressing me.
Soon after this visit, on 28th June 1863, a son, Sergius, was born. During the first eleven years of marriage, the Countess bore her husband eight children, and another five during the next fifteen years: making in all, thirteen children in twenty-six years.
But we must turn back a few months to mention the stories by Tolstoy which appeared during this year.
In the January number of the Russian Messenger, Katkóf had published The Cossacks, which Tolstoy had kept back to revise, and had only delivered in December.
In the February number of the same magazine appeared Polikoúshka, the story of a serf who, having lost some money belonging to his mistress, hangs himself.
These stories are referred to in the following letter from Tolstoy to Fet, undated, but written in 1863:
Both your letters were equally important, significant, and agreeable to me, dear Afanásy Afanásyevitch. I am living in a world so remote from literature and its critics, that on receiving such a letter as yours, my first feeling is one of astonishment. Whoever was it wrote The Cossacks and Polikoúshka? And what's the use of talking about them? Paper endures anything, and editors pay for and print anything. But that is merely a first impression; afterwards one enters into the meaning of what you say, rummages about in one's head, and finds in some corner of it, among old, forgotten rubbish, something indefinite, labelled Art; and pondering on what you say, agrees that you are right, and even finds it pleasant to rummage about in that old rubbish, amid the smell one once loved. One even feels a desire to write. Of course, you are right. But then there are few readers of your sort. Polikoúshka is the chatter of a man who 'wields a pen,' on the first theme that comes to hand; but The Cossacks has some matter in it, though poor. I am now writing the story of a pied gelding, which I expect to print in autumn. [It did not appear till 1888!] But how can one write now? Invisible efforts—and even visible ones—are now going on; and, moreover, I am again up to my ears in farming. So is Sónya. We have no steward; we have assistants for field-work and building; but she, single-handed, attends to the office and the cash. I have the bees, the sheep, a new orchard, and the distillery. It all progresses, little by little, though of course badly compared with our ideal.
What do you think of the Polish business? [the insurrection of 1863, then breaking out]. It looks bad! Shall we—you and I and Borísof—not have to take our swords down from their rusty nails?...
The bees, which Tolstoy here places first among his out-door duties, occupied much of his time, and he often spent hours studying the habits of these interesting creatures.
Tourgénef, writing to Fet, commented on The Cossacks as follows:
I read The Cossacks and went into ecstasies over it; so did Bótkin. Only the personality of Olénin spoils the generally splendid impression. To contrast civilisation with fresh, primeval Nature, there was no need again to produce that dull, unhealthy fellow always preoccupied with himself. Why does Tolstoy not get rid of that nightmare?
Several months later he wrote:
After you left, I read Tolstoy's Polikoúshka and marvelled at the strength of his huge talent. But he has used up too much material, and it is a pity he drowned the son. It makes it too terrible. But there are pages that are truly wonderful! It made a cold shudder run down even my back, though you know my back has become thick and coarse. He is a master, a master!
Tolstoy was now fairly launched on the life he was destined to lead for sixteen years: a quiet, country life, occupied with family joys and cares. These years followed one another with so little change that the story of a decade and a half can almost be compressed into a sentence. Children came in quick succession, two great novels and an ABC Book were produced, a large orchard was planted with apple-trees, the Yásnaya Polyána property was improved, and new estates were purchased east of the Vólga.
During the year 1863 Tolstoy wrote two plays, which have never been published. One, a farcical comedy called The Nihilist, was privately performed at home with great success. The second, also a comedy, written on a topic of the day, was called The Infected Family. Hoping to have it staged, Tolstoy took it to Moscow early in 1864; but the theatrical season, which in Russia ends at the commencement of Lent, was already too far advanced; and he never subsequently appears to have troubled himself to have it either published or acted.
The Countess Tolstoy's brother, S. A. Behrs (who from 1866 when he was a boy of eleven, till 1878, spent every summer with the Tolstoys) in his book, Recollections of Count Tolstoy, gives much interesting information about the life at Yásnaya. He mentions that it was a proverb about the hard fate of penniless noblemen, that prompted Tolstoy to take all possible care to provide for the future of his children; and the passage in the letter quoted above, about the bees, sheep, new orchard and distillery with which he was occupied, shows how this care was applied.
In his Confession, Tolstoy says of the years now under review:
Returning from abroad I married. The new conditions of happy family life completely diverted me from all search for the general meaning of life. My whole life was centred at that time in my family, wife and children, and in care to increase our means of livelihood. My striving after self-perfection and progress, was now again replaced by the effort simply to secure the best possible conditions for myself and my family.
So another fifteen years passed.
In spite of the fact that I regarded authorship as of no importance, I yet, during those fifteen years, continued to write. I had already tasted the temptation of authorship: the temptation of immense monetary rewards and applause for my insignificant work; and I devoted myself to it as a means of improving my material position, and of stifling in my soul all questions as to the meaning of my own life, or of life in general.
Again, writing in 1903 of this middle period of his life, Tolstoy says:
Then came a third, an eighteen-year period which may be the least interesting of all (from my marriage to my spiritual re-birth) and which from a worldly point of view may be called moral: that is to say, that during those eighteen years I lived a correct, honest, family life, not indulging myself in any vices condemned by public opinion, but with interests wholly limited to selfish cares for my family, for the increase of our property, the acquisition of literary success, and all kinds of pleasure.
(In the one place he speaks of 'fifteen years,' and in the other of 'eighteen years'; but that is his way, and chronological exactitude is not the important matter here.)
After the Emancipation, in many parts of Russia the landlords had more or less serious difficulty with the peasants, among whom stories were rife to the effect that the Tsar intended to give them all the land, but had been deceived by the officials into only giving half; and, for a time, riots were not infrequent. There was no serious trouble of this sort on Tolstoy's estate; but his sister (whom I met at Yásnaya in 1902, long after her husband's death and when she, a nun, had been allowed out of her convent to visit her brother, after his very serious illness) told me that on one occasion the peasants refused to make the hay; and to save it from being lost, Tolstoy, his wife, the members of the family, and the masters from eleven neighbouring schools, all set to work with a will, and by their own strenuous exertions saved the crop before the weather changed.
On settling down to married life, Tolstoy formed the plan of writing a great novel, and the epoch he at first intended to deal with was that of the Constitutional conspiracy which came to a head on the accession of Nicholas I to the throne in December 1825. That quite premature military plot was quickly snuffed out. So little were things ripe for it, that many even of the soldiers who shouted for a 'Constitution' (Konstitútsia) thought they were demanding allegiance to Nicholas's elder brother Constantine, who having married a Polish lady of the Roman Catholic faith had renounced his right to the throne. While considering the plan of his work, Tolstoy found himself carried back to the scenes amid which his characters had grown up: to the time of the Napoleonic wars and the invasion of Russia by the French in 1812. Here was a splendid background for a novel, and putting aside The Decembrists he commenced War and Peace, a work conceived on a gigantic scale, and that resulted in a splendid success.