Shall I tell you something surprising about myself? When the horse threw me and broke my arm, and when I came to after fainting, I said to myself: 'I am an author.' And I am an author, but a solitary, on-the-quiet kind of author.... In a few days the first part of 'The Year 1805' [so the first part of War and Peace was originally called] will appear. Please write me your opinion of it in detail. I value your opinion and that of a man whom I dislike the more, the more I grow up—Tourgénef. He will understand. All I have printed hitherto I consider but a trial of my pen; what I am now printing, though it pleases me better than my former work, still seems weak—as an Introduction must be. But what follows will be—tremendous!!!... Write what is said about it in the different places you know, and especially how it goes with the general public. No doubt it will pass unnoticed. I expect and wish it to do so; if only they don't abuse me, for abuse upsets one....
I am glad you like my wife; though I love her less than my novel, still, you know, she is my wife. Be sure you come to visit us; for if you and Márya Petróvna do not stay here on your return from Moscow it will really, without a joke, be too stupid!
In May 1865 one sees by a letter of Tolstoy's to Fet that one of the children had been ill and he himself had been in bed for three days and barely escaped a fever. His wife's younger sister, Tánya, she of the contralto voice who (with some admixture of his wife) served Tolstoy as model for Natásha in War and Peace, was spending the summer at Yásnaya, as she had done each year since her sister's marriage. The Countess Mary and her children were also there. The children, he says, were well, and out all day in the open air. He adds:
I continue to write little by little, and am content with my work. The woodcock still attract me, and every evening I shoot at them, that is, generally, past them. My farming goes on well, that is to say, it does not disturb me much—which is all I demand of it....
In reply to a suggestion from Fet, he goes on to say that he will not write more about the Yásno-Polyána school, but hopes some day to express the conclusions to which his three years' ardent passion for that work had brought him. Then comes a reference to the state of agricultural affairs after the Emancipation, and a passing allusion to the question of famine—a subject destined to make great demands on Tolstoy's attention in later years:
Our affairs as agriculturists are now like those of a share-holder whose shares have lost value and are unsaleable on 'Change. The case is a bad one. Personally I only ask that it should not demand of me so much attention and participation as to deprive me of my tranquillity. Latterly I have been content with my private affairs; but the general trend—with the impending misery of famine—torments me more and more every day. It is so strange, and even good and terrible. We have rosy radishes on our table, and yellow butter, and well-baked, soft bread on a clean tablecloth; the garden is green, and our young ladies in muslin dresses are glad it is hot and shady; while there that evil hunger-devil is already at work, covering the fields with goose-weed, chafing the hard heels of the peasants and their wives, and cracking the hoofs of the cattle. Our weather, the corn, and the meadows, are really terrible. How are they with you?
The letter closes with advice to Fet to transfer his chief attention from the land to literature, and a statement that Tolstoy himself has done so, and is finding life less difficult.
When Tolstoy went out hunting hares and foxes with borzoi dogs, Miss Tatiána Behrs (the Tánya alluded to above) used often to accompany him.
Between this lady and Count Sergius Tolstoy (Leo's elder brother) an attachment had grown up which caused great distress to them both, for, besides being twenty-two years older than the lady, Sergius was living with, and had a family by, the gipsy mentioned in a previous chapter, though he was not legally married. His affection for his family prevented his yielding completely to his love for Tánya and asking her to be his wife. The Behrs were quite willing that he should do so, and the young lady would have accepted him, and was much pained by the vacillation that resulted from the battle between his love for her and his affection for his family. Ultimately he resolved to be faithful to the union he had formed, and, in order to legitimise his children, went through the form of marriage with their mother in 1867. Almost at the same time, Tánya, having recovered from her disappointment, married a Mr. Kouzmínsky.
Here again one gets a slight glimpse of the experience of life which has led Tolstoy, contrary to the opinion general among the Russian 'intelligents,' to advocate faithfulness at all costs to the woman with whom one has once formed a union.