Just now I am constantly out hunting and am busy arranging how to place our educational staff for the winter. I have been to Moscow looking for a teacher and a tutor. To-day I feel quite ill.
1878
Nor did matters improve as the months went on, for on 27th January he again writes:
Most unfortunately your suppositions, dear Afanásy Afanásyevitch, are wrong. Not only am I not at work, but the reason I failed to answer you was because I have been ill all this time. Lately I have even been in bed for some days. A chill in various forms: teeth and side, and the result is that time goes by—my best time—and I do no work.
Then follows a touch showing how, in many matters, his wife's mind was still attuned to his own, though she was not sharing his spiritual struggles, and in the matter of the education of the children there was already some disagreement between them:
On reading it I said to my wife, 'Fet's poem is charming, but there is one word that is wrong.' She was nursing and bustling about at the time; but at tea, having quieted down, she took up the poem to read, and at once pointed out the words 'as the Gods'—which I considered bad.
On 25th March 1878 he writes to Fet:
Last week, after seventeen years' absence, I went to Petersburg to purchase some land in Samára from General B....
There I met a pair of Orlóf Generals who made me shudder: it was just as though one were standing between two sets of rails with goods trains passing. To enter into the minds of these Generals, I had to recall the rare days of drunkenness I have experienced, or the days of my very earliest childhood.
After completing Anna Karénina Tolstoy again took up The Decembrists, which he had put aside in favour of War and Peace fourteen years before. As already mentioned, a second cousin of Tolstoy's mother, Prince S. G. Volkónsky, had been a prominent Decembrist; and Tolstoy had at his disposal a number of family diaries and journals throwing much light on the subject of that conspiracy. While in Petersburg he made personal acquaintance with some of the survivors of the movement, and also applied to the Commandant of the Petropávlof Fortress—who happened to be an officer under whom he had served in the Crimea—for permission to see the Alexis dungeons, in which the Decembrists had been confined. The Commandant received him very politely, allowed him to see over other parts of the fortress, but told him that, though any one could enter the dungeons, only three persons in the whole Empire—the Emperor, the Commandant, and the Chief of the Gendarmes—having once entered them, could again leave them.