Leo Tolstoy: The Later Years

BY

ERNEST J. SIMMONS

CHAPTERS I-XXI

Foreword

Five years ago, after extensive research, Ernest J. Simmons began his two-volume life and appraisal of Russia’s great writer, Leo Tolstoy. In the first half of this biography, chapters of which were serialized in the Atlantic in 1945, he traced the gusty, exuberant career of the young Tolstoy. Leo was the fourth son of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman. Leo’s mother died before he was two; and he knew little of his good-natured but ineffectual father, who died when the boy was eight. Leo, his three brothers, and a sister were brought up by their aunts in a golden age on the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, with its thousands of acres and hundreds of serfs.

For the future novelist tint road to wisdom lay through the valley of excess. Intensely passionate, vain, hypersensitive, Leo loved society and yearned to be comine il faut like his brother Sergei, but his coarse peasant features and his awkwardness did not make him popular with students and the well-bred girls of Kazan when he matriculated at the university there in 1844.

Young Tolstoy took pride in his physical strength. Studies interfered with his gymnastic exercises, and with sudden contempt he broke away from the university and returned to his estate, where for a time he played at being a bucolic philosopher and at reforming the serfs. But the serfs objected, and in the face of their recalcitrance the fleshpots of Moscow and Petersburg seemed more inviting.

In the city the eligible young man had more invitations than were good for him. His love of cards and his conviviality endeared him to the other young bachelors, who introduced him to the shady restaurants, the haunts of the gypsy singers. He struggled against these temptations, mercilessly flagellating himself for weaknesses of the flesh. With sudden resolution he left the city wasteland and accompanied his Army brother, Nikolai, who was returning to his battery in the Caucasus. There, in the intervals of frontier life, Leo found time to write his first book, Childhood. which was widely acclaimed on its publication in Petersburg. But in the rough-and-tumble life his spiritual resolution was as hard as ever to sustain.

During the Crimean War, Leo received a commission in the artillery and fought gallantly at Sevastopol. He wrote a scries of Serastapol Tales, and on his return to Petersburg after the war he was welcomed as a literary hero by Turgenev and other contributors to the magazine Contemporary. But Leo was too strident to fit with ease in a literary coterie. He would argue at the drop of a hat, and a dispute with Turgenev led to an angry challenge to a duel. Turgenev averted the duel by apologizing, but the estrangement between the two lasted seventeen years.

Again Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana with reforms in mind. With great zeal he plunged into the work of educating peasant children. In 1861, as he approached his thirty-third birthday, Tolstoy reached the point in his struggle between spiritual perfection and material happiness when neither education nor work nor literature could satisfy the urge within him. A passionate affair with a peasant girl, Aksinya Bazykin, forced him to a decision: he would try to find in marriage (though not with her) a happiness and a salvation which thus far had escaped him.

It is at this point that we resume Mr. Simmons’s definitive work.

LEO TOLSTOY: THE LATER YEARS

by ERNEST J. SIMMONS

1

FROM his early youth Tolstoy had been searching for family happiness, not yet recognizing it as one aspect in his endless struggle between good and evil. On several occasions in the past he had played with the idea of marriage, but only now did there exist for him that favorable conjunction of forces that appears to determine the ascendancy of marriage in a man’s life. For some time he had been weighing in the scales every eligible girl who crossed his path, but all had been found wanting. About the latest of these, Ekaterina Tyutchev, he wrote to Granny (a distant cousin, Alexandra Tolstoy) immediately after his return from abroad in May, 1861 “The excellent girl E. is too much of a hothouse plant, loo trained in ’fool-proof enjoyment’ to be able to share my work or even to sympathize with it. She is occupied with the preparation of moral sweetmeats, and I have to do with soil and manure.”

Here, as in all other cases, he unconsciously demanded perfection to compensate for an absence of love. The experience with his peasant, Aksinya Bazykin, who seemed so much like a wife to him, had failed to teach him that there was no substitute for love. At this crucial time his attention centered on the Bers family, with which he had been on familiar terms for several years. Madame Bers, only two years older than Tolstoy, had been his childhood playmate. She had grown up on an estate some twenty-five miles from Yasnaya Polyana. When only sixteen she had married the thirty-six-year-old Dr. A. E. Bers.

They settled in Moscow, where both the doctor’s practice and his family flourished. His engaging manner with the ladies, and perhaps his medical skill, gained him many patients among wealthy aristocrats, and he was eventually appointed Court Physician with quarters in the Kremlin. Here his five sons and three daughters grew up.

Liza, the oldest daughter, was a beautiful girl of nineteen, tall, with fine features and serious, expressive eyes, but with a cold, unsociable nature. She held herself aloof in the household. Eternally with a book in her hand, she scorned the customary games and amusements of a large family and gave herself up to things of the mind. Tanya, four years younger than Liza, was a striking contrast to her sister. Affectionately nicknamed “Tatyanchik the Imp,”she was her father’s favorite and the spoiled tyrant of the household. Her passionate, artistic nature bubbled over with enthusiasm and excitement on the slightest provocation, and although she was something of an egotistical little show-off, her warm heart was always filled with irrepressible love for everyone and everything around her.

The nature of eighteen-year-old Sonya (Sofya Andreyevna), a healthy, rosy girl with great brown eyes and dark braids, was in a sense a mean between the two extremes of her older and younger sisters. Despite her lively disposition, she affected a sentimentality that easily slipped into melancholy. Her father remarked that she could never he completely happy, and she once admitted to Tanya that she could always find sorrow in her joy. A fondness for children and domestic tasks appeared in Sonya even as a young girl, and she early exhibited a curious miserly trait.

Expansive hospitality reigned in the Bers household. The girls were constantly entertaining crowds of young people with games and music, and often they put on plays. The gelid Liza maintained a decorous deportment amid these carefree gatherings, and her stern mother always held her up to her sisters as a model of correct behavior. But Sonya and Tatyanchik the Imp secretly yearned to turn the heads of the uniformed students whom their oldest brother, a member of the cadet corps, brought home on vacations. One of them, Mitrofan Polivanov, had already turned Sonya’s head. They whispered eternal devotion to each other, but Mitrofan, with the magnanimity of a boyish lover, graciously granted her complete freedom to break her plighted word should she fall in love with another. The little firebrand Tanya, who still played with her favorite doll, Mimi, shared Sonya’s secrets of the heart, and in turn confessed her own romantic passion for her cousin Kuzminski. Here was a merry society of Moscow girls with their ribbons, calicoes, shy coquetry, and all the poetry and stupidities of youth.

When Tolstoy renewed his visits to the family after returning from abroad he was struck by the change in the sisters. Awkward girls had been transformed into attractive young ladies. Liza and Sonya had finished their schooling, wore long dresses, and did up their hair in the latest coiffures. He grew more interested. With the bookish Liza he discussed literature, and urged her to write articles for his pedagogical magazine. Duets on the piano or a quiet game of chess delighted the sentimental Sonya. With Tatyanchik the Imp, he played the schoolmaster, set problems in arithmetic, obliged her to recite verses; and when success crowned her efforts, he triumphantly carried her around the room on his back. Tolstoy quickly became a favorite in the family. Even the numerous servants, whom he regaled with jokes and stories, loved him, and the merry household grew still merrier when he was present.

2

THESE frequent visits to a family with at least two marriageable girls soon set tongues to wagging. Gossip represented Tolstoy as the suitor of the oldest sister. His own sister, a lifelong friend of mother Bers, favored Liza. Such a solid, serious, and well-educated girl, Marya told him, would make an excellent wife. The solid Liza was indifferent at first, but the persistent gossip began to arouse her from her books. All noticed that she paid more attention to her appearance, and soon she was madly in love.

From the very first, however, the serious Liza left Tolstoy quite cold. The spirited Imp was more to his liking, but she was still a child. On the other hand, he began to observe that Sonya grew more attractive with every passing day. Her young cadet, Polivanov, was away in Petersburg. She wept over him and eagerly read to her younger sister the letters this delicate lover sent.

Somehow Tolstoy as a lover had not at first dawned upon Sonya’s consciousness. She had known him when, as a little girl, she had gone into raptures over his Childhood and Boyhood, copied pages of them into her diary, and memorized whole passages. She regarded the author through a prism of poetic ecstasy. He became her shining hero. She tied ribbons to the chair on which he sat, and even wrote out from Youth several lines that she wore next to her heart as a precious jewel. Sonya was then a child of eleven. Now she Was eighteen, and a furtive mouse of an idea crept into her mind that she was not unattractive to this man almost twice her age. His face was common, almost ugly, but there were a strange charm and spiritual power in his piercing glance. He was also a count, a famous author, and the possessor of a large estate. It was a challenge to win the love of such a man. The more her thoughts dwelt upon him, the paler grew the image of Polivanov at his military studies in Petersburg. And suddenly Sonya was almost ready to confess to herself that she was in love not with Polivanov but with Tolstoy.

Mother Bers decided to take her three daughters on a visit to Ivitsy, the estate of their grandfather. On the way she planned to stop over at Yasnaya Polyana in order to see her childhood friend, Marya Tolstoy. No doubt this ambitious mother also had in mind the fact that her friend’s brother was being much talked of as a suitable match for her eldest daughter.

The party arrived at Yasnaya Polyana in the early evening. Tolstoy tried to conceal his agitation over all this charming feminine company by indulging in gestures of fussy hospitality. It was discovered that one bed was lacking. He suggested a huge armchair, and Sonya at once elected it for herself. With awkward, unaccustomed movements he began to spread the sheets, and these preparations filled her with a pleasant sense of intimacy. That night she fell happily asleep in the armchair, her young heart gladdened by the thought that he had prepared this bed for her with his own hands.

The guests continued their journey to Ivitsy two days later, promising to call again on the way home. Lively grandfather Islenev received them joyfully, pinching the fresh cheeks of his granddaughters and ordering up all manner of old-fashioned entertainment for these “Moscow ladies” as he called them. Shoals of neighbors were invited, and there were rides, picnics, and, at night, dances for the young people and whist for their parents.

The day after the arrival of the girls, Tolstoy suddenly appeared on his big white horse. Liza blushed, accepting it as a compliment, and so did Sonya, who immediately became unnaturally lively. But it was Sonya that he singled out for his special attention.

At the dancing the following evening Tolstoy preferred to play cards or talk with the mothers and fathers. He was too old, he told Tanya and Sonya, when they teased him to dance. After supper the capricious Tanya was asked to sing. She refused, and to escape her petitioners ran into the drawing room and hid under the piano. Suddenly Tolstoy and Sonya entered. They seemed agitated. Tanya did not dare to move. Sonya wished to leave, for her stern mother had already ordered her to bed.

“Sofya Andreyevna, wait a moment,” pleaded Tolstoy. “You must read what I’m going to write for you.”

“All right,” she agreed.

“But I shall write only the initial letters and you must guess what the words are.”

“How so? But that’s impossible! Well, write.”

Tolstoy wrote with a piece of chalk on the surface of a card table the letters “ Y.y.a.n.o.h.r.m.t.s.o.m.a. a.t.i.o.h.”

Sonya read with some prompting from Tolstoy: “Your youth and need of happiness remind me too strongly of my age and the impossibility of happiness.” (The initial letters of the Russian words, of course, are different, but the translation is an exact rendering of the Russian sentence.)

Her heart beat loudly, her face burned. She felt that something she had hoped for and dreamed of was about to happen, and she was both eager and afraid. All her senses were sharpened to a point of miraculous comprehension.

Then Tolstoy wrote further: “I.y.f.e.a.f.o.a.m.a.y. s.L.D.m.w.y.s.T.”

Again Sonya read with a bit of help: “In your family exists a false opinion about me and your sister Liza. Defend me with your sister Tanichka.”

At the conclusion of the second sentence, Sonya, hearing her mother calling her to bed, ran out of the room. Before she fell asleep that night, she wrote the sentences in her diary. She fully realized that something serious and significant had taken place between her and Tolstoy, something that would not cease there. Only to Tanya, a witness to the whole scene, did Sonya confide her hopes and misgivings.

Tolstoy departed the next day. Once again he saw the Bers family at Yasnaya Polyana on their return journey to Moscow. When they were saying their farewells, to the surprise of all he announced that he would drive to the city with them. His simple excuse was that it would now be boring and empty at Yasnaya Polyana. The sisters were delighted.

For most of the journey he contrived to sit with Sonva alone, somewhat to the indignation of the now jealous Liza. During the long hours of the trip he told her the story of his life, of the beauties of the Caucasus, and of his adventures there. Perhaps like Othello he hoped to win this credulous girl by an account of the dangers he had been through. Unlike Desdemona, however, she fell asleep before his story ended. But until the fatigue of the journey had taken its toll, she had been a most enraptured listener to this real tale of her favorite author.

3

THOUGH it was the middle of August, Tolstoy could not tear himself away from Moscow. Passion gambled with reason and his future destiny was the stake. The Bers family moved to their summer house at Pokrovskoye, only eight miles from the city. Here Tolstoy was almost a daily caller, often walking the distance. His frequent visits began to embarrass him as well as the members of the household; yet he could not stay away. The parents were confused as to his intentions and began to treat him with some restraint. Sonya, tortured by his uncertainty, received him with conflicting emotions, one day gay and bright, the next sad and gloomy. Why did he not declare himself?

At Pokrovskoye there were long walks together on beautiful moonlight nights, but no romantic scenes took place. Once Sonya sat in her father’s carriage, from which the horses had just been unharnessed. She called out to Tolstoy in a merry mood: “When I’m an empress, I’ll be driven about in such a carriage.” He impetuously seized the shafts, and with an unusual show of strength wheeled her around the yard, shouting: “This is the way my empress will ride!”

Throughout all this period of indecision, Tolstoy kept his diary, and it is a sorry record of confusion and struggle. His calm was murdered the moment Sonya entered his thoughts, and he could not keep her out of them. Two days after his thirty-fourth birthday, he busied himself with work and visits, and refused to be disturbed. But a “bouquet of letters and flowers” from the Bers family arrived. Sonya’s brief contribution to the family’s collective congratulatory epistle — her first letter to him — set him off once again on the treadmill of his emotions.

He tried to draft a reply, but the words would not come. Then he sought to regain tranquillity by reminding himself in the diary: “Ugly mug that you are! Think no more of marriage; your calling is something other, and for that, much has been given you.”

September arrived and the family returned to Moscow. Tolstoy diligently continued his vigil at their house. In a moment of misplaced confidence, Sonya confessed to her mother that she expected a proposal from him. She was testily ordered to forgot such nonsense and to cease imagining that everybody was in love with her. Meanwhile, father Bers began to grow angry with the ubiquitous Tolstoy for not making an offer to Liza.

On his next visit Tolstoy noticed that father Bers sat angrily in his study. The whole family was grave and stern. He knew what they were waiting for. As he looked at the cold Liza, all he could think of was what a dreadful misfortune it would be if she should become his wife. He took refuge in Sonya’s blushes and obvious agitation in his presence. “Oh . . . don’t dream!” he cautioned himself in the diary. “Again I departed anguished, remorseful, but happy at heart. Tomorrow I shall go as soon as I arise and tell all or . . .” He added “shall shoot myself” but crossed this out. “Four o’clock in the morning. I’ve written a letter; I’ll give it to her tomorrow, i.e. today, the 14th. My God, how I fear to die. Happiness, and such a happiness, seems to me impossible. My God, help me!”

On the evening of September 16 Tolstoy called on the Bers family again. He seemed agitated. The letter he had written for Sonya three days before still nestled in his pocket.

Ill at ease, Tolstoy asked Sonya to play a duet with him and then decided not to. They sat quietly at the piano. She gently fingered the accompaniment to the “II Baccio” waltz that she was learning for her sister. His agitation quickly infected Sonya. Nervously she called to Tanya to sing the piece.

Tanya agreed, but she noticed that the request seemed to displease him. She was in voice that night. Standing in the center of the room, she soon forgot them both in her rapt concentration on the song. Sonya stumbled on the accompaniment and Tolstoy slipped into her place and took it up, at once giving new life to Tanya’s voice and the words of the song. He promised himself that if Tanya took the final high note well, he would give Sonya the letter. The little singer soared to the final note with perfect ease.

“How you sing tonight!" he exclaimed in an excited voice.

At this moment Tanya was called from the room to help with the tea. They were alone.

“I wanted to speak with you,”Tolstoy began, but he could not continue. “Here is a letter that I’ve been carrying around in my pocket for several days. Read it. I’ll wait for your answer.”

Sonya seized the letter and ran downstairs to her room and locked the door. She opened the letter with trembling hands and read: —

“This is becoming unendurable. Every day for three weeks I have been saying: today I shall tell all, and I have been going away with the same anguish, remorse, fear, and happiness in my soul. And every night, as even now, I examine the past, torment myself, and say: why have I not spoken, and I tell myself how and what I should have said. I have taken this letter with me in order to give it to you if I again find it impossible or lack the spirit to tell you all.

“The false opinion in your family about me, it seems, arises from the belief that I am in love with your sister Liza. This is unfair.

“At Ivitsy I wrote: Your prisence too strongly reminds me of my age and the impossibility of happiness, and just you. . . .

“But even then and afterwards I lied to myself. Then even more so I could have given over everything and again gone into my monastery of lonely work and become absorbed with affairs. Now I can do nothing of the kind, and I feel that I have made a mess of things in your family, that having grown cold, my dear relations with you, as with another honest person, are ended. But I cannot take my leave, and I do not dare remain. You, an honest person, and with hand on heart — without haste, for God’s sake, without haste — tell me what to do. He who laughs may in the end suffer. I would have died with laughter if a month ago I had been told — that I could suffer as I now suffer, and happily suffer. Tell me, as an honest person, — do you wish to be my wife? Unless you can boldly say yes with all your soul, then you had better say no — if there is a shadow of doubt in you.

“For God’s sake, examine your heart carefully.

“It will be dreadful for me to hear ‘no,’ but I foresee it, and I will find in myself the strength to bear it; but if as a husband I shall never be loved as I love, it will be terrible.”

The ecstatic Sonya did not pause to read through this confused analysis of a heart enthralled. Her eager eyes quickly discovered the question: “Do you wish to be my wife?” That was enough. On the other side of the locked bedroom door she heard Liza’s frightened voice: —

“Sonya, what has the Count written to you? Speak!”

Sonya remained silent, tightly gripping the precious letter.

“Speak at once! What has the Count written you?” cried Liza again, a hysterical note in her voice.

“He has proposed to me,” Sonya, with an effort, calmly answered.

“Refuse!” screamed Liza. “Refuse at once!” And she burst into sobs.

Tanya called her mother to quiet Liza. Sonya told her mother what had happened, and she was ordered to give Tolstoy her answer. She flew up the stairway, shot by the dining room, the drawing room, and ran into her mother’s apartment. Tolstoy stood there, leaning against the wall in the corner of the room, waiting for her. He took both her hands.

“Well, what?” he asked.

“Of course, yes.”

In a few minutes the whole house knew what had happened.

4

CONGRATULATIONS in the household were not unanimous. The news threw father Bers into a rage. He refused at first to give his consent, for he had expected Tolstoy to propose to his eldest daughter. But the mother’s tactful diplomacy, Sonya’s tears, and even Liza’s generous pleading won a begrudging blessing from him.

Tolstoy’s choice of Sonya, however, caused some embarrassment. The day after the proposal, the name-day of Sonya and her mother, was turned into an occasion for announcing the engagement to many visiting relatives and friends. Sonya and Liza, as usual, were dressed alike lilac gowns with white barèye trimmings, open collars, and lilac bows at the waist and on the shoulders. Both girls were pale and received the guests with tired eyes. To the customary name-day felicitations, the mother at first made the mistake of announcing to the guests that her daughter must also be congratulated on her engagement to Tolstoy. Many promptly turned to the crimson and suffering Liza with the customary exclamations. One of her old professors, even when apprised of the mistake, naïvely remarked: “It is a shame that it was not Liza: she was such a good student.”

Horror chilled Sonya when she saw in the throng the happy face of young Polivanov, resplendent in his new Guards uniform. Her brother perhaps prevented a scene by taking him aside and telling him the fatal news. Later, Sonya sought him out in an effort to explain. Her letter to Petersburg had not reached him.

“I knew,” the unhappy Polivanov declared with tears in his eyes, “that you would forsake me; I felt it.”

The only solace Sonya could offer her childhood sweetheart was that she could forsake him only for one man — Tolstoy.

“Bridegroom, gifts, champagne,” was Tolstoy’s sole comment in his diary on this day of celebration. In his bliss he did not forget to write to Granny, that faithful friend whom he might have married if she had only been “ten years younger.” He informed her of his approaching marriage, and then with the pardonable exaggeration of the insensate lover, he added: “I would have to write volumes to give you any understanding of what she is like; I have never been so happy since I was born.”

Whatever sense of personal loss Granny may have felt over this announcement, she rose nobly to the occasion, expressing her delight at the thought of acquiring “a charming granddaughter,” and concluding: “There, now, our prodigal son is bound forever. I rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!”

Over the strenuous objections of mother Bers, Tolstoy demanded that the marriage take place as soon as possible. The trousseau and various other preparations he impatiently brushed aside as needless delays. Finally, a date just one week after his proposal was decided upon. Every day he visited Sonya. With the conviction that there should be no secrets between them, he turned over his diaries to her, and with the unwisdom of a girl of eighteen she allowed herself to peer into this history of his past excesses and moral lapses. “I remember,”she wrote later, “how terribly shocked I was by the reading of these diaries that he gave to me before my marriage out of a sense of personal duty. I wept much upon glancing into his past, but to no purpose.”Sonya forgave all, though she now feared to lose the love of this man.

Tolstoy had his own fears and doubts, the doubts that had tormented him from the moment he fell in love with Sonya. On the morning of his marriage day, September 23, he violated all proprieties by suddenly appearing at her home. He at once overwhelmed her with questions and doubts about her love for him. it seemed to her as though he were afraid of marriage. Sonya began to weep. Her mother scolded him for his behavior and he immediately left.

The marriage was to take place in the evening in the Court church of the Kremlin. Sonya’s attendants dressed her in her wedding gown and veil. Then they awaited the arrival of Tolstoy’s best man to tell them that the bridegroom was at the church. The minutes passed and still no news. A terrifying thought flashed into Sonya’s mind, that he had actually run off. Finally, instead of the best man, Tolstoy’s faithful valet arrived with the agitated explanation that his master had no clean dress shirt. Everything had been packed and sent to the Bers house. A clean shirt was finally procured; and after another long wait, the news came that Tolstoy was at the church.

The bridal parly set out. Many people crowded the church, which was brightly illuminated for the wedding. The priest in his sacerdotal headgear and vestments of heavy silver cloth met Tolstoy and his bride at the door and led them to the pulpit. Sonya’s thin arms and shoulders emphasized her extreme youthfulness. Spectators whispered comments on it and on her weeping. Perhaps some said, as they did of Kitty in Anna Karenina: “What a darling the bride is, like a lamb decked for the slaughter.”The beautiful Russian Orthodox ceremony, enhanced by the lovely music of the invisible choir, lasted a long time. After the marriage the party drove back to the bride’s house, where guests were provided with a bountiful repast and much champagne.

The new dormeuse (sleeping carriage) that Tolstoy had bought for the occasion waited outside. He was impatient to he off for Yasnaya Polyana. The tearful farewells between Sonya and her family were painfully prolonged. Finally tearing herself away with difficulty from her sobbing mother, Sonya entered the carriage and they began their journey. Burying herself in a corner, the bride, worn-out from weariness and grief, did not cease to weep. Tolstoy was a bit hurt. An orphan for most of his life, he found it difficult to understand Sonya’s copious tears on parting from her parents. He wrote cryptically of that night in the diary: “She is weepy. In the carriage. She knows everything and it is simple. . . . But she’s afraid.”

On the evening of the next day they arrived at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy’s brother Sergei welcomed them with the traditional hospitality of bread and salt, and Auntie Tatyana with an icon of the Virgin. Bride and groom bowed, kissed the image and then Auntie Tatyana. Their long and eventful life together at Yasnaya Polyana had begun, and under the most auspicious circumstances. The next day Tolstoy jotted down in his diary: “Incredible happiness! . . . It cannot be that all this will end only with life!”

5

BACK in Moscow Tatyanchik the Imp impatiently awaited news from her married sister, and when the letter arrived it was filled with the self-satisfaction of a happy bride. There, were exclamations over the gracious reception accorded her by all and praise for the charming appointments of her new home. Sonya no doubt exaggerated for effect, for no special bridal furnishings had displaced the Spartan simplicity of the large bare rooms of Yasnaya Polyana.

As for her husband, she only discreetly hinted at the immensity of his love for her, as though it had already become a hallowed subject. But she added a sophisticated touch for the benefit of her younger sister: “I’m afraid to think about the future, for now one does not dream as a virgin, but directly knows one’s fate, only it is terrible to think of spoiling it. Being still a little girl, you do not understand this; when you are married, you will understand.” Then putting aside the mystery and the burden of marriage for a moment, she asked Tanya to send her the warm boots and face powder that she had forgotten.

Tolstoy tacked on a humorous posteript. “You sec,”he wrote to Tanya, “how all this is fine and touching, especially the thoughts about the future and the powder. . . . Farewell, darling, and may God give you such happiness as I now enjoy. More does not exist.”

A lyric ecstasy filled the letters and diaries of the happy couple during their honeymoon days. The new feelings that Tolstoy was experiencing defied his passion for analysis. He tried to take an inventory of the reasons for his sensations and reactions, but he succeeded only in reducing them to trifles that in turn added up to something beyond his immediate powers of comprehension.

In his diary he wrote: “I love her at night or in the morning when I awake and see: she looks at me and loves. And no one, especially not I, prevents her from loving me in her manner, as she understands it. I love her when she sits close to me and we know that we love each other, as only we are able to, and she says: ‘Lyovochka,’and then adds: ’Why are ehimnevs built so straight?' Or: ‘Why do horses live so long?’ etc. I love when we are alone, and I say: ‘What are we to do? Sonya, what are we to do?' She laughs. I love when she gets angry with me, and in the twinkling of an eye, her thoughts and words sometimes sharp, she says: ‘Let me be, you bore me.’ In a moment she smiles timidly at me. I love when she does not see me and does not know that I love her in my fashion. I love her when she is a little girl in a yellow dress and sticks out her lower jaw and tongue at me. I love when I see her head tilted backwards, her serious, frightened, childish, and passionate face.”

The honeymoon ardor ran its course rather soon, and the disillusioning period of adjustment set in. Hardly a week had passed after their arrival at Yasnaya Polyana when the first tiff look place. Others followed in alarming succession, for both husband and wife were extremely sensitive, and each seemed bent on creating more than the usual number of difficulties that complicate early married life.

Sonya was immensely flattered with her title of Countess and with being mistress of a large house. But even in these attractive circumstances, existence in the country soon became a trying matter. She was a city girl, only eighteen, accustomed to the theater, music, balls, and to merry parties of young folk. There was none of this at Yasnaya Polyana. Almost the only people she saw, besides the members of the household, wore provincial neighbors and the uncouth wayfarers her husband liked to bring home or the peasants he often took delight in talking to. Tolstoy tried to amuse her in the long autumn and early winter evenings. They read Les Misérables together, and he taught her English.

Although Sonya was eager to take an active part in her husband’s work in the country, she found it extremely difficult to adapt herself to this new way of life. Frequently she was left alone with no resources of her own to fall back on. Tolstoy would shut himself up in his study, or go hunting, or more often busy himself with the affairs of his estate. For at this time, perhaps because of the feeling that he would soon be a family man, he experienced anew a desire to expand and improve his propert. He began the cultivation of bees, bought a herd of sheep, planted numerous fruit trees, and planned to set up a distillery, to which Sonya and even her father objected as immoral. He plunged into these new enterprises with zeal, and Sonya tried to share his enthusiasm. She bravely declared her desire to work in the dairy, but the smell of the cowshed nauseated her. Tolstoy was annoyed by her city-bred squeamishness.

Over these first months of marriage after the honeymoon, the diaries of both husband and wife wore turned into frank confessions of their quarrels, reconciliations, and painful efforts to build their love on a foundation of mutual understanding and selfsacrifice. This fact is all the more surprising since, by agreement, each had free access to the other’s diary. There is a marked difference, however, in the uses to which they put their respective records. Tolstoy, as formerly, made his an impartial history of events and an inventory of his thoughts and feelings; Sonya, by her own admission, took to her diary when things went wrong, when she fell the need of seeking relief by pouring out her dissatisfactions and sorrow in its pages. The result is that her diary more frequently presents a dark, one-sided picture of her existence.

About two weeks after her marriage, Sonya expressed the gloomy conviction in her diary that Tolstoy did not believe in her love, and that she could not forget, as she ought to, her stupid, childish dreams of an ideal husband. Intellectually and emotionally jealous of Tolstoy’s capacity for selfsufficiency, she was too young and inexperienced to accept him as she found him. It was hard to surrender her storybook notion of married love for the commonplace reality of daily life on a country estate. Then, too, her penchant for seeking misery in her happiness, her fondness for sitting, like Stephen, melancholy upon a stool, complicated the simple adjustments that any young bride has to make.

Complaints about her inability to fill up the hours of the day ran like a lit any through the early pages of her diary. Rather bitterly she wrote: " It is not difficult to discover an occupation; there are many of them. But one must first develop a liking for these trifling matters — winding up the clock, banging on the piano, reading many stupid things and very few fine ones, and pickling cucumbers. All this will come about, I know, when I manage to forget my idle girlhood life and get accustomed to the country.”

6

TOLSTOY was fully aware of the trying period his young wife was going through, but he was not disposed to make many concessions. In his long bachelor existence he had fallen into ruts that were now not easy to climb out of. He had grown accustomed to being alone with his thoughts and work and could not, like a lovesick young swain, attach himself everlastingly to the skirts of his girl wife.

The disturbing doubts that tortured Tolstoy before his proposal returned more than once. “Today there was a scene,“ he wrote in his diary only a week after marriage. “I was sad at the thought that we behave just like others. I told her that she had offended me in my feeling for her; I wept. She’s charming. I love her even more. But is there not something false?” A few days later he listed two more disputes, but his love, he insisted, was stronger, though now different.

The ubiquitous ghosts and even the living images of women in her husband’s past haunted Sonya and were the cause of much of their quarreling. She struck a note of protest on the very first page of her diary after marriage, and she continued to strike it with morbid persistence. “All his past is so awful for me,” she wrote, “that it seems I shall never become reconciled to it.” A precious part of him — his golden youth with its eager passion — had been forever lost to her. Her reactions were natural enough for a girl of eighteen: her own purity had been polluted by the many women who had preceded her. And her imagination insistently conjured up these predecessors: “He kisses me, and I think: I’m not the first to attract him. . . . I also have been captivated, but only in my imagination, whereas he has been fascinated by women, real, pretty, with characters, faces, and souls of their own, which he loved and by which he was captivated, just as he is captivated by me, at least for the present.”

No doubt Sonya had in mind a particular woman — Tolstoy’s recent peasant love, Aksinya. By chance, less than three months after the marriage, Aksinya was ordered to wash the floors of the manor house, and she was pointed out to Sonya as “that woman.” The ardent lines devoted to Aksinya in Tolstoy’s diary had stuck in Sonya’s memory. That day she jotted down a few venomous ones of her own. “Sometimes I think I’ll put an end to myself from jealousy,” her diary reads. “‘I’m in love as never before! [A line in Tolstoy’s diary about his love for Aksinya.] A simple wench, fat, fair; it is horrible! With what satisfaction I just now looked at a dagger, a gun. One blow — easy. While there’s yet no child. [Apparently Aksinya was pregnant by Tolstoy at this time.] And she is right here, several steps away. I’m simply like an insane woman. I’m going for a drive. I can see her at this moment. How he loved her! If one could only burn his diary and all his past.”

Here was the stuff of tragedy and a theme worthy the creative powers of her husband. One can sympathize with the young wife’s fury, although she knew that her husband had severed all relations with Aksinya shortly before his marriage. If only she could kill him and create him anew, Sonya reflected, she would do it with pleasure.

Aksinya continued to stalk her thoughts. She saw her in a terrible dream that she described in her diary. The peasant women of the village appeared in the garden, all dressed up as ladies of fashion. “The last to enter was Aksinya in a black silk dress,” wrote Sonya. “I talked with her, and such a vicious feeling came over me, that I at once seized her child from somewhere and began to tear it into bits. In my fearful rage I ripped off feet, head — all. Lyovochka came; I told him that they would send me to Siberia. But he gathered up the legs, arms, all the parts, and said that it was nothing, only a doll. I looked, and in fact instead of a real body, there was only cottonwool and leather. And this vexed me.”

One need be neither a medieval necromancer nor a modern Freudian to read the proper interpretation into this horrific farrago from the world of dreams. However excusable was Sonya’s jealousy of Aksinya, there was little sense to her childish fears about other women at this time. She complained bitterly because her husband liked to play duets with Olga Islenev, her cousin, who visited them at Yasnava Polyana, and there were moments when even her younger sister Yanya fell under suspicion. Perhaps just because of her intense love, she was jealous of everyone and everything that surrounded him. Her diary clearly shows that she tended to be hostile to any interest of her husband that did not immediately serve their mutual affection. Even the inner world of creative fancy that he liked to retire to often caused her qualms, for she feared he would find there support and sustenance independent of her love.

7

FoR the first three months at Yasnava Polyana the Tolstoys rarely visited and had few callers. Late in December the couple packed themselves off to Moscow for the Christmas holidays. To her delighted sister Tanya, Sonya seemed pale and thin. She was already pregnant.

After the solitude of the country, the resumption of her former gay Moscow existence was not an unmixed blessing for Sonya. She had to visit and be visited by Tolstoy’s friends, often people she had never met before and of some of whom she stood in awe. It was a trial for the young bride. There were fashionable clothes and hats to buy, and a fastidious husband to please, for Tolstoy had very definite opinions about female attire, as he had about nearly everything. He came into the room suddenly when she was trying on a new hat, a modish creation, very high in front, covering the ears, and adorned with a chin strap.

“What!” he exclaimed in horror. “Is Sonya going to visit in this Babylonian tower!” She stuck to her choice. The visit was made. Sonya felt ill tit ease, timid, and got cross with him for not paying sufficient attention to her.

In the end Sonya preferred to let Tolstoy visit without her. She had become self-conscious about her pregnant condition. One evening he went off to call on the Sushkovs, and promised to return at twelve as usual. The irritated Sonya remained with her mother and Tanya and whiled away the evening with an account of her life at Yasnava Polyana. With the natural instinct of the happy bride, she garnished her narrative with glamour and gladness. But here and there a peevishness peeped through. “You know, Tanya,” she complained, “I sometimes get bored with being ‘grown-up’; the silence in the house vexes me, and I feel an irresistible need for jollity and action. I leap about, run and remember YOU when we used to cut up, and you used to say that I was ‘off my head.’ And then Auntie Tatyana laughs good-naturedly, and, looking at me, says: ’Be careful, softly, my dear Sonya; think of your baby.’”

The hours wore on with this chatter till midnight. But no Tolstoy. Sonya grew quiet, then angry, and was somewhat hysterical by the time one o’clock struck. She imagined all manner of accidents that might have happened, and was afraid that he might have met a former lover. With difficulty her mother restrained her from returning to her hotel alone. Soon after one, Tolstoy entered. Sonya, her nerves at the breaking point, burst into tears. In consternation he tried to comfort her, begged her pardon, and fell to kissing her hand.

Sonya was heartily glad to leave Moscow and return to Yasnava Polyana. By now the purging fire had badly singed, if not utterly destroyed, some of her fine-feathered notions of married life. There was nothing in the world dearer to her than Lyovochka, she told herself. Only to be alone with him in the country, away from his exacting Moscow friends — that would be heaven. She now saw no reason why she could not create happiness for herself at Yasanya Polyana. Thoughts of the coming child banished her former restlessness.

If quarrels were less frequent and love less strained, a worm of discontent did not cease to gnaw at Tolstoy over most of the period of his wife’s pregnancy, He was an active, passionate man, and the passivity, even frigidity, of Sonya, now accentuated by her condition, preyed upon his mind. Not unlike many young brides, she evinced fear and disgust for physical relations. About two weeks after marriage, she wrote in her diary: “All physical manifestations are so repugnant.” And this common difficulty, requiring sympathetic understanding and delicate adjustments, was apparently magnified by his inordinate demands.

The tension increased with the months of pregnancy, evoking a desperate protest from Sonya. “Lyova deserts me more and more,” she noted in her diary. “The role of the physical side of love plays a great part with him. And that is awful. For me, on the contrary, it means nothing.” At times she grew frantic at the thought that she would lose him. “I feel that I have become unendurable to him; now I have only one purpose — to leave him in peace, to take myself out of his life as much as possible. I can bring him no pleasure now because I’m pregnant.”

Tolstoy curiously connected this sexual coldness with Sonya’s pronounced inactivity and general lack of interest in everything that went on around her. He called her a doll, and in a letter to her sister Tanya he betrayed in a psychic manner his intense emotional dissatisfaction. The letter was a joint effort, indicating his intention that Sonya should read what he wrote. His part amounted to a short story, to which has actually been given the title, “The Tale of the Porcelain Doll.” Although on the surface it claimed to be nothing more than a joking performance, composed to amuse Tanya and her parents, it was executed with all his literary skill and concealed a profound meaning.

In a seriocomic vein he told how be fell asleep, and suddenly his wife entered the room. “I opened my eyes and I saw Sonya, not the Sonya whom we know, but a porcelain Sonya!”

Tolstoy ended the story by relating that the next day Sonya became her own live self, but that every time they were alone, she turned into porcelain. “She is not dismayed by this.” he concluded, “nor am I. To put il frankly, however strange it may be, I’m glad of this, and despite the fact that she is porcelain, we are very happy.” It is difficult to believe that Sonya missed the point of the slorv, but she nniveK added to this letter to Tanya : “ He has invented this that I am porcelain; such a rascal! But what does it mean — God knows.”

Whatever amusement was intended, — and the Bers family regarded the story only as a pleasantry, the letter unquestionably reflected a serious difficulty in the intimate relations between husband and wife. Yet it would be a mistake to construe his tale of the porcelain doll as evidence of a permanent lesion in their physical life together. Uneven as this was at the time, their life together was essentially a happy one. Only the day after his letter to Tanya, he noted in the diary: “I love her always more and more.”

8

As Sonya’s time approached, the couple were drawn still closer together in that mysterious community of feeling evoked by the unknowable future that they both awaited. “I, happy man, still live,” Tolstoy wrote his sister. “I listen to my child’s kicking in Sonya’s belly.” He planned the education of his unborn child, read medical books, and, as Sonya put it, “continually examines my abdomen” in an effort to determine exactly the eventful day. He would suddenly enter the room after reading an authority on obstetrics and abruptly announce to his wife: “He already has toenails,” to which Sonya would be on the point of replying: “Who?” before she recollected herself.

The eagerly expected first-born arrived on June 28, 1868, and was christened Sergei. One of the greatest scenes that Tolstoy ever wrote, the birth of Killy’s first child in Anna Karenina, was directly inspired by his emotional reaction to the birth of Sergei. Now close his art could be to reality may be observed by comparing this scene in the novel with the rather full record of his experience in his diary. “At the crucial time,” he wrote in this detailed account, “I was both agitated and quiet, occupied with trifles as before a battle or during a moment close to death. I was annoyed with myself that I felt so little.”He held Sonya during her labor pains, “and I felt how her body trembled, stiffened, and she grimaced; and I never before experienced the feeling that her body conveyed to me, not even before marriage.”He prepared for her the huge divan on which he himself had been born. “But in me,” he continued, “there was always the same feeling of indifference and of self-reproach for it, and of irritation.”

The birth of Sergei ended Tolstoy’s preparatory period for the enjoyment of family life. There were some immediately stormy scenes, for his mother-inlaw had descended on Yasnaya Polyana to be on hand for the arrival of her first grandchild. There were the usual sharp differences of opinion, which sometimes developed into three-cornered battles on the care of infants. Sonya’s mother and father took her side in the controversy that raged on the nursing of little Sergei. Because of Sonya’s illness, the physician ordered her not to nurse the child herself. Tolstoy had obstinate and unreasonable ideas on this score, perhaps long ago suggested to him by his reading of Rousseau, and he demanded that the young mother should lake complete charge of her infant. Although his son-in-law might be a master of language and literature. Dr. Bers angrily declared, he had no understanding of practical matters, and accordingly a wet nurse was engaged. But soon one could see the father frying to quiet the crying child by sticking a funnel in the infant’s mouth and pouring milk into it with his large, trembling hand.

These tempests in the teapot, however, quickly passed. Despite his firm intention to share equally in all the cares connected with the bringing-up of little Sergei, he soon manifested a father’s indifference to his child in the infant stage. The baby interested him only as an essential part of the world that he dwelt in with his beloved wife. And that world at last began to pay its premiums in family happiness. “Whoever is happy is right,”he observed, and if thinking could make it so, he was happy now with his wife, his child, and with that golden vision of an ideal family life illuminating the path before him.

9

TOLSTOY was fond of saying that writing was just like childbirth: until the fruit had ripened, it did not emerge, and when it did, it came with pain and labor. Yet he was as happy in producing novels as Sonya was in bringing forth children. In a creative ferment, six months after his marriage, he was impatient to rid his mind of all other concerns. In his letters and diary at the end of 1864 and the beginning of the next year, he threw off various hints that he was contemplating a new novel. And in a letter to Granny in the autumn of 1863, his intention for the first time was declared in more definite language: “I have never felt my mental and even all my moral faculties so free and so ready for work. And this work now exists. It is a novel covering the years from 1810 to 1820, which has entirely occupied me since autumn. . . . Now I am an author with all my soul. I write and meditate as never before.” He had at last embarked on the arduous creative path that led to War and Peace.

The gestation period of Tolstoy s great masterpiece was long and severe, and its birth was attended by much pain and labor. It is clear that his final design comprehended an extensive trilogy, of which War and Peace, centered in the year 1814, was to he the first novel: the other two, connected but complete works in themselves, were to deal with the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 and the return of an exiled Decembrist in 1856. Although the introductory chapters of the novel on 1856 exist, no manuscript drafts have come down to us concerning the theme of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Yet over the course of the next fifty years he never lost sight of his original desire to write a novel about the Decembrists. Once Tolstoy had settled upon the external limits of War and Peace, the second and most difficult stage began: working out the plan and composition of the novel. When he started to write, he by no means had clearly in mind the succeeding course of events that would fill his vast canvas. Nor did the finished product six years later embody the artistic purpose with which he began. For the earliest outlines place the emphasis upon “peace.”Historical events were intended to serve merely as a seaffolding or background for the development of a tale of family life among the gentry. The principal characters were to be subjected to a series of adversities that would undermine them spiritually, but in the end they would be regenerated and begin a quiet and happy life. The whole theme of “war" with its historical events and persons did not enter into the design of the novel until much later.

By September of 1863 Tolstoy was deep in War and Peace. The family circle and intimate friends buzzed with the news. Father Bers in Moscow enthusiastically acclaimed the project and sent his son-in-law batches of references to source material on Napoleon’s invasion. Even the studious Liza, who by now had forgiven if not entirely forgotten her unrequited love, loyally answered an urgent request for aid: “I have fulfilled your commission, dear friend Lyovochka; I have looked up the materials for your novel, and I’m sending you a list of books in which mention is made of the year 1812.”I here follows a long list carefully drawn up and meticulously annotated. At this point, the learned girl appears to have read much more on the subject than her brotherin-law. And from her detailed answers to his questions concerning these books, it is clear that at this stage Tolstoy was interested primarily in memoirs, letters, and human-interest stories. That is, he intended to place the emphasis upon the private lives of people rather than upon historical events.

At first this sudden, all-absorbing literary activity worried Tolstoy’s wife. Besides, at the moment she was foolishly annoyed with him for an impulsive desire he had manifested to go off to war (Russian troops were being sent to put down a Polish rebellion). “What do you think of the Polish business?” he interpolated in a letter to the poet Fet. “It looks bad! Shall we . . . not be obliged to take down our swords from their rusty nails?” Sonya took this passing fancy seriously. Angrily she scribbled in her diary: “Now he’s married, is pleased with himself, has a child, but he wants to throw it all over and go to war. . . . I don’t believe in this love for the fatherland, in this enthusiasm at the age of thirly-five.”

But her Lyovochka was really interested in another war, that of 1812, and he waged it on reams of paper, shut up in his study hours on end. “Where is he?” Sonya gloomily asked herself in the diary, and she answered: “The History of 1812. He used to tell me everything — now I’m unworthy. Formerly all his thoughts were mine. The minutes were happy, marvelous, now they are not.”

As soon as Tolstoy had finished a small section of the novel, written in his nearly illegible handwriting, Sonya was promptly drafted to make a clear copy, and there began the long years of close association in his literary work. She developed into an invaluable assistant. With some justice she might have complained of the use that he made of her in this work. The poet takes the best out of his life and puts it into his writings, Tolstoy once declared, which is the reason his writing is beautiful and his life bad. However conscious Sonya may have been of the truth of this observation, and although she grew jealous at times of his complete absorption, she never ceased to take an eager interest in his literary endeavors. She loved to copy War and Peace, she declared, and she copied a great deal of it as many as seven times. The consciousness of serving a genius and a great man gave her strength for anything, she wrote in her diary. As she copied the barely decipherable pages she felt uplifted, morally and spiritually. She was carried away into a world of poetry, and it seemed to her that it was not his novel that was so good but she who was so clever.

10

NOT all of Tolstoy’s material came out of books. His own life and the lives of many who made up his intimate world were drawn upon for War and Peace, as in the case of so many of his other works. Of particular importance at the moment was Tatyanchik the Imp. In the summer of 1863 she, her brother Alexander, her childhood sweetheart Kuzminski, and a certain Anatole, with whom she was carrying on a violent flirtation, were all invited to Yasnaya Polyana. The slim, supple, and graceful sixteen-year-old Tanya was original and attractive in appearance with her dark, slightly wavy hair, refined face, large mouth, and delicately tinted complexion. In her

spontaneous nature that expressed itself in irresistible mirth, quick sensibility, and passionateness, Tolstoy found the model for his heroine Natasha Rostov, and he now observed Tanya’s every movement.

The young people made Yasnaya Polyana ring from morn till night with their merrymaking. Tolstoy and his wife soon grew displeased with the sly, designing, handsome Anatole, and finally, offended by the impropriety of his conduct, they sent him packing. He reappeared again as the brilliant but calculating Anatole Kuragin in War and Peace.

Tanya was devoted to Tolstoy; he seemed like a father to her and was the one man, she said, who thoroughly understood her. When he looked at her with his penetrating eyes, she knew that she could keep no secrets from him. They were much together that autumn, oflen strolling through the paths of the ancient Zasek woods that seemed to Tanya more majestic and beautiful than ever at sunset. She rode with him on the hunt, and in the evening sang for hours to his accompaniment on the piano.

In October, the nobility of Tula gave a ball in honor of the young Tsarevitch, later Alexander III, who was visit ing the city. The Tolstoys were invited. Sonya wept because illness would not permit her to attend; Tanya was in ecstasies, for Tolstoy promised to take her. All the fears, joys, triumphs, and breathless experiences of Tanya on that memorable night reappear in the unforgettable description of Natasha’s first ball in War and Peace.

The next day Sonya pensively listened to her sister’s rapturous account of the dance.

“Do you know, Tanya,” she broke in, “I could not have gone even if I had been well.”

“Why?”

“Surely you know Lyovochka’s views. Could I dress in a ball gown with an open neck? This is entirely unthinkable. How often has he condemned married women who ‘go naked,’ as he expresses it.”

There was truth in this — Tolstoy was extremely severe in such matters. He was even capable of grotesque fits of jealousy over the harmless attention that young men paid to his wife. There was also a twinge of jealousy, however, in ‘Sonya’s reaction to Tanya’s gala evening with her husband. Tolstoy continued to study Lanya’s volatile nature, and he frequently engaged her in conversations about herself, while there gradually took shape in his imagination the charming image of Natasha Rostov.

Over the next six months there were periods when Tolstoy wrote little. Much of his time was spent in hunting, or on business trips to the estates of his brother and sister. Sonya disliked his being away from home. She grew melancholy, and the fear that he would suddenly die haunted her. Her letters were cheerless accounts of daily tasks and of worries over her son. His answers were chatty, amusing, and comforting. To the charge that he had forgotten her, he wrote: “Not for a moment, especially when I’m with people. On the hunt, however, I do forget; I remember only about a particular woodchuck. . . .” In another, announcing his return home, he wrote: “Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving, and by evening I’ll be feeling your watermelon and seeing your dear face.” (Sonya was again far gone in pregnancy and gave birth to a daughter, Tatyana, on October 4, 1864.)

One day Tolstoy set off on horseback to visit a neighbor. Two of his hunting dogs trailed after him. Suddenly a hare was sprung and the dogs were after it in a flash. He could not restrain himself. “Sic ’em!” he yelled, and galloped after the dogs. The horse, unused to the hunt, stumbled and fell, and Tolstoy also went down, breaking his right arm. He lay there in agony for some time before he could attract the attention of a passing peasant, and he had himself carried to a hut in the village rather than home, for he feared to frighten his pregnant wife. The arm was soon set by a Tula physician, but for weeks afterward he continued to suffer severe pain. Finally, deciding that it had been badly set and that an operation might be necessary, he went to Moscow towards the end of November.

Tolstoy remained at his mother-in-law’s home for a little more than three weeks. A painful operation was performed, and he eventually recovered full use of his arm. Before and after the operation, he crowded his days with activity, most of it in connection with work on War and Peace. He shopped in the bookstores for material, consulted authorities on history, and spent hours reading in the libraries. The amount of historical research that he did for the novel, however, has often been exaggerated. He made no attempt to exhaust such material, for he read only up to the point where it became clear to him what use he wished to make of his sources.

Liza and Tanya Bers served as eager amanuenses when Tolstoy was unable to write because of his injured arm. With a concentrated expression on his face, and supporting his bad arm with his hand, he dictated to Tanya while walking back and forth across the room. “No, it’s trite, won’t do,”he would talk to himself, forgetting her presence. In dictating. his tone was imperious, there was impatience in his voice, and often he changed his phrasing three or four times. Occasionally he dictated smoothly, quietly, as though he had it all by heart, and then the expression on his face became calm. The awed Tanya felt that she was doing something immodest, that she had become the involuntary witness of his inner world, a world concealed from all. The periods of quiet cold dictation he distrusted. Without agitation, he told his wife, the business of writing just did not get on.

11

TOLSTOY could not resist the desire to test a few of the initial chapters of his novel by reading them to friends. An evening was arranged by papa Bers at the Perfilyevs’. Guests gathered in the large, murky drawing room, illuminated by two oil lamps. To

the observant Tatyanchik the Imp, the preparations took on all the solemnity of a christening. The plump hostess in her tall cap spangled with ribbons, seated in the middle of a high-backed divan, looked like a Stuffed museum piece expecting a miracle to bring her to life.

Tolstoy began with some confusion, weakly, hesitantly. Tanya suffered for him. But he quickly gathered confidence, firmness, and soon his brilliant reading carried all with him. These guests, intimates of the Bers family, began to look furtively at each other as they recognized the living models of many of the characters he described. When Natasha was introduced, Varya Perfilyev broadly winked at the blushing Tanya. And Tanya was delighted to hear the description of her own doll, Mimi, and the true story of how she had asked Boris to kiss the doll and made him kiss her instead. This was not life transposed by art: it was life itself. And as all the guests crowded around to congratulate him at the conclusion of the performance, Varya Perfilyev excitedly cried out to her mother: —

“Why, Mama, Mary a Dmitrevna Akhrosimov is you; she resembles you exactly!”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, Varya,” replied the charmed hostess. “I’m not worth describing.”

Tolstoy smiled and said nothing, but papa Bers was in a seventh heaven over the success of his sonin-law.

Tanya regretted that Sonya was not present at this triumph. Hardly a day passed during Tolstoy’s brief absence, however, that letters or telegrams were not exchanged between husband and wife. As always, Sonya’s correspondence was largely a record of domestic trivia: her daily tasks, the diarrhea and smallpox of the children, and the various illnesses of cows, pigs, and sheep. She worried over his seeming lack of concern for little Sergei and Tanya, and she overwhelmed him with well-intentioned advice on how to take care of himself in Moscow. The temptations of the city troubled her imagination, and she confessed to being jealous of the women he might meet.

But throughout these letters her love and infinite concern for everything that made up his life shone forth brightly. She missed him terribly. “With you I feel myself an empress, without you I’m superfluous.” She pleaded for every last detail about the operation on his arm and about Ins work in Moscow. “Lord, how I should like to see you, talk and sit with you,” she wrote after he had been gone only five days. “You know me, you know how I love you and that I’m wretched without you.”

Sonva envied and perhaps was a little jealous of the privilege enjoyed by her sisters m Moscow of taking dictation on the novel. Tolstoy had left her some sections to copy, and she eagerly applied herself to this task at night, after the children were asleep and the house quiet. “How I like everything about Princess Marya! she excitedly wrote him. “You see her so clearly. Such a splendid, sympathetic character. I will always criticize you. Prince Andrei, in my opinion, is not yet entirely clear.”

Tolstoy wrote Soma how proud he was of her praise of the novel. Love, deep and tender, ran through nearly all of his letters to her during these few weeks in Moscow; and for her frequent moods of depression and anger over household worries or his absence, he had only words of understanding and sympatby. At the first opport unity he returned home, but only after he had handed over to his publisher the first thirty-eight chapters of War and Peace, a surrender that saddened him, he wrote Sonya, because he could no longer correct and improve them.

Life at Yasnaya Polyana now flowed smoothly along those well-grooved ruts prescribed by the petty obligalions and pleasant amenities of a happy family existence. The Tolstoys lived modestly, and the contented inertia that often lakes possession of congenial married people made them loath to leave their isolated estate. Sonya was rapidly and completely identifying herself with the sphere Kaiser Wilhelm allotted to women: Kirche,Küche,Kinder. The model housewife, she ordered the surroundings cleaned up, the paths fixed, and flowers planted.

Upon surveying the results, her husband remarked with a trace of annoyance: “I don’t understand why all this. We lived very well without if.”

But gentle Auntie Tatyana came to Sonya’s rescue. “My dear Léon,”she observed, “Sonya has done well in tidying up around the house; it is so much pleasanter now to promenade.” In fact, although he had a masculine weakness for old clothes and for preserving things as they always had been, he quickly took his wife’s hint, and all were surprised one day to discover him painting the benches in the garden and cleaning and trimming the paths. This was not merely part of the business of learning to be a husband; it was also devotion to Sonya.

12

THE happy family life that could so easily divorce Tolstoy from his youthful ideals had also created that disposition of soul so vital to the free functioning of his art. For the present the strggle between spiritual perfection and material well-being had ceased. When he was shut up in his study, no one dared to disturb him. He wrote with irritation, often with tears and pain, but always with the conviction, as his wife expressed if, that this greatest creation of his genius must be superb.

The road ahead was long and hard, but he took fresh courage at the thought that the first section of War and Peace would soon be published. With a feeling of elation he wrote to Fet in January, 1865: “Do you know what surprise I have in store for you? After a horse threw me to the ground and broke my arm, and just as I regained my senses, I said to myself that I am an author. And I really am an author, but an isolated, furtive author. In a few days the first half of Part I . . . will appear. Please, write me your opinion of it in detail. . . . What I have printed formerly, I now regard only as a trial of the pen and a kind of draft of an opus. What I now print . . . seems weak, as introductions must be. But what comes after — tremendous!”

No reader could have guessed from the first part of War and Peace the massive superstructure that would be raised on this rather slight foundation. Least of all could Tolstoy have guessed it at the beginning of 1865. Drafts of early plans called for a family novel with a historical background. There were no indications of the vast sweep, the concentration on war, and the elaborate philosophy of history in the final scheme. Tolstoy’s desire to transform his novel into a mighty epic of war was first suggested in a passage in his diary on March, 1865, in which he mentions the possibility of writing “a psychological novel of Alexander and Napoleon, and of all the baseness, phrases, madness, all the contradictions of these men and of the people surrounding them.”

Now new plans ran through all the cracks and zigzags of Tolstoy’s creative mind, but they still failed to crystallize into the intricate pattern of War and Peace. Several compelling factors, however, were inevitably directing his thoughts towards the ultimate design and execution of that work as a medium for the full expression of a philosophy of history. During the 1860’s in Russia the subject of philosophy of history was much discussed in intellectual circles. The two problems most frequently posed were the relation of individual freedom to historical necessity, and the factor of causality in history. By March, 1867, he had at last hit uupon the title War and Peace, and the future course of the novel was finally decided.

Despite fears, doubts, illness, and periods of deep despair, War and Peace moved irresistibly on. If Tolstoy had many low moments in the course of its composition, there were also joyous compensations after a day well spent in the successful handling of a difiicult scene. Then he would jauntily emerge from his study, happy, smiling, and declaring that he had just left a piece of his life in the inkwell. The sixth and last, part was published in December of 1869. It had taken him more than six years to write War and Peace.

Tolstoy was staying with the Bers family in Moscow at the time the first part of War and Peace appeared. On the morning of publication, before he got out of bed, he sent his young brother-in-law, a military student, for a copy of a newspaper in which he expected a review. The youth lagged, and Tolstoy impatiently shouted: “You wish to be a general of infantry? Yes? Well, I wish to be a general of literature! Run at once and bring me the paper!” Tolstoy was serious; he wanted to be a literary general, and War and Peace was intended to advance him to that rank. Further, the financial stake was considerable and now an important item in his mounting expenses. War and Peace caused a sensation. It quickly went into a second edition and was extolled in numerous reviews. The most thorough and discriminating criticism was contributed in a series of four articles by N. N. Strakhov, later a distinguished philosophical thinker and a close friend of Tolstoy. After reading this appraisal, Tolstoy, with the selfassurance of the genius who knows that he has scored, calmly remarked to his wife: “N. N. Strakhov has placed War and Peace on the pinnacle where it will remain in the opinion of society.”

Each of the more than five hundred active characters he placed on this vast stage of life has his own distinct personality and speaks his own language. Even the dogs, as Strakhov pointed out, are individualized. if many of these men and women were suggested by people he knew, and if he drew upon himself for those two central figures, Prince Andrei and Pierre, all were passed through the alembic of his art and transformed into creatures of his imagination. With some justice the radical critics could point out that he did not see the faults of the privileged classes and failed to portray the dark misery of the peasantry at that time, although he significantly recognized in the novel the historical mission of the masses.

In an interesting letter addressed but not sent to the author P. D. Boborykin, Tolstoy defended his avoidance of social problems. “The aims of art,”he wrote, “are incommensurable (as they say in mathematics) with social aims, i he aim ol an artist is not to resolve a question irrefutably, but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations, and these are inexhaustible. If I were told that I could write a novel in which I could indisputably establish as true my point of view on all social questions, I would not dedicate two hours to such a work; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years from now by those who are children today, and that they would weep and laugh over it and fall in love with the life in it, then I would dedicate all my existence and all my powers to it.”

However justifiable this conviction may be as an aesthetic aim, it is not a full explanation of Tolstoy’s deliberate avoidance of the real social problems that played so large a part in the historical period he attempted to re-create. The fact is that he wrote War and Peace in an atmosphere of love and family happiness. The prevailing spirit of the book is an ecstatic love of life in all its manifestations. Lulled to contentment by his own happiness, he evaded the suffering and grief of people in the historical past and tried to see in life, as his peasant character Karatayev did, only “a resplendent comeliness.”

13

TOLSTOY told Fet that the hours seemed dead after his prolonged effort on War and Peace. He read and wrote nothing and simply felt himself agreeable and stupid. Nerves had been stretched to the breaking point, and his physician warned him of the danger of a collapse. His creative imagination and intellect, however, could never lie fallow for long. Whole poems, novels, and philosophical theories, he wrote Granny, marched through his brain continually. Turgenev once remarked that the hounds of thought hunted Tolstoy’s head to exhaustion.

He had already plunged into a special study of philosophy before his masterpiece was fairly out of the way. Hegel’s works struck him as an “empty collection of phrases,” but in August, 1869, he wrote Fet: “Do you know what this summer has been for me? An endless ecstasy over Schopenhauer, and a series of mental pleasures such as I’ve never experienced before.”

Philosophy was an intellectual brew that Tolstoy always stirred the wrong way. He was hostile to systems of thought or to systems of any sort. He now pondered much and painfully over philosophical problems, and he talked endlessly, but the net result was always a headache. His speculations filled him with gloom and thoughts of death, whereas a faith was what he really hoped to find.

Drama quickly displaced Tolstoy’s zeal for philosophy. Over the winter of 1870 he read plays of Shakespeare, Alolière, Goethe, Pushkin, and Gogol, and he contemplated writing a comedy.

Sonya saw that he was not really serious about this new endeavor, and he actually confessed to her that after having wrestled with a subject of epic proportions, it was difficult and hardly worth while to concern himself with a drama. In fact, with another epic subject in mind, he now turned to explore the age of Peter the Great. The period excited him with its rich, thrilling activity and colorful figures. Jottings on this reading in his notebook for April, 1870, plainly indicate the preliminary massing of material for a historical novel on the time of Peter. An opening chapter was drafted, and in November he wrote Fet: “You cannot imagine how difficult is this preliminary labor of ploughing deeply the field that I intend to sow. I ponder and change my mind continually over what may happen in the lives of all the future people of this huge projected work, and I think of the million possible combinations which make the selection of one so hard.”

Less than a month later, however, Fet was bewildered to receive the following information from Tolstoy: “I got your letter a week ago but have not answered because from morn to night I’m learning Greek. I’m writing nothing, only learning; and . . . your skin — to be used as parchment for my Greek diploma — is in danger.” He then went on to relate that he could already read Xenophon at sight and Homer with a dictionary. “But how glad I am that God sent this folly upon me! In the first place I enjoy it, and secondly, I have become convinced that of all that human language has produced truly and simple beautiful, I knew nothing — like all the others who know but do not understand; and thirdly, because I have ceased to write, and never more will write wordy rubbish. I’m guilty of having done so, but by God I won’t do so any more!" And he finally expressed the conviction that “without a knowledge of Greek there is no education.”

The proposed novel on Peter the Great was quite submerged under this new enthusiasm. He applied himself to Greek with all that ardor and concentration that he gave to any subject or cause that excited his admiration and interest. Like an arrogant schoolboy, he boasted to friends that he read Plato and Homer in the original, and to Fel he wrote that he was living in Athens and at night spoke Greek in his sleep. Sonya listened to all the wearying details of his progress. Her principal worry was that his intense application would undermine his health.

In the early months of 1871 Tolstoy’s health did break down. Although his Greek studies were no doubt one cause, other factors contributed. There were organic disturbances — fever and rheumatic pains, but these were accompanied by insomnia, nervous exhaustion, and depressed spirits. The feverish and fruitless activities of Tolstoy after the completion of War and Peace were not so much a cause as a symptom of his physical and spiritual breakdown. For to pause meant always to examine himself, to concentrate upon his own fate and historical mission. Now, as in periods of inactivity in the past, he sought to escape from himself. These swift thrusts into philosophy, drama, and Greek studies were unconscious attempts to arrest his mind with some all-absorbing task. But his studies did not distract him from the intense self-analysis that nearly always brought him to the point of spiritual despair.

14

TOLSTOY’S low state at this time was aggravated by a serious quarrel with his wife. Sonya had already given birth to two more sons — Ilva and Leo. After this fourth child in less than seven years of married life, with perhaps justifiable querulousness she noted in her diary: “With every child I deny myself more of life and grow reconciled under the burden of cares, illness, and years.” Nevertheless, on February 12, 1871, a fifth child, Marya, arrived, and after this birth Sonya suffered an illness that almost proved fatal. The prospects of another pregnancy frightened her, and she made known her fears to her husband. With his strict views on marriage, such an attitude deeply offended him and brought about a temporary coldness in their relations that intensified his spiritual loneliness. His poor health became so alarming that he was advised to go to Samara for a kumys cure.

Tolstoy visited Samara again in the summer of 1872 to purchase some land. When he returned, hie found that a bull had fatally injured his herdsman. With officious zeal, the local examining magistrate, a young man, placed Tolstoy under technical arrest

— that is, he obtained a promise that Tolstoy would not leave his estate until the whole matter could be brought up at court.

These proceedings infuriated Tolstoy, and worry over the impending examination deprived him of any judicious perspective in this occurrence. With a feeling of outraged dignity, he wrote to Granny for sympathy and perhaps because he deliberately wished to wound the sensibilities of this aristocratic woman who always remained in his eyes a symbol of the governmental proprieties that he scorned.

The wrong done him was infamous he protested. “It is intolerable to live in Russia — intolerable for a man like me, a man with a gray beard, six children, with the consciousness of a useful, industrious life, with my firm conviction that the fault cannot be with me, with the contempt I cannot help feeling for these newfangeled tribunals as I know them, and with my sole wish to be left alone, just as I let the entire universe alone; it is intolerable, I say, to live in dread of some silly youngster, displeased with my nose, who is able to make me sit down in the prisoner’s dock and send me to jail afterwards.” He had decided, he told Granny, to go to England, where everybody’s freedom and dignity were assured. Sonya agreed, and the children would benefit. He would sell all his property and find a good healthy place on the English coast.

Tolstoy’s frequently expressed dislike for Europe and his contempt for the kind of educational value that children obtained from association with aristocratic families were momentarily forgotten in the rage that prompted this letter. On the other hand, whenever his life, as now, had come in contact with the arbitrariness of the law or abuses of society, the instinct to revolt always flared forth. Nothing could be more consistent than his growing intolerance for all manifestations of man-made civilization. It was the anarchy of extreme individualism.

The incident passed off harmlessly enough, for the authorities soon wrote to excuse their precipitate action, and Granny also to twit him for his unreasonable attitude. His feeling of resentment, however, did not die easily, and he felt obliged to answer Granny that in a matter of this sort he would always adhere to his expressed opinion that it was best for a man who esteemed himself “to turn from this dreadful sea of obtrusive triviality, of disgusting idleness, this lie, lie, lie that from all sides floods the tiny island of honest and industrious life that I have built up for myself. Away to England, for there only is personal freedom protected from every kind of outrage, and there alone is it possible to lead a tranquil and independent life!” This incident added fuel to a flame that was soon to become a bonfire and consume the last ties binding him to man’s social order.

England as the domicile of the future exponent of civil disobedience had something of the ludicrous about it. Only in Russia could Tolstoy be moderately contented, or perhaps it would be better to say, only on that plot of land with which he had so completely identified himself — Yasnaya Polyana. However uncertain his spiritual happiness may have been at this time, in the bosom of his blooming family he still thoroughly enjoyed life, despite frequent tribulations.

In March, 1872, Tolstoy wrote in a jocular vein to Granny and compared himself to an old, gray-haired, toothless creature. “My life,” he added, “is the same as ever, and I could not wish it better. There are a few great intellectual joys — as few as I have it in my power to experience — and a fat fund of silly joys, for instance: to teach reading to peasant children, to break in a colt, to admire the large room that has just been built on the house, to calculate the income from a newly purchased estate, to translate a fable of Aesop well, to work at a symphony with my niece, playing four hands, to have fine calves, all of them heifers, and so on. The great joys — that means an extremely happy family, all the children lively, healthy, and, I‘m almost convinced, clever and unspoiled, and then work.”

There was nothing more to add to the silly joys and great joys of Tolstoy’s self-contained existence at this time. Happy people, he remarked, had no history, and at Yasnaya Polyana they were all happy. In September, 1873, he mentions the eleventh anniversary of his marriage in a letter to Fet, and finds nothing to comment on, save that his children are learning, that his wife assists in teaching them, and that he is sitting for his portrait by Kramskoi, the distinguished Russian artist.

The children — a sixth, Petya, had been born on June 13, 1872 — had each finally won an individual place in the affection of their father. Their sprouting natures fascinated him and he swiftly gained their confidence, not as a father, but as a big brother who knew all the secrets of their little hearts.

Petya, when seventeen months old, died from a sudden illness. It was the first death in the family. Tolstoy drew comfort from the fact that if one of the eight members of the family had to go, it was better that it should be the youngest. Sonya grieved deeply over the loss of her child, and her husband sympathized with this sorrow of a mother’s heart, that wonderful and highest manifestation of divinity on earth, as he declared.

15

SORROWS at Yasnaya Polyana, however, were few during these halcyon days. Informality prevailed in the household, although a few aristocratic traditions clung to the daily routine like fine old lace on a modish wedding gown. An editor from Moscow arrived on business. Presently a door in the rear opened and a man, a bit above middle height, appeared. He had sandy hair and a full beard, and wore common boots and a worker’s dark-gray blouse pulled together by a leather belt. The editor took him for a servant and asked for the Count. The “servant” enjoyed the mistake and risked a rebuke for his impertinence before announcing that he was Count Tolstoy. At once he changed into the gracious host. Those deep blue eyes under the bushy brows lit up with curiosity. There was something electric about this personality, and it shocked a visitor into an immediate awareness that he was in contact with the great.

A devotion to work was one of the rules of Tolstoy’s life. All the family assembled at breakfast, and the master’s jokes and quips rendered the conversation more gay and lively. Finally, he would get up with the words, “It’s time to work now,” and he would disappear into his study, often carrying off a glass of strong tea with him. No one dared disturb him.

When he emerged in the early afternoon, it was to take his exercise, usually a walk or a ride. At five he returned for dinner, ate voraciously, and when he had satisfied his hunger he would amuse all present by vivid accounts of any experience he had had on his walk. After dinner he retired to his study to read, and at eight he would join the family and any visitors in the living room for tea. Often there was music, reading aloud, or games with the children.

The children came in for a good deal of attention from both their parents. As one might expect, the democratic educational principles that Tolstoy formulated for peasant youngsters were in good part abandoned in the case of his own children, out of deference to the prevailing views of the social circle in which later they would have to move. When the children were old enough, they were placed under the care of foreign governesses and tutors from whom they learned English, French, and German. But the parents kept a strict watch over them. Sonya taught them reading, writing, and music, and Tolstoy taught them arithmetic. The children were not allowed to study only the subjects they were interested in, as had been the case in Tolstoy’s peasant school, but they were not punished for failure in their lessons and were rewarded when they did well.

For the children, their father was the greatest man in the world and they loved to be in his company. He divined their inmost, thoughts, and there was nothing they could conceal from him. In their games he was one of them, and they eagerly vied with him in gymnastics, skating, swimming, and riding. Frequently they accompanied him on long walks through the woods, when he tried to impress upon them the beauties of nature that he understood and appreciated so well.

With an unusual sense of childish fun, he invented games or banished their tears or sulks with some spontaneous outburst of tomfoolery. When all the children would be sitting quietly in the living room after the departure of some dull visitor, he would suddenly jump up from his chair, raise one hand, and run around the table at a hopping gallop. All the children flew after him, hopping and waving their hands in imitation. After several gallops around the table, they would fall panting in their chairs, the flat atmosphere having been cleared and gay spirits recovered. He called this restorer of happy spirits his “Numidian Cavalry.”

On holidays the house was turned over to the children. At Christmas, for example, all was a beehive of activity as the grownups arranged various amusements for the youngsters. Tolstoy always took a leading part in these festivities. The children were gathered around the tree one holiday, fingering their presents. Suddenly an old man appeared leading a bear on a rope. The children screamed with delight. At their demand the bear growled, crawled, danced, and lay down on one side and turned slowly over. Only when the children noticed the absence of their father, who had been there a moment before, did they discover that he was the bear — in a fur coat turned inside out.

16

SHOHTLY alter the completion of War and Peace, the hounds that indefatigably coursed Tolstoy’s brain had turned up a fine quarry, but the game had escaped because of various false seents. For in February, 1870, Tolstoy had mentioned to Sonya a new theme for a novel; it would concern a married woman in high society who had lapsed morally. His problem, he said, was to represent this woman as not guilty but merely pitiful.

Tolstoy had actually hit upon the theme of his next great, novel — Anna Karenina — but various occupations at that time had crowded the project out of his mind. Three years later, impelled by a curious circumstance, he suddenly returned to the theme. One day his son Sergei had been reading to his old aunt from Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin. The book was left lying around. Tolstoy picked it up, thumbed through it, read bits to Sonya, and was delighted with the narrative skill. The opening sentence of a fragmentary tale in the collection caught his eye: “The guests arrived at the country house.”

“How charming that is!” he exclaimed. “That’s the way for us to write. Pushkin enters directly into the matter. Another would begin to describe the guests, the rooms, but he jumps into the action at once.” That very night, under the inspiration of his reading Pushkin, he began Anna Karenina. Sonya noted in her diary that he started the novel on the nineteenth or twentieth of March, 1873.

As usual the family circle hummed with excitement over the beginning of a new work of fiction, and his letters at this time testify to his own enthusiasm. My March, 1874, Tolstoy had the first part of his novel ready for printing, but four months later he wrote to a friend that Anna Karenina was “repulsive and disgusting" to him. In truth, he had already put the novel aside, for once again the restless urge to be doing something that seemed really worth while had run afoul of his creative spirit. What that something was he explained in a letter to Granny: “I find myself in my summer disposition of soul, i.e. not occupied with poesy, and I have given over printing my novel; I’m so displeased with it that I wish to abandon it; I now occupy myself with practical matters, and precisely with pedagogy. . . .”

During the next three years, Tolstoy, as in the period before his marriage, attempted to convince the skeptical teaching profession that their methods of instructing children were wrong. This time, however, he achieved more success. An article that he published, “On National Education,” won wide attention. In it he boldly attacked the popular visual and phonetic methods and sharply criticized native teachers for failing to understand the educational needs of the Russian masses. The new primers he now published were recommended by the Ministry of Education and sold in tens of thousands of copies. And as a member of the County Educational Committee. he tirelessly visited the schools of the district in an effort to improve the instruction. In the end, however, the failure of a teachers’ training seminary that he set up at Yasnaya Polyana, his “university in bast shoes” as he called it, discouraged him and ended his efforts to change formal education in Russia.

No doubt Sonya fell relieved at the demise of her husband’s pedagogical passion. Now he could finish Anna Karenina. In December of 1874 he had sold the serial rights to Katkov for the magnificent sum of 20,000 rubles, and a little more than three parts had appeared in 1875 in the early numbers of the Russian Messenger. Then work on the novel was interrupted until the next year. Fet egged him on, and Strakhov wrote him of the ecstatic praise going the rounds of Petersburg over the early parts. Family worries, periodic feelings of repugnance for the novel, and a trip to Samara — at the end of which he gloomily wrote Fet that he had not soiled his hand with ink or his heart with thoughts — were excuses for his failure to keep at Anna Karenina.

Several more parts were published in 1876, but only under considerable stress and with such a conviction that the writing was poor that he begged Strakhov not to praise his efforts. Two laudatory reviews that Strakhov sent he burned without reading. As he reached the end, however, he took new courage and expended greater effort. The final parts appeared in 1877 in the first four issues of the Russian Messenger. But the eighth and last part Katkov refused to publish because Tolstoy would not change unpatriotic allusions to Russian volunteers who were at that time aiding the Serbs against the Turks, Accordingly, Tolstoy published this last part separately. The whole novel, considerably corrected with Strakhov’s aid, appeared in book form the following year.

Tolstoy had built the story of this novel, as that of War and Peace, out of the stuff of life, and its greatness rests on those qualities that he thought most important in art — simplicity, goodness, and truth. After eight years of respectable married life with a cold and pompous husband, the warmhearted and attractive Anna falls in love with Vronski, a passion that is sincerely returned. Her husband, conventional society, and her own moral nature are sacrificed to this consuming love which becomes the only thing left in life for Anna. In her frantic efforts to protect and sustain her love, she becomes egotistic and possessive, and jealousy eventually transforms into hate the love for which she had given up everything. There is only one escape, and Anna’s suicide in the end fulfills the epigraph of the novel: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.”

Parallel with the story of Anna and Vronski runs the account of the love of Kitty and Levin. Tolstoy drew heavily upon himself for the character of Levin, and Levin’s brother Nikolai is modeled on Tolstoy’s dead brother, Dmitri. Indeed, the whole story of Levin and Kitty — their courtship, marriage, and family existence — is in many respects the story of Tolstoy and his wife. Scenes from his own life are transformed by art into the magnificent drama of fiction — the birth of Levin’s first child, the death of his brother, the unsurpassable mowing scene; and even the tragic suicide of Anna under the wheels of the train was suggested by the similar fate of the jealous mistress of one of Tolstoy’s neighbors.

If Anna Karenina has nothing of the epic sweep of War and Peace, it gains artistically by virtue of its compactness and inner unity. As art it is perfection, Dostoyevsky remarked, and he felt that there was nothing in European literature that could be compared with it. Tolstoy had never probed more deeply the mystery of human fate or presented more arrestingly the dependence of human happiness on the immutable laws of nature. Anna defied these laws, and nature, which neither forgets nor pardons, quietly and dispassionately exacted retribution.

With the appearance of Anna Karenina the reputation of Tolstoy as Russia’s greatest novelist was secure. Almost without exception, the enthusiastic reviews accorded him the leading position. Even abroad, Turgenev, in a foreword to a French translation of the Two Hussars, generously declared Tolstoy’s pre-eminence. From Petersburg, Strakhov maintained a running commentary in his letters to Tolstoy on the reaction of the reading public as the parts of the novel appeared. People were in ecstasies; they wept over the unforgettable and pathetic scenes of little Seryozha, and haunted the bookshops for fear of losing out on the next installment. Nearly everyone recognized, as Henry James did some twenty years later in America, that Tolstoy’s fiction represented perfection in the art of depicting life.

17

MEANWHILE, death stalked the premises at Yasnaya Polyana throughout the period in which Anna Karenina was written. In June, 1874, Auntie Tatyana, almost eighty years of age, died. Although it was expected, Tolstoy could not fail to be deeply affected by the passing of this foster mother of his childhood, the constant solace and confidante of his youth and manhood, the woman who had taught him “the spiritual happiness of love.”

The next year, on February 21, Tolstoy’s tenmonths-old son, Nikolai, died from a sudden illness. He had been born only five months after the death of little Petya, and was so like him that the parents involuntarily called him “Petya.” Both Tolstoy and his wife were grief-stricken. Sonya was soon pregnant again, however, and at the end of 1875, falling desperately ill, she gave premature birth to a daughter who lived less than two hours. Very shortly after this, at the end of December, Tolstoy’s ancient aunt, Pelageya, who had recently come to live with the family, also died. For some mysterious reason the loss of this last link with his mother and father, his protectress during his Kazan student days, profoundly affected and haunted him for some time. It is little wonder that he wrote to Fet: “Fear, horror, death, the children’s jollity, food, vanity, doctors, falseness, death, horror. It was all terribly oppressive.”

Death, however, could not absorb for long the interests of a family in which births had become so frequent: a ninth child, Antlrei, was born to the Tolstoys on December 6, 1877. With this brood Sonya’s tasks were endless. She made their clothes, tended them in all their illnesses, played games with them; and despite the employment of various governesses and tutors, she also gave lessons to the children. And at night, if guests were not present, she made neat copies of her husband’s untidy manuscripts. To her sister Tanya she wrote: “I teach, and nurse like a machine from morn to night, from night to morn.”

Tolstoy felt keenly his duty towards the children, particularly in the matter of their education. When they were old enough, he taught them Latin and Greek. After explaining the alphabet, he would set them to reading Xenophon at once, completely ignoring the grammar. Ilya, the second son, surprised all the masters at his school examination by his ability to translate the classics at sight with comparative ease, although he knew no grammar. At night Tolstoy would sometimes read to them romantic fiction, such as the tales of Jules Verne, and on one occasion they were all delighted with the illustrations he drew for one of these stories.

As Tolstoy’s creative work demanded more and more of his time, he easily fell into the habit of letting Sonya assume most of the responsibility for their growing family of children. The tense moments when his overcharged sensitivities reacted violently to childish misbehavior grew more frequent. The “nasty face” of little Ilya, he wrote his wife, on one of the rare occasions when she was away from home, literally tortured him all day. When he finally overcame his indecision and talked to the child, he wept with his son.

He had praised all his children to Granny, but in a letter four months later he wrote wearily: “I have fell so much and thought so much about them, and made such efforts — and to what end? In order that at best they may grow up neither too bad nor too stupid. It’s a strangely ordained world, and, as my friend Fet says, the longer I live in it, the less I understand.” He was beginning to realize the truth of the Russian proverb: “Few children, few cares; more children, more cares.”

Tolstoy absented himself from Yasnaya Polyana with more and more reluctance. Trips to Moscow on the business of publishing Anna Karenina were unavoidable, but he never remained in the city any longer than necessary. Now, not even Moscow’s cultural attractions could detain him. In December, 1876, however, he felt a hurried business visit to the city well rewarded, for he made the acquaintance of the great composer Tschaikovsky. From his youth, Tschaikovsky had been an enthusiastic admirer of Tolstoy’s works, which he felt had been written by an author with a superhuman power for probing the human heart.

After their first meeting Tschaikovsky wrote a friend that he had been completely enchanted by Tolstoy’s ideal personality. Tschaikovsky induced N. G. Rubinstein, then Director of the Moscow Conservatory, to give a musical evening solely for Tolstoy’s benefit. When Tschaikovsky’s “Andante in D Major” was played, Tolstoy burst into tears, not an unusual occurrence when he was deeply affected by music. Tschaikovsky admitted that his vanity as a composer had never been so flattered. After Tolstoy returned home, he wrote Tschaikovsky that his literary efforts had never been so wonderfully rewarded as on that musical evening, and he sent him a collection of folk songs taken down in the Yasnaya Polyana district, in the hope that Tschaikovsky would make use of them, he remarked, “in a Mozart-Haydn style and not in the Beethoven-Schumann-Berlioz artificial manner!” But Tschaikovsky did not think much of the songs.

It is rather strange that this acquaintance, begun with such ardor and lofty mutual regard on both sides, should have quickly cooled. Later evidence indicates that Tschaikovsky rather resented that Tolstoy, this searcher of souls in his novels, was in real life a simple fellow who had no interest in probing his soul and merely wanted to chat with him about music.

18

DURING the period in which Anna Karenina was written. Sonya enjoyed and had earned the right to bask in the reflected glory of her husband’s genius, but like any practical-minded woman, there were times when she would have willingly exchanged the reflected glory for some commonplace fun. She was still an attractive young woman, and the long winters at remote Yasnaya Polyana provided her with no stage on which to shine. The summer with its visitors and festivities was always an eagerly anticipated season in a year of isolation, but now Tolstoy, exhibiting a moodiness strange for him, wrote to Fet that these visitors bored him.

Sonya confided her rebellion largely to the pages of her diary. ”I hale those people,” she wrote, “who tell me that I’m beautiful; I never thought this, and now it is already too late. And what good would beauty do me, what do I need it for? . . . Lyovochka would grow accustomed to the most hideous face, if only his wife were quiet, worshipful, and lived the kind of life that he had selected for her.” And in another passage she complained gloomily: “This excessively isolated country existence has finally become insupportable to me. A sad apathy, an indifference to everything; today, tomorrow, the months, the years are all the same to me,”At this charming time of their life together, why, she suspiciously asked, did he so willingly leave her for a trip to Samara? She used the excuse of collecting material for his biography to pore over his old diaries, and once again, after almost fifteen years of married life, these records of his old sins of the flesh filled her with brooding jealousy. In her diary, passages of fiercely expressed hatred for herself and her daily existence alternated with such pathetic declarations as “I’m much concerned with my own external appearance, and I begin to dream about another life than that which I am now leading. That is, I want to read much, to be educated, to be intellectual. I want to be beautiful, to think about clothes, and stupid things.”

No doubt a series of illnesses contributed greatly to Sonya’s frayed disposition at this time and kept her husband in a state of constant worry. “What situation can be more terrible for a healthy husband than the illness of a wife,” he wrote to a friend in the spring of 1876. He thought of taking her abroad, but instead he sent her for treatment to a distinguished Petersburg physician in January, 1877. And with deep concern he hastened off a letter to Granny in that city, asking her to watch out for his wife and give him an absolutely faithful report of her health. It was the first meeting between these two — the wife and the woman of whom Sonya could never dispel a twinge of jealousy because of the part, however innocent, that she had played in her husband’s past.

Granny, as might be expected from this aristocratic lady of exquisite breeding, wrote Tolstoy a warm letter concerning his wife’s charms. Sonya was more restrained in her reaction to Granny. The comforting report of the doctor was that he had never seen lungs so sound and strong (they had feared consumption). He found nothing organically wrong and attributed most of her illness to nerves. His concluding advice to husband and wife was that they should live in a normal and philosophic manner.

Tolstoy and his wife, however, had reached a point where life together in a normal and philosophic manner had become quite impossible. Something had quietly and unobtrusively dropped out of the happy harmony of their married existence. It had been caught in the ebb and flow of the ceaseless conflict in his soul, in the throb and stress of a gigantic disharmony. Outwardly, all remained as before, but a mutual dissatisfaction was felt. Nor could Tolstoy interest himself so wholeheartedly in family matters as formerly, and Sonya observed this defection.

Tolstoy’s mind was now full of thoughts on life and death. He had once again returned to the path that he had stumbled along and had been repeatedly diverted from all his life. He was never again to leave it. The questions that had intermittently worried him for years must now be answered. The spiritual crisis had been reached. His confused and persistent spiritual quest made for coldness and disharmony in the family. Poor Sonya did not understand this soulsickness; it depressed her and evoked protest. And she would continue to protest for the next thirty years.

19

ALL his life Tolstoy had been searching for God, often in wavs that evaded his own consciousness. Instead of sinning his way to God, like Dostoyevsky, he had to reason his way to Him. What was about to take place in his spiritual life did not represent a change or a break with the past, but rather an intensification of a development that had been proceeding slowly ever since his youth.

Marriage, with its hope of family happiness, had saved Tolstoy from a period of deep despair that had seemed crucial. What he did not realize, however, was that his fifteen happy years of marriage were a transition period — they had not cured his despair, but had merely diverted it. Shortly after marriage the same gnawing self-examination began again, quietly at first, but with a constantly rising tempo. This was a disease family happiness could no longer cure. Indeed, as the ideal existence he liked to consider it, his family happiness had ended forever. His sense of futility grew like a malignant cancer and slowly began to paralyze all his activities. He experienced moments of perplexity when life seemed to stand still, and he felt dejected, for he did not know what to do or how to live. These moments of perplexity passed, but they returned more and more frequently, and they were always expressed by the questions: “What is it for? What does it all lead to?”

At first, Tolstoy thought these were rather stupid and childishly simple questions to which everyone knew the answers. But when he tried to solve them, he became convinced that they were the most important and deepest of life’s questions. Now he had to know why he did anything — why he built up his estate, bettered the lot of his peasants, educated his children, or wrote novels. He found no satisfactory answer. Life came to a standstill; it had become meaningless. His love of family happiness and of art had ceased to be sweet to him. Death waited; all else was false.

The question that brought Tolstoy to the verge of suicide at the age of fifty was, as he expressed it himself, the simplest of questions lying in the soul of every man: Why should I live, why wish for anything or do anything? In short, has life any meaning that the inevitable death awaiting one does not destroy? And to free himself of this dilemma, he experienced an almost irresistible urge to commit suicide. So strong was this inclination to self-destruction that he had to be wily with himself. He took a cord out of his room lest he be tempted to hang himself from the crossbeam, and he avoided hunting, for fear that he would shoot himself. One cannot doubt the reality of the forces that almost brought him to take his life, but his inquiring mind first imposed upon him the necessity of searching every possible source for a solution to this question. And his Confession, which he probably drafted in 1879, contains the remarkable record of this extensive inquiry.

The exact sciences, Tolstoy found, did not deal with the question at all; whereas the speculative sciences, culminating in metaphysics, dealt with it but supplied no satisfactory answer. He could get no answer from the materialists. The answers of all the pure philosophers and great thinkers he consulted may be summed up in the words of Socrates: “The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing and we should desire it.”

In his search Tolstoy next turned to an inquiry into the lives of the men of his own class, and he decided that they met the problem that beset him in one of four ways. The first way was that of ignorance; some people, mostly women or the very young or dull, did not understand this question to which he could not close his eyes. The second way was that of the Epicureans, the majority of the men of his circle, who, because of their leisure, comfort, and all the favorable but accidental circumstances of their position, would not think of the inevitability of sickness, age, and death, which would destroy all their pleasures.

The third way out, Tolstoy saw, was that of strength and energy, an escape that he wished to adopt himself, for it was suitable only for a few exceptional people who understood that life was an evil and must be destroyed. The last way out was that of the weak people, who saw the truth of the situation and yet clung to life as though they still hoped to obtain something from it. And sadly he realized that he belonged to this category.

The fact that he could reach such conclusions and not act upon them puzzled Tolstoy. If he really believed that life was a stupid joke, then why not get rid of it? Other people were contented and liked what they were doing, so why bother them with this conviction that life was repulsive and dull? His very failure to act convinced him that something was radically wrong with his reasoning and he turned his thoughts in a new direction.

But Tolstoy did not live by reason alone. The quality of sheer feeling, so prevalent in his artistic productions, constantly warred against his rational convictions and tormented him to the point of physical suffering. Reason might prove to him, as it had to many others, that life was a long disease of which sleep was the only alleviation and death the only cure, but a feeling deep within him told him that there was something more, some answer beyond the power of reason to divine.

He had found no answer to his doubts either in knowledge or in the personal solutions of the social class to which he belonged. Something now obliged him to turn for light to the peasantry. In his Confession he related that suddenly he instinctively felt that if he wished to live and to understand the meaning of life, he must seek this meaning not among those who had lost it — his own social class — but among those millions who knew it and who supported the burden of their own existence. Upon examination he saw that the peasantry had a knowledge of the meaning of life, and that that knowledge was their faith in God. This simple faith of the peasant, however, his reason at first rejected.

Tolstoy’s dilemma was more terrible than ever. He could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life, and in faith he could find nothing but a denial of reason. Yet he quickly realized that it was a mistake to expect finite things to supply a meaning to life, for the finite has no ultimate meaning apart from the infinite. The two must be linked together before an answer to life’s problems could be reached. And heat last began to see that however unreasonable might be the replies given by faith in God, they had an advantage in that they introduced a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which no reply was possible.

He saw at this time that religion gave meaning to life, but the Church itself was an insult to his reason. Only faith, however, could make life possible for him, for if a man lived, he must believe in something. His problem now was to reconcile faith and the Church that preached it, for he was willing to accept any faith if only it did not demand of him a direct denial of reason.

Tolstoy next began a detailed investigation of religions — Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and especially Christianity. He studied them in books, and lie eagerlv sought information from learned people, theologians, and monks. Even the popular “New Christians” of that time, the Evangelicals, who professed salvation by faith in the Redemption, he sympathetically considered. Tolstoy knew followers of Lord Radstock, the ardent and persuasive English Evangelical preacher, who traveled in Russia. One of them, Count A. P. Bobrinski, Minister of Ways of Communication, visited him in February, 1876, and he wrote to Granny of this prominent Radstockite: “No one ever spoke better to me about faith than Bobrinski. He is irrefutable because he does not offer evidence, he simply believes, and you feel that he is happier than those who do not have his faith, and you chiefly feel that it is impossible to acquire this happiness from faith by the power of reason; one must obtain it by a miracle. And this I desire.”

But Tolstoy’s searching intellect and instinctive hatred of insincerity quickly led him to condemn the Evangelicals, who hoped to make him their spokesman in Russia. He required a faith much more intelligible than the scheme of Redemption by the blood of Jesus. God pouring down grace on aristocratic members of the English Club and well-fed Stockholders seemed to him a silly and immoral conception. The faith he sought had to face the facts of life, and he imagined that it could be won only through work and suffering. In a later letter to Granny he wrote: “It is strange and awful to say, but I believe in nothing that is taught by religion. And what is more, I not only hate and despise atheism, but I can see no possibility of living, and still less of dying, without faith.”

Throughout 1876 and part of the next year Tolstoy’s letters to close friends revealed his attempts, now in passionate outbursts, now in closely reasoned speculation, to reconcile the God of revealed religion with his reason and his demand fora faith that made life worth living. To the ordinarily sympathetic Granny, this complex, tortured searching seemed futile. Why did he not accept the salvation offered him In the Russian Orthodox Church? And she attributed his persistent ratiocination on this theme to false shame.

The charge angered him. “The religious problem for me,” he replied, “is exactly like the problem of a shipwrecked man: he looks out for something to seize in order to save himself from the imminent danger that he feels with all his being. And now for two years religion has held out to me this possibility of salvation; therefore false shame is utterly out of the question, The fact is that every time I seize this plank of salvation, I am drowned with it: I seem somehow able to float along if I do not catch hold of the plank.”

20

TOLSTOY’S prolonged and profound spiritual stuggle seemed to effect a transformation in his whole character. Sonya noted in her chary how the religious spirit in him grew stronger every day; and she wrote to her sister Tanya that his eyes were often lixed and strange; that he hardly talked at all and had quite ceased to belong to this world. His health suffered under the strain and his ebullient nature grew meek and humble. The very thought that he had a single enemy in the world became painful to him. In this temper of mind he remembered his longstanding feud with Turgenev and promptly sent him a letter to Paris, in which he recalled their old friendship and his initial literary indebtedness to him, and concluded: “Sincerely, if you can forgive me, I offer you all the friendship of which I am capable. At our time of life there is only one good — loving relations with people, and I shall be very happy if they exist between us.”

Turgenev was touched and joyfully accepted the offer of reconciliation, promising to visit Tolstoy that summer. The dangerous fascination of the younger for the older writer had never really ceased, and Turgenev had followed closely, though critically, every step of Tolstoy’s career during the whole course of their rupture of seventeen years.

True to his promise, Turgenev visited Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1878, The whole household bubbled with excitement, for most of its members had never seen the famous author. They were much impressed by his appearance — his huge frame and noble head with its full white beard and shock of hair. Both men seemed delighted to see each other. Turgenev thought Tolstoy had grown quiet and mature. Much of the time was spent in Tolstoy’s study in philosophical and religious discussions.

Turgenev charmed the family with his conversation, played chess with young Sergei, and read to all of them one of his tales, “The Dog,”which, however, failed to impress his listeners. He was very active and accompanied Tolstoy and the children on a walk about the estate. Coming across a seesaw that had been set up to amuse the youngsters, the two authors were tempted. The sixty-year-old Turgenev mounted one end of the board and the fifty-year-old Tolstoy the other, and they seesawed while the children gleefully looked on.

Returning to his own estate Turgenev wrote: “I cannot help repeating to you once more what a fine and agreeable impression my visit to Yasnaya Polyana made on me, and how happy I am that the misunderstanding that existed between us has vanished without a trace, as though it had never been.”Yet not even Tolstoy’s newly discovered humility could entirely eradicate his suspicion of his rival’s sincerity. In subsequent letters to Fet, Tolstoy complained that Turgenev had not changed, and that it was better to “keep farther away from him and from sin,”for he was “an unpleasant sort of quarrel-maker.”

Throughout this period Tolstoy’s distraught state of mind made literary work extremely difficult and at times impossible, although it is clear that he found a kind of refuge in creative efforts. Frequently he had lost sight of Anna Karenina in this religious mist, and he apparently gained comfort from the work only in describing Levin’s painful search for spiritual values that reflected so strikingly his own quest. Towards the end of the novel, however, in 1877, Tolstoy returned to the design ofThe Decembrists, which some fourteen years before he had laid aside in favor of War and Peace.

This old project, a logical sequel to War and Peace, and long conceived of as the second of a great trilogy of novels, aroused Tolstoy’s sluggish creative powers. He had in mind a work as prodigious as War and Peace, and he now turned to it with something of his former zeal. His interest continued until January, 1879, when he once again dropped the subject. His decision was no doubt prompted partly by the fact that the authorities refused him permission to study material in the State Archives, and partly because he lost sympathy with the rebels when he learned that their movement was not a purely national one but had been inspired by French example and thought. On the other hand, it is also clear that a resurgence of his spirit mil unrest and his preoccupation with another work at this time — his Confession — helped turn him away from the theme.

The growing intensity of Tolstoy’s spiritual search for a religious faith that would solve all his doubts was gradually drawing him away from the material concerns of life. In March, 1876, Sonya had written of her husband in her diary: “ Today he says that he cannot live long in this terrible religious struggle in which he has been buried over these last two years, and now he hopes that he is close to the time when he may become an entirely religious man.”He extracted a curious comfort from the Pensées of Pascal, a book that he eagerly read, and wrote about to Granny and Fet. It was not, however, the dogmatic theology of the great Frenchman that pleased him, but the consuming and dramatically expressed doubts about life and death that drove Pascal on in his quest for religious faith.

Since the faith of worldly theologians and of the people of his own class repelled him, Tolstoy turned to believers among the poor, simple, unlettered folk: pilgrims, monks, sectarians, and peasants. Pilgrims he sought out on the highway, on their long plodding trips to holy places; peasants he stopped to converse with on their way to and from work; and hermits and monks he visited in their retreats and monasteries.

Tolstoy found a great deal of superstition mixed with Christian truths among these simple people, but the deeper he pondered the more convinced he became that they possessed a real faith that was necessary to them and gave their life real meaning. Their days were passed in labor, and whereas people of his own social level were terrified of suffering and death, he observed that these poor folk lived and suffered and approached death with tranquillity. The better he came to know them, the more he loved them, and the easier it was for him to go on living. Under their influence he was conscious of a change taking place in him, a change that had long been preparing and the promise of which had always been in him. The life of his own spoiled and rich circle had lost all meaning for him, but the life of laboring people, of the great masses of mankind that produce life, now appeared to him in its true light.

21

THE process of fluctuating between belief and unbelief induced in Tolstoy an awareness of something that had hitherto escaped his attention. He noticed that when he believed in God, life seemed worth living; when he forgot Him or disbelieved in Him, he had no further interest in life. “What more do you seek?” a voice exclaimed within him. “This is He. To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life. Live seeking God and then you will not live without God.”

This experience drove all thoughts of suicide from his head. He recognized that the strength of life that now returned to him was not new; it had belonged to his earliest childhood and youth. He had simply reverted to the belief that the Will that produced him desired something of him — it desired a belief in God, in moral perfecting, and in a tradition transmitting to us the meaning of life.

The humble people of Russia had led Tolstoy to an understanding of the meaning of life and to a belief in God, and like them he felt that he must live “godly,” and that he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must labor, humble himself, suffer, and be merciful. He realized that the essence of the peasant’s faith in God, like the essence of every faith, consists in its giving life a meaning that death does not destroy. Hut he still had his exacting reason to contend with. Although he strove with all his soul to mingle with the people and fulfill the ritual side of their religion, his reason rebelled. For a time he accepted the dogma of the Church on the principle that truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the ritual of the Church, you transgress against love, and by transgressing against love, you deprive yourself of the possibility of recognizing the truth.

Accordingly, Tolstoy humbled his reason, faithfully attended the Russian Orthodox services, fasted, and prepared for communion. This kind of playing bopeep with God by observing religious ceremonies, the sincerity and truth of which his reason denied, soon revolted him. When the priest at communion made him say that he believed that what he was about to swallow was the true flesh and blood of the Lord, he felt a pain in his heart. He knew that he was lying and thus destroying his relation to God and losing all possibility of believing.

V. I. Alekseyev, an atheistically inclined tutor whom Tolstoy took into his house at this time, expressed surprise that a man of his intellect and sincerity could pray and observe the rites of the Church. It was a winter morning and they were discussing such questions in the drawing room at Yasnaya Polyana. The sun’s slanting rays were striking the frosty tracery on the window. Tolstoy called Alekseyev’s attention to the fact that in the wonderfully illuminated flower patterns he saw only the sun’s reflected rays, but knew that afar off it was the real sun that produced the effect. The people, continued folstoy, saw only a reflected image of religion, but he himself looked further and saw — or at least knew — that very far away there existed the source from which all light comes.

But the difference between him and the people, he pointed out, need not prevent their common brotherhood, for both looked at the source of light, only their reason penetrated it to different depths. Yet at times Tolstoy, upon returning from church, admitted that he could stand it no longer. The peasants chatting unconcernedly on everyday affairs at the most solemn moments of the service proved to him that their relation to religion was one of complete unconsciousness.

Fasting also troubled Tolstoy. When his doctor warned him that he was injuring his health, he made a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Sergius, some miles from Moscow, to consult the famous monk Leonid. He solved the problem, however, in his own way. One day his wife served up fast-food to all the household save the tutors, who, by their own request, received regular meals. A dish of the tutors’ cutlets was left on the window sill. Tolstoy asked Ilya to pass him this dish, and he ate the cutlets with great relish. From that time on he gave up fasting.

In the end, Tolstoy was obliged to confess to himself that belief in Orthodoxy was impossible. He wondered why the priests of his own Church considered the beliefs of all others heretical. Because of the conflicting interpretations of various churches, the teaching of Christ that promised to unite all in one faith and love had ended in destroying what it sought to create. When he asked a theologian why these sects should not unite on the main points on which all could agree, he was told that such concessions would bring reproach on the spiritual authorities for deserting the faith of their forefathers.

This was the last straw. Tolstoy was seeking faith, the power of life, and the priests were seeking the best, way to fulfill before men certain human obligations. His disillusion was complete when he studied the relation of the Church to war and executions, for by now he had forsworn patriotism as an irrational state of mind. Killing was evil and repugnant to him, yet the teachers of the faith prayed for the success of Russian arms and sanctified murder in war.

Tolstoy ended his Confession on this promise to write a future work — an examination of Christian theology — in an effort, to determine what is true and what is false. He had come a long way from War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Confession, however, is one of the noblest and most courageous utterances of man, the outpourings of a soul perplexed in the extreme by life’s great problem,— the relation of man to the infinite,— yet executed with complete sincerity and high art. In it he dared to tell the cynical unbelievers that religion contained the only explanation of the meaning of life, and to the believers in dogmatic and popular religion he declared that the very foundations of their faith were erroneous. And in Confession he uncompromisingly turned his back on fifty years of his existence with all their joys and sorrows, all their fame and magnificent artistic achievements, and bravely looked forward to a new way of life: that of a man seeking moral perfection in service to God and humanity.

(To be continued)