Tolstoy (27 page)

In the tense atmosphere that was exacerbated by peasant riots and student unrest around the time of the emancipation, the publication of Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
in March 1862 was like the explosion of a bomb. In his young university graduate hero, the 'nihilist' Bazarov, Turgenev had created the first fictional
raznochinets,
but both the 'fathers' and the 'sons' felt they had been ridiculed, and the novel created a storm of controversy. As its first English translator commented a few years later, 'passionate criticisms, calumnies, and virulent attacks abounded ... Of course the more the book was abused, the more it was read. Its success has been greater than that of any other Russian book.'
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Tolstoy was probably the only person in Russia who found it boring. His mind was on other matters that spring. The stress caused by other Justices of the Peace obstructing all his initiatives and the mounds of paperwork generated by his job were debilitating, and had started to make him ill. To the rejoicing of all the vindictive landowners who wanted revenge on the man who had ruined their corrupt livelihoods, Tolstoy resigned his post in April 1862. Shortly afterwards he set off for the steppes beyond Samara, taking with him two of his favourite pupils and his servant Alexey. He planned to undergo a koumiss cure, hoping to restore his frayed nerves.
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Tolstoy's hostile neighbours wreaked their greatest revenge on him later that summer. In July 1862, soon after the government had shut down
The Contemporary,
Chernyshevsky was arrested for spreading revolutionary propaganda and exiled to Siberia. That same month the tsarist secret police descended on Yasnaya Polyana, where they conducted a two-day search of the estate, hoping to find seditious material connected with his schools. Aunt Toinette was so traumatised by the intrusion of the police into the tranquillity of her home that she became ill, and Tolstoy's sister Masha, who was staying at Yasnaya Polyana and sleeping in his study, had to endure tsarist gendarmes rifling through her brother's papers and reading everything he had ever written. The police ransacked the entire house, including the cellars and the water-closet, and placed Tolstoy's twelve student teachers under arrest, but were forced to go away empty-handed.
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Tolstoy was livid when he discovered what had happened upon his return from Samara at the end of July, and he vented his fury and anguish in a passionate letter to Alexandrine. 'It was my whole life, my monastery, my church, in which I found salvation, and saved myself from all the worries, doubts and temptations of life,' he wrote, describing how important his school work was to him.
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Fearing that the police action had irreparably damaged his reputation for probity amongst the peasants, he decided he should close his schools down, and by the following spring all the teachers had left (Gustav Keller, the young German mathematics teacher, went to tutor Sergey Tolstoy's son Grisha). But there was another reason why Tolstoy suddenly lost interest in his schools: he had finally found the woman he wanted to marry.

7. HUSBAND, BEEKEEPER, AND EPIC POET

The epic genre is becoming the only one natural to me.

Diary entry, 3 January 1863
¹

AT SOME POINT
in the autumn of 1862 Tolstoy received a surprise visit from the father and grown-up daughter of a large family he had helped to evacuate during the siege of Sebastopol. His visitors were themselves surprised to discover that Tolstoy had married, and they were to encounter a further surprise. When Tolstoy's wife came running into the drawing room to meet the visitors, the beautiful, tall young lady she was introduced to could not help staring at her. 'What, Lev Nikolayevich,' she blurted out, 'this young girl is your wife?' Sofya Andreyevna was indeed very young - she had just turned eighteen, and would have looked even younger, as she was wearing a short brown cotton dress rather than the elegant gown the guests were clearly expecting the new Countess Tolstoy to be wearing. Tolstoy had specially ordered and purchased it for her, on the grounds that he would never be able to find his wife under the steel-hooped crinolines and dresses with long trains fashionable at that time. He also did not believe that such formal attire was suitable in the countryside anyway. Sonya had become pregnant almost immediately after their wedding, and the dress was loose-fitting as well as very plain.
²
Her husband's own preferred attire in the countryside was a baggy grey flannel shirt, belted around the waist, worn loose over trousers tucked into boots.
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Tolstoy was embarking on the happiest years of his life, but there was no question of husband and wife ever being equal partners in this marriage. At thirty-four, Tolstoy was acutely conscious of his bride being a child, and he even refers to her as such in his diaries.
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He was also only two years younger than his mother-in-law, Lyubov Alexandrovna Bers, whom he had known since childhood, their fathers having been good friends. Indeed, his youngest brother-in-law, Vyacheslav, was just one year old when Tolstoy married his sister Sonya. Nevertheless, it suited Tolstoy to have a young girl as his bride. As their son Sergey would later comment, his father was deeply in love with his mother when he married her, but he also wanted someone he could educate and mould according to his own tastes.
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Sonya, happily, accepted her husband's moral authority from the beginning, and even directly referred to herself in letters to him in the early years of their marriage as his 'eldest daughter'. In one letter she reassures her husband that she has not forgotten his 'parental advice'.
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Then there was the difference in social backgrounds. Sergey also notes at the start of his memoirs that his father had not wanted to marry an aristocrat like himself. As the daughter of a doctor descended from a German immigrant and an illegitimate Russian noblewoman, Sonya certainly could not boast such an impressive pedigree. When she married, she took on a title as well as all her husband's views, and she liked being Countess Tolstoy. Her husband later renounced his title, but she continued to sign herself 'Grafinya'S. A. Tolstaya' (
grafinya
being a Russian form of the original German
Gräfin).
Sonya never had the time to ruminate on the religious and philosophical ideas which inspired her husband's radical change of lifestyle — she was too busy raising their family — so it was all the harder for her to repudiate the values he had so carefully inculcated her with during the first decades of their marriage and suddenly live another kind of life.

Sonya's great-grandfather was Johann Bärs (or Behrs), an officer in the Horse Guards from Saxony, whose coat-of-arms depicted a bear repelling a swarm of bees, as befits a surname derived from the German word for bear.
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Ivan Bers, as he became known in his Russianised incarnation, was sent to St Petersburg by Empress Maria Theresa in the mid-eighteenth century to assist Empress Elizabeth with Russian military training. Before he was killed in action in 1758 at the Battle of Zorndorf, he married and had a son, Evstafy (Gustav), who grew up in Moscow, became a chemist and married into another Russianised German family. Evstafy Bers lost all his wealth and possessions in the great Moscow fire of 1812, but through his German connections was able to give his two sons a fine education. They both became students at Moscow University in 1822, and trained as doctors at the same time as Russia's most famous nineteenth-century medical practitioner Nikolay Pirogov. One of the two sons was Sonya's father Andrey, born in 1808.

Owing to its low social rank, medicine was not a highly regarded profession in early-nineteenth-century Russia, and certainly never pursued by aristocrats. At the time the Bers brothers qualified, when they were about twenty years old, the most respected doctors were still foreign, but still socially inferior. In the late 1820s Andrey Bers became family doctor to the Turgenevs (when the future writer was still a boy), and accompanied them to Paris. For the next two years he devoted himself to further study, Italian opera, and, it seems, Turgenev's redoubtable and unhappily married mother, who bore him an illegitimate daughter, Varvara, whom she raised as her ward (which makes Sonya Turgenev's half-sister). After he returned to Moscow, Andrey Bers started working as a doctor attached to the Senate, which was located in the Kremlin, and then under Nicholas I he was appointed court physician. This entitled him to a cramped, low-ceilinged state apartment adjacent to the Kremlin Palace, the Tsar's imposing 700-room Moscow residence. This is where Sonya was born in 1844.

The family was never wealthy. They had servants in their Kremlin apartment, of course, but they never owned a country estate or possessed any serfs. Working for the Russian state meant that Dr Bers entered the civil service and the Table of Ranks, thereby gaining greater social respectability. Indeed, by finally attaining the eighth rank of collegiate assessor in 1842, Andrey Estafevich was entitled to acquire hereditary nobility, but he was still considered a very unsuitable match for sixteen-year-old Lyubov Islavina, to whom he proposed after treating her as a patient. Quite apart from the fact that her family were old-world Russian aristocrats, albeit an illegitimate branch, who regarded him as little better than a tradesman, Bers was by this time already thirty-four, and a Lutheran to boot. Nevertheless, the marriage went ahead, and Andrey and Lyubov Bers had eight children. Sonya was the middle of three daughters, who were all educated at home, first by German governesses. When she was sixteen, in 1860, Sonya acquired a private teaching qualification from Moscow University. By this time she had got to know Tolstoy's family quite well, having taken dancing lessons on Saturday afternoons one winter with his sister Masha's three children. Masha had been her mother's friend since childhood, and when the Bers came to visit Varya, Liza and Nikolay at home, their uncles Lev and Nikolay would sometimes be there as well.
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When Tolstoy first started to visit the Bers during his trips to Moscow, everyone assumed he was interested in the eldest daughter Elizaveta (Liza). But in the summer of 1862 he turned his attention to Sonya. It was an eventful few months. When the secret police had raided Yasnaya Polyana that summer Tolstoy had been away on the Bashkirian steppe taking his two-month koumiss cure, having been in poor health. He learned of the raid only when he visited the Bers in Moscow on his way back home to Yasnaya Polyana at the end of July. Days later he had guests. Lyubov Alexandrovna, plus her three daughters and youngest son were on their way to spend a couple of weeks at Ivitsy, her father's estate, which was not far away, and they decided to stay the night with Tolstoy. Lyubov had not been to Yasnaya Polyana since she was a child, and she was shocked by the patch of weeds growing in the gaping empty space where the old house had stood before being dismantled by its new owner. The wing that Tolstoy had settled in had never been intended to be a principal home, and it was quite a squash accommodating everybody. Along with the permanent residents (Tolstoy, Aunt Toinette and her companion Natalya Petrovna), his sister Masha was still staying, and now there were five extra guests. Beds were made up on the blue-and-white striped sofas downstairs for the three girls Liza, Sonya and Tanya, then twenty-seven, eighteen, and sixteen years respectively. A few months later the spartanly furnished room would be where Tolstoy sat down to write the opening chapters of
War and Peace.
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After being shown around, the city-dwelling Bers children were most excited to be taken into the garden to pick raspberries. Tolstoy, meanwhile, was distracted from his preoccupation with the recent disturbing events by the charms of Lyubov Alexandrovna's ingenuous middle daughter. No sooner had the Bers arrived at Ivitsy than 'le Comte', as they called him, came riding over on his white horse to visit them.
¹⁰
This is when he started communicating with Sonya by spelling out the first letters of words with a piece of chalk, which he would later immortalise when describing Levin's courtship of Kitty in
Anna Karenina.
One can only marvel at Sonya's ability to understand the words behind the letters 'V. v. s. s. 1. v. n. n. i. v. s. L. Z. m. v. s. v. s. T.', which in English would read: 'In your family there is a false view of me and your sister Liza. You and your sister Tanya must defend me.' A week later Tolstoy decided to accompany the Bers back to Moscow, and he then spent the next two weeks walking almost daily to visit them at their dacha five miles north of the city, and falling more and more in love with 'S', as he refers to her in his diaries.

During this euphoric time Tolstoy tried to concentrate on a pedagogical article he was writing, but not very successfully. He did, however, write a forceful letter to Alexander II in which he complained in the strongest terms about the search of his estate:

I consider it unworthy to assure Your Majesty that the insult I have suffered is undeserved. All my past, my contacts, my activities in serving people's education, which are open to all, and finally the journal in which my most heartfelt convictions are expressed, could have proved to anyone interested in me, without the deployment of measures which have destroyed people's peace and happiness, that I could not have been a conspirator, an initiator of proclamations, murders or arson. Apart from the insult, suspicion of criminal activities, apart from the opprobrium in the opinion of society and that feeling of eternal threat, under which I am obliged to live and work, as a result of this visit, I have completely plummeted in the opinion of the people, which I have cherished, which I spent years earning, and which was vital for the activity which I had chosen - the foundation of schools for the people.