Tolstoy (43 page)

She was not in lilac, which Kitty had so set her heart on, but in a low-cut black velvet dress, revealing her ample shoulders and a bosom like old chiselled ivory, rounded arms and tiny slender hands. The entire dress was trimmed with Venetian lace. On her head, in her black hair, unaugmented by any extension, was a small garland of pansies, and there was another on the black sash ribbon around her waist, between pieces of white lace.
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Tolstoy dressed Anna in a black dress, but it was Sonya who suggested the fabric should be velvet, and accentuated the overall sensual impression by making the lace around her waist white.
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In the second instalment of
Anna Karenina,
which appeared in the February issue of the
Russian Messenger,
readers sympathised with the grieving Kitty and Levin, both now spurned. They thrilled to Anna's romantic night-time encounter with Vronsky at a remote railway station in the middle of a snowstorm, but they were probably slightly disconcerted by the way this instalment ended. In the middle of chapter 10 of Part Two came two coy lines of dots representing the moment when Anna and Vronsky become intimate with each other.
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They were followed by a passage in which the sexual act was clearly associated with murder:

As she looked at him, she felt physically humiliated, and she could say nothing more. He meanwhile was feeling what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has robbed of life. That body he had robbed of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something terrible and loathsome in the memories of what this terrible price of shame had bought. Shame at her spiritual nakedness oppressed her and communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer's deep horror before the body of his victim, the body must be hacked to pieces and hidden—the murderer must take advantage of what he has gained by murder.

Tolstoy experienced the first of several bruising encounters with his editor over this chapter. Katkov objected to his 'vivid realism', and asked him to tone it down. Tolstoy refused to change a single word, however, arguing that this was one of those parts on which the 'whole novel' depended.
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All in all, February 1875 was not a good month for Tolstoy. If he felt completely indifferent to all the accolades he was receiving for
Anna Karenina,
it was because there had been another death in the family.
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This time it was Nikolay, their ten-month-old baby, who passed away after three weeks of harrowing illness. It was particularly agonising for Sonya, who was still breast-feeding. Instead of the sunshine which had accompanied Petya's funeral, the day of Nikolay's burial was one of the coldest that winter—minus twenty degrees, with fierce, biting winds which tore at the muslin he was wrapped in and the crown on his head, traditionally a part of Orthodox funerals. Sonya told Tanya that she felt as if she had turned to stone.
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Three months later, she was pregnant again.

There were further instalments of
Anna Karenina
in March and April 1875, but Russian readers then had to wait eight months for the next chapters to be published. The reason for the delay was simple: Tolstoy had not finished them. It was unprecedented for the serial publication of a novel to be interrupted in this way, and only a writer of Tolstoy's stature could have got away with it. He could not back out of his deal with Katkov, but he found it hard to muster the necessary enthusiasm to carry on. He was still wrapped up in his educational ideas, and preoccupied with the publication of his
New ABC,
which won immediate acclaim as soon as it appeared in June 1875. He was also becoming very depressed and needed distraction.

That summer the whole family returned to Samara, accompanied by Sonya's brother 'Uncle Styopa', their English governess Emily Tabor and Jules Rey, the bespectacled but athletic Swiss tutor who had arrived at Yasnaya Polyana that January.
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He was a spruce, neatly turned out young man of twenty-three with a secret drink problem, and he made a bee-line for Emily.
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At the beginning of August Tolstoy organised a traditional Bashkir horse race—five laps of a three-mile circular course marked out on his land—for which he offered prizes.
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Tents sprang up all around it in the days leading up to the race as Bashkirs arrived with their horses, and Tolstoy offered a lame foal and a few sheep for the feasting that went on beforehand. It was thrilling for the Tolstoy children, who had never encountered throat singing or the traditional dancing that accompanied the songs performed on the
quray,
the long Bashkir flute. Thirty-two riders took part in the race, which drew hundreds of spectators. A handful were local Russians, including Tolstoy on a mount he had bought specially for the occasion, but the rest were Bashkir and Kirghiz horsemen, one of whom claimed the top prize of a rifle. It was a far cry from the horse races in
Anna Karenina,
attended by the court. Tolstoy was hatching a plan to start breeding horses, and he brought home some Kirghiz horses, prized for their speed and stamina, as well as two donkeys christened Bismarck and MacMahon after two opponents in the Franco-Prussian War.
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Back in Yasnaya Polyana at the end of August, rested and sunburnt, Tolstoy declared that the experience of witnessing first-hand the clash of sedentary Russian and nomadic Bashkir lifestyles, and putting up with flies and dirt out on the steppe, was infinitely superior to listening to speeches in the English Houses of Parliament, which he regarded as a dubious privilege. He had not picked up a pen for two months.
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He forced himself to return to 'boring, banal'
Anna Karenina
in the autumn of 1875, but both he and Sonya were soon in low spirits again. On 12 October Sonya wrote in her diary that their excessively isolated country life was now unbearable, and that the monotony of her routine over months and years had led to an overwhelming apathy and indifference to everything which she could no longer fight. Her husband's gloom was infectious: 'He sits miserably and despondently for days and weeks on end without doing anything, without work, without energy, without joy and seems to have reconciled himself to this state of affairs. It is a kind of moral death, but I don't want to see it in him, and he himself can't go on living like this.'
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At the end October Sonya fell gravely ill with peritonitis, and then went into labour. Varvara, born three months premature, died a few hours after she was born.
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'Fear, horror, death, children cavorting, eating, fuss, doctors, falsity, death, horror' was how Tolstoy defined the situation at Yasnaya Polyana in a letter to his correspondent Fet.
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A further source of stress was that the house was full of people just at that time. After Toinette's death the previous summer, Tolstoy's other aunt, seventy-eight-year-old Polina, had moved to Yasnaya Polyana from her Tula convent, and she took over running the household while Sonya was ill, but there were also lots of guests: Sonya's brother Sasha and his wife, her uncle Kostya Islavin, Pyotr Samarin and his wife and another family friend. On the most critical day of Sonya's illness, Jules Rey's sister arrived from Geneva to become the children's new governess.
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Tolstoy found some solace in writing a very long letter to Strakhov about philosophy, but ended up confronting the meaning of life and the inescapable truth that his own life was just an 'empty and stupid joke'. He had just turned forty-seven, and he felt he was entering old age—a time when there was no longer anything in the 'outside world' that interested him, and all he could see ahead was death. He had now started the long descent back to where he had originated, he wrote, aware that whatever his desire—breeding a particular kind of horse, shooting ten hares in one field, learning Arabic—it could not bring him any true satisfaction. His only hope was that he had understood the meaning of life wrongly.
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Meanwhile, to be on the safe side, he went hunting without a gun, so that he could not turn it on himself, and boasted to his brother Sergey that he had managed to bag six hares with his dogs without firing a shot.
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Sonya did not have the luxury of contemplating the meaning of life. Usually she was too busy with household chores, and now, not the first time, she was actually close to death. Her long convalescence was immediately beset by new problems. Jules Rey's sister was not a success as a governess, and there was friction: soon Sonya could no longer bear her.
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And then, in December 1875, came the slow, painful demise of
tyotushka
Polina.
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It was Sonya who had to look after her during her last illness when she was confined to bed. It was Sonya who had to change her soiled bed linen and suffer her shouting and cursing from the pain that the slightest movement caused her. Polina, who conversed in French with her nephew to the last, was terrified of dying, and finally passed away after great suffering on 22 December. She was buried two days later. It was another quiet Christmas.
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Tolstoy was greatly saddened, as the last living link with his parents had now been irrevocably sundered. As he wrote to Alexandrine in March, the death of this old woman had affected him profoundly—more than any other. Despite feeling as fed up with
Anna Karenina
as with a 'bitter radish',
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he had to soldier on, however. Another third of the novel was printed in the first four issues ofthe
Russian Messenger
in 1876. The April issue contained a substantial section of Part Five, ending with a chapter recounting the last days of Levin's brother Nikolay.
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As with many other parts of
Anna Karenina,
Tolstoy drew on his own personal experience to write it. For the character of Nikolay, he recalled aspects of his eccentric late brother Dmitry, and also resurrected in his memory the last days of his dearly loved brother of the same name who had died in his arms. Death seemed to be everywhere. Tolstoy told his one surviving brother Sergey in February that, like his character Levin, he was finding it impossible to get away from thoughts of death, and the notion that nothing else remained for him in life.
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Sergey was familiar with the feeling as he himself was a depressive, but so was their sister Maria, who wrote to Tolstoy from Heidelberg in March 1876 to tell him she had been feeling suicidal too:

I'm in such an appalling moral state, loneliness is affecting me so
dreadfully
, with the constant worry which hangs over on me like the sword of Damocles, and which I think about day and night, that I sometimes get frightened. Thoughts of suicide have begun to hound me, I mean really hound me and so relentlessly that it's become a kind of illness or madness.
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Maria's 'constant worry' was Elena, the illegitimate daughter she had given birth to in September 1863, months after the Tolstoys' first child Sergey was born.
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In 1876 Elena turned thirteen, and Masha, as a widowed single woman, was still too ashamed to bring her to Russia.

Russian society had begun to change rapidly in the 1860s, but the patriarchal structures enshrined in law by the state remained in place. Tolstoy struck a chord with thousands of female readers suffering unhappy marriages when he wrote
Anna Karenina.
Even though few had the bravery of Anna Arkadyevna, they identified with her. The paradox of Tolstoy writing with such sympathy about Anna while at the same time writing a novel which clearly condemns adultery is partly explained by the fate of his sister Masha, whose unhappy experience of marriage was one of the many life stories which served as the raw material for his 'family' novel. It is almost as if Masha read her brother's mind, as in the letter she sent him in March 1876, she also spoke of the bitter life lessons she had learned, and directly identified herself with his heroine. 'If all those Anna Kareninas knew what awaited them,' she wrote, 'how they would run from ephemeral pleasures, which are never, and cannot be pleasures, because nothing that is
unlawful
can ever constitute happiness.' This, of course, was Tolstoy's own view.

Until the publication of Tolstoy's correspondence with his siblings in 1990, Masha was a somewhat shadowy figure in Tolstoy's biography,
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but she was an important person in his life, and they remained close (his letters to her are some of the most touching he ever wrote). Masha had lived to regret her marriage to Valerian Petrovich Tolstoy and buried her sorrows in foreign travel, travelling with her children to spas where she could treat the various illnesses she believed she was suffering from. It was in Aix-les-Bains in 1861 that she met the handsome Swedish Viscount Hector Victor de Kleen, with whom she spent the next two winters in Algiers. Her brothers learned they were living together when she made a trip back to Russia in the summer of 1862, just when Tolstoy was about to get married. The following autumn, fearing their censure, she wrote from Geneva to tell them she had given birth to a little girl. Both Tolstoy and his brother Sergey had fathered illegitimate children themselves, and were sympathetic. Tolstoy hastened to reassure Masha of their support, and resolved to try to help her.
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In January 1864 he and Sergey met with Valerian Petrovich, who acknowledged his responsibility in the breakdown of the marriage and agreed to a divorce. Tolstoy obtained the necessary permission from the bishop, and then sent the documents for Masha to sign and return. She was scared to set things in motion, however, as Valerian Petrovich sent her a threatening letter, telling her a divorce would 'harm his position and bring him a great deal of unpleasantness'. In a letter to Toinette she asked pitifully if she had the right to go through with it, even though he had made her suffer so much.
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