Tolstoy (28 page)

Alexander II happened to be visiting Moscow, which meant the letter could be hand-delivered. The Tsar did not bother to reply to Tolstoy himself, but Prince Dolgorukov, the head of the secret police, was instructed to send a mealy-mouthed letter of self-justification to the governor of Tula for him to pass on.
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Fortunately Tolstoy had other things to occupy him at this time. Rather than return to Yasnaya Polyana, he had stayed on in Moscow when the Bers returned to their Kremlin apartment at the beginning of September, and for once the strength of his romantic feelings stopped him from becoming too self-analytical. The previous year, when he was considering the merits of another woman as a potential bride, his sister Maria had warned: 'For heaven's sake, don't analyse too much, because once you start analysing, you always find some stumbling block in every straightforward issue, and without knowing how to respond to
what and why,
you run away.'
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He had indeed prevaricated back then, and nothing came of the liaison, but this time he moved swiftly, perhaps realising the dangers of reflection. On Sunday 16 September he proposed to Sonya and, at his insistence, they were married seven days later.

It was not just that the engagement lasted only a week that made their marriage quite unusual, or even that Sonya was so nervous she could only eat pickled cucumbers and black bread in the days leading up to the wedding.
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Tolstoy offered his fiancée the choice of going back to live with her parents, a honeymoon abroad, or starting their new life straight away in Yasnaya Polyana.
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Sonya chose the last option; she never went abroad even later in her life. There was no time for Lyubov Alexandrovna to sew her daughter a complete trousseau, but Tolstoy made sure to give Sonya his old diaries to read, not wanting to conceal anything in his past. As an innocent and inexperienced girl who had seen little of life, she was deeply shocked and upset by what she later termed his 'excessive conscientiousness'. The previous month she had given him a thinly disguised autobiographical story to read, it is true, in which she described a young girl being courted by a prince of 'unusually unattractive appearance' and volatile opinions.
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But this was different. Sonya found it painful to learn about his sexual conquests and romantic liaisons with peasant women, no matter how much he now repented of them.
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Her father, meanwhile, was seething with anger. Initially opposed to the marriage, he felt deeply for his slighted elder daughter, who should have been the one to marry first, and he was only gradually reconciled. Sonya's mother was also hardly overjoyed by the match, and for a while adopted a patronising tone with Tolstoy, whom she continued to call by his childhood nickname of 'Lyovochka'.
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Both parents were well aware, however, of Tolstoy's eligibility, and of the unlikelihood of finding similar suitors for their other daughters.

The wedding was scheduled for eight in the evening but was delayed by at least an hour and a half. In the haste of all the packing that had to be done in preparation for the journey to Yasnaya Polyana, which would begin immediately after the ceremony, Tolstoy's servant had forgotten to leave out a clean shirt for him. Thus instead of his best man arriving at the Bers' apartment to announce that the bridegroom was waiting in the church, a sheepish Alexey Stepanovich came to rummage through the packed luggage.
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The ceremony took place at the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady in the heart of the Kremlin, minutes from the Bers' apartment. Dating back to the late fourteenth century, this small church is the oldest of all the Kremlin buildings, and in the nineteenth century it became part of the Great Palace built by Nicholas I. (All one can see of it nowadays is its single white drum and golden cupola rising above the palace's green rooftop — it has not been returned to the Orthodox Church, nor is it open to the public.) Unlike the grand cathedrals nearby, where state occasions were held, this was a church attended by those who lived and worked in the Kremlin, and on the evening of Tolstoy's wedding it was filled with gatecrashers — curious employees of the court who worked in the palace — as well as the small number of invited guests. None of Tolstoy's own family were present except for his aunt Polina, who accompanied Sonya to the church in the carriage, along with her nine-year-old brother Volodya, who carried the icon of St Sophia the Martyr she had j'ust been blessed with by her mother and uncle. Tolstoy's brother Sergey had been in Moscow, but had departed already so that he could organise a proper welcome party for the couple at Yasnaya Polyana.
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His sister Masha was in Marseilles.

Late in the evening, after the celebratory champagne, and after observing the Russian custom of sitting down and saying prayers before going on a journey,
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the newly-weds set off in the brand new
dormeuse
Tolstoy had purchased for the occasion: a particularly well-sprung carriage with extensions so that a bed could be made up for the occupants. It came with six horses, driven by a coachman and postilion. Sonya found it difficult to leave her family, as she had never been parted from them before, nor had she ever travelled in the autumn or winter, let alone at night. The light given off by the streetlamps of Moscow was exchanged for pitch blackness as soon as they left the city. It was also raining heavily. Still unable to pluck up the courage to switch from the
vy
form of address to the more intimate
ty
with her husband, Sonya was also terrified: they had never been alone before. The married couple barely spoke before stopping at the coaching inn in Biryulevo, fifteen miles south of Moscow, where they spent their wedding night. 'She knows everything', 'Her fright', 'Something painful' were amongst the pithy telegraphic comments Tolstoy made in his diary after they finally arrived at Yasnaya Polyana the following evening.
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A couple of weeks later Sonya was evidently still struggling to come to terms with the 'physical manifestations' of their relationship, which she found appalling, but which she discovered were clearly so important to him.
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At the house they were greeted by Sergey, who offered the traditional Russian bread and salt as a sign of welcome, and by Aunt Toinette, holding up the family icon of the Mother of God of the Sign. Sonya bowed deeply before them both, crossed herself, kissed first the icon and then Aunt Toinette. Tolstoy did the same.
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Over the next few days Sonya met the various members of the household as they came to offer their congratulations to the happy couple. They included Nikolay Mikhailovich the cook, Anna Petrovna the cowherd, accompanied by her daughters Annushka and Dushka, grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna's old maid Agafya Mikhailovna, always knitting stockings, even while she was walking about,
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the jolly laundrywoman Aksinya Maximovna and her pretty daughters Polya and Marfa, as well as the coachman, the gardener, the pastry cook and numerous other servants and peasants from the estate and neighbouring villages. Sonya's mother had thoughtfully given her 300 roubles, so she would not have to depend on her husband for money initially, but it nearly all disappeared as gifts to those who came to offer congratulations. Henceforth, Sonya was entirely dependent on her husband in financial matters, and disliked having to ask him for money. He never made her feel she was a penniless bride without a dowry, however, nor that his wealth belonged to him alone, she notes in her autobiography.
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Yasnaya Polyana was now also Sonya's domain, and she would barely leave it for the first eighteen years of her marriage. Aunt Toinette put Sonya in charge of running the house straight away, handing her an enormous bunch of keys on a ring, which she later hung from the belt round her waist. Sonya had not grown up in luxury, but she was nevertheless taken aback by the austerity ('almost poverty') of her new surroundings. Her husband was used to sleeping on a grubby dark red leather pillow without a pillowcase,
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and there was no bath anywhere in the house. Sonya was determined to change that. When her trousseau arrived, her silverware replaced the ancient metal cutlery and a silk eiderdown replaced the cotton one, which, much to her husband's amazement, she lined with a sheet.
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She embroidered 'L.T.' in red on his underwear.
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After finding an unpalatable species of vermin in her soup one day, Sonya also tackled the lack of hygiene in the kitchen. White chef's jackets and hats soon materialised, and Sonya took over responsibility for the daily menu. Over time she built up a Yasnaya Polyana cookery book consisting of 162 recipes, for everything from 'Partridge in Herring Sauce' and 'Duck with Mushrooms' to 'How to Cook a Pike'. Then there were recipes for traditional Tolstoy dishes such as almond soufflé, and black bread pudding, or the special Bers recipe for apple pie, and Marusya Maklakova's lemon kvass (comment: 'very good').
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Sonya came to be very fond of Nikolay Mikhailovich the cook, even if he was too drunk to turn up to work sometimes, and had to be replaced by his breezy wife. He had once played the flute in old Prince Volkonsky's serf orchestra, and had turned to cooking when he lost his embouchure, as he recounted to her with a sad, wry smile.
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The first few days and weeks, while Lev and Sonya were setting up house together, were a mixture of wild happiness and the inevitable friction caused by the differing habits and expectations of two people who in reality barely knew each other. Tolstoy wrote to Alexandrine soon after arriving back at Yasnaya Polyana to tell her that he had not known that it was possible to be so happy, and that he loved his wife more than anything else in the world.
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He also commented on experiencing 'unbelievable joy' in his diary, but just a few days later he recorded having an argument with Sonya, and expressed his sadness at discovering their relationship was no different from that of any other couple.
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By this time, Sonya had resumed the diary she had started keeping two years earlier, and she now turned to it whenever she began to sense she was losing her husband's affections. She was certainly beginning to lose his attention. Tolstoy could occupy himself with domestic matters and marital bliss up to a point, but after a while the prolonged distraction from intellectual pursuits began to be irksome. Three weeks into their marriage, he confided to his diary: 'All this time I have been busy with matters which are termed practical. But I'm finding this idleness difficult. I cannot respect myself. So I am not satisfied with myself and not clear in my relationships with others...
I must work
...'
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First of all, Tolstoy was behind with the August and September issues of his journal
Yasnaya Polyana.
His heart was no longer in it, but there were two articles for it that he needed to finish, one of which typically put forward the Tolstoyan idea that the peasant children actually had more to teach their supposed teachers than the other way round. At the end of September Sonya's spurned elder sister Liza sent in the brief article about Luther she had been commissioned to write by Tolstoy. It was conceived as one of the popular historical sketches he hoped would interest peasant children. Whether it was due to her suddenly being elevated to a countess, or just plain jealousy of anything which took her husband away from her, Sonya resented and disliked Tolstoy's involvement with the peasantry. Having grown up in the city, peasants were alien beings to her, and neither then nor later did she understand her husband's deep devotion to them. She certainly never came to share his love of the muzhik, much to his chagrin. But there was an additional reason for her jealous resentment: she had read with horror the entries in his diary about his romantic liaison with the peasant girl Aksinya Bazykina, such as the one in which he claimed that he was in love 'like never before'. Sonya knew she might run into her any day, because Aksinya had not, of course, moved away and was still working on the estate. 'I've been reading the beginnings of his works,' she wrote now in her own diary on 16 December 1862, 'and I'm disgusted and sickened by everywhere where there is love, where there are women, and I'd like to burn absolutely all of it. So that I don't have to be reminded of his past.'
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The trouble was, Tolstoy's involvement with the peasantry was also a creative and linguistic one. Fighting in the Crimean War had revealed to him how great was the abyss between the educated classes and the peasantry. Reluctant to continue writing solely for the nobility, he had resolved to try to bridge that abyss, not only by writing fiction in which the protagonists were peasants, but in an unvarnished language and style that was close to peasant speech. His first experiments in this vein had produced several unfinished stories which he returned to in the first few months after he married, and Sonya helped with the completion of one of them by writing out a fair copy to send to the publisher. Thus began what was to be an extraordinarily fruitful partnership, in which Sonya acted as amanuensis to her husband, performing an invaluable service by deciphering the often barely legible handwriting of the amendments which were invariably crammed into the margins of his tortuously composed drafts. 'Polikushka', a parable about the evils of serfdom, was the first story Sonya copied out,
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and it was published in early 1863.
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Another of Tolstoy's stories of peasant life was entitled 'Tikhon and Malanya', but at some point in December 1862 he abruptly stopped working on it, most likely for the simple reason that the central female character Malanya was modelled on Aksinya. He never returned to it, and it was published for the first time only after his death.
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