Tolstoy (33 page)

When he was engaged in physical pursuits, Tolstoy could stave off the dark thoughts that threatened to encroach on him during what he called the 'dead time' between writing projects.
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It was a time of terrible uncertainty, he wrote in the first letter he sent to the Petersburg-based critic and philosopher Nikolay Strakhov, who was to become one of his closest friends and confidants.
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A priest's son from the provinces, and a man of formidable intellect, Strakhov had spent the earlier part of his career teaching mathematics and natural science, but was now employed at the St Petersburg Public Library, where he remained until his retirement in 1885.
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He and Tolstoy, whom he idolised, were exactly the same age. Strakhov had been the first to recognise the magnitude of Tolstoy's achievement in the three review articles he had written about
War and Peace.
After the last of them was published in the new Slavophile journal
The Dawn
in January 1870,
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he wrote to Tolstoy to invite him to become a contributor. Tolstoy declined, explaining that he was in an awful state, one minute conceiving wildly ambitious plans and the next succumbing to self-doubt. Perhaps this was the necessary prelude to a period of happy, self-confident work like the one which had just ended, he conceded, but perhaps it meant that he was never going to write anything ever again.
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Tolstoy always found the start of a new work of fiction mentally taxing, as he felt he needed to work out the different trajectories of the characters in his head before he could proceed, as if it were a game of chess. He described this complicated process in a letter he wrote to Afanasy Fet in November 1870:

I'm moping and not writing anything, and finding work torturous. You can't imagine how difficult I find this preparatory work of thoroughly ploughing the field I
have
to sow. Thinking through and reflecting on everything that could happen to all the future people of my forthcoming work, which is going to be very big, and thinking through millions of possible combinations in order to choose 1/100000 is terribly difficult. And that's what I am busy with.
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Far from being able to enjoy a sense of achievement having finished
War and Peace,
Tolstoy was plagued by fears that he himself was finished as a writer. But his anxieties went deeper, as Sonya later recalled. Occasionally his spirits lifted when he had flashes of inspiration, but he was more often morose, and convinced that 'it was all over for him, that it was time for him to die, and so on and so forth'.
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He was forty-one. As it turned out, he had exactly forty-one more years to live.

While he was carried along by the huge wave of creative inspiration that drove the writing of
War and Peace,
Tolstoy had successfully suppressed his tendencies towards depression, but now he could not help succumbing to melancholy thoughts, and his continuing ill-health also contributed to his low spirits.
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Two years after he finished
War and Peace,
he still felt so low that he confided in Sergey Urusov that he had no will to live, and had never felt so miserable in all his life.
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Misreading the symptoms, which at this point her husband himself did not fully understand, Sonya became increasingly anxious for him to start another book. It would be three years before Tolstoy started
Anna Karenina,
however, and writing it would prove to be as arduous as the writing of
War and Peace
had been stimulating. More than any other,
Anna Karenina
is the novel which readers invariably say they cannot put down. Tolstoy, by contrast, had so little desire to finish it that he had to force himself to pick it up. Neither he nor Sonya quite realised it yet, but the happiest years of their marriage were already over.

If Tolstoy was visited by thoughts of his own mortality after finishing
War and Peace,
it was because he had begun to confront death seriously while he was writing it. The first unwelcome confrontation with death had come through his chance involvement in the court-martial of Private Vasily Shabunin in 1866. This isolated incident exerted a far greater impact on him than he was prepared to admit at the time. That summer the Tolstoys had received a visit from a family friend of the Bers, Grigory Kolokoltsov, an officer serving with a Moscow infantry regiment stationed a few miles down the road from Yasnaya Polyana. On subsequent visits to Yasnaya Polyana, he brought his colonel, Pyotr Yunosha, and another officer called Alexander Stasyulevich, and Tolstoy enjoyed going riding with them.
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One day Kolokoltsov and Stasyulevich came to ask Tolstoy if he would defend one of the regiment's regular soldiers at his forthcoming court-martial: Private Shabunin had struck his superior, and according to Russian law, this was an offence punishable by death. As an opponent of capital punishment ever since he had witnessed a public execution in Paris, Tolstoy agreed.
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Despite Tolstoy's plea, Shabunin was convicted and sentenced to be shot by firing squad. Appalled that such a minor infraction could attract such a drastic and inappropriate punishment, Tolstoy immediately appealed to higher channels via his influential cousin Alexandrine in St Petersburg, but to no avail. This was perhaps owing partly to the hysteria at court following the attempt to assassinate Alexander II in St Petersburg a few months earlier. The man wielding the gun, Dmitry Karakozov, who was one of Russia's first revolutionaries, was also sentenced to death. In September, Tolstoy asked the military band which had been obliged to play at Shabunin's execution to come up to Yasnaya Polyana as a surprise for Sonya's name-day party. It was a warm evening, and after dinner on the veranda, at a long table decorated with flowers, the guests had danced into the night - Sonya recorded in her diary that it had been a very jolly evening, and her husband had been in particularly good spirits.
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Tolstoy then went back to writing
War and Peace.
Stasyulevich's suicide the following year, which apparently struck Tolstoy deeply, was not directly related to Private Shabunin's death, but it was a chilling postscript to an event which, as it turned out later, would gnaw at his conscience.
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Then there were personal losses. He had not been particularly close to his father-in-law Andrey Estafevich, or his philandering uncle Vladimir in Kazan, still less his ghastly brother-in-law Valerian Petrovich Tolstoy, who all died in the 1860s, but he was greatly upset by the deaths of Elizaveta, the sister of his distant cousin Alexandrine, and particularly Darya Alexandrovna, known to all as Dolly—the wife of his best friend Dmitry Dyakov, whom he had known since student days.
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Then, in 1869, Tolstoy's friend Sergey Urusov, already widowed, lost his only daughter Lidia, while another friend Afanasy Fet lost his sister Nadezhda and two brothers-in-law, Nikolay and Vasily Botkin, in quick succession. Tolstoy had himself been friends with Vasily Botkin for well over a decade, and was disturbed to hear that he had died suddenly, in the company of the friends who had gathered at his home to hear a string quartet performed.
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In the summer of 1869 Tolstoy had also begun to confront life and death philosophically by reading Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a thinker famed for his pessimistic view of the world. One of the great philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer was esteemed by figures as diverse as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud and Jung, but he also held particular appeal for creative minds in view of the beauty and simplicity of his exposition, his direct engagement with the real-life problem of existence, rather than with abstractions, and the high value occupied in his philosophical system by art. Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers able to undertake a serious study of Indian philosophy through translations which had become available, and the influence of Buddhist ideas on his view of life as suffering is plain to see. As in Buddhism, Schopenhauer identified suffering with attachment to desires, regarded art, along with resignation and compassion, as one of the few means available to man of experiencing a temporary liberation from suffering. Schopenhauer's ideas about the futility of human striving made perfect sense to Tolstoy, and such was his newfound fervour for them that he acquired a portrait of the philosopher and put it up on the wall of his study.
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Tolstoy was not alone in his veneration of Schopenhauer. There have been many other major artists for whom he has been equally important, including Turgenev, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, not to mention composers such as Richard Wagner, who was engaged while Tolstoy was writing
War and Peace
in composing the
Ring
cycle, its musical equivalent not only in terms of scale and ambition, but also technically through its creative use of repetition.

Somehow Tolstoy's morbid thoughts all came to a head in the autumn of 1869, when he made a trip to Penza province to inspect some land he was thinking of buying. While stopping overnight in the town of Arzamas, he found himself awake at two in the morning, exhausted but unable to sleep. Although physically quite well, he was suddenly gripped by a fear of dying more intense than any he had experienced before, which produced in him a state of existential anguish he found completely terrifying. Many years later he drew on this memory of extreme emotional desolation when he started writing an autobiographical story called 'Notes of a Madman', although he never completed it.

Apart from his fixation with death, another cloud appeared on Tolstoy's horizon after he finished
War and Peace:
marital difficulties. Tolstoy may have treated his wife as a child to begin with, but in many ways he was also like a child with her. Once they started a family, Sonya became a source of maternal protection, and provided him with the emotional stability he needed to concentrate on his writing. There had been a few troubling incidents which had intruded into the serenity of the fundamentally happy years while Tolstoy was writing
War and Peace,
but they were exceptions rather than the rule, and had been dismissed as aberrations. Now it began to be the other way round. In August 1871 Sonya noted in her diary that something in their relationship had 'snapped' the previous winter when they had both been unwell. Tolstoy also later referred to becoming aware of his loneliness after 'a string broke' in their marriage at around this time in his diary.
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They had squabbled before, of course, but this rift was more serious, and initially arose over their differing views of the woman's role in a marriage. Even though Sonya continued to defer to her husband, she was becoming increasingly confident about asserting her own views, sometimes goaded by sheer physical necessity.

In February 1871 Sonya gave birth to their second daughter and fifth child, who was christened Maria after Tolstoy's sister, and who, like her, immediately became known to everybody as Masha. After an extremely difficult delivery, Sonya contracted puerperal fever and nearly died, which understandably made her unwilling to endure the terror and pain of another bout of life-threatening illness. She began to think it would be best for her not to become pregnant again, but her husband had different ideas. It was not just that Tolstoy could not conceive of marriage without children—he regarded a woman's main vocation as being to bear children, breast-feed and raise them, and was therefore horrified at the thought of his wife avoiding future pregnancies. As a matter of fact, in March 1870 he had set out his ideas on this subject in an unsent letter addressed to Nikolay Strakhov, who had immediately followed up his review of
War and Peace
with an article on 'The Woman Question' in the next issue of
The Dawn.
Even though he never sent this letter, it is revealing that Tolstoy felt moved to respond straight away. In fact, he had begun to draft an article on the subject himself in 1868, describing men as the 'worker bees in the hive of human society' and women as queens who should not be distracted from their primary role to reproduce the species.
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The 'woman question' exercised him deeply, and would indeed lie at the very heart of
Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy generally did not like to read or subscribe to newspapers or journals, but there were a few exceptions. In 1870 Theodor Ries, the German from Oldenburg who had been responsible for printing
War and Peace,
became founding editor of the
Moskauer Deutscher Zeitung.
As he started publishing a German translation of
War and Peace
in its inaugural issue,
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only one month after producing the last volume in Russian, he sent his newspaper to Tolstoy gratis. The Parisian
Revue des deux mondes
was for a long time the only journal the Tolstoys actively read,
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but later in the 1870s, they arranged to share the cost of several subscriptions with Sergey over in Pirogovo.
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Tolstoy affected never to read reviews of his work, remembering how the critics had hounded Pushkin during his lifetime.
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But the truth is, he did read them, and he took criticism very personally, invariably responding to it immediately in writing, although his hurt feelings clearly often soon subsided, as he left most of his ripostes to critics unfinished.
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If he made an exception for Strakhov, it was because his review was intelligent and highly positive, and also because
The Dawn
was also sent to him gratis—that is how he had come to read Strakhov's article on the topic of women's liberation.