Tolstoy (38 page)

A primitive Bashkir village in the middle of nowhere was not every Russian's idea of the ideal health resort. Much more fashionable at that time was to go abroad, either to the German spas, or to the French Riviera. Those who wished to stay within the Russian Empire were also now spoiled for choice: they could enjoy the bracing sea air at a lido on the Baltic, take the waters at the resorts that had sprung up around the mineral springs in the Caucasus, such as Kislovodsk or Pyatigorsk, or patronise the increasingly popular seaside town of Yalta in the balmy Crimea, where the Romanovs vacationed. It had been a long time since Tolstoy cared for fashion, however, and he positively relished the lack of amenities, writing merrily to Sonya to tell her the complete absence of beds, crockery and white bread (food was consumed from wooden bowls without cutlery) would be more than her 'Kremlin heart' could stand.
¹⁰²

The Bashkirs were originally nomadic horsemen from the southern Urals who lived between the Kama and Ural rivers, east of Samara. A Turkic-speaking Moslem people, they were forced to acknowledge Russian supremacy after the conquest of Kazan in the mid-sixteenth century, but then gradually found themselves becoming a minority as Russians and other ethnic groups from the Volga region settled in the lands they had for centuries believed belonged to them.
¹⁰³
This was frontier territory for the Russians, who in the eighteenth century proceeded to build a line of forts from Samara to the new town of Orenburg, in preparation for advancing into Kazakhstan and beyond (Samarkand was conquered for the great White Tsar's new province of Turkestan in 1868). While the Bashkirs had been brutally subjugated by the middle of the eighteenth century, and their lands fully absorbed into the Russian Empire, they were given a special tax status and they tried to maintain their traditional way of life amongst the more numerous Russians who steadily colonised their fertile pastures. One of these Russians was Tolstoy.

Tolstoy might have poured a lot of his own money into publishing the first edition of his
ABC,
but he had large reserves from sales of
War and Peace,
and at this stage of his life he was eager to increase them. Bashkir land was very cheap, and Tolstoy had an eye to making a profitable deal by buying some land, and pocketing the proceeds of its cultivation. Two weeks after his arrival he made a decision to buy nearly 7,000 acres for a total cost of 17,500 roubles. He explained to Sonya by letter that with two good harvests he would recoup his investment, but that they would need to spend the following summer living there to make that possible. He described the hilly landscape to his wife as picturesque, although he admitted there were no trees, and he also acknowledged there was no shade at all, but to compensate there was 'steppe air, bathing, koumiss, and riding'. Tolstoy assured Sonya that he wanted her approval first, but he went ahead anyway, even before he had received her reply. As it happened, she was not at all enthusiastic: 'If it's profitable, that's your business, and I don't have an opinion on the matter. But it would have to be extreme necessity that would want to force a person to live in the steppe without a single tree for hundreds of miles, as one would never go there willingly, particularly with five children.'
¹⁰⁴

In the summer of 1871 Tolstoy and his two companions lived in a huge Bashkirian
kibitka
(tent) belonging to the local mullah, with feather grass serving as flooring. It had formerly been a mosque, and featured a table and one chair, oats for the horses, a black dog and lots of hens who brought disorder, but also a regular supply of eggs. Tolstoy got up at dawn every day, he wrote to Sonya, and after three cups of tea, would go outside to watch the herds of horses coming back over the hills (about 1,000 of them, he reckoned). Then it was time to drink koumiss, produced in leather churns behind curtains by the Bashkir women, but served always by the men. Afterwards, he told Sonya, he would usually walk into the village to consort with other people who had come from Russia for the koumiss cure, including a Greek teacher who helped him read Herodotus. Sometimes there was some shooting (for bustard, ruff, and the occasional wolf), and there was always a great deal of hospitality from the Bashkirs they visited due to Tolstoy's aristocratic title. At the end of June Tolstoy and Stepan travelled fifty miles east, in a cart pulled by the horse he had bought for sixty roubles when he arrived, to Buzuluk, a town with several churches, mostly wooden houses and a bustling trade in grain, tallow and hides.
¹⁰⁵
After spending a rough night at the halfway point in their exhausting journey across the steppe, Tolstoy slept soundly when they finally arrived—indeed, he slept so deeply he did not notice the bedbugs crawling all over him—but soon his mind was taken up with the colourful fair they had come to see. About a dozen different nationalities had converged to trade Kirghiz, Cossack and Siberian horses.

Tolstoy returned home to Yasnaya Polyana that year in high spirits, and in much better health, having gloried in the dry heat of the steppe, the clear air and bright skies. In the end he went back to Samara the following summer without Sonya, since she had just given birth to Pyotr (Petya), their sixth child, and as his companion he took with him instead Timofey Fokanov, a Yasnaya Polyana peasant, who was going to become the first manager of his property. This trip was more difficult in many respects. The harvest in 1871 had been very poor, but the harvest in 1872 was the worst in decades, causing problems which would only worsen the following year. Tolstoy was staying in a house rather than a tent this time—the house on his new
khutor
(homestead), but it left something to be desired. The first impression was very pleasant, he wrote to Sonya, although there was no water in the pond. He also admitted that the house was old and drab, and had only two rooms, but it would be absolutely fine for all of them, he reassured her brightly.
¹⁰⁶
That summer Tolstoy was very preoccupied with his first
ABC
book, which was now finally being printed, so in the end he came back early, after only three weeks.

Whatever qualms Sonya had about living out in the steppe, she managed to suppress them the following summer, when the entire family headed east. In June 1873 sixteen members of the Tolstoy household gathered in the drawing room, shut the doors and sat in silence for a few moments to prepare for the journey ahead, then completed the ritual by getting up and crossing themselves. A caravan of carriages and carts then transported them to Tula to catch a train, and in Nizhny Novgorod they boarded the steamer for Samara. When they stepped on board, they already felt they were in Asia when they saw the exotic robes and skullcaps of the various Tatars and Persians travelling in third class, and particularly when they heard them speak. During a refuelling stop in Kazan, Tolstoy got off with the eldest boys, Sergey and Ilya, to show them where he used to live, and it was not until the boat had travelled several miles further down the Volga that Sonya realised they had failed to re-embark. As she notes in her autobiography, the captain would not have turned back for a 'mere mortal', but since Tolstoy was a count, it was different.
¹⁰⁷
From Samara the family travelled in an enormous old carriage pulled by six horses, donated by Tolstoy's friend Urusov, which had been brought from Yasnaya Polyana. It was a long, hot and dusty journey, punctuated by a night spent at a peasant coaching inn. For the elder children, who slept outside on hay under the stars, and had never seen such a strange landscape, everything was a great novelty.

When they finally arrived, the Tolstoys had difficulty cramming themselves into the small and extremely basic residence on their new estate. In the end, Tolstoy and Stepan took up residence in a kibitka, and the boys and their German tutor slept in the barn. Sonya's qualms, it turned out, were fully justified. The dried dung used as fuel did not burn well, and smelled disgusting; there were clouds of flies everywhere during the day, while large black beetles would drop from the ceiling and start running all over the tablecloth as soon as the candles were lit. The only neighbours for miles around were Bashkirs and peasants. Sonya put on a brave face, however, and did her best to make sure everyone enjoyed their stay. Tolstoy was conscious they were all there because of him, and also did his best to keep everyone amused. He invited an elderly Bashkir to provide the koumiss that summer, which he had almost on tap. Muhammed Shah brought along his wives and daughters-in-law plus ten mares, and pitched his kibitka near to the Tolstoys' house. Every morning various members of the family, plus Hannah, who had come up from the Caucasus to join them, went to sit cross-legged on the carpets in the kibitka and drink from the wooden bowls proffered by Muhammed. The Bashkirs had not adapted well to leading sedentary lives, like the Russian settlers, and Muhammed spoke wistfully about the lands they had lost to peasant farmers from Tambov or Ryazan, who were distinguishable by the colour and styling of their clothes.

Tolstoy certainly derived health benefits from downing up to eight bowls of koumiss at a sitting, and he loved going to Orenburg and Buzuluk to the horse fairs, on one occasion buying a whole herd of wild steppe horses. But that summer he was preoccupied with the drought, and the famine in the area that was beginning to follow the third consecutive failed harvest. There was absolutely no prospect that his optimistic forecast of being able to recoup his investment in two years was possible now. Sonya egged him on to do something, and the new governor's staggering lack of concern goaded him into action.
¹⁰⁸
Indeed, the new governor's only action was to put pressure on those peasants who were in tax arrears with the administration. Tolstoy spent two weeks travelling round each of the districts in a fifty-mile radius of his homestead in order to assess the problem, and then he put together a detailed inventory of twenty-three households in Gavrilovka, the nearest village. It included information about the number of cattle each family owned, the size of their property, how much they had sown and harvested that year and the extent of their debts. Then he sat down and wrote a letter to the editors of the
Moscow Gazette
to ask for the government and the public to come forward with aid. He also wrote to Alexandrine, asking her to raise the issue at court.

There was no area of Russia so dependent on the outcome of the harvest each year as Samara province, he wrote in his letter. Everywhere he had gone, he wrote, he had encountered the same situation: signs of approaching famine which threatened to engulf ninety per cent of the population in the province: 'There are no men anywhere, they have all gone off to look for work, leaving at home thin women, with thin and ailing children, and old people. There is still grain, but it is running out; dogs, cats, calves, and chickens are thin and hungry, while beggars keep coming up to the window and they are given tiny crusts or refused.'
¹⁰⁹
Aware that the authorities' preferred course of action was simply to ignore this disaster (they had already tried to pin the blame for the approaching famine on the peasants by arguing it was due to their drunkenness and laziness), Tolstoy included in his letter all the data he had collected, verified in writing by the local priest, and endorsed with a stamp by the village elder, who of course was illiterate. His research had been very thorough:

1. Savinkin [household]. Old man of 65 and old woman, 2 sons, one married, 2 girls. 7 mouths to feed, 2 workers. No animals: no horse, no cow, no sheep. The last horses were stolen, the cow died last year, the sheep have been sold. They sowed eleven acres [last year].
Nothing
grew, so there was nothing to sow [this year]. No stores of grain. Poll tax of 30 roubles due for the last two periods; for loans from last year 10 and a half roubles; private debt for borrowing train 13 roubles; total 53 and a half roubles...

19. Khramov [household]. Six mouths to feed and one baby, one worker. Animals: 2 horses, 3 cows, 5 sheep. Sown: 9 and a half acres and nothing has grown. Debt: 28 roubles and 48 kopecks...
¹¹⁰

Tolstoy's letter was published on 17 August, while the family was travelling home to Yasnaya Polyana, and quickly reproduced in many other newspapers. It was the factual detail of Tolstoy's inventory which struck Russian readers, for he was not just warning of imminent tragedy on a large scale, but providing some of the very first statistical information about the peasantry ever collected. Liberal politicians in Europe had been championing the collection of empirical data from populations as a valuable tool of social progress since the early nineteenth century, but the spectre of politics had severely impeded the development of the new discipline of statistics in Russia. Nicholas I had been so cautious about Russian society being placed under the microscope (particularly where serfdom and state institutions were concerned) that he had simply censored a lot of statistical work. As a consequence, next to no statistical knowledge of the Russian peasantry was acquired prior to the Emancipation of Serfdom Act of 1861, despite peasants representing the vast majority of the population. Attitudes predictably changed in the 1860s, but it was not until the 1880s that poorly paid members of the intelligentsia began conducting censuses in villages on behalf of the
zemstvo
(local government), and it was not until 1897 that the first national census took place. Tolstoy's letter about the famine in 1873 caused a national outcry, and resulted in donations of nearly 2 million roubles and 344,000 kilograms of grain. Through these donations, which came both from central government and from the populace at large, much of the suffering was either prevented or alleviated. This was Tolstoy's first clarion call about the reality of many Russian peasants' lives, and it would not be his last.