Leo Tolstoy

Sofia’s situation was, of course, significantly more difficult. Unlike her husband, who enjoyed his native environment, she had grown up in the Kremlin, the literal centre of the empire. A fashionable and educated city girl had to turn herself into a rural landlady, playing cards with Tolstoy’s old aunt Toinette, taking care of children and sharing a responsibility for running the estate. ‘He disgusts me with his peasants’ (SAT-Ds, p. 43), she confessed in her diaries two months after the marriage. Still, Sofia coped remarkably well in the circumstances. During the final months of her first pregnancy Sofia informed her younger sister that she and Lev were ‘becoming real farmers and buying cattle, birds, piglets, calves’ (SAT-Ds, p. 526). They had also acquired ‘a lot of bees’ and the estate abounded with honey. During a visit to the Tolstoys Afanasy Fet was enchanted by the sight of an unexpectedly young and visibly pregnant girl running around the farm with a huge bundle of keys on her belly.

Tolstoy in 1862, before marriage.

Tolstoy immersed himself in agriculture with his usual fervour. He had early decided to get rid of the stewards and managers. He did not need any intermediaries between himself and the peasants. Contrary to the persistent advice of his father-in-law, he adamantly refused to hire a steward, believing that together with Sofia they could do the job much better. On 3 May 1863 Tolstoy informed Fet that:

Sofia in 1862, before marriage.

Sonya is working with me too. We have no steward; I have people to help with the fieldwork and the building, but she manages the office and cash by herself. I have bees, sheep, a new orchard and a distillery. Everything progresses little by little, although of course poorly, compared with the ideal. (CW, LXI, p. 17)

Fet, who unlike his friend ran his estate as a profitable business, was unconvinced. When he asked for his sincere regards to be passed on to the countess if she was not busy ‘playing dolls, sorry playing cash’ (TP, I, p. 366), Tolstoy replied curtly:

My wife is not playing dolls at all. Do not offend her. She seriously helps me, carrying a burden, from which she hopes to free herself in the beginning of July. I made a discovery . . . Try to fire all the administration and sleep until 10, everything will go no worse. I made this experiment and am quite satisfied with it. (CW, LXI, p. 20)

The abolition of serfdom had cut the traditional bond of personal dependence between the masters and the servants. As Nekrasov, Tolstoy’s first publisher, wrote in his poem ‘Who Lives Well in Russia’, ‘the great chain has broken and struck the landlord by one end and the peasant by the other.’¹ This ancient chain was to be replaced by economic cooperation based on common interests. Tolstoy still believed in the natural alliance of the two classes living on the land, which would protect peasants from proletarianization and landlords from ruin. Though he needed the income from the land to sustain his growing family, money was not the main reason Tolstoy chose to live in the country. He retreated to Yasnaya Polyana to build a family utopia that would be a bastion against the advance of modernity. Rural economy was only an auxiliary tool in this campaign. His main battlefield was literature. By the end of 1862 he had closed down his village school and pedagogical magazine, wondering why these occupations held his attention for so long.

Old debts still plagued him. Prior to his marriage he had lost a considerable sum of money at the gambling table and had to borrow 1,000 roubles as an advance for The Cossacks from Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the magazine Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik). At the end of the 1850s many authors disillusioned with Sovremennik had switched their allegiance to Katkov. A once moderate conservative who was gradually turning into a morbid reactionary, Katkov was no less successful and efficient as a publisher than Nekrasov. Katkov provided an alternative to radical journalism and was supported by the authorities. He gladly made the loan to Tolstoy and kept rejecting all attempts by the repentant writer to repay the debt in money. Having settled in Yasnaya Polyana with a young wife, Tolstoy rushed to complete an overdue story.

The most difficult task facing him was to decide a natural outcome of Olenin’s longing for Marianna. After numerous changes, Tolstoy came to a decision. Irritated by the constant womanizing of her suitor Lukashka, the bravest Cossack in the settlement, Marianna finally gives her consent to Olenin. After a quarrel with his bride, Lukashka loses his usual self-control and is mortally wounded by the Chechens. Full of remorse and hatred towards her unwanted admirer, Marianna throws Olenin out and he is left with no option but to go back to St Petersburg.