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 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 became 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.