Tolstoy

At the end October Sonya fell gravely ill with peritonitis, and then went into labour. Varvara, born three months premature, died a few hours after she was born.⁸⁵ ‘Fear, horror, death, children cavorting, eating, fuss, doctors, falsity, death, horror’ was how Tolstoy defined the situation at Yasnaya Polyana in a letter to his correspondent Fet.⁸⁶ A further source of stress was that the house was full of people just at that time. After Toinette’s death the previous summer, Tolstoy’s other aunt, seventy-eight-year-old Polina, had moved to Yasnaya Polyana from her Tula convent, and she took over running the household while Sonya was ill, but there were also lots of guests: Sonya’s brother Sasha and his wife, her uncle kostya Islavin, Pyotr Samarin and his wife and another family friend. On the most critical day of Sonya’s illness, Jules Rey’s sister arrived from Geneva to become the children’s new governess.⁸⁷

Tolstoy found some solace in writing a very long letter to Strakhov about philosophy, but ended up confronting the meaning of life and the inescapable truth that his own life was just an ‘empty and stupid joke’. He had just turned forty-seven, and he felt he was entering old age – a time when there was no longer anything in the ‘outside world’ that interested him, and all he could see ahead was death. He had now started the long descent back to where he had originated, he wrote, aware that whatever his desire – breeding a particular kind of horse, shooting ten hares in one field, learning Arabic – it could not bring him any true satisfaction. His only hope was that he had understood the meaning of life wrongly.⁸⁸ Meanwhile, to be on the safe side, he went hunting without a gun, so that he could not turn it on himself, and boasted to his brother Sergey that he had managed to bag six hares with his dogs without firing a shot.⁸⁹

Sonya did not have the luxury of contemplating the meaning of life. usually she was too busy with household chores, and now, not the first time, she was actually close to death. Her long convalescence was immediately beset by new problems. Jules Rey’s sister was not a success as a governess, and there was friction: soon Sonya could no longer bear her.⁹⁰ And then, in December 1875, came the slow, painful demise of tyotushka Polina.⁹¹ It was Sonya who had to look after her during her last illness when she was confined to bed. It was Sonya who had to change her soiled bed linen and suffer her shouting and cursing from the pain that the slightest movement caused her. Polina, who conversed in French with her nephew to the last, was terrified of dying, and finally passed away after great suffering on 22 December. She was buried two days later. It was another quiet Christmas.⁹²

Tolstoy was greatly saddened, as the last living link with his parents had now been irrevocably sundered. As he wrote to Alexandrine in March, the death of this old woman had affected him profoundly – more than any other. Despite feeling as fed up with Anna Karenina as with a ‘bitter radish’,⁹³ he had to soldier on, however. Another third of the novel was printed in the first four issues of the Russian Messenger in 1876. The April issue contained a substantial section of Part Five, ending with a chapter recounting the last days of Levin’s brother Nikolay.⁹⁴ As with many other parts of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy drew on his own personal experience to write it. For the character of Nikolay, he recalled aspects of his eccentric late brother Dmitry, and also resurrected in his memory the last days of his dearly loved brother of the same name who had died in his arms. Death seemed to be everywhere. Tolstoy told his one surviving brother Sergey in February that, like his character Levin, he was finding it impossible to get away from thoughts of death, and the notion that nothing else remained for him in life.⁹⁵ Sergey was familiar with the feeling as he himself was a depressive, but so was their sister Maria, who wrote to Tolstoy from Heidelberg in March 1876 to tell him she had been feeling suicidal too:

I’m in such an appalling moral state, loneliness is affecting me so dreadfully, with the constant worry which hangs over on me like the sword of Damocles, and which I think about day and night, that I sometimes get frightened. Thoughts of suicide have begun to hound me, I mean really hound me and so relentlessly that it’s become a kind of illness or madness.⁹⁶

Maria’s ‘constant worry’ was Elena, the illegitimate daughter she had given birth to in September 1863, months after the Tolstoys’ first child Sergey was born.⁹⁷ In 1876 Elena turned thirteen, and Masha, as a widowed single woman, was still too ashamed to bring her to Russia.