Tolstoy

More than ever before, Sonya now lived for the summer months, when Tanya brought her family to stay. She often felt very lonely, and longed to enjoy herself amongst the bright lights of the big city. She had initially welcomed her husband’s embrace of Russian Orthodoxy, but now he seemed to be losing his exuberant joie de vivre. He seemed to be less and less interested in the family, and also in running the estate. She was not mistaken. Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov in October 1880 that he had been misguided all his adult life by equating goodness first with his aspirations to be awarded the St George Cross, then with the writing of novels and owning land, and finally with having a family, as he now knew that true goodness could only be found in the Gospels.⁸⁰

In 1880 Tolstoy began to break with old friends and relatives, who were left feeling hurt and confused. In January he went to St Petersburg to hand over the final payment for the land that he had bought, and he went to see Alexandrine the day after he arrived. After telling her he now rejected the divinity of Christ, he had a violent argument with her which lasted all morning, and he returned to continue it that evening, leaving her so agitated she could feel her heart thumping in her chest. After being unable to sleep that night, Tolstoy then left Petersburg first thing the next morning, and Alexandrine felt deeply wounded that he did not come to say goodbye.⁸¹ Tolstoy’s sister Masha also became intensely religious at this time, but her spiritual journey took her in the opposite direction, deep into the bosom of the Orthodox Church. Her only son Nikolay had married in October 1878, with Tolstoy as best man, but the following summer, just as her illegitimate daughter Elena was finishing her education in Switzerland and Masha was preparing to bring her to settle in Russia, he died of typhoid.⁸² It was a terrible blow for Masha, from which she never really recovered. Instead, under the spiritual guidance of Elder Ambrosy at Optina Pustyn, she became more and more devout, and eventually in 1888 she decided to become a nun. After a stint in a convent in Tula, she settled in a convent near to Optina Pustyn, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Masha remained close to her brother, but they had no common ground when it came to religion.

It took a while for Tolstoy’s friends to acclimatise to his new state of mind. Nothing seemed to be able to faze Strakhov, but the deeply religious Sergey Urusov could not accept Tolstoy’s new views, which he regarded as heretical, and their friendship foundered. Tolstoy’s friendship with Afanasy Fet also disintegrated. Ironically, it was just when Tolstoy decided he wanted to abandon belles-lettres under the influence of his new religious views that his fiction began to become available to the French and English-speaking worlds. The combined Childhood and Youth appeared in English in 1862,⁸³ but it was not until Eugene Schuyler published his translation of The Cossacks in 1878 that there was anything else available by Tolstoy. Turgenev’s friend, the Russian specialist and translator William Ralston, was rebuffed by Tolstoy when he wrote to him asking for biographical information in preparation for an article he was writing about him in October 1878.⁸⁴ ‘I cannot partake the temporary illusion of some friends of mine, which seem to be sure, that my works must occupy some place in the Russian literature,’ Tolstoy wrote back in decorous but distinctly Russian English to Mr Ralston’s address in Bedford Square, London. ‘Quite sincerely not knowing, if my works shall be read after 100 years, or will be forgotten in 100 days,’ he continued, ‘I do not wish to take a ridiculous part in the very probable mistake of my friends.’⁸⁵ Ralston filled in the blanks with the help of Turgenev, and published his pioneering article on ‘Count Leo Tolstoy’s Novels’ in 1879. For the subject of Anna Karenina, Ralston wrote, Tolstoy had chosen ‘society as it exists at the present day in Russian aristocratic circles, combining with his graphic descriptions of the life now led by the upper classes, a series of subtle studies of an erring woman’s heart.’