Tolstoy

Completing the first draft of What I Believe produced a state of spiritual euphoria in Tolstoy, and reawakened a desire which had lain dormant ever since he had set out on his quest to live a life consonant with the religious and moral principles he had painfully been hammering out for himself. He wanted to leave his family and make a complete break with his former life, but voicing this desire aloud to his wife resulted in the first serious rift between them. The violent row on a hot August night which led to them sleeping apart was not easily forgotten. Sonya had devoted her life to her husband and his writings, and to bringing up their children. She was already angry that he had been neglecting them ever since they had moved to Moscow, and the thought of him leaving altogether was devastating. Tolstoy was, in fact, deeply conflicted. He was repelled by his family’s patrician lifestyle, but he still loved Sonya deeply – they would have two more children during the next few difficult years – and he had a keen sense of his obligations. In the spring of 1882, after resigning himself to the fact that his family was going to live in Moscow whether he liked it or not, Tolstoy went house-hunting. Days after delivering the proofs of Confession to the editorial office of Russian Thought, he finally decided to buy an old wooden house for them in a quiet back street on the outskirts of the city centre. He had been to visit it several times and negotiated a price of 36,000 roubles. He then spent part of the summer carrying out improvements and repairs so the family could move in at the beginning of autumn.

The house, which dated back to 1808, had belonged to a merchant couple who had bred large numbers of dogs, and was not in a fashionable residential area.¹⁸ Sonya was crestfallen when she first came to Dolgo-khamovnichesky Lane and set eyes on the rather shabby and nondescript house, which had a lunatic asylum and a brewery for neighbours and stood opposite a textile factory. But it had a lush, tranquil garden which made it seem more like a country estate than an inner-city house, and Tolstoy’s mind was made up by the profusion of roses, gooseberry bushes and fruit trees it contained.¹⁹ Tolstoy worked conscientiously that summer: as well as whitewashing, wall-papering and plastering, there were stoves to repair, parquet floors to lay and pieces of furniture to buy. The family moved in on 8 October, happy to be settled at last in what would be their home for the winter months. While Sonya became caught up in a hectic whirl of activities, as she sought to keep all the children under control as well as entertain them, Tolstoy consoled himself that autumn by studying Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi, who was rather taken aback to find his pupil arguing with him about the meaning of certain passages of the Old Testament after only a few lessons.²⁰

As time went on, Tolstoy sought to bring more aspects of his life into line with his religious ideals, and 1883 was a pivotal year in this regard. He now wore peasant clothes in the city as well as at home in the country, dispensed with his title wherever possible and tried to avoid having to be waited upon, but he was conscious that there was a lot more he could do. While visiting Yasnaya Polyana that May, after doing what he could to help put out a fire in the village which destroyed twenty-two peasant homes, he took the first steps in divesting himself of his property, including his literary works, by handing to Sonya power of attorney. Immediately afterwards he travelled for the last time to Samara, where he sold his horses and cattle. He also divided up his land there into five plots to let to peasants.²¹ During his month on the steppe, Tolstoy engaged in heated discussions with a peasant revolutionary living under police surveillance, and endeavoured to show him and his comrades that the use of violence was both immoral and futile.²² He also wrote to Sonya to tell her he had renewed his contact with the local Molokans, with whom he had further long conversations about Christianity. He knew full well that this contact would come to the attention of the police, but despite Sonya’s qualms, his response was ‘Let them report it’.²³