Tolstoy

Relations continued to be strained that summer when the family moved back to Yasnaya Polyana, and Tanya arrived as usual to take up her summer residence in the other house, along with her children (as a rule, her husband, Alexander kuzminsky, did not join them). The summer days which Sonya spent with her sister were still the happiest time of year for her, but she was increasingly living apart from her husband. He had now started getting up even earlier, so he could do more physical work, and spent long days mowing with the peasants. He now also gave up eating meat, stopped drinking wine and tried to give up smoking.⁵⁸ His personal self-discipline was not sufficient to maintain a cool head in his altercations with Sonya, however, and by early June he was longing to leave Yasnaya Polyana and move away from his family. There was a particularly bitter argument with Sonya about money on 17 June, just before she gave birth. Late that afternoon Tolstoy decided to leave, and he got halfway to Tula before feelings of guilt made him turn back. When the two bearded young men playing cards in the house (two of his sons) told him the rest of the family were outside playing croquet he retreated to his study, to be woken at three in the morning by Sonya, who had gone into labour.

The birth of Alexandra (Sasha) was not a happy occasion – Sonya had not wanted another child, she had dreaded giving birth, and she hired a wet-nurse this time in a fit of pique. Later she explained in her autobiography that Tolstoy was perennially so cold and unpleasant with her during this time, and so unhelpful around the house, that she felt no compunction about defying him in this matter.⁵⁹ That July she was so unhappy that she could not refrain from unburdening herself in a letter to her husband’s former confidante Alexandrine. ‘Lyovochka has never been before in such an extreme frame of mind,’ she wrote, describing how difficult it was to find any common ground between them where they could both make compromises. She also found it hard that Tolstoy was complaining about her in letters, and telling his correspondents how lonely he was.⁶⁰ Alexandrine was no doubt sympathetic. Her irascible relative had barely been in touch since they had fallen out over their divergent views on Christianity, and then suddenly that spring she had been bombarded with four letters from him in quick succession. Tolstoy wanted her to intercede on behalf of Anna Armfeldt, the widow of a Moscow University professor. Her daughter Natalya was a revolutionary who had been sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labour in kara, a particularly harsh prison in eastern Siberia, just north of the border with China (where convicts worked the gold mines). Natalya had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and her mother wanted to be able to settle near her.⁶¹

Tolstoy’s relations with Sonya improved somewhat when post-natal complications made her ill.⁶² Tanya reported to her absent husband in July that her sister was still weak, and that her brother-in-law was still preaching about the need to sell everything up and dismiss the servants, but he became more solicitous.⁶³ One rare source of merriment during these tense years was the Yasnaya Polyana post box. Every member of the household was invited to drop unsigned stories, news items, poems and anecdotes into a locked box placed on the landing by the grandfather clock for Sunday evening readings around the samovar. On 22 August 1884, which was Sonya’s birthday, Tolstoy compiled twenty-three medical histories for the mentally ill inmates at the Yasnaya Polyana hospital, who all suffered from a particular mania. He began with himself, describing his own mania as Weltverbesserungswahn (a desire to improve the world), and its symptoms as a dissatisfaction with the status quo, condemnation of everyone but himself, an annoying loquacity with no thought for his listeners, and frequent descents from anger and irritability to an unnatural lachrymose sensitivity. He prescribed complete indifference from everyone around him to anything he might say as his cure.

Tolstoy diagnosed his wife as suffering from petulantia toropigis maxima (unruly haste), a condition causing the patient to believe that everything depends on her, and a concomitant fear that she cannot manage to do everything.⁶⁴ In her autobiography, Sonya records some of the ‘Ideals of Yasnaya Polyana’ that were posted:

• Lev Nikolayevich: Poverty, peace and harmony. To burn everything he used to have reverence for, and to have reverence for everything he has burned.

• Sofya Andreyevna: Seneca. To have 150 babies who will never grow up.

• Tatyana Andreyevna: Eternal youth, female emancipation.

• Ilya Lvovich: To carefully conceal from everyone that he has a heart, and to give the impression that he has killed 100 wolves.⁶⁵