The years immediately after the abolition of serfdom were tumultuous. Many villages around Russia saw disjointed but violent rebellions by peasants who believed that the nobles were concealing from them the actual will of the tsar. The atmosphere in the capital was also tense and the radical movement was growing. In May 1862 a series of powerful fires, believed to be the result of arson, broke out in St Petersburg. The government started an investigation and a wave of new arrests. In June Chernyshevsky was arrested for instigating a peasant uprising and Sovremennik was temporarily closed. On 6 July 1862 Tolstoy’s estate in Yasnaya Polyana was searched by the secret police following entirely false accusations that he was keeping an illegal printing press. Nothing suspicious was found, but in the process the police turned the house and the whole village upside down, looked in the barn and the pond, scared his old aunt Toinette and his sister Maria to death and, most outrageously, read Tolstoy’s intimate diary and correspondence.
Tolstoy was absent from Yasnaya Polyana when the secret police came. Having lost two brothers to consumption, he had become anxious about his own health and travelled to the Bashkir villages on the Volga to drink kumys, the horse milk popular among the locals, which was believed to have healing effects. He received the news about the raid on his way back and felt himself insulted as an aristocrat, an anarchist and a Russian patriot who devoted his life to healing social divisions instead of inflaming them – and first and foremost as a human being. ‘How extraordinarily lucky it was, that I wasn’t there’, he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘if I had been, I should probably be on trial for murder by now.’
The school could not continue. For a while Tolstoy considered ‘expatriating’. He reassured his cousin that he would not join Herzen and get engaged in his subversive activities:
Herzen has his way and I have mine. Nor shall I hide. I shall loudly proclaim that I am selling my estate in order to leave Russia, where it is impossible to know a minute in advance that they won’t chain you up or flog you together with your sister, your wife, and your mother – I am going away. (Ls, I, pp. 162, 160)
He did not go into self-imposed exile and actually never again left Russia, not even temporarily. The catastrophe relieved him of his obligations and set him free to follow his calling. Tolstoy was certain that to be able to produce work that would finally satisfy him, he needed to change his lifestyle completely. The only way to achieve this radical transformation, he knew, was to get married.
2
A Married Genius
The thought of marriage was not new to Tolstoy. From his early twenties he had been envisaging the idea of family life. When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, he set himself three aims: ‘1) to gamble, 2) to marry, 3) to obtain a post’ (Ds, p. 19). He managed only the first. Five years later, he confided to his diary an intention ‘to go to the country’ and ‘get married as soon as possible’ (Ds, p. 99). On 1 January 1859 he made another New Year’s resolution: ‘must marry this year or not at all’ (Ds, p. 138). As his diaries and letters reveal, over the years he had considered nearly a dozen young women as prospective brides. Only once, however, did Tolstoy take practical steps in this direction. In 1856 he planned to marry Valeria Arsenieva, the orphaned daughter of some country neighbours, for whom Tolstoy was acting as guardian.
Tolstoy’s courtship proceeded in a predictably tortured manner. He constantly questioned himself in his diary whether he loved Valeria and whether she was capable of true love. One day he found her attractive and sweet, another repugnant and stupid. He also bombarded the girl with long didactic letters telling her how she should dress, behave and feel in order to become a good wife. Their frequent conversations doubtless evolved on similar lines. Both parties eventually tired of such peculiar relations. After half a year of hopeless deliberations, Tolstoy suddenly went abroad sending Valeria a formal apology. Two years later, an idealized version of Valeria, as he imagined her at the height of his self-imposed infatuation, appeared in Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, a novella that described life as it might have been if he and Valeria were married.
‘While education is free, upbringing is based on coercion,’ Tolstoy wrote a couple of years later in his article ‘Upbringing and Education’. ‘There is no right to an upbringing. I do not recognize this right. The young generation that always and everywhere protests against the coercion of upbringing does not recognize it, has never recognized it and never will’ (CW, VIII, pp. 215–16). Meanwhile, it was precisely this type of coercive upbringing that Tolstoy practised on poor Valeria, while she dared not protest for fear of losing such an enviable match. In fact, Tolstoy never regarded the family as a union of two separate human beings, but rather as a joint symbiotic personality. In Anna Karenina Konstantin Levin is surprised to find out that his wife became for him an integral part of his own self and he ‘could not now tell where she ended and he began’ (AK, p. 438). Tolstoy’s vision of family happiness was as maximalist and uncompromising as was his notion of literary perfection. Yet he also realized that if he failed at marriage he would not be given a second chance.
Before falling in love with his future wife, Levin often visited the Shcherbatskys and fell in love with the family. Strange as it may seem, it was the whole Shcherbatsky family – especially the feminine part of it – that Levin was in love with. He could not remember his mother . . . so that in the Scherbatskys’ house he saw family life for the first time . . . such as he had been deprived of by the death of his own father and mother. All the members of that family, especially the women, appeared to him as though wrapped in some mystic poetic veil, and he not only saw no defects in them, but imagined behind that poetic veil the loftiest feelings and every possible perfection. (AK, p. 19)
The marriage of the two elder Shcherbatsky sisters relieved Levin of the necessity to choose. Tolstoy’s relationship with the family of the doctor Andrei Bers was similar, but more complicated. Andrei’s wife Liubov’, born Islavina, is described in Childhood. As rumours had it, as a ten-year-old Lev had once pushed her from a balcony, jealous of the attention she gave to another boy. As a friend and regular guest of the Berses, Tolstoy was captivated by the vision of family happiness he had been deprived of in his own early years: he once told his sister that if he were ever to marry, it would be to someone in the Bers family.
Andrei and Liubov’ had five sons and three daughters. Tolstoy loved to spend time with the teenage girls and even played leapfrog with them. The sisters, all of whom had developed literary interests, admired ‘the count’ (‘le comte’) as they called him among themselves. Unlike Levin, his future novelistic alter ego, Tolstoy also had the allure of being a famous writer. In Russian families it was traditional to marry off daughters in order of age. When the Berses first detected Tolstoy’s matrimonial intentions, they were confident that he was interested in nineteen-year-old Liza (Elizaveta), the most serious and well behaved of their daughters, whom they believed to be better prepared for matrimony than her younger siblings.
Tolstoy also was considering this possibility: ‘Liza Bers tempts me, but nothing will come of it’ (Ds, p. 145), he wrote in his diary in September 1861. Next year events took a sudden and dramatic turn. On his way to the Samara steppes for a course of kumys treatment, Tolstoy stayed with the Berses for a day. After his departure, the youngest sister, Tanya (Tatiana), found the middle one, Sonya (Sofia), in tears. ‘Do you love the count?’ asked a surprised Tanya, well known for her ability to ask awkward questions. ‘I don’t know,’ answered Sonya, sobbing. ‘His two brothers died from consumption’ (Kuz, p. 89). Sonya had already promised her heart to a student, Mitrofan Polivanov, and fifteen-year-old Tanya, as she recalled many decades later, was struck by a sudden realization of the inherent duality of human feelings. After ‘the count’ returned from Samara the Berses paid two short visits to Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy first took notice of Sonya not so much as a little girl, but as a charming young woman. By the time he reached Moscow in August 1862, Tolstoy was already asking himself the perennial question: did the feelings he was experiencing amount to real love? ‘I am afraid for myself – what if this is only the desire for love, and not love? I try to look only at her weak sides, but still. A child! It could be’ (Ds, p. 146).