Traditionally the preparations for a wedding in Russian noble families would take between six and eight weeks, at the least. Tolstoy would not hear of any procrastination. For the first time in his life, he felt a strong erotic attraction to a woman of his own social standing. In his diary he recalled ‘the kiss by the piano and the appearance of Satan’ (Ds, p. 150), obviously meaning sexual arousal. Apart from that, he felt that the time to realize his family utopia had arrived. He was eager to retire to Yasnaya Polyana, enjoy marital bliss and engage in the only two activities he now found appropriate: managing the estate and writing.
His impatience notwithstanding, Tolstoy subjected Sonya’s love to two highly challenging tests. Convinced that spouses should be fully transparent to each other, he gave her his diaries to read. Sonya was shocked and dismayed by the descriptions of her fiancé’s lust and sexual exploits, and especially by the story of his infatuation with Aksinya Bazykina, with whom he had fathered a son. Then, unable to quell his ‘doubts about her love and the thought that she is deceiving herself’ (Ds, p. 150), Tolstoy breached all customs by visiting his bride on the morning of their wedding day and drove her to tears by inquiring whether she was completely certain she wanted to marry him.
The wedding took place on 23 September 1862, a week after the engagement and exactly a month after Tolstoy had, for the first time, mentioned Sonya in his diary as ‘a child’. The couple were married in the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady in the Moscow Kremlin, where Andrei Bers resided as a local doctor. The spurned Liza and the unlucky Polivanov participated in the ceremony. According to Sofia’s memoirs, the marriage was consummated in the carriage taking the newlywed couple from the church to Yasnaya Polyana. Very soon Sonya was pregnant. Their first son, Sergei, was born on 28 June 1863, followed by a daughter Tatiana in 1864, and sons Ilya and Lev in 1866 and 1869, respectively.
The Tolstoys’ honeymoon and the first years of their marriage were far from idyllic. Leo’s feelings proved to be even more fickle than Dublitsky’s opinions. During their first night at Yasnaya Polyana, he had ‘a bad dream’, which he summarized in his diary in two words: ‘Not her’ (Ds, p. 150). After a month of frenzied courtship, he suddenly started to suspect that he had married the wrong woman. The next day he recorded ‘unbelievable happiness’. A week later ‘there was a scene’ that made Tolstoy ‘sad that we behave just in the same way as other people’. He wept and told Sonya she had hurt him with regard to his feelings for her. ‘She is charming,’ he concluded in a rather unpredictable way, ‘I love her even more. But is it all genuine?’ (Ds, p. 150). Tolstoy felt there was something unnatural in their relations. In a long letter to his sister-in-law Tanya, he jokingly described a dream in which his wife had turned into a china doll (Ls, I, pp. 177–9). Was this a veiled expression of erotic dissatisfaction?
The inevitable difficulties of mutual adjustment were aggravated by jealousy. Sonya, stunned by the revelations about her husband’s past, was constantly expecting him to revert to his old ways. In one of the entries in her diary she expressed an ardent desire to murder Aksinya and to tear off her son’s head. Leo, never fully believing he deserved the love he longed for, was traumatized by every real or imaginary token of Sofia’s interest towards any young man who happened to be around. Tolstoy hardly suspected her of physical infidelity; but for him feelings mattered most and he was never completely confident about his wife’s inner world.
The diaries that both spouses kept during the early period of their marriage reflect constant clashes followed by passionate reconciliations. The intense emotional regime imposed by Tolstoy demanded that they share their diaries. Sofia and Leo felt a duty to be sincere and to confess every shade of feeling, but could not avoid anticipating each other’s reactions. Gradually the stream of entries slowed into a trickle and then nearly stopped. They were to resume fifteen years later with even greater intensity when, for Sofia, the diary became the main tool for settling scores and proving her case before her husband and posterity.
Sofia’s situation was, of course, significantly more difficult. Unlike her husband, who enjoyed his native environment, she had grown up in the Kremlin, the literal centre of the empire. A fashionable and educated city girl had to turn herself into a rural landlady, playing cards with Tolstoy’s old aunt Toinette, taking care of children and sharing a responsibility for running the estate. ‘He disgusts me with his peasants’ (SAT-Ds, p. 43), she confessed in her diaries two months after the marriage. Still, Sofia coped remarkably well in the circumstances. During the final months of her first pregnancy Sofia informed her younger sister that she and Lev were ‘becoming real farmers and buying cattle, birds, piglets, calves’ (SAT-Ds, p. 526). They had also acquired ‘a lot of bees’ and the estate abounded with honey. During a visit to the Tolstoys Afanasy Fet was enchanted by the sight of an unexpectedly young and visibly pregnant girl running around the farm with a huge bundle of keys on her belly.
Tolstoy in 1862, before marriage.
Tolstoy immersed himself in agriculture with his usual fervour. He had early decided to get rid of the stewards and managers. He did not need any intermediaries between himself and the peasants. Contrary to the persistent advice of his father-in-law, he adamantly refused to hire a steward, believing that together with Sofia they could do the job much better. On 3 May 1863 Tolstoy informed Fet that:
Sofia in 1862, before marriage.
Sonya is working with me too. We have no steward; I have people to help with the fieldwork and the building, but she manages the office and cash by herself. I have bees, sheep, a new orchard and a distillery. Everything progresses little by little, although of course poorly, compared with the ideal. (CW, LXI, p. 17)
Fet, who unlike his friend ran his estate as a profitable business, was unconvinced. When he asked for his sincere regards to be passed on to the countess if she was not busy ‘playing dolls, sorry playing cash’ (TP, I, p. 366), Tolstoy replied curtly:
My wife is not playing dolls at all. Do not offend her. She seriously helps me, carrying a burden, from which she hopes to free herself in the beginning of July. I made a discovery . . . Try to fire all the administration and sleep until 10, everything will go no worse. I made this experiment and am quite satisfied with it. (CW, LXI, p. 20)
The abolition of serfdom had cut the traditional bond of personal dependence between the masters and the servants. As Nekrasov, Tolstoy’s first publisher, wrote in his poem ‘Who Lives Well in Russia’, ‘the great chain has broken and struck the landlord by one end and the peasant by the other.’1 This ancient chain was to be replaced by economic cooperation based on common interests. Tolstoy still believed in the natural alliance of the two classes living on the land, which would protect peasants from proletarianization and landlords from ruin. Though he needed the income from the land to sustain his growing family, money was not the main reason Tolstoy chose to live in the country. He retreated to Yasnaya Polyana to build a family utopia that would be a bastion against the advance of modernity. Rural economy was only an auxiliary tool in this campaign. His main battlefield was literature. By the end of 1862 he had closed down his village school and pedagogical magazine, wondering why these occupations held his attention for so long.