by A. N. Wilson
One evening Tolstoy went out, leaving Sofya behind with her sister Tatyana and their mother. Obviously, they wanted to hear all about life at Yasnaya Polyana. For the first hour or so, Sofya had nothing but praise for her husband and his ménage. But as time wore on, she was able to admit that life at Yasnaya was not without its difficulties. She admitted to Tanya – as they all called her – that she sometimes got fed up with being an adult. Sometimes she yearned for the company of her younger sisters; she wanted to lark about, as in nursery days, and do the sort of silly things which made Tanya say she was off her head. But if she showed high spirits in that silent house ‘Auntie’ Tatyana Alexandrovna would say, ‘Careful! Gently, ma chère Sophie, pense à votre enfant!’12*
Sofya’s loneliness, and her need for her sister Tanya’s company, was to provide Tolstoy with an essential catalyst when he came to write his masterpiece: not just the model for Natasha Rostova, but a whole imaginative injection of vigour and vitality.
Meanwhile, on that evening during the Christmas holidays in 1862–3, there was in evidence another, more backward-looking ingredient in the masterpiece. The women sat up talking, and talking, and eventually Sofya could not conceal her anger and alarm: Tolstoy was still not back, and it was by now one o’clock in the morning. When at length he appeared, Tolstoy was confronted with a pale, agitated Sofya in floods of tears, and a distracted mother and sister trying to console her. He had no idea why she was so upset. ‘Darling girl, calm down!’ He laughed, and then, as though this would console a young wife who was, apart from anything else, hurt by his neglect, said, ‘I was at Aksakov’s and I didn’t notice the time going by. You see, I met one of the Decembrists there: Zavalishin.’13
One of the interesting things about this story, which occurs in the memoirs of Tanya herself, is that it is not true. Zavalishin, one of the Decembrist rebels in 1825 who had been exiled to Siberia, was not in Moscow at this time. It is impossible to know whether Tolstoy was lying, or whether Tanya misremembers the facts. It reveals, either way, that if there was anything in the family which you would expect to keep Tolstoy up until one in the morning, it would be an encounter with one of those doughty old liberal rebels against the autocracy.
Since 1861, when he had been to Rome and met his own distinguished Decembrist cousin, S. G. Volkonsky, Tolstoy had been toying with the idea of a novel about the Decembrists. Only three chapters got written. They are set in 1856, the year in which S. G. Volkonsky was in fact allowed to return to Moscow after his exile. As he travels back to the city, the returning exile is impressed by all the improvements which he witnesses in his country since 1825 – ‘Russia’s strength is not in us,’ he muses (i.e. in the aristocracy), ‘but in the people [narod].’14 The character, who is a prototype of Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace, has the name of Labazov, so clearly, though he is loosely based on Volkonsky, he is also linked in Tolstoy’s mind with that other Decembrist hero Zavalishin,* his enthusiasm for whom gave a late night to the Bers household in the early days of January 1863.
*
The first six months of 1863 were devoted to clearing the decks in preparation for greater things. As far as Tolstoy’s writing was concerned, it was a time for collecting up what he had written so far, and publishing it in four volumes – the first Collected Works of Tolstoy. The fourth volume contained the much revised The Cossacks, which was published in the beginning of 1863 in Russkii Vestnik, and received, on the whole, golden opinions. Tolstoy, who had published nothing for the previous three years, was now established as a major Russian writer: the author of Childhood, Sebastopol Sketches and The Cossacks. But he knew by now that within him there was a much greater enterprise, nothing less than the history of his own nation, seen entirely through his own imagination: or, to put it another way, the history of his own soul dressed up as the history of Russia. It needed only one spark of joy to set the whole thing going.
During this period Tolstoy wrote one of his most original and enchanting tales, Kholstomer or Strider. It is the story of a piebald horse. Then, there was a pause. The heavily pregnant Sofya, who was a naturally efficient household manager, began to get Yasnaya Polyana ready for the birth of her first child. She was, according to Fet, ‘a beautiful bird who enlivened everything by her presence’. She introduced carpets and curtains into rooms where they had never before been seen. Nursery staff were engaged, and prepared. The rough old servants found themselves on the staff of a Victorian country house: a Russian house, where Auntie still muttered to the icons, and where bast-clad beggars still appeared at the windows, but one touched and enlivened by western civilisation. As June approached, all the family awaited the birth with eagerness and on June 28 Sofya gave birth to their son Sergey, her comfort by no means increased by Tolstoy’s insistence that the labour and delivery should take place on the very same knobbly leather divan from which he had chosen to make his entrance into the world thirty-five years before.
Not long after this joyful event, Sofya’s sister Tanya came to stay for an extended period, and Tolstoy was able to start writing his grande œuvre.
Tanya Bers played an extremely important role in the lives of both the Tolstoys. In the awkward days of their honeymoon, they took refuge in writing jokey letters to Tanya. By March 1863, Tanya was a close confidante of Tolstoy’s. To her he could speak, as to no one else, of his worries about Sofya Andreyevna’s emotional instabilities. For instance, one night he had a bad dream in which his wife had become a painted china doll. He asked her, ‘Are you made of china?’ and she replied ‘Yes I am.’ He began to touch her, and found that she was china all over. The paint was coming off her lips, and there was a piece coming off her shoulders. Her bodice was china, and so was the flesh beneath. The eyes looked real, but they weren’t real. They just stared at the bed.
She obviously wanted to go to bed, and she kept rocking back and forth. I was at my wits’ end, and took hold of her and tried to carry her over to the bed. My fingers made no impression on her cold, china body and, what surprised me even more, she had become light as a glass phial. And suddenly she seemed to shrink away, and she grew tiny, tinier than the palm of my hand, although she still looked exactly the same. I took hold of a pillow, stood her up in one corner, pummelled another corner with my fist and laid her down there; then I took her nightcap, folded it into four and covered her with it up to the chin. She lay there looking exactly the same. I put out the candle and laid her down to sleep under my beard. Suddenly I heard her voice from under the pillow: ‘Lyova, why have I become china?’ I didn’t know what to reply. Again she said, ‘Does it matter that I’m china?’ I didn’t want to upset her and said that it didn’t.15
But it did, and it went on worrying Tolstoy even in his waking hours. Sometimes he would look up and think that the dream was true. As he looked at her, she had a way of becoming a tiny china doll. Tanya was rising seventeen when she received this confidence from her brother-in-law.
Tanya had the most electrifying effect on Tolstoy’s brother Sergey, who met her on one of his visits to Yasnaya from his own estate of Pirogovo. For some years now, he had been living with his gipsy mistress Marya Mikhaylovna Shishkina and they had several children. Apparently, he felt considerable awkwardness about this arrangement and had more or less given up society, living on his stud farm, breeding horses, and seeing no one except gipsies and family.
As soon as he met Tanya Bers, he fell deeply in love with her and she with him. Here was a case of the family sticking together, if not actually an assembly of the Ant Brotherhood. Lev marries the daughter of Marya’s best friend Lyubov and within months, Sergey is in love with Lyubov’s other daughter Tanya. (‘Ah, Lyubov Alexandrovna, do you remember how we used to dance to these tunes together when we were young?’)
A wedding day was fixed. Sergey was to marry his beautiful Tanya. She, unrealistically, had only ever met him on his visits to Yasnaya Polyana which were invariably conducted alone. She was not fully aware of the commitments which he had left behind at
Pirogovo.
Sergey himself decided to put Marya Mikhaylovna away and return her to her gipsy encampment. It was against his conscience to do this, but he was so much in love with Tanya he could not do otherwise. Then, one day, he arrived home before dawn. He came into the house and glanced into Marya Mikhaylovna’s room. He saw her at prayer before her icon and something told him that he could not go through with his plans. That night he wrote to Tanya telling her that the gipsy woman was in despair and that he could no longer marry her, Tanya. Tanya, ever ebullient and volatile, tried to poison herself, but it was not a very successful attempt. Her misery on this occasion was all useful to Tolstoy when he came to describe the grief of Natasha Rostova for Prince Andrey in War and Peace.
Tolstoy, from the beginning, had been gravely suspicious of her attachment to Sergey. When she first confided her love to Lev, he wrote to her:
In the centre of the earth is the alatyr stone and in the centre of man is the navel. How inscrutable are the ways of providence! Oh younger sister of the wife of her husband! In this centre, other objects are sometimes found as well. . . . Tanya, my dear friend, you are young, beautiful, gifted and lovable. Guard yourself and your heart. Once your heart has been given away you can’t get it back again, and the mark on a tormented heart remains forever. . . . I know that the artistic demands of your rich nature are not the same as the demands of ordinary girls of your age; but Tanya, as an experienced man who loves you not just because we are relations, I’m telling you the whole truth. . . .16
Not long afterwards, Sergey did the decent thing by his gipsy girl and married her, giving her children legitimate status (a matter of great importance in nineteenth-century Russia). Tanya herself was to marry an unsatisfactory man called Kuzminsky, ‘on the rebound’. It was not a happy marriage. But Tanya was a survivor.
Her young face still arrests us as it stares out of the photographs. She had rather big ears, and not, by the strictest canons, a beautiful face. But it is all animation. No china doll she. Tanya Bers had a quickening effect upon the Yasnaya Polyana household. As happened in the case of so many nineteenth-century marriages, devotion to the sister-in-law was an important factor, at once solidifying of affection, and dangerous. Tanya was the best friend of Tolstoy’s wife, and not just her sister. It was therefore companionable that he should like her so much too. At the same time, the emotional hazards of proximity were always there, to enliven the relationship. Unlike Dickens, Tolstoy never fell overtly in love with his sister-in-law. He left that to his brother Sergey. Equally it was a matter of fascination. By being the protective friend and brother-in-law, who could warn her off too close an attachment to Sergey, Tolstoy was able to indulge as freely as he liked in the luxury of loving her himself.
In October 1863, there was a ball in Tula, the nearest provincial town of any size to Yasnaya Polyana. Alexander II was visiting the place, and the Tolstoys were invited. Sofya, who was pregnant again, and feeling unwell, could not go, and told Tolstoy that he must take Tanya. Sofya adapted a ball-gown for her little sister, and there came the moment when Tanya, flushed with excitement, appeared in her ball-finery to ask how she looked.
‘You realise, don’t you, Tanya, that even if I was well enough, I could not have gone to the ball?’ asked Sofya.
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t you know Lev’s views? How could I have worn evening dress? It is unthinkable! He is always criticising married women who, as he puts it, “expose themselves”.’17
So it was Tanya’s pretty shoulders and back, and Tanya’s bosom that were exposed for the gentry of Tula. Tolstoy, himself splendidly attired in a frock coat, emerged from his chamber and the pair set off. Tanya’s excitement is written into the episode of War and Peace where Natasha Rostova goes to the ball and dances with Prince Andrey. When Tanya and Tolstoy had driven off, Sofya collapsed in tears. There were to be no more balls for her. Biographers can weep with her, but readers of War and Peace can be thankful. The much needed catalyst was Tanya. It was she who got the novel on the move, it was she who released something in Tolstoy’s imagination. The ingredient was a love which never really rose above the level of a flirtation. Years later, Sofya Andreyevna asked Turgenev why he had not written any fiction in the years immediately before. He confided that he could only write fiction when he was slightly in love, and that of late the ardour had cooled.18 So, Tanya may be viewed as the ‘onlie begetter’ of War and Peace precisely because she was not deeply the object of Tolstoy’s love. This, always, was Sofya. Tolstoy was neither a disloyal nor an inattentive husband. However repellent a modern reader might find Tolstoy’s attitude to women, there was nothing, on its own terms, which was dishonourable about it. Not only was he true to Sofya. From the first, he owed her a dangerous amount. But she was always a wife. This meant, as far as Tolstoy was concerned, that she was his mistress, the mother of his children, and the manager of his household. It meant so much more besides. She was his confidante, his helpmeet and, after only a few months, decidedly the most powerful figure in the marriage. But it was on strange terms – terms which today, outside the stricter disciplines of old religions such as Islam, are almost unknown. She was a wife. Therefore, in public, she submitted; and she did not bare her arms.
If her powerful and disciplined management of all the outward circumstances of Tolstoy’s life provided the setting in which War and Peace was able to get written, it was the good-humoured, lively Tanya who provided the book with that inexpressible liveliness – the life which is its clue.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1863, Tolstoy worked on his book. He was still planning to write The Decembrists, but he now conceived the story as being of three eras. In 1856, his Decembrist hero was to return to Moscow from his Siberian exile; but before that there would have to be an extended section describing the Rising itself, in 1825. Before that again, it would be necessary to tell the story of how that generation came into contact with European egalitarian ideals and notions – through their military service in the Napoleonic wars.
But the mere contemplation of the Napoleonic wars was, for Tolstoy, a matter which called forth all the deep inconsistencies in his outlook and sympathy. With one part of himself, in adolescence and early manhood, he had been a fervent westerniser, a French rationalist, a believer in progress, liberty, and political freedom. All these things were beliefs cherished by the Decembrists, some of whom – so intense had been their devotion to French ideas – followed the invading army of 1812 back to Paris in order to imbibe the new culture. But for the majority of Russians, the invasion of their country by Napoleon had been an appalling outrage. It had led to slaughter on a scale unparalleled in the history of warfare. Memory of this invasion hardened, for so-called Slavophils, the sense that outside, European influences were essentially hostile to Russia’s interest. Russia had been delivered – though at such great cost – and they should show their thanksgiving for that delivery by being as un-European as possible, by recognising that they owed their deliverance to the Christ of the Orthodox Church, to the Mother of the wonder-working icons, to the prayers of the Orthodox saints, to the valour of the Orthodox army, to the wisdom of the saintly Emperor, and to the god-sent Russian winter.
Modern visitors to the Soviet Union, or those who entertain Soviet visitors in the West, are today frequently surprised by the strength of Russian memories of the Second World War. Russians still talk about it all the time – it is not just the Second World War, but the Glorious Patriotic War. Russians find the western attitude towards the last great European war just as incomprehensible: where, among young people, there is not total ignorance of who the protagonists were, there is a tendency to be flippant about it. Not so in the Soviet Union. Whether this is because until very recently it was, by and large, a gerontic state ruled over by men whose finest hour was during the last war, or whether because of the huge numbers slain, or whether because the shock of being invaded when you live in an uninvadeable country takes several generations to live down,
who can say. What a twentieth-century Russian feels about the Glorious Patriotic War against Fascism was felt just as strongly by the nineteenth-century Russian about the invasion by Napoleon. It was the great moment of national trial and national deliverance, analogous to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in Elizabethan England, exercising a similar appeal over the popular imagination, the sort of collective experience in which a nation finds itself.
By October, Sofya records that Tolstoy was now at work on a book which she calls The History of 1812, but it was no mere outward account of those events. A fortnight later, on November 13, she records a coolness between them and, as usual, over-reacts. ‘He does not love me, I couldn’t keep his love. How could I? It was fate! In a moment of grief, which I now regret, when nothing seemed to matter but the fact that I had lost his love, I thought even his writing was pointless; what did I care what Countess So-and-so said to Princess So-and-so?’19
These are clear indications that the masterpiece as we know it was taking shape. From the huge number of drafts, now lodged in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, the scholars have been unable to decide with certainty which bits were written in 1863, and which later. One of the earliest versions, perhaps written soon after Tolstoy had taken Tanya to the ball at Tula, began with a ball at a nobleman’s house in St. Petersburg in 1811. A similar variant begins with the ball, but has a long preparatory paragraph describing the European situation between Tilsit and the fire of Moscow. We know that the link with the Decembrist theme was still strong in Tolstoy’s mind. We know that some of the battle scenes were sketched out in 1863. But most of what he had written were family scenes – what Sofya contemptuously called ‘what Countess So-and-so said to Princess So-and-so’.
Perhaps she was a little jealous that Tolstoy used her sisters, Tanya and Lisa, as secretaries while she was occupied with her baby. But it would be a mistake to imagine that Tolstoy did nothing all year except write The History of 1812. There were long spells when he did not write anything. It was during this year that Tolstoy made ‘an important discovery’: ‘Managers, foremen and overseers are only a burden on a farm. You can verify this by firing all overseers, and by sleeping until ten o’clock. You will see that there will be no change for the worse. I have made this discovery and am absolutely convinced.’20
