by Cathy Porter
“She’s got enough clothes,” said Lev Nikolaevich. “She looks very smart too.”
She managed to get one or two things hastily made for me, including the dress for my wedding, which was set for 23rd September at 7 in the evening, at the Palace Church in the Kremlin. At our house everyone was rushing about getting ready, and Lev Nikolaevich had a mass of things to see to. He bought a magnificent dormeuse,* ordered photographs to be taken of everyone in my family and presented me with a diamond brooch. He also had his own photograph taken, which I had begged him to have fitted into a golden bracelet my father had given me. But I didn’t get a great deal of pleasure from the dresses or presents—I wasn’t interested, I was too wrapped up in my love for Lev Nikolaevich and the fear of losing him. These fears have never left me; they have remained in my heart throughout my life, although thank God we have kept our love for each other intact throughout 48 years of marriage.
When we discussed our future together, Lev Nikolaevich said I should choose where I would like to live after the wedding. We could stay on with my parents in Moscow for a bit, we could go abroad or we could go straight to Yasnaya Polyana. I said I wanted to go to Yasnaya Polyana, and start a proper family life at home straight away. And I could see that he liked this very much.
The Wedding
It was 23rd September at last, the day of the wedding. I didn’t see Lev Nikolaevich all day, but he dropped in for a moment. We sat down together on our valises and he started tormenting me, questioning me and doubting my love for him. The thought occurred to me that he wanted to run away, and might have had sudden doubts about the marriage.* I started to cry, and at that moment my mother came in and pounced on him: “Well, you’ve chosen a fine time to make her cry,” she said. “Today is her wedding day, it’s hard enough for her as it is and she’s got a long journey ahead of her, and look at her crying her eyes out.” Lev Nikolaevich looked very penitent, and went off to dine with the Perfilevs, his wedding sponsors, who would bless him and take him to the church. He had asked Timiryazev to be his best man, as his brother Sergei had gone to Yasnaya Polyana to get things ready and would be meeting us there.
From Lev Nikolaevich’s side of the family was his aunt Pelageya Yushkova. She was to drive to the church with me and my little brother Volodya, who carried the icon.
Just before seven that evening, my sisters and friends began to dress me. I begged them not to call the hairdresser, as I wanted to do my own hair, and the girls pinned on the flowers and the long tulle veil. The dress was also tulle, and in the current fashion—very open at the neck and shoulders. It was so thin, light and airy, it seemed to envelop me like a cloud. My thin, childish unformed arms and shoulders looked pitifully bony. I was soon ready, and we now had to wait for the best man to come and tell us the bridegroom was in the church. An hour or more passed, and no one came. It flashed through my mind that he had run away—he had been so odd that morning. But then who should appear but cross-eyed little Alexei Stepanovich, his valet, who rushed in looking very agitated and asked us to open the suitcase immediately and get out a clean shirt. In all the preparations for the wedding and the journey they had apparently forgotten to leave one out! Someone had been sent to buy one, but it was Sunday and all the shops were closed. Another age elapsed while they took the shirt back to the bridegroom and he put it on and went to the church. Then began the farewells, the tears and the sobs, and I felt distraught.
“How will we manage without our little Countess!” my old nurse kept saying over and over again. (She always called me that, probably in memory of my grandmother, Countess Sofia Zavadovskaya, after whom I had been named.)
“I’ll die of grief without you,” my sister Tanya said.
My little brother Petya just gazed at me despairingly with his sad black eyes. Maman avoided me and bustled about preparing the wedding supper. Everyone was plunged in gloom by the impending separation.
Father wasn’t well. I went to say goodbye to him in his study, and he seemed deeply moved. They prepared bread and salt, Maman took down the icon of St Sofia the martyr, and with her brother, my uncle Mikhail, standing beside her, she blessed me with it.
We all drove in solemn silence to the Palace Church of the Virgin Birth, which was just a moment away from our apartment in the Kremlin. I was sobbing all the way. The winter garden and the church were magnificently lit up. Lev Nikolaevich met me in the garden, took me by the hand and walked me to the doors of the church, where we were met by the priest. He took both our hands in his and led us to the altar. The palace choir was singing, two priests conducted the service, and everything was very solemn and splendid. All the guests were assembled, and there were a great many strangers, palace employees mostly. They all remarked on my extreme youth and tear-stained eyes.
Lev Nikolaevich has described our wedding beautifully in his account of Levin and Kitty’s wedding in his novel Anna Karenina. Not only did he paint a brilliantly imaginative picture of the ceremony, he also described the whole psychological process taking place in Levin’s heart. As for me, I had already had so much excitement over the past few days that I experienced absolutely nothing as I stood at the altar. I just felt as though something obvious and inevitable was happening, as though it couldn’t be otherwise, and there was no point in questioning it.
My best men were my brother Sasha and his friend P.,* a former Guards officer with him.
The ceremony ended, everyone congratulated us, and Lev Nikolaevich and I drove home together, just the two of us. He was being very affectionate to me and seemed happy…At home in the Kremlin they had prepared the usual wedding feast—champagne, fruit, sweets and so on. There were a few guests—just close friends and relatives.
Then I had to change into my travelling dress. Our old chambermaid Varvara, who my father’s friend the waggish Doctor Anke had named the “Oyster”, was coming with me, and bustled about with Lev Nikolaevich’s valet finishing the packing.
The Departure and Send-off
The postilion brought round six mail horses, which were harnessed to the brand new dormeuse Lev Nikolaevich had bought, gleaming black trunks were buckled and strapped to the top of the carriage, and Lev Nikolaevich was impatient to be off.
I had an agonizing lump in my throat and was choking with sadness. For the first time I suddenly realized I was actually leaving my family and everyone I had loved in my life for ever. But I struggled to control my tears. Then the farewells started. It was frightful! I broke down and sobbed when I said goodbye to my sick father. When I kissed Liza goodbye I stared into her eyes and she too was in tears. Tanya howled like a child, and so did Petya, who had drunk too much champagne in order to dull the sadness and had to be taken to bed. I then went downstairs and made the sign of the cross over my two-year-old little brother Vyacheslav, who was sound asleep, and said goodbye to my nurse, Vera Ivanovna, who sobbed and hugged me, kissing my face and shoulders, then kissing me all over. Stepanida Trifonovna, a reserved old lady who had lived with us for over thirty-five years, politely wished me much happiness.
These were the last moments. I had deliberately kept the final farewell with my mother to the very end, and just before getting into the carriage, I flung myself into her arms and we both sobbed. Those tears of parting expressed our mutual gratitude for all the love and kindness we had given each other, forgiveness for the pain we had unwittingly caused, my sorrow at parting with my beloved mother, and her motherly wish that I should be happy.
At last I managed to tear myself away from her and took my seat in the carriage without looking back. I shall never forget the piercing cry she uttered then; it seemed to have been torn from her heart.
The autumn rain was pouring down, and the puddles reflected the dull glow of the street lights and carriage lamps, which had just been lit. The horses were stamping impatiently and the ones in front with the postilion were straining to be off. Lev Nikolaevich slammed the carriage door shut, his valet Alexei Stepanovich jumped onto the back seat, and old Varvara
the “Oyster” got up beside him. The horse’s hooves splashed through the puddles, and we were off. I sat crouched in the corner, wretched and exhausted, and wept uncontrollably. Lev Nikolaevich seemed puzzled and dismayed. He had never had a real family and had grown up without a father or mother, and as a man he couldn’t understand what I was feeling. He said he could see I didn’t love him if it hurt me so much to leave my family. What he didn’t realize then was that if I was capable of such passionate love for my family, I would later transfer this love to him and our children. Which is exactly what happened.
We left the city and it became dark and frightening. I had never travelled anywhere in autumn or winter before, and found the darkness and lack of street lights terribly dispiriting. We barely spoke a word until we reached the first stop, Birulevo I think it was. I remember Lev Nikolaevich was particularly gentle and considerate to me. When we arrived at Birulevo, a young couple, titled, in a brand-new dormeuse driven by six horses, we were given the royal suite. The rooms were large, bare and cheerless, with red damask upholstery. They brought in the samovar and made tea. I huddled in a corner on the sofa and sat there silently, as if condemned to death.
“Come now, you must be mistress and pour the tea,” said Lev Nikolaevich.
I obeyed and we had tea, and I felt terribly bashful and nervous. I simply couldn’t bring myself to change to the “thou” form, as he had done, and avoided calling him anything at all; I addressed him by the formal “you” for a long time afterwards too.
Our Arrival at Yasnaya Polyana
The journey from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana took just under twenty-four hours, and we reached our home the following evening, to my great joy. It felt so strange—I was at home, and home was now Yasnaya Polyana.
The first person I saw as I went up the steps of the house where I would spend the next half-century of my life was Aunt Tatyana, holding up the icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Sergei Nikolaevich, my brother-in-law, standing beside her with the bread and salt. I bowed to their feet, made the sign of the cross and kissed first the icon, then Aunt Tatyana. Lev Nikolaevich did likewise. That day was the start of my life in Yasnaya Polyana, where I lived almost uninterruptedly for the first eighteen years of my marriage.
Lev Nikolaevich wrote in his diary: “25th September 1862. Unbelievable happiness! Is it possible that this will last all our lives?”
Various Notes for Future Reference, and Remarks Made by L.N. Tolstoy on His Writing
20th November 1873. L.N. has been describing to me the way he got some of the ideas for his novel Anna Karenina:
“I was sitting downstairs in my study, examining the white silk embroidery on the sleeve of my dressing gown, and I thought how beautiful it was. And then I wondered how it occurred to people to invent all these designs and decorations and embroideries, and I realized there was a whole world of fashion and ideas and hard work that make up women’s lives, and women are so fascinated by all this. And it naturally led my thoughts about the novel to Anna, and suddenly this piece of embroidery on my sleeve suggested a whole chapter to me. Anna is cut off from all the joys of this side of a woman’s life, for she is alone, other women spurn her and she has no one to talk to about all the ordinary, everyday things that interest them.”
21st November 1876. He came up to me and said: “This bit of writing is so tedious!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, you see, I’ve said Vronsky and Anna were staying in the same hotel room, but that’s not possible. In St Petersburg, at least, they’d have had to take rooms on different floors. So as you see, this means all the scenes and conversations will have to take place in two separate places, and all the various visitors will have to see them separately. So it will all have to be altered.”
3rd March 1877. Yesterday L.N. went to his table, pointed at his notebook of writing and said: “Oh, how I long to finish this novel (Anna Karenina) and start something new. My ideas are quite clear now. If a work is to be really good there must be one fundamental idea in it that one loves. So in Anna Karenina, I love the idea of the family; in War and Peace I loved the idea of the people, because of the 1812 war; and now I see very clearly that in my next book I shall love the idea of the Russian people’s powers of expansion.” These powers are demonstrated for Lev Nikolaevich by the constant migration of Russians to the new lands of South-east Siberia, Southern Russia, the Belaya River region, Tashkent and so on.
One hears a great deal about theses migrants at present. Last summer when we were staying in Samara, the two of us drove out to a Cossack settlement ten miles from the farm where we were staying, and on the way we passed a whole string of carts with several families and numerous children and old men, all looking very cheerful. We stopped and asked them where they were going. “We are travelling from Voronezh to the new lands,” they said. “Our people went out to the Amur region some time back, and now they have written telling us to join them there.”
Lev Nikolaevich was fascinated by this. And just the other day at the railway station he heard of a hundred or more Tambov peasants leaving to settle in Siberia on their own initiative. They crossed the steppe and finally reached the Irtysh River. There they were told that the land belonged to the Kirghiz people, and they couldn’t settle there, so they went on a little further.
This is the idea for his next book, as I understand it anyway, and around this main idea he is gathering new facts and characters, many of which are still quite unclear, even to him.
25th August [1877]. L.N. has gone to Moscow to find a Russian tutor for the children.* His religious faith is becoming firmer with every day that passes. He says his prayers every day now as he did when he was a child, and on every holy day he goes to matins, where all the peasants crowd round him and question him about the war.* On Wednesdays and Fridays he fasts, speaks constantly of the spirit of humility and won’t let anyone speak ill of others, stopping them half-jokingly if they do. On 26th July he visited the Optina Pustyn Monastery and was much impressed by the monks’ wisdom, culture and way of life.*
Yesterday he said: “My mental valve has been unblocked, but I have a terrible headache.” He is very upset about all our reserves in the war with Turkey and the situation at home, and he spent all yesterday morning writing about it. That evening he told me he realized the best way to express his ideas would be in a letter to the Tsar.* By all means let him write it, but it’s a risky way to express himself and he mustn’t send it.
26th December [1877]. At three in the morning on 6th December, our son Andrei was born. This seemed to release L.N.’s mind from its mental shackles, and a week ago he started writing some new religious, philosophical work in a large bound volume. I haven’t read it yet, but today he was saying to my brother Styopa: “The purpose of the work I’m writing is to demonstrate the absolute necessity for religion.”*
I like the argument he puts forward in favour of Christianity and against all the socialists and communists, who believe that social laws are higher than Christian laws, so I am going to record it. It goes like this:
“If it hadn’t been for the teachings of Christianity, which over the centuries have taken root in us and laid the basis of our entire social life, there would have been no laws of morality and honour, no desire for equality, goodness and a fair distribution of the earth’s blessings, which is what people live for.”
31st January 1881. Feeling that his knowledge of the Russian language was far from perfect, L.N. decided this summer to set himself the task of studying the language of the people. He had long talks with the pilgrims, holy wanderers and others he met on the highway, and jotted down in his notebook all the popular words, proverbs and ideas he was hearing for the first time. This had some unexpected results.
Until about 1877, his religious feelings were vague, or rather indifferent. He was never an outright unbeliever, but nor was he a very committed believer. This caused him terrible anxieties (he actually wrote a religious confession at the beginning of his new wor
k).
But from this close contact with the people, he became deeply impressed by their lucid, unshakeable faith, and terrified by his lack of it, and he resolved wholeheartedly to follow the same path. He started going to church, keeping the fasts, saying his prayers and observing all the laws of the Church. This continued for some time.
But soon he came to see that the source of all this goodness, patience and love that he had witnessed in the people was not the Church and its teachings; as he himself said, having seen the rays he followed them to the light, and discovered that this was Christianity itself, through the Gospels. He persistently denies any other influence. I shall quote his own words on this: “Christianity lives unconsciously but securely in the spirit and traditions of the people.” That is what he says.
Little by little, L.N. saw to his horror what a discrepancy there was between Christianity and the Church. He saw that the Church, hand in hand with the government, had conspired against Christianity. The Church thanks God for the men killed in battle and prays for military victories, yet in the Old Testament it says: “Thou shalt not kill”, and in the Gospels: “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” The Church demands an oath of allegiance, yet Christ tells us not to take the Lord’s name in vain. The Church has given people a lot of rites and rituals which are supposed to assure their salvation, but have been an obstacle to Christianity; its true teachings about God’s kingdom on earth have been obscured, because people have been forced to believe that they will be saved by baptism, communion, fasting and the like.
This is L.N.’s current preoccupation. He has begun to study, translate and interpret the Gospels.* He has been working on this for two years now, and it seems to be only half-finished. But his soul is now happy, he says. He has seen the light (in his words), and this light has illuminated his whole view of the world. His attitude to people has changed too; according to him, whereas before he had just a small circle of intimates, people like him, he now has millions of men as his brothers. Before, his wealth and his estate were his own—now if a poor man asks him for something he must have it.
