Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but he loved and lived affectionately with everything that life brought him in contact with, particularly with man - not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be… To Pierre he always remained… an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.60
With every passing year, Tolstoy strived to live more and more like a peasant. He learned how to make his own shoes and furniture. He gave up writing and spent his time working in the fields. In a turn from his previous life, he even advocated chastity, and became a vegetarian. Sometimes in the evening he would join the pilgrims walking on the road from Moscow to Kiev, which passed by the estate. He would walk with them for miles, returning barefoot in the early morning hours with a new confirmation of his faith. 'Yes, these people know God,' he would say. 'Despite all their superstitions, their belief in St Nicholas-of-the-spring and St Nicholas-of-the-winter, or the Icon of Three Hands, they are closer to God than we are. They lead moral, working lives, and their simple wisdom is in many ways superior to all the artifices of our culture and philosophy.'61
4
In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya) Behrs, the daughter of Dr Andrei Behrs, the house doctor of the Kremlin Palace in Moscow, in a ceremony at the Kremlin's Cathedral of the Assumption. Tolstoy drew on this event when he came to write the splendid wedding scene between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina. As in many gentry weddings of the time, the ceremony combines Orthodox and peasant rituals; and there is an insistence, voiced by Kitty's mother Princess Shcherbatskaya, 'on all the conventions being strictly observed'.62 Indeed, one can read the scene as an ethnographic document about this special aspect of the Russian way of life.
Every Russian knows the verses from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in which the lovesick Tatiana asks her nurse if she has ever been in love. The peasant woman replies by telling the sad story of how she came to be married, at the age of just thirteen, to an even younger boy she had never seen before:
'Oh, come! Our world was quite another! We'd never heard of love, you see. Why, my good husband's sainted mother Would just have been the death of me!' 'Then how'd you come to marry, nanny?' 'The will of God, I guess… My Danny Was younger still than me, my dear, And I was just thirteen that year. The marriage maker kept on calling For two whole weeks to see my kin, Till father blessed me and gave in. I got so scared - my tears kept falling; And weeping, they undid my plait, Then sang me to the churchyard gate.
'And so they took me off to strangers… But you're not even listening, pet.'63
The scene encapsulates the contrast between the two different cultures - the European and the folk - in Russian society. Whereas Tatiana looks at marriage through the prism of romantic literature, her nurse regards it from the viewpoint of a patriarchal culture where individual sentiments or choices about love are foreign luxuries. Tolstoy draws the same contrast in Kitty's wedding scene. During the ceremony Dolly thinks back tearfully to her own romance with Stiva Oblonsky and, 'forgetting the present' (meaning all his sexual infidelities), 'she remembered only her young and innocent love'. Meanwhile, in the entrance to the church stands a group of ordinary women who have come in from the street to 'look on breathless with excitement' as the bridal couple take their marriage vows. We listen to them chattering among themselves:
'Why is her face so tear-stained? Is she being married against her will?' 'Against her will to a fine fellow like that? A prince, isn't he?' 'Is that her sister in the white satin? Now hear how the deacon will roar:
"Wife, obey thy husband!" ' 'Is it the Tchudovsky choir?' 'No, from the Synod.' 'I asked the footman. It seems he's taking her straight to his home in the
country. They say he's awfully rich. That's why she's being married to him.' 'Oh no. They make a very well-matched pair.'
'What a dear little creature the bride is - like a lamb decked for the slaughter. Say what you like, one does feel sorry for the girl.'64
'A lamb decked for the slaughter' is perhaps not how Kitty felt - her love affair with Levin was a true romance - but, if Sonya's own experience is anything to go by, she might have found some points of contact with these women from the street.
Sonya was eighteen when she married Tolstoy - rather young by European standards but not by Russian ones. Eighteen was in fact the average age of marriage for women in nineteenth-century Russia - far younger than even in those pre-industrial parts of western Europe where women tended to marry relatively early (around the age of twenty-five).65 (For the past 300 years no other European country has
had an average female age at first marriage as low as twenty years -and in this respect Russian marriage more closely fits the Asiatic pattern.)66 Tatiana's nurse was, therefore, not exceptional in marrying so young, even though thirteen was the youngest she could marry under Russian canon law. Serf owners liked their peasant girls to marry young, so that they could breed more serfs for them; the burden of taxation could be easily arranged so that peasant elders took the same opinion. Sometimes the serf owners enforced early marriages -their bailiffs lining up the marriageable girls and boys in two separate rows and casting lots to decide who would marry whom.67 Among the upper classes (though not the merchantry) girls married at an older age, although in the provinces it was not unusual for a noble bride to be barely older than a child. Sonya Tolstoy would have sympathized with Princess Raevskaya, who became a widow at the age of thirty-five
– by which time she had given birth to seventeen children, the first at the age of just sixteen.68
The arranged marriage was the norm in peasant Russia until the beginning of the twentieth century. The peasant wedding was not a love match between individuals ('We'd never heard of love,' recalls Tatiana's nurse). It was a collective rite intended to bind the couple and the new household to the patriarchal culture of the village and the Church. Strict communal norms determined the selection of a spouse
– sobriety and diligence, health and child-rearing qualities being more important than good looks or personality. By custom throughout Russia, the parents of the groom would appoint a matchmaker in the autumn courting season who would find a bride in one of the nearby villages and arrange for her inspection at a smotrinie. If that was successful the two families would begin negotiations over the bride price, the cost of her trousseau, the exchange of household property and the expenses of the wedding feast. When all this was agreed a formal marriage contract would be sealed by the drinking of a toast which was witnessed by the whole community and marked by the singing of a ceremonial song and a kborovod.69Judging from the plaintive nature of these songs, the bride did not look forward to her wedding day. There was a whole series of prenuptial songs - most of them laments in which the bride would 'wail', as the nineteenth-century folklorist Dahl described it, 'to mourn the loss of maidenhood'.70 The
prenuptial khorovod, which was sung and danced by the village girls in spring, was a sad and bitter song about the life to come in their husband's home: