Sonya thought she was pregnant again. She had engaged an English nurse, Hannah Tracey, a clean, energetic, cultivated woman, with whom Tolstoy himself could find 110 fault. The children were growing up, handsome and healthy. And yet, at the slightest pretext he became giddy with dread. One day in May, when Sonya was sitting on the floor of her room sorting and arranging the drawers of a chest, he came in, looked at his wife and suddenly, without reason or warning, felt a wave of rage sweep over him. "Why are you sitting there on the floor?" he shouted. "Get upl" "Right away! I must just finish putting these away." "You are to get up at once!"
He went out and slammed the door. Stupefied, Sonya wondered whether she had unwittingly done something to offend him or whether he was angry because she was working in her condition. She went to his study and gently asked: "Lyovochka, what's the matter?" lie exploded:
"Go away! Go away!"
As she began to draw nearer, he hurled a tray holding a coffeepot and cup to the floor, tore a thermometer off its hook and smashed it against the wall. Tanya, who was in the next room, came running when she heard the noise. Sonya had already left the room. Tolstoy was standing there, his arms hanging down limply, his face white and staring, his lower lip trembling.
"I was afraid of him and sorry for him," Tanya later wrote. "Never had I seen him in such a state." He himself was alarmed by this moment of insanity and decided a few days later to go to Moscow and consult a specialist.
Distance had its usual effect, and on June 18, 1867, overflowing with tenderness, he wrote to his wife:
"Coming into Moscow yesterday, as soon as I saw the dust and the crowds, felt the heat and heard the din, I was so terrified that I wanted to run back and hide beneath your wing as quickly as possible. I always love you even more when I leave you!"
And on June 20:
"I have just read your letter and I cannot describe the tenderness —to the point of tears—I feci for you, not only this minute, but every minute of the day. My little soul, my dove, the best in all the world!"
lie had promised her to see Dr. Zakharin. He went. The physician thumped and poked and prodded him with "pedantic thoroughness" and then announced that his nerves were overstrained and he had gall stones. As he refused to take any medicine, a cure at Carlsbad was proposed as an alternative. But he had no intention of doing even that. At most, he might go on a special diet. Reassured on the score of his health, the question of the publication of his book remained to be settled. On Sonya's advice, he had decided to discontinue the installments in the Russian llerald. The lukewarm response of both critics and readers, when the second part came out in 1866, had convinced him that the essence of a work of this type was in its totality and tli3t by releasing it bit by bit in a periodical, he was distorting its meaning and weakening its impact. Now, therefore, he wanted to publish the book as a whole, and sell it directly through the bookshops.
After a number of unsuccessful attempts, he agreed on terms with a publisher, P. I. Bartenyevf and a printer, Riss. The first printing, without illustrations (Too bad for Bashilov and his drawings! "There is something missing from them—the nerve of life!"), was to be 4800 copies. The book would be published as it was set up, in six volumes.
\ Publisher of Russian Archives.
The series would sell for eight rubles. Tolstoy would advance 4500 rubles to the printer,$ in installments, as his share of the printing costs. He allowed Bartcnyev 10 per cent of the selling price, 20 per cent went to the booksellers, and he took the rest. If the book was a success, the enterprise would be highly profitable for him. Of course, now he would not only have to go on writing the book, he must also revise the two parts which had already come out in the magazine, in preparation for their publication in bound volumes. According to his contract with Bartenyev, the publisher would have the proofs checked over after the author had finished with them, to correct "any mistakes in language or grammatical errors."
He arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, highly pleased with his contract, to learn that Tanya was about to become engaged to her cousin Alexander Mikhailovich Kuzminsky, a good-natured, dull young magistrate. The engagement was nearly broken off because the girl—who was decidedly under her brother-in-law's influence—had the rash idea of showing Kuzminsky her diary, containing her account of her misfortunes with Sergey Tolstoy. But everything worked out in the end. Leo would have preferred Tanya to marry his friend Dmitry Dyakov, who had been much attracted to her since the death of his wife, but was prevailed upon to side with the others." Sergey, moreover, had just legalized his situation by marrying his mistress, the gypsy Marya Shishkin.f On their way to find a country priest to celebrate their respective unions, the two couples had met in their coaches outside Tula. Tanya and Sergey exchanged embarrassed greetings and the horses bore them off to their separate destinies.
Tanya was married on July 24, 1867, and Tolstoy, "patron of the ceremony," made an effort to appear pleased by the event, which was depriving him of his sister-in-law. But although he was losing her in real life, she still belonged to him in his work. Nobody could deprive him of Natasha Rostov. Unfortunately, he was now forced to Stop writing while he corrected the proofs of the first part of the book. He received the galleys of the opening pages in mid-July. He scored out and revised in so many places that Bartcnyev wrote back indignantly:
| Or $12,700.
f On June 7, 1867.
' n an intimate of the Dyakov family, went abroad with
"Cod alone knows what you are doing! If you go on like that we will be correcting and resetting forever. Anyone can tell you that half your changes are unnecessary. But they make an appreciable difference inthe typesetting costs. I have asked the printer to send you a separate bill for corrections. . . . For the love of God, stop scribbling!"23
"It is impossible for me not to scribble the way I scribble and I am firmly convinced that my scribbling is most useful," retorted Tolstoy. "Therefore, I am not afraid of the typesetter's bills which will not, I trust, be exorbitant. Those passages you say you liket would not have been as good if I had not scribbled all over them five times."24
In the chapters telling of Pierre Bezukhov's initiation into a masonic lodge (Volume I, Book V, Chapters III and IV), he made so many changes that he doubted whether the corrector would be able to make them out and demanded a new set of proofs. Even so, the work went quickly. On September 23 Tolstoy returned to Moscow for another interview with his publisher, and also to visit the battlefield of Borodino, seventy-five miles away. His young brother-in-law Stepan Behrs (then twelve years old) went with him; Dr. Behrs lent them his hunting wagon.
For two days they drove back and forth in a driving rain across the vast, muddy, misty plain, punctuated by hummocks and potholes, where, fifty years before, the most devastating of all Napoleonic battles had been fought. Victory of Borodino for the Russians, victory of the Moskva for the French: this hopelessly entangled encounter between the two armies came back to life in Tolstoy's eyes with frightening clarity.* He had studied the movements in books, but everything took on a new light at the actual scene of the battle. He questioned old peasants, who muddled everything up in their memories, took notes, consulted maps, verified troop movements, imagined his characters in different settings. The drizzly fog of September 26, 1867 dissolved in the sunlight of August 26, 1812.t Fields of rye sprang from the bare earth. The landscape became peopled with phantom regiments, nightmare faces wavered past in the fog, flags snapped in the wind, the voice of the cannon thundered through the ground. Lost in his vision, Tolstoy told his inattentive little companion everything he saw. They spent the night in a convent inn and returned to Moscow the following morning after a final tour of the neighborhood of Borodino. "I am very, very pleased with the trip and the way I endured it, regardless of lack of sleep and inadequate food," lie wrote to his wife on September 27. "God grant me health and peace and quiet, and I shall describe the battle of Borodino as it has never been described before."