On the road his dread returned, but with less force; he managed to control it. "I felt that some misfortune had befallen me; I might forget it for a moment, but it was always there, at the back of my mind, and it had me in its power. ... I went on living as before, but the fear of this despair never left mc again."
On September 4, when he arrived at Saransk, he wrote to his wife, "How are you and the children? Has anything happened? For the last two days I have been wild with worry. . . . Something extraordinary happened to me at Arzamas. It was two o'clock in the morning, I was very tired, I was sleepy, but I felt perfectly all right. And suddenly I was seized by a despair, a fear, a terror such as I have never known before. I shall tell you the details later. . . ."
He looked at the property for sale and thought it very handsome, but did not have the courage to buy it after his ominous revelations at Arzamas. Everything he saw was tinged with ash. lie had only one thought, to hurry home to Yasnaya Polyana. There, at least, on his own land, with his own furniture and family around him, his life would recover its meaning, or so he trusted. That was his home port, his haven of hope. When he saw the two entrance towers, he felt saved. Sonya rushed into his arms.
Some time afterward he learned that his old friend Vasfly Pctrovich Botkin, the publicist, had died at his home on October 4 during a soiree musicale to which he had invited a great many people. How strange it was—all those preparations, the invitations sent out all over town, the orchestra, the gilded chairs, the baskets of flowers, decisions to make about the buffet, the wines, one's clothes, the seating arrangements, and, all of a sudden—blackout. And how would he die? Leafing through his notebook, he found some lines he had written four years before: "I was expecting some people I was fond of. . . . They arrived and were exactly as I had hoped they would be. I was happy. That evening I went to bed. I was in that half-waking state in which superficial agitation dies away and the soul begins to speak clcarly. My soul was striving toward something, wanting something. 'What can I want?' I asked myself in surprise. 'My friends arc here. Isn't that what I needed to regain my peace of mind? No, that is not it. . . . What, then?' I
went through everything in my mind. . . . Nothing could satisfy this desire in me. And the desire persisted, it still persists and indeed it is the most important and strongest thing in my soul. I desire what does not exist in this world. But it exists somewhere, since I desire it. Where . . . ? 'I'o be reborn, to die. That is the peace I yearn for, we all yearn for. . . Yesterday he was courting death, today he was running away from it. But isn't that the very essence of man, in every circumstance, to put hope in his fear and fear in his hope? For the rest of his life, he was to live like a man who had been hit by a bullet that cannot be extracted. It is always there, lodged in one's head. Impossible to forget it, although one hardly feels it at all.
Winter came, snow enveloped the house, the family huddled together around the glowing stoves and, little by little, Leo Tolstoy regained his confidence in the future.
PART V
Conflict
1. Interim
"All this winter," Tolstoy wrote in February 1870, "I have done nothing but sleep, play bc/.ique, ski, skate and run, but mostly lie in bed."1
This vision of vegetation was not strictly accurate. At forty-two as at twenty, Tolstoy was incapable of doing nothing for a week on end. Between whirls around the frozen pond, where he made S-turns and cut figure-eights, gliding gracefully along with his beard streaming in the wind, he began reading again. That year the objcct of his curiosity was the theater: he read and reread Shakespeare—for whom he had scant affection—Goethe, Moliere, Pushkin and Gogol, and planned to write a play on the reign of Peter the Great. However, when he began to look into the period more deeply, in Ustryalov's History of Peter the Great, he realized that a novel would give him greater scope. He immediately started making notes and drafting outlines, and even dashed off a chapter. But with the first ray of sunshine he dropped his pen and fled outdoors. His place was with the peasants. There was so much to be done on the estate in the springtime! "I received your letter," he wrote to Fet 011 May 11, 1870, "as I caine in from work, covered with sweat and carrying my ax and spade, and thus a thousand miles from any thought of art." A month later, "Thanks be to God, this summer I am as stupid as a horse. I work, chop, spade, mow and, luckily for me, do not give one thought to that awful lit-tra-tyure or those awful lit-try folk." Nor did he give a thought to politics. The noise of the world died away at his doorstep. Neither the Franco- Prussian war of 1870 nor the Commune of Paris troubled his meditations. He did occasionally open his notebook, but only to inscribe philosophical maxims or make childish drawings to illustrate his Reader. Sonya, distressed by his inability to concentrate, blessed the return of the rainy season that drove him back into his study. She so
wanted to relive those arduous years of the creation of War and Peace.
That autumn, she thought her prayers had been answered. "Now our life has become very sober, we work all day long," she wrote to her brother. "Leo sits behind a stack of lx)oks, portraits and pictures, frowning and reading, examining, taking notes. In the evening, when the children are in bed, he tells me his plans and what he wants to write. . . . He has chosen the period of Peter the Great."2 And a month later, "I think he is going to write another epic like War and Peace."3
She was wrong. Tolstoy suddenly abandoned his charactcrs, almost before they were born. He didn't feel them, he couldn't see them, it was hard for him to imagine the world in which their story unfolded. To Strakhov, who was pressing him for the beginning of his next novel to publish in The Dawn, he sadly replied that he could not promise anything: "I am in a most exasperating state of mind, with wild schemes, doubts of myself and hard mental labor all intermingled. Perhaps this is the prelude to a period of happy and confident work, and perhaps, on the contrary, I shall never write another word!"4
A strong feeling of intellectual companionship had bound him to this correspondent after Strakhov's glowing article on War and Peace. Also, he was delighted with a study Strakhov had just published in The Dawn on the position of women. According to its author, woman was entitled by her physical and moral beauty to be considered the queen of creation, as long as she did not forsake her mission. Bom to give delight and bear children, she became a monster the moment she turned aside from the path God had traced for her. Feminism was a crime against nature and it was man's duty to see that his helpmeet did not succumb to this temptation. Tolstoy was ready to enlist in Stra- khov's cause, but pointed out that some women might be useful to society even though they were not wives or mothers: nurses, nannies, maiden aunts, unoccupied widows, "all those who look after other people's children," and even "loose women!" Tie had not yet developed his theory of prostitution as an attack upon human dignity. In 1870, the man who was to fulminate a few years later against the ignominy of paid love (in Resurrection) calmly wrote to his new friend Strakhov that "prostitutes" were necessary for the safeguard of the family. Without them, in the cities, where large numbers of bachelors congregated, "few- wives and daughters would remain pure." Without them, most husbands would eventually be unable to put up with their wives. "These poor creatures have existed since time immemorial and they always will," he said, "and in my opinion it would be impious and unintelligent to pretend that God was wrong to tolerate this state of affairs and Christ had been wrong to pardon one of them." When he read his letter over, how-