ever, his claims did not seem quite .so self-evident, and he decided not to send it.
While he was thus meditating upon the role of women in general, his own wife was watching for the rebirth of his inspiration. "1'oday, for the first time, he began to write," she noted in her diary on Decernl>er 9, 1870. "I cannot understand what is going on in his head during his hours of inactivity. His lack of direction is a great trial to him. He is ashamed of it, not only with me but with the servants and everyone else. . . . Sometimes he thinks he is losing his mind, and his fear of insanity is so intense that I am terrified when he tells me about it afterward." Tiptoeing back and forth before his study door, she yearned, as though for manna from heaven, to see the pages that illustrious hand would pass out to her to copy. She was eager to do something useful but she did not dare to interfere, for fear of disturbing the work in gestation. Days passed, nothing camc, she grew impatient. Suddenly, instead of handing her the opening chapters of a novel, he announced that he was going to learn Greek. She thought he was joking. But he meant it. He sent for a theological student from Moscow to tcach him the rudiments of the language. From the first day, the forty-two-year-old pupil threw himself into Greek grammar with a passion, pored over dictionaries, drew up vocabularies, tacklcd the great authors. In spite of his headaches, he learned quickly. In a few weeks he had outdistanced his teacher. He sight-translated Xenophon, reveled in Homer, discovered Plato and said the originals were like "spring-water that sets the teeth 011 edge, full of sunlight and impurities and dust-motes that make- it seem even more pure and fresh," while translations of the same texts were as tasteless as "boiled, distilled water." Sometimes he dreamed in Greek at night. He imagined himself living in Athens; as he tramped through the snow of Yasnaya Polyana, sinking in up to his calves, his head was filled with sun, marble and geometry. Watching him changing overnight into a Greek, his wife was torn between admiration and alarm. "There is clearly nothing in the world that interests him more or gives him greater pleasure than to learn a new Greek word or puzzle out some expression he has not met before," she complaincd. "I have questioned several people, some of whom have taken their degree at the university. To hear them talk, Lyovochka has made unbelievable progress in Greek."5 He himself felt rejuvenated by this diet of ancient wisdom. "Now I firmly believe," he said to Fet, "that 1 shall write 110 more gossipy twaddle of the War and Peace type."
He sententiously proclaimed to Sonya, whose eves bulged at his words, "Writing is easy. The hard thing is not to write." "He wants to write something pure and elegant, from which not one word could be- removed," she noted, "like the works of ancient Greek literature or art."8 He had half a mind to write directly in the language of Homer; after all, at the end of a few months of study he had held his own in an argument with Professor Leontyev of the University of Moscow and had even convinced him that he had made mistakes in translation. But in the end, such an undertaking, carricd out at such a pace, could only add to his fatigue, and Tolstoy's constitution began to suffer from his love of Greek. Sonya was pregnant, but he was the one who had dizzy spells, bouts of melancholy and irrational despair. She was more impatient to see him begin a new book than he was to see her delivered of her fifth child.
On February 12, 1871 she gave birth, after a difficult labor, to a deli- catc little girl with pale blue eyes, who was baptized Marya. Puerperal fever set in; the doctors feared for the mother's life. Tolstoy was badly frightened. Then her temperature fell, the pain diminished, and Sonya got up out of bed. Reassured to see her back on her feet again, Tolstoy returned to his worries over the state of his own health: rheumatism in one knee, a little hacking cough. ... He was not quite a hypochondriac, but he was always ready to believe himself seriously ill. It seemed to him that death was assuming all kinds of mysterious disguises in trying to worm its way into his body. "I am ill," he wrote to Fet, "but I don't know what's the matter with me; at any rate, it looks bad, or good, depending on one's attitude toward the end of it all."7 And to Urusov, "My health is poor. I have never been so depressed in all my life. I have lost all joy in living. . . "8 Persuaded that his hour was at hand, he began to treat his wife with increasing coolness. He had lost his appeal for her as well. "Something in us has broken," she wrote. "I have lost my faith in happiness and life. ... I am afraid of the future." And to drag him out of his apathy, she begged him to follow the doctors' advice and return to Samara for another kumys treatment, like the one he had had in 1862. Flattered to see that someone took his symptoms seriously, Tolstoy condescended to go. But, dreading a repetition of the nightmare of Arzamas on the way, lie took along his sixteen-year-old brother-in-law Stcpan Behrs, who had accompanied him to Borodino, and a manservant.
From Moscow they went to Nizhny-Novgorod by train, then down the Volga by steamboat. To reach the village of Karalyk they still had to travel eighty-five miles by road, from Samara. Upon reaching the Bashkir settlement, he was delighted to find that everyone remembered him, after nine years. He rented a felt tent from a mullah, which leaked at every seam. Their bed was a layer of hay, their furniture a chair, a table and one rickcty buffet. Hens cackled and pecked at the ground in the doorway, and tethered horses whinnied. 'ITie diet was strict. No vegetables, no ccrcals, no salt. They ate nothing but mutton, tearing it apart with their hands, and drank kumys. The fizzy, invigorating milk was brewed in leather vessels by the women of the tribe. There were a few Russian summer visitors, in more or less acute states of decline, trying to convince themselves of the rejuvenating powers of the beverage. Consumed at the rate of six bottles a day, it produced a mild and pleasant state of inebriation. At first, however, Tolstoy was sorry he had come. Around slx o'clock every evening, the mortal oppression of the night of Arzamas settled down on him. He could not repress the feeling, and relieved himself by describing it to his wife, with the perverse desire of tormenting her: "It is like a fever, a physical feeling of dread, a sensation I can only describe by saying that the soul becomes separated from the body. As for my mental anguish on your account, I
refuse to let it raise its head. I never think about you or the children,
* *
I forbid myself to think aljout them, for if I did I should head for home the next minute. I don't understand my condition at alclass="underline" either I caught a cold in the kibitka the first chilly nights, or else this kumys is bad for me."0
His consolation was the discovery, among the "patients," of a professor of Greek at a theological seminary, with whom he read his beloved ancients in the original. Thanks to them, in spite of his discomfort, he began to find "a touch of Herodotus" about the Bashkirs. "If you keep slaving away at your Greek you'll never get well," was Sonya's irritated reply. "That is the cause of your anxiety and indifference to life here and now. It's not for nothing that Greek is a dead language: it puts the mind in a coma."10
Tolstoy was touched by her naive concern. Once again, at a distance, his wife seemed a priceless pearl. "Your letters do me more harm than my Greek, they disturb me so," he wrote. "I cannot read them without shedding tears, my whole body trembles, my heart begins to pound. You write anything that comes into your head, but for me every single yvord" is important, I read them over and over again. Right now I love you so much that I want to cry."