When the shepherd had been buried, the bull sacrificed, and the matter was at an end, lie went back to his Reader and his pupils. At first, Sonya also showed an interest in the education of children. After all, she had received her teacher's certificate before she married, and she personally was teaching her sons Leo and Ilya and her daughter
t Or $566,300.
Tanya to read and write; they learned foreign languages from the English Miss Ilannah and Mr. Rey, a Swiss, and Tolstoy himself was to instruct them in arithmetic and Greek. But although he was a paragon of mildness and patience with the little muzhiks, he became exacting, irritable and unfair where his own progeny were concerned. What was endearing in ignorant creatures destined to oblivion became intolerable in the descendants of Count Tolstoy.
Sonya deplored her husband's sternness, but her chief source of anxiety lay in the fact that he was now totally immersed in his pedagogical experiment and was increasingly neglecting literature. At first she was touched by his concern for the education of the poor, but then it began to exasperate her to see the author of War and Peace frittering away his time on the three Rs. "I am sorry," she wrote to her brother Stepan Behrs, "that Lyovochka is wasting his energy on such occupations instead of employing it to write books. I do not sec the point of all this, since his efforts must be confincd to one tiny corner of Russia, the district of Krapivna."19 It would be a different matter if the publishers would leave her Lyovochka alone; but he was receiving the most mouth-watering proposals from all sides for the publication of a new book: ten thousand rubles in advance and five hundred rubles per sixteen-page sheet.0 A fortune! And he was playing deaf. "It isn't so much the money," she wrote to her sister Tanya, "but the main thing is that I love his literary works, I admire them and they move mc. Whereas I despise this Reader, this arithmetic, this grammar, and I cannot pretend to be interested in them. Now there is something lacking in my life, something I loved—it is Leo's work I am missing, that has always given me so much pleasure and filled me with such respect. You see, Tanya, I really am a writer's wife, I take his work so much to heart."20
She clung all the more fiercely to her mission as "writer's wife" because she was afraid she had failed in her role of just plain "wife." There was no doubt about it; after singing her praises as an ideal helpmeet, capable of satisfying both spirit and flesh, Tolstoy was now discovering that she was "separate" from him. Apart from brief moments of physical pleasure, no fusion was possible between two such strong characters. Both, walled up in their own natures, felt alone and misunderstood. Obsessed by his own work and worries, Tolstoy refused to l)clieve that Sonya, too, might be having difficulties. lie saw her as a fertile mother, secretary, manageress, housewife; he loved her out of habit, because he needed her, because lie had chosen her to play a cer-
• Or 528,300 in advance and $1400 per sheet.
tain role; he did not even notice her any more. And she was scarcely thirty. All those pregnancies! Year after year, she wrote in her diary: "I am pregnant. . . "I am afraid I am pregnant again. . . "I wish I were not pregnant. . . ." What had she got out of life, apart from housework and childbearing? A pitiful coquetry awoke in her. Hiding in her study, her eyes full of tears, she wrote, "I need gaiety, idle chatter, elegance. 1 would like to be liked, to hear people tell me I am beautiful, and I would like Leo to see and hear them too. He ought to abandon this isolation—sometimes he wearies of it—and live with me the way ordinary mortals do."
A look in the mirror turned her to stone: an aging woman with thickened waist and a double chin, her hair parted in the middle, her weary eyes. . . . Oh, no! She was not beautiful! "I never thought I was before, and time is growing short. Besides, what good would it do mc to be beautiful? My darling Petya loves his old nursie as much as he would have loved a great beauty, and Lyovochka would have grown accustomed to the ugliest facc alive, provided that his wife were obedient and contented herself with the life he had chosen for her. . . . I feel like curling my hair. Nobody will see, but it will be pretty all the same. Why should 1 need people to see mc? I like ribbons and bows. I should like a new leather belt; after writing that, I feel like crying."21
With the birth of the sixth Tolstoy child, Petya, the house had become too small. A wing was added, in which the master installed his study. When he withdrew to this book-filled room, the children were ordered to ccase all noise. For them their father was a mysterious, remote and powerful being; they did not really understand what it was he did in there with a pen in his hand. One day Uya asked his mother who had written the poetry she had just recited to him, and she replied that it was by a great author named Pushkin. The child was miserable because he was not the son of an author, but his mother told him that his father was also a famous writer, and then Ilya cheered up again. For him and his brothers and sisters, the most important person in the house was Maman. Everything depended upon her. She was tireless. She was forever nursing "some little one," and she was on the go from dawn to dark, ferreting al)Out and organizing things: she bullied the servants, laid in stores for the winter, cut and sewed shirts for her husband and sons, told the cook Nicholas Mikhailovich what to prepare for dinner, sent everyone out for a walk or ordered them to stay indoors becausc it looked like rain, insisted that they speak French at table and come with clean hands, and administered "the King of Denmark's drops" when they had sore throats. When someone wanted a "treat" he went to see Dunyasha, the steward's wife, who would give him jam in a thin, battered old silver spoon. "We knew why the spoon was like that," wrote Ilya.22 "It had been thrown in the garbage pail and a sow had chewed on it." Even more highly prized as sweets were the hot, sugary pastries concoctcd by Mikhai- lovich. To make them nice and round, he injccted air into them through a little hole, but he could not be bothered to use a straw and simply puffed away with his mouth. They were called "Nicholas' sighs." He was very dirty and drank hard. The children adored him.f They were also fond of Agatha Mikhailovna, tall and scrawny, with white witches' locks and a sour smell in her clothes, surrounded by every dog on the estate; and old Aunt Toinette, who was almost always in bed in her room, in which there was an imposing silver-sheathed icon that gleamed; and Hannah the nurse, and Natalya Pctrovna. . . . Papa, of course, was the most severe. "He almost never punished us," wrote Ilya. "But if he looks me straight in the eyes, he guesses everything I am thinking and I feel uneasy. I can lie to Maman but not to Papa. He knows all our secrets."
And yet sometimes he could be so jolly, this dreaded father! He told his children wonderful tales, about his dogs, Bulka, Malish and Sultan, or a horse he had trained, or the grouse he flushed over by the bog. He took them out sledding and ice-skating in the winter and bathing in the Voronka in the summer, played football and croquet with them. He took them hunting with the hounds and on foot, dressed himself up in disguises and composed charades that made them laugh. Or he read to them: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Grant's Children, The Three Musketeers. He skipped over the "love scenes" in the latter, which made the story incomprehensible. 'ITiere were no pictures in Around the World in Eighty Days, so he illustrated it himself; his young audience crowded around him as he sketched, tumbling to the floor and crawling over the round table. And he invented new games that immediately caught their childish fancy. For example, he would stuff one of them into the laundry basket and drag it all over the house, making him guess at every stop which room he was in. Or, seeing the family bored at tea-time, he would leap up from his chair, raise one arm as though holding a pair of reins, and gallop around the table. 'I"hat, he said, was "the charge of the Numidian cavalry." The children, dizzy with laughter, clattered after him under their mother's mournful, tender gaze.