The only thing that seriously marred their otherwise happy stay on the steppe was the great poverty around them. A dreadful famine had devastated the province that year. The ruined peasants were selling off their emaciated livestock and going to hire themselves out elsewhere. Women and old people begged by the roadside. The administration was helpless to cope with a disaster of such magnitude, and did not know where to begin. With Sonya's approval, Tolstoy investigated the situation in the neighborhood, toured farms and villages, evaluated the remaining food supply and calculated requirements. Then he published an appeal on behalf of the victims in the Moscow papers. His article, written in the simplest terms, had a considerable impact: a donation from the empress headed the list, and nearly two million rubles were collected within a few months.
The next year only Sergey went to the Bashkir country with his father, but in 1875 Tolstoy took the whole family again, this time to set up the stud farm. He soon had four hundred head: English thoroughbreds,
Rostopshins, Kabardian trotters. To establish good relations with the natives, he organized a race meet. The track was circular, three and three-tenths miles long. First prize: a shotgun; second: a gown of Chinese silk; third: a watch bearing the emperor's portrait. Bashkirs and Kirghiz flocked to the race. A motley encampment sprang up around the farm. Beside every tent the natives dug a hole in the ground— their oven—and drove stakes to tether their horses. The festivities continued for two da^: singing, dancing, banquets. Incredible quantities of kumys were drunk, fifteen sheep eaten as well as one horse and an "English colt that had bad legs." In the evening the veiled women disappeared into the kibitkas and the men, in multicolored costumes and embroidered bonnets, gathered to wrestle. Tolstoy beat them all in the club pulclass="underline" the two opponents, sitting opposite each other on the ground with the soles of their feet together, tugged at a club until one forced the other to his feet. A large body of spectators assembled along the track for the horse race, the women in closed wagons and the men on horseback. Twenty-two riders started, uttering hoarse cries. The wind ballooned in their clothes and sharpened their profiles; whiplashes rained down. The count's horse won second prize.
Tolstoy returned to Samara every summer for seven years, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife, children and friends. But the herd was not kept up and deteriorated from year to year. The last Kabardian horses were shipped to Yasnaya Polyana, where they ended their days ingloriously, working in the fields.
After finishing his Readers, Tolstoy remembered his plan to write a historical novel. He went back to his notes and books and tried once more to take up with the ghosts of the past. Every morning he left his corner room on the second floor and came downstairs in a dressing gown, with his beard in a tangle and his hair on end, to dress in his study on the ground floor of the new wing. He soon reappeared, neat and clean, wearing a gray blouse, and went to the dining room to eat with the family. A light breakfast, and he was back on his feet. With one hand stuck through his leather belt and the other holding a glass of tea in a silver stand, he exchanged a few words with his wife and children and went back to the study, while the brood lowered their voices in order not to disturb him. The little ones retreated to their rooms, or to the garden in the summer, and Sonya, alert to every sound, stayed behind sewing shirts or copying manuscripts in the jam-scented dining room.
Around three or four in the afternoon the master emerged, weary and morose, and climbed on his horse or set off on foot with a gun slung over his shoulder and a dog at his heels. At five, the bell hanging from an old elm rang to call the family together. The children ran to wash up. Everyone waited for the paterfamilias before going to dinner. He came in late, apologized, poured a measure of vodka into a silver goblet and tossed it down with a gulp, heaved a sigh, made a face and went to the table. His walk had whetted his appetite, and he tore into his food. Sonya told him not to "stuff himself on porridge" because the "meatballs and vegetables" were coming afterward.
"You're going to upset your liver again," she would say.114
After dinner he returned to his study and did not come out until eight o'clock, for tea. After that, the grownups conversed among themselves, read aloud or played the piano, while the children, crouching in the corners, hoped they would be forgotten. But the clock on the landing struck ten in its rusty voice, and the young ones were ruthlessly ordered to bed. Sometimes Tolstoy went back to his "lair" to pore over some history book. He was fond of the room, which Sonya had lovingly furnished for him. Book-filled cabinets supported by cross- bracing cut the room in two. Behind the desk, littered with papers and pamphlets, stood an old barrel chair. Hie walls were decorated with stag-antlers brought back from the Caucasus, and the antlers of a stuffed reindeer-head served as clothes hooks. Beside them hung portraits of Dickens, Schopenhauer and Fet. A bust of Nicholas stood in a reccss, sculpted abroad from his death mask. Opposite it was a photograph, dating from 1856, of the contributors to The Contemporary: Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Goncharov, Grigorovich, Druzhnin, and Lxo Tolstoy in uniform.
Despite the comfort and charm of his surroundings, Tolstoy still did not feel ready to begin his book. "Thus far I am not really working," he wrote to Strakhov on December 17, 1872. "I am surrounded by books on Peter I and his period, I read, I take notes, I want to write, and I cannot. But what a period for a painter! Everywhere you look— a mystery, which can only be penetrated by poetry. The whole secret of Russian life is there. I begin to feel that nothing is going to come of all my preparations: I've been trying and fretting for too long now! Besides, I wouldn't care if nothing did come of them."
In one notebook he methodically recorded everything relating to the customs, dress, manners and dwellings of the people; in another, everything connected with the tsar and his court; in a third, the characters, general ideas, crowd scenes, the crucial episodes. . . . "It's like making a mosaic," noted Sonya. "He is going into the most minute details. Yesterday he came back from hunting early and tried to find out from various documents whether it was not wrong to say that high collars were worn with short caftans [tunics with long, hanging sleeves]. He thinks they were only worn with long caftans, especially among the common people."20
Every book he read about Peter the Great made him want to read another one. He had them shipped out from Moscow by the carload. But the more deeply he delved into the period, the more he was afraid of getting lost in it. "I have now reached the point in my research at which I am beginning to go round in circles," he wrote to Golokhvas- tov, the historian, 011 January 24, 1873. And a week later, to Fet, "I am in a very bad mood. Making no headway. The project I have chosen is incredibly difficult. There is 110 end to the preliminary research, the outline is swelling out of all proportion and I feel my strength ebbing away." The very figure of Peter the Great, whom he so admired when he began, had become repulsive to him. It was perfectly plain that his famous reforms, copied after the tyrannical grand duke of Saxony, had not been inspired by a concern for the salvation of the State, but by a desire to add to his own comfort. He had not founded St. Petersburg in order to escape from the plotting of the boyars, but in order to lead an immoral life with his fellow rakes. He had disfigured Russia by introducing decadent Western manners. lie had made the Church subservient to the State, undermined tradition, ordered the boyars to cut off their beards. Tolstoy, a Slavophil in his heart of hearts, sided staunchly with the boyars and the beards. Then, too, he could not forget that the man had had his son Alexis put to death for the crime of not sharing his ideas. If he had to describe the monster, he would give him the same treatment as Napoleon. lie was a past master at the sport of shattering pedestals and upending idols. But this time the idol was Russian, and in spite of everything, it hurt him to demote a national hero. Perhaps he would have better luck with Peter's successors: Catherine II and her favorites. How about taking the officer, Mirovich, as his hero—the one who had tried to free the dethroned tsar Ivan VI? He had looked so hard that he was growing desperate. "The period is too far removed from mc," he said. "I can't put myself inside the people, they have nothing in common with us." During the month of March 1873, he tried seventeen times to begin the book and seventeen times he gave it up. "My work is not progressing," he wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy. "Life is so beautiful, so light, so short, and a representation of it is always so ugly, so heavy and so long."2®