"She ceased to exist for me about three years ago. So (right or wrong? I cannot say) I avoided her, and could not look at her without suffering. Now she has really ceased to exist (her death-agony was long and painful, as a long labor in childbirth), and my heart goes out to her more strongly than ever before. She was an admirable person. . . ."a2 A little later, he told his sister:
"When death came, her features cleared, and all my memories of her returned; I miss her; one of my most important tics with the past has been broken. You and Sergey are all I have left."33
Mourning, travel, work on the sccond Reader—Anna Karenina suffered from this irregular life. Tolstoy already had a new project in mind: to found a primary teacher training school in his home. He had desks and benches put into the pavilion in which the Kuzminskys usually spent the summer holiday: "Instead of your dear faces," Sonya wrote to her sister, "we shall be seeing unknown muzhiks and theological students." But the local administration showed little interest in the project, there were few applicants (a dozen) and Tolstoy abandoned the idea.
Anna Karenina was no consolation for his academic fiasco. He was fed up with the book and wanted to rewrite the beginning, "everything that has to do with Levin and Vronsky." Strakhov, who had read the opening chapters, begged him not to be too severe: "I can't get your book out of my head. Every time you write something I am stupefied by the freshness, the utter originality of your creation, it is as though I leaped from one period of literature into another. The growth of Anna Karcnina's passion is a divine miracle! . . ."
Chapters I to XIV came out at last in the Russian Herald of January 1875. Willy-nilly, Tolstoy had to sit down and produce the rest, for which Katkov was clamoring. 'Ilie public was enthusiastic. "It's nothing less than delirium!" Strakhov wrote to the author. "I have seen solemn old bodies hopping up and down in admiration: 'Ah, how beautiful! Ah, how beautiful!' they said. 'How can he write like that?' And it's true, the story is pure as crystal."34 With this incitement, Tolstoy redoubled his speed, but did not give up his educational activities. "Not only did I not expect [Anna Karenina] to be a success," he wrote to Strakhov, "but, I must confess, I was afraid I would lose my name as a writer forever 011 account of the book. . . . This winter I am very- busy. ... I am directing the seventy schools that have opened in our district; all are working to perfection. I am continuing the educational research I wrote to you about, teaching my older children myself, supervising the printing of the book, correcting the proofs of the second Reader and going through a family crisis to boot."
The crisis was the illness of their last-bom, Nicholas, who had water 011 the brain.
"In the last four months he has gone through ever)' phase of this incurable disease," Tolstoy continued. "My wife is feeding him herself. Part of the time she is in despair at the thought that he is going to die, and part of the time she is in terror lest he live and remain an idiot."
And with devastating frankness he went straight on, without transition:
"As for myself, it is curious, but I have never wanted to write as intensely, as joyfully as I do now."35
Four days later, 011 February 20, 1875, the child died in dreadful
agonies.!
"I am deeply upset because of my wife," Tolstoy wrote to Fet; "for her, after nursing the child, it was awful. You speak highly of Anna Karenina, and that is music to my ears; the book is a success, from what
t It was on this death that Tolstoy based his shoit story, The Prayer (1905).
I hear on all sides; but I am sure there has never been a writer more indifferent to success than I am, if it is success."3®
Still stunned by this latest death, Sonya had to continue caring for several of the other children, who had whooping cough. They all recovered, but she caught the disease from them, and peritonitis followed. And she was pregnant. Utterly exhausted, she gave birth prematurely, on October 30, 1875, to a baby girl who died after half an hour. Tolstoy was terrified by this new onslaught of death in the family. Why was fate dogging his heels like this? He felt as though he were skirmishing with some animal—intelligent, powerful and vindictive— that had been trained to snap at him. In a moment of abandon, he wrote to Fet: "Fear, horror, death, the children laughing and gay. Special food, agitation, doctors, lies, death, horror—it was torture!"37 Death was there; and he had to eat and sleep, teach the children, tell them to keep their voices down, command them to learn their lessons, write letters, read proofs, cut his nails, brush his beard. . . .
Soon after Aunt Toinette died ha former rival, Aunt Pelagya Ilin- ishna Yushkov, left the convent in which she was perishing of boredom and moved in, bag and baggage, to Toinette's little wood-paneled room. In spite of her seventy-six years, the new arrival was alert, sharp-witted and dictatorial. She had been nursing her dream of usurping Aunt Toinette's place in her nephew's home for twenty-eight years; but her triumph was short-lived. A few months after moving in, she fell ill. Aches and pains everywhere, legs, chest, stomach. The vast piousness that had sustained her throughout her life suddenly fled. Terrified at the thought that she, too, was about to disappear, she struggled, refused to see a priest, accused the family of not knowing how to take care of her. She whined, in French: "I am so happy with you! I don't want to die!"38 Sonya, still extremely weak from her latest deliver)', had to nurse her as though she were a child.
Pelagya Ilinishna Yushkov passed away on December 22, 1875. The same men who had delivered a miniature coffin for the dead baby seven weeks before returned with a larger one for the old woman who lay waiting for them, stiff and white, with an aristocratic pout on her lips and her hands clasping an icon. And once more there were the hymns, the odor of incense, the trip to the cemetery, the muzhiks baring their heads in their doorways. In three years, 1873 to 1875, Tolstoy had lost three children and two dearly loved aunts.
"It is a strange thing," he wrote to Alexandra, "but the death of that eighty-year-old woman has affected me more than any other; I was sorry to see her disappear, to see disappear the last memory to recall my father's and mother's generation, and also sorry to see her suffering; but there was something else in this death that I cannot describe. . . And to his brother, "This winter has been very hard for me emotionally; Aunt's death has depressed me terribly. ... It is time to die! 'lhat is not true. What is true is there is nothing else to do in life but die. I feel it every instant. I am writing, I'm working very hard, the children are healthy, but there is no happiness for me in any of it."40