In the meantime his sister-in-law Tanya had lost a daughter, Dasha, five years old, and his brother Sergey a two-year-old son, Alexander.0
Sonya was a long time recovering from her deaths, deliveries and illness. She had lost weight; she suffered from migraines; she coughed and spat blood. Yet she would not give up her role as mistress of the household, and scurried about, ordering and scolding from morning to night. More than ever, she needed to feel her husband beside her, but it bothered him to see her so tired. "There is no worse situation for a healthy man than to have a sick wife," he said.41 One night young Sergey, who slept downstairs, heard a cry in his sleep: "Sonya! Sonya!" His father's voice. Frightened, he got up and opened the door. The hallway was pitch dark. The anguished cry rang out again: "Sonya! Sonya!" She appeared at the top of the stairs, holding a candle, and asked:
"What's wrong, Lyovochka?"
"Nothing," he answered. "I don't have any matches. I got lost in the house."
Sonya was so startled that she had a coughing fit and stood there, gasping and wheezing. Afterward, her husband explained that when lie came out of his study to go to his bedroom, he suddenly could not remember where he was. What were those walls? Where did those steps lead? Panic gripped him to the roots of his hair. "I can give no explanation of this event other than a pathological condition," his son Sergey later wrote. "In my opinion the terror he felt that night was the same as what he used to call the anguish of Arzamas.'" No one in the family dared to pronounce the word hysteria but Sonya must have thought it at the time. She was increasingly worried by her husband's condition. Moreover, she was not in a normal state herself. "I don't sleep, I eat almost nothing, I choke back my tears or hide and cry," she wrote in her diary on September 16, 1876. "I have a low temperature every day and chills in the evening. I am so tense that I feel my head will burst."
At the beginning of 1877 she was no better, and went to Moscow
• Tanya's daughter died on May 3, 1873, and Sergey's boy in January 1873.
to be examined by Dr. Botkin, a court physician.t He reassured her. The cause of all her troubles was her nerves, nothing serious. Back at Yasnaya Polyana, she resumed her secretarial duties with renewed zeal. She hoped Leo would finish the book in the next few months. But he was writing slowly, in snatches, and without real conviction. "I'm sick and tired of my Anna K." he wrote to Alexandra. And to Strakhov, "Don't praise my book! Pascal had a nail-studded belt he used to lean against every time lie felt pleasure at some word of praise. I should have a belt like that. I ask you, be a friend; either do not write to me about the book at all, or else write and tell me everything that is wrong with it. If it is tTue, as I feel, that my powers are weakening, then, I beg of you, tell me. Our profession is dreadful, writing corrupts the soul. Every author is surrounded by an aura of adulation which he nurses so assiduously that he cannot begin to judge his own worth or see when it starts to decline."42
However, he labored away at his manuscript, full of mistrust, anger and weariness. He made revision after revision. He felt that he was taking two steps backward for every stqj ahead. "There are days when one gets up feeling refreshed and clear-headed," he said. "One begins to write; everything is fine, it all comes naturally. The next day one reads it over, it all has to go because the heart isn't there. No imagination, no talent. That quelque chose is lacking without which our intelligence is worthless. Other days one gets up hating the world, nerves completely on edge; nevertheless, one hopes to be able to get something done. And indeed, it doesn't go too badly; it's vivid, there is imagination by the carload. Again, one reads it over: meaningless, stupid; the brains weren't there. Imagination and intelligence have to work together. As soon as one or the other gets the upper hand, all is lost. There is nothing to do but throw away what you've done and start over."
One evening he told Strakhov in anger, "Ah, if only somebody else could finish Anna Karenina for me."43
The summer of 1876 was especially sterile: "Summer has come, wonderful! I go out for a walk, I admire, I don't understand how I was able to sit there and write last winter."44 Toward autumn his energy finally returned and on December 9, 1876 Sonya triumphantly announced to her sister: "At last, we are writing Anna Karenina for good, that is, without interruption. Lyovochka is tense and excited; he writes another chapter every day; I am copying feverishly."
When the children were in bed and the house fell silent, she sat
t It was on this trip that she made the acquaintance of Alexandra Tolstoy, of whom she received, she said, an excellent impression.
down at her little mahogany writing desk and, with loving pen, neatly copied out the pages her husband had left for her, still smoking with the heat of creation. One day he came up to the desk, leaned over her shoulder and said, pointing to the notebook:
"Oh, let me hurry and finish this book so I can start another. Now I see it clearly. If a book is to be any good, you have to love the central idea it expresses. In Anna Karenina I love the idea of the family, in War and Peace I loved the idea of the people, in my next book I shall love the idea of the Russian nation, as a rising force."45
When the proofs of Anna Karenina began to come back in the mail, Tolstoy forced himself to read every word, and in every line a mistake leaped up before his eyes. He was disgusted by his carelessness. "In the margins," Ilya Tolstoy later wrote, "the proofreader's corrections appeared first—punctuation, letters omitted; then my father began to change words, then whole sentences; he crossed out one line and put in another, and in the end the proofs were smudged all over and some passages were so black that it was impossible to return them in that state, since no one except Maman could dcciphcr them. Maman spent whole nights copying over the corrections. In the morning the new- pages, covered with her fine, clear writing, were laid, carefully folded, on his desk, to be sent off in the mail when Lyovochka got up. Papa would pick them up for one last glance. But when evening came it was the same thing all over again: everything altered, even-thing crossed out and written over.
" 'Sonya, darling, forgive me; I've spoiled all your work again; this is the last time,' he would tell her, shamcfaccdly pointing out the places lie had changed. 'Tomorrow well send it all off.'"
Sometimes, after the proofs had already gone he would remember a sentence that was wrong or a weak adjective and have to telegraph the correction.
He went to Moscow several times that winter, and met Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, who had l)ecn worshiping him from afar. "I was frightened and self-conscious when I found myself face to facc with him," the composer wrote in his diary. "It seemed to mc that none of the filth that lies hidden in the heart of man could be kept secrct from this great authority on the subject. . . . But . . . his manner was very straightforward and open and showed little of that omniscience I had feared. With me, he only wanted to talk music, in which he was very interested at that time. He liked to l>clittlc Beethoven and was skeptical of his genius." Tchaikovsky asked Rubinstein to arrange a recital for his favorite author at the Conscrvatory, and was most flattered to see the author of War and Peace shedding tears when the orchestra played the andante of his D Major Quartet.
Tolstoy had always been sensitive to music. It acted on him like a drug. It unstrung his nerves and made him lose control of his reactions. Sometimes he even grew angry with the artist for destroying his peace of mind. Stepan Behrs observed that when his brother-in-law was listening to his favorite melodies, he would suddenly turn "very pale," and "he winced, almost imperceptibly, in a way that seemed to express fear."4® When he returned to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy sent Tchaikovsky a series of folksongs and asked him to arrange them "in the style of Mozart or Haydn."