Brief interlude. Once the biography was written, revised and sent off to Strakhov, Sonya relapsed into lethargy: "The autumn has brought back my morbid melancholy. I spend all my time embroidering a rug in silence or reading. I feel nothing but coldness and indifference toward everyone and everything. Eveiything seems tedious and sad, and ahead —the shadow of darkness."8
On January 30, 1880 she wrote to her sister Tanya, "Sometimes I find this cloistered existence extremely hard. Think, Tanya, that since last September I have not set foot outside the house. It is a prison, though everything inside it is light enough, both morally and materially. Nevertheless I often feel as though someone is fencing me in, shutting me away, and I want to knock everything down and smash everything around me and run away somewhere, but quickly, quickly!"
Of course, if her husband had the only say in the matter, she would never have returned to the city to live. But there were the children. They could not go on studying indefinitely with tutors in the country. In 1881 the eldest boy, Sergey, was eighteen and it was essential to enroll him at the University of Moscow; Ilya and Leo, aged fifteen and twelve, were old enough to attend classes at the lycee; Tanya, seventeen, had a flair for drawing and would study painting and make her debut. Sonya had long been preparing Lyovochka for this great step. Tlicy had discussed it together a hundred times. Tolstoy was unwilling to oppose the move to town since the children's education was at stake; but while everyone around him was looking forward to it with delight, he contemplated with loathing the new life, so contrary to his principles, that he would be compelled to lead there.
While he was imbibing kumys at Samara, Sonya, pregnant again, went to Moscow to rent a house and make preparations to move the entire family. It was decided that they would leave Yasnaya Polyana early in September. Soon suitcases, trunks and wicker hampers appeared in all the rooms. The servants counted linen and sorted it into piles. In the children's rooms all was laughter and clatter and joyous whispering. Neglected, misunderstood and morose, Tolstoy prowled about the grounds and bade farewell to the trees and animals as though he were never to see them again. On August 28, 1881 Yasnaya Polyana was in such a ferment that neither his wife nor his sons nor his daughters thought to wish him a happy birthday. lie was fifty-three years old. That evening he wrote in his diary, "I could not help feeling sad that
nobody remembered." And on September 2, "I often want to die. I cannot get caught up in my work."
At last, on September 15, 1881, the whole family removed to Moscow, to a house rented from Prince Volkonsky in Dcnezhny Street. It was a huge place full of echoes, the partitions were too thin. "A cardboard house," Sonya said. Leo's study was so imposing that he felt lost in it. No possibility of peace and quiet here: the slightest tremor reverberated between the walls as in a drum. Sonya, in dismay, ordered the servants and children to talk in whispers. She wrote to her sister, "Leo says that if I loved him I would have shown more consideration for his state of mind, I would not have chosen for him this enormous room in which he cannot have a minute's peace, in which ever)' ami- chair would be the answer to a muzhik's prayers because with the same twenty-two rubles the muzhik could buy a horse or a cow, that he feels like crying, etc."
And indeed, he did cry. His wife wept beside him.
But she soon recovered. Since Lyovochka was going to fail her, she would have to cope alone. Two weeks before her confinement she- plunged into sorting and storing, arranging, buying furniture. Following her lead, the family found its second wind. Sergey, now a sober young man, reserved, awkward, brutally frank, donned the student's uniform and entered the University. He admired his father and, considering himself also to be an intellectual, despised the government, all civil servants and rich people, and the Orthodox Church. Pretty, sweet Tanya, who had been brought up as a hoyden, swooned with joy at her first trip to the dressmaker. She was clothed from head to foot, enrolled in a painter's studio, presented with a schedule of social engagements. Their father proceeded to enroll Ilya and Leo, the younger boys, in a gymnasium. At the last minute, however, a difficulty arose. In order for a child to be admitted to a State institution, his parents had to vouch for his good behavior in writing. In front of the open- mouthed principal, Tolstoy categorically refusal to assume such a responsibility. "How," he cried, "can I vouch for the conduct of someone other than myself?" lie enrolled his two sons in the Polivanov School, a private gymnasium where pupils were admitted with no other formality than an entrance examination.
The more his family rejoiced in their new style of life, the more he abhorred the city, its falsehood and artificial pleasures. On October 5, 1881 he wrote in his diary: "Moscow. A month has gone by, the hardest month of my life. The move to Moscow. Everybody is settling down. But when are they going to start living? Everything they do is done not in order to live, but because somebody else is doing it.
Poor wretches! And there is no life here! Stench, stone, opulence, poverty, debauchery. The robbers have banded together and despoiled the people, assembled an army, elected judges to sanction their orgies, and now they are feasting. There is nothing left for the people to do but take advantage of other men's passions, to get back what has been stolen from them. The muzhiks are best at this game. In town, the women do housework and the men polish floors or bodies in the steam- baths, or become cab drivers."
At Yasnaya Polyana, social injustice was camouflaged by country quaintness, the poor were scattered far apart, and sun and wind drove away the bad smells; but in Moscow poverty was walled in and concentrated, and it exploded in your face like a boil. Impossible not to see it. In this city, merely having food to eat was enough to make you feel guilty. Stricken by remorse at the comfort in which he and his family were living, Tolstoy could not sleep, refused to eat, groaned, wept and pined for the solitude and peace of his country estate. On October 31, 1881 Sonya gave birth to her eleventh child, a boy, Alexis.
This event brought no joy to the father. He rented two small, quiet rooms in the adjoining villa for six rubles a month and shut himself up to work on his philosophical studies in peace. Around two or three in the afternoon he would slip surreptitiously out of the house dressed as a workman, cross the frozen river and climb the hills on the other side—the Sparrow Hills, white with snow—and there, with voluptuous pleasure and gratitude, he helped the muzhiks to chop and saw wood. In the evening he drew the water from the well himself. Sometimes, as if to impose a penitence upon himself, he went walking in the grim- est districts of Moscow, or to the Khitrovka Market, inhabited by beggars, thieves and escaped convicts. Twisting alleyways led down to a sort of pit surrounded by flophouses and gambling dens. Gaunt creatures, half-man, half-beast, each with his own tragedy, his mortal wound, his madness, swarmed in the murk. Tolstoy inhaled the gamy smell of the fivc-kopcck-a-night flophouses, stumbled over sleeping drunks, brushed against ragged, filthy cripples, handed out his small change and went home, sick with horror and pity. His guilt deepened at the sight of the carpeted stairway, chandeliers, white-gloved lackeys, well-dressed, healthy children and wife, set table, silvcrplatc, five-course dinners.
"It is very hard for me to live in Moscow," he wrote to Alexeyev on November 15, 1881. "I have been here for two months and it is not becoming any easier. I know now that, although I was aware of the enormity of the evil and temptations around us before, I did not really believe in them, I did not really see them as they arc. . . . Now the