That night, or another soon afterward, she yielded to his importunities. Complications and pains followed, and Tolstoy became alarmed. The midwife came to the rescue, and forbade "intimate relations between husband and wife." In dismay, the fifty-six-year-old husband rebuked himself for his brutality and raw schoolboy haste. "The midwife prescribes a strict diet (you can guess what I mean!) for a month at least," Sonya wrote to her sister on September 23, 1884. "I have l>ccn ordered to remain seated or lying down, not to walk, not to go out driving, not to get upset—nothing! It's a nuisance, but what can I do? I did not take care of myself before my confinement and I was not spared by others after it. . . . Lyovochka is quite alarmed and full of consideration for me, although he is unpleasantly surprised by my condition." This enforced chastity so tormented Lyovochka that he advanced the date of his wife's departure for Moscow, hoping to kill temptation by removing it.
Left alone at Yasnaya Polyana he thought of her constantly—as a male, "as a muzhik," he confessed in his letters. He begged her not to pay too much attention to what the Moscow doctors would say, as "they can only ruin our lives." And with what huge satisfaction he described his healthy, simple life in the country, working with his hands, striving for humility and talking to no one but the peasants. A little irritated by this homily, Sonya tartly replied:
"I see you have stayed on at Yasnaya Polyana to play at Robinson Crusoe, not to do the intellectual work I value above everything else. . . . No doubt you will say this is the life that corresponds to your convictions and you enjoy it. That is another matter. All I can say is, 'Be happy, much good may it do you!' All the same, though, it makes me sad to see such intellectual power as you have going to waste chopping wood, heating the samovar and making boots. These may be ideal as relaxation after work, but not as occupations in themselves. Ah, well, we'll speak no more of that! ... I comfort myself with the saying, 'Never mind what game the baby plays, as long as it keeps him from crying.'"
She was afraid her sarcasm might sting too sharply, however, and ended her letter on a conciliatory note:
"Farewell, my beloved, 1 kiss you tenderly. Suddenly I can see you clearly, and I feel my heart swelling with love. There is something wise and good in you, innocent and obstinate, that no one has but you, and it is illuminated by your affectionate solicitude for everyone around you and your look that pierces straight to the depths of every soul."8
Still under the effect of this wifely homage, Tolstoy learned the following day that Dr. Chizh had confirmed the midwife's fears and recommendations. Dismayed, he gave free rein to his remorse:
"Yesterday I received the letter you sent after seeing the doctor, and it has grieved and pained me, and above all, disgusted me with myself. All this is nobody's fault but my own, brutal, selfish beast that I am! And I set myself out to judge others and ape righteousness! I cannot tell you how upset I am. Yesterday I saw myself in a dream, full of contempt for myself."9
"Why, my beloved, do you worry so about my condition?" she answered. "You are absolutely not to blame; we are both at fault; perhaps it is the result of some mechanical thing that went wrong when the baby was being bom. Yesterday I was in great pain, something was flowing inside me as though an absccss had burst, but today there's not a drop and the pain is much less."10
And two days later: "Oh, Lyovochka, if I were to write to you at the times when I want to see you so badly, and tell you all I feel for you, I should burst into such a torrent of passionate, demanding words that you would be submerged by them. Sometimes I suffer from your absence more than I can tell. . . . But as I have told you before, I would suffer more to sec you miserable in Moscow than not to sec you at all. And just now you arc in such a good mood! Your love of music, your impressions of nature, your desire to write, those are you, the real you, the one you want to kill; but in spite of everything, that one remains wonderful, full of poetry, and so good, the one all your friends love in you. And you will not kill him, 110 matter how hard you try."
While these protestations of love, hyperbolic praise and tender counsels were flying back and forth between Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana, Sonya was not losing sight of the material side of the household. Since her husband was absorbed in his meditations and would not stoop to glance at the accounts, she was forced to replace him as master of the house. And its steadily mounting expenses worried her. According to her calculations, they needed 910 rubles a month® to
°Or $26co-$570 plus $280 plus $1700.
manage; 203 for the children's education (including the salaries of two governesses and two schoolmistresses), 98 for the servants and 609 for expenses and food. She informed Tolstoy of this and added that it was impossible to reduce these expenses and she wondered how much longer they would be able to meet them.
From the depths of his retreat, the philosopher smiled. How could Sonya, his wife, fail to realize that such trivialities merited no more than the contempt of the righteous? "Don't be angry, my darling, I simply cannot attach any importance to these money problems," he wrote to her. "These are not events, such as an illness, for example, or a marriage or birth or the acquisition of new knowledge or a good or bad deed or the praiseworthy or blameworthy habits of beings near and dear to us; this is a matter of our personal arrangements, and if we arranged tilings one way before, we can always arrange them differently now, in a hundred different way's. I know it annoys you often and the children always, but I must repeat that our happiness or unhappi- ness does not depend upon whether we spend or earn money, but upon what we make of ourselves."11
Had she been able to read the outline for an ideal existence for himself and his family which her husband had conceived and inscribed in his notebook that very summer, Sonya would in all likelihood have been appalled: "Live at Yasnaya Polyana. Give the income from the Samara farm to the poor. Same for the money from Nikolskoyc, after distributing the land to the muzhiks. For us, that is for my wife, myself and the younger children, keep two thousand to three thousand rubiest of the income from Yasnaya Polyana as a provisional measure. ('As a provisional measure,' i.e., with the ultimate design of turning the money over to others later and restricting our own needs as far as possible; in a word, give more than we take, which is the supreme goal of all our efforts and the joy of our existence! . . .) Keep only those servants who are necessary to teach us their work and transform us, after which, having learned what to do, we will dispense with their services. All live together, the men in one room, the women and girls in another. One room must be a library for intellectual work, another must be a workshop. As an indulgence, we might also provide a separate room for those who cannot resist. ... On Sunday, dinner for us and the poor, readings, conversation. Our life, food and clothcs will be of the utmost simplicity. Everything superfluous, piano, furniture, coach horses, will be sold or given away. Concentrate exclusively on the sciences and arts that can be understood by all. Equal treatment for all, from governor to beggar."
] Or $5600 to $8500.
When, captivated by this mirage, Tolstoy returned to Moscow on November 3, 1884 and found the big house with its servants, schoolmistresses, indolent children, shiny new furniture, polished floors and white tablecloths, he had a rude awakening. lie was forced to admit that Sonya had reason to l)c alarmed by the growing strain on the family budget. Since it was out of the question to change their style of life overnight, literature would have to fill in the gaps left by agriculture. But since Lyovochka had stopped writing novels his royalties had fallen off considerably. lie couldn't care less, of course; but it kept Sonya awake nights.