"Forgive me, dear Aunt, I am a good-for-nothing wretch to make you unhappy on my account. I know I am the cause of your grief, and I have made up my mind to come back to you as soon as I can and never to leave you any more, except now and then for a few weeks."
It was a somewhat crestfallen Tolstoy who left Petersburg early in June, after paying a few of his creditors and leaving sizable debts behind him with Dussot's Restaurant, Sharmer the tailor and three or four overtrusting friends.
Aunt Toinette welcomed him with open arms. She knew all, forgave all. Gambling debts were traditional in great families. It would have been as abnormal for a young gentleman not to lose at cards as for him not to have a mistress. Since Leo had 110 mistress, honor required him to lose at cards. Even so, she gave a start when he began to quote figures. Extreme in everything, her dear Leo! She frowned, while her heart melted.
Unfortunately, Leo was not alone. He had brought back from Petersburg a German pianist named Rudolf, a man he had picked up in a cabaret, who was, he said, a genius. Under this virtuoso's tutelage, he imagined that he, too, could become a composer. In his enthusiasm he seriously considered writing a treatise entitled Foundations of Music and Rules for Its Study. In the meantime, he learned Rudolf's works by heart: Hexengalop and Cavalry Trots. The two melomaniacs were carried away by their harmonics far into the night. But Rudolf was also earned away by vodka. And as his fingers often left the keyboard to stray among the conservatory of servant girls, he had to be sent packing. Thereupon, Aunt Toinette remembered that she had once been a good musician herself. To please her nephew she took up the piano again, and, four-handed, they played his favorite Etudes and sonatas. Delicious moments. A male presence at her side. A smell of tobacco in the house. She transferred to the son her old mute worship of the father. He bccamc the second man in her life. Sometimes, in conversation, she would call him Nicholas, on purpose, and with guilty pleasure. "I was especially touched by this," Tolstoy wrote, "for it showed me that my father's image and my own had merged into one in her love for us." She was fiftv-seven, her body had thickened and her
j r 4
hair was turning gray, but her eyes still gave off the light, keen glimmer of agate. Her nephew came to her room almost every evening, sat down in a tapestried armchair, nibbled a piece of candy or a date and helped her to lay out her solitaire, watched over by a tall silver-sheathed savior. "Every time I sec Aunt Toinette," he wrote to his brother Nicholas, "I find more excellent qualities in her. The only fault one can find with her is that she is too romantic; but that is because she has such a good heart and such a good mind, and she had to occupy her mind with something, so for want of anything better, she chose to build the whole world into one great romance."7
And Aunt Toinette confessed, in her private diary and the drafts of her letters, that her nephew's affection made her forget the "cruel torment" that gnawed at her heart; he was the "light of her life," she could not live without him. "When you sat beside me on the divan," she wrote, "I looked at you with all my soul and all my senses, I was transformed into that look, I could not utter a word; my soul was so full of you that I forgot everything else."8 This love, more or less repressed, more or less disguised, did not prevent the old spinster from judging "her Lyovochka" with clear eyes. She said he was "a man for challenges" and that in order to use up his excess energy he should be "writing novels." Attached to him so intensely by the complex feelings of pseudo-mother and pseudo-mistress, she might well have dreaded the thought that another woman could come and take him away from her. But she was above such petty jealousy; on the contrary, it pained her to see her attractive nephew living so sedately. She yearned for an amoral, brilliant future for him in keeping with the fashion of the time. " The good aunt with whom I lived, the purest creature alive," Tolstoy wrote in Confession, "was always telling me there was nothing she wanted so much as for me to have an affair with a married woman. There is no better education for a young man than an affair with a woman of good breeding!' There was another blessing she desired for me: to be an aide-de-camp, preferably to the emperor; but the very summit of bliss would have been for me to marry a very rich girl, so that I might acquire many serfs."
None of these projects appeared outrageous to the young man at the time, but neither did any of them tempt him. To be sure, he had given up his solitary pleasures, but when he sought the company of women now, he wanted them easy to take and easy to leave. His roving eye first fell upon one of Aunt Toinette's servants, Gash a," who was a virgin, guileless and clean. She had eyes that were "black as wet currants," a candid smile on velvet lips, a white apron over a round belly— her very walk disturbed him, the mere sound of her voice. He pursued her down the corridors, stole a few kisses from her and, one night, entreated her to open her door to him. 1'he latch dropped back, he slipped through the crack and clasped in his arms a quaking body huddled inside a coarse linen nightshirt. Ilis desire quenched, what disgust, what lassitude! "What does all that mean?" he asked himself. "Is what has happened to me wonderful or horrible?" And he concluded, "Bah! it's the way of the world; everybody does itf't Aunt Toinette soon discovered the liaison, duly flew into a rage against her maid—not her nephew—and dismissed the poor girl. "I seduced her, she was sent away, and she perished," Leo Tolstoy later told Biryukov, his biographer. And when, in Resurrection, he told the story of the young servant-girl who was deflowered by her benefactress' nephew, turned out of the house pregnant, and driven to prostitution, penury and theft, it was Gasha who was haunting his memory. Contrary to Tolstoy's assertions, however, Gasha's fate had nothing in common with that of the Katyusha Mazlova of the novel. After her "fault," Gasha became a chambermaid to Marya Nikolaycvna, Leo Tolstoy's sister, gained her confidence and raised her children.
Another house-servant next attracted the young master's attention and received the honor of his favors. Her name was Dunyasha and she was later to marry a steward of the Tolstoy family named Orekhov. After riding by their trysting-place at the age of sixty-nine, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "1 remembered the nights I spent there, Dunvasha's beauty and youth (I did not have a real affair with her), her strong womanly body. Where is it? Long since, nothing but bones."9 lie was also to confess to a relationship with a serf-woman from the village. Did he, like Irtenyev in his short story The Devil, meet his mistress in the gamekeeper's collage? Irtenyev behaved as he did because it was
•Her full name was Agatha Mikhailovna Trubctskaya.
f Remrrection, Book I, Chapter XVII.
"essential to his health and peace of mind." The woman the gamekeeper had provided for him "wore a white blouse and an embroidered skirt, had a red scarf on her head and was barefoot—fresh, sturdy, comely, smiling." Thanks to her, he was able, the author states, to overcome "the major drawback of country life: voluntary chastity." But what Irtenyev believed to be only a passing fancy developed into an abiding passion. This was not the ease with Leo Tolstoy who, while having a whirl with the girls in his house and village, kept enough of a cool head to work.
Every time he took up some new activity, he wanted to write a treatise on it. The treatise on music, Foundations of Music and Rules for Its Study, was followed by one in French, On Gymnastics—because he had resumed his morning limbering-up exercises—and another, On Cards—because he had lost so much money playing them. He might also have written a treatise on the habits and customs of the Bohemians, for he had been haunting the singers of the gypsy chorus at Tula for some time. The distance between Yasnaya Polyana and Tula was small and the road was paved. Officially, Tolstoy went to town now and then on business (he had signed up to work part-time for the Chancellery of the Assembly of Representatives of the Nobility, at Tula). But in fact, once he got there, he sped from elegant reception to low dive, from the young ladies to the girls. His passion for the gypsies was shared by his brother Sergey, who had fallen in love with a little singer, Marya Shishkin, a wasp-waisted lass of seventeen with intense black eyes and a throaty voice. She became his mistress. After paying a steep price for her to the leader of the chorus, he intended to take her to his estate at Pirogovo and break off all relations with any neighbors who dared to raise their eyebrows.