Leo Tolstoy was not in love with any particular gypsy; he mixed them all up together in one impersonal desire and admiration. Their husky singing so moved him that the tears spilled out of his eyes every time he listened. "Suddenly the chorus is still," he wrote in A Holy Night. "Then there is a chord, and then the same melody, over and over, in a gentle, tender, sonorous voice with extraordinary inflections and astonishing flourishes, and the voice grows steadily stronger and more vigorous until the melody is imperceptibly transmitted to the chorus, which takes it up in a group." And the hero of The Living Corpse said about the gypsy songs, "They're the steppe, they're the tenth century, not freedom, but independence. . . . How is it man can attain that ecstasy and then can't make it last inside him? Ah, Masha, Masha, how you made my guts heave!"
On his way home from these nocturnal sprees his head whirled with the thrum of guitars, the smell of smoke, the silhouettes of the girls in their many-colored dresses, the metallic taste of champagne, a bottomless melancholy, a desire to walk to the ends of the earth, to love- anybody, to die, to be born again, to have a drink of cold water and go back to the place he had just left. He wrote in his diary, "No one who has known the gypsies can ever cease humming their songs over and over, in or out of tune, but always with pleasure, because they remain so sharp in his memory."10
Back home, he sank gratefully into his quiet, peaceful humdrum existence and the gentle face of Aunt Toinette, waiting for him. "After the wicked life in Tula, with the neighbors, cards, gypsies, the hunting and idiotic futility, I returned home and went to her. . . . According to the old custom, we kissed each other's hands: I, her pretty, lively hand; she, my dirty, sinful hand; we greeted each other in French, again according to the old custom; I would tease Natalya Petrovna [her servant] for a moment, and sit in my armchair. She knows everything I have done and is miserable because of it but will not say one word to me about it; always the same good-will, the same love. I sit in the armchair, I read, 1 think, I listen to her conversation with Natalya Petrovna. Sometimes they talk of the past, sometimes they play solitaire, sometimes they discuss omens, sometimes some remark amuses them, and then the two little old ladies begin to laugh, especially my aunt, the way children do—a charming laugh I can still hear today."11
But all the time she was pretending to chat with Natalya Petrovna, Aunt Toinette was watching her nephew out of the corner of her eye. She was clever enough to guess that he would soon be leaving her again. And one clay, after losing four thousand rubiest to his neighbor, the young landowner Ogarev, he suddenly became panic-stricken. Luckily, he won the money back, down to the last kopeck, which enabled him to observe that lie had a rare degree of self-control, except when he was with the gypsies, or drunk. "But I have sworn not to get drunk any more," he wrote. In any case, he would be better off away from Tula and the gypsy singers. . . . Moscow was the place where he could live a life of virtue. He packed his bags on the spot. Left gasping by the suddenness of this decision, Aunt Toinette swallowed her tears, made the sign of the cross over the traveler's head, ordered supplies for the trip and went out on the steps to watch the carriage roll away down the broad drive, its trees stripped by the autumn wind.
In Moscow, Tolstoy rented a small furnished apartment in the Arbat district. His lodgings consisted of a drawing room, with armchairs and
J Or $11,300.
sofa upholstered in red rep, a dining room with a piano—a rented "royalino"—in solitary state, a study with the leather couch indispensable to all Russian reveries, a bedroom, a dressing room and an antechamber. For forty rubles a month, he hired a pochevny, a sort of sledge in fashion that year. He even bought an expensive harness; his turnout was, in his own opinion, flawlessly elegant. All this was necessary for the new project he had adopted. For, as always, he intended to forge ahead. Only he had changed his tack. As soon as he was settled, on December 8, 1850, he sat down to take stock in his diary: "1 have stopped building castles in the air and making plans beyond all human power to carry out. ... In the past, everything that existed in the ordinary sense seemed unworthy of me. Now, on the contrary, I will not acknowledge as good or true any conviction I cannot test in action and apply in practice. . . With this as his point of departure, he drew up the following program: "(1) Join a group of card players, to try my luck when I am in funds. (2) Get into the best society and, under certain conditions, marry. (3) Find a good position."12 And, to fill in the details of the role he meant to play, he set down some "rules of society" for his personal use: "Try to control the conversation at all times, S]>cak in a loud voice, slowly and distinctly; always contrive to begin and end the discussion. Seek out the society of people more highly placed than I. In a conversation, do not shift from French to Russian or Russian to French. At dances, invite the most important ladies and do not be discouraged by a refusal. Be as cold as possible and let no feeling show. . . . Do not stand for an impertinent remark but redeem it immediately by one twice as impertinent." Thus the apostle of Yasnaya Polyana became a social climber. He was seen in every salon: calls on Governor General Zakrcvsky, on the Corchakovs, the Volkonskys, the Lvovs, the Stolypins, the Konivalskys, the Perfilyevs; workouts at the riding academy, exchange of bows along the paths in Sokolniki Park, concerts, theater, balls, dinners, gymnastics, and fencing in Poire, the Frenchman's famous fencing school. All the while Tolstoy was writing in his diary that this existence was vain and futile, he made no attempt to elude it. And, as at Tula, he returned to the gypsies. For variety, he would leave some stiff evening party full of marriageable young ladies, with cold buffet, rubber plants and musicians in tailcoats, to descend, with his habitual drinking companions—Islavin in the lead—upon the surburban cabarets where the beautiful Bohemians with gleaming teeth were performing—the terror of fiancees, wives and mothers. There they sang, drank champagne, broke glasses and spent money with the delicious feeling that they were committing a fatal folly, poetic and irreparable. After solemnly noting in his diary, on December 24, 1850 —Christmas Eve—"in accordance with the laws of religion, stay away from women," lie confessed two days later: "A bad day, went to the gypsies." Again, on December 28, "to the gypsies." And on December 29, "I am living like a beast. ... In the evening, drew up precepts, then went to the gypsies."
Seated on Leo Tolstoy's knees, Katya the gypsy hummed his favorite song, "Tell Me Why," and vowed between verses that she had never loved another man. "That evening I believed her sly gypsy chattcr with all my heart, I was in a good mood and no 'guest' came to disturb me," he admitted a few months later. I lis acquaintance with the gypsies gave him a desire to write a story about them. What fun it must be to tell a story, let your pen flow across the paper. . . . After blackening a few pages, he changed his mind; he was toying with an idea for a noveclass="underline" Aunt Toinette's love life—her sacrificcs, defeat, resignation. . . . But did one have the right to divulge the innermost secrets of the heart, just for the pleasure of composing a work of art? He sorrowfully observed, "Aunt Toinette's life would make a good book," and abandoned the idea. The best thing of all, he said to himself, was to seek material from his own life. And by good fortune, he thought he had just fallen in love with Princess Shcrbatov. What a godsend for a writer! All he had to do was tell the truth. The title would be Story of Yesterday. But his social commitments prevented him from setting to work at once. More gypsies, supper parties, balls—at one costume ball, he turned up dressed as a cockchafer!18 ... At last, he made up his mind. Progress was fitful, the charactcrs would not come to life, the style was heavy, cluttcrcd with metaphor. But the author already knew how to suggest a mood by a gesture or a look, and made skillful use of monologue. "I told myself," he noted, "I shall just go ahead and describe what I sec. What is the best way to describe? Letters make up words and words make sentences, but how to transcribe feelings? Description is not enough." Dissatisfied, it occurred to him that he would feci more at case relating the circumstances that had made him what he was, rather than those of his present life. His childhood was still within reach; in the process of recounting it he would be stimulated by- it, his writing would improve. He set to work with a will. Strict timetable. Iron discipline. Gymnastics and creation. Once again, the torrent drained away into the sand, and the manuscript of Childhood was abandoned after a few pages.