Then, after sealing his letter, he would wander pensively into Aunt Toinette's room, sit down in the battered tapestry armchair, exchange a few words with the wrinkled little old lady who took the place of a mother for him, watch her begin to nod over her sewing basket, turn the pages of a book, read, daydream. . . . Suddenly she would raise her head and mumble a few trivial words: "Sergey went to Pirogovo a few days ago. ... I think Nicholas is going to stay on in Moscow with Mashenka. . . ." Or she would ask him how the telegraph worked and, after listening to her nephew's explanation, comment: "That's odd. I watched it for a whole half-hour and I didn't see a single letter going along the wire."21
Tolstoy appreciated these soporific family evenings all the more because he was exhausted by the end of the day. To preserve the excellent physical condition he had worked so hard to achieve in Moscow, he had a bar fixed to the wall of his study in front of the window and worked out on it every morning, to the mystification of the passing muzhiks. "I come to the master for orders," the steward said, "and I find him hanging upside down by one leg on a bar. There he hangs, swinging back and forth with his head down. His hair is all on end and goes flying to and fro, and his face is purple. ... I don't know whether to listen to his orders or watch him perform."22 IIow was one to pay any heed to the exhortations of a country gentleman who behaved like a circus acrobat? And what a frightful spectacle for the maids! One girl told Marya Tolstoy, who wanted to send her to work at her brother's house, "I won't go there, Madame. He runs about the place stark naked, turning somersaults."23
The master progressed from bar to plow. He wanted to share in the work of the muzhiks, in order to understand them better. One in particular, Yufan, impressed him enormously by his strength and skill. The ever-ironic Nicholas Tolstoy told Fct that "I.eo was enchanted with the way Yufan spreads his arms when he plows. And lo and behold, Yufan has now become a symbol of peasant vitality to him. . . . Following his example, he spreads his elbows apart, seizes the plow ... and Yufan izes."24 Tolstoy liked scything best of all—the rhythmic strokes, the mind a blank and sweat pouring down, taking care to remain on a line with the rest of the men. lie often shared their meal, sitting on the ground in the shade of a copse. One day on a visit to Yasnaya Polyana Turgenev saw him carrying bales of straw on his back and concluded that he was "lost to literature." Tolstoy himself wrote in his diary, "I am not writing, or reading, or thinking. I am completely absorbed in the farm. The peasants hem and haw and dig in their heels. Those from Grumond look gloomy, but are silent."23
Once again he realized how incompetent he was when it came to running a farm or managing the muzhiks. Haying with them was a joy, arguing a torment. There were times when he hated them: "I am afraid of myself. I am beginning to feel a desire for revenge, which is something I have never known before."28
However, on September 1, 1858 he attended an assembly of the nobility of the entire province held to elect rq^resentatives to the provincial committee at Tula, and, with one hundred and four other gentry, signed a request for the abolition of serfdom, whereby every peasant was to receive a piece of land and every owner a fair sum in payment. Most of the landowners in his district refused to endorse the project: liberals and conservatives showed equal selfishness where their own interests were concerned. "The Cherkasky gang are no less a bunch of low-down scum than their opponents," he wrote on September 4 when the deliberations were over. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana with the feeling that the grand idea of emancipation would never overcome the resistance of the local aristocracy. His neighbors accused him of "going over to the peasants." That was too much: for the time being, he confined his treason to having an affair with one of their women. She was married, her name was Axinya Bazykin, she was twenty-three years old and lived in a hamlet seven miles from the master's house. He saw her often, and her husband, an understanding type, did not take umbrage. "In love all day long. . . . Saw her for a short while. . . . She is very nice. ... I am in love as I have never been before. . . . Thought of nothing else. . . .W2T These sentences in his diary punctuate the phases of a healthy, straightforward and undramatic passion. He saw few people other than those at home, and had no desire to go out. After visiting Turgenev at Spasskoyc he noted, "Ivan Turgenev is impossibly difficult. ... lie is behaving badly toward Marya. The pig!"28 The truth was that Turgenev's feelings for Marya Tolstoy had cooled; he now thought her ugly, aging and dull, but he continued to court her, just to pass the time, with mincing gallantry, vocal tremolo and poetic glances. Irritated by this play-acting, which was keeping the poor girl on tenterhooks, Tolstoy seized every pretext for quarreling with his colleague. And, "I'm through with Tolstoy," the latter wrote to Botkin. "He has ceased to exist for me. May God grant him every blessing, to him and his talent, but I who was first to say 'Hail' to him now have an irresistible desire to tell him 'Farewell.' We arc from opposite poles. If I cat soup and like it, I know by that very fact and beyond the shadow of a doubt that Tolstoy will not like it, and vice versa."29
The widening gap between Tolstoy and Turgenev coincided with the former's growing affection for Fet. It was Fet who arranged for Tolstoy and his brother Nicholas to be invited to a bear hunt in December 1858, 011 the estate of a friend of his who lived near Volochck in the government of Tver. The first day (Deceml>er 21), all went well. But the next day Tolstoy, who had neglected to trample down the snow in order to have room to move about in, suddenly saw the she- bear, maddened by gunfire, charging toward him down the narrow path. The huge shape, dark, soft and powerful, came straight at him. He took aim and fired, missed and fired again when the animal was almost on top of him. The bullet went into her mouth, she gave a roar of pain and threw herself full tilt upon him. He saw the open jaws dripping foam, and beyond, "a bit of brilliant blue sky between purple clouds piled on top of each other." He instinctively lowered his head and flung his arm over his eyes. The bear tore at his facc. He thought the end had come. But a beater cainc running up with a stick in his hand, shouting, "Where arc you going? Where are you going?" and the frightened bear released him and ran off into the forest. Tolstoy looked at the blood-spattered snow and put a hand to his burning face. His left cheek was torn below the eye and a strip of flesh had been gouged from his forehead.I He bore the scars for the rest of his life. That evening's entry in his diary reads simply, "Went bear hunting. The twenty-first I killed one; the twenty-second, the animal took a