According to the Orthodox ceremony, the fianc<S reached the church first; as soon as he got there, he sent his best man to inform the bride that she could start. Sonya had long been ready and was standing stiffly in her haze of gown, biting her nails in the midst of her family. Thirty minutes went by, an hour, an hour and a quarter, still no messenger! A chilling thought crossed her mind: he had decamped! She remembered all he had said that morning, and her doubt became a certainty. Half-dead with shame, she did not dare to look at her parents, who obviously shared her apprehensions. At last Tolstoy's manservant Alexis appeared, instead of the groomsman, in a terrible state of agitation. When packing his master's things he had forgotten to leave out a clean shirt. It was Sunday, the shops were closed and all the future couple's belongings were already waiting at the Behrs'. The trunks had to be opened and searched. Finding the precious shirt at last, Alexis set off at a run.
Another long moment went by before the best man appeared, radiant, to announce that Count Leo Tolstoy, fully dressed, was waiting for his fiancee on the steps of the church. Tliis was the signal for the farewells, exhortations and tears to begin:
"What will become of us without our little countess?" moaned the old nanny.
"I shall die of sorrow without you!" said Tanya.
Dr. Behrs, who was ill, stayed behind in his office, so Mrs. Behrs blessed her daughter with the icon of St. Sofya the Martyr. Then Sonya, leaving her parents at home as was the custom, climbed into the coach and set off alone for the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin, a stone's-throw away. She cried all the way. Through a veil of tears she saw the winter garden, Tolstoy standing in formal black and stiff white shirtfront, the illuminated nave, a crowd of strangers whispering as she passed. . . . The service was celebrated by two priests in heavy' gold- and silver-embroidered dalmatics. The Court choirs sang hymns of hope. Behind the couple, the groomsmen took turns holding the wedding crown. One of them, deckcd out in the handsome uniform of the horse guards, was none other than Mitrofan Polivanov, the rejected suitor. Majestic in his restrained suffering, he had accepted this final sacrifice for love of Sonya. She, however, was so exhausted that she began to grow numb. "It seemed to me," she wrote, "that some event was taking placc as fatal and inevitable as an act of God and that there was no longer any need to think."9
After the ceremony, intimate friends gathered in the Behrs' apartment to wish the young couple long life and happiness. More champagne and bonbons. The time to change from her tulle gown into a dark blue woolen traveling costume, and Sonya announced that she was ready to leave. Tolstoy's brother Sergey had come to Moscow to pay his respects to his future sister-in-law and then gone to Yasnaya Polyana, the day before the wedding, to help Aunt Toinette with the preparations for the newlyweds' arrival. The Behrs' old chambermaid Varvara, nicknamed "The Oyster," was to accompany her little mistress to the country. She would be all that was left to Sonya of her girlhood.
At the moment of departure, the drawing room resounded with tragic lamentations. The entire family was sobbing. One might think the young bride was being led off to the torture chamber. In the midst of this concert of wailing Tolstoy stood silent and restless. When Lisa came up to kiss her sister, Sonya looked long and hard at her. Tears swam in the eyes of the girl who had been left behind. After the Russian custom, everyone sat for a minute of silence, commending the travelers to God. After this unspoken prayer, they all stood up again and the well-wishing, exhortations, benedictions and signs of the cross resumed louder than before.
Outside in the night, an immense dormetise stood waiting, harnessed to a team of six post horses and driven by a coachman and postilion. It was raining. The lanterns' light gleamed in the puddles. The black trunks, strapped and roped, were loaded onto the roof. As Tolstoy kept looking impatiently at his watch, Sonya tore herself from her mother's cmbracc and climbcd into the coach without looking back. A loud cry pierced his ears. Mrs. Behrs was still calling her daughter! Quick! Tolstoy sat down beside his wife and slammed the door. Alexis, the valet, and the servant Varvara, The Oyster, clambered up onto the outside seats. The heavy vehicle lumbered off in the rain.f
Inside the dark, narrow, roughly jolting box Sonya continued to cry. She heard the rain drumming on the roof, the horses' hoofs splashing through puddles, the bitter wind blowing under the door; now and then, the livid glow of a lantern shone through the deluge around her;
t Tolstoy used all the incidents of his engagement and wedding in Anna Karenina.
everything seemed sodden, deathly cold, weird and frightening. Separated from her family for the first time in her life, her flesh crawled in terror of this bearded old man beside her, who had now acquired dreadful powers over her of which she knew absolutely nothing. It was not for nothing that she had called him Dublitsky in her story: Dublitsky, the double man, capable of the best and the worst. As she sighed and turned away, he remarked that she must not love him very much, since it made her so miserable to leave her family. She could not reply, and so he turned away too.
However, at the relay at Biryulevo he tried to dispel their malaise and became tender and even gay. In honor of this young couple with the distinguished name who had driven up in the brand-new dormeuse, the innkeeper offered to open the tsar's chambers for them: a vast, gloomy apartment full of furniture upholstered in red rep. In this garish and pompous setting, Sonya's discomfort increased. Cowering in a corner of the sofa, she remained silent, "like a person condemned to death." A woman brought in the samovar.
"Well," said Tolstoy, "wouldn't you like to do the honors; how about serving tea? . .
Sonya obeyed. Her movements were awkward. She didn't dare to use the familiar form of address to her husband, or even call him by his first name. Her flesh frozen, her mind in chaos, she was waiting for the moment when he would pounce upon her, throw her down on the bed and perform that hideous act, that pleasure he talked about so much in his diary. It was still raining. Coaches stopped in the posthouse courtyard. Doors slammed, horses whinnied, grooms cursed. That was the night Tolstoy first possessed his young and terrified wife. Brutal and disillusioning combat between an experienced man and a virgin struggling to defend herself, weeping and imploring and then dropping back inert. The act over, he noted, for the record: "She knows all. Simple. Biryulevo. Her terror. Something morbid."
In the evening of September 24 the dormeuse drawn by six muddy- horses pulled up at the door of Yasnaya Polyana. Aunt Toinette, clutching the sacred image of the Annunciation to her bosom, camc forward in the hall to welcome the new mistress. Sergey, Leo's brother, stood beside her holding the bread and salt of hospitality on a tray. Sonya bowed to the ground, made the sign of the cross, kissed the icon and embraced the old woman. Tolstoy followed suit. Then, arm in arm, they entered, as though a cathcdral, the waiting house.
The next day Tolstoy wrote in his diaiy, "Immense happiness. . . . It is impossible that all this should end except with life itself."
2. A Terrifying Happiness
Sonya was so young; he could not get over it. He watchcd her "playing grownup" and continually wanted to carry her off to their room and smother her with kisses. "I lived for thirty-four years without knowing it was possible to love so much and be so happy," he wrote on September 28, 1862, to his beloved Alexandra Tolstoy. "I keep feeling as though I had stolen some undeserved, illegal happiness that was not meant for me." He was even delighted by his first quarrel with his wife. After weeping as he consoled her in his arms, he went to write in his diary, "She is exquisite, I love her more than ever." Later, seeing her writing to her sister Tanya, he leaned over her shoulder and added a postscript: "My dear Tanya, pity me, I have a stupid wife." Sonya then added: "He's the stupid one, Tanya!" Whereupon he continued: "You must be deeply chagrined to learn that we arc both stupid, but there is a good side to everything: we are very happy in our stupidity and would not wish to be otherwise." "But I would like him to be a little more intelligent," concluded Sonya.