At Yasnaya Polyana, the first warm days brought a flock of visitors: charming Tanya Behrs, old friend Dyakov, Fet the poet and his wife Marya Petrovna, Samarin, Bibikov, Sergey Tolstoy on a neighborly call from Pirogovo. . . . Improvised theatricals, musical evenings, picnics, charades, readings ... In spite of all the movement and laughter in the house, Sonya was bored, with her heavy stomach, drawn face and frayed temper. She cursed her pregnancy for preventing her from going to look at the bees or walk in the forest with Lyovochka. "Lyova resents my weakness, as though it were my fault that I am pregnant," she wrote in her diary. Or, "My condition is intolerable to me, both physically and emotionally. . . . And I have ccascd to exist for Lyova. ... I can give him no joy, since I am pregnant."27 She thought of him crouching in front of a hive with the net over his head, or striding down a path, or bantering with a peasant woman leaning over a fence, and every moment he spent away from her seemed torn out of her own life. Even the thought of the child she was carrying could not reconcile her to her fate. A lot of good it would do her to become a mother if she were to lose her husband as a result! Sometimes, wild with frustration, she wanted to get rid of her encumbrance: "Yesterday I ran through the garden, thinking I would surely have a miscarriage," she wrote. And concluded with cold regret: "But nature is as strong as steel."28
t This "first part" was the only part Tolstoy wrote.
t Ostrovsky, the dramatist, to whom Tolstoy read the play in 1864. wrote to Nekrasov: "It is such a piccc of filth that my ears'blenched during the reading!"
Although he sympathized with her, Tolstoy found her tears, her persecuted smiles and senseless chatter hard to bear. It seemed to him that it was somehow her fault if he could not settle down to write. When he could take no more, he fled to nature to be alone with his problems. He anxiously questioned himself: he had never had any friend or confidant other than himself, and now he was suddenly supposed to share everything, his thoughts, his freedom, his life, with the being least calculated to understand him: a woman. Even though lie tried to put Sonya temporarily out of his mind, he could not forget that she would reproach him for bolting out of the house with his dogs, would be waiting for him, weeping, with her forehead pressed against the windowpane, and that he would feel guilty afterward. Was he going to disintegrate completely—mind, will, talent—in this paralyzing conjugal atmosphere? "Where is it—my old self," he wrote on June 18, 1863, "the self I loved and knew, who still springs to the surface sometimes and pleases and frightens me? I have become petty and insignificant. And, what is worse, it has happened since my marriage to a woman I love. Nearly every word in this notebook is prevarication and hypocrisy. The thought that she is still here now, reading over my shoulder, stifles and perverts my sincerity. ... I must add words for her because she will read them. For her I write not what is not true, but things I would not write for myself alone. ... It is appalling, dreadful, insane, to allow one's happiness to depend upon purely material things: a wife, children, health, wealth . . ."
When Sonya read these lines, intended for her ey es, they probably sent her into a fresh paroxysm of despair. Why suffer all these months of fatigue and nausea, missing all the fun of life, if Lyovochka did not even want the child she was preparing to bring into the world? On June 27, in the dead of night, the first pains came. Tolstoy ran to fetch the midwife from Tula. When he returned, Sonya was pacing up and down in her bedroom, "in a peignoir open over her lacc-insct gown, her black hair in disorder, her face afire, her dark eyes shining with extraordinary intensity'." How beautiful she was, with her expression of suffering, shy reserve and majesty! lie helped her to stretch out on the leather couch on which he himself had been born. T ouching her half- naked body gave him a feeling completely unlike any he had ever known in other circumstances: not desire, but compassion, and incisive attention to every detail, the curiosity of a professional writer eager to learn something new. But when the pains began to come more quickly, he lost his self-possession. He could not rccognizc Sonya in this "scrcaming and writhing" female. She pressed his hand weakly between contractions. The midwife, the Polish doctor sitting in the
corner smoking cigarettes, the candles burning in their sockets, the smell of vinegar and eau-de-Cologne, the twisted sheets, rags, basins, it was all part of a nightmare. Suddenly there was a terrible heaving and thrashing around the leather couch. The midwife and doctor were bending over a slaughter. A sharp cry cut through the jerking gasps of the mother. 'Hie doctor said, "It's a boy!" Tolstoy saw a tiny creature, "strange and reddish," with a big soft head. Remembering the scene, he wrote in Anna Karenina, "Levin had to make an enormous effort to believe that his wife was still alive, that she was all right, that this wailing baby was his son. . . . Why this child? Who was he? Where did he come from? He had great difficulty in accepting the idea. It took him a long time to get used to it."
When Tanya Behrs was allowed into the room, she saw Tolstoy "white-faced and red-eyed with weeping," and Sonya "appeared tired, but happy and proud."29 Champagne was drunk. They decided to call the child Sergey, after his uncle. Receiving his family's congratulations, Tolstoy was surprised to find that he felt neither joy nor pride but a sort of apprehension, as though from that day on there were "another area of vulnerability" in his life. Wouldn't this added source of care drive him still farther away from himself and his work? The only good thing about the birth, he thought, was that Sonya, filled with the new joy of motherhood, would become even-tempered and cheerful once more. He was prepared to worship her, if only she would behave like a proper wife again.
It was he, however, who started their first quarrel. As befits a true disciple of Rousseau, he believed that all mothers should nurse their babies. Sonya herself agreed, although paid wetnurscs were more the custom in her circle. But from the beginning, she suffered excruciating pain. Ilcr breasts were soon fissured and the doctors ordered her to stop. Tolstoy protested vehemently, in the name of nature, against "official pretexts" that allowed a young mother to shirk her obligations; he asserted that his wife was spoiled and soft, her mind perverted by civilization, and he demanded that she fulfill her role as givcr-of-life to the bitter end. When Sonya, exhausted, engaged a nurse, he refused to enter the nursery because he could not bear to see the heir to his name suspended from the breast of a strange woman. Why must a common girl be able to perform what Countess Tolstoy considered beyond her strength?
Exasperated by his son-in-law's irrational obstinacy, Dr. Behrs wrote to the couple: "I see you have both lost your wits. ... Be reasonable, dear Sonya, calm yourself, don't make a mountain out of a molehill. ... As for you, dear Leo Nikolayevich, rest assured that you will never
be transformed into a real muzhik, any more than your wife will be able to endure what a Pelagya can endure. . . . And you, Tanya, do not let your mad sister out of your sight for one moment, scold her as often as possible for her crazy notions that are enough to try the patience of the Lord, and pitch the first object that comes to hand straight at Leo's head, to knock some sense into it. lie is a great master at speechifying and literature, but life is another matter. Let him write a story about a husband who tortures his sick wife by forcing her to nurse her baby. He will be stoned by every woman alive."