It was the first time the couple had been separated for so long. Their respective grievances faded with distance. Each idealized his love to the point of frenzy, as the other was not there to disappoint him. True, their almost daily letters were cluttered with trivial reminders and discussions of nursing bottles, diapers and diarrhea, but this drear)' domes-
tic fare was perpetually transfigured by love. "Without you, I am nothing," wrote Sonya. "With you, 1 feel like a queen." He answered, "1 he bell rang during dinner. It was the newspapers. Tanya ran to the door. The bell rang a second time. It was your letter. They all asked me to let them read it, but I did not want to give it to them. . . . And they did not understand. It affected me like a piece of good music: made me feci both happy and sad, pleasant and wanting to cry." On December 2, 1864, four day's after the operation, he dictated a letter for his wife to Tanya, and painfully added in his own hand, "Good-bye, my darling, my dove. I can't dictate everything. I love you very much, with every kind of love. And the more I love you, the more frightened I am."
"Your letter has just come, my dear Leo," she replied on December 5. "What joy to read the scribble you added with your own sick handl Every kind of love, you say? And I can't tell any more what kind of love I love you with!"
And two days later, "I went into your study and everything came back to me: how you dressed, over by the cupboard that contains your hunting clothes; how excited Dora was [the dog], bounding around you; how you wrote, sitting at your desk, when I peeped fearfully through a crack in the door to see whether I was disturbing you. And then, feeling how intimidated I was, you would say, 'Come in!', which was what I wanted."
He finally left Moscow on December 12, restored to health, his spirits high, ardently eager to sec Sonya again and resume the patriarchal life at Yasnaya Polyana that was so bcncficial to his work. Guests were usually rare in winter, because of the snow-blocked roads; but on Twelfth Night that year (January 6, 1865), Tolstoy organized a costume ball. The house, decorated with paper flowers and hung with green cloth, was transformed. Neighbors and relatives and friends, the Bibikovs and the Dyakovs, drove up in sledges. Sergey brought his illegitimate children! and trunks stuffed full of material for costumes. The house-servants also took part, of course. Dunyasha, the chambermaid, was dressed as an old army major and sat astride a charger formed by two muzhiks under a piece of brown cloth; the cook was dressed as a nursemaid, the coachman's wife as a lord, and the children as Algerians, Harlequins, Pierrots, shepherdesses and pages. Peasant musicians played the violin and the bandura.t They drew lots for the king's crown and ate the cake, and then there were fireworks, fights with bags full of water, and Bengal lights. Suffocated by the smoke, a few guests withdrew to vomit in the corners. But those with more solid stomachs
f Those he had had by Marya Shishkin.
$ A type of round guitar.
sang and danced on until dawn. Tolstoy was as frantic as the youngest of his guests. Echoes of the party were to appear in the book he was writing.* lie was so fashioned that sooner or later his whole life had to go into his work. A few days after this colorful party, he jokingly wrote to his friend Fet, "I am glad you love my wife, although I love her less than my book. Of course, as you know, that is my wife. Someone is coming! Who? My wife!"7
Formerly indifferent to the opinion of others, he suddenly became very anxious to know what his friends thought of The Year 1805. "I set great store by your opinion," he wrote to Fet in the same letter, "and by that of a man I love less and less as I grow up: Turgcncv. I regard the books I have published thus far as mere cxcrcises in penmanship."
Publication of the first part of the book (Chapters I to XXVT1T) began in February 1865, and at first even the most indulgent readers were disappointed by the slowness with which the story moved, the plethora of detail, the author's digressions and excessive use of conversation in French. His friend Botkin could scarcely hide his disappointment: "This is Only a preface, the background of the picture to come," he said. Borisov told Turgenev, "I think Fet was not very impressed by it." And Turgenev, whose verdict Tolstoy was so impatiently awaiting, told Borisov in reply, "The thing is positively bad, boring and a failure. ... All those little details so cleverly noted and presented in baroque Style, those psychological remarks which the author digs out of his heroes' armpits and other dark places in the name of verisimilitude—all that is paltry and trivial, against the broad historical background of a novel. . . . One feels so strongly the writer's lack of imagination and naivctdl . . . And who arc these young ladies? Some kind of affected Cindercllas . . ."*
Although he had yet to learn the public's reaction to the opening chapters of his book, Tolstoy guessed by a thousand indefinable signs that he had not been understood. But he had gone too far out into midstream to lose heart now. Sometimes the world of his characters seemed closer to him than the one he inhabited with Sonya. He discussed them with his wife as though they were flesh-and-blood people. "I write, I cross out," he wrote on March 7, 1865. "It is all clear in my head. But the immensity of the task ahead is frightening." Knowing how unstable he was, he vowed to make himself work every day, whatever the results. Simply, as he said, "in order to keep in the habit." His friend Dyakov came to Yasnaya Polyana to see him on March 11. Tol-
0 See, in War and Peace, the description of the ball at the Rostovs', in Book VII, Chapters IX to XI.
stoy was looking forward to his visit, but that evening he wrote with annoyance, "Dyakov was here. One day wasted."
With Sonya, on the other hand, lie was more comfortable than before. Their meeting, after the long separation, had been very sweet. Even the children, in whom he had previously shown no interest, began to delight him. "I am beginning to be very fond of him," he wrote of his son Sergey. "This is a new feeling for me." His new passion for his family coincided with the more intimate scenes of his book. Was it because he loved this atmosphere of calm and quiet that he described it so well in his book, or was it bccausc some of his charactcrs had found that kind of happiness in the book that, by mimicry, he sought it for himself in his life? At his present stage of spiritual maturity, he felt a need to lighten his palette, to paint simple figures of noble dimensions, as "unoriginal" as possible, but capable of affecting the reader by the warmth that flowed from them.
Toward Easter, his zeal for work began to flag. Every year when spring came, he felt the call of rebirth and laid down his pen to return to the land. He sorted camellia and azalea seeds, made improvements in the farmyard, planted birch trees, fished for pike, hunted hare and snipe. "Only the hunter and landowner have any real feeling for the beaut)' of nature,"9 he was wont to say. For some time, although he claimcd to be fully contented by his relationship with his wife, he had been missing his sister-in-law, the fantastical, mischievous Tanya. In February he had written her a singular epistle, confessing that he was as enthusiastic "as a boy of fifteen," that he felt "surges of emotion" on any and every occasion, that he missed her and that she must not show his letter to anyone, "or people will think I am out of my mind."