In 1866, he had not yet realized the role he was to play in the world, and he was thoroughly demoralized by this setback. After condemning the French and their guillotine, he could now condemn the Russians and their firing squad. Corruption, hence, was not a question of nationality, but of the period he lived in. To cast it off, one must cast off "civilization."
After such a cruel bout with rcalitv, Tolstov returned to his fictional
/' *
visions with a sigh of relief. The engaging characters of 1805 soon hid Shabunin's bloody corpse from view. And as an encouragement to turn his mind to other matters, Bashilov, the painter, submitted his first drawings. The author experienced a childish delight when he saw his heroes' portraits: as though they were real people. He knew them so well that he began writing to the artist to suggest that he retouch this feature or that in order to obtain "a better likeness." lie could not have been more precise in his suggestions had he been writing about his own family: "Can't Ilclenc be given more bust (beauty of form is her main characteristic)? . . . Pierre's face is very well done, but his forehead should be made more thoughtful by adding a furrow, or two bulges above the eyebrows. . . . Prince Andrcy is too tall and his attitude should be more casual, scornful, gracefully negligent . . . Princess Bolkonsky is remarkably successful. . . . Hippolvte's portrait is perfect, but it would be better to lift his upper lip slightly and cross his legs
higher up—in short, to make him more ridiculous, more of a caricature."17 Later, he asked Bashilov to retouch Natasha: "In the kissing scene, could she not be made to look more like Tanya Behrs?"18
Another confirmation of the relationship between Natasha and his sister-in-law. Her broken heart had mended, and she was in the best of spirits on September 17, 1S66, Sonya's name-day. t Dinner was served on a new terrace. The cloth was heaped high with flowers, and Venetian lanterns glowed among the leaves. Suddenly the sounds of a joyful march were heard: La Muetle de Portici.* Sonya turned in astonishment to look at her husband, who was chuckling into his beard. At the end of the drive, a military band appeared in full-dress uniform. As a surprise for his wife, Tolstoy had asked Colonel Yunosha to lend him his band—the same colonel who, hardly two months before, had sentenced Quartermaster Sergeant Shabunin to death. Decidedly, this barrister-writer was without malice toward the judge who had refused to listen to him. Ah, well, feelings are one thing and social life another: Colonel Yunosha in person opened the ball. His two assistants, Stasulcvich and Kolokoltsov, were also there, so the entire military tribunal found itself dancing in the home of counsel for the defense. The musicians who had marched in front of Shabunin's body now played dances for the young ladies dressed in white muslin, whose eyes were devouring all the cocky young officers. "I can see Lyova's animated and charming face; he had taken such pains to give us a good time and was 1>eing so successful at it," wrote Sonya. "To my utter surprise, un- frivolous as I am, I enjoyed the dancing immensely." Tolstoy, flushed and hilarious, was the wildest of them all. He whirled his wife around in his arms, and his sister-in-law and a few of the guests. For the sixth figure in the quadrille the band broke into the kamarinskaya, a folk- dance.
"Get out there!" cried Tolstoy to Kolokoltsov. "How can you stand still to a rhythm like that?"
Kolokoltsov circled around and stopped in front of Tanya. After a moment's hesitation she set off, one fist 011 her hip and the other hand swinging loosely back and forth in the manner of the Russian peasants. Someone tossed her a handkerchief, which she caught in mid-air. Tolstoy delightedly watched his sister-in-law and noted her every gesture with the deliberate intention of using her in his book. And so Natasha Rostov did a country- dance, too, in War and Peace. "Where, when, how, simply through the air she breathed, had this little princess, brought
t September 17, according to the Orthodox calendar, is the day of the Blessed Martyrs Vera, Nadczhda, Lyubov (Faith, Hope, Charity) and their mother, Sofya.
• An opera by Auber.
up by an emigree Frenchwoman, imbibed so much of the national spirit that should have been obliterated long ago by the pas de chdle?"19
Unfortunately, soon after this most successful party, Tanya fell ill with a dry, racking cough. "Be still! Be still!" begged Tolstoy, watching her with tense affection. He had fresh visions of consumption. Once before, when she had been in a wildly gay mood, lie had said to her, "T anya, do you know you will die one day?" And she had cried back, "Die? Me? Never!" He could still hear her words as he watched her now, breathing in spasms with her hand over her mouth. He decided to take her back to Moscow and, at the same time, complete his documentation in the libraries there. On November 10, 1866 Sonya, who was obliged to stay behind and nurse her latest baby, blessed her husband and sister as they set out. Tolstoy insisted that Tanya hold an "inhaling mask" in front of her face to protect her lungs from the cold air as they rode through the rain in a post-chaise.
In Moscow the doctors called in for consultation by Dr. Behrs agreed that her lungs were weak and advised her to give up vocal exercise, diet and go abroad for a rest in the sun, after which she would soon be well again. Reassured, Tolstoy returned to his labors as ferreting historian.
For once in her life, Sonya was not jealous at the thought of his being far away with Tanya. She missed him, the nights were long, and she thought back to the evening of September 17 when he had danced with her and looked lovingly at her. "The house is so sad and empty when he is away," she wrote on November 12. "A meeting of minds closer than ours seems impossible to mc. We arc terribly happy in our relations with each other, with our children and with life." He had left her a mountain of sheets to transcribe and she settled eagerly down to work. Mailing the copy off to him, she wrote, "Now I feel that it is your child and consequently my child and, as I send off this package of paper to Moscow, I feel I am abandoning a baby to the elements; I'm afraid something may happen to it. I like what you are writing very much. I do not think I shall care as much for any other book of yours as this one."*0
From Moscow he kept her informed of his progress. He was living with his in-laws in the Kremlin, and every morning he went to the library of the Rumyantsev Museum, where he dug into manuscripts on freemasonry—which had been outlawed in Russia after the Decembrists' aborted coup d'dtat in 1825—and became fascinatcd by them. His hero, Pierre Bczukhov, would be a freemason. But how they depressed him, all those yellow pages attesting to a puerile aspiration to
virtue! "The sad thing about these Masons," he wrote to Sonya, "is that they were all imbeciles."21 He wanted to know every detail of his characters' daily lives. To get a clearer picture of the world they lived in, he thought of buying a complete set of the Moscow News, which was already in existence in 1812, and advertised for it in the newspapers, offering two thousand rubles.
On November 18, 1866 he was back at Yasnaya Polyana, where he began to write again and did not stop all winter. He was so excited by the furious intensity with which he was working that his eyes would suddenly fill with tears. Sonya shared his emotion and she, too, wept when he read aloud the chapters he had just finished. He complained, increasingly often, of violent headaches. "For the past two weeks my brain has been congested and I have such a strange pain that I fear an attack," he wrote to his brother in February 1867.
Irritable, tired and overwrought, he welcomed his sister-in-law with open arms when she returned to Yasnaya Polyana after a restorative trip to Baden-Baden and Paris. But gloom redescendcd upon him soon afterward: his friend Dmitry Dyakov had just lost his wife, and Elizabeth Andreyevna Tolstoy, Alexandra's sister, also died that year. Tolstoy was obsessed by these deaths, he was afraid for himself and those around him; he wrote to his babushka: "There arc times when one forgets it, it, death, and then there are others, like this year, when one keeps very quiet around those one loves, for fear of losing them, and watches in terror as it strikes here and there, cruel and blind, sometimes those who are best and the ones you need most."22