Yasnaya Polyana was now also Sonya’s domain, and she would barely leave it for the first eighteen years of her marriage. Aunt Toinette put Sonya in charge of running the house straight away, handing her an enormous bunch of keys on a ring, which she later hung from the belt round her waist. Sonya had not grown up in luxury, but she was nevertheless taken aback by the austerity (‘almost poverty’) of her new surroundings. Her husband was used to sleeping on a grubby dark red leather pillow without a pillowcase,26 and there was no bath anywhere in the house. Sonya was determined to change that. When her trousseau arrived, her silverware replaced the ancient metal cutlery and a silk eiderdown replaced the cotton one, which, much to her husband’s amazement, she lined with a sheet.27 She embroidered ‘L.T.’ in red on his underwear.28 After finding an unpalatable species of vermin in her soup one day, Sonya also tackled the lack of hygiene in the kitchen. White chef’s jackets and hats soon materialised, and Sonya took over responsibility for the daily menu. Over time she built up a Yasnaya Polyana cookery book consisting of 162 recipes, for everything from ‘Partridge in Herring Sauce’ and ‘Duck with Mushrooms’ to ‘How to Cook a Pike’. Then there were recipes for traditional Tolstoy dishes such as almond soufflé, and black bread pudding, or the special Bers recipe for apple pie, and Marusya Maklakova’s lemon kvass (comment: ‘very good’).29 Sonya came to be very fond of Nikolay Mikhailovich the cook, even if he was too drunk to turn up to work sometimes, and had to be replaced by his breezy wife. He had once played the flute in old Prince Volkonsky’s serf orchestra, and had turned to cooking when he lost his embouchure, as he recounted to her with a sad, wry smile.30
The first few days and weeks, while Lev and Sonya were setting up house together, were a mixture of wild happiness and the inevitable friction caused by the differing habits and expectations of two people who in reality barely knew each other. Tolstoy wrote to Alexandrine soon after arriving back at Yasnaya Polyana to tell her that he had not known that it was possible to be so happy, and that he loved his wife more than anything else in the world.31 He also commented on experiencing ‘unbelievable joy’ in his diary, but just a few days later he recorded having an argument with Sonya, and expressed his sadness at discovering their relationship was no different from that of any other couple.32 By this time, Sonya had resumed the diary she had started keeping two years earlier, and she now turned to it whenever she began to sense she was losing her husband’s affections. She was certainly beginning to lose his attention. Tolstoy could occupy himself with domestic matters and marital bliss up to a point, but after a while the prolonged distraction from intellectual pursuits began to be irksome. Three weeks into their marriage, he confided to his diary: ‘All this time I have been busy with matters which are termed practical. But I’m finding this idleness difficult. I cannot respect myself. So I am not satisfied with myself and not clear in my relationships with others … I must work …’33
First of all, Tolstoy was behind with the August and September issues of his journal Yasnaya Polyana. His heart was no longer in it, but there were two articles for it that he needed to finish, one of which typically put forward the Tolstoyan idea that the peasant children actually had more to teach their supposed teachers than the other way round. At the end of September Sonya’s spurned elder sister Liza sent in the brief article about Luther she had been commissioned to write by Tolstoy. It was conceived as one of the popular historical sketches he hoped would interest peasant children. Whether it was due to her suddenly being elevated to a countess, or just plain jealousy of anything which took her husband away from her, Sonya resented and disliked Tolstoy’s involvement with the peasantry. Having grown up in the city, peasants were alien beings to her, and neither then nor later did she understand her husband’s deep devotion to them. She certainly never came to share his love of the muzhik, much to his chagrin. But there was an additional reason for her jealous resentment: she had read with horror the entries in his diary about his romantic liaison with the peasant girl Aksinya Bazykina, such as the one in which he claimed that he was in love ‘like never before’. Sonya knew she might run into her any day, because Aksinya had not, of course, moved away and was still working on the estate. ‘I’ve been reading the beginnings of his works,’ she wrote now in her own diary on 16 December 1862, ‘and I’m disgusted and sickened by everywhere where there is love, where there are women, and I’d like to burn absolutely all of it. So that I don’t have to be reminded of his past.’34
The trouble was, Tolstoy’s involvement with the peasantry was also a creative and linguistic one. Fighting in the Crimean War had revealed to him how great was the abyss between the educated classes and the peasantry. Reluctant to continue writing solely for the nobility, he had resolved to try to bridge that abyss, not only by writing fiction in which the protagonists were peasants, but in an unvarnished language and style that was close to peasant speech. His first experiments in this vein had produced several unfinished stories which he returned to in the first few months after he married, and Sonya helped with the completion of one of them by writing out a fair copy to send to the publisher. Thus began what was to be an extraordinarily fruitful partnership, in which Sonya acted as amanuensis to her husband, performing an invaluable service by deciphering the often barely legible handwriting of the amendments which were invariably crammed into the margins of his tortuously composed drafts. ‘Polikushka’, a parable about the evils of serfdom, was the first story Sonya copied out,35 and it was published in early 1863.36 Another of Tolstoy’s stories of peasant life was entitled ‘Tikhon and Malanya’, but at some point in December 1862 he abruptly stopped working on it, most likely for the simple reason that the central female character Malanya was modelled on Aksinya. He never returned to it, and it was published for the first time only after his death.37
Marriage diverted Tolstoy from the path taking him closer to the peasantry that he had started out on. He now embarked on the lengthy but productive detour which just happened to result in him writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s changes of direction may no longer have been as frequent as when he was in his twenties, but they were no less violent when they took place. For two and a half years he had turned his back on art while he had thrown himself into his revolutionary educational activities and worked as a Justice of the Peace. Now he was preparing to turn his back on working for the peasantry and leave this life behind to return to the cultural milieu of his class. But before he could proceed, he needed to fulfil his obligation to his publisher Mikhail katkov, who had lent him 1,000 roubles back in February 1862 to pay a gambling debt. This was the last time Tolstoy gambled. under the terms of the deal, katkov was to have the right to publish Tolstoy’s ‘Caucasus novella’ in his journal the Russian Messenger. It was nowhere near finished, however. Tolstoy tried vainly to persuade katkov to allow him to send money now rather than a manuscript, but eventually he knuckled down and pulled his various drafts into shape.
Tolstoy had been working on this novella for ten years – longer than for any work he ever published – and it had undergone many changes as he read and absorbed works such as The Iliad.38 What was ultimately published in the January 1863 issue of the Russian Messenger was a novella entitled The Cossacks,39 but because Tolstoy had submitted his manuscript so late, the issue in fact only physically appeared at the end of February. He had planned to write a sequel, and he continued to toy with this idea, but really his mind was on other things. The Cossacks is a kind of Rousseau-inspired metaphor of Tolstoy’s spiritual journey in the decade before his marriage. It tells the story of Olenin, a young Russian officer from Moscow, who is stationed with some Cossack villagers during his period of service in the Caucasus. He envies them their freedom, perceiving in them a natural grace and nobility, and he falls hopelessly in love with a particularly alluring Cossack girl. ultimately, however, Olenin realises he cannot overcome his aristocratic, metropolitan background and become one with nature like the Cossacks, and he realises he has to go back to his old life. Something similar happened to Tolstoy when he married, and he openly acknowledged that his views on life had changed when writing to his closest confidante, Alexandrine.40 He was now ready to go back to writing fiction for an educated audience about members of his own class.