In January 1863 Tolstoy announced in the Moscow press that his journal Yasnaya Polyana would cease publication.41 Later that year his schools would also close, causing the student teachers to disperse. Sonya did not regret their departure, as the dense fumes of tobacco smoke during the meetings she had attended in their small drawing room had made her nauseous while she was pregnant.42 She came to hate the students’ presence on the estate as soon as she began to feel at home at Yasnaya Polyana, inasmuch as the students came from an alien social background, and took her husband away from her.43 But Tolstoy still had to publish the December 1862 issue of his Yasnaya Polyana journal, and he completed his last article for it on 23 February 1863. Two days later Sonya wrote to her sister Tanya to tell her her husband had started a new novel.44 This was War and Peace. Over 5,000 manuscript pages, numerous false starts, several different titles and six years later, it was finished. In the exhilaration which overcame Tolstoy soon after marrying he declared that he wished to have the freedom to work on a long-term project (‘de longue haleine’),45 but even he could not have imagined the life he would breathe into this novel would be quite as long drawn-out as this.
Just as it took the newly married couple several months to acclimatise to each other, it took the best part of the year for Tolstoy to find his focus with this new novel, but there was no question that he wanted to harness this new surge of creative energy to the composition of a substantial work of fiction. First he tinkered with an idea for a story he had been given back in 1856, about the fate of an old piebald gelding that had once been renowned for its speed. ‘kholstomer’, usually translated as ‘Strider’, is one of his most remarkable stories. Tolstoy later adopted a third-person narrator, but much of the story is told from the horse’s point of view. One summer when he had been visiting Turgenev, and they were returning home from an evening walk, they encountered an emaciated old horse standing in a pasture with strength only to swish its tail at the flies buzzing round it. Tolstoy went up to stroke the horse and commented on what it must have been thinking, prompting Turgenev to tell him he must have been a horse in a former life. Tolstoy was not happy with the story in 1863, so he put it aside, and resumed work on it some twenty years later at the instigation of his wife.46
Work on the estate also distracted Tolstoy from his purpose initially, especially with the approach of spring. Filled with new energy, Tolstoy bought cattle, sheep, birds and pigs, and tried vainly to interest Sonya in milking and butter-churning. Apart from being pregnant, she was also a city girl, and she found she could not tolerate the smell of manure in the cattle-sheds.47 For a while Tolstoy took an interest in a distillery which he built with his neigh-bouring landowner and friend Alexander Bibikov.48 Sonya tried to dissuade Tolstoy from pursuing this project on moral grounds, but he argued that he also needed grain for his pig-breeding.49 In any event, it only operated for about eighteen months. Far more rewarding was the planting of about 1,000 apple trees at the Nikolskoye estate,50 and an orchard of about 6,500 trees at Yasnaya Polyana. Each spring they produced clouds of exquisite pink and white blossom, which always seemed to Tolstoy to be about to float up into the sky.51 This was on a much larger scale than Tolstoy’s animal husbandry, which was never terribly profitable; indeed, it was believed that the Yasnaya Polyana orchard was the second largest in Europe. By the mid-1870s, Tolstoy had increased its size from ten to forty hectares.52 Sonya was actually keen to help with tree planting – this was one aspect of farming she did not find too distasteful. That autumn she for the first time experienced the air on the estate filling with the dense, sweet smell of thousands of ripening apples. By May 1863, when she was weeks away from giving birth, it became physically impossible for her to do very much, but that did not stop Tolstoy chastising her for being idle.53
Tolstoy also became passionately interested in bees after he got married. He bought some hives from Sonya’s grandfather, and installed them in a distant part of the estate, about a mile from the family home in the lime and aspen wood beyond the Voronka river.54 Sonya tried and failed to share this passion as well. As she later wrote in her autobiography:
The whole of Lev Nikolayevich’s passionate nature was revealed in this enthusiasm. He developed enthusiasms for the most diverse things throughout his life: games, music, [ancient] Greek, schools, Japanese pigs, pedagogy, horses, hunting – too many in fact to count. And that’s not including his intellectual and literary interests: they were most extreme. He was madly passionate about everything at the height of his enthusiasm, and if he could not convince whomever he was talking to of the importance of the activity he was caught up in, he was capable of being even hostile to that person.55
In Moscow while she growing up, Sonya had never had time on her own. Now when Tolstoy pursued his enthusiasms, she was left by herself at home, and she became very lonely, as she recorded in her diary. Sometimes during the early summer of 1863, when her husband spent whole days with his bees, she walked through the fields to take him his lunch or a glass of tea in the evening, and would find him with a net over his head arranging the combs in a hive, or capturing a swarm.56 After sitting there and getting stung, she would face a solitary walk back home. As well as reading about beekeeping, Tolstoy spent hours observing the patterns of behaviour of his bees, assisted by his beekeeper, an old man with a long grey beard. During the summer he was also helped by Nikolka, the gardener’s young son.57 His absorption with the Yasnaya Polyana apiary abated after about two years, but his enthusiasm for beekeeping left its mark in his writing. Firstly, there is the famous epic simile in War and Peace, borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Moscow in 1812 is compared to a queenless hive. Conversely, Tolstoy thought of a busy hive when conveying the atmosphere of the ball in Anna Karenina, and a little later in the novel he describes bees on their first spring flight after the relocation of their hive for the summer. The precision of his vocabulary, overlooked by most translators, tells us a great deal about the rigour he applied to his study of apiculture.58
Apart from the prolonged visit to Yasnaya Polyana of Sonya’s sister Tanya and brother Sasha, plus two of their cousins, Tolstoy had one other major distraction from the writing of fiction in the summer of 1863. In the middle of June, husband and wife temporarily stopped writing and reading each other’s diaries, and for a short period at least, Sonya was able to claim Tolstoy’s full attention: on 28 June their first child was born. In her autobiography Sonya does not describe the birth of Sergey as a joyous event. This was not only because he arrived in the world over a week early, and caught everybody unawares. Lyubov Alexandrovna just managed to arrive in time, but the set of baby clothes she had sent from Moscow did not. The newborn had to be wrapped in one of Tolstoy’s nightshirts before being placed in the crude limewood cradle that had been made by the family carpenter. Both the midwife, Maria Ivanovna Abramovich, and Dr Shmigaro, the chief doctor at the Tula armaments factory, were Polish exiles, whose number in Russia had exponentially increased after the government had brutally suppressed the Polish uprising that January. Compared to the thousands of Poles deported to Siberia, the Tolstoys’ doctor and midwife had a much easier fate. Over the next twenty-five years Maria Ivanovna would make many journeys from Tula to Yasnaya Polyana – she assisted Sonya at all except one of the births of her thirteen children, five of whom did not live to adulthood.