Somehow Tolstoy’s morbid thoughts all came to a head in the autumn of 1869, when he made a trip to Penza province to inspect some land he was thinking of buying. While stopping overnight in the town of Arzamas, he found himself awake at two in the morning, exhausted but unable to sleep. Although physically quite well, he was suddenly gripped by a fear of dying more intense than any he had experienced before, which produced in him a state of existential anguish he found completely terrifying. Many years later he drew on this memory of extreme emotional desolation when he started writing an autobiographical story called ‘Notes of a Madman’, although he never completed it.
Apart from his fixation with death, another cloud appeared on Tolstoy’s horizon after he finished War and Peace: marital difficulties. Tolstoy may have treated his wife as a child to begin with, but in many ways he was also like a child with her. Once they started a family, Sonya became a source of maternal protection, and provided him with the emotional stability he needed to concentrate on his writing. There had been a few troubling incidents which had intruded into the serenity of the fundamentally happy years while Tolstoy was writing War and Peace, but they were exceptions rather than the rule, and had been dismissed as aberrations. Now it began to be the other way round. In August 1871 Sonya noted in her diary that something in their relationship had ‘snapped’ the previous winter when they had both been unwell. Tolstoy also later referred to becoming aware of his loneliness after ‘a string broke’ in their marriage at around this time in his diary.23 They had squabbled before, of course, but this rift was more serious, and initially arose over their differing views of the woman’s role in a marriage. Even though Sonya continued to defer to her husband, she was becoming increasingly confident about asserting her own views, sometimes goaded by sheer physical necessity.
In February 1871 Sonya gave birth to their second daughter and fifth child, who was christened Maria after Tolstoy’s sister, and who, like her, immediately became known to everybody as Masha. After an extremely difficult delivery, Sonya contracted puerperal fever and nearly died, which understandably made her unwilling to endure the terror and pain of another bout of life-threatening illness. She began to think it would be best for her not to become pregnant again, but her husband had different ideas. It was not just that Tolstoy could not conceive of marriage without children – he regarded a woman’s main vocation as being to bear children, breast-feed and raise them, and was therefore horrified at the thought of his wife avoiding future pregnancies. As a matter of fact, in March 1870 he had set out his ideas on this subject in an unsent letter addressed to Nikolay Strakhov, who had immediately followed up his review of War and Peace with an article on ‘The Woman Question’ in the next issue of The Dawn. Even though he never sent this letter, it is revealing that Tolstoy felt moved to respond straight away. In fact, he had begun to draft an article on the subject himself in 1868, describing men as the ‘worker bees in the hive of human society’ and women as queens who should not be distracted from their primary role to reproduce the species.24 The ‘woman question’ exercised him deeply, and would indeed lie at the very heart of Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy generally did not like to read or subscribe to newspapers or journals, but there were a few exceptions. In 1870 Theodor Ries, the German from Oldenburg who had been responsible for printing War and Peace, became founding editor of the Moskauer Deutscher Zeitung. As he started publishing a German translation of War and Peace in its inaugural issue,25 only one month after producing the last volume in Russian, he sent his newspaper to Tolstoy gratis. The Parisian Revue des deux mondes was for a long time the only journal the Tolstoys actively read,26 but later in the 1870s, they arranged to share the cost of several subscriptions with Sergey over in Pirogovo.27 Tolstoy affected never to read reviews of his work, remembering how the critics had hounded Pushkin during his lifetime.28 But the truth is, he did read them, and he took criticism very personally, invariably responding to it immediately in writing, although his hurt feelings clearly often soon subsided, as he left most of his ripostes to critics unfinished.29 If he made an exception for Strakhov, it was because his review was intelligent and highly positive, and also because The Dawn was also sent to him gratis – that is how he had come to read Strakhov’s article on the topic of women’s liberation.
The ‘woman question’ was a hot topic in Russia at this time, as it was all over Europe, so much so that two Russian translations of John Stuart Mill’s seminal essay The Subjection of Women were published within months of its original publication in England in 1869, and Strakhov’s article followed a few months later, in February 1870. John Stuart Mill, famous for being the first British member of parliament to call for women’s suffrage and for his advocacy of women’s rights, had plenty of followers in Russia, but as conservatives, Strakhov and Tolstoy were not amongst them. Strakhov, a quiet, scholarly, lifelong bachelor, had celebrated War and Peace for being a family chronicle, and he argued in his article that a woman’s place was within the family. Tolstoy wholeheartedly agreed, and took issue only over Strakhov’s negative view of prostitutes, arguing that they had an important role to play in preserving the institution of the family. ‘Imagine London without its 80,000 magdalenes – what would happen to families?’ he wrote.30
Sonya was only twenty-seven when Masha was born, so must have been filled with dread at the thought of complying with her husband’s wishes: the intransigence of his views would lead to her having eight more children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. Quite apart from the health risks, each new pregnancy bound her more tightly to Yasnaya Polyana, and meant she had to postpone yet again her hopes of having a life outside the nursery. ‘With every child you have to give up a life for yourself even more, and resign yourself to the burden of cares, worries, illnesses and years,’ she noted in her diary in June 1870.31 Sonya was a devoted mother, and she loved living at Yasnaya Polyana, but she was a young woman who had grown up in a city, and after a while she began to long for a change of scene, some company, and the chance to go to the occasional soirée. She found the solitude depressing.32 The custom for Russian families from their milieu was to spend the winter in the city, and retreat to the country estate or a dacha during the summer months, but the Tolstoys lived the country life all year round. At the beginning of their marriage Tolstoy had dreamed of having a pied-à-terre in Moscow – a flat on Sivtsev-Vrazhek, a quiet back-street in the heart of the city favoured by the well-to-do, where his cousin Fyodor Ivanovich ‘the American’ had lived. He confided in Sonya’s father that he imagined transferring their Yasnaya Polyana life to Moscow for three or four months each winter, complete ‘with the same Alexey, the same nanny, the same samovar’, in order to be able to enjoy stimulating conversation with new people, visit libraries and go to the theatre.33 That plan was stymied by lack of funds, however, and by the time the income from War and Peace had made Tolstoy an affluent man, he no longer had the inclination. He became more reclusive as he got older, preferring to be at home for long stretches, when he could work undisturbed. City life soon chafed him, so he was always happy to leave, but he did have the freedom to come and go more or less as he pleased. He did not particularly appreciate hearing operas like Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto and Gounod’s Faust, but at least he had the opportunity to go to the theatre while he was writing War and Peace. Opera was Sonya’s great passion – what would she have given to be able to dress up occasionally for a night at the Bolshoi Theatre!34 She went to Moscow a handful of times during these years, but for the most part she was at home in the countryside: the highlight of the year for her was the summer, when her sister Tanya and other relatives came to stay. ‘If all my intellectual and emotional capacities were awakened, and most of all my desires, I would be crying until kingdom come,’ she wrote to Tanya in November 1871, and a few months later she wrote to her again about the ‘lonely, monastic’ life at Yasnaya Polyana.35