When they were young, the elder children also used to look forward to the summer months when people came to visit. Their father’s friends (such as Afanasy Fet and his wife, Sergey urusov and Nikolay Strakhov) usually came to stay for a few days, but their aunt Tanya and their cousins Dasha, Masha and Vera, who were all under five in 1871, would take up residence in the other wing for over a month every summer. Sonya’s younger brother Stepan (‘uncle Styopa’) also spent every summer at Yasnaya Polyana from 1866 to 1878 while he was in his teens. Sometimes grandmother Lyubov came to stay (she was now living in Petersburg), and Aunt Polina would make regular visits from the convent in Tula which was now her permanent home. Summer had truly arrived after the buttercups appeared in the lawn in front of the house, and the children’s summer clothes had been unpacked and no longer smelled of camphor. It was the time for picnics with the samovar by the stream under the shade of an oak tree, with the girls reading poems aloud. It was the time for mushroom gathering and evening bonfires, sometimes with the thrill of watching the express train speed by the nearby village of kozlovka. Summer was also the time for jam-making, a ritual that took place every year in the garden under the lime trees, accompanied by clouds of bees and wasps buzzing overhead. Barefoot village girls would come up to the porch on hot afternoons bearing plates of mushrooms and strawberries to be exchanged for a few kopecks.
For the two elder Tolstoy boys, summer also meant taking a net into the fields to hunt for butterflies, or riding through oak woods and dewy glades full of forget-me-nots on their kirghiz ponies, Sharik and kolpik. If they were lucky, their father would accompany Sergey and Ilya on his English stallion, and more often than not they would tie them to the birch trees next to the bathing hut and go swimming in the pond. used to having at least a shack to change in when she was growing up, Sonya had been shocked when she had first arrived at Yasnaya Polyana to discover there was nothing but the bare bank, but this was in keeping with Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for living the natural life. When Sergey was a baby, Tolstoy also bought some unbleached linen in the village and ordered Sonya to make traditional peasant shirts with a skewed collar for him, like the ones he himself wore and became identified with (which later even came to be named the tolstovka after him). Sonya dutifully complied, but she also made little shirts out of her fine muslin blouses for Sergey to wear under the rough linen.100
Just twice, in 1873 and in 1875, the Tolstoy family went away for their summer holidays, to their new estate out in the steppe of Samara province, over 500 miles away to the east. It was a huge adventure for the children, and an enormous undertaking for their parents. Tolstoy had made the trip several times already for health reasons: he was a great advocate of koumiss, the fermented mare’s milk produced by the nomadic Bashkirs. He made his first trip to the steppe in the summer of 1862, before his marriage, and then returned in 1871 and 1872, leaving Sonya and the children at home. In 1871 he took Stepan Bers (now sixteen) and his old servant Vanya Suvorov with him, and was away for six weeks.101 At that time, there was no railway beyond Nizhny Novgorod, which was already two days away from Yasnaya Polyana, and just to get to the remote steppe village where Tolstoy undertook his koumiss cure required a two-day passage on a Volga steamer, and then a further two days of travel in a tarantass from Samara, which lay on the main highway to Central Asia. What awaited at the end of the journey was mile upon mile of scorched, treeless steppe, a round felt tent, an almost exclusive diet of mutton, and gallons of koumiss.
A primitive Bashkir village in the middle of nowhere was not every Russian’s idea of the ideal health resort. Much more fashionable at that time was to go abroad, either to the German spas, or to the French Riviera. Those who wished to stay within the Russian Empire were also now spoiled for choice: they could enjoy the bracing sea air at a lido on the Baltic, take the waters at the resorts that had sprung up around the mineral springs in the Caucasus, such as kislovodsk or Pyatigorsk, or patronise the increasingly popular seaside town of Yalta in the balmy Crimea, where the Romanovs vacationed. It had been a long time since Tolstoy cared for fashion, however, and he positively relished the lack of amenities, writing merrily to Sonya to tell her the complete absence of beds, crockery and white bread (food was consumed from wooden bowls without cutlery) would be more than her ‘kremlin heart’ could stand.102
The Bashkirs were originally nomadic horsemen from the southern urals who lived between the kama and ural rivers, east of Samara. A Turkic-speaking Moslem people, they were forced to acknowledge Russian supremacy after the conquest of kazan in the mid-sixteenth century, but then gradually found themselves becoming a minority as Russians and other ethnic groups from the Volga region settled in the lands they had for centuries believed belonged to them.103 This was frontier territory for the Russians, who in the eighteenth century proceeded to build a line of forts from Samara to the new town of Orenburg, in preparation for advancing into kazakhstan and beyond (Samarkand was conquered for the great White Tsar’s new province of Turkestan in 1868). While the Bashkirs had been brutally subjugated by the middle of the eighteenth century, and their lands fully absorbed into the Russian Empire, they were given a special tax status and they tried to maintain their traditional way of life amongst the more numerous Russians who steadily colonised their fertile pastures. One of these Russians was Tolstoy.
Tolstoy might have poured a lot of his own money into publishing the first edition of his ABC, but he had large reserves from sales of War and Peace, and at this stage of his life he was eager to increase them. Bashkir land was very cheap, and Tolstoy had an eye to making a profitable deal by buying some land, and pocketing the proceeds of its cultivation. Two weeks after his arrival he made a decision to buy nearly 7,000 acres for a total cost of 17,500 roubles. He explained to Sonya by letter that with two good harvests he would recoup his investment, but that they would need to spend the following summer living there to make that possible. He described the hilly landscape to his wife as picturesque, although he admitted there were no trees, and he also acknowledged there was no shade at all, but to compensate there was ‘steppe air, bathing, koumiss, and riding’. Tolstoy assured Sonya that he wanted her approval first, but he went ahead anyway, even before he had received her reply. As it happened, she was not at all enthusiastic: ‘If it’s profitable, that’s your business, and I don’t have an opinion on the matter. But it would have to be extreme necessity that would want to force a person to live in the steppe without a single tree for hundreds of miles, as one would never go there willingly, particularly with five children.’104
In the summer of 1871 Tolstoy and his two companions lived in a huge Bashkirian kibitka (tent) belonging to the local mullah, with feather grass serving as flooring. It had formerly been a mosque, and featured a table and one chair, oats for the horses, a black dog and lots of hens who brought disorder, but also a regular supply of eggs. Tolstoy got up at dawn every day, he wrote to Sonya, and after three cups of tea, would go outside to watch the herds of horses coming back over the hills (about 1,000 of them, he reckoned). Then it was time to drink koumiss, produced in leather churns behind curtains by the Bashkir women, but served always by the men. Afterwards, he told Sonya, he would usually walk into the village to consort with other people who had come from Russia for the koumiss cure, including a Greek teacher who helped him read Herodotus. Sometimes there was some shooting (for bustard, ruff, and the occasional wolf), and there was always great deal of hospitality from the Bashkirs they visited due to Tolstoy’s aristocratic title. At the end of June Tolstoy and Stepan travelled fifty miles east, in a cart pulled by the horse he had bought for sixty roubles when he arrived, to Buzuluk, a town with several churches, mostly wooden houses and a bustling trade in grain, tallow and hides.105 After spending a rough night at the halfway point in their exhausting journey across the steppe, Tolstoy slept soundly when they finally arrived – indeed, he slept so deeply he did not notice the bedbugs crawling all over him – but soon his mind was taken up with the colourful fair they had come to see. About a dozen different nationalities had converged to trade kirghiz, Cossack and Siberian horses.