Tolstoy returned home to Yasnaya Polyana that year in high spirits, and in much better health, having gloried in the dry heat of the steppe, the clear air and bright skies. In the end he went back to Samara the following summer without Sonya, since she had just given birth to Pyotr (Petya), their sixth child, and as his companion he took with him instead Timofey Fokanov, a Yasnaya Polyana peasant, who was going to became the first manager of his property. This trip was more difficult in many respects. The harvest in 1871 had been very poor, but the harvest in 1872 was the worst in decades, causing problems which would only worsen the following year. Tolstoy was staying in a house rather than a tent this time – the house on his new khutor (homestead), but it left something to be desired. The first impression was very pleasant, he wrote to Sonya, although there was no water in the pond. He also admitted that the house was old and drab, and had only two rooms, but it would be absolutely fine for all of them, he reassured her brightly.106 That summer Tolstoy was very preoccupied with his first ABC book, which was now finally being printed, so in the end he came back early, after only three weeks.
Whatever qualms Sonya had about living out in the steppe, she managed to suppress them the following summer, when the entire family headed east. In June 1873 sixteen members of the Tolstoy household gathered in the drawing room, shut the doors and sat in silence for a few moments to prepare for the journey ahead, then completed the ritual by getting up and crossing themselves. A caravan of carriages and carts then transported them to Tula to catch a train, and in Nizhny Novgorod they boarded the steamer for Samara. When they stepped on board, they already felt they were in Asia when they saw the exotic robes and skullcaps of the various Tatars and Persians travelling in third class, and particularly when they heard them speak. During a refuelling stop in kazan, Tolstoy got off with the eldest boys, Sergey and Ilya, to show them where he used to live, and it was not until the boat had travelled several miles further down the Volga that Sonya realised they had failed to re-embark. As she notes in her autobiography, the captain would not have turned back for a ‘mere mortal’, but since Tolstoy was a count, it was different.107 From Samara the family travelled in an enormous old carriage pulled by six horses, donated by Tolstoy’s friend urusov, which had been brought from Yasnaya Polyana. It was a long, hot and dusty journey, punctuated by a night spent at a peasant coaching inn. For the elder children, who slept outside on hay under the stars, and had never seen such a strange landscape, everything was a great novelty.
When they finally arrived, the Tolstoys had difficulty cramming themselves into the small and extremely basic residence on their new estate. In the end, Tolstoy and Stepan took up residence in a kibitka, and the boys and their German tutor slept in the barn. Sonya’s qualms, it turned out, were fully justified. The dried dung used as fuel did not burn well, and smelled disgusting; there were clouds of flies everywhere during the day, while large black beetles would drop from the ceiling and start running all over the tablecloth as soon as the candles were lit. The only neighbours for miles around were Bashkirs and peasants. Sonya put on a brave face, however, and did her best to make sure everyone enjoyed their stay. Tolstoy was conscious they were all there because of him, and also did his best to keep everyone amused. He invited an elderly Bashkir to provide the koumiss that summer, which he had almost on tap. Muhammed Shah brought along his wives and daughters-in-law plus ten mares, and pitched his kibitka near to the Tolstoys’ house. Every morning various members of the family, plus Hannah, who had come up from the Caucasus to join them, went to sit cross-legged on the carpets in the kibitka and drink from the wooden bowls proffered by Muhammed. The Bashkirs had not adapted well to leading sedentary lives, like the Russian settlers, and Muhammed spoke wistfully about the lands they had lost to peasant farmers from Tambov or Ryazan, who were distinguishable by the colour and styling of their clothes.
Tolstoy certainly derived health benefits from downing up to eight bowls of koumiss at a sitting, and he loved going to Orenburg and Buzuluk to the horse fairs, on one occasion buying a whole herd of wild steppe horses. But that summer he was preoccupied with the drought, and the famine in the area that was beginning to follow the third consecutive failed harvest. There was absolutely no prospect that his optimistic forecast of being able to recoup his investment in two years was possible now. Sonya egged him on to do something, and the new governor’s staggering lack of concern goaded him into action.108 Indeed, the new governor’s only action was to put pressure on those peasants who were in tax arrears with the administration. Tolstoy spent two weeks travelling round each of the districts in a fifty-mile radius of his homestead in order to assess the problem, and then he put together a detailed inventory of twenty-three households in Gavrilovka, the nearest village. It included information about the number of cattle each family owned, the size of their property, how much they had sown and harvested that year and the extent of their debts. Then he sat down and wrote a letter to the editors of the Moscow Gazette to ask for the government and the public to come forward with aid. He also wrote to Alexandrine, asking her to raise the issue at court.
There was no area of Russia so dependent on the outcome of the harvest each year as Samara province, he wrote in his letter. Everywhere he had gone, he wrote, he had encountered the same situation: signs of approaching famine which threatened to engulf ninety per cent of the population in the province: ‘There are no men anywhere, they have all gone off to look for work, leaving at home thin women, with thin and ailing children, and old people. There is still grain, but it is running out; dogs, cats, calves, and chickens are thin and hungry, while beggars keep coming up to the window and they are given tiny crusts or refused.’109 Aware that the authorities’ preferred course of action was simply to ignore this disaster (they had already tried to pin the blame for the approaching famine on the peasants by arguing it was due to their drunkenness and laziness), Tolstoy included in his letter all the data he had collected, verified in writing by the local priest, and endorsed with a stamp by the village elder, who of course was illiterate. His research had been very thorough:
1. Savinkin [household]. Old man of 65 and old woman, 2 sons, one married, 2 girls. 7 mouths to feed, 2 workers. No animals: no horse, no cow, no sheep. The last horses were stolen, the cow died last year, the sheep have been sold. They sowed eleven acres [last year]. Nothing grew, so there was nothing to sow [this year]. No stores of grain. Poll tax of 30 roubles due for the last two periods; for loans from last year 10 and a half roubles; private debt for borrowing train 13 roubles; total 53 and a half roubles…