Back in Yasnaya Polyana at the end of August, rested and sunburnt, Tolstoy declared that the experience of witnessing first-hand the clash of sedentary Russian and nomadic Bashkir lifestyles, and putting up with flies and dirt out on the steppe, was infinitely superior to listening to speeches in the English Houses of Parliament, which he regarded as a dubious privilege. He had not picked up a pen for two months.83 He forced himself to return to ‘boring, banal’ Anna Karenina in the autumn of 1875, but both he and Sonya were soon in low spirits again. On 12 October Sonya wrote in her diary that their excessively isolated country life was now unbearable, and that the monotony of her routine over months and years had led to an overwhelming apathy and indifference to everything which she could no longer fight. Her husband’s gloom was infectious: ‘He sits miserably and despondently for days and weeks on end without doing anything, without work, without energy, without joy and seems to have reconciled himself to this state of affairs. It is a kind of moral death, but I don’t want to see it in him, and he himself can’t go on living like this.’84
At the end October Sonya fell gravely ill with peritonitis, and then went into labour. Varvara, born three months premature, died a few hours after she was born.85 ‘Fear, horror, death, children cavorting, eating, fuss, doctors, falsity, death, horror’ was how Tolstoy defined the situation at Yasnaya Polyana in a letter to his correspondent Fet.86 A further source of stress was that the house was full of people just at that time. After Toinette’s death the previous summer, Tolstoy’s other aunt, seventy-eight-year-old Polina, had moved to Yasnaya Polyana from her Tula convent, and she took over running the household while Sonya was ill, but there were also lots of guests: Sonya’s brother Sasha and his wife, her uncle kostya Islavin, Pyotr Samarin and his wife and another family friend. On the most critical day of Sonya’s illness, Jules Rey’s sister arrived from Geneva to become the children’s new governess.87
Tolstoy found some solace in writing a very long letter to Strakhov about philosophy, but ended up confronting the meaning of life and the inescapable truth that his own life was just an ‘empty and stupid joke’. He had just turned forty-seven, and he felt he was entering old age – a time when there was no longer anything in the ‘outside world’ that interested him, and all he could see ahead was death. He had now started the long descent back to where he had originated, he wrote, aware that whatever his desire – breeding a particular kind of horse, shooting ten hares in one field, learning Arabic – it could not bring him any true satisfaction. His only hope was that he had understood the meaning of life wrongly.88 Meanwhile, to be on the safe side, he went hunting without a gun, so that he could not turn it on himself, and boasted to his brother Sergey that he had managed to bag six hares with his dogs without firing a shot.89
Sonya did not have the luxury of contemplating the meaning of life. usually she was too busy with household chores, and now, not the first time, she was actually close to death. Her long convalescence was immediately beset by new problems. Jules Rey’s sister was not a success as a governess, and there was friction: soon Sonya could no longer bear her.90 And then, in December 1875, came the slow, painful demise of tyotushka Polina.91 It was Sonya who had to look after her during her last illness when she was confined to bed. It was Sonya who had to change her soiled bed linen and suffer her shouting and cursing from the pain that the slightest movement caused her. Polina, who conversed in French with her nephew to the last, was terrified of dying, and finally passed away after great suffering on 22 December. She was buried two days later. It was another quiet Christmas.92
Tolstoy was greatly saddened, as the last living link with his parents had now been irrevocably sundered. As he wrote to Alexandrine in March, the death of this old woman had affected him profoundly – more than any other. Despite feeling as fed up with Anna Karenina as with a ‘bitter radish’,93 he had to soldier on, however. Another third of the novel was printed in the first four issues of the Russian Messenger in 1876. The April issue contained a substantial section of Part Five, ending with a chapter recounting the last days of Levin’s brother Nikolay.94 As with many other parts of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy drew on his own personal experience to write it. For the character of Nikolay, he recalled aspects of his eccentric late brother Dmitry, and also resurrected in his memory the last days of his dearly loved brother of the same name who had died in his arms. Death seemed to be everywhere. Tolstoy told his one surviving brother Sergey in February that, like his character Levin, he was finding it impossible to get away from thoughts of death, and the notion that nothing else remained for him in life.95 Sergey was familiar with the feeling as he himself was a depressive, but so was their sister Maria, who wrote to Tolstoy from Heidelberg in March 1876 to tell him she had been feeling suicidal too:
I’m in such an appalling moral state, loneliness is affecting me so dreadfully, with the constant worry which hangs over on me like the sword of Damocles, and which I think about day and night, that I sometimes get frightened. Thoughts of suicide have begun to hound me, I mean really hound me and so relentlessly that it’s become a kind of illness or madness.96
Maria’s ‘constant worry’ was Elena, the illegitimate daughter she had given birth to in September 1863, months after the Tolstoys’ first child Sergey was born.97 In 1876 Elena turned thirteen, and Masha, as a widowed single woman, was still too ashamed to bring her to Russia.
Russian society had begun to change rapidly in the 1860s, but the patriarchal structures enshrined in law by the state remained in place. Tolstoy struck a chord with thousands of female readers suffering unhappy marriages when he wrote Anna Karenina. Even though few had the bravery of Anna Arkadyevna, they identified with her. The paradox of Tolstoy writing with such sympathy about Anna while at the same time writing a novel which clearly condemns adultery is partly explained by the fate of his sister Masha, whose unhappy experience of marriage was one of the many life stories which served as the raw material for his ‘family’ novel. It is as almost as if Masha read her brother’s mind, as in the letter she sent him in March 1876, she also spoke of the bitter life lessons she had learned, and directly identified herself with his heroine. ‘If all those Anna kareninas knew what awaited them,’ she wrote, ‘how they would run from ephemeral pleasures, which are never, and cannot be pleasures, because nothing that is unlawful can ever constitute happiness.’ This, of course, was Tolstoy’s own view.