NATASHA

14. Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana, late nineteenth century. The huts and fields in the foreground belong to the villagers

the teachers being drawn in the main from those students who had been expelled from their universities for their revolutionary views.⁴⁵ Tolstoy became a magistrate, appointed by the Tsar to implement the emancipation manifesto, and angered all his colleagues, the leading squires of the Tula area, by siding with the peasants in their claims for land. On his own estate Tolstoy gave the peasants a sizeable proportion of his land - nowhere else in Russia was the manifesto fulfilled in a spirit of such generosity. Tolstoy almost yearned, it seemed, to give away his wealth. He dreamed of abandoning his privileged existence and living like a peasant on the land. For a while he even tried. In 1862 he settled down for good with his new wife, Sonya, at Yasnaya Polyana, dismissed all the stewards, and took charge of the farming by himself. The experiment was a complete failure. Tolstoy did not care for looking after pigs - and ended up deliberately starving them to death. He did not know how to cure hams, how to make butter, when to plough or hoe the fields, and he soon became fed up and ran away to Moscow, or locked himself away in his study, leaving everything to the hired labourers.⁴⁶

The fantasy, however, would not go away. 'Now let me tell you

what I've just decided,' he would tell the village children at his school. 'I am going to give up my land and my aristocratic way of life and become a peasant. I shall build myself a hut at the edge of the village, marry a country woman, and work the land as you do: mowing, ploughing, and all the rest.' When the children asked what he would do with the estate, Tolstoy said he would divide it up. 'We shall own it all in common, as equals, you and me.' And what, the children asked, if people laughed at him and said he had lost everything: 'Won't you feel ashamed?' 'What do you mean 'ashamed'?' the count answered gravely. 'Is it anything to be ashamed of to work for oneself? Have your fathers ever told you they were ashamed to work? They have not. What is there to be ashamed of in a man feeding himself and his family by the sweat of his brow? If anybody laughs at me, here's what I would say: there's nothing to laugh at in a man's working, but there is a great deal of shame and disgrace in his not working, and yet living better than others. That is what I am ashamed of. I eat, drink, ride horseback, play the piano, and still I feel bored. I say to myself: 'You're a do-nothing.''⁴⁷ Did he really mean it? Was he saying this to give the children pride in the life of peasant toil that awaited them or was he really planning to join them? Tolstoy's life was full of contradictions and he never could decide if he should become a peasant or remain a nobleman. On the one hand he embraced the elite culture of the aristocracy. War and Peace is a novel that rejoices in that world. There were times while working on that epic novel - like the day one of the village schools shut down in 1863 - when he gave up on the peasants as a hopeless cause. They were capable neither of being educated nor of being understood. War and Peace would depict only 'princes, counts, ministers, senators and their children', he had promised in an early draft, because, as a nobleman himself, he could no more understand what a peasant might be thinking than he 'could understand what a cow is thinking as it is being milked or what a horse is thinking as it is pulling a barrel'.⁴⁸ On the other hand, his whole life was a struggle to renounce that elite world of shameful privilege and live 'by the sweat of his own brow'. The quest for a simple life of toil was a constant theme in Tolstoy's works. Take Prince Levin, for example, the peasant-loving squire in Anna Karenina - a character so closely based on Tolstoy's life and dreams that he was virtually autobiographical. Who can forget

that blissful moment when Levin joins the peasant mowers in the field and loses himself in the labour and the team?

After breakfast Levin was not in the same place in the string of mowers as before, but found himself between the old man who had accosted him quizzically, and now invited him to be his neighbour, and a young peasant who had only been married in the autumn and who was mowing this summer for the first time.

The old man, holding himself erect, went in front, moving with long, regular strides, his feet turned out and swinging his scythe as precisely and evenly, and apparently as effortlessly, as a man swings his arms in walking. As if it were child's play, he laid the grass in a high, level ridge. It seemed as if the sharp blade swished of its own accord through the juicy grass.

Behind Levin came the lad Mishka. His pleasant boyish face, with a twist of fresh grass bound round his hair, worked all the time with effort; but whenever anyone looked at him he smiled. He would clearly sooner die than own it was hard work for him.

Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing did not seem such hard work. The perspiration with which he was drenched cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head, and his arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigour and dogged energy to his labour; and more and more often now came those moments of oblivion, when it was possible not to think of what one was doing. The scythe cut of itself. Those were happy moments.⁴⁹

Tolstoy loved to be among the peasants. He derived intense pleasure - emotional, erotic - from their physical presence. The 'spring-like' smell of their beards would send him into raptures of delight. He loved to kiss the peasant men. The peasant women he found irresistible -sexually attractive and available to him by his 'squire's rights'. Tolstoy's diaries are filled with details of his conquests of the female serfs on his estate - a diary he presented, according to the custom, to his bride Sonya (as Levin does to Kitty) on the eve of their wedding:* '21 April 1858. A wonderful day. Peasant women in the garden and by the well. I'm like a man possessed.'⁵⁰ Tolstoy was not handsome,

* Similar diaries were presented to their future wives by Tsar Nicholas II, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and the poet Vladimir Khodasevich.

but he had a huge sex drive and, in addition to the thirteen children Sonya bore, there were at least a dozen other children fathered by him in the villages of his estate.

But there was one peasant woman who represented more than a sexual conquest. Aksinia Bazykina was twenty-two - and married to a serf on his estate - when Tolstoy first saw her in 1858. 'I'm in love as never before in my life', he confessed to his diary. 'Today in the wood. I am a fool. A beast. Her bronze flush and her eyes… Have no other thought.'⁵¹ This was more than lust. 'It's no longer the feelings of a stag', he wrote in 1860, 'but of a husband for a wife.'⁵² Tolstoy, it appears, was seriously considering a new life with Aksinia in some 'hut at the edge of the village'. Turgenev, who saw him often at this time, wrote that Tolstoy was 'in love with a peasant woman and did not want to discuss literature'.⁵³ Turgenev himself had several love affairs with his own serfs (one even bore him two children), so he must have understood what Tolstoy felt.⁵⁴ In 1862, when Tolstoy married Sonya, he tried to break relations with Aksinia; and in the first years of their marriage, when he was working without rest on War and Peace, it is hard to imagine his wandering off to find Aksinia in the woods. But in the 1870s he began to see her once again. She bore him a son by the name of Timofei, who became a coachman at Yasnaya Polyana. Long after that, Tolstoy continued to have dreams about Aksinia. Even in the final year of his long life, half a century after their first encounter, he recorded his joy, on seeing the 'bare legs' of a peasant girl, 'to think that Aksinia is still alive'.⁵⁵ This was more than the usual attraction of a squire to a serf. Aksinia was Tolstoy's unofficial 'wife', and he continued to love her well into her old age. Aksinia was not beautiful in any conventional sense, but she had a certain quality, a spiritual strength and liveliness, that made her loved by all the villagers. 'Without her', Tolstoy wrote, 'the khorovod was not a khorovod, the women did not sing, the children did not play'.⁵⁶ Tolstoy saw her as the personification of everything that was good and beautiful in the Russian peasant woman - she was proud and strong and suffering - and that is how he drew her in a number of his works. She appears, for example, in 'The Devil', which tells the story of his love affair with her both before and after his marriage. It may be

significant that Tolstoy did not know how to end the tale. Two different

conclusions were published: one in which the hero kills the peasant woman, the other where he commits suicide.

Tolstoy's own life story was unresolved as well. In the middle of the 1870s, when the 'going to the people' reached its apogee, Tolstoy experienced a moral crisis that led him, like the students, to seek his salvation in the peasantry. As he recounts in A Confession (1879-80), he had suddenly come to realize that everything which had provided meaning in his life - family happiness and artistic creation - was in fact meaningless. None of the great philosophers brought him any comfort. The Orthodox religion, with its oppressive Church, was unacceptable. He thought of suicide. But suddenly he saw that there was a true religion in which to