The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy (50 page)

In Moscow I was delighted by the way people treated me. Everyone was so friendly and cheerful, as though they were all my friends. Even people in the shops and banks welcomed me back warmly after my long absence.

I dealt successfully with my business, visited the Wanderers' Exhibition* and the exhibition of St Petersburg artists, went to an examination performance of Mozart's cheerful opera
Così Fan Tutte
and saw a lot of friends, and on Sunday invited a group of my closest friends to the house—Marusya, the Maklakovs, Uncle Kostya, Misha Sukhotin and Sergei Ivanovich, who played me some of Arensky's lesser-known pieces, a Schumann sonata and his own charming symphony, which gave me more pleasure than anything.

Soothed and satisfied, I set off for Gaspra, assuming from the daily telegrams that everything there was in order. But on my return I discovered that L.N. had had a fever for the past two or three evenings, and eventually typhoid fever was diagnosed. These past
days and nights have been agony and terror for all of us. At two in the morning I called on Doctor Nikitin, who is staying here with us, and he administered some strophanthus, stayed a while, then went off to bed.

Lev Nikolaevich is now lying quietly in the large gloomy Gaspra drawing room and I am writing at the table. The house is silent and ominous.

 

13th May
. He is better, thank God. His temperature is falling steadily and his pulse has improved. Seryozha is being insufferable and keeps finding new reasons for being angry with me.

I live only for
today
, it's enough for me if everything is all right. I played the piano alone for two hours in the wing while L.N. slept.

 

15th May
. This unpleasantness with Seryozha has taken its toll. Yesterday I had such terrible pains all over my body that I thought I was dying. I am better today. L.N.'s typhus is passing; his temperature was 36.5 after his bed-bath this evening, and his pulse was 80; his maximum temperature today was 37.3. But he is weak and terribly wretched. I was told not to go downstairs but couldn't resist visiting him. It is cold, 11 degrees.

 

16th May
. He is much better and his temperature is down to 37, not even that. He is very bored, poor man. I should think so too! He has been ill for almost 5 months now.

He is dictating ideas about the unequal distribution of the land and the injustice of land ownership; this is his major preoccupation at the moment.* I feel I am about to break. If only I could leave!

 

22nd May
. Lev Nikolaevich is gradually recovering: his temperature is back to normal, no higher than 36.5, and his pulse is 80. He is upstairs at present, as the downstairs rooms are being cleaned and aired. The weather is cool and rainy. Everyone in the house has become terribly homesick all of a sudden, and even L.N. is in low spirits, despite his recovery. We are all longing to be back in Yasnaya. Tanya is missing her husband, and Ilyusha his family. To be perfectly frank, all of us are feeling the need for some sort of personal life again, now that the danger is past. Poor Sasha, it's quite reasonable for her to want this at her age.

Yesterday and today I played the piano on my own in the wing. I am practising the very difficult Chopin Scherzo (the second, in five flats).
What a lovely piece it is, and how it harmonizes with my present mood! Then I sight-read the Mozart rondo (the second, the minor), such an elegant, graceful work.

I was lying in bed today wondering why a husband and wife so often find estrangement creeping into their relations, and I realized it was because married couples know
every aspect of each other
, and as they grow older they become wiser, and see everything more clearly. We don't like people to see our
bad
side, we carefully conceal our flaws from others and show ourselves off to our best advantage, and the cleverer a person is the more able he is to present his best qualities. With a husband or wife though, this isn't possible. One can see all the lies and the masks—and it's not at all pleasant.

I am reading Fielding's
The Soul of a People
, translated from the English. It is quite delightful. How much better Buddhism is than our Orthodoxy, and what marvellous people these Burmese are.

 

29th May
. I haven't written for a whole week. On Saturday the 25th Tanya went home to Kochety. On the 26th Lev Nikolaevich was carried downstairs and taken outside to the terrace, where he sat in his armchair. Yesterday he even took a spin in the carriage with Ilyusha. Professor Lamansky was here yesterday, and some peculiar fellow who talked about the low cultural level of the peasants and the necessity to do something about it. He kept saying “pardon” in French, and deliberately didn't pronounce his “r”s. Lev Nikolaevich got very angry with him, but when I sent him away to take his pulse—which was 94 per minute—he angrily shouted at me in the presence of Lamansky: “Oh, I'm so tired of you!” which hurt me deeply.

The lovely white magnolias and lilies have come into flower.

 

5th June
. Still in the Crimea. It is very pleasant here at the moment; the days are hot and fine and the moonlit nights are beautiful; I am sitting upstairs, admiring the reflection of the moon in the sea. Lev Nikolaevich is walking about with a stick now and seems well, although he is very thin and weak. He only lost his temper once with me yesterday, when I cut and washed his hair. He writes every morning—a proclamation to the working people, I think, and also something about the ownership of the land.

 

11th June
. Today he went for a drive with Doctor Volkov to the Yusupovs' Park in Ai-Todor, which he enjoyed very much.
Altschuler's wife visited, as well as Sonya Tatarinova, the Volkov family and Elpatevsky with his son. A large crowd of strangers came and peered through the window at Lev Nikolaevich.

 

Sofia Tolstoy in 1863

 

Sofia Behrs and her younger sister Tatyana, photographed some time in the early 1860s

 

Yasnaya Polyana, the general view of the Tolstoys' estate, 1897

 

Sofia Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoy, Sofia's younger brother Stepan Behrs, Sofia's daughter Maria and Maria Petrovna Behrs, Stepan's wife, 1887

 

Peasant women gathering apples in the Tolstoys' orchard at Yasnaya Polyana, 1888

 

Sofia Tolstoy with her children Tatyana and Sergei, 1866 (above left), Ivan Tolstoy (Vanechka), the Tolstoys' youngest child, photographed in 1893 in Moscow by the firm of Scherer and Nabholz (above right)

 

Sofia Tolstoy with her younger children: left to right, Mikhail (Misha), Andrei (Andryusha), Alexandra (Sasha) and Ivan (Vanechka)