However difficult I might find it to combine the copying with my maternal and other duties, when I had not got it, I missed it and waited impatiently for my husband’s artistic work to begin again.
The conditions under which Anna Karenina was written were much more difficult than those under which War and Peace was written. Then we had undisturbed happiness, now there died in succession three of our children and two aunts. I became ill, grew thin, coughed blood, and suffered from pains in the back. Leo Nikolaevich became alarmed, and in Moscow, on the way to get kumiss, he consulted Professor Zakharin, who said: “It is not yet consumption, but her nerves may be shattered”; and he added reproachfully: “You have neglected her, though.” He forbade me to teach the children or do the copying, and he prescribed a régime of silence. For a long time I got no better, especially as we had to spend the summer on the Samara steppes in very inconvenient surroundings and living on kumiss, which I could not drink. Miserable and ill, I wrote to my sister: “Levochka’s novel is published and is said to be a great success. In me it arouses strange feelings; there is so much sorrow in our house, and we are everywhere made so much of.”
After Anna Karenina, Leo Nikolaevich, wishing to purify the literature read by simple folk and to introduce more morality and art into it, wrote a series of stories and legends which I admired very much; I sympathized keenly with their idea and object. I remember being present at the university when these legends were read aloud, and I wrote to Leo Nikolaevich at Yasnaya Polyana:
“The legends were a tremendous success. They were beautifully read by Professor Storozhenko. The majority of the audience were students. The impression which the stories makes on one is that the style is remarkably severe, concise, not a single unnecessary word, everything true and pointed — a harmonious whole. Much meaning, few words; it gives one satisfaction right up to the end.”
I mention these works, as I have done those which were created during the happiest years of our life.
IV
DURING THE FIRST years of our married life we had few people to stay with us. I remember that Count Sollogub, the author of Tarantas, with his two sons, used to come and visit us. He was a clever and amiable man, and we all liked him very much; he won my heart by saying to Leo Nikolaevich: “Lucky man to have such a wife.” To me he once said: “You are, in fact, the nurse of your husband’s talent, and go on being that all your life long.” I always remembered this wise and friendly advice of Count Sollogub, and I tried to follow it as well as I could.
Very often Fet used to come to us; Leo Nikolaevich was fond of him and Fet was fond of us both. On his journeys between Moscow and his estate he used to stay with us, and his good wife, Marie Petrovna, often came with him; he used to make the house ring with his loud, brilliant, often witty, and sometimes flattering, talk.
In the early summer of 1863, he was at Yasnaya Polyana when Leo Nikolaevich was tremendously interested in bees and used to spend whole days among the hives; sometimes I used even to bring the lunch out there. One evening we all decided to have tea in the apiary. Everywhere in the grass glow-worms began to shine. Leo Nikolaevich took two of them and laughingly held them to my ears, saying: “Look, I always promised you emerald ear-rings; could anything be better than these?” When Fet left, he wrote me a letter in verse, ending as follows:
In my hand is yours,
What a marvel!
And on the earth are two glow-worms,
Two emeralds.
Almost always after a visit Afanasii Afanasevich Fet sent me a poem, and many of them were dedicated to me. In one of them I was pleased by the, perhaps, undeserved description of the qualities of my soul in the following stanza:
And, behold, enchanted
By thee, here, remote,
I understand, bright creature,
All the purity of thy soul.
When we settled down in Moscow, Fet bought a house near us and often visited us, saying that in Moscow all he wanted was a samovar. We laughed at this unexpected desire of Fet’s, and he explained: “I must be certain that in such and such a house, in the evening, the samovar is boiling and that there is sitting there a sweet hostess with whom I can spend a pleasant evening.”
Among the interesting visitors at Yasnaya Polyana was Turgenev, who came twice. The first time was in 1878, and the second when he came to ask Leo Nikolaevich to be present at the opening of the Pushkin memorial. He was amiable and lively and liked our happy family life, and he said to Leo Nikolaevich: “How well you did for yourself, my dear, in marrying your wife.”
I thank those dear, dead, real friends of ours for their invariable goodness and kindness to me. Many of them were more than twenty years older than I and treated me, as a young woman, with kindliness.
Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov often came to us on long visits; he was for all of us a loved and respected friend and he was always deeply touched by our life and was fond of the children. He used to say: “I must write about Yasnaya Polyana and the life here.” But his intention remained unfulfilled.
Many other guests came to us at Yasnaya Polyana and in Moscow. Among them were foreigners, Riepin, the famous artist, Gué, Syerov, Ginsburg, Truberskoi, Aronson who painted and sculptured Leo Nikolaevich and myself. My portraits for some reason were never like me.
A great deal could be written about this happy period of my life, when everything was so full of joy, interest, and occupation. I regret that at the time I kept few records of events and the interesting conversation of visitors and of Leo Nikolaevich himself; now I remember little, for I have passed through different experiences in which I had to pay with sorrow and tears for former happiness, experiences caused by painful circumstances and by wicked people.
V
WHEN CHILDREN BEGAN to appear upon the scene, I could no longer devote myself entirely to my husband’s service and to the constant sympathy with his work. We had many children: I bore thirteen. Ten of them I nursed myself, on principle and because I wanted to do so. I did not want to have wet-nurses. Owing to difficulties, I had to give up the principle on three occasions.
The children were growing up, and at that time we were of one mind with regard to their education. Leo Nikolaevich always himself engaged or found teachers and governesses for them. We parents taught them a great deal ourselves. Their father wanted to give them a most refined education, and to the boys an exclusively classical one. He learnt Greek himself with great labour in order to teach our eldest son, Serge, whom Leo Nikolaevich wanted to go to the university. “By that time Tanya will be grown up,” he would say, “and we shall have to bring her out.” I had to teach the children those subjects for which at the time there were no teachers, French, German, music, drawing, Russian literature, and even dancing. I knew very little English. Leo Nikolaevich, who also at that time had a poor knowledge of the language, began teaching it to me, and the first book which we read together in English was Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Later on I easily acquired the language from the English governess whom we had for the children.
What we were chiefly concerned for in the education of the elder children, we obtained in 1881 when we moved to Moscow for the winter. Our eldest son, Serge, entered the university; our two other sons, Ilya and Leo, were sent by Leo Nikolaevich to L. I. Polivanov’s classical school. He sent our daughter, Tanya, to the School of Painting and Sculpture, and he took her out to her first fancy-dress ball at the Olsufevs, as I was expecting my eighth child, Alesha, born on 31 October, and did not go out anywhere.
The move to Moscow and our life in the town turned out for both of us to be much more difficult than we could have anticipated. It is true that Leo Nikolaevich wrote to me from the Samara steppes, where he had gone for a kumiss cure: “If God will, I shall come and help you in your Moscow affairs willingly — you have only to give me the order”; but he was unable to carry out his word and he suddenly fell into despondency.
Now that he was away from the country and nature, the impressions of town life, which he had forgotten, but which now came fresh to him, with its poverty on the one side and its luxury on the other, threw him into despondency, so that it often made me cry to see his moods which became much worse after he took part
