Books: Tolstoy, Troglodyte

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Truth & Consequences. Matured by every kind of rough experience, Tolstoy had an irritable perception of the weakness in much literary chatter. In Petersburg he roared first at one coterie of intelligentsia and then at another, quarreled with Turgenev, insisted that he himself lived by instinct, not "convictions"—the fashionable word of the moment. Truth to Tolstoy, as to Rousseau, was a matter of feeling, though he called it "reason."

One of Tolstoy's presentiments was that unless Russia's serfs were freed they would free themselves in violence; he tried to get his own serfs to accept a program of gradual emancipation and was profoundly hurt by their suspicious rebuff. He practically gave up writing for several years to conduct a school for peasant children at the Tolstoy estate, Yasnaya Polyana, meanwhile tormenting himself over a passionate affair with a pretty young woman of the village: "Today, in the big old wood. I'm a. fool, a brute. Her bronze flush and her eyes. . . ." It was beyond him to give up the privileges of a Russian landowner, though he felt sure by this time that the Russian feudal system was evil.

Sonya & Serenity. After a long, puzzled courtship and a proposal as awkward as all Tolstoy's efforts with women of his own class, he married Sonya Andreyevna Bers in 1862. Tranquillized by his marr;iage, he settled down in the next years to write the long novel he had been meditating. At first he meant to call it All's Well That Ends Well. When he wrote the first 38 chapters he had no idea of the expanding design of the next volumes; Turgenev, still smarting over their most recent quarrel, in which Tolstoy had scornfully challenged him to a duel, found the opening "bad, boring, and unsuccessful." But before the last volumes of War and Peace appeared, in 1869, all Russia knew that the work was a masterpiece. So did Tolstoy. After going over :he battlefield of Borodino he wrote to Sonya: "I'll write such a description of Borodino as was never written before. Always boasting!"

Sonya, who worked faithfully recopying his manuscripts, had meanwhile borne him four children. Absorbed in his work and in his family, Tolstoy was untroubled by social and spiritual worries until after the novel was finished. Then for several years he turned restlessly from one concern to another, learning Greek in three months by a prodigious zeal of application, writing a schoolbook, taking a milk cure. Even when he began Anna Karenina his creative enthusiasm sometimes gave way to his urge for personal salvation. But in 1878 Anna was published, presenting, in the characters of Levin and Kitty, Tolstoy himself and Sonya, who had now borne nine children and wrote to her sister: "I . . . nurse like a machine from morn to night. . . ."