have taught him better, but poor Sonya Tolstoy slept with only one man in her life, whose embraces were described as bear-like.
When he is writing his great novels there is no suggestion that his characters hate sex, but as a polemicist he says that women hate sex and after sex are cold and hostile, and that this hostility is the real relationship between men and women, concealed by the recurring cycles of sexual attraction and indifference.
When Tolstoy was very old, sex ceased, and Sonya Tolstoy complained that what she had always feared had happened: without the sexual bond all ties were cut between them. Yet, very old, they were writing loving notes saying they could not live without each other.
This cycle of sex and quarrelling has always fascinated me. Anybody who has enjoyed passionate sex will recall as passionate quarrels, but surely it is not surprising, when sex is such a promoter of strong emotions of all kinds that antagonism should sometimes be one of them. It is not unknown, either, for people to report enjoying the crazy quarrels that may spice and heighten sex. Enjoy – out with the word. Woman is an unwilling victim and man the guilt-ridden and driven aggressor.
Thirteen children did his countess and Tolstoy get between them. Sonya Tolstoy had eight children in eight years. Yes, there were nannies and nursemaids, but the implications of the simple physical fact are surely enough to explain a lot of that rioting emotion.
They lost three children, in three years, to illnesses that these days would not amount to more than a few days’ indisposition. Of the thirteen children they lost four. Sonya Tolstoy must always have been pregnant, nursing, and a good part of the time in mourning. Tolstoy was as affected by these deaths as his wife. After a particularly poignant death of a much loved child – the thirteenth, he said: ‘Yes, he was a delightful wonderful little boy. But what does it mean to say he is dead? There is no death; he is not dead because we love him, because he is giving us life.’ This apparently monstrous egotism was not what it looks like, for we have an account of Tolstoy, crazed with grief, running across the fields to escape from his emotion, repeating ‘in a jerky savage voice’ ‘There is no death! There is no death!’
The Kreutzer Sonata was written after hearing the music played, which affected him strongly: he was white and suffering, and arranged to have it played again. As a result of the first hearing he made love to Sonya – if that is the word for it – and as a result of that she got pregnant with the little boy Ivan, who died seven years later and caused Tolstoy to insist: There is no death.
By this time he was claiming that there was no justification for art that is not polemical. In 1865 he wrote ‘The aims of art are incommensurable with the aims of socialism. An artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.’ By the time he was writing socialist and religious tracts art nevertheless sometimes triumphed over polemics, in Resurrection, for instance, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Not very long after this tract against sex, The Kreutzer Sonata, which no one could say is not a compelling read, came Bohemianism, to be intensified by the First World War and its social aftermath, Free Love and ‘Live, Drink and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die’. As early as 1907 there was a scene like a rude riposte to Tolstoy and his Kreutzer Sonata. Ida John dying in Paris of her fifth, of puerperal fever, lifting her glass in a toast of champagne ‘to Love’ with her rapscallion of a husband, Augustus John, then at the height of his fame. In the next room his mistress is looking after the children.
The Bohemians, who repudiated all conventional sexual morality as thoroughly as did Tolstoy, though from the opposite viewpoint, were then a minority which set out to shock. Epatering the bourgeoisie was their raison d’être. And then, not so long after that, came the Second World War, and wartime morality, and then what a witty friend used to call ‘The horizontal handshake’, and now young women depart from all over Europe in droves for holiday shores where they screw, presumably enjoyably, with males who wait for them like Inuits for migrating caribou.
Hedonism rules, okay?
What has happened? Birth control has.
In Anna Karenina Dolly, overburdened with children, visits bad Anna the outcast from society who confides that she knows how to prevent conception. She is kind enough not to point out that she is still young and pretty while Dolly is worn out with childbearing. Shock and horror is what Dolly feels. She is repulsed. And that is what Tolstoy feels about birth control. It is unnatural, says he, and women make monsters of themselves, destroying in themselves their capacity of being women, that is, mothers, so that ‘men may make no interruption of their enjoyment’. Note that it is the men who are doing the enjoying.
Anna Karenina, is always talked of as the story of Anna, a society beauty, and her seducer Vronsky, a variation of the great nineteenth-century theme of adultery. Its fame as the greatest of the adultery novels (some claim that for Madame Bovary) tends to obscure the scope of the novel: Tolstoy portrayed a gallery of women of that time. Dolly is the unhappy wife of a bad husband. Kitty is the happy wife of a jealous and loving husband. There are court ladies, whom Tolstoy detests, and peasant women, whom he admires. One is Levin’s housekeeper, more of a friend than a servant, and another the peasant woman who came to rescue Dolly from her domestic disorders. A young peasant woman shocked Dolly by saying that ‘The Lord has relieved me of a burden’, talking of the death of a child – one mouth less to feed. A spinster fails to get a husband and is doomed to a life of being a guest in other people’s houses. A bad woman – Anna Karenina’s mirror – is a prostitute and can have no future. This is a novel about the situation of women in that time. Anna now would not have to throw herself under a train. Dolly would not have so many children. Kitty perhaps would not be so content as the wife of an unreasonably jealous man. The spinster would have a career, might be a single mother. Nowhere in Anna Karenina does that great artist describe a wife or mistress disgusted with sex and full of implacable hatred for men’s sexuality. Anna hates Vronsky at the end because he is free and she is not, but she does not hate him sexually.
There is just a hint of the conflict between the moralist and the artist in this novel, which begins with the inscription, like a curse, ‘“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” saith the Lord.’ But there is no vengeance, the novel is irradiated by Tolstoy’s love and understanding of everything.
Understanding of everything and everybody but not of himself. He said to Gorki, ‘Man can endure earthquake, epidemics, dreadful diseases, every form of spiritual torment, but the most dreadful tragedy that can befall him and will remain, is the tragedy of the bedroom.’
We have the diaries of two people with a gift for complaint, invective, and a relish for recording the minutiae of the ups and downs of their love. For it was that. In between the storms were days of tranquillity. We have all the facts, or think we have, but few of us now have the experiences that could tell us what life in that family was like.
Yasnaya Polyana – which can translate as Aspen Glades, or Bright Glades – the Tolstoys’ country house, is now a shrine, and visited by thousands every year. It was the estate’s manor house, a large villa, with many rooms that turned out not to be enough to accommodate all those children, and so a wing was built on. There were all kinds of sheds, outhouses and annexes. Now it has to impress us by its potentialities for discomfort, because of the numbers of people it had to house. Large, high-ceilinged rooms, which must have been hell to heat. In summer, set as it is in fields and woods, what a paradise – but there is a long Russian winter. The furniture is adequate. The sofa where Tolstoy was born and where the countess laboured thirteen times is hard, slippery, ungiving.
Fresh water did not come gushing from taps: it was brought in by the bucket and there was a bathhouse. No electric light. There is a scene of Tolstoy, an old man, writing in his study with the aid of
