While he was carried along by the huge wave of creative inspiration that drove the writing of War and Peace, Tolstoy had successfully suppressed his tendencies towards depression, but now he could not help succumbing to melancholy thoughts, and his continuing ill-health also contributed to his low spirits.14 Two years after he finished War and Peace, he still felt so low that he confided in Sergey Urusov that he had no will to live, and had never felt so miserable in all his life.15 Misreading the symptoms, which at this point her husband himself did not fully understand, Sonya became increasingly anxious for him to start another book. It would be three years before Tolstoy started Anna Karenina, however, and writing it would prove to be as arduous as the writing of War and Peace had been stimulating. More than any other, Anna Karenina is the novel which readers invariably say they cannot put down. Tolstoy, by contrast, had so little desire to finish it that he had to force himself to pick it up. Neither he nor Sonya quite realised it yet, but the happiest years of their marriage were already over.
If Tolstoy was visited by thoughts of his own mortality after finishing War and Peace, it was because he had begun to confront death seriously while he was writing it. The first unwelcome confrontation with death had come through his chance involvement in the court-martial of Private Vasily Shabunin in 1866. This isolated incident exerted a far greater impact on him than he was prepared to admit at the time. That summer the Tolstoys had received a visit from a family friend of the Bers, Grigory kolokoltsov, an officer serving with a Moscow infantry regiment stationed a few miles down the road from Yasnaya Polyana. On subsequent visits to Yasnaya Polyana, he brought his colonel, Pyotr Yunosha, and another officer called Alexander Stasyulevich, and Tolstoy enjoyed going riding with them.16 One day kolokoltsov and Stasyulevich came to ask Tolstoy if he would defend one of the regiment’s regular soldiers at his forthcoming court-martial: Private Shabunin had struck his superior, and according to Russian law, this was an offence punishable by death. As an opponent of capital punishment ever since he had witnessed a public execution in Paris, Tolstoy agreed.17
Despite Tolstoy’s plea, Shabunin was convicted and sentenced to be shot by firing squad. Appalled that such a minor infraction could attract such a drastic and inappropriate punishment, Tolstoy immediately appealed to higher channels via his influential cousin Alexandrine in St Petersburg, but to no avail. This was perhaps owing partly to the hysteria at court following the attempt to assassinate Alexander II in St Petersburg a few months earlier. The man wielding the gun, Dmitry karakozov, who was one of Russia’s first revolutionaries, was also sentenced to death. In September, a few weeks later after Shabunin’s execution, Tolstoy asked the military band which had been obliged to accompany it to come up to Yasnaya Polyana to play as a surprise for Sonya’s name-day party. It was a warm evening, and after dinner on the veranda, at a long table decorated with flowers, the guests had danced into the night – Sonya recorded in her diary that it had been a very jolly evening, and her husband had been in particularly good spirits.18 Tolstoy then went back to writing War and Peace. Stasyulevich’s suicide the following year, which apparently struck Tolstoy deeply, was not directly related to Private Shabunin’s death, but it was a chilling postscript to an event which, as it turned out later, would gnaw at his conscience.19
Then there were personal losses. He had not been particularly close to his father-in-law Andrey Estafevich, or his philandering uncle Vladimir in kazan, still less his ghastly brother-in-law Valerian PetrovichTolstoy, who all died in the 1860s, but he was greatly upset by the deaths of Elizaveta, the sister of his distant cousin Alexandrine, and particularly Darya Alexandrovna, known to all as Dolly – the wife of his best friend Dmitry Dyakov, whom he had known since student days.20 Then, in 1869, Tolstoy’s friend Sergey urusov, already widowed, lost his only daughter Lidia, while another friend Afanasy Fet lost his sister Nadezhda and two brothers-in-law, Nikolay and Vasily Botkin, in quick succession. Tolstoy had himself been friends with Vasily Botkin for well over a decade, and was disturbed to hear that he had died suddenly, in the company of the friends who had gathered at his home to hear a string quartet performed.21
