Page:Rolland Life of Tolstoy.djvu/106

102 that he falls ill. In 1871 he was forced to go to Samara to undergo the koumiss cure, staying with the Bachkirs. Nothing pleased him but his Greek. At the end of a lawsuit, in 1872, he spoke seriously of selling all that he possessed in Russia and of settling in England. Countess Tolstoy was in despair:

“If you are always absorbed in your Greeks you will never get well. It is they who have caused this suffering and this indifference concerning your present life. It is not in vain that we call Greek a dead language; it produces a condition of death in the spirit.”

Finally, to the great joy of the Countess, after many plans abandoned before they were fairly commenced, on March 19, 1873, he began to write Anna Karenin. While he worked at it his life was saddened by domestic sorrow; his wife was ill. “Happiness does not reign in the house,” he writes to Fet in 1876.

To some extent the work bears traces of these depressing experiences, and of passions disillusioned. Save in the charming passages dealing