Leo Tolstoy

4

A Fugitive Celebrity

Since the time he suddenly left university at the age of eighteen, Tolstoy’s life had been full of forced breaks and abrupt departures. He resigned from the army, stopped teaching at his school and gave up managing his estate. He rejected the dissolute life he had led in his youth and then the respectable lifestyle of a rich landowner. He abandoned the Orthodox Church and the social class into which he had been born. He also made several attempts to break up with literature, but each time he had returned to writing.

In October 1864 Tolstoy fell from his horse and broke his arm while hunting. After an unsuccessful intervention by local doctors, the bone started to heal in the wrong way and it became clear that a new operation would be necessary. This was performed in Moscow at the house of his father-in-law, who made sure to engage the best surgeons in the country. According to the memoirs of Tatiana Kuzminskaya, having received the first dose of anaesthetic, Tolstoy ‘jumped up from the armchair with wide-open staring eyes, threw away the sachet of chloroform and shouted loudly: “My friends, one can’t live like this . . . I think . . . I have decided . . .”’ (Kuz, p. 315). He was given another dose, calmed down and the operation went successfully.

Whatever Tolstoy had ‘decided’ in his delirium, the urge to liberate himself from something he cherished always lived inside him. The stronger the bonds were, the more desperate he was to break them, however painful it was – particularly if it was painful. There was nothing in the world he valued more than family. In spite of or because of this, even during the happiest periods of his life he could not rid himself of a yearning to escape. In the early 1880s, when he renounced the Church, money, property, authorship, meat, tobacco, alcohol, hunting and so on, these thoughts became obsessive. ‘He cried today loudly that his most passionate thought was to leave the family,’ wrote Sofia in her diary on 26 August 1882. ‘Even on my deathbed I will not forget the sincerity of his exclamation; it was as if my heart had been cut from inside me’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 108).

Tolstoy was experiencing an almost physiological need to leave behind his ‘position as a famous writer’ and a comfortable life and to join the thousands of homeless wanderers who lived off nothing more than the fruits of their daily labour and alms. One of his younger disciples once asked him where a true follower of Tolstoy’s religion was supposed to dine. ‘Don’t be worried,’ came the mentor’s answer, ‘whoever needs you, will feed you.’¹ He was unable to perceive Sofia’s attitude towards him as love, and he wrote in his diary on 5 May 1884: ‘Dreamed that my wife loved me. How simple and clear everything became! Nothing like that in real life. And that’s what is ruining my life . . . It would be good to die’ (Ds, p. 186).

Several weeks later, after an argument with Sofia, who had accused him of financial recklessness, he packed his bag and left home. He ‘wanted to leave for good’, but her advanced pregnancy made him ‘turn back halfway to Tula’. The next morning their last daughter, Alexandra, was born. His urge to leave did not recede. Late in 1885 Sofia wrote to her sister Tatiana that Leo had told her he wanted to divorce her and go to Paris or America, as ‘he can’t bear to live like this.’ By the end of the row that followed, according to Sofia, Leo was sobbing hysterically: ‘Can you imagine, Levochka shaking and twitching from sobs’ (SAT-ML, I, pp. 499–500).

Twelve years later, in the midst of the family crisis over Sofia’s infatuation with Taneyev, Tolstoy wrote her a farewell letter:

Dear Sonya,

I have been long tormented by the incongruity between my heart and my beliefs. I have not been able to make you change your life or your habits, to which I have myself accustomed you and up to now I haven’t been able to leave you . . . Neither was I able to continue living any longer the way I have been living for the last sixteen years, now struggling and irritating you; now yielding to the temptations to which I was accustomed and by which I was surrounded, and I have now decided to do what I have long wished to do – to go away. (Ls, II, p. 561)

Tolstoy did not deliver this letter and did not leave either. He believed the Gospels compelled him to leave his family and everyone he held dear in order to follow his calling, but he was also convinced that universal love could manifest itself only through love to those who are close by. It was, after all, a sudden feeling of compassion towards his wife and son that had allowed Ivan Ilyich to renounce his animal egotism and die peacefully.

Tolstoy’s enemies and followers alike accused him of hypocrisy. He was pained by these reproaches, but able to withstand them because he knew them to be false. The pleasures derived from everyday comforts would never be able to influence his decisions. He was less sure about the temptations of lust and earthly fame. His struggle with both of these is evident in Father Sergius, a piece in which the intensity of contained passion is breathtaking even by the standards of Tolstoy’s prose. Tolstoy spent most of the 1890s devising and writing this story before it was completed in 1898. It was never published in his lifetime. The story starts with a description of the sensational disappearance of a highly successful person:

In Petersburg in the eighteen-forties a surprising event occurred. An officer of the Cuirassier Life Guards, a handsome prince who everyone predicted would become aide-de-camp to Emperor Nicholas I and have a brilliant career, left the service, broke off his engagement to a beautiful maid of honour, a favourite of the Empress’s, gave his small estate to his sister and retired to a monastery to become a monk. (TSF, p. 235)

Prince Stepan Kasatsky changes his life so dramatically because his bride confesses to him that, before their engagement, she had been a mistress of the emperor. This discovery turns Kasatsky’s love into a sham and exposes the futility of his ambitious aspirations. Religious beliefs he has preserved from his childhood save him and guide him to a monastery where he takes holy orders as Father Sergius. From there he retires to a remote cell where he leads an ascetic life of prayer and abstinence. His solitude is, however, marred by recurrent doubts about his choice and by carnal desires. In one of his worst moments he is tempted by an eccentric aristocratic beauty, who comes to his cell specially intending to seduce the handsome hermit. Father Sergius manages to resist the temptation only by cutting off one of his fingers.

This incident, which soon becomes public knowledge, makes the recluse immensely popular and gives rise to rumours about his healing powers.

More and more people flocked to him and less and less time was left him for prayer and for renewing his spiritual strength . . . He knew he would hear nothing new from these folk, that they would arouse no religious emotion in him, but he liked to see the crowd to which his blessing and advice was necessary and precious, so while that crowd oppressed him, it also pleased him. (TSF, pp. 256–7)

Tolstoy was thinking of himself, his newly acquired status as a prophet and of the crowds of people who came to seek his advice. His son remembers that, after the departure of a particularly annoying guest, Leo would start jumping wildly through the rooms of his house followed by a line of hilarious children. They used to call this silent ritual of liberation ‘Numidian cavalry’. His daughter Tatiana once asked him about a strangely clad man in his room. ‘He is a young member of what’s to me the world’s most strange and incomprehensible sect,’ responded her father, ‘the tolstoyans.’²

In May 1893 he noted in his diary that ‘as soon as a person is able to free himself a little from the sin of lust, he immediately stumbles and falls into the worse pit of human fame’. Thus it was necessary not ‘to destroy existing bad reputation, but to value it as a means to avoid the greatest temptation . . . I need to elaborate on this topic in “Father Sergius”. It is worth it’ (CW, LII, p. 82).

The limits of Father Sergius’s pretended saintliness are laid bare by a plump, imbecilic and sexually voracious merchant’s daughter, who makes him succumb to the desires of the flesh. The world of the hermit and his faith are ruined. ‘As usual at moments of despair, he felt a need of prayer. But there was no one to pray to. There was no God’ (TSF, p. 263). Tolstoy initially planned to make the hermit kill the girl, but that would have made the story a second version of his earlier novella, The Devil. Instead Tolstoy transformed the story of sex and murder into one of escape. In a trademark paradox, ugly sin liberates Father Sergius from the slavery of earthly fame and enables him to serve God by serving people. The hermit leaves his cell and is saved from utter destitution by a hapless old childhood friend, who lives a life of self-sacrifice supporting her desperate daughter, sickly and useless son-in-law and two grandchildren, without ever thinking that she is doing anything good or moral. Father Sergius becomes a wandering beggar, is arrested and exiled to Siberia. There he settles down, working in the kitchen garden of a well-to-do peasant, teaching his children and attending to the sick.

This ending seems to have been borrowed from another escape story Tolstoy considered writing in the 1890s. Posthumous Notes of the Elder Fyodor Kuzmich were based on a popular legend about Alexander I, according to which the emperor, known as a mystic and visionary, did not die in 1825, as had been officially announced, but escaped and lived under the assumed name of Fyodor Kuzmich. Fyodor was a real person. Like Father Sergius, he had wandered around Russia and been arrested for vagrancy and exiled. In his old age he lived in Siberia working in the kitchen garden of a merchant and teaching peasant children in return for meals – the old man never took money. Fyodor died in 1864, leaving behind some encoded papers. His identity was never revealed.

Tolstoy was inclined to believe the legend, but he did not write the story. He had too many other commitments in the 1890s to be able to bury himself in the documents and achieve the historical accuracy and sense of truthfulness he required. The themes of sudden escape, downturn in lifestyle, arrest and manual labour in a Siberian kitchen garden were transferred to Father Sergius. In 1901 the Russian historian Nikolai Schilder published a four-volume comprehensive biography of Alexander I. Schilder did not fully subscribe to the tale of the emperor’s escape, but also he did not refute it and seemed to be cautiously sympathetic to the legend. The biography, with its wealth of material, gave a boost to Tolstoy’s design. In 1902 he met Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, also a court historian, in Gaspra and talked with him about his relative. According to the grand duke, Tolstoy thought that if Alexander ‘really ended his life as a hermit, his redemption would be complete’ (CW, XXXVI, p. 585). In the writer’s mind such a transformation would redeem Alexander from the sin of having been complicit in the murder of his father, and the no less horrendous crime of ruling over other human beings for nearly a quarter of a century.

In 1905 Tolstoy started drafting the story narrated as an autobiography by the eponymous Fyodor Kuzmich. He had made little progress by 1907 when Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich published a monograph disproving the legend beyond reasonable doubt. It was likely, he concluded, that Fyodor was a fugitive nobleman, but definitely not the emperor. Thanking the grand duke for the book, Tolstoy wrote:

Tolstoy at work, drawing by Ilya Repin, 1891.

Let the impossibility of identifying Alexander and Kuzmich as the same person be proven historically, the legend still remains alive in all its beauty and truthfulness. I started writing about it; but shall probably not go on. No time, I have to pack for the forthcoming transition. It is a pity. What a charming image. (CW, LXXVII, p. 185)

He was charmed by the sudden and mysterious disappearance of a tsar and could not stop dreaming about it. In the midst of the revolutionary turmoil, Tolstoy felt an almost regal sense of mission weighing down upon him and the responsibility this entailed. These provoked, in turn, an irresistible urge to escape. He could not yet allow himself to withdraw from the public stage, but he had all but withdrawn from the world of literature.

Tolstoy, 28 August 1903.

Since the publication of Resurrection he had almost stopped publishing original artistic works. When the first posthumous edition of his complete works appeared in 1911, the reading public was stunned by Father Sergius, Hadji Murat, The Living Corpse and many other hidden treasures. The impact was similar to that achieved earlier with the publication of his great novels. ‘Tolstoy’s Alyosha the Pot. Never read anything greater,’³ wrote the leading Russian Modernist poet Alexander Blok about a four-page story about the life, love and death of a hard-working and selfless village boy considered a fool by some, for his kindness and readiness to oblige others.

There were many reasons for Tolstoy’s reluctance to publish. He wanted to avoid family rows about copyright; he also felt compelled to mortify his authorial vanity. Still he was physically unable to stop writing fiction. In 1909 he was working on a big story that was tellingly entitled There Are No Guilty People in the World. He confessed in his diary that he still had ‘an urge to do artistic work, not real desire of the kind I had before with a clear goal, but without any goal or rather with a hidden and unattainable goal of peering into the human soul. And I want it very much’ (CW, LVII, p. 52). On 2 October 1910, a month before his death, he had a new creative idea and exclaimed, ‘What a great thing that could be!’ (CW, LVIII, pp. 110–11).

Tolstoy needed to build himself ‘a scaffolding’ to write, but at the same time he was consciously trying to turn his literary pursuits into an innocent eccentric pastime for an old man, like playing cards for no money, horseriding or listening to Mozart on the gramophone. When rumours began to spread that he was about to be awarded the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his Swedish friends asking him to plead with the Academy to avoid ‘putting him in the very unpleasant position of refusing it’ (Ls, II, p. 660). He did his best to prevent major celebrations for his eightieth birthday in 1908.

Tolstoy on horseback at the age of eighty, 1909.

His main literary preoccupation at that time, however, was to find a form of self-effacement not only in the world of publishers and readers, but within the text itself. For several years he had been working on A Cycle of Readings. The purpose of this commonplace book of quotes and selected passages was to serve the needs of labouring people who did not have enough leisure time to spare on books. Arranged as a calendar, it collated quotations from major religious and moral teachers of all ages and nations from Lao Tzu and Confucius to Tolstoy himself. These were the fruits of Tolstoy’s years of digging through piles of books searching for pearls of wisdom that were both profound and digestible. He even found a valuable thought in Nietzsche, a philosopher he detested. Daily entries were accompanied by longer ‘weekly readings’ designed for Sundays and consisting of short stories and essays. For this purpose Tolstoy edited folk stories, religious parables and the works of dozens of writers including Turgenev, Maupassant, Anatole France and others. Some he inevitably wrote himself. The longest of these was his story The Divine and the Human, in which he set out to demonstrate the vanity and futility of revolutionary activity.

In A Cycle of Readings Tolstoy tried to dissolve his own input in an ocean of universal wisdom and morality to become just one voice in a great chorus. His creative role may have been confined to the choice and arrangement of material, but he was still shaping the artistic mainstream of the epoch. His role was akin to that of a theatre director or an orchestral conductor, two professions that were then acquiring their own independent artistic value.

Having completed A Cycle of Readings, Tolstoy started compiling For Every Day, later published in English as A Calendar of Wisdom or Wise Thoughts for Every Day, a work of the same sort addressed to even less educated readers. Here weekly readings were replaced by daily ones, simplified and rearranged in thematic order. This led to another compilation called The Way of Life, which abandoned the calendar altogether and arranged the texts thematically. This book, published in small instalments, dealt with the most pressing questions of religion, morality, life and death, sin and virtue. Tolstoy continued editing it until his death. He now included more of his own texts, presented in a short aphoristic form almost entirely devoid of the characteristic features of his authorial voice. The Way of Life was arguably the most personal of Tolstoy’s books in terms of its existential meaning, and the most impersonal in terms of style. He was trying to escape from his own expressive power to let unadulterated truth speak for itself.

In the meantime, Tolstoy’s marriage turned from dysfunctional to outright miserable. During the 1905 revolution his wife and sons had summoned police to arrest peasants cutting wood in their forests, and called armed guards to protect the estate. Having legally transferred ownership of the land to the members of his family, Tolstoy could do nothing to stop this but the peasants, the press and the Tolstoyans accused him of hiding behind his wife’s back. So did Sofia herself.

Chertkov’s return to Russia had given Tolstoy an opportunity to resume conversations with a friend he had greatly missed and brought relief from the unbearable atmosphere at home. However, Chertkov’s presence strongly aggravated the crisis in his family. Sofia considered him the cause of all her troubles and did not hold back in her diary: ‘A scoundrel and despot. He has taken the poor old man in his dirty hands and makes him perform evil deeds’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 212). She compared Chertkov to the Devil, playing on the etymology of his surname, derived from chert (‘the devil’) (SAT-Ds, II, p. 213). Sofia also spread rumours about the homoerotic nature of her husband’s attachment to Chertkov.

There were two basic reasons for the quarrels. One was Tolstoy’s diaries. Tolstoy had himself encouraged Sofia to read them many years before, but he changed his mind after the utopian ideal of merging his own being with that of his wife collapsed. In the cramped confines of the house at Yasnaya Polyana, however, there were few opportunities to hide the papers. He started to keep secret diaries for himself alone, hiding them under the upholstery of the armchairs. He passed some manuscripts to Chertkov, but backed down after this provoked a series of rows with Sofia. It is to Sofia’s credit, however, that after her husband’s death, when she had the diaries at her full disposal, she crossed out only five words, three of which scholars are still unable to read.

Copyright was an even more divisive issue. Tolstoy’s decision to transfer his works to the public domain was legally valid only until his death; after that the rights would automatically revert to Sofia as his legal heir. Some of his sons threatened to start legal proceedings against him to invalidate his decisions on the basis that he was suffering from a mental disability. Given Tolstoy’s precarious status as a quasi-excommunicate outlaw, this was not a hollow threat. On the other side, Chertkov was pressing the old man to settle the question of copyright once and for all. Finally Tolstoy gave in and drew up a will, certified by a lawyer, in which he bequeathed the beneficial rights to all his works to his daughter Alexandra, a passionate Tolstoyan and Chertkov’s most trusted friend in the family. Chertkov was appointed as his literary executor. Unable to face the tumult this would cause with Sofia and other members of his family, Tolstoy signed the document secretly in the forest.

His reasons for doing this were self-evident and justifiable. Chertkov’s devotion, competence and efficiency had been tested many times. Tolstoy’s will was also beneficial for future generations of readers and scholars. Under the Bolshevik regime, Chertkov, protected by official reverence towards his mentor, managed to launch an academic edition of Tolstoy’s complete works and to organize a team of researchers able to sustain and complete this ninety-volume chef-d’oeuvre of academic publishing after his death in 1936.

Nevertheless, on a personal level, Tolstoy’s decision violated at least three important tenets of his self-professed faith. He had signed a legal document, authorizing the state, with its laws, courts and executive powers, to intervene in his family affairs. He had done this secretly, making it necessary for Alexandra to lie to her mother. Tolstoy had also always argued against thinking about the future, which is beyond our control, and advised focusing one’s moral duty on the present. His favourite slogan was, ‘Do whatever you must, come what may.’ Now he had failed to apply this precept.

Neither Leo nor Alexandra was any good at dissembling. When confronted by Sofia’s direct questions, they both had to resort to hopeless ambiguities. As Tolstoy had always predicted, the truth came out, justifying Sofia’s suspicions and accusations. From her point of view, by conspiring with Chertkov behind her back he had proved himself to be hypocritical, secretive and scheming. She threatened to murder Chertkov and – repeatedly – to commit suicide. She was reading her husband’s diaries and believed he was doing the same with hers. As a consequence, mentions of suicide in her diaries were often accompanied by assertions that she actually possessed the means to kill herself.

Tolstoy tried to pacify her with concessions on issues that were not existentially important for his soul. In 1909, contrary to his usual aversion to giving public speeches, he agreed to go to the peace congress in Sweden, possibly looking for an excuse to get away from home. Sofia, frightened that he would not come back, started to object vehemently and, after several clashes, he backed down. In the summer of 1910 she managed to extract from him a promise to stop seeing Chertkov. Suspicious that he would break his word during one of his walks, she spied on him from a cave in the forest. Leo’s strategy was self-defeating. Sofia interpreted his concessions as a sign that she could achieve more by pressing harder. Tolstoy knew this, but confessed that the moments when he gave in brought him pure and unadulterated joy, while standing firm, or worse, allowing himself to react angrily, made him suffer and feel ashamed of himself.

On 26 September 1910, after a furious quarrel with her mother, Alexandra left and went to stay with Chertkov, swearing never to return home. A week later, on 3 October, Tolstoy suddenly fainted and experienced a total loss of memory when he came round. When he had partially recovered, Sofia asked Alexandra to forgive her and released her husband from his vow not to see Chertkov. Alexandra relented but told her mother that, had Tolstoy died from this fit, all the world would have blamed her for it. Clearly this was the only kind of argument capable of carrying any weight with Sofia.

Some members of the family, including Tolstoy himself, believed Sofia was insane. In July 1910 the leading Russian psychiatrist Grigory Rossolimo concluded that she was showing symptoms of hysteria and paranoia, and predicted that the couple would not be able to go on living together. Others suspected her of feigning madness in order to manipulate her husband and pointed to her full recovery after Leo’s death. This interpretation seems unlikely even if there was method in her madness.

In one of her diary entries, Sofia recorded that she had inadvertently knocked Leo’s portrait off her table with her notebook, adding, ‘In the same way I am throwing him from his pedestal with this diary’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 400). This task was beyond her power and, in reality, she never tried to accomplish it. She needed her own place on the pedestal, and was ready to fight for it with all the means at her disposal. Tolstoy wrote on 15 September 1910, ‘Not to mention her love for me, of which not a trace remains, she does not need my love for her either, she only needs one thing: for people to think that I love her. And it’s this that is so dreadful’ (Ds, p. 464). His worldview did not allow him to see that Sofia’s aspiration to preserve for posterity her role as the wife of a genius was the only thing that made her life meaningful to her after her children had grown up. Leo had stopped loving her ‘exclusively’ and her ideal love for Taneyev had evaporated.

By now Sofia’s main and possibly only preoccupation was to archive her own version of her life story. A particular bone of contention was photographs. On 21 October 1910, after looking at a newspaper photograph of herself and Leo, she wrote: ‘Let more than a hundred thousand people see us together holding each other’s hand as we have lived all our lives’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 222). After threatening suicide, running away from home, scandals and quarrels, she wanted others to believe in her happy family life. These stage-managed displays of family harmony were especially painful for Leo, who wrote with disgust about Sofia’s desire to be photographed as a happy couple. She objected to his photographs with Tolstoyans and made him take Chertkov’s photograph off the wall. When Leo was reproached for doing this by Alexandra and put the photograph back, Sofia tore it down again and burned it.

Last photo of Lev and Sofia as a happy couple, on the 48th anniversary of their wedding.

Sofia’s identity was restored after Tolstoy’s death. Now no one could challenge her status as a widow. She even finally accepted de facto the distribution of roles established in Tolstoy’s will. While Chertkov assumed responsibility for publishing, she took upon herself the position of guardian angel of the Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow houses. She managed to preserve both from the horrors of revolution and civil war.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Sofia was so preoccupied with Leo’s diaries and that she was especially sensitive to the way in which these represented his love for her. She once read an entry in which Lev expressed his retrospective inability to understand his own reasons for marrying: ‘I was never even in love, but I could not help getting married’ (Ds, p. 476). In reply she pointed out extracts from his earlier diaries in which, in his own words, he spoke of his passionate love. He had nothing to say. He just could not remember his feelings, as Pierre Bezukhov was unable to imagine himself being made happy by the death of his wife when talking with Natasha. Like Pierre, Tolstoy had changed beyond self-recognition.

After a sudden loss of consciousness in 1908, Tolstoy’s memory, which used to be impeccable, began to fail him. Of the things that happened to him during the last years of his life, few gave him such unmitigated pleasure: finally his mind was freeing him from its enslavement to his past. Tolstoy believed that history was retained in the present and thus could be understood and reconstructed by retrospective analysis. Documents were either redundant or, at best, could only play an auxiliary role in this process. Likewise, an individual, at any given moment of his life, was just an embodiment of his experience in its entirety. There was no need to remember specific episodes:

If I were to live in the past, or at least be conscious of and remember the past, I would not be able to live a timeless life in the present as I do now. How then is it possible not to rejoice in the loss of memory. Everything I had worked for in the past, for example the inner work expressed in my writings, is in me to live by and to use, and I cannot recall the work itself. Amazing. And I think that this joyous change happens to all old people: all your life concentrates in the present. How nice! (CW, LVIII, p. 121)

What marked the life he was now living was tension between the desire to escape and an acute consciousness of his duty to stay. In July 1910 he started keeping a diary ‘for himself only’, which he tried to hide from Sofia. ‘I am bearing up and will bear up as much as I can, and pity and love her. God help me’ (Ds, p. 477), he wrote on 8 September. Tolstoy reproached himself for unkind feelings towards his wife, reminding himself two weeks later that ‘The main thing is to remain silent and remember that she has a soul – that God is in her’ (Ds, p. 478). On 25 October he confessed to a ‘sinful desire on my part that she should give me an excuse to go away. That’s how bad I am. I think of going away and then I think of her situation, and I feel sorry and I can’t do it’ (Ds, p. 483).

The same day he spoke about his intention to leave with Alexandra. On the next day, he sought advice from Maria Schmidt, one of the very few Tolstoyans who understood the reasons he chose to stay in the family and who was friendly with Sofia. Schmidt was appalled. ‘It is a weakness, it will pass,’ she allegedly told him. ‘It is weakness’, replied Tolstoy, ‘but it won’t pass.’⁴ The next day, as Tolstoy recorded, ‘nothing special happened. Only my feeling of shame increased, and the need to take some step.’ On the evening of 28 October, already far away from Yasnaya Polyana, he wrote one of the most frequently quoted diary entries in literary annals:

Went to bed at 11.20. Slept until after two. Woke up, and again as on previous nights, I heard the opening of doors and footsteps . . . It was Sofia Andreyevna looking for something and probably reading. The day before she was asking and insisting that I should not lock my door. Both her doors were open, so that she could hear my slightest movement. Day and night, all my movements and words have to be known to her and to be under her control. There were footsteps again, the door opened carefully and she walked through the room. I don’t know why, but this aroused indignation and uncontrollable revulsion in me. I wanted to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. I tossed about for an hour or so, lit a candle and sat up. Sofia Andreyevna opened the door and came in asking about ‘my health’ and expressing surprise at the light, which she had seen in my room. My indignation and revulsion grew. I gasped for breath, counted my pulse: 97. I couldn’t go on lying there and suddenly I took the final decision to leave. (Ds, pp. 469–70)

Shortly before his marriage, gendarmes had raided his estate searching for clandestine publications. Nearly half a century later, his own wife was raiding his working table and his bedroom looking for papers she thought he was concealing from her. Tolstoy woke up Alexandra, her friend Varvara Feokritova and his doctor Dushan Makovitsky, who helped him to pack. Having written a farewell letter to Sofia, he left the house before six o’clock, accompanied by Makovitsky and leaving Alexandra behind to deal with the inevitable consequences.

Dr Makovitsky had been living at Yasnaya Polyana for the past six years. After Tolstoy’s illnesses in Gaspra, Sofia had insisted on having an in-house medic. Although he was not fond of doctors, Tolstoy agreed to this because Makovitsky was an ardent Tolstoyan. His professional abilities may have been questionable, but his love and devotion to his patron were not. From the time of his arrival until Tolstoy’s death, Makovitsky performed the role of a Russian Eckermann or Boswell, carefully documenting every sentence pronounced by his host.

To run away, however, was not enough. A fugitive must go somewhere. Tolstoy’s favourite characters just disappeared, but this solution worked only in fiction. Heading to a railway station, Tolstoy asked Makovitsky where he could go to be ‘further away’ from home (Mak, IV, p. 398). Makovitsky suggested Bessarabia, where they could stay with a Tolstoyan they both knew and liked, and then try to get abroad. Tolstoy was considering other options. He wanted to see his sister Maria, the only person he knew and loved from childhood who was still alive.

Maria Tolstoy was two years younger than Lev. Throughout their lives the two youngest children had been especially close. After a disastrous marriage and a stormy separation, Maria lived abroad for several years with a Swedish viscount, Hector de Kleen, and had a daughter with him. Afterwards she deeply repented her illicit love and became fervently religious. In 1891 she entered a convent at Shamordino, near the famous monastery of Optina Pustyn’, which Tolstoy had once frequently visited.

In spite of their diverging beliefs, the siblings loved each other. In April 1907, telling her about his grief over the loss of his daughter and her namesake Maria, Lev wrote to his sister:

I often think about you with great tenderness, and in the last days, it is as if some voice keeps telling me about you, how I would wish, how it would be nice to see you, to know about you, have contact with you . . . I am your brother both in blood and in spirit, do not reject me. (CW, LXXVII, p. 77)

‘Dear friend Levochka, my dear brother in blood and spirit,’ Maria answered. ‘How touched I was by your letter. I wept reading it and am now writing touched to the depths of my heart’ (CW, LXXVII, p. 78).

Tolstoy arrived at Optina late in the evening of 28 October and stayed the night at the monastery inn. The next morning Chertkov’s assistant, Alexei Sergeenko, to whom Tolstoy had sent a telegram about his whereabouts from the railway station, brought distressing news from Yasnaya Polyana. Having heard about Leo’s escape, Sofia had run to drown herself in the pond, slipped on the bridge and fallen into the shallows. Carried home by Alexandra and Tolstoy’s secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, she had oscillated between an intention to repeat her suicide attempt and the urge to bring her fugitive husband home. Sofia kept saying that if she were to get him back, she would sleep on the floor in the doorway of his bedroom so as not to allow him to escape again.

Tolstoy dictated his last article against the death penalty to Sergeenko and walked around the grounds of the monastery, thinking about the possibility of remaining there. He longed for an environment that would allow him to ‘pack for transition’, as he had put it several years before. He hoped that the walls of Optina Pustyn’ might protect him from tactless curiosity, alien intrusions and the struggle with himself, but he was not contemplating the possibility of rejoining the Church. Later he told his sister that he would gladly obey the rules that applied to novices, if only he were to be allowed not to attend services and not cross himself.

This solution was impracticable. The authorities at the monastery could hardly accept an unrepentant heretic, excommunicated by the Synod, who was, on top of everything else, legally married. Tolstoy could not fail to envisage the problems he would face and decided against visiting the monastery’s elder. In the afternoon he left Optina for Shamordino. ‘Is it bad at home?’, asked Maria, seeing the state in which her brother had arrived. ‘It is terrible,’ Leo answered and started crying.⁵

At Shamordino he spent the last enjoyable evening of his life with his sister and her daughter Elizaveta Obolenskaya, whom he had always loved:

Mashenka made a very comforting and joyful impression on me . . . and so did dear Lizanka. They both understand my situation and sympathize with it. On the journey I kept thinking as I was travelling about a way out of my situation and hers, and could not think of any, but there surely will be one, whether we want it or not, and it won’t be the one we foresee. Yes, I should only think about not sinning. And what will be, will be. (Ds, p. 471)

By then he had all but decided to settle in Shamordino near his sister. Also that evening Alexandra arrived with fresh news and letters from the family. Sofia pleaded with him to come back or at least to allow her to see him, promising to renounce luxury, follow his way of life and reconcile with Chertkov. In the morning Tolstoy went to rent a hut and made an arrangement with a peasant widow, but then changed his mind, scared that Sofia would catch up with him.

In the afternoon the whole group sat over a map choosing a place to go: Bulgaria, the Crimea and the Caucasus were suggested. Tolstoy was hesitant about the direction, but adamant that he was not going to a Tolstoyan commune because he wanted to live in an ordinary peasant hut. Leadership was one of the things he had renounced; he imagined for himself a kitchen garden, like the one where Father Sergius or Fyodor Kuzmich had found their last abode. He went to bed without making up his mind, but in the night he panicked and once again woke up Makovitsky and Alexandra.

On 31 October they caught the first morning train and bought tickets to the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. There they would be able to choose their next destination. Tolstoy wrote letters to his sister, apologizing for his sudden departure, and to Chertkov, informing him that he was probably going to the Caucasus. By the middle of the day, however, he became seriously ill. Very soon his companions saw that he was unable to travel and had to get off the train at Astapovo station. The station did not have an inn, but the stationmaster, who happened to be a Tolstoyan himself, offered them the two best rooms in his house. The last letter he started to dictate was addressed to his English translator, Aylmer Maude, on 3 November: ‘On my way to the place where I wished to be alone I was taken ill’ (Ls, II, p. 717); he was too weak to continue.

To be alone was his only wish. In a telegram sent from Astapovo to Chertkov he said that he was ‘afraid of publicity’, but publicity was inevitable. News about his escape appeared in the newspapers the morning he left Shamordino; in the train he was recognized by other passengers, who rushed to his coach to satisfy their curiosity. Within a day the little railway station became the main provider of breaking news to the whole world from Japan to Argentina. Reporters, photographers, cameramen, government officials, police agents, admirers and gawpers started swarming to Astapovo. Tolstoy’s flight brought him further into the limelight. Trying to evade the advance of modernity, he had contributed to its triumph by creating one of the first global media events.

Wanting to return to nature, he ordered that his body be buried in an unmarked grave near the place where as a child he had searched for the mythical green stick. His wish was granted, but his grave became a major global tourist attraction. The absence of a name plaque eloquently shows that none was necessary. Who needs a plaque on the Holy Sepulchre?

Arguably Tolstoy was not able to imagine the scale of the sensation he had caused, but he had some idea of what was happening. During the first days of his stay at Astapovo, he asked for the newspapers to be read to him, leaving out news about himself. The attention he received was burdensome for him; after one medical intervention he exclaimed, ‘And the peasants, the peasants, how they die’. The day before he died he reproached those around him for ‘concerning themselves with Lev alone’, when ‘there are a great many people in the world besides Lev Tolstoy’ (AT, II, pp. 404–5).

Tolstoy’s grave in Yasnaya Polyana.

The selected pool of visitors allowed to approach his bedside also kept growing. Chertkov arrived on 2 November, calm, confident and decisive as usual. Goldenveizer and Tolstoy’s publisher, Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, arrived the next day. Tolstoy criticized Goldenveizer for having cancelled a concert: ‘Peasants do not leave the field even if their father is dying, and the concert is your field.’⁶ He told Gorbunov-Posadov that he was unable to look at the proofs of the new instalments of The Way of Life he had brought to Astapovo.

Sofia and the children, with the exception of Sergei, who had arrived earlier, came on 4 November and stayed in the specially chartered railway carriage that had brought them. Sofia, however, was not allowed to see her dying husband. The unanimous view of Tolstoy’s followers and his children was that such a meeting would be fatal for him. Sofia wandered around the outside of the stationmaster’s house, peeping through the window and giving interviews to journalists about her 48 years of happy family life. Her every step was recorded, photographed and filmed. She was summoned to give Lev a final kiss and to ask him for final forgiveness only a few hours before his death, when he was unconscious or already seemed to be.

Did Tolstoy understand or suspect that Sofia was close by as he was dying? Since his departure he had been thinking and inquiring about her, and expressing his love and pity for her. At the same time he wanted to avoid meeting her at all costs, at least during the first days of his illness when he was still hoping to recover and continue his journey. He had been on the brink of death many times and got used to it. Only on 4 November did he hesitantly say, ‘It seems I am dying. And, may be, not.’ Did he change his mind when the prospect of eternal separation became imminent? At one point in his last days, when he was already half-delirious, he said to his eldest daughter Tatiana: ‘So many things are falling on Sonya. We managed things badly.’ Not certain she had understood her father correctly, Tatiana asked him to repeat it and he distinctly said: ‘Sonya, on Sonya, so many things fall on her.’ ‘Do you want to see Sonya?’, she asked, ready to break the taboo against admitting her.⁷ He did not answer. There is also a recently publicized family legend that Tolstoy did once express the wish to see his wife, but there is no way to verify this.

We know that the decision not to tell Tolstoy about his wife’s arrival was taken by the people surrounding him, who wanted to protect the old man from excessive and possibly fatal emotions. They may have been right, but they did not give him a choice. Likewise, he was not told about the arrival of a monk from Optina Pustyn’ on a mission to try to convince him to reconcile with the Church. There is little doubt that Tolstoy’s answer would have been negative, but once again he was deprived of the possibility to decide for himself.

Sofia peeping in the window to see the dying Tolstoy, November 1910.

Tolstoy was subjected to intensive medical treatment. He had never believed in medicine, considering it, at best, useless for the sick and especially for the dying, but he believed it was helpful for those around the sick and dying because it afforded them an illusion of meaningful activity. Sometimes he objected to specific medicines and procedures, asking the doctors ‘not to jostle him’ and ‘not to bother him’ (Mak, IV, p. 426), but in general he was an obedient and obliging patient. There was one thing, though, that he resisted vehemently: morphine injections.

Apart from his aversion to all kinds of intoxication, Tolstoy had a more intimate and existential reason to object to any sedation with opiates. Throughout his life he had been thinking about death, preparing himself for this solemn moment and had often expressed his desire to experience this most important transition while fully conscious. He was denied that chance.

Dying proved to be difficult for him. His body was struggling against the inevitable. On the eve of his death he agreed to an injection only when he was convinced that he was going to be treated with camphor, not morphine. He called his son Sergei and, with growing difficulty, said: ‘Seriozha, Truth, love much, love all’ (Mak, IV, p. 430). Different memoirists recall this sentence in different ways, but its meaning was clear to everyone. At 11 p.m., when everyone except for the doctors on duty had gone to bed, Tolstoy said: ‘How hard it is to die, one should live a godly life.’ Half an hour later, believing his persistent hiccups were a danger to his heart, Dr Makovitsky suggested he take morphine. ‘I do not want parffin,’ Tolstoy replied, confusing the words ‘morphine’ and ‘parffin’ [paraffin]. Towards midnight, however, a dose of the drug was injected. Makovitsky observes that a quarter of an hour later a half-delirious Tolstoy muttered: ‘I am going somewhere, so that no one can bother (or find) [me], Leave me in peace . . . It is time to scarper. It is time to scarper’ (Mak, IV, pp. 430–31). These were his last words.

The meticulous Makovitsky put the words ‘or find’ in brackets to indicate that he might have misheard one word in the phrase ‘no one can bother me’. The Russian words nashol (‘find’) and meshal (‘bother’) do sound similar, but the significance of these alternatives is more or less irrelevant. Just as he had done eighty years before, when two caring grown-ups stood over his bed and watched while his arms were bound in swaddling, Tolstoy was protesting against suffocating control. But there was one difference this time. Now he had the chance to ‘scarper’. He used this chance the next morning, on 7 November, at 6.05 a.m.

Tolstoy on his deathbed.