Tolstoy

at the most unexpected moments and wins people's sympathy. Looking at herself in a mirror on her way to the ball, Kitty is entranced by the black velvet rifolxm around her ncck. "She might entertain some doubt about the rest of her attire, but as for the velvet ribbon, no, decidedly, nothing could be said against that. She felt on her shoulders and arms that marble coolness she so loved."

But although the same descriptive process is used in Anna Karenina and War and Peace, the general tone of the two works is very different. After dealing with a historical conflict between peoples in War and Peace Tolstoy narrowed his field of vision in Anna Karenina, to concentrate on a few persons and forage into their darkest recesscs. What the picture loses in scope, it gains in depth. Hie cpic is no longer played out in the open air, but within, in the dark shadows of the conscience. ^rIlie battles are those of emotions, and they rage with the same incoherence and fury as the others.

Just as the outcomc of military encounters is not determined by the strategists, so the fate of the individual most often escapes his own will. Actions are determined by circumstance, by the circlcs in which people move, the friends around them, a thousand imponderables collected together under the name of fatality. The fatality that presides over Anna Karenina is not, as in War and Peace, the god of war, bloated by politics and reeking of carrion and gunpowder, but the breathless god of passion. There are a hundred times more corpses in War and Peace than in Anna Karenina, yet the first seems a broad, optimistic, sun-filled work, while Anna Karenina is enveloped in gray, troubled clouds. War and Peace is an act of faith in life, a poetic glorification of the couple, the family, patriarchal traditions, a hymn to the triumph of the Russian armies over the invader. Victory ennobles all the sacrifices made to obtain it, and the heroes emerge purified by the sufferings they have undergone in the defense of their native soil. None of this is true of Anna Karenina, where the air is weighted down with ominous dreams, forebodings, hallucinations and supernatural presences. The very first meeting between Vronsky and Anna at the Moscow railway station is marked by the death of a switchman, crushed beneath a train. After the accident, Oblonsky sees his sister's lips quivering and tears glittering in her eyes.

"What's the matter, Anna?" he asks.

And she answers:

"It's a bad omen."

Later, leaving the train, she is seized by a feeling of anguish and chaos as she steps out onto the platform in the snowstorm. After Vronsky's decisive words—"I am going to St. Petersburg to be where

you are!"—the night, the cold and noise and the fleeting silhouettes of the passengers all conspire to plunge the young woman into a world of fantasy. "The wind, as though it would overcome all obstacles, beat the snow from the carriage roofs and triumphantly brandished a sheet of metal it had ripped loose, and the locomotive's whistle emitted a demented howl. Anna became even more exhilarated by the tragic splendor of the storm: she had just heard the words her reason dreaded and her heart longed for."

A still more awesome menace is Anna's famous dream, in which a little muzhik in rags appears, bending over an iron plate and mumbling incomprehensible words in French, "and she sensed that he was performing some strange ritual over her with this piece of iron, and awoke drenched in cold sweat." She had this nightmare several times; Vronsky himself was affcctcd by it through a kind of telepathy; and the moment Anna throws herself under the wheels of the train, she sees, in a flash, "a little man, muttering to himself and tapping on the iron above her."

Another symbol: the death of the mare Froufrou. Through Vron- sky's fault, she falls and breaks her back during the steeplechase, prefiguring Anna's suicide, to which she was driven by her lover's indifference. Even the words Tolstoy chooses to describe the fallen mare and the fallen woman arc oddly similar. Here is Vronsky with Anna, who has finally yielded to him: "Pale, his lower jaw trembling, he urged her to be calm." And here he is beside his fatally wounded horse: "He was pale, his lower jaw trembling, his face transfigured by rage."

The evil omens become more clearly defined when Anna, returning to the hotel after her meeting with her son, removes from an album the photographs she had kept of him: "There was only one left, the best. . . . Her quick fingers, more nervous than ever, vainly tried to prize it out of the frame; there was no paper cutter nearby, so she poked at the stiff paper with another photograph she had picked up without looking, a portrait of Vronsky, taken in Rome." This incident strikes her as a warning from God: her lover driving out her son. . . .

Equally significant is the symbol of the candle that burns brighter just before going out. The first time she watchcs the wavering flame, Anna is seized by an irrational, morbid dread, and quickly, her heart pounding, lights another candle as though by doing so she might ward off the shadow of death. The sccond time is in the instant she loses consciousness under the wheels of the train: "And the candle by whose light she had read the book of life, full of conflict, trcachcry, sadness and honor, flared up more brightly than ever, lighting all the pages that

had remained in darkness before, and then sputtered, flickered and went out forever."

Anna is not the only person to be affcctcd by dread. Oblonsky's wife Dolly fears for her children's future; Princess Sherbatsky is beset by funereal presentiments at night; Levin's brother Nicholas is haunted by fear of what lies beyond life; the only chapter in the book that bears a title is Chapter XX of Part V: Death. All the characters' struggles to achieve happiness end in failure. Even Kitty and Levin are not exempt from the curse hanging over all couples who are bound by the flesh. In telling their story, the author tried to contrast the blessings that flow from conjugal love and the havoc caused by unsanctificd love; but even the bliss of family life proves to be only a snare and a delusion. The happily married Levin is equally consumed by doubt. All his efforts at social improvement fail, and he saves himself in extremis only by grasping at the primitive faith of the muzhik. All in all, the hell of forbidden passion in which Anna and Vronsky are consumed is scarcely less perilous than the heaven of family affection in which Kitty and Levin slowly decompose.

One strange thing: in both Anna Karenina and War and Peace, it is the exceptional, glittering beings, those marked by some metaphysical sign, who disappear, and the average, even insignificant ones who survive and trudge on along their little paths, halfway between good and evil. After the death of Prince Andrcy—with his dreams, his doubts, his pride—we are left with the placid Bezukhov and Rostov families, for whom every imaginable felicity lies in store if they will only be content to stay out of the limelight. Anna Karenina and Vronsky are swept from the scene, leaving behind them the mighty conquerors in the battle of life: Kitty and Levin, fine, upstanding, dull young folk, held up as an example by all their neighl>or$. Is this Tolstoy's plea for mediocrity? No; he simply feels that mankind needs, now and then, these extraordinary beings to shake up the dozing masses; but in the final analysis, it is the conjunction of innumerable ordinary destinies that carries history forward. Whether we like it or not, the future belongs to the Rostovs and Bczukhovs and Levins, to the shuffling mob of men of good-will. As landowner and father, Tolstoy considers himself among their number. In justifying them, he justifies himself. And even if he is occasionally tempted to desert to the camp of the idcalists-in- rcvolt, he never tarries there. He is still at the stage of condemning private property with one hand while buying more land with the other, and inviting judges to his home while he reviles capital punishment.

But, contrary to his intentions, it is the damned, in this bitterly pessimistic novel, who arouse our sympathy and the virtuous who disappoint us. Saddled with every curse that could be laid upon her, Anna Karenina towers so far above all the other characters that the author was forced to give the book her name. The inscription, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay," bears out the idea that Anna's fall proceeds from a decision by some higher authority, divine and without appeal. Everything in this superficially realistic tale is magical. Even objects—the candle, the snowy windowpane, Anna's little red bag—arc invested with occult powers. Tolstoy invited his readers to contemplate the implications of a vast, disturbing, gloomy tragedy.

And they flung themselves upon it voraciously, titillated by the portrayal of "high society," spellbound by Anna's illicit love affair, shocked by the daring sccnes of her "fall." As the issues of the Russian Herald succeeded each other, Strakhov, in the front ranks in Moscow, dispatched regular communiques to headquarters at Yasnaya Polyana: "Excitement keeps mounting. . . . Opinions are so divergent that it is impossible to summarize them. . . . Some complain that you arc too cynical; others—more intelligent (Danilcvsky, for one)—are in ecstasy." (March 21, 1875.) "Everyone is dumb with admiration of the February issue. The January one was less popular. . . . Now there is a roar of satisfaction. It's as though you were throwing food to starving men." (March 5, 1876.) "Everyone is fascinated by your novel, it's incrcdible how many people are reading it. Only Pushkin and Gogol have ever been read like this, with people scrambling for every page and paying no attention to what anybody else is writing." (February 1877.) "Dos- toyevsky is waving his arms about and calling you a god of the art; I am surprised and delighted—surprised, because I know how intensely he dislikes you." (May 18, 1877.)

Alexandra Tolstoy was also in raptures: "Every chapter has society rearing up 011 its hind legs," she wrote, "and there is no end to the commenting and praise and gossip and argument, as though it were something that affected every individual personally."⁴

Friend Fet hailed him as a genius: "What artistic insolence in the description of the childbirth! Nobody since the world began has ever done it before, and nobody will ever do it again. The fools will go on about Flaubertian realism, when everything here is idealism!"⁵

Professional critics were no less stirred by the publication of the novel. Comparing Tolstoy and Stendhal, V. V. Chuyko, in The Voice, pointed out that whereas Stendhal always began with a psychological postulate and only gave a semblance of reality to his characters by the "extraordinary logic" with which he followed up the consequences of a given situation, Tolstoy was all instinct, inseparable from life, owing nothing to any process.

Another critic in the same periodical affirmed that "Count Tolstoy- has no equal in any foreign literature" and that "in our country, Dos- toyevsky alone can come near him."

"The author," Suvorin wrote in New Times, "has spared nothing and no one. lie portrays love with a realism that 110 one in our country has yet approached."

And Stasov chimed in, "Count Tolstoy alone is forging ahead, while all our other writers are beating a retreat or falling silent or fading away or losing face. . . ."

Dostoyevsky himself, although he disapproved of the last part of Anna Karenina out of loyalty to the holy war against the Turks, paid homage to the rest of the book in Diary of a Writer:

"Anna Karenina is a perfect work of art, appearing at exactly the right moment, utterly unlike anything being published in Europe; its theme is totally Russian. There is something in this novel of our 'new- word/ a new word that has not yet been heard in Europe, although the peoples of the West have great need of it, however proud they may be."

In a burst of national pride the author of Crime and Punishment explained that in Europe—the scat of logic, materialism and the narrow view—humans who violated the laws of society were punished by human justice, but for a Russian writer like Tolstoy, the true seat of judgment was in the heart of the individual. 'The human judge must know that lie is not a final judge, being a mere sinner like the rest, that it is absurd for him to pass judgment excqit through the only means of understanding that exists: charity, and love."

Along with these distinguished expressions of approval, Tolstoy received, as usual, a volley of snide comments and insults. Skabishcvsky wrote, in the Stock Exchange News, that the entire novel was "permeated with an idyllic aroma of diapers" and that Anna's suicide was "a melodramatic piece of nonsense in the manner of the old French novels, and a fit conclusion to a vulgar love affair between a snob and a lady of Petersburg society with a weakness for flogged coats." Ilca- chev, in The Affair, accused Tolstoy of seeking "to degrade public morality," swore that Anna Karenina was "an epic of baronial passions" utterly "devoid of meaning" and, parodying its author, suggested that he write a book on the pastoral bliss of Levin and a cow. The anonymous critic of the Odessa Courier announced that "food, drink, hunting, balls, horse races and love, love, love in the most naked sense of the word, without psychological ramifications or moral interest of

any sort—that is what the novel is about, from start to finish." lie concluded, "I challenge the reader to show me one page, nay! one half-page, that contains an idea, or rather the shadow of an idea."

Nor did Ivan Turgenev like Anna Karenina. "He has gone off the track," he wrote to Suvorin on April 1 (13), 1875. "It is the fault of Moscow, and the Slavophil aristocrats and Orthodox old maids, and his isolation and lack of perseverance." And to Polonsky, on May 13 (25): "I do not like Anna Karenina, despite some truly magnificent pages (the horse racc, the hay-making, the hunt). But the whole thing is sour, it smells of Moscow and old maids, the Slavophilism and the narrow-mindedness of the nobility."

Tolstoy returned the compliment, when Turgenev published his Virgin Soil. "I haven't read the Turgenev yet," he wrote to Strakhov, "but, judging from what I have heard about it, I am deeply sorry that this well of pure and wonderful water should have become sullied by such filth. If he would simply choose a day in his life and write about it, everybody would be delighted."⁶

He felt even more aloof from praise and censure alike than he had after War and Peace. Without setting foot outside Yasnaya Polyana, he had conquered Russia. Sitting at his desk in his peasant blouse, he glanced through the press clippings sent by Strakhov. One, signed W—, was especially dithyrambic: "New generations will comc, society will be transformed, Russia will turn down other paths, but these works [Wc/r and Peace and Anna Karenina] will continue to be read and reread by all because they are inseparable from Russian life and Russian culture. They will be eternally new."⁷

How did Tolstoy respond to these glowing prophecies? With pride, skepticism, indifference? Whatever he said, he must have been touched by the understanding and love of so many people. But for him fulfillment, true fulfillment, was not to be found in newspaper articles, however flattering they might be. He must seek it in himself. And when he looked there, he saw nothing but darkness, uncertainty and confusion.

3. Art and Faith

'l'he royalties from Anna Karenina, added to those from War and Peace, exceeded twenty thousand rubles a year; in addition, the farms were bringing in nearly ten thousand rubles.* This more than covered the family's expenses. Once again, Sonya had taken full charge of the administration of the estate, releasing her husband from all material Cares. All he had to worry about was writing.

The increase in his income led to the purchase of more land, but also to the enlargement of his domestic staff. Alongside the regulars —onetime serfs in caftan and bark shoes, dedicated to the family, with their own familiar way of addressing the masters—appeared liveried footmen (in red waistcoats and white cotton gloves), "trained" chambermaids, seamstresses, governesses, French and German tutors. Little Tanya, who at the age of fourteen was also keeping her diary, wrote on November 11, 1878: "I have a governess, Mile. Gachet, but Masha has an Englishwoman, Annie; the boys have M. Nief; Andrey has a nyanya; we also have a Russian teacher, B. A. Alexcycv; he lives in a wing of the house with his wife, his son who is one year and two months old, and his stepdaughter Lisa, aged eight. M. Nief's wife also wants to live here; he has already taken a little isba for her and his son. Other teachers come to the house; the drawing teacher, Simonenko: he is short and humpbacked. Then the Greek teacher, Ulyansky. The priest, the music teacher Michurin, the German woman Amalya Fedorovna . .

The most striking figure among this large staff of intellectuals was the Frenchman, M. Nief. "Nief" was a pseudonym, masking a certain Jules Montel, onetime supporter of the French Commune, who fled

⁰ Or a total (royalties and income from the estate) of $84,900.

the country after the "Vcrsaillais" had crushed the rebellion and did not reveal his true identity until 1880, when an amnesty was proclaimed in Paris. Alexeyev, the Russian teacher, was also a militant socialist. At first he was offended by the material comforts of the inhabitants of Yasnaya Polyana, but he ultimately fell under Tolstoy's spell and liked to say he was his debtor and his friend. Both tutors and pupils took part in all the family festivities. A picnic in the forest was planned for Tanya's birthday, on October 4, 1878. "M. Nief rolled up his sleeves and made an omelette and hot chocolatc," Sonya wrote in her diary. "Four fires were burning. Sergey roasted shashlik. The party was very gay, we ate a great deal and were fortunate enough to have a magnificent day."

The house had been enlarged in 1871 but the new quarters were already cramped: guests were assembling at Yasnaya Polyana with increasing frequency. The disciples had not yet begun to come, but there were relatives, friends and neighbors. According to the Russian tradition, they said they were coming for the day and stayed for a week or a month. As the nearest station was three miles away and there was no hotel in the vicinity, Sonya offered bed and board to all comers. Tolstoy was not averse to this hum of guests, servants and children. He loved to feel himself surrounded by a noisy, simple life. It was his overcoat, to shield him from cold and death. Sometimes, in his study, he heard the laughter of croquet players under the larches and the crisp taps of their mallets against the balls. But did you have the right to make merry when a trap-door was about to yawn beneath your feet? He looked at himself in the mirror. A fifty-year-old face: hair cropped short above a high furrowed brow, broad bushy eyebrows overhanging two sharp gray eyes sunk deep in their sockets, a shapeless nose, fleshy ears, a sensuous mouth, and, framing the whole, a forest of stiff, tangled graying hair, thick as wire. He had never been in better condition. In spite of his headaches, he could easily work eight hours on end. Hiking, galloping through the brush, cutting hay or sawing wood, nobody could keep pace with him. Was there any more healthy, better-balanced life in the world than his? Everything he had wanted when he was young he had obtained, and in the prime of life. He had wanted literary fame, and he shared with Dostoyevsky the honor of being universally acclaimed as the greatest living Russian author; he had hoped to spend calm years working in the home of his ancestors, surrounded by a loving wife and many children, and thanks to Sonya, he was savoring this family happiness to the full. He had dreaded being forced to write in order to earn a living, and his financial circumstances allowed him to work in total freedom.

And yet, lie was not happy. Or rather, the form of happiness that had become his lot did not content him and he wondered whether there might not be some other kind. I lis thoughts were haunted by the night at Arzamas. Sometimes he did not read a single page or write a line for days on end. Along with mental paralysis came physical indifference. An automaton went through the motions of everyday life in his place. Then, suddenly, he awoke and began to ask questions, and apathy would give way to anguish.

"I would be deep in my problems of estate management," he write in Confession, "and a question would come to me: 'All right, so you have 1350 acres of land in the government of Samara, and 300 head of horses; so what?' Or, thinking of my children's education, 1 would ask myself, 'What for?' Or, meditating upon the best way of making people happy, I would conclude, 'What docs it have to do with me?' Or again, thinking of the celebrity my books had brought me, I told myself, 'Fine, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molifrc, and all the writers in the world, and then what?'"

At that moment, if anyone had offered to grant his dearest wish he would not have known what to ask for; he wished for nothing. He wished for nothing because he had discovered the futility of human enterprise. He had walked along the road for fifty years, his eyes distracted by a moving leaf or a passing face, and suddenly he saw the chasm. "And you can't stop and you can't go backward and you can't close your eyes in order not to see that there is nothing ahead but the lie of freedom and happiness, nothing but suffering, real death, complete annihilation."

When he reached this point in his brooding, he thought he heard a sort of distant laughter. Someone was making fun of him, someone who had worked everything out beforehand, a long time ago.

"The someone was enjoying himself, watching how, after growing up, after cultivating my body and mind for thirty or forty years, after attaining the summit of my powers, reaching the height from which one looks out over the whole of life, there I stood like an idiot, realizing at last that there was nothing and never would be anything in life. And he thinks it's funny!"

If life was a nasty joke, the only thing to do was refuse it. Just as powerfully as he had once longed to fight, Tolstoy now wanted to die. 'Ilie void attracted him as strongly as the prospect of new land to buy had done before. A simple and profitable operation. The rewards were certain. lie was not troubled by the thought of his wife or children: he had never been concerned with them except in relation to himself. With him dead, they would manage, living 011 the income from the

estate and his books. The question was when and how he would destroy himself. He was in no hurry—there was a glimmer of common sense in his delirium. No sooner had he let himself be swept away by the temptation of obliteration than he caught himself up again, his reason alerted, with a delicious shiver running down his spine.

The need to make an end of it all was strongest at night. lie slept alone, in his study. As he undressed for bed, he looked at the crossbar between the two cabinets loaded with books. A slipknot, a chair kicked away, a body that jerks, sways back and forth and then stops. ... No more Leo Tolstoy! "Then I, the happy man," he wrote, "removed the rope from the room . . . and stopped taking my gun when I went out to hunt, so that I could not yield to the desire to do away with myself too easily."¹

This alternating boldness of purpose and prudence of action was in keeping with the rest of his personality. No one could be more preoccupied by the state of his health than this permanent suicide candidate, lie was fond of recalling an oriental fable: A man pursued by a tiger climl)S down into a well. At the bottom of the well he sees the gaping jaws of a dragon. Unable to go either up or down, the poor man clings to a bush growing between the loosened stones. As his strength begins to fail he spies two mice, one white and one black, gnawing at the branch he is hanging from. A few seconds more and he will fall. Knowing himself about to die, the man makes a supreme effort, and licks the drops of honey from the leaves. Tolstoy would have been glad to do the same; but the two drops of honey—love of family and love of literature—that had formerly helped him to accept reality had now lost all their savor for him.

"The family, I told myself, my wife, my children, are also human beings and therefore ruled by the same conditions as myself: either they must live a lie or face up to the ghastly troth. Why do they have to live? Why do I have to love and protect them and help them to grow up and safeguard their interests? To lead them into the despair in which I am myself, or to keep them in a state of imbecility? As I love them, I cannot hide the truth from them. . . . And the truth is death. As for art and poetry—for a long time I managed to convince myself, under the influence of success and praise, that they were a possible form of activity, even though death would destroy all, both my work and the memory of it. Then I realized that this activity was also a lie."²

The despair he thought lie alone suffered was in fact being shared —and indulged in—by a good many intellectuals in Russia. In Fathers and Sons Turgenev had given a name to this mal du siecle: nihil-

ism. And he had made it the subject of his last book, Virgin Soil. As defined by Turgcncv, the nihilist was "a man who would accept no authority and adopt no principle as an article of faith, no matter how highly esteemed that principle might be." A steadily growing number of young people, having rejected family, art, religion and all existing social structures in general, were finding themselves alone in a great emptiness, and losing their heads. Some began to dress as muzhiks, "going over to the people" and coming back misunderstood. A suicide epidemic was raging among the students and wealthy classes. People were killing themselves out of lassitude, nausea, imitation, braggadocio or plain curiosity.

But the true nihilists, those who resisted the call of "nirvana," were the confirmed materialists who preached the messianic future of the Russian people and saw salvation for the country in the abolition of the monarchy and the institution of a republican government based on the rural commune. This revolutionary movement was very foreign to Tolstoy, who tended toward idealism and non-violence; but both attitudes were the result of the same fundamental disillusionment, the same desire to challenge official doctrine and the same trust in the wordless wisdom of the peasant. After admiring Bakunin and Ilerzen, Tolstoy turned away from them in disgust. All those two cared about was the material side, and for him the welfare of the soul was more important than that of the body. His personal torment had overleaped the social phase and ripened into full flower in the metaphysical realm. In search of a reliable opinion, he read or reread Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, all the philosophers who had given a spiritualist explanation of life. But their enlightened minds had all tripped over the same obstacle. "The life of the body is an evil and a lie," said Socrates. "And that is why we should desire its destruction as a blessing." "Everything in the world—folly and wisdom, riches and poverty, joy and grief—is nothing but empty agitation and vanity," Solomon went on. "Man will die and nothing will remain of him." "Life should not be," said Schopenhauer, "and the sole good is the passage from being to nothingness." "To live, conscious of the inevitability of suffering, weakness, age, death, is impossible," added Buddha. "We must free ourselves from life, from all possibility of life."³

Not having found what he was looking for in the great thinkers, Tolstoy came down a few levels, and tried to understand how ordinary mortals made their peace with the human condition by observing those around him. If death were preferable to life, why did the majority of the people not commit suicide? Upon reflection, he concluded that his fellow men adopted one of four attitudes toward the problem: some

were honestly unaware of the tragedy of life and death, but this implied a mental lethargy bordering upon idiocy; others, related to the epicureans, were aware of their desperate situation but continued licking the honey off the leaves of the bush while they waited to fall into the dragon's jaws; still others, realizing the absurdity of their destiny on earth, made it a point of honor to destroy themselves; and the last group, too weak to carry out this act of deliverance, went on eating, drinking, dressing, procreating, buying land and making money, in a state of insurmountable revulsion. Tolstoy belonged to the last category. He hated himself for his cowardice. Sometimes, however, his certainty wavered.

"If there were no life, there would be no reason," he suddenly said to himself. "'Itierefore, reason is the child of life, and being the child of life, reason cannot deny life."

He was trapped in an infernal circle. His notebooks were filling up with observations on the relationship between intelligence and faith, man and space, matter and motion. The most self-evident concepts now seemed debatable to him. His new-found ignorance was comparable to that of the muzhik. The muzhik. Why hadn't he thought of him before? There was the source of light.

"I turned my eyes to the huge masses of simple, ignorant, poor people, and I saw something altogether different," he wrote.

These people accepted poverty, hunger, ill-treatment, disease, suffering and death with tranquil resignation. Some, in the direst circumstances, even looked happy. And few, in any event, thought of hanging themselves. Was it reason that helped them to bear the burden of their existence? Assuredly not. They drew their courage from the most simple blind faith, as taught by the pope in the little country church with the tarnished gilt cupola. Faith like theirs could only be accepted, without question or argument. God, like vodka, was to be swallowed at a gulp, without thinking. "As soon as man applies his intelligence and only his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object," Tolstoy wrote in his notebook.⁴

One spring day when he was walking in the forest, his mind suddenly- felt lighter and his whole body began to move more freely through the light-spattered dimness. Intrigued, he observed that he was always sad when he rejected God with his reason and always cheerful when he accepted him like a child.

"At the thought of God, happy waves of life welled up inside me," he wrote. "Everything came alive, took on meaning. The moment I thought I knew God, I lived. But the moment I forgot him, the mo-

mcnt I stopped believing, I also stopped living. ... To know God and to live are the same thing. God is life."⁵

He had found faith. A faith within reach of all. Like a shipwrecked man at the end of his strength, Tolstoy clung to this raft.

First, he saw that he could only remain in his state of grace by accepting it unconditionally. Even if certain rituals seemed silly and unjustifiable to him, even if the behavior of the faithful resembled blind superstition, he must obey the law of the flock or be lost. God, as creator of the entire world, could only have revealed his truth to all men, united by love. To pray to God by oneself was an absurdity. It was necessary to pray to him among the masses, through the masses.

With the same energy he had formerly applied to reviling the dogma of the Orthodox Church, Tolstoy now threw himself into piety. He who had even refused to attend the services in the house organized by Sonya for feast days now began to say his prayers morning and night without any prompting from anyone; he got up early for mass on Sunday, confessed and took communion, fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays.

"I know that what I am doing is right," he said, "if only because, in order to mortify the pride of the spirit, be united with my ancestors and fellow men and continue my search for the meaning of life, I am sacrificing my physical comfort."

To tell the truth, his mortification of the spirit was greatly attenuated by the feeling that he was being united, not only with the people, but with his own youth. lie was not prospecting new ground, he was turning back into an old familiar path. The appeal of religion was heightened by the appeal of his childhood memories. The trembling flame of the vigil light in front of the icon was the same one that had fascinated him as a child. And when he made the sign of the cross, it was not a bearded fifty-year-old his protective gesture was shielding, but a nervous, sensitive boy, dreaming of the kingdom of the Ant Brothers.

"It was a strange thing," he admitted, "but the life force I rediscovered then was not new to me; it was the oldest of all, that of the very beginning of my life."

Was there a shade of ostentation in his repeated genuflections in the little country church? Did he think it rather admirable of himself to return to this simplicity after studying the philosophers? In any ease, he made no secret of his reconversion. He spoke of it at the dinner table with his wife and children, as though it were something that concerned them all. Sonya, who had so often bewailed his skepticism, was overjoyed at his new devoutness. Following his example, even-one

in the family became possessed of renewed zeal. For Lent, they fasted not only in the first and last weeks, but for seven consecutive weeks.

When a guest arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy invariably led him to state his position on the problem of religion. Count Bobrinsky, founder of the "Society for the Promotion of Religious and Moral Reading" and partisan of Lord Radstock's theories, pleased him immensely by the intensity of his faith. "He cannot be contradicted," Tolstoy wrote to Alexandra, "because he is not trying to prove anything. He simply says he believes and, listening to him, one feels that he is happier than those who do not believe, one feels above all that belief such as his cannot be achieved by an effort of the mind, but that it must be received as a miraculous gift. And that is what I desire."⁶

lie read passages from his philosophical meditations to his friend Urusov. lie had weighty discussions on materialism with Ushakov, the governor of Tula, and with Dr. Sakharin. Alexcyev, the Russian teacher, affirmed that in the United States, where he had spent some time in a Russian communist colony, the pioneers had been forced to abandon their social reform until they had established their "religious foundations." 'lliis convinced Tolstoy that a society without God was inconceivable. His letters to Fet, Strakhov and Alexandra began to sound like metaphysical dissertations; he read nothing but religious works; he abhorred Rcnan's Life of Jesus, which Strakhov had sent to him, and said everything in it was false, dry and ridiculous; he was in seventh heaven, on the other hand, over Pascal's Pensees. How had this seventeenth-century Frenchman managed to understand his torment so completely, and even point the way to a remedy? "Their method is to do everything as though they believed, to sprinkle holy water and hear masses said. . . . Quite naturally, simply by going through the motions, you will come to believe and cease to reason." There was an admirable piece of advice! The way it gave preference to feeling over reason, it might almost have been written by a Russian! Pascal approved of the faith of the muzhik. On the map of Christian thought, Port-Royal was next door to Yasnaya Polyana. Hurry, hurry, run to the people, down into oblivion, down into ignorance!

The highway to Kiev passed not far from the estate. In the springtime the pilgrims filed through the dust, pack on back and staff in hand, some going to the sanctuaries in the south, some to the north. It was like a river of folk-faith flooding his land. Every day, drawn by this flow of fresh water, Tolstoy donned his peasant blouse, pulled on his boots and stationed himself by the roadside. "I am going out to the Nevsky Prospect," he would say, taking up his walking stick. He ad-

mired and envied these simple folk, who had left their villages weeks before with a few kopecks in their pockets and begun walking, never swerving from their course, with sunburned faces and bleeding feet, sleeping out under the open sky, living on whatever sustenance charitable souls provided as they passed, praying in every church, borne up in their weariness by the desire to kiss some icon or drink some holy water or touch the tomb of some miraculous monk.

Now and then the count would stop one of these visionaries and sit down in the grass with him, to question him about the goal of his journey and the nature of his faith. One day Strakhov, who was visiting at Yasnaya Polyana, accompanied him to a pilgrims' inn. There were a dozen people inside, men and women in rags, dirty and exhausted. Some slept, others were praying, and others were eating black bread and cucumbers. Tolstoy eagerly began to question one of them. "It was most curious to listen to them," Strakhov wrote to his friend Danilevsky. "Tolstoy is very interested in the language of the people. He finds new words every day."

Indeed, it was not only the naive piety of the pilgrims' tales that delighted him, but the tellers' quaint turns of speech as well. He came for a lesson in faith and went away having learned a lesson in style. An incorrigible professional, he would have jotted down his impressions under the very nose of God. The pages of his notebook were soon covered with strange words, rhymes, adages and proverbs, the age-old lore of the common people. He brought tale-tellers to the house, chief among them Shchegolenok, whose corkscrcw beard fascinated the children; he used some of the old man's tales as a basis for lovely stories, such as that of Michael the cobbler (What Men Live By) and the men who find salvation on an island (Three Old Men).

In July 1877 lie made a pilgrimage with his friend Strakhov to the monastery of Optina-Pustyn in the province of Kaluga, deep in the heart of Russia. Nicholas Gogol, the publicist Kireyevsky, the author Konstantin Leontycv, the philosopher Solovyev, even Dostoyevsky himself, had been there before him. The place was famous throughout the country for the devoutness of its monks and the authority of its starets, the spiritual leader of the brotherhood.

Following Leonid and Makarios, starets Ambrose was then head of the hermitage, and he was reputed to be something of a saint.⁷ Persons suffering in body or soul, illiterate peasants and tormented intellectuals, wealthy merchants, military officers, great ladies, unwed mothers and starveling beggars, all came in search of enlightenment from the admirable old man. His advice was solicited with regard to a job to take or turn down, a projected marriage, a religious vocation, a family

feud, a love betrayed, a hidden crime. Sometimes starets Ambrose guessed the trouble before the suppliant even had time to confide in him, and banished it with a soothing word.

'l'olstoy had high hopes for their meeting. The travelers reached Optina-Pustyn at night and slept in the convent hostelry. Early next morning Prince Obolensky dropped over from his nearby estate to invite them to dinner the following day—to what desert did one have to flee to escape one's social obligations? 'Iliis disappointment was followed by a much larger one: 'I'olstoy took an immediate dislike to starets Ambrose, who received them in his cell. He was a tall, stooped, lean man with keen eyes and a deeply lined face ending in a little beard. He had not read the count's books, but he had heard of Levin's confession to the priest in Anna Karenina. It had been spoken of most highly. Emboldened by the compliment, Tolstoy plunged into an interrogation of the Gospels. Perhaps his questions were too aggressive: the starets became withdrawn and curt and replied evasively. They parted in mutual dissatisfaction.

This unfortunate occurrence did nothing to weaken Tolstoy's religious beliefs and may even have strengthened his conviction that it was the common muzhik and not the exceptional being who was best qualified to perceive the mind of God.

A few months later, on December 26, 1877, Sonya noted that her husband had begun to write a philosophical-religious work in a large bound notebook. "The object of what I am writing in this big book," he told her, "is to demonstrate the absolute necessity of religion." To those who claimed that social laws, "and especially socialist and communist laws," were superior to Christian laws, he replied: "If the Christian doctrine, which has been implanted among us for centuries and is the basis of our society, did not exist, then neither would there be any moral law or law of honor or desire for a more equitable distribution of earthly wealth, or aspiration to goodness and equality, all of which exist in all men."

This might almost be an echo of Pascal's remark: "The Christian religion alone, being a mixture of internal and external, is proportionate to all. It elevates the lowly within and humbles the proud without."

But while Sonya was under the impression that her husband was wholly engrossed in inscribing his theological reflections in "the big notebook," he was still consigning more secular observations to his private journal. The novelist was continually tugging at the coatslceve of the thinker. Country life supplied material for comment and sketches. At first these were only thumbnail descriptions of nature, in telegraphic notation: "Vaporous heat. Toward evening, luminosity in

the air. Hurts the eyes. Eyes go for rest to the dark green line of the forest. Mosquitoes spin, whining." (June 23, 1877.) "A downpour, the wind at a sharp angle. A linden uprooted. Mud and dirt. Puddles 011 the road gleam blue." (July 8, 1877.) "Sparkling day. Cold. Rain. It smells of wet straw." (August 25, 1877.)

Then he began to embroider and improvise upon these practice scales. Names appeared, dates, embryonic outlines. Once again Tolstoy wanted to write a work of fiction, although he did not abandon his mystical daydreams. But what would be the tlicmc? It would have to be sufficiently serious and vast to stand comparison with War and Peace and Anna Karenina. After letting his mind roam in all directions, he returned to the idea of the Decembrist uprising.

In January 1878 he asked Alexandra Tolstoy to send him information about General Perovsky, whom she had known personally; he was a former military governor of the province of Orenburg and a confidential friend of Nicholas I. "Now I am deep in my readings on the 1820s and I cannot tell you how much pleasure I derive from them," he wrote to Alexandra. "It is both odd and appealing to me to think that a period I can remember—183c—is already part of history.⁸ The figures in the picture suddenly stop wavering and shifting, and everything freezes into the solemn immobility of truth and beauty. I feci like a (mediocre) cook wandering through a loaded marketplace, eying the huge choice of vegetables, meat and fish, and dreaming of the dinner he is going to serve! . . . This is so important to 111c! ... As important as your faith is to you. I am tempted to say, even more important. But nothing could be that!"⁹

In fact, the theme was still not clear in his mind. He admired the Decembrists for their noble aspirations and disapproved of their trying to impose them by force. He hated Nicholas I for putting down the insurrection so brutally, but recognized that maintaining order was essential to society. Also, he wanted to bring the common people into his book, but they had played a very small part in events. One day he said to Sonya, "All these things will take place on Olympus. Nicholas Pavlovich [Tsar Nicholas I] will live among the aristocrats like Jupiter among the gods; the muzhiks will be transported to the governments of Samara and Irkutsk. One of the conspirators of December 14 will be living with these emigrants, and that will make the connection between the simple life and the aristocrats. Like a drawing, my book must have a background, and that will be provided by my present religious position. . . . For instance, one could treat the uprising of December 14 without judging anyone, either Nicholas Pavlovich or the conspirators, simply understanding both sides and portraying them."

In his letters he often spoke of this desire for impartiality. "In this story there must be no guilty party." (Letter to Alexandra Tolstoy, March 14, 1878.) "It is a great blessing that I do not take sides, and can love and sympathize freely with all." (Letter to Alexandra Tolstoy, September 5, 1878.)

With this principle as his point of reference, he began the first chapter, twice. "Yesterday morning," Sonya wrote in her diary, "Lyovochka read me the beginning of his new book, which is conceived on a scale as vast as it is fascinating. The action begins with a trial about land between an owner and his muzhiks, the arrival in Moscow of Prince Chernishcv and his family, the laying of the cornerstone of Holy Savior Cathedral, and the apparition of a pious old man. . . ,"¹⁰ But to write the next part, he needed more than printed documentation. There were still survivors of the conspiracy around; he wanted to meet them and hear in their own words the story of the aborted coup d'etat, their imprisonment, their exile to Siberia. . . .

In February 1878 he went to Moscow to meet two Decembrists, Svistunov and M. I. Muravyev-Apostol, who had been imprisoned in Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress and sent to the convict colonies at Chita and Pctrovsk. The old men recounted their ruined lives with a mixture of nostalgia and pride. Some people justify their lives by their work; theirs were justified by their sense of the ill-treatment they had suffered.

From Moscow, Tolstoy went to St. Petersburg, where he saw his old and dear friend babushka Alexandra. They had long, mystical conversations, no doubt, and Alexandra was very happy to see Leo back in the Church. However, there was something impetuous and insistent in the neophyte's zeal that gave her cause to fear he would soon abandon the rank and file of the faithful. They also talked about the 1820s and the prominent figures of the day, whom the maid of honor had had the good fortune to know at first hand. Tolstoy took advantage of his trip to the capital to ransack the libraries. He was refused permission to examine the secret files of the Third Section, but he was allowed to visit Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress, where most of the Decembrists had been incarcerated, with his brother-in-law Stepan Bchrs. Baron Maidel,t the prison governor, showed the author the irons in which some of the prisoners had been shackled fifty-three years earlier, and told him how one of them (Svistunov) had tried to kill himself, first by leaping into the Neva and then by eating broken glass. When Tolstoy said he would like to take a closer look at the cells in the Alexis

\ Baron Maidcl was Tolstoy's model for Baron Kriegsmuth, the prison governor in Reswrcction.

ravelin, Baron Maidel shook his head and said with a smile that, "Anyone could enter the ravelin, but only the emperor, chief of police or governor of the prison could leave it, and every guard in the place knew it."¹¹ Then, with professional pride, lie explained to his guests the new features adopted in the cells, 'lolstoy left him in a fury. As they passed the monument of Nicholas I on Great Morskaya Street, he looked away and said to Stepan Behrs that it was unpardonable for the tsar to have punished the Decembrists so harshly and that by his fault Russia had lost the cream of a generation at one blow.

Always ready to deplore the cruel fate of rebels past, present and to come, lie was nevertheless stupefied, on March 31, 1878, to leani the verdict of the trial of the revolutionary Vera Zasulich. Two months before, she had seriously injured General Trepov, St. Petersburg commissioner of police. Indeed, Trepov was a notorious brute, but who could have foreseen that the tables would be turned in the courtroom and the accused become the accuser, that the jury, bewitched and subjugated, would acquit the defendant and that the public would greet their verdict with applause? Far from rejoicing at this victory for the partisans of revolution, Tolstoy saw it as a dangerous incitement to fresh violence. lie later wrote in his notebook:

"Revolutionaries are specialists. Tlicy exercise a profession like any other, like the military profession, for example (the analogy is perfect). It is a mistake to believe their profession nobler than any other."¹²

Back at Yasnaya Polyana, surrounded by the peaceful fields, he found it even more inconceivable that politics should lead to crime. "Living at a distance and having no part in the conflict, I can see plainly that hatred between the two extremist parties has reached the point of bestiality," lie wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy on April 6, 1878. "For Maidel and those like him, all these BogolyulxwsJ and Zasuliches are so low that they cannot recognize them as human beings or feci any sympathy for them; for a Zasulich, Trepov and his like are wild animals that can and should be cut down like dogs. This is not indignation, it is open war. Every one of those who acquitted the assassin and every one of those who approved her acquittal know full well that for their own personal safety a murderer must not be allowed to go unpunished; but in their eyes the question is not who is right but who, in the long run, will prove strongest. All of this seems to me to bode much misery and sin. And yet there are fine people on both sides. . . . Since reading the account of the trial and all this commotion about it, I can think of nothing else."

J Pseudonym of the revolutionary Emclyanov, arrested in 1876.

To Strakhov the next day: "The Zasulich business is no joking matter. This madness, this idiotic capriciousness that has suddenly seized hold of people is significant. These are the first signs of something not yet clear to us. But it is serious. The Slavophil madness was the precursor of war, and I am inclined to think that this madness is the precursor of revolution."

He returned to his novel, but without conviction. These Decembrists he was preparing to immortalize may well have been the distant source of inspiration to a Vera Zasulich, whose violence he could not condone. In keeping with his main idea, should he not show what brought men together, rather than what drove them apart? Religion alone could help him out of the dilemma in which he was caught in the conflict between his love of the downtrodden masses and his love of peace.

Under the influence of his new Christian sentiments, he felt a need for tolerance in life as well as in literature. And to prove how merciful he could be, he chose to humble himself to the person he held in least esteem: Turgcncv. The mere thought of that over-refined and pettish European sent a shiver of disgust down his spine. With morbid delight he determined to write to him, out of the blue, on April 6, 1878:

"Ivan Sergeyevich, these past few days, I have been thinking back over our relationship and I was surprised and happy to find that I had lost all my animosity toward you. Please God you feel the same. In fact, knowing how kind-hearted you are, I am almost certain that your hostility died long before mine. If this is true, shall we shake hands, and will you consent to forgive me entirely and completely all the wrong I have done you? It is natural for me to remember only your best features, for you have been very good to me. I do not forget that it is to you that I owe my literary success and I also remember that you used to like what I wrote, and myself too. Perhaps your memory of me will be the same, for there was a time when I loved you sincerely. Honestly and openly, if you can forgive me, I offer you all the friendship of which I am capable. At our age there is only one thing of value: the love we can share with our fellow men; I should be very happy if you and I could have such a relationship."

After seventeen years of vindictive silence, this declaration of affection stupefied Ivan Turgcncv. There was the Russian temperament, all right, quick to anger, confession, debasement and embrace. Not even the most extravagant of his French acquaintances would have been capable of such an about-face. From Paris, where he was still languishing in the shadow of the Viardot family, he replied, on May 8 (20), 1878:

"Dear Leo Nikolaycvich, the letter you sent to the post office to be left until callcd for did not reach me until today. It touched me deeply

and made me very happy. It is my fondest wish to renew our former friendship and I most warmly shake your outstretched hand. You arc quite right to believe I have 110 hostile feelings toward you. If I ever did, they vanished long ago; all that is left is a memory of a man to whom I was sincerely devoted, an author whose first works I had the good fortune to applaud before anyone else, and who continues to arouse my keenest interest with every new publication. I rejoice with all my heart and soul to sec the end of the misunderstanding between us. I hope to go to Orel this summer and if I do we will surely meet again. In the meantime, I wish you all good things and, once again, cordially shake your hand."

On August 8, having written to announce his arrival, Turgenev steamed into the Tula station. Tolstoy and his brother-in-law Stepan Behrs were waiting for him on the platform, and the three set off in a carriage for Yasnaya Polyana, where Sonya, delighted, intimidated and anxious, was preparing to welcome this remarkable guest of whom her husband had said so much good and so much evil.

She was immediately charmed by the tall man with the regular features crowned by a thick crest of silver hair, and the gentle, oily, feminine eyes. His gray beard was yellowed around the lips. His movements were graceful, he swayed slightly as he walked, and he had a thin little voice that contrasted with his imposing stature. Beside him Tolstoy seemed small, clumsy and unbelievably young. The children were agape with admiration at the traveler's suitcases, his velvet jacket and waistcoat, his silk shirt, his paisley cravat, soft leather pumps, gold chronometer and precious snuff-box, and they sniffed the air of Paris all around him.

At dinner he dazzled them with his eloquence. In front of Tolstoy, who was making a strenuous attempt to be amiable, he talked about his pet dog Jack, the hectic and futile life of Paris where the French dismissed everything as "vieux jeu"—the latest fashionable expression —the villa he and the Viardots had bought at Bougival, near which they had built an orangery costing ten thousand francs, and the cholera, of which he was in deadly fear. Whereupon, observing that they were thirteen at table, he said, "Whoever is afraid of death raise his hand!" And he raised his own, laughing. No one followed suit, for fear of offending the Christian sentiments of the master of the house. "I seem to be the only one," Turgenev resumed. Since the night at Arzamas Tolstoy was too familiar with this elemental dread to deny it any longer, but he did not want to resemble his old enemy in anything, not even in this; at last, spurred by honesty or hospitality,

he stuck up his hand and growled, "Well, I don't want to die cither!" Then, to change the subject, he affably inquired of his guest:

"Why don't you smoke? You used to."

"Yes," Turgenev answered. "But two charming young ladies in Paris told me that they would not allow me to kiss them if I smcllcd of tobacco, and so I have stopped."

Acutely embarrassed, Tolstoy looked around at his family, but no one dared to smile.

After dinner the two men withdrew to Tolstoy's study where, in privacy, their conversation turned to more serious matters. Neither alluded to the quarrel that had divided them. But they talked at length of literature, poetry, philosophy. Once again Tolstoy was appalled by his guest's indifference to questions of morality and religion. Turgenev, then engaged in writing his delightful Prose Poems, placed art above all else. For him God, the salvation of the soul and life after death were meaningless concepts, since the human mind was incapable of penetrating the mystery of creation; the worship of beauty, on the other hand, could illuminate an entire life. To Tolstoy, this adoration of the aesthetic was the height of irresponsibility. Sitting across from him in an armchair he saw his ideal opponent—in the form of a well- groomed, roguish, garrulous old man. Everything he most loathed—the music of words, intellectual divertissements, artificial courtesy, Western culture—combined in a single man! What self-control it must have required for him to refrain from turning him out of the house! As a good Christian, he dedicated his patience to God.

It was a fine day, so they went outdoors, where the rest of the family were waiting for them. There was a seesaw near the house, formed by a plank laid across a chopping block. Tolstoy climbed on one end and proposed that Turgenev sit on the other and then, to amuse the children, the two writers began to bounce up and down in alternation. Did Tolstoy think of the literary symbolism of their game of teeter- totter? The author of Smoke counterweighing the author of War and Peace, the descent of one causing the rise of the other . . .

They stopped, out of breath, and Tolstoy urged his guest to come with him for a walk in the country. Turgenev, who was a keen hunter, could identify the birds by their song: "There's a flicker," he said. "A linnet! A starling!" But even he who knew nature so well, was amazed at Tolstoy's more profound understanding of animals. There was more than a familiarity between them—something like an organic intimacy. He stood by a bony, mangy old nag, stroking its back and whispering gently into its ear, while the horse listened with evident interest. 'ITien he translated the animal's feelings to those around him.

"I could have listened forever," Turgenev later said. "He had got inside the very soul of the poor beast and taken me with him. I could not refrain from remarking, 'I say, Leo Nikolayevich, beyond any doubt, you must have been a horse once yourself!' "ⁿ

In the evening everyone assembled in the drawing room and Turgcncv read aloud one of his stories, The Dog. His audience's response was lukewarm and their words of praise halfhearted, but the author did not seem to notice. As he said good-bye the following day, he thanked his hosts with genuine emotion, and said to Tolstoy, in front of Sonya who blushed with pleasure, "You did admirably well, old man, when you married your wife!"

He wrote to Tolstoy from his Spasskoye estate, "I cannot help saying once more how good and enjoyable it was for me to be at Yasnaya Polyana, and how happy 1 am to see that the misunderstanding between us has vanished without a trace, as though it had never existed. I felt very strongly that the years which have aged us were not lived in vain and that both of us have become better than we were sixteen years ago.* I need not add that I shall certainly stop by to see you again on my way back."

On September 2, 1878 Turgenev returned to Yasnaya Polyana for three days, accepted his host's forced cordiality at face value, and sent an enthusiastic letter to Fet:

"It was a great joy for me to renew relations with Tolstoy. . . . His whole family is most likable and his wife charming. He himself has calmed down considerably and matured. We Russians know he has no rival."

Tolstoy, more perceptive, measured the full width of the gulf between them and foresaw that their views of life could only drive them apart as they grew older. The day after Turgencv's departure, he also wrote to Fet, their mutual friend:

"Turgcncv is the same as ever, and we have no illusions as to the degree of intimacy that is possible between us."

And to Strakhov:

"Turgenev has come back among us, amiable and brilliant as ever. But, between you and me, he is a little like a fountain of water that has been piped in: one is continually afraid it will run dry and there will be nothing left."

Unaware of this harsh judgment, Turgenev generously devoted his energies to serving his compatriot in France. On October 1, 1878 he wrote from Bougival to announce the success of the English transla-

⁰ In fact, it was seventeen years since Tolstoy and Turgcncv had seen each other.

tion of The Cossacks and the publication of the same work, in French, in the Journal de St. Petersbourg, in an adaptation by Baroness Meng- den. lie was rather annoyed by this, moreover, as he had wanted to translate The Cossacks himself, with the help of Mme. Viardot. "I don't know whether you have already made arrangements to publish it in book form in Paris," he wrote to Tolstoy, "but I should be very happy to assist the French public to appreciate the best story ever written in our language"!

I lis letter camc just as Tolstoy was going through a crisis of literary humility, which paradoxically took the form of exacerbated sensitivity about everything. Instead of thanking Turgcncv for his generosity, he flared up and replied:

"Skyler has sent me his English translation of The Cossacks. I think it is very good. Baroness Mengden's French translation (you met the lady at our home) is certainly bad. Please don't think I am putting on airs, but sincerely, it gives me an extremely disagreeable and confuscd feeling—the main ingredients of which arc shame and the fear of being made fun of—to reread what I have written, and even to skim it or hear it talked about. ... In spite of all my affection for you and my assurance that you wish me well, I feel as though you, too, are making fun of me. Therefore please let us not talk any more about my writing. You know every man has his own way of blowing his nose, and believe me, I blow mine exactly as I sec fit."

After this outburst, a resurgence of Christian charity prompted him to add, "I continue to admire your activc old age. During the sixteen years since we last saw each other, you have done nothing but improve in ever)' respect, even physically."¹⁴ Justifiably surprised, Turgcncv wrote back immediately: "Though you ask me not to speak of your writing, I cannot help pointing out that I have never, in the slightest degree, made fun of you. I have liked some of your books immensely, disliked others intensely and derived keen pleasure and genuine astonishment from still others, such as The Cossacks. But why should I have laughed at them? I thought you had long since gotten rid of such 'centripetal' feelings. Why do they affect only authors, and not painters, musicians and other artists? Probably because a larger share of that region of the soul which it can be embarrassing to expose goes into a literary work. No doubt; but at the stage we have reached in a writer's career, we should no longer be bothered by this."¹⁵

This letter, courteous as it was, nevertheless seemed the height of

f Turgcnev's plan to translate The Cossacks with Pauline Viardot never materialized.

insolcncc to Tolstoy and he complained to Fet: "Received an epistle from Turgenev yesterday. You know, I have decided to keep away from him and temptation. He really is an unpleasant trouble-seeker."¹⁸

This curious association of Ivan Turgenev and "temptation" provided Tolstoy with one more reason for hating the man who was morally and physically irritating to him.

Turgenev, however, continued his efforts in France on his friend's behalf. War and Peace appeared on the Paris booksellers' shelves in 1879, in a translation by Princess Paskcvich.¹⁷ Turgenev immediately began to sound the drums, send copies to the most important critics (Taine, Edmond About) and call 011 his friends to create a wave of enthusiasm.

"One must hope they will grasp all the power and beauty of your epic," he wrote to Tolstoy. "The translation is somewhat faulty, although conscientious and faithful. I have been rereading your very great work for the fifth or sixth time, and with renewed pleasure. Its structure is very foreign to everything the French arc fond of and look for in a book, but truth ever prevails. I trust there will be, if not a smashing triumph, at least a slow but sure invasion."¹⁸

A fortnight later he sent Tolstoy an extract from a letter Flaubert had written after reading War and Peace:

" ITiank you for giving me 'lolstoy's novel to read," he wrote. "It is first-rate. What a painter, what a psychologist! The first two volumes are sublime, but the third falls off terribly. He repeats himself! And he philosophizes! At last we see the man—the author and the Russian— whereas until then we had seen only Nature and Mankind. There arc some things in him that remind me of Shakespeare. I uttered cries of admiration as I read, and one is a long time reading! Yes, it is powerful, very powerful."

Turgenev added: "I think, 011 the whole, you will l>c satisfied. . . . There have not been any individual reviews yet, but three hundred copies (out of five hundred) have already been sold."

But once again, Turgenev and his congratulations came at the wrong time. Just then, Tolstoy did not want to hear another word about his novels. The Decembrists, for which he had compiled a vast documentation, appealed to him less and less. After starting over ten times and telling Sonya that the characters were beginning to come to life in his mind at last, he shut the manuscript up in a drawer, for good.

"My Decembrists are God knows where now," he wrote to Fet on April 17, 1879, "and I have forgotten all about them."

Was it fear of being asphyxiated under the mountain of historical detail, or lack of sympathy for the characters' political ideas, or the

difficulty of writing objectively about a period so close to him, or discouragement in the face of the sheer size and complexity of the undertaking? All these were behind Tolstoy's refusal, but even more, there was his growing desire to renounce the pleasures of the pen and devote himself to the mysteries of religion. For they had not seen the last of each other! His first step had been to return to the Church and adhere blindly, a la muzhik, to the Orthodox ritual. This phase of obedience had lasted nearly two years, to the satisfaction of Sonya and Alexandra. Tolstoy's children marveled at the athletic ease with which the model penitent prostrated himself in front of the icons. Yet, at the very moment his forehead touched the dusty floor of the little church of Yasnaya Polyana, a seed of doubt began to sprout in his heart. Perhaps he had taken a wrong turning. lie had never been one to follow in the footsteps of the common herd or submit to a rule that he had not invented. He had questioned even-thing he had ever learned, before teaching it to others in his own way. This spirit of dissension, independence and domination ill accorded with the self-effacement demanded of the faithful. No matter how sternly he ordered himself to respond automatically in thought and deed, his intelligence rebelled.

On May 22, 1878 he wrote in his diary, "Went to mass Sunday. I can find a satisfactory explanation for everything that happens during the service. But wishing 'long life' [to the tsar] and praying for victory over our enemies arc sacrilege. A Christian should pray for his enemies, not against them." This was the beginning of schism.

Other parts of the service gradually began to come into conflict with his common sense, and even with the teachings of Christ. After refusing to let himself question a single word of the dogma, he now began to pick it to pieces, word by word, not as a skeptic but in the manner of one of the early Christians, still illuminated by the historical proximity of the Lord. He admired the ctliical laws preached by the apostles, but he did not believe in the resurrection of Christ because he could not imagine it actually happening. He also balked at the celebration of the miracles—Ascension, Pentecost, the Annunciation, the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin. To his mind all that was a product of cheap imagery, unworthy of the cause of God. "To reinforce the teachings of Christ with miracles," he wrote in his notebook, "is like holding a lighted candle in front of the sun in order to see it better."¹⁹

Still more absurd and pointless, in his opinion, were the mysteries, especially baptism and Eucharist. And besides, why did the Orthodox Church, whose mission should be to bring about an alliance between all men, treat the Roman Catholics and Protestants—who worshiped the same God—as heretics? Why, in the same breath as it commanded

the faithful to be charitable and forgive those who trespassed against them, did it pray for the victory of the Russian army over the 'l urks? Why was the Church, champion of the poor and disinherited, swathed in gold and precious stones and damasks?

Hereafter, every time Tolstoy went anywhere, he made a pilgrimage to see some ecclesiastical dignitary. In June 1879, with Fet, he went to the holy city of Kiev, ran from cell to ccll and hermitage to hermitage, confided all his doubts to the monks, to the anchorite Anthony, to Metropolitan Makarios of Moscow, to Bishop Alexis of Mozhaysk, to Leonid the archimandrite. These eminent personages sympathized with his desire to raise himself to a higher level of spirituality at which all the inconsistencies and implausibilities of the different churches would melt away, but they warned him against undermining, by ill- considered criticism, a tradition that had been tried and accepted by the people. All too often, they told him, setting one angle straight will throw a whole edifice out of kilter, especially if the house is an old one. The imperfections of the Orthodox religion were of small consequence; the main thing was that it remain intangible throughout the centuries. "What have they done?" wrote Tolstoy. "They have cut up the teachings into shreds and tacked their idiotic, vile explanations- hateful to Christ—onto every morsel. They have blockcd the door for others and won't go inside themselves."²⁰

He wrote to Strakhov:

"They are all admirable, intelligent people; but my convictions are growing stronger and stronger, I am straining my brains, thrashing about, struggling with all my soul and I am suffering, but I thank God for my suffering."²¹

The bishop of Tula, with whom he had a conversation in December 1879, was much surprised to hear him say he would like to become a monk. Despite his visitor's resolute air, he dissuaded him from this project. Next, Tolstoy informed him that he was thinking of giving all his possessions to the poor. Kissing him on the forehead, the holy man mildly replied that this was "a dangerous course." Tolstoy withdrew, at once disappointed and relieved.

Less than ten days later the decidedly indefatigable Sonya gave birth to her seventh son, Michael.

"Although it no longer gives me the same sensation of wonder as when my first children were born, I am grateful that this time there were no complications," he wrote to his brother 011 December 21, 1879.

One morning a short time later, as he was preparing to take communion, the priest called upon him to affirm that the body and blood of Jesus Christ were literally present in the consecrated bread and

wine. He was suddenly disturbed and annoyed by this ritual question he had heard hundreds of times before; he felt something like a knife- thrust near his heart, and stammered out a faltering "yes"; but he knew as he came out of the little country church that he would never touch the bread of life again. One Wednesday—a fast-day—when the whole family was sitting down together for the evening meal, he pushed away his porridge and, pointing to a dish of meatballs that had been prepared for the two non-fasting tutors, frowned at his son Ilya and growled aggressively, "Pass the meat!" No one dared to express surprise. Before the entire mute but smirking table, the master of Yasnaya Polyana defiantly began to chew the forbidden food.

It was the declaration of war on orthodoxy. Tolstoy was not content with repudiating the Church. He felt as resentful as a deceived husband; he was itching to revenge himself, by word and pen, for the two years he had wasted believing in it. He covered the pages of his notebooks with vindictive entries: "From the third century to the present," he wrote on September 30, 1879, "the Church has been nothing but lies, cruelty and deceit. In the third century something gTcat was still lying hidden. But what? Is there really anything? Let us examine the Gospels. If the soul exists, then God's commandments exist. The question of the soul is the only question. What did the others have to say about it?"

And on October 28: "In this world there are heavy people, without wings. They lurch about here below. Among them there are strong men like Napoleon, who leave terrible marks on mankind, and sow discord among men, but all this happens at ground level. Then there are men who let their wings grow, who rise slowly from the earth and soar above it: the monks. And then there arc lighter men, who spring easily from the ground and fall back again: the good idealists. And there are men with broad, powerful wings who let themselves come to rest in the thick of the human crowd for the sheer pleasure of it, and then their wings are torn: I am one of those. Afterward the wounded wings beat the air, thrust upward and fall back again. My wings will heal. I shall fly very high. May God help me! And then there are men with celestial wings, who come down to earth on purpose and fold their wings out of love for their fellows, in order to help them learn to fly. Then, when they are no longer needed, they go back up into the sky: Christ."

On October 30 the government came under his fire: "Religion, as long as it is religion, cannot, by its very essence, be subjcct to authority. . . . Religion negates temporal authority (war, torture, plunder, theft, every tiling bound up with government). That is why a govern-

ment must make certain of its control over religion. If it docs not lock up this bird, the bird will fly away."²²

At last he saw plainly what it was he had to do. Starting with the texts of the Gospels, he must think religion through again, separating the true from the false. "Now it is all clear," he told Sonya, "and, God willing, what I write will be very important." But it worried Sonya to see him continually plunged into books on theology. "His eyes art- strange and staring," she wrote to her sister. "He hardly speaks. lie seems not to be in this world and he is incapable of taking any interest in ordinary matters." He attacked the Church violently at table, to his wife's consternation. The most ordinary incidents of daily life were pretexts for vituperation and parable. "He often quarreled with Maman," his son Ilya later wrote, "and from the fun-loving, lively head of our family he was transformed before our eyes into a stern, accusatory prophet. . . . We would be planning an amateur play, everybody was animated, chatting away, playing croquet, talking of love, etc. Papa appeared and with one word, or worse, with one look, everything was spoiled: the gaiety was gone; we felt ashamed, somehow. It would have been better for him to have stayed away. The worst of it was that he felt it too." Yes, he would have preferred not to deflate this childish joy. But he could not resist: he had never been able to hide what he felt. He was doomed to l>c a kill-joy.

On a brief trip to St. Petersburg in January 1880, he called on Alexandra to explain his new position to her. 'Hie old spinster was aghast when she heard this rabid evangelist, his eyes like marbles and his face aflame, reviling the popes who had perverted the message of Christ and exhorting her to break with the aristocratic and pious circle in which she had been living blindly for so long. She demurred, became angry, he raised his voice, the discussion degenerated into an argument. Disrespectful words tumbled out of Tolstoy's mouth. In a paroxysm of rage he rushed out, slamming the door behind him, went home and was unable to sleep all night. The next day he set out for Yasnaya Polyana without seeing his dear aunt again, although he sent her a letter of apology: "To you, I cannot talk any other way than with my whole heart. I think you truly love God and goodness, and therefore you must understand where He is. I ask your pardon for my bad temper and rudeness. . . ."²³

She replied the same day:

"Your precipitous departure annoyed, offended and pained me to the depths of my soul. There was cruclty in your action, and enmity, and I would almost say a desire for revenge. Such behavior would be unseemly in the young, but at our ages, when every parting may be

our last, it is unpardonable to separate on such terms, and it will be hard for me to forgive you."

Six days later, on January 29, she had recovered her serenity and wrote to tell him that she wanted to forget their quarrel, but would never change her mind because she was too happy in the peace she derived from her allegiance to the Orthodox Church. "Not one stone can be removed from the holy edifice without destroying the harmony of the whole." Touched by the conciliatory tone of this letter, Tolstoy elaborated upon his views:

"I can believe in something I can neither understand nor refute. But I cannot believe in something that seems to me to be a lie. Or better still: to persuade myself that I believe in something I cannot believe, something that is no use to me in understanding my soul and God and the relations between them, to persuade myself of that, I say, is an attitude diametrically opposed to true faith."

He went on to affirm that he was quite ready to respect the beliefs of Alexandra and the muzhiks, if they enabled them to accede to a knowledge of God. The only thing was, he was afraid his dear friend was looking toward God through spectacles borrowed from the Church, which were not right for her eyes: "Do those spectacles bother you or not? I cannot tell. A man as cultivated as you are could not tolerate them, that I am sure of, but a woman, I don't know. That is why I am sorry I said all those things. . . . The sense of my words was this: 'Look at the ice you are walking on; it might be wise to try to make a hole in it and test whether it is firm. If it gives way, it would be preferable to return to more solid ground.'"

For him, solid ground was the Gospels, and not another word: "I and all the rest of us live like animals, and we will die the same way. To escape from this excruciating situation, Christ offered us salvation. Who is Christ: a God or a man? He is what he says he is. He says he is the Son of God, he says he is the Son of Man, he says, 'I am what I tell vou I am. I am the truth and the life. . . And from the moment they began to mix it all up together and say he was God and the second person of the Trinity, the result was sacrilege, falsehood and nonsense. If he were that, he would have been capable of saying so. He offered us salvation. IIow? By teaching us to give a meaning to our lives that is not destroyed by death. . . . For me, the foundation of his teaching is that to achieve salvation it is neccssaiy, every day and every hour of every day, to think of God, of one's soul, and therefore to set the love of one's neighbor above mere bestial existence."²⁴

Not content to profess his new faith in letters to his friends, he decided to bequeath it to Russia and the world, in a series of books: first,

his Confession, begun in 1879, then a Criticism of Dogmatic Theology (1880), Union and Translation of the Four Gospels (1882) and lastly, What I Believe (1883). In these four complementary books, he sought to define the origins of his torment and the outcome of his reflections. "Leo is still working, as he calls it," Sonya wrote to her sister on November 7, 1879, "but alas! all he is producing are philosophical disquisitions! He reads and thinks until it gives him headache. And all in order to prove that the Church does not accord with the Gospels. There are not ten people in Russia who can be interested in such a subject. But there's nothing to be done. My only hope is that he will soon get over it, and it will pass, like a disease."

Far from passing, the "disease" was developing complications. By thinking about it night and day, Tolstoy was aggravating his case. Ills Confession was the tale of the internal struggle that led him to leave the Church. To be sure, the desire for total honesty that prompted it is praiseworthy, and many of its pages arc remarkable for their tragic beauty, but the general impression created by the book is an unhealthy one of public exposure and flagellation. One continually feels that the author is burrowing into his dung-heap with too-evident relish. The extravagance of his language casts doubts 011 the nobility of his purpose. At the end of the book one wonders whether this display of Christian humility is not rather an orgy of masochistic pride, for self- criticism, when performed in broad daylight, can produce a kind of intoxication, and setting oneself up as an example not to follow may be another way of attracting attention.

"I killed men in the war," he writes, "I fought duels; playing cards, I squandered money extorted from the peasants, and I punished them

cruelly: I fornicated with women of easy virtue and deceived husbands.

# ' /

Lies, theft, adultery, drunkenness and brutality of every sort, I have committed ever)' shameful act; there is no crime I am not acquainted with." Elsewhere he calls himself "a base and criminal man" and a "vermin"—flashy eloquence and greasepaint. He struts in his rags, he wallows in sham humility, and more than ever, reviling himself, he adores himself.

In the Criticism of Dogmatic Theology he wages a frontal attack on the teachings of the Orthodox Church. In the name of reason he rejects all that is beyond his understanding, beginning with the dogma of the Trinity: "Let us suppose that God lives on Olympus, that God is made of gold, that there is no God, that there arc fourteen gods, that God has several children or one son. All these affirmations may be strange and barbaric, but each of them is based on one idea, one concept. But that God is one and three can be based on no con-

ccpt or idea." Further on, he refuses to accept that Jesus is "the second person of God who became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary through the intervention of the Holy Ghost." Demons and angels, the creation of the world in six days, the story of Adam and the serpent, salvation and eternal damnation are just so many primitive legends. At times his refutation of the traditional trappings of religion reveals the author's fragmentary knowledge and specious argumentation, ill- hidden by the polemicist's fervor.

Still more singular is his claim to offer a personal and original version of the divine message, in the Union and Translation of the Four Gospels. His knowledge of Greek is insufficient, so he hastily learns Hebrew in order to penetrate and compare the sacred texts. He attempts to throw light on what he cannot understand through the works of the exegctes: Dom Calmct, Reuss, Griesbach, Tischendorf, Meyer, Liicke, etc. By good fortune, his children have a new tutor, the young philologist Ivakin; whenever Tolstoy encounters some difficulty in translation, he runs to him and thrusts the Greek Bible under his nose. "I translated the passage he pointed out to me," Ivakin recounts in his reminiscences, "and most of the time my translation concurred with that of the Church." Tolstoy was greatly vexed at this. He would have liked the text to say exactly what he thought it ought to say: " 'Can't that be interpreted to mean this or that?' he would ask. And he told me what he wanted. I pored over the lexicons and did the impossible to satisfy him." 'Ilius, carried away by his passion to convince, he sometimes lost sight of the truth in his efforts to impose his version of it at all costs. In a fever of excitement, he would ay out, "What do I care whether Christ is risen! Is he risen? Well, God be with him! What I care about is to find out what I must do, how I must live!"²⁵

He relied on his intuition, his heart, to rediscover the sources of Christianity. Starting with the idea that all four Gospels were describing the same events, he rearranged them in chronological order into a single text. The Gospels according to Sts. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were superseded by the Gospel according to St. Leo, which is no more nor less than another of his rules of life. It is embodied in the fourth part of his mystical series, What 1 Believe. The entire foundation of the Tolstovan faith is in the Sermon on the Mount. Six com- mandments: "Thou shalt not be angry, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not swear, thou shalt not resist evil by evil, thou shalt have no enemies, thou shalt love God and thy neighbor as thyself." With prodigious naivctd Tolstoy observes, "Strange as it may seem, it was necessary for me to discover these rules after eighteen centuries, as though for the first time." What Tolstoy really wanted was to believe

in God and to live according to Christian morality, while denying the divinity of Christ.

It required courage to adopt a position in open opposition to the Church, in a country in which the Church was a State institution. Since the publication of such inflammatory religious writings was out of the question, Tolstoy had a number of manuscript copies made and circulated among the public. Later he published a printed edition of What I Believe, limited to thirty copies, which could be done without authorization from the censor. Even so, the police seized every one.I Union and Translation of the Four Gospels was first published in Geneva in Russian, and French and German translations soon appeared elsewhere abroad.

"You used to be worried because you had no faith; why aren't you happy now that you have it?" Sonya sighed. Even Fet was unable to go along with his friend's newest passion. Strakhov, however, continued to sing the master's praises: "Not only have you amazed me, inestimable Leo Nikolayevich, as you have often done in the past, but this time you have given me peace and warmed my heart. . . . My God, it's good! When I think of you, your tastes, your habits, your work, when I remember the horror of every form of deceit that is expressed in all your books and permeates your life, then I can understand how you arrived where you arc now. . . . Please, do not chidc mc for these words of praise. I need to believe in you; that belief is my sole support. . . . I shall cling to you and, I hope, be saved."²®

And as, in spite of these clouds of incense, Tolstoy still complained that he was unhappy, the good disciple protested, "You are in the prime of life; you are not suffering from any illness; why arc you so sad and why do you talk of death? Of course, you lead an appalling life. You drive yourself unmercifully."²⁷

Now that he had become the prophet of his own religion, Tolstoy began to wonder when and how he could put it into practice.

At the end of April 1880, Russia's foremost writers gathered in Moscow in preparation for the unveiling of a monument to Pushkin. Turgenev, a fervent admirer of the poet, returned from France for the occasion and resolved at all costs to persuade Tolstoy to take part in the celebration. He came to Yasnaya Polyana on May 2, 1880, and was received with open arms. Spring was warming the air, a green mist of new leaves shimmered around the birches, the nightingale sang through the heart of the night. Tolstoy arranged a hunt and posted

J This took place on February 18, 1884. See following chapter.

his colleague in a choice clearing, where the snipe usually came. But just then, there was not a bird in sight. Sonya, who had stayed behind with her guest, asked why he had stopped writing. lie smiled wistfully and murmured:

"No one can hear us, so I shall tell you. I can't write any more. Whenever I felt the desire to write, in the past, I was trembling in an absolute fever of love. Now that's finished. I am an old man, and can neither write nor love any more."

At that moment a shot rang out and Tolstoy, invisible, called to his dog to retrieve the bird he had brought down.

There, we're off," said Turgenev. "Leo Nikolayevich is already hard at work. Now there's a man of many blessings. Fortune has smiled on him his whole life long."²⁸

True enough, all the snipe were flying Tolstoy's way. Turgenev only managed to bring down one, and it caught in a branch and was not found until the next day.

After the hunt the two men withdrew to an isba that had been converted into a study, not far from the house. There Turgenev tried to persuade Tolstoy that in his position as a great Russian author it was his duty to make a speech at the forthcoming ceremony in honor of Pushkin. But Tolstoy categorically refused to appear in public. True, he had always loathed official occasions: but this time his bashfulness was coupled with pride—in a way, the evening would almost be a kind of contest between him and Dostoyevsky, and he did not want to run the risk, by going to Moscow, of finding himself less popular than his rival. When Turgenev had exhausted his store of arguments he could hardly hide his vexation at his host's obstinacy. He packcd his bags and left the same day. In Moscow he saw Dostoyevsky, who had just arrived for the unveiling and was planning to go to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy. Turgenev talked the author of The Brothers Kara- mazov out of making the trip. It was rumored in the literary world that Tolstoy was going through a mystical crisis. Dostoyevsky wrote to his wife: "Grigorovich told me today that Turgenev fell ill upon his return from Tolstoy's place and that Tolstoy is half-mad and maybe completely mad."²⁹

The festivities in Pushkin's honor concluded with an apotheosis for Dostoyevsky: at the end of his speech the audience burst into wild applause, women flung bouquets of flowers onto the platform, enemies embraced each other and one student fainted. Upon hearing the news of this triumph, Tolstoy must have congratulated himself for sitting tight at home.

He and Dostoyevsky were destined never to meet. That summer he

reread The House of the Dead and, struck with admiration, wrote to Strakhov: "I know of no more beautiful book in modem literature, not excepting Pushkin. I am not so much impressed by the style as by the author's point of view—wonderfully sincere, natural and Christian. It is a good book, uplifting. ... If you sec Dostoyevsky, tell him I like him." Strakhov did more than pass on the compliment; he gave Dostoyevsky the letter. A few months later, 011 January 28, 1881, Dostoyevsky died. When he read the news in the papers, Tolstoy felt a sharp, profound blow, which surprised him.

"How I should like to be able to say all I feel about Dostoyevsky," he wrote to Strakhov. "I never saw the man, never had any direct contact with him, and suddenly, at his disappearance, I realized that he was the closest of all to me, the most precious and essential. ... I was a writer and all writers are vain and envious, or at least I was. But it never occurred to me to compete with him. Everything he set out to do was so good, so sincere that the more he did the happier I was. Artistry can make me jealous, and so can intelligence, but actions that spring from the heart give me nothing but joy. I always thought of him as a friend, and was convinced that one day we would meet. . . . And all of a sudden, during dinner—I was dining alone, late—I read of his death. It was as though one of my supporting pillars had suddenly buckled. I had a moment of panic, then 1 realized how precious he was to me and I began to cry, I am still crying."³⁰

When his emotion subsided, Tolstoy's critical sense returned and he abandoned himself to his natural animosity to anyone who did not share his opinions. Some time later Rusanov, an admirer of his, asked what he thought of Dostoyevsky and lie unhesitatingly replied:

"The House of the Dead is a fine thing, but I do not set great store by his other books. People cite passages to me. And indeed there are some very fine parts here and there, but, on the whole, it is dreadful stuff! His style is turgid, he tries so hard to make his characters original, and in fact they are hardly outlined. Dostoyevsky talks and talks and in the end all you arc left with is a sort of fog floating above what he was trying to prove. There is a peculiar mixture in him of the most lofty Christian concepts and panegyrics 011 war and submission to emperor, government and the popes."

"Have you read The Brothers Karamazov?" asked Rusanov.

"I couldn't stick it out to the end," confessed Tolstoy.

"But Crime and Punishment? It's his best book! What do you think of it?"

"Read a few chapters at the beginning and you can guess everything that's going to follow, the whole novel."³¹

Above all, Tolstoy disliked Dostoyevsky's exaggeration, his implausi- bility, his "shapeless style," his grammatical errors, his mania for crowding the stage with epileptics, alcoholics and paranoiacs. "If Prince Mishkin had been a healthy human being, his innocence and fundamental decency would have moved us deeply," he said. "But Dostoyev- sky lacked the courage to make him healthy. Besides, he did not like healthy people. Since he was sick, then he wanted the whole universe to be sick with him."³² Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, had written about Anna Karenina, "A boring book, by and large, and nothing out of the ordinary at all. What do they all find that is so wonderful in it? I don't see it!"** There was a chasm between these two giants, one of whom had lived a martyrdom while the other sought the tranquil wisdom of the prophets.

Later, after publishing a biography of Dostoyevsky, Strakhov wrote an extraordinary letter to Tolstoy:

"All the while I was writing the biography I had to fight off a revulsion that kept rising within me, and I have tried to stifle this evil feeling. Help me to find some solution. I cannot regard Dostoyevsky either as a good man or as a happy one (in reality they are the same). He was vicious, envious, depraved and spent his entire life in a state of emotional upheaval and exasperation that would have made him appear ridiculous had he not been so malicious and so intelligent. ... He was attracted by base actions and gloried in the fact. . . . Viskovatov told me that he bragged one day of having . . . with a little girl whom his governess had brought him, in the public baths. . . . Note that along with his bestial sensuality he was utterly lacking in taste, and had no sense of beauty or feminine charm. . . . The characters most like him are the hero of the Notes from Underground, Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, and Stavrogin in The Possessed. ... He was a truly wretched and truly evil man, who thought he was noble and happy, and never had any real affection for anyone but himself."³⁴

Strange rejection on the part of a man who had long been Dostoyevsky's prot6g6, confidant and intimate friend. Why did he not refuse to write the biography, if it "revolted" him to think of the man? Seeing how easily Strakhov turned coat, Tolstoy might have feared for the future of his own relations with him. But he was so habituated to the adoration of this envious, petty, prolix little writer that the idea of being betrayed by him never entered his head. He answered:

"I believe you have been victim of a false and erroneous opinion of Dostoyevsky. This opinion, which is not really yours at all but is universally held has exaggerated the man's importance and raised him to the rank of a prophet or a saint, a man who died in the throes of a ficrcc struggle between Good and Evil. lie is moving and interesting, no doubt, but an individual who was all conflict cannot be put on a pedestal as an example for future generations. . . . There are horses which are splendid to look at (thousand-ruble trotters), until suddenly one sees their 'flaw.' Then the most handsome and strongest horse in the world is worth nothing. . . . Pressense and Dostoyevsky both have flaws. One sacrificed wisdom, the other intelligence and heart, and both for nothing! Turgenev will outlive Dostoyevsky, not because he is a greater artist but because he has no flaw."³⁶

On Monday, March 2, 18S1, one month after Dostoyevsky's death, Tolstoy was taking his customary walk along the highroad to Kiev, rutted and flooded by the spring thaw, when he saw a young itinerant musician splashing toward him through the puddles, carrying a hurdy- gurdy over his shoulder and some birds in a cage. The boy had pronounced Italian features and was presumably on his way from Tula. Owing to the state of the roads, the family at Yasnaya Polyana had been unable to send anyone to town for the newspapers for some time. Tolstoy asked the traveler what was going on in the world.

"Bad business," the boy managed to articulate. "Tsar murdered."

"What tsar?" cried Tolstoy. "Who murdered him? When?"

"Russian tsar. Petersburg. Bomb!"

The next day the papers arrived to confirm the news. Tsar Alexander II was going along the Katerina Canal in his carriage 011 his way back from reviewing the guard, which he did every Sunday in the riding school, when someone threw a newspaper-wrapped parcel under die horses' feet. A violent explosion killed the horses and injured two Cossacks in the escort and a passing child, but by some miracle the tsar was unharmed. However, instead of leaping into another carriage and riding away post-haste, he stopped to question the author of the attempt upon his life, who had also l>ccn injured. At that moment a second bomb, thrown by an accomplice, finished the work of the first. His legs crushed to a pulp, his face torn to shreds, the emperor collapsed, his blood pouring out in the snow. He was taken to the Winter Palace, where he died during the night. This was the Nihilists' seventh attempt upon his life. Their persistence was incomprehensible, especially as Alexander II had abolished slavery, recalled the exiled Decembrists, ended the disastrous Crimean War and, at the instigation of General Loris-Melikov, was about to give Russia a sort of constitution as a first step toward more far-rcaching structural reforms. It was presumably in order not to be outdistanced by a liberal monarch that the conspirators had determined to make an end of him on the eve of the publication of his manifesto: by granting more than the people

were asking for, Alexander II might well have drawn the teeth of the opposition and, by his last-minute action, rendered a revolution pointless or simply inopportune. In politics your worst enemy is the one who uses your ideas to achieve his own ends. Alexander II had to contend with both the liberals, who reproved terrorist methods but wanted him to hasten the country's administrative reorganization, and the reactionaries, who were afraid of losing their few remaining privileges in the renovation that had been in progress since the beginning of his reign.

Tolstoy, absorbed in his own battles of conscience, had paid scant attention to politics. True, "shady-looking characters" with long dirty hair and demented eyes were occasionally seen going into his study, arriving from St. Petersburg with their pockets full of subversive tracts —they wanted a cataclysm of fire and blood, from which Russia would emerge torn, impoverished and ready for her new destiny; they were proud of the assassinations perpetrated by the "People's Will" group, and wanted official support from Tolstoy. Gently but firmly, however, in the name of Christian morality, he sent them away. 'The revolutionary and the Christian," he said, "are at opposite ends of an open circle. Their proximity is only apparent. In reality, no two points could be farther apart. To meet, they would have to turn around and travel back over the entire circumference."³®

He was horror-stricken at the murder of Alexander II. Steeped in his evangelical doctrine of love and forgiveness, he was unable to understand this crime, committed without hatred, without real necessity, as part of a program, by cold-blooded, iron-nerved theorists. But he was even more tormented by the thought that the killers would themselves be sentenced and executed. Blood for blood. By going on in this way, from crime to vindication, the whole country might soon find itself being propelled toward the slaughter of civil war. To stop this chain reaction, one act of mercy by the new sovereign would suffice. A week after the assassination, when Tolstoy was taking an after-dinner nap on his leather sofa, lie had a dream: in the courtroom, it was himself, not the murderers, who was standing trial; and he was the judge, too; and Alexander III; and the executioner. He pronounccd, carried out and was victim of the sentence.

He awoke drenched with sweat. lie now knew that if he had been in the new emperor's place, it would have been a divine joy for him to pardon the assassins. Inspired by this idea, he decided to write to Alexander III forthwith. Perhaps it might appear presumptuous on his part. But he told himself that under divine law, human hierarchies ceased to exist; there was no difference between him and the monarch. In fact,

with his eternal need to teach others, be they muzhik or prince, he felt that lie was an ideal person, by virtue of his experience and fame, to preach clemency to the young sovereign. After all, potentates need Readers, too. His eyes brimming with tears, he appealed—as subject, friend and prophet—to the son of the assassinated tsar:

"Sire, your father, the emperor of Russia, an old and good man who did much that was good himself and always wished for the welfare of his people, has been cruelly tortured and slain. And he was not killed by personal enemies, but by the enemies of the established order, who destroyed him, so they claim, for the good of mankind. You have succeeded to his place and before you stand the enemies who tormented your father during his lifetime and then murdered him. Now they are your enemies, too, because you have taken your father's place and because, in order to achieve that good of mankind which they claim to be seeking, they must also wish to do away with you. Toward these men, your father's murderers, you feel a desire for vcngcance, mingled with a sense of horror at the act you arc about to commit. . . . Your position is a dreadful one, but the doctrine of Christ is neccssary precisely in order to guide us through such moments of dire temptation which befall every man. ... It is true that it is presumption and folly on my part to demand that you, the ernperor of Russia and a loving son, should pardon your father's murderers in spite of the pressure of those around you, returning good for evil. It is folly, yet I cannot do otherwise than wish it. . . . About twenty years ago a little group of young men banded together, full of hatred for the established order and the government. These young men aspire to heaven only knows what new order, or rather to none at all, and, by the basest, most inhuman mcth ods, fire and robbery and murder, they are destroying the structure of society. . . . People have tried, in the name of the State and for the welfare of the people, to suppress, deport and execute them; people have also tried, in the name of the same State and the same welfare of the people, to treat them humanely. The result has been the same in both cases. Why not try, then, in the name of God, to carry out His law, thinking neither of the State nor the people? . . .

"Sire, now you stand pure and innocent before yourself and before God, but you arc at a crossroads. A few days more and, if the victory goes to those who think and say that Christian truths have no value except in words and that in life, blood must flow and death must reign, then you will lose forever your blessed state of purity and communion with Cod, and you will set forth along the dark road of 'reasons of State' that justify everything, even the violation of divine law. If you

do not pardon, but exccutc the murderers, you will have done away with three or four individuals out of hundreds; but evil breeds evil, and thirty or forty more will spring up to replace those three or four. . . . But forgive, return good for evil, and out of a hundred wrongdoers ten will be converted, not to your side but to the side of God, whereas before they were on the side of Satan. And thousands, millions of your subjects will thrill with joy and affection at this act of mercy from a throne, at a moment so painful for the son of a murdered father. Sire, if you did that, if you called these men before you, gave them some money and sent them away somewhere, to America, and wrote a manifesto beginning with the words, 'But verily I say unto you, love your enemies,' I do not know what others would feel, but I, who have not been a model subject, would become your dog, your slave, I would weep with love—as I am weeping at this moment—every time I heard your name. What did I say: that I do not know how others would feel? I know with what torrential force good and love would pour over Russia at those words. . . . The death penalty is useless against revolutionaries. Their numbers are not what counts, it is their ideas. To fight them, you must meet them on the ground of ideas. Their ideal is universal well-being, equality, liberty. To combat them some other ideal must be advanced, superior to theirs, larger than theirs. There is only one ideal that can be opposed to them: that to which they turn for support without realizing it, and in blaspheming it, the only ideal that is larger than their own, the ideal of love and forgiveness. . . . Then, as wax melts in the fire, the revolutionaries' opposition will melt in the deed of their emperor, the man who fulfills the law of Christ."

After writing out his plea, Tolstoy read it to his family. Sonya was furious that he could dare to intervene on the murderers' behalf. She was afraid he would anger the young tsar by preaching a form of mercy that was unnatural. In her anxiety she even threatened to dismiss Alexeyev, her children's tutor, who was guilty of approving her husband's latest folly." Under the storm of reproach, Tolstoy held his ground as far as the principle was concerned, but agreed to tone down some of the more inflammatory sentences. Then he sent to Tula for some best-quality paper and his copyist Ivanov wrote out the epistle in the proper calligraphic form.

It was sent to Strakhov on March 17, 1881, to be given to Pobycdo- nostsev, the tsar's minister to the Holy Synod, who had been the monarch's tutor and had great influence over him. If he presented the

f Although she later apologized to him for this outburst, Alexeyev and his family left the house and went to live on the Samara farm.

request in person, Alexander III would certainly consider it favorably. In a postscript to Tolstoy's note to Strakhov, Sonya reiterated her misgivings:

"Despite my advice and entreaties, Leo N'ikolayevich has decided to send his letter to the emperor. . . . Read it, judge for yourself and ask Pobyedonostsev's opinion. Won't it be likely to arouse the tsar's displeasure or animosity toward Leo Nikolayevich? If so, I beseech yon to see that it does not reach him."

Wasted effort! Thrilled by Tolstoy's gesture, Strakhov immediately went to see the minister, who glanced through the letter and refused to show it to the emperor on the ground that in a matter of such consequence he was bound to follow his own views of Christianity, which were diametrically opposed to those of the writer. His visitor bemoaned this fresh recourse to violence, so Pobycdonostscv assured him that although he personally was a confirmed partisan of capital punishment, he would see that the criminals were executed privately. Strakhov withdrew in despair.

After lie left, Pobyedonostev began to fear that copies of the letter might be circulated in the city, and the emperor would hear of it from soinc other source. That evening he learned that the philosopher Solovyev had just made a public address on capital punishment and that in his peroration lie, too, had exhorted the heir to the throne to pardon the assassins. That was too much! On March 30, 1881 the minister dashed off the following note to Alexander III:

"An idea that fills me with horror has just begun to circulate. People are capable of such mental aberration that some of them think it possible not to execute the murderers. The Russian people are already beginning to fear that monstrous schemes may be submitted to Your Majesty to incite you to pardon the criminals. . . . No, no, a thousand times no; in this moment, with the eyes of the entire Russian nation upon you, it is unthinkable that you should pardon the murderers of your father, the emperor of Russia—that you should forget the blood that has been shed, for which everyone (apart from a few weak-hearted and feeble-minded individuals) is crying vcngcancc, and people arc already demanding to know why the sentence is so long in coming. . . . I am a Russian, I live among Russians, and I know what the Russian people feel and want. At this moment, they are all eager for punishment. If one of these wretches should escape death, he will immediately begin to hatch new plots for undermining the government. For the love of God, Sire, do not listen to misguided sycophants."

With a firm hand Alexander wrote across the page: "Rest assured,

no one will dare to come to me with such a request, and I promise you that all six of them will hang."}

When lie learned that his first attempt had failed, Tolstoy telegraphed to Strakhov asking him to give the letter to Professor Kon- stantin Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who would pass it on to Grand Duke Sergey, one of the monarch's four brothers. This time the contact was the right one: the document reached the tsar's desk within forty-eight hours. But Alexander III, a clear-sighted, intransigent man imbued with the doctrine of the divine right of kings, did not alter his decision.

On April 3, 1881 the six murderers were hanged. The rope broke twice under one of them, Mikhailov, who had to be hanged a second time with his legs broken.

Two and one-half months later, Tolstoy received a letter from Pobye- donostsev telling him why, in good conscience, he had been unable to support his appeal:

"When I read your letter I saw that your faith had nothing in common with mine, which is that of the Church, and that my Christ was not your Christ," wrote the minister for religious affairs. "My Christ is a man of strength and truth who heals the weak, and yours seemed to me to be a weak man himself in need of healing."³⁷

Tolstoy choked down his anger and did not reply to this lesson in Christianity administered by the highest official of the empire, the man in charge of relations between Church and State.

Now he was certain that lie had found Christ by rejecting the priests. In this spirit, he began to draft his Notes of a Christian: "I have been on earth for fifty-two years and, apart from the fourteen or fifteen years of more or less total unconsciousness of my childhood, I have lived, for thirty-five years, not as a Christian, Mohammedan nor yet as a Buddhist, but as a nihilist, in every sense of the word, that is, someone who believes in nothing. Two years ago I became a Christian. And from that moment all I hear, see and feel has appeared to me in a new light."

He also took up his diary again. The first entry, dated April 17, 1881, is significant:

"Conversation with Sergey on non-resistance to evil."^aB

And further on:

"May 21. Discussion: Tanya, Sergey, Ivan. Good is a convention. In other words, good does not exist. There is nothing but instinct."

"May 22. Continuation of discussion: the good I am talking about is what you regard as good for yourself and everyone else!"

"May 29. Conversation with Fet and my wife. The Christian doc-

t Six conspirators were arrested: "Rysakov, Sofya PcrovsVy, Zhelyabov, Jcssya Hermann, Mikhailov, Kibalchich . . ."

trine cannot be lived. Then, is it nonsense? No, but it cannot be lived! Yes, but have you tried? No, but it cannot be lived."

Fet seldom agreed with Tolstoy, but the author's sons could not help feeling that the poet was a sensible and likable man. lie had pronounced Semitic features, a long brown beard already going gray, and small womanly hands with well-manicured nails. His speech was interspersed with sighs resembling little moans. When his audience was least expecting it, he would toss out some witticism and disarm the most sullen among them. (One day Igor, the man who served at table in white gloves and scarlet vest, could not help laughing out loud at one of the poet's jests and, setting his dish on the floor, scuttled away to the kitchen.) Now even more than before, Tolstoy criticized his friend for preaching art-for-art's-sakc and refusing to enter into the tonnents of the conscience. He, on the contrary, was not at all loath to engage in evangelical exhortation at table. He claimed to despise earthly blessings; and when lie argued with a guest, he begged his pardon immediately afterward.

"I often have little quarrels with Leo now, and once I even wanted to leave the house," Sonya wrote to her sister. "It must be because we have begun to live as Christians. In my opinion, everything went much better before, without the Christian manner."³⁹

And to her brother:

"You should see and hear Leo now! He has changcd a great deal. lie has become the most convinced and earnest of Christians. But he has grown pale, his health is poor and he is more subdued and somber than before."

In order to become more actively involved in the misery of the world, Tolstoy made several visits to the prison at Tula, comforted the prisoners, accompanied them to court and stood on the platform when trains of deportees left for Siberia. "Their heads are shaved and their feet chained together. One man, almost at death's door, and a little boy, crippled. One hundred and fourteen persons sent away for failure to possess a passport. Some very corrupt. Others simple, delightful. One old man, very weak, just out of hospital; a huge louse on his cheek. Some deported by their commune. Two accused of nothing; they're just being deported. Another on a complaint by his wife ... A strapping soldier who has been in prison for four years . . . Two convicts sentenced to hard labor for life, for brawling and manslaughter . . . They were crying. A pleasing facc. Appalling stench . . ."'¹⁰

The sight of such wretchedness confirmed his feeling that the mission of a man such as he was not to devote himself to his family. "The family is the flesh," he wrote as early as May 5. "Abandon the

family. That is the second temptation. Commit suicide. The family is only a body. But do not yield to the third temptation: live not for the family but for God."

A plan had been nagging at him for some time: to make a second pilgrimage to Optina-Pustyn. This time, it was not the desire to reconcile himself with the Church that was driving him, but the hope that by mingling with the muzhiks, the sick and the sanctimonious old women, he might renew his own faith in mankind. Although he considered their piousness false, crude and ridiculous, he continued to admire the fervor with which they believed the unbelievable. Perhaps, in order to accede to their inner beatitude, one must spurn carriages and railroad cars and set off like them, on foot, walking along the highways for days on end across the unchanging plains, sleeping under the open sky or in some filthy inn, begging for alms. . . . Nothing can prepare the soul to meet God like the infinite flatness of the Russian steppe, where the eyes skim and wander and lose their way and find no obstacle to stop them.

On June 10, 1881, dressed muzhik-fashion with a pack on his back, bark shoes and a staff in his hand, Tolstoy took leave of his wife and children, who were mortified by this masquerade, went down the front steps and turned onto the road. Two bodyguards trudged along behind him, also in disguise: Vinogradov the schoolmaster; and a valet, Arbuzov, who had red sideburns and a comical countenance, lugging a suitcase full of clean clothes. Tolstoy was enchanted by this escapade. However, as he was not used to the plaited Irark shoes his feet were soon covered with blisters. Arbuzov had to teach him how to wrap strips of cloth around his burning toes. At Selivanovo, the first halting-place, the trio slept 011 the floor of an old peasant woman's house. The next day at Krapivna, the vagabond count bought heavy socks to protect his sensitive feet and prunes to purge himself and wrote to his wife: "One cannot imagine how new, important and useful it is to the soul to see how God's world lives, the true world, the great world, not the one we have arranged for ourselves and never stepped outside of."⁴¹

They continued their trek, shuffling along, stopping for a snack at the roadside, napping in the shade of a copse, spending the night in an isba, getting up at dawn. On the evening of the fourth day they readied the monastery of Optina-Pustyn. It was mealtime and the bell was ringing. A rich aroma of soup wafted out of the kitchens. At a glance the monks summed up the three hairy and dust-covered pilgrims as beggars and would not allow them inside the travelers' dining room. Relegated to the common rcfcctory, they went inside with their packs on their backs, crossing themselves.

Tolstoy was in seventh heaven. At last he was a muzhik among muzhiks. Men ancl women were sitting together around a long table, elbow to elbow in the dim light, gulping down food and drink and breathing heavily in a fog of cabbage, sweat and dirt. Pulling a notebook from his pocket, Tolstoy jotted down an aside:

"Borscht, kasha, kvass. One cup for four people. Everything is good, 'lliey eat hungrily."

After supper he and his two companions followed the crowd toward the third-class dormitory. In the doorway of the stinking hall with its dubious straw pallets ancl walls encrusted with squashed insects, the stomach of the lord of Yasnaya Polyana heaved. Perhaps he was carrying humility too far. . . . His manservant rushed over to one of the hostelry monks, thrust a ruble into his hand and asked him to provide some more decent accommodation for them. The monk let them sleep in a little room already occupied by a cobbler from Bolkov. The man, about to drop off to sleep, must have been amazed to sec one red- whiskered muzhik pull a clean sheet and pillows out of a bag, arrange them on a bench and, with obsequious airs, assist another muzhik, grizzled, tanned and bearded, to settle himself comfortably for the night. After putting his master to bed, Arbuzov himself stretched out on the floor. As soon as the candle was blown out, the cobbler began to snore so loudly that Tolstoy sat up in alarm and whispered: "Wake up that man ancl ask him not to snore." Arbuzov shook the cobbler by the shoulder and said: "Old buddy, you're snoring too loud, you've scared my old man, it frightens him to hear somebody snoring in his sleep in the same room."

"So on account of your old man I'm not supposed to sleep all night?" growled the cobbler.

He turned to the wall and went back to sleep, but snored no more.⁴² At ten the next morning, after drinking a few glasses of scalding tea, Arbuzov went to mass while his master, the enemy of the Church, watched the monks working in the fields. A little later a rumor began to spread through the convent that Count Leo Tolstoy was there incognito, among the pilgrims. Some monks questioned Arbuzov, who confessed the truth with a sigh of relief.

A great commotion ensued among the brotherhood. Excitcd palavering of black habits, whisperings into the superior's car. The illustrious guest's baggage was carried forthwith into the first-class hostel, where the walls were hung with velvet. Tolstoy protested that he wanted to remain with the poor. But his eyes were already feasting upon the clean bed, polished flooring, deep armchairs. There were monks bow-

ing to him and calling him "Excellency." "Hopeless," he sighed, and, turning to Arbuzov: "Give me my boots and my good shirt."

After removing his beggar's garb, he went to call on the superior, who, meanwhile, had invited him to dine. He spent nearly two hours with him. Then, as on his previous visit, he requested an audience with Father Ambrose. Thirty or more poor wretches had been waiting five or six days at the hermitage door for the starets to condescend to receive them, if only for one minute, and give them his blessing and counscl. Grouped according to category, they milled about mumbling prayers: the men just outside the door, the women behind the house, the nuns in the entry. Tolstoy asked a few of the pilgrims their reasons for coming to Optina-Pustyn, and wrote down their answers in his notebook: "Will my daughter marry soon?" "I am starting to build a house: is this a good thing?" "Should I go into trade or open a cab arct?"

As befits a lord, he swept by in front of this hoi-polloi and was admitted at once. He spent four hours with the hermit, who was aware of Tolstoy's religious opinions and wanted to persuade him to return to the Church. Wasted effort: Tolstoy was immovable. He even caught the starets in a flagrant misconstruction of a passage from the Gospels. As he came out of the cell, much agitated, lie saw the pilgrims, still waiting humbly, and distributed his small change among them.

The next day he donned his muzhik's costume again and, with his two companions in tow, set off on foot. But he did not feel up to going all the way to Yasnaya Polyana; at Kaluga, he decided to finish the trip by rail. But in a fresh burst of Christian humility, however, he ordered his manservant to buy third-class tickets. I lis place was among the dispossessed. Smiling sarcastically, he recoiled before the fine gentlemen in their white false collars who were climbing into the first-class cars. Ah, the charms of temporary poverty! Before the train pulled out, he wired Sonya the time of their arrival, and spent the entire trip chatting with the peasants sprawling about him on the benches. They were all his brothers!

Nevertheless, at Tula he greeted the coachman Philip, who was waiting for them with a carriage and a handsome pair of horses, with unmitigated pleasure.

No sooner had he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana when he received a letter from Turgenev inviting him to spend a few days at his home at Spasskoye. He went on July 8, 1881, but he had got the date wrong and was not expected until the following clay. Late at night the poet Polonsky, also Turgcnev's house guest, heard footsteps, barking, a shrill

blast on a whistle. "In the light of the candle I saw One tanned and graying muzhik in a blouse giving money to another muzhik. I looked at hirn more closely, but I did not recognize him. Then the muzhik looked up and saw me and said, 'Are you Polonsky?' Only then did I realize that it was Count Tolstoy."⁴³

Turgenev had not gone to bed and greeted his guest with joy. He proudly showed him his remodeled, freshly painted house, but l olstoy was insensitive to the charm of physical surroundings. He wrote in his diary, "At Turgenev's. Nice Polonsky, peacefully occupied with painting and poetry, judging nobody, perfectly untroubled. Turgenev fears the name of Cod, although he believes in him. But he, too, is naively peaceful and untroubled in the midst of his life of luxury and idleness."

To inject a little seriousness into this gathering of aesthetes, Tolstoy told them about his trip to Optina-Pustyn and the new religion he had founded. They listened politely, they offered timid objections, Turgenev's face bore an expression of commiseration and tenderness. Some time before he had written to a friend, "I am very sorry for Leo Tolstoy, but after all, as the French say, everyone has his own way of killing his fleas. . . ,"⁴⁴ I lis entire being now radiated the same sentiment.

Tolstoy remained only two days at Spasskoye. On July 12 he was back at Yasnaya Polyana, and on the thirteenth, with his eldest son Sergey, he started off for Samara, where he had not been for two years. Sonya was very sad as she went out onto the steps with him. But the huge estate, the forests and the stud farm could not wait any longer for the master's tour of inspection. And then the kumys treatment was essential to his health. Once again (All very well to be a big landowner, but one must be able to get along with the common people!) he bought third-class tickets. At every station there were crowds milling about on the platform, shouting "Hurrah!" But not for Leo Tolstoy: Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich was traveling in a special car in the same train.

When he first reached Samara, Tolstoy's conscience reeled at the wretchedness of the people in comparison with his own prosperity: "July 16. Went to see the horses. Unsurmountable anguish. Idleness. Shame . . ." "July 24. The husband of a woman from Pavlova died in prison, her son died of starvation. Gave milk to the daughter. Patrov- sky, used to be a herdsman—now destitute. Pale, gray hair . . . Conversation with A.A. about the owners: those who do not want to give the land and those in favor of division."

On his land, at any rate, the workers were not idle. Three hundred husky fellows, burnt black by the sun, were scything, harvesting, putting up hay, threshing wheat. The price of horses was rising at the fairs. Tolstoy counted on asking one hundred rubles for a good colt, one hundred and twenty for a full-grown horse of average quality. According to his calculations, the property would bring in between ten and twenty thousand rubles that year.t He triumphantly informed Sonva of this fact, but a prick of conscience prompted him to add, in the same letter, "'I he only sad thing would be if one could do nothing at all for the people around one. There are too many poor in the village. It is a shameful kind of poverty, they are not even aware of it."⁴⁵ Sonya made her usual commonsense reply: "You know what I think about giving help to the poor. It is impossible to feed the entire population of Samara, which is thousands. . . . But if you see or hear of some man or woman who has no bread or cow or horse or isba, you must give them to him right away."⁴⁶

Whether engaged in increasing his income from the estate or in pitying those who had nothing, Tolstoy never lost sight of his religious pursuits. Having broken with the Church, he was being increasingly drawn to the sectarians. There were many of them in the region, mostly Molokhans. Tolstoy went to see them one Sunday, and noted: "To prayer with the Molokhans. Heat. They wipe off the sweat with handkerchiefs. Very loud voices. Necks brown and rough as rasps. Greetings exchanged. Dinner: 1. Cold plate. 2. Cabbage soup with thistles. 3. Boiled mutton. 4. Noodles. 5. Walnuts. 6. Roast mutton. 7. Cucumbers. 8. Noodle soup. 9. Honey . . ." These half-literate people amazed him by the simplicity of their customs and the soundness of their reasoning. He discussed the commandments with them and the meaning of the Feast of Cana; he read them passages from his theological studies and was proud to find that nearly all of them understood and approved of his ideas.

As always, kumys, rest and separation from the family restored his equilibrium. Calm, relaxed, full of love for the human race, he was already beginning to consider spending the remainder of his life in meditation while his wife assumed, single-handedly, the heavy burden of raising the children and managing the property.

"You cannot imagine how it upsets me to think that you are working too hard, and how sorry I am to help you so little, or in fact, not at all," he wrote to Sonya on August 2, 1881. "Now I see things differently. I still think and feci as before, but I am cured of the en-or of believing that other people can and must think as I do. I am very guilty toward you, my darling; involuntarily and unwittingly, you know that, but guilty all the same. My excuse is that in order to work under such tension, and really crcatc something, one must forget everything else.

I Or between $28,300 and $$6,600.

And I have forgotten too much, and I am sorry. In the name of Cod and our love, take care of yourself. Put off as much of the work as you can until I come home; I shall do it joyfully, and not too badly; I shall apply myself."

And on August 6:

"Please God let me come home safe to you all, and you'll sec what a good boy I will be, exactly as you want me!"

These letters poured balm into Sonya's heart. At the news that her husband was planning another novel, she could not contain herself:

"I felt such a surge of joy when I read that you want to return to poetical writing. You know how long I have been waiting and longing for that! It is salvation and happiness. That is the thing that will bring us together again. That is what will consolc you and light your life. That is real work! Away from it there can be no peace for your soul. I know you cannot force yourself, but may God keep you in the same State of mind, so that the divine spark may kindle in you again!"

Tolstoy's good resolutions did not outlast his treatment. When he had emptied his last bowl of kumys, his optimism and forbearance vanished as though by magic. On August 17, 1881, returning to Yas- nava Polyana, he found the house full of relatives, guests and neighbors. The young people were dancing and chattering and racing about in all directions, pawing through the closets: an amateur play was in preparation. Irritated by all this racket, the master took refuge in solitary and morose meditation. No more thought of writing novels or doing his share of the family chores. He wrote in his diary, "Theatricals. Non-entities. . . . The days of 19, 20 and 21 are stricken from my life."

The next day, August 22, Turgenev came to Yasnaya Polyana for Sonya's birthday and was swept away in the general hilarity. Tolstoy glowered at the elegant and garrulous old man trying to share in the amusements of youth. The newcomer proposed that each person should recite the happiest moment of his life. Among the group were Tanya and Sergey, whose romance had once been a major topic of interest in the family and who had since married separately—she to Kuzminsky and he to his gypsy. Sergey whispered something into the young woman's ear; she blushed and murmured, "You are impossible, Sergey Nikolayevich!" and forbade him to tell "his most wonderful memory." Then they all turned to Turgenev, who smiled dolefully, assumed a languid expression and confessed: "The most shining moment of my life naturally has to do with love. It is the one in which your eyes meet those of the woman you love and you guess that she loves you, too. That happened to me once . . . perhaps twice."

It was hard for Tolstoy to hide his scorn; and he was forced to re-

double his efforts when his colleague, yielding to the pleas of the young, demonstrated how the cancan was danced in Paris. As Turgenev hopped nimbly about with his thumbs stuck through the armholcs of his waistcoat and a gasping leer on his face, the whole household applauded and laughed. At last he collapsed, breathless, into an armchair. They flocked around, plying him with questions about France. He told them that he had attended classes in "pornography" in Paris, with demonstrations "on live subjects." The ladies gasped. Tolstoy scowled. An air of debauchery had entered his house. To change the subject, someone began to talk of French literature. Turgenev was very well acquainted with Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Goncourt, Maupassant. . . . Once again he entertained his audience with his recollections of the great foreign authors. He said he disapproved of the excesses of realism. Then, carried away by his eloquence, he turned to Russian literature, and began to pick Dostoyevsky to pieces. Tolstoy immediately pricked up his ears. The expression on Turgenev's face was mocking and mean.

"Do you know what a backward clichd is?" he said. "When a man is in love his heart pounds; when he is furious he turns scarlct, etc. Those are ordinary cliches. But with Dostoyevsky it's all the other way around. For instance, a man meets a lion. What docs he do? In the normal course of events, he turns pale and tries to run away or hide. In any ordinary story, in Jules Verne for example, that's the way it would happen. But in Dostoyevsky it's all the opposite: the man sees the lion, he turns red, and he stays put. That is a backward cliche. It is an easy method of being thought original. And then, in Dostoyevsky, the heroes are always in a state of delirium, frenzy, fever every second page. No, really, that is not how tilings happen in real life!"⁴⁷

Tolstoy was jubilant to hear such lively criticism of the writer whom some, in the press, had dared to place on a level with himself. He might almost have forgiven Turgenev his well-cut vests and his fancy manners with the ladies. However, he could not forget that ridiculous cancan. That evening he wrote in his diary: "August 22. Turgenev—cancan. Pity."

4. The Horrors of the City; the Appeal of the "Dark

One s"

As the years went by, Tolstoy felt a growing need to be alone. He even began to fear the coming of summer, with its noisy guests, dinner-table chattcr, croquet and tennis matches, organized walks and picnics. With the first rain, his private sky cleared. lie waited impatiently for the dry white frost that drove away the importunate guests, brought the family together under one roof and restored propitious conditions for meditation. Sonya, on the contrary, dreaded the approach of winter. When the house was walled in by snow she dreamed ruefully of city- lights, receptions, balls, theater. ... If only she had a novel of I.yo- vochka's to copy, she might have peopled her own empty existence with the sentimental life of his heroes. But he showed no inclination to go back to fiction. The more she urged him, the less he hastened to obey. He wasn't bored, in his study surrounded by his philosophers. But her only distractions were the children's education, household accounts, needlework, the dinner: "I am going down to dine, I will cat pike, then I will nurse the baby and go to bed. . . ."* "I drank tea and ate chocolate. . . ."² Lyovochka went hunting every day, and she feverishly awaited his return. "He went out after hare, but saw no game. . . "He came back with four hares and a fox. . . "Yesterday, with the pointer, he took six hares, and today, with the hounds, one fox. . . ."³ One child had diarrhea, another a sore throat, Andryusha's fontanels were late in hardening. . . . Worries of this kind were soul- destroying. Sonya complained, alone with her notebook. For a while she became engrossed in a job her husband had given her, at Stra- khov's instigation: the preparation of a short biography of Lyovochka for an anthology of selected works, The Russian Library. "It is not easy to write a biography," she noted. "I have written little and badly. I was interrupted by the children, nursing, noise. And in addition, I

do not know the details of Lyovoehka's life before his marriage."⁴ Later, she wrote, "In the evening we went over Lyovoehka's entire life together for his biography. lie talked and I wrote. We worked cheerfully and amicably."⁵

Brief interlude. Once the biography was written, revised and sent off to Strakhov, Sonya relapsed into lethargy: "The autumn has brought back my morbid melancholy. I spend all my time embroidering a rug in silence or reading. I feel nothing but coldness and indifference toward everyone and everything. Eveiything seems tedious and sad, and ahead —the shadow of darkness."⁸

On January 30, 1880 she wrote to her sister Tanya, "Sometimes I find this cloistered existence extremely hard. Think, Tanya, that since last September I have not set foot outside the house. It is a prison, though everything inside it is light enough, both morally and materially. Nevertheless I often feel as though someone is fencing me in, shutting me away, and I want to knock everything down and smash everything around me and run away somewhere, but quickly, quickly!"

Of course, if her husband had the only say in the matter, she would never have returned to the city to live. But there were the children. They could not go on studying indefinitely with tutors in the country. In 1881 the eldest boy, Sergey, was eighteen and it was essential to enroll him at the University of Moscow; Ilya and Leo, aged fifteen and twelve, were old enough to attend classes at the lycee; Tanya, seventeen, had a flair for drawing and would study painting and make her debut. Sonya had long been preparing Lyovochka for this great step. Tlicy had discussed it together a hundred times. Tolstoy was unwilling to oppose the move to town since the children's education was at stake; but while everyone around him was looking forward to it with delight, he contemplated with loathing the new life, so contrary to his principles, that he would be compelled to lead there.

While he was imbibing kumys at Samara, Sonya, pregnant again, went to Moscow to rent a house and make preparations to move the entire family. It was decided that they would leave Yasnaya Polyana early in September. Soon suitcases, trunks and wicker hampers appeared in all the rooms. The servants counted linen and sorted it into piles. In the children's rooms all was laughter and clatter and joyous whispering. Neglected, misunderstood and morose, Tolstoy prowled about the grounds and bade farewell to the trees and animals as though he were never to see them again. On August 28, 1881 Yasnaya Polyana was in such a ferment that neither his wife nor his sons nor his daughters thought to wish him a happy birthday. lie was fifty-three years old. That evening he wrote in his diary, "I could not help feeling sad that

nobody remembered." And on September 2, "I often want to die. I cannot get caught up in my work."

At last, on September 15, 1881, the whole family removed to Moscow, to a house rented from Prince Volkonsky in Dcnezhny Street. It was a huge place full of echoes, the partitions were too thin. "A cardboard house," Sonya said. Leo's study was so imposing that he felt lost in it. No possibility of peace and quiet here: the slightest tremor reverberated between the walls as in a drum. Sonya, in dismay, ordered the servants and children to talk in whispers. She wrote to her sister, "Leo says that if I loved him I would have shown more consideration for his state of mind, I would not have chosen for him this enormous room in which he cannot have a minute's peace, in which ever)' ami- chair would be the answer to a muzhik's prayers because with the same twenty-two rubles the muzhik could buy a horse or a cow, that he feels like crying, etc."

And indeed, he did cry. His wife wept beside him.

But she soon recovered. Since Lyovochka was going to fail her, she would have to cope alone. Two weeks before her confinement she- plunged into sorting and storing, arranging, buying furniture. Following her lead, the family found its second wind. Sergey, now a sober young man, reserved, awkward, brutally frank, donned the student's uniform and entered the University. He admired his father and, considering himself also to be an intellectual, despised the government, all civil servants and rich people, and the Orthodox Church. Pretty, sweet Tanya, who had been brought up as a hoyden, swooned with joy at her first trip to the dressmaker. She was clothed from head to foot, enrolled in a painter's studio, presented with a schedule of social engagements. Their father proceeded to enroll Ilya and Leo, the younger boys, in a gymnasium. At the last minute, however, a difficulty arose. In order for a child to be admitted to a State institution, his parents had to vouch for his good behavior in writing. In front of the open- mouthed principal, Tolstoy categorically refusal to assume such a responsibility. "How," he cried, "can I vouch for the conduct of someone other than myself?" lie enrolled his two sons in the Polivanov School, a private gymnasium where pupils were admitted with no other formality than an entrance examination.

The more his family rejoiced in their new style of life, the more he abhorred the city, its falsehood and artificial pleasures. On October 5, 1881 he wrote in his diary: "Moscow. A month has gone by, the hardest month of my life. The move to Moscow. Everybody is settling down. But when are they going to start living? Everything they do is done not in order to live, but because somebody else is doing it.

Poor wretches! And there is no life here! Stench, stone, opulence, poverty, debauchery. The robbers have banded together and despoiled the people, assembled an army, elected judges to sanction their orgies, and now they are feasting. There is nothing left for the people to do but take advantage of other men's passions, to get back what has been stolen from them. The muzhiks are best at this game. In town, the women do housework and the men polish floors or bodies in the steam- baths, or become cab drivers."

At Yasnaya Polyana, social injustice was camouflaged by country quaintness, the poor were scattered far apart, and sun and wind drove away the bad smells; but in Moscow poverty was walled in and concentrated, and it exploded in your face like a boil. Impossible not to see it. In this city, merely having food to eat was enough to make you feel guilty. Stricken by remorse at the comfort in which he and his family were living, Tolstoy could not sleep, refused to eat, groaned, wept and pined for the solitude and peace of his country estate. On October 31, 1881 Sonya gave birth to her eleventh child, a boy, Alexis.

This event brought no joy to the father. He rented two small, quiet rooms in the adjoining villa for six rubles a month and shut himself up to work on his philosophical studies in peace. Around two or three in the afternoon he would slip surreptitiously out of the house dressed as a workman, cross the frozen river and climb the hills on the other side—the Sparrow Hills, white with snow—and there, with voluptuous pleasure and gratitude, he helped the muzhiks to chop and saw wood. In the evening he drew the water from the well himself. Sometimes, as if to impose a penitence upon himself, he went walking in the grim- est districts of Moscow, or to the Khitrovka Market, inhabited by beggars, thieves and escaped convicts. Twisting alleyways led down to a sort of pit surrounded by flophouses and gambling dens. Gaunt creatures, half-man, half-beast, each with his own tragedy, his mortal wound, his madness, swarmed in the murk. Tolstoy inhaled the gamy smell of the fivc-kopcck-a-night flophouses, stumbled over sleeping drunks, brushed against ragged, filthy cripples, handed out his small change and went home, sick with horror and pity. His guilt deepened at the sight of the carpeted stairway, chandeliers, white-gloved lackeys, well-dressed, healthy children and wife, set table, silvcrplatc, five-course dinners.

"It is very hard for me to live in Moscow," he wrote to Alexeyev on November 15, 1881. "I have been here for two months and it is not becoming any easier. I know now that, although I was aware of the enormity of the evil and temptations around us before, I did not really believe in them, I did not really see them as they arc. . . . Now the

enormity of the evil is crushing me, driving me to despair, driving me to doubt everything. . . ."

How to get out of this dilemma? Fold his arms and whimper? Deceive himself playing cards or talking? No!

"I see one way: propaganda, spoken and written, but I am afraid this is nothing but vanity, conceit and possibly delusion. Another way would be to give help to people. But the infinite numbers of the destitute arc disheartening. It isn't like in the village where a little circle forms naturally. The only way I can see is to live honestly and always show one's good side to others."⁷

His own "good side" was shown increasingly seldom to his wife and children; he was keeping it for the poor, who alone could understand him. At home, he was a stranger. When she had recovered from her confinement, Sonya flung herself into the social season with a vengeance. Accompanied by Tanya, she went calling, shopping, to the theater and the concert. She even chose an "at-home" day, Thursday, to which all the smartest people came in droves. It was impossible for Tolstoy to avoid his wife's guests all the time, but he insisted upon appearing in his gray peasant's blouse, and categorically refused to dress up in city clothes. The very thought of putting on a jacket and stiff collar, knotting a tie, putting his feet into fine leather shoes, revolted him as a form of treason. He stood by his dress as he stood by his principles. "However," wrote his son Sergey, 'lie eventually accepted a compromise. He had a sort of black tunic, which he put on over a starched shirt and buttoned up to the throat. This black tunic was neither a blouse nor a jacket. lie wore it one winter, then went back to his usual blouse."⁸

Deep in his own social preoccupations, he was filled with eager anticipation by the announcement that the city administration was to make a census of the population, in January 1882. The project was being directed by civil servants, with the help of sociologists, students and other interested persons, and would last three days. Tolstoy decided to volunteer. He hoped to make use of this sally into the lower depths to devise a scheme for relieving the underprivileged. In all likelihood there was, mingled with his official and disinterested intentions, the artist's ever-present desire to document himself 011 a little-known fauna and put his sensitivity to the test. He would certainly get a closer look at human destitution during this survey than on his solitary walks in the Khitrovka district, where he could only go as far as people were willing to let him. lie obtained permission from Professor Yanzhul, the census director, to cover the district beyond Smolensky Market, which contained the grimmest slums, flophouses and dives in the entire city.

Tolstoy spent the days of January 23, 24 and 25 moving about in this skid row swarming with thieves, prostitutes, drunkards and starveling children. At the sight of the census-takers, they all tried to run away. The exits were blocked and the poor wretches were assured that no one was going to ask them for their papers.

"Terrified and frightening in their terror," wrote Tolstoy, "they clustered together by the reeking cesspool, listened to our explanations and did not believe a word we said. . . . Every dwelling was full, every bunk occupied. . . . All the women who were not dead drunk were lying with men. Many of those who had babies with them were wallowing on narrow bunks with total strangers. After this place a second, identical, then a third, tenth, twentieth and on forever, and everywhere the same suffocating stench, cramped quarters, mingling of the sexes. Men and women drunk to the point of idiocy, and on every face the same alarm, the same docility, the same guilt."

Swallowing his nausea, Tolstoy questioned this human debris, trying to find out what they lived on and how they had fallen so low. Their answers revealed a degree of stupidity, cowardice, bad luck, cunning and vice that left him speechless. No collection, no charitable bequest, no State relief would be enough to save these souls from the abyss. Such need could only be repaired by love, not money. Public opinion must be awakened, the eyes of the rich must be opened to the hell outside their doors, they must be forced to share their fortunes with those who had nothing. To gain support in the wealthier classes, Tolstoy published a poignant article entitled On the Moscow Census.

This appeal to Christian charity went unheeded. The voice of one writer, be he the author of War and Peace, could not shake the foundations of the established order. Tolstoy saw that he would have to content himself with a few disciples, rather than the hordes he had hoped to draw into the paths of righteousness. Quality would take the place of quantity. Well: the worshipful Strakhov was still at his side, and this stammering sycophant had rcccntly been joined by Alexeyev, his sons' former tutor, who, after being arrested for his progressive ideas, had emigrated to Kansas with some other socialists to found an agricultural community and then returned to Russia disenchanted. He had abandoned Marxism in 1878 and had been seeking some religious foundation for his morality ever since. He was an excellent teacher, but after his quarrel with Sonya over Tolstoy's letter to Alexander III, he had left Yasnaya Polyana and settled with his family on the Samara estate. In his letters, Tolstoy poured out his heart to him as to a member of the same church.

He would have been pleased to number Ivanov, the scribe, among his followers; he had picked him up starving on the road to Kiev and employed him to copy his manuscripts for the last three years. But Ivanov, a mild little man with a pockmarkcd face and a goat's beard, had two obsessions—alcohol and vagabondage. One spring day he would get drunk and start off along the highroads, going nowhere in particular, "Russian-style," begging his food, writing a letter or giving a lesson in grammar to earn a few kopecks. lie returned with the autumn, repentant and tearful, and the Tolstoys took him in with open arms. In Moscow Tolstoy had found him a job as secretary of a district court judge, and arranged for his marriage to a seamstress. Within days, Ivanov abandoned the conjugal hearth. Some ragged urchins brought the count a note from the fugitive, beseeching him to settle his account with the owner of a Khitrovka flophouse, so that he could leave, lie had run through the money he had received from the judge and sold all his clothes. Tolstoy bailed him out of that predicament, but gave up any hope of elevating him to the ranks of the faithful.

He had better luck in his friendship with two remarkable meu he had met in Moscow: Fyodorov and Orlov. Old Fyodorov, librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum, was a learned, ascetic scholar, who lived in a bare cell, slept on a pile of newspapers, ate almost nothing and gave what little money he earned to the poor. Ilis extraordinary memory made him a "walking encyclopedia." He believed that scientists would soon be able to resurrect the dead in flesh and blood, and it was therefore the duty of the Christian community to preserve all that men left behind thcin after giving up the ghost. Whenever he saw Tolstoy he exhorted him, in a voice quivering with emotion, to spread the new- word of physical resurrection, and was offended when the author expressed doubts as to the future of his doctrine of "mystical and scientific immortality." Orlov was a professor at the Railways School, but there was no one like him for the interpretation of the Gospels. He worked himself into a state of collapse to support his nine children and, in spite of his poor health and slender resources, never complained of his lot.

These two fellow-thinkers paled, however, before a third, a certain Syutayev. Tolstoy had heard of him the previous July during his kumys treatment in Samara, from another patient named Prugavin, who wrote histories of Russian religious sects. According to Prugavin, Syutayev, a peasant, herdsman and stonecutter, raised in the faith of the Old Believers, was a man of supernatural goodness and wisdom. He was said to live in a village near Tver. Shortly after his arrival in Moscow in autumn 1881, Tolstoy had gone to sec an old friend of his, Bakunin, whose estate was five miles from the hamlet of Shevelino where Syuta-

yev lived. 'Hie temptation was too great; the next day, the count went to call on the muzhik. Of the two, the count was the more intimidated. Syutayev willingly explained the substance of his doctrine: pool everything in the family—land, implements, food, animals, clothes, women! lie would have no commerce, courts, taxes or army. He wanted the whole world to have but one heart. Tolstoy was overcome with admiration for the little old shepherd with the illuminated eyes, melodious voice and dirt)' beard. In the evening Syutayev accompanied his guest back to Bakunin's home in a telega. As it was against the Old Believer's principles to use a whip, his horse ambled along at a snail's pace. Unnoticed by driver and passenger, who were deep in their theological discussion, the wagon gradually edged off the road and all of a sudden, they found themselves head over heels in a ditch.

Back in Moscow, Tolstoy continued to think of Syutayev as a sccond self, simpler, less educated and, consequently, closer to God. He even invited him to call on him at Denezhny Street if ever he came to town, and at the end of January 1882, when he was still in a state of shock after the census-taking, he received an unexpected visit from the old shepherd. He dragged him into his study, told him of his sufferings and explained his plan to succor the unfortunate. Syutayev, hunched up in a short black sheepskin cloak which he wore, peasant-style, indoors and out, seemed to be thinking of something else. Suddenly he broke in:

'That's all nonsense!"

"Why nonsense?" asked Tolstoy. "Is it wrong to clothe those who are naked and feed those who are hungry, as it says in the Gospel?"

"I know, I know. . . . You sec a man, he asks you for twenty kopecks, you give them to him. Is that charity? No; all you want is to get rid of him!"

"Then is one supposed to let him die of hunger and cold?"

Syutayev's little gray eyes sparkled and he murmured, "Let us divide up these unfortunate people between us. I'm not rich, but I'll take two right away; even if there are ten times as many, we will take them all. . . . We will all go to work together. . . . We will sit down at the same table. One of them will hear a good word spoken by you or me. He will learn the right way to live. That is real charity; but your scheme is just a game of seesaw."*

'Ilus Christian communist, who rejected government in any form and relied on love alone, was a perfect expression of Tolstoy's ideas. Overjoyed, he saw that he had invented nothing new, that it had all existed before him in the head of an old shepherd, that he was at last becoming one with the people!

He talked about Syutayev to his wife, his friends and acquaintances.

[10] A galley proof of the novel Resurrection, corrected by the author

I f

[i 2] Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, 1901