Tolstoy

[i 3] lolstoy and Maxim Corky in the Crimea, 1901

[14] Iolstoy and his daughter Tatyana. at Gaspra in 1902

5j Tolstoy at his work tabic, ca. 1903

The hard core of the countess's Thursdays also wanted to meet the prophet of Shevclino. Tolstoy consented to exhibit his "discovery" to society. "These evenings arc always dull," Sonya wrote to her sister, "but we were saved by the presence of a sectarian named Syutaycv, who is now the talk of Moscow and is being introduced everywhere and is spreading his ideas everywhere."¹⁰

Not in the least intimidated by his brilliant audience, Syutayev preached in a singsong voice, drawing out his "o's" like the peasants of the north. His sheepskin jacket gave off an odor of tallow. Tolstoy's attitude toward him was both fatherly and deferential. Young Tanya, attracted by the picturesqueness of the old prophet, painted his portrait in oils.

After several of these evenings had taken place, Prince Dolgorukov, governor general of Moscow, became alarmed at the thought that people of the best society were gathering in Tolstoy's home to listen to the ranting of a muzhik. He sent an officer of the gendarmerie to ask the count what was the meaning of these lectures and, as on every

other occasion when the administration had the cffrontcrv to meddle

#

in his affairs, Tolstoy reacted like an offended boyar. White-faced, his beard trembling and his eye dreadful to behold, he pointed to the door and snarled at the governor's emissary:

"Get you gone in the name of God! And on the double!"

But Prince Dolgorukov was not to be so easily repulsed, and dis patched a government official to persuade Tolstoy to reply to his questions. Luckily, Syutayev had already gone back to his village by then.

He left his fellow believer convinced that any effort made by an individual to help the poor was futile in practical terms, and an offense to human dignity, in moral ones. This view was corroborated by the failure of Tolstoy's appeal in the press. Tolstoy distributed the money lie had begun to collect and gave up his "nonsense."

Because lie was stifling in Moscow, he went to Yasnaya Polyana on February 1, 1882. Back in his childhood home, with the snow-covered grounds and the aging servants and the silence, he felt new strength surge up within him. "I think there is no place where I shall feel better or more at peace than here," he wrote to Sonya on February 4. "Eternally occupied as you are by the household and the family, you cannot understand what a difference there is for me between town and coun try. . . . 'lTie main thing wrong with life in town, for me and any thinking man, is that one is constantly compelled either to argue and refute mistaken opinions, or to accept them without an argument, which is worse."

Divested of his wife, his sons, his daughters and the Thursday crowd, lie wrote an essay: What Then Must We Do?, savored the rough and hearty peasant fare (blinis, salt meat, kasha), and thought "no more of man, but only of God." Looking at him, the old servant Agatha Mi- khailovna shook her head and grumbled, "You've left the countess back there to carry on alone with eight children, while you sit here pulling at your beard!"

And although Sonya agreed that her husband needed a rest, she could not forgive him for such an ostentatious lack of interest in his family.

"You and your Syutayevs," she wrote on February 3, "maybe you can remain above all feelings of affection for your own children, but mere mortals like me cannot. Or maybe it's that we don't try to justify our lack of any profound love by pretending to love the whole universe."

And the following day:

"Even when you are in Moscow I hardly ever see you. Our two lives have separated. Is this still a life at all?"

Remorse-stricken, Tolstoy returned to Moscow, talked to his wife and, unfortunately, had another religious quarrel with Alexandra Tolstoy who had made a special trip from St. Petersburg to see him. Once more, the old maid of honor tried "to bring him back to Christ" and once more he lost his temper, denied that she had any right to give lessons in Christianity to anyone and left her, not on speaking terms, lie was so angry that he struck out for Yasnaya Polyana again, to calm himself. The moment he reached the country, he wrote a letter of unprecedented violence to his incorrigible babushka:

"Right or wrong, I regard your faith as the devil's work, designed solely to deprive mankind of the salvation promised by Christ. ... In my book and in person, I denounce all liars and false prophets in sheep's clothing. . . . Those liars will do as they have always done, they will be silent. But when they can be silent no longer, they will kill me. I am expecting it. And you are helping them in their task, for which I am grateful to you!"¹¹

Having signed his name at the bottom of the page, he called for a horse and galloped off at full speed to post his vindictive qjistle in person from the Yasenki station. But when he got back to the house, his fever began to abate. Fearing he had gone a little far, he sent a servant to recover the letter in the mailbag, with a word of apology to the mail clerk.

The next day he wrote what he hoped was a milder letter to Alexandra, although in fact it was hardly less violent:

"Do stop talking about Christ, in order to avoid the inanity that is SO prevalent among ladies of the court, with their sermonizing and preaching and converting. Is it not laughable that ladies of the court such as you, or the Bludovs or the Tyutchevs, should feel called upon to preach Orthodoxy? 1 can understand that any woman should desire salvation, but then, if she is a true Christian, the first thing she will do will be to leave the court and society; she will go to matins, and fast, and do the best she can to save her soul. Why has the position of courtier become tantamount to a degree in theology? Nothing could be more absurd!"

At this point he could not forgo the pleasure of imagining himself a martyr again, falling beneath the blows of the false prophets. Although no one was threatening his life, he repeated the terms of his first letter with evident relish:

"They will be silent as long as they can, and then they will kill me. And you, talking to me about your Christ, arc helping them in their work. You and I have as little in common as Christ and the Pharisees. My body can perish, but the teachings of Christ will not perish."

This was the first time he had compared himself with Christ, and consigned his enemies to the status of Pharisees. He so wanted to suffer for the faith! The pain, the spilling blood, the wondering crowds . . . Ah, but it was sweet to imagine his torture, sitting in his warm study at Yasnaya Polyana with a shawl over his shoulders and woolen slippers on his feet.

Having settled Alexandra's hash, he turned to his wife. As always, after an outburst, he was full of guilty affection for her. lie wrote to her that he needed the country "to thaw out morally" ancl "recovcr [his] self-possession," that he was planning "poetical works," that he was playing solitaire and dreaming of his beloved helpmeet, but that he was crushed by his consciousncss of the evil that dominated the world. Sonya answered:

"I begin to think that when a happy man suddenly notices that life is dreadful and closes his eyes to everything good in life, that man is sick. You should undergo treatment. 1 say this without any ulterior motive, I am simply noting a fact. I am very sorry for you, and if you were to think over what I say with an open mind you might find a remedy for your troubles. . . . Have you only just discovered that there are starving, sick, miserable, wicked people in the world? Look again; there are also cheerful, healthy, happy and good people. May God help you! As for me, what can I do? . . . You don't need my love any more now. What do you need, then? If only I knew!"

This appeal moved Tolstoy to tears.

"Don't worry on my account," he wrote, "and above all, don't accuse yourself. ... I have forgotten why I was so unhappy. Maybe it's age, or poor health. But I have nothing to complain about. I learned a

great deal from life in Moscow. It showed me the path to follow if I want to continue my work, and it has brought us closer together. . . .

"I cannot live apart from you. Your presence is absolutely necessary to me. . . . You say, 'I love you, but you don't need my love any more.' On the contrary, that is all I do need. And nothing can revive me like your letters. A liver ailment is one thing, the life of the soul another. I had a desperate need of solitude; it has refreshed me; and your love gives me the greatest joy in the world."

Sonya had to stay in the city because of the children's studies, so he made several quick trips to Moscow that spring to keep in touch with his family. Between trains, he visited picture galleries, chatted with writers and journalists and supervised the publication of Confession in Russian Thought. But by order of the censorship committee, the police confiscated the first issues of the review. However, handwritten and typed copies of the book circulated secretly, and it was later published in Geneva.

The violence with which the author denounced his own errors, criticized the Christian religion and proclaimed the need for a new rule of life provoked moral crises among his readers. Strangers wrote to insult him; others to congratulate him or ask him for advice. Gay, a well- known painter, was enthralled by the article On the Moscow Census, caught the first train to Moscow, rushed to Denezhny Street and found no one at home, paced back and forth outside the door for three hours, came back the next day and at last saw the master, fell into his arms and begged to be allowed to paint his portrait or that of his daughter. "Do my wife instead," said Tolstoy, and Gay, who was a gentleman, hid his disappointment and set to work forthwith. "I have been posing for a week now," Sonya wrote to her sister. "He is doing me with my mouth half-open, in a black velvet top with Alengon lace and my hair loose "

A few days were all that the painter needed to fall in love—not with the wife, but with the husband. He had admired Tolstoy as a writer before meeting him. Once admitted to his inner circle, he resolved to devote himself to the author for life. "I loved that man beyond words," he said to Stasov. "He revealed everything to me."¹² Gay carried a New Testament in his pocket and was forever pulling it out to cite a passage; the fifty-year-old man with his gray beard, bald pate and blue eyes was transfigured. Tolstoy said he was "an elderly child, brimming over with affection for everything and everyone."¹³ Gay was a severe critic of his own work, however. He did not like his portrait of Sonya: "I painted a lady in a velvet dress who has forty thousand rubles in the bank," he said. Or, "I painted a woman of the world and Sofya Andreycvna is a

mother."¹⁴ He finally destroyed it. He made a second portrait of Sonya later, holding her youngest daughter in her arms, and another, very good one, of Tolstoy at his desk.

Early in the summer of 1882 the entire family returned to Yasnaya Polyana; as usual, the Kuzminskys moved into their special pavilion, other guests flocked in and the youngsters were hard at play around the swings, along the paths and on the croquet lawn. Sergey and Ilya were grown up now and had their own horses and guns and dogs and their own ideas, and talked with men's voices. Tolstoy, who had just given up hunting, looked on and gritted his teeth as his sons strode off to shoot snipe and hare. He found them heavy and rather oafish, as he himself had been at their age. There was no communion of thought between him and any of his family. His true sons were Syutayev, Alexeyev, Fyodorov, Strakhov. . . .

"The folly of the people I live with saddens me," he wrote to Alexeyev. "Often they fail to see how I can perceive their insanity so clearly when they are utterly lacking in the capacity to understand the error of their ways. And so there we stand, staring at each other and not understanding, astonished by each other and each holding the other to blame. Only, there arc untold hordes of them and I am alone. And they look happy and I look sad. . . ."¹⁵

His coldness toward his children could not fail to affect Sonya, espe cially as Ilya had just fallen ill. She was afraid he had typhus. The doctor prescribed frequent small doses of quinine. He lay in the drawing room shivering with fever. At her wit's end with won}', Sonya complained that Lyovochka was no help to her in nursing him and, in general, never lifted a finger in the house. He turned white with anger and shouted that his fondest desire was to run away from his family. "As long as I live I shall remember the sincerity of that cry which broke my heart," Sonya wrote on the evening of August 26, 1882. "I yearn for death with all my strength, for I cannot live without his love. I cannot prove to him how deeply I have loved him these twenty years, no less today than on the first day. My love weighs me down, but it only irritates him. He is filled with his Christian ideals of self-perfection. I am jealous of him."

After tliis explosion he had fled to his study, intending to sleep alone on the sofa. Sonya, choking with sobs, stared at the empty bed and refused to get into it. Carried away, as always, by her romantic imaginings, she told herself that Lyovochka had been scduccd by another woman. She went to her son, gave him his medicine, passed in front of the study door hoping her husband would call to her, heard nothing, went back to her bedroom, waited, motionless, her eyes blank, under the round circle of lamplight. He came back at dawn, but their recon-

ciliation was not immediate. At last, tears gave way to kisses. Worn out by emotion, lack of sleep and her husband's final caresses, Sonya made her way along the path through the woods to the bathhouse early in the morning. "I shall never forget that glorious morning, light and cool, and the silver-gleaming dew." Nor was she to forget her husband's cri du coeur, threatening to abandon her. Half-joyful, half-anxious, she dived into the chilly water and stayed longer than she should have. "I would have liked to catch cold and die," she wrote in her diary. "But I did not catch cold. I came back to the house and nursed Alyosha, whose smile filled me with joy."

When summer came to an end, Tolstoy left his wife at Yasnaya Poly- ana and went to Moscow with the two older boys to prepare for the family's return. Four months before, he had bought a house that was more to his liking—as a measure of economy, he said. In fact, he had paid 27,000 rubles* for it and thought to himself that it was cheap at the price. Naturally, with his simple tastes, he had not chosen to live in one of the luxurious parts of town, but in the industrial outskirts in the southwest, 011 Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street.t Close by were a sock and stocking factory, a perfume distillery, a spinning mill and a brewery. Each had its own whistle, its special smell and its muffled, ceaseless, daily noise. The chief attraction of the new residence was a big walled garden (over two acres), with a row of lime trees, impenetrable thickets, a dozen apple trees, thirty or so cherry trees, a few plum trees and barberries, a little hummock covered with stiff grass, a pavilion for solitary daydreamers, a wide raised walk that could be used as a croquct lawn in summer and a skating rink in winter. The outbuildings (caretaker's house, coach house, stables, barn and cowshed) stood around the main house, which was built all of wood, two stories high. The facade was painted ochre and the shutters green. There were twenty rooms inside, all badly in need of redecoration. No running water. But they were used to that in the country. Besides, there was a well in the garden.

With surprising energy in a man who declared himself the enemy of all material contingencies, Tolstoy directed the renovation. The roof needed repairs, new floors had to be laid, the woodwork repainted, the wallpaper changed. A mere trifle! He had decided that they would move in at the beginning of October. Racing to meet his deadline, he bullied the contractor, heckled the workmen, raccd through the shops in search of antique furniture (preferably mahogany), brought everything he could from the Denezhny Street house and dispatched daily bulletins

• $76400.

t In 1920, this house becamc the Tolstoy Museum.

to Sonya: "Yesterday, to my great despair, the contractor announced that we would not be able to move in before October 1! . . . The four downstairs rooms will be ready on Tuesday. . . . The wallpaper has been hung, but the doors and woodwork still have to be repainted." (September 12.) "The main reason for the delay is that it is taking the plaster so long to dry. They heat and heat, but not everywhere. . . . The ceilings and one wall are already dry in the big hall and the drawing room, and have turned from gray to white. . . . The wallpaper in the corner room is too light, and too dark in the dining room, but in your room and Tanya's it is perfect!" (September 14.) "'Hie banister is very handsome, but the rails are so far apart that a baby could easily squeeze between them. I shall talk to the contractor about it tomorrow." (September 28.) "My dream of stunning you with my remodeled house will not come true. I am afraid you will be disagreeably surprised by the disorder you will find when you arrive. But we can all move in, warm and dry." (September 29.)

At first Sonya was amused by these technical reports, but she soon began to worry at the lack of affection in her husband's letters.

"You write of nothing but practical things," she said. "Do you think I am made of wood? Floors and toilets arc not the Only things in the world that interest me."

On October 8, the rest of the family arrived in the new house, where the table was laid for the travelers: cold meat, tea, fruit. Sonya went from room to room admiring her husbands taste; but the garden was the chief subject of enthusiasm.

It required a few weeks for the little tribe of eight children and twelve servants to divide up the rooms, unpack their belongings and adapt their habits to the new walls, furniture and echoes. Order was established. Lunch at one o'clock, dinner at six, evening tea at nine. 'There was a chef for the family and a woman cook for the staff. Fach member of the family had his own place at the big table in the dining room with its yellow walls and brown woodwork. Sonya presided; a voluminous soup tureen steamed on her right and a pile of soup plates mounted on her left; she filled them one after the other and a footman set them in front of each person in order of seniority. No wine, but a carafe of water and a jug of home-made kvass. Tolstoy had resolved to go on a vegetarian diet, as far as possible, and lived on oatmeal porridge, fruit jelly and preserves, This special menu suited both his philosophy and his lack of teeth. Conversation was always animated. The children whispered and teased each other. Chewing his bread in his toothless mouth, their father told a funny story, began to laugh before anyone else, and carried the whole table with him. Then, at a

moment's notice, the grownups would begin to "philosophize" and the youngsters to ache with boredom. At regular intervals a cuckoo clock on the wall uttered his wheezy hiccough.

When there was company, evening tea was served in the big white- walled drawing room with its outsize table and massive mahogany chairs. Not one picture, not one rug on the bare, gleaming floorboards, and, in the place of honor, a piano, at which Tolstoy and Sonya sometimes sat to play four-hand ducts. On reception clays, forty-four candles in the hanging chandeliers and wall-sconces were lighted, in addition to the three kerosene lamps. Famous musicians and singers came to perform for the master. A few years later Chaliapin sang his greatest arias for him-"Midnight," "The Miller's Return," "The Flea"-which he did not like as well as the folksongs sung by the same artist.

Tolstoy often left his wife and Tanya to receive their friends and hid himself away in his study, a little room halfway between the first and second floors, with bare walls painted pale green. To the left of the door stood a deal table covered with dark green felt, with three drawers and a railing around the top. No bric-^-brac, but two wooden-shafted penholders, a marble paperweight, a crystal inkwell, a goblet of ink, penwipers, folders and two bronze candlesticks. Tolstoy wrote by the light of a single candle. 'Hie corners of the room swam in darkness. He boasted that he didn't need glasses, but as lie was really quite myopic he had his chair legs sawed off to bring the paper closer to his eyes. When he tired of working seated, he would get up, open a folding writing- desk and continue standing. Or else he would settle himself among the brown silk pillows on his imitation leather sofa and read and take notes with his legs tucked under him. A litter of papers and books in Russian, French, English and German spread all around him. More books were stacked inside the glass-front bookcase.

Tolstoy had never felt more remote from Sonya. While she splashed about on the surface, he, or so he thought, was probing the lower depths. He listened to the jolly drawing-room gabble going on over his head, and wrote to an almost unknown correspondent, the young revolutionary Engelhardt:¹⁶ "You cannot imagine how alone I am, how my true self is scorned by everyone around me. ... I am guilt}', 1 live in sin, I deserve contempt because I do not practice what I preach, but I will say to you in reply, less to justify than to explain my weakness: look at my past life and look at my life now, and you will see that I am attempting to do what must be done; I have not achieved the thousandth part of it, true, not because 1 have not wanted to but because I did not know before. . . . Judge me if you like; I judge myself severely enough! But do not judge the path I have chosen. I know which is the

road that leads home and if T weave like a drunken man as I go down it that does not mean the road is the wrong one."

In order "to weave as little as possible" going down his road, he got up in mid-winter while it was still dark, to the cry of the whistles summoning their workers to the nearby factories, did a few calisthenics with his dumbl>ells, dressed himself in peasant clothes, went down to the courtyard to draw the water, drag the huge tub through the snow on a little sled and fill the water pitchers; he split wood for the stoves, cleaned his room and then, sitting in the entryway, pulled open a drawer under a bench, took out wax and brushes and waxed his boots, proudly reminding himself that he had twelve servants and was taking care of himself. Moreover, it was his opinion that such menial tasks put one in a proper frame of mind for lofty thought. Ilis mind bubbled and soared while his hands stayed earthbound, slaves to routine. He had become infatuated with Hebrew, which was to help him to a better understanding of the Gospels, and was taking lessons from Rabbi Minor. "Leo is learning the Hebraic language, to my intense regret," said Sonya. "He is wasting his energy on foolishness." And, "This is the end of his literary career and it is a shame, a great shame!"

She unconsciously knew that whenever he began to write a work of fiction, he drew closer to her. It was all this cloudy theology, this striving for a superhuman perfection, that separated tliein. She did not have what it took to be the wife of a saint. With objectivity and humility, she wrote to Tanya Kuzminskaya on January 30, 18S3:

"Leo is very calm. He's working, writing articles and only occasionally showing his aversion to town life, especially that of the aristocracy. It is painful for me, but I know he cannot do otherwise. lie is a man ahead of his time, he marchcs in front of the crowd and shows the way it must follow. And I am one of the crowd, I live with it and, with it, I sec the light in the men ahead of their time, like Leo, and I say yes, that is the light, but I cannot walk any faster than the crowd to which I am bound; I am held back by my environment, by my habits."

He, meanwhile, was writing in his diary:

"Again in Moscow, and again, for more than a month, enduring atrocious moral agonies, but not without progress. . . . What you have done will not be truly good until you are no longer there to spoil it. . . . One sows, the other reaps; you, Leo Nikolayevich, will not reap. . . . I used to think it unfair that I should not be allowed to see the fruit of my labor, now I realize that it is not unfair, it is good and reasonable. . . . Now it is clear: what you do out of love, without reaping any reward, is certainly the work of God."¹⁷

For the New Year, 1883:

"Property defended by force—a policeman armed with a pistol—is bad. Make yourself a spoon and cat with that spoon as long as no one else needs it. That is what is ccrtain. . . . We live, therefore we are dying. To live well means to die well. The New Year. I make a wish, for myself and for all, that we may die well."

Every minor illness, every death among his acquaintances, brought him back to the thought of his own end. The previous year he had been particularly distressed by the news that Ivan Turgenev was seriously ill in France. With his usual tact, he had hastened to inflict his compassion upon his unfortunate colleague: "The news of your illness has caused me much sorrow . . . especially when I was assured that it was serious. I realized how much I cared for you. I felt that I should be much grieved if you were to die before me."¹⁸

Touched by this letter, Turgenev immediately replied, saying that, according to his doctors, he was suffering from "angina pectoris with gout"—not, he believed, a dangerous disease. In fact, he had cancer of the bone marrow, which had momentarily subsided after the first warning signs. Between spoonfuls of medicine he still took an interest in literature. Much intrigued by Tolstoy's Confession, he asked him to send a lithographed copy; but after reading the book, so remote from his own convictions, he could not bring himself to enthuse to the author, and wrote to Grigorovich: "Confession is astonishing in its sincerity, truthfulness, persuasiveness; and yet it is built upon false premises and leads in the end to the most somber negation of all human life. ... It is a sort of nihilism. . . . This does not alter the fact that Tolstoy is, without doubt, the most remarkable man in Russia today."¹⁹

Turgenev's condition grew worse at the beginning of 1883. He was tortured by excruciating pains shooting through his back. Nothing helped—poultices, chloroform or morphine; he screamed in agony. He had become cadaverously thin, and entreated Mme. Viardot, who was nursing him devotedly, to heave him out the window. As soon as the warm weather came, he was carried—"the patriarch of the mollusks," as he said—to Bougival, to the villa "Lcs Frdnes." On June 27, summoning his last remaining strength, he penciled on a scrap of paper:

"My good and dear Leo Nikolayevich, I have not written to you for a long time because I was and still am, to tell the truth, on my deathbed. 1 cannot get well, it is useless even to think it. I write you chiefly in order to tell you how happy I am to have been your contemporary and to make one last, sincere appeal to you. My friend, return to literature! That gift came to you from the same source as all the rest. Oh, how happy I should be to think that this letter might have some influence upon you! I am clone for, the doctors don't even know what

name to give to my illness. Gouty stomach neuralgia! I can neither walk nor eat nor sleep. It bores me to talk about it. My friend, great writer of the Russian land, hear my prayer. Let me know you have received this scrap of paper, and allow me to embrace you once more, hard, very hard, you, your wife and all your family. I cannot go on, I am tired. . .

Tolstoy did not read this poignant letter until long afterward. When it reached Moscow he was in Samara for his kumys treatment. Before that, he had gone to Yasnaya Polyana where, finding the village half- destroyed by fire, he directed emergency relief operations. Decidedly, however, he had no desire to handle his affairs alone. On May 21, 1883 he signed a power of attorney authorizing Sonya to manage all his property. Then he set off, at peace. Three days later he was in the old wooden house among the Bashkirs. What a disappointment! The farm was being badly mismanaged, half the colts had died during the winter and the harvest would be worthless. Discouraged, Tolstoy decided to sell the stock and stud farm and farm out the land. But he could not bear to witness the "bargaining" between the steward and the prospective buyers.

On the other hand, he engaged in lengthy conversations with the Molokhan sectarians and his friends Alexeyev and Bibikov,! whom he liked less and less, and two militant socialists who had come to stay with them. These men had been involved in an important political trial; they bitterly defended the right to use violence and this infuriated Tolstoy, who did not agree. lie was relieved when they left. The treatment was prolonged, lie began to feel better. "Although I am ashamed and disgusted to think of my base body, I know the kumys will be good for me, principally because it will regulate the functioning of my stomach, the effect of which will be to improve my nerves and put me in a better frame of mind," he wrote to his wife.-⁰

Once again the benefits of the kumys evaporated in the superficial and agitated atmosphere of Yasnaya Polyana in the summer. Back with his family in July 1883, he began again to suffer from nothing and everything. He had refused to serve as marshal of the nobility for the Krapivna district, in order to avoid even the slightest temptation to collaborate with the authorities. One day, returning home after a visit to an old muzhik on his deathbed, he heard his son Sergey playing Brahms' "Hungarian Dances" 011 the piano. Startled, he hesitated for a moment, then flew into a red-hot rage: "It isn't that particular thing I hold against him," he said, "but how strange: by our side are wretched

t Alexis Alcxevcvich Bibikov; not to be confuscd with Alexander Nikolayevich Bibikov, Tolstoy's neighbor at Yasnaya Polyana.

souls lying ill and dying, and we don't even know they are there, we don't want to know it, we are playing joyful music!"¹'¹

Another day the guests suggested resuming the old game of "post- box," and he proposed this thorny question for their meditation: "Why must Ustyusha, Alyona, Peter, etc. [the servants} cook and prepare things, sweep, clear away and serve at table, and the gentlemen cat, gorge themselves, defecate and cat again?"

He made himself clearer in his next note, which also went into the "post-box":

"Today, July 7, thirteen chickens were killed in the two houses;* July 8, one sheep was delivered to one house, salt-meat to the other; July 10, 11 and 12, thirty pounds of roast beef were brought to the two houses, forty pounds of beef for soup, two hens, seven chickens and a seventy-pound lamb. . . ."

Another variation:

"Timetable of activities at Yasnaya Polyana: 10 to 11 a.m., coffee indoors; 11 to noon, tea on the croquet lawn; noon to 1 p.m., lunch; 1 to 2 p.m., tea on the croquct lawn; 2 to 3 p.m., study; 3 to 5 p.m., swimming; 5 to 7 p.m., dinner; 7 to 8 p.m., croquet and lxwting; 8 to 9 p.m., low tea; 9 to 10 p.m., high tea; 10 to 11 p.m., supper; and 11 p.m. to 10 a.m., sleep!"

The only work he could really enjoy was manual, so for several days he helped the peasants with the haying. His children brought him food in the fields, like a real muzhik. "He is so free and gay, he has come back to us again!" his daughter Tanya gratefully noted. But he told a guest, Rusanov, "I wish they would exile me or lock me up somewhere!" Once again, his eternal shame of his physical comfort, his yearning for some form of bodily suffering to crown and give substance to his mental anguish, his greedy envy of all who had the good fortune to be unfortunate.

On September 2, 1883 he learned that Ivan Turgenev, at the end of his strength, had died at Bougival on August 22. He was instantly sorry he had not answered his colleague's last letter, so mournful and so tender. To be sure, Turgenev's pretensions to lead him, Leo Tolstoy, back to the paths of literature were absurd, but his intentions had been good. I low death blots out all imperfections in the individual, and placcs him in a favorable light. Now that the author of Smoke was no more, Tolstoy was suddenly possessed of a consuming passion for him. He reread his complete works, sighing and weeping. "I think of Turgenev continually, I love him terribly, I pity him, I read him, I live with

* The main house at Yasnaya Polyana and the pavilion in which the KuzminsKn- family stayed.

him," he wrote to Sonya, who was in Moscow. "I have just finished his Enough! Read it! Magnificent!"

Could he recall that, some eighteen years before, he had abhorred the book for being "full of false suffering"?²²

Turgcncv's body was brought back to Russia. Edmond About and Ernest Renan made speeches on the platform in the Paris railway station. In Moscow, the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature decided to organize an official ceremony in honor of the late, great author, and scheduled it for October 23, 1883. Tolstoy was approached to speak. What he had refused to do for Pushkin, he agreed to do for Turgenev. True, Dostoveysky had died in the meantime, so there was no rival speaker on the program. lie conscientiously prepared to inter under posthumous praise the man he had so often buried in sarcasm during his lifetime. He recalled their first meetings, their conversations, their disputes, and in his memory everything became noble, beautiful and serene. Sonya was very excited at the prospect of this glorious occasion: "All Moscow is already in an uproar," she wrote to Tanya. "They say there will be a huge crowd in the great hall of the University."²⁸

The powers-that-bc thought so too, and took a very dim view of all this fuss and bother. Tolstoy had been under police surveillance for the past year. Spies reported that he had been to see the Molokhans in Samara, that he was inculcating false and dangerous notions about the equality of men into the muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana and had publicly proclaimed that the Orthodox Church had distorted the teachings of Christ. On September 28, 1883, having been called to jury duty at Krapivna, he refused to serve on the pretext that his religious beliefs would not allow him to take part in an act of punishment. Cost of this offense: two hundred rubles. A trifle, in comparison with the moral satisfaction he felt as he walked, head high, out of the courtroom. But on October 18 the minister of the interior, his homonym Count Dmitry Andrcyevich Tolstoy, submitted a paper to Alexander III on measures to be taken against the writer whose activities were in clanger of "undermining the people's confidence in justice and arousing the indignation of all true believers." The tsar had not replied when the head of the department of press affairs notified the minister of the interior that Tolstoy was to make a speech at the ccremony in honor of Turgenev. "Now," pursued this well-informed official, "Count Tolstoy is a madman; he is capable of anything; he may say all manner of outlandish tilings; and the scandal will not be a small one!" The minister of the interior immediately sent off a coded telegram to Prince Dolgorukov, governor general of Moscow, ordering all memorial speeches for Turgenev to be submitted for prior approval. Prince Dolgorukov sent for the president of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature and strongly "advised" him to postpone the ceremony, indefinitely. And so, because of Tolstoy, Turgenev was deprived of the homage his fellow citizens had wanted to pay him. 'iTie friendship of these two men had been decidedly star-crossed.

In Ivan Turgenev, Tolstoy had lost one steadfast and sincere admirer; but another, of a very different sort, was to emerge from the autumn mists that same year, 1883. The newcomer was named Vladimir Grigor- yevich Chertkov, and belonged to the St. Petersburg aristocracy. His father, a general and aide-de-camp to the tsar, had a huge fortune; his mother, nee Chcmishcv-Kuglikov, was an intimate friend of the empress. He himself, after graduating from the military acadcmy, had chosen to make his carcer in the army. Handsome, rich, elegant, impeccably educated, he could expect, thanks to his parents' connections, a brilliant future in uniform. Yet, as early as 1879, he contemplated resigning his commission to devote himself to social work. At his father's behest, he agreed to confine himself to applying for a year's leave of ab scnce and, after a long stay in England, he returned to his horse guards, albeit with heavy heart. Before, he had played cards, drunk and flirted with the girls, but he no longer derived the slightest pleasure from joining his comrades in their debauchery. His dream now was to retire to his family estate in order to live in closer union with the peasants. He had already read the works of Tolstoy. He felt there must be a communion of thought between them. He went to call on him in Moscow.

At first, Tolstoy was flattered to see that his philosophy had touched not only the "Dark Ones" of town and country—the ragged sectarians and disheveled nihilists—but also a man of the best society, a landowner and guards officcr. lie looked with friendly approval upon the tall thirty-year-old man with the receding hairline, aquiline nose and well- tailored uniform, who was telling him how he wished to leave the army. Master and disciple agreed that military servicc was incompatible with the doctrine of Christ. Then Tolstoy read his visitor passages from What I Believe, which he had just finished. "The realization that my period of moral isolation was over at last gave me such joy," Chertkov later said, "that, lost in my own thoughts, I paid no attention to the passages he was reading to me; I only came to my senses when, after reading the last lines of the work, he pronounced the author's name with peculiar emphasis: 'Leo Tolstoy."'

Then and there, with radiant vanity, Chertkov announced that he was his hosfs "co-thinker." He was certain that his fervor was as ncces-

sary to Tolstoy as Tolstoy's teachings were to him. The two men parted company affectionately.

A short time later, Chertkov resigned from the army. Tolstoy's first letter to him began with the words: "Very dear, very kind and very close to me Vladimir Grigoryevich ..." It was as though he were writing to his spiritual son. Sonya herself admitted that, for the first time, one of her husband's followers had some class and decent manners, and when he came back, she received him cordially. She soon observed, however, that this new type of disciple was more intransigent than his master on questions of doctrine. Chertkov had a narrow, systematizing mind, and was so attached to Tolstoy's ideas that he would not suffer him to depart one iota from them himself. On any and every matter, however trifling, he would respectfully call the master to order in the name of Tolstoyism. Instinctively, he sided with the thought against the thinker, with the work against the man. At first, the family was amused by his stern application of the rules. Then Sonya dirnly began to sense that a rival had crept under her roof and, uneasy and uncertain, she put up her guard.

On February 18, 1884 the police seized all the copies of What I Believe at the Kushncrcv printing-works. "I hope after this he will calm down and write nothing more in this vein!" Sonya wailed to her sister. Urged on by Chertkov, however, Tolstoy was working furiously away at his new essay, What Then Must We Do?

PART VI

This Loathsome Flesh...

1. The Temptation of Sainthood

On January 30, 1884 Countess Tolstoy and her eldest daughter, in full evening dress, attended the ball given by Prince Dolgorukov, governor general of Moscow—the man who, three months before, had decreed that the ceremonies in honor of Turgenev could not take place because Leo Tolstoy was to speak. "The governor general had a chair brought and sat next to me," the dazzled countess wrote to her husband, "and for one whole hour he talked to me as though he wished to show me a mark of special favor. . . .lie also paid thousands of compliments to Tanya." Sonya's letter, bubbling over with socialite vivacity, crossed one from Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, proudly announcing that he was making a pair of shoes for their old servant Agatha Mikhailovna, whose feast-day was on February 5.

Evcr>' evening he went to the isba of Arbuzov or Mitrofan, the village cobbler, and humbly drove pegs and punched holes with his awl under the half-amused, half-fearful eyes of the muzhiks. "How clean, how morally elegant everything is in their dirty, dark hole!" he said. And, "All it takes to give new life to the soul is to enter the dwelling of a workman!"¹

Back in Moscow, he wanted to continue his apprenticeship and had a workshop set up next to his study. He bought tools and leather. A pensive, bashful cobbler with a thick black beard came to give him regular lessons. An oddly-shaped stove stood by the window against the bench, intended both to heat and ventilate the room. In spite of this device, a cloying odor of leather and tobacco assailed one in the doorway. The cobbler came at fixed hours and was admitted by a white- gloved, liveried lackey; walking on tiptoe, his head screwed down be tween his shoulders and his eyes darting off into the corners, he joined

the count in his gray blouse and sat down beside him on a stool. Work began: wax the thread, stitch, shape the quarters, nail on the sole, mount the heel. . . . Ilumpcd over his bench, Tolstoy grunted and cursed, trying to drive the wooden pegs into the soles.

"Let me do that, Leo Nikolayevich," the cobbler would say.

"No, no! You do your job and I'll do mine!" growled the pupil.²

Friends and admirers came to see the writer in action and were amazed at his perseverance in a trade at which, try as he like, he could never excel. He explained to the skeptics that no 011c had the right to profit from the labor of the poor without giving them as much in return. He made a pair of boots for his friend Sukhotin, who stood them up in his bookcase next to the first twelve volumes of Tolstoy's works, bearing the label "Volume XIII." And Fet, in exchange for a pair of shoes, gave the cobbler-author a certificate stating that they had been made "to order, by Count Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace."

The joys of bootmaking were soon augmented by the discovery of Chinese philosophy. He read Confucius and Lao-tzu and recognized his own ideas in oriental disguise. "One must make a circle of reading for oneself," he wrote, "Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Pascal, the Gospels. Everyone should do it." What would he have given to see his wife following him in this praiseworthy enterprise. But she refused to leave the flock. When he needed her, he had to look for her in the world of other people. Every time, he came back from the country with a renewed appetite for her. Even though, at forty, she was matronly and faded, she remained extremely desirable. After weeks of privation he could not contain himself, he took her, roughly, rapidly, to relieve himself and exorcise the evil spirit, and when it was over he went back to his philosophy, pacified.

Early in 1884 she found to her despair that she was pregnant for the twelfth time. This succession of pregnancies now humiliated her. She was no longer a woman, she thought, she was a brood marc, a vase, good only to receive the master's seed and germinate his progeny. "It's too bad," she wrote to her sister Tanya on February 5, 1884, "that I won't be confined before we go to Yasnaya Polyana. I should so like to get this ghastly thing over with in solitude." And on March 22, "This year I am going to Yasnaya Polyana to be tormented instead of happy. The best season—swimming, haying, long days, wonderful moonlit nights—I'll be spending in bed in the company of a squawling baby. I'll take a wetnurse." She complained to Tolstoy, and he was incensed at her for daring to disparage the holy state of motherhood. "Her nerves are badly strained," he noted. "Her pregnancy is an obsession with her. It is a great, a very great sin. A shame!"³

The truth is that he could not have approved her without condemning himself to continence, since for him conception was the sole justification of physical relations between couples. With a woman who rc fused to have children the act of love became a lewd farce. No concern for mere beauty could prevail against divine law. Nor any fatigue. So long as the male could procreate, the female must lend him her womb. And Tolstoy was full of sap, eager to spread and multiply. How admirable that religion and nature agreed on this point.

Without telling her husband, Sonya went to Tula to be al>ortcd by a midwife. But when the woman heard her caller's name she became frightened and refused the job. Then Sonya tried to abort herself by taking scalding baths and jumping off the top of a dresser with her feet held together.⁴ To 110 avail.

Meanwhile Tolstoy, busy with his own thoughts, daily noted in his diary all his grounds for dissatisfaction with his family life. "It distresses inc greatly, but I cannot approve of them. Their joys—success at school or social success, music, physical comfort, shopping—I consider them all bad for them, but I cannot say so out loud. I might, but nobody would pay any attention to me. What seems to count for them is not the meaning of my words but the fact that I have the deplorable habit of repeating them. In my moments of weakness—this is one now —I am amazed by their lack of pity. How can they fail to see not only that I am suffering, but that I have ceased to live at all for the last three years? I arn condemned to play the part of a grumbling old man and as far as they are concerned I can play no other; but if I joined them, I would be deserting the truth, and they would be the first to let me know I had defected!" (April 4.) "Poor creature [Sonya], how she hates me! My God, help me! I don't mind bearing a cross, so long as it demolishes me completely. But this emotional tug-of-war is awful, painful and sad." (May 3.) "I saw in a dream that my wife loved me. Everything immediately became light and sunny. The truth is nothing like that. It is poisoning my existence. It would be so good to die." (May 5.) "I am suffering atrociously. Her soul is obtuse and dead; that I could bear, if that were all; but she is insolent and self-assured. . . . I ought to be able to put up with her out of pity, at least, if not love." (May 20.) "I have the feeling that I am the only sane man in a madhouse run by a madman." (May 28.) "The dreadful thing about it is that the luxury ancl sin in which I live were created by me; I am corrupt myself and incapable of doing anything about it. 1 cannot break the habit of smoking, I cannot devise a way of treating my wife without offending her and I cannot allow her to go on without any restraint. ... I keep looking. I try. . . ." (May 29.) "Why, really, am I necessary to them? What is the use of all this brain-beating? However hard the life of a vagabond (and it is not so hard as all that!), it cannot be anything like the agony I endure." (June 4.)

He had cut down his cigarette ration and given up eating meat and white bread, and tried to steady his nerves by working in the fields with the muzhiks. But he need only enter the house to return to the "life of debasement" in the person of his sons, sprawled about in armchairs, his too well-dressed daughters, Sonya with her swollen stomach, her face drawn by her pregnancy and her eyes full of resentment. On the evening of June 17 he had a stupid quarrel with her in the garden over the sale of some horses, which he had carried out without consulting her. As her voice began to rise, he suddenly felt that his cup was running over, the camel's back was breaking, he had to get away. He ran to his bedroom, grabbed up a knapsack, threw some clothes and his toilet articles into it, slung it over his shoulder and came out shouting that he was going to Paris or America. His daughter 'l'anya watched him go down the drive toward the Tula road. Sitting in front of the house, Sonya, her labor pains beginning, clutched her stomach and sobbed hysterically. Her second son Ilya came running, helped her to her feet and half-carried her to her room.

Tolstoy strode along the road under the moonlight at a furious pace. He had thought of leaving his wife before, since she kept saying how tired she was, of taking some broad-hipped young peasant woman with a bosom made for nursing and setting off for parts unknown, joining some group of emigrants. Once, in a burst of honesty, he had even told Sonya of his plan. She had not believed him. Now he was going alone. Lack of preparation. Besides, he didn't know where he was going. Halfway to Tula his conscience began to nag. Did he have the right, morally, to leave his wife just when she was about to give him another child? In his wrath he had forgotten this detail. Reluctantly, he turned back. He became gloomier with every step that brought him closer to the entrance towers of the estate. "In the house," he wrote, "I saw two bearded muzhiks playing vint—my two young sons. Their sister Tanya said, 'Have you seen her? . . I answered, 'I don't even want to see her!' And I came into my study to sleep on the couch. But I am too weighed down with sorrow to sleep. It's too painful. Now I feel sorry for her. I cannot believe she is made entirely of stone."

At three in the morning, just as he was about to drift off, Sonya, distraught and haggard, dragged herself to his room: "Forgive me," she said. "The child is coming. Maybe I shall die! . . He did not say a word, but stared fixedly at her and helped her to her room. The pains were coming faster. The midwife—the one from Tula?—sent the count out of the room.

In the morning of June 18, 1884 Sonya gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra, called Sasha. While the exhausted mother lay in her bed, Tolstoy was writing: "This event, which should have filled the family with joy and happiness, resembled some pointless and painful ordeal. A wetnurse has been engaged. If there is someone directing the course of our lives, I feel like complaining to him. It's too hard and too cruel. . . . Cruel for her. I see her heading for her ruin, and dreadful moral suffering. ... I have stopped drinking wine, I drink tea and suck on a lump of sugar, I eat no meat, I am still smoking, but less." (June 18, 1884.)

For the first time he confessed—to his brother Sergey who had come over from Pirogovo to congratulate the mother—that he was unhappy in his marriage and did not know what to do to get out of this "dread fill predicament." He also confided his grievances, by letter, to his new "co-thinker" Chertkov. Now there was a wonderful disciple, understanding, dedicated, uncompromising! "He coincides uncannily with me!" he wrote.⁵ He had a nightmare, however, that was as disturbing as an evil omen: "I saw Chertkov in my dream. Suddenly he began leaping about, he was nothing but skin and bones, I realized that he had gone mad!"⁶ What a pity that Chertkov's soul and Sonya's body could not be joined together to form one person. Many times, simply looking at her, with her round neck and broad waist and red mouth, he was on the point of forgiving her everything, even the fact that she refused to nurse the baby. Then one remark led to another; his patience at an end, he stormed out, slamming the door; she ran after him, wheedling, begging his pardon. "She tries to win me with her body," he wrote. "I struggle to resist, but 1 know I cannot, the way things are now. And living with a woman who is a stranger to your soul is horrible!"

On July 7, another sccnc. Tolstoy, beside himself, wrote some ominous sentences in his diary: "Until the day I die she will be a stone around my neck and the necks of my children. I must learn not to drown with this stone around my neck."

Later, lying beside her in bed after the light was out, desire awoke in him again. A certain warmth, something in the odor of her skin and hair made him dizzy. He wanted to hurl himself upon her as he used to do, drown his sorrows in the pleasures of his senses. She refused him. It was hardly a month since the baby was born. It was too soon, she- told him. He was hurt by the tone in which she rebuffed him—cold, "willfully mean." She was simply provoking him, of course. He could not sleep all night. He wanted to run away again. He got up and packed his knapsack, woke up his wife and, trembling with desire, disgust and resentment, poured out everything he had on his mind: "I told her she was no longer a wife to me. A helpmeet for her husband? She ceased to be a help to me long ago, she is a hindrance! A mother to her children? She refuses. A nurse? She won't. The companion of my nights? She provokes me, she makes it into a game. It was very unpleasant, and I felt how weak and pointless it was. I was wrong not to go. I think it will happen, sooner or later."⁷

That night, or another soon afterward, she yielded to his importunities. Complications and pains followed, and Tolstoy became alarmed. The midwife came to the rescue, and forbade "intimate relations between husband and wife." In dismay, the fifty-six-year-old husband rebuked himself for his brutality and raw schoolboy haste. "The midwife prescribes a strict diet (you can guess what I mean!) for a month at least," Sonya wrote to her sister on September 23, 1884. "I have l>ccn ordered to remain seated or lying down, not to walk, not to go out driving, not to get upset—nothing! It's a nuisance, but what can I do? I did not take care of myself before my confinement and I was not spared by others after it. . . . Lyovochka is quite alarmed and full of consideration for me, although he is unpleasantly surprised by my condition." This enforced chastity so tormented Lyovochka that he advanced the date of his wife's departure for Moscow, hoping to kill temptation by removing it.

Left alone at Yasnaya Polyana he thought of her constantly—as a male, "as a muzhik," he confessed in his letters. He begged her not to pay too much attention to what the Moscow doctors would say, as "they can only ruin our lives." And with what huge satisfaction he described his healthy, simple life in the country, working with his hands, striving for humility and talking to no one but the peasants. A little irritated by this homily, Sonya tartly replied:

"I see you have stayed on at Yasnaya Polyana to play at Robinson Crusoe, not to do the intellectual work I value above everything else. . . . No doubt you will say this is the life that corresponds to your convictions and you enjoy it. That is another matter. All I can say is, 'Be happy, much good may it do you!' All the same, though, it makes me sad to see such intellectual power as you have going to waste chopping wood, heating the samovar and making boots. These may be ideal as relaxation after work, but not as occupations in themselves. Ah, well, we'll speak no more of that! ... I comfort myself with the saying, 'Never mind what game the baby plays, as long as it keeps him from crying.'"

She was afraid her sarcasm might sting too sharply, however, and ended her letter on a conciliatory note:

"Farewell, my beloved, 1 kiss you tenderly. Suddenly I can see you clearly, and I feel my heart swelling with love. There is something wise and good in you, innocent and obstinate, that no one has but you, and it is illuminated by your affectionate solicitude for everyone around you and your look that pierces straight to the depths of every soul."⁸

Still under the effect of this wifely homage, Tolstoy learned the following day that Dr. Chizh had confirmed the midwife's fears and recommendations. Dismayed, he gave free rein to his remorse:

"Yesterday I received the letter you sent after seeing the doctor, and it has grieved and pained me, and above all, disgusted me with myself. All this is nobody's fault but my own, brutal, selfish beast that I am! And I set myself out to judge others and ape righteousness! I cannot tell you how upset I am. Yesterday I saw myself in a dream, full of contempt for myself."⁹

"Why, my beloved, do you worry so about my condition?" she answered. "You are absolutely not to blame; we are both at fault; perhaps it is the result of some mechanical thing that went wrong when the baby was being bom. Yesterday I was in great pain, something was flowing inside me as though an absccss had burst, but today there's not a drop and the pain is much less."¹⁰

And two days later: "Oh, Lyovochka, if I were to write to you at the times when I want to see you so badly, and tell you all I feel for you, I should burst into such a torrent of passionate, demanding words that you would be submerged by them. Sometimes I suffer from your absence more than I can tell. . . . But as I have told you before, I would suffer more to sec you miserable in Moscow than not to sec you at all. And just now you arc in such a good mood! Your love of music, your impressions of nature, your desire to write, those are you, the real you, the one you want to kill; but in spite of everything, that one remains wonderful, full of poetry, and so good, the one all your friends love in you. And you will not kill him, 110 matter how hard you try."

While these protestations of love, hyperbolic praise and tender counsels were flying back and forth between Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana, Sonya was not losing sight of the material side of the household. Since her husband was absorbed in his meditations and would not stoop to glance at the accounts, she was forced to replace him as master of the house. And its steadily mounting expenses worried her. According to her calculations, they needed 910 rubles a month® to

°Or $26co-$570 plus $280 plus $1700.

manage; 203 for the children's education (including the salaries of two governesses and two schoolmistresses), 98 for the servants and 609 for expenses and food. She informed Tolstoy of this and added that it was impossible to reduce these expenses and she wondered how much longer they would be able to meet them.

From the depths of his retreat, the philosopher smiled. How could Sonya, his wife, fail to realize that such trivialities merited no more than the contempt of the righteous? "Don't be angry, my darling, I simply cannot attach any importance to these money problems," he wrote to her. "These are not events, such as an illness, for example, or a marriage or birth or the acquisition of new knowledge or a good or bad deed or the praiseworthy or blameworthy habits of beings near and dear to us; this is a matter of our personal arrangements, and if we arranged tilings one way before, we can always arrange them differently now, in a hundred different way's. I know it annoys you often and the children always, but I must repeat that our happiness or unhappi- ness does not depend upon whether we spend or earn money, but upon what we make of ourselves."¹¹

Had she been able to read the outline for an ideal existence for himself and his family which her husband had conceived and inscribed in his notebook that very summer, Sonya would in all likelihood have been appalled: "Live at Yasnaya Polyana. Give the income from the Samara farm to the poor. Same for the money from Nikolskoyc, after distributing the land to the muzhiks. For us, that is for my wife, myself and the younger children, keep two thousand to three thousand rubiest of the income from Yasnaya Polyana as a provisional measure. ('As a provisional measure,' i.e., with the ultimate design of turning the money over to others later and restricting our own needs as far as possible; in a word, give more than we take, which is the supreme goal of all our efforts and the joy of our existence! . . .) Keep only those servants who are necessary to teach us their work and transform us, after which, having learned what to do, we will dispense with their services. All live together, the men in one room, the women and girls in another. One room must be a library for intellectual work, another must be a workshop. As an indulgence, we might also provide a separate room for those who cannot resist. ... On Sunday, dinner for us and the poor, readings, conversation. Our life, food and clothcs will be of the utmost simplicity. Everything superfluous, piano, furniture, coach horses, will be sold or given away. Concentrate exclusively on the sciences and arts that can be understood by all. Equal treatment for all, from governor to beggar."

] Or $5600 to $8500.

When, captivated by this mirage, Tolstoy returned to Moscow on November 3, 1884 and found the big house with its servants, schoolmistresses, indolent children, shiny new furniture, polished floors and white tablecloths, he had a rude awakening. lie was forced to admit that Sonya had reason to l)c alarmed by the growing strain on the family budget. Since it was out of the question to change their style of life overnight, literature would have to fill in the gaps left by agriculture. But since Lyovochka had stopped writing novels his royalties had fallen off considerably. lie couldn't care less, of course; but it kept Sonya awake nights.

Suddenly she had an idea that would save them all! Why should the profits from the sale of his books go to others? Following the example of Dostoyevsky's widow, Countess Tolstoy would publish her husband's works too.

At first Tolstoy was horrified at this mercenary scheme, but he eventually admitted that in the present state of their finances he had nothing better to offer. He, who devoutly desired to abandon his land to the muzhiks, refuse the income from his writing and live half-naked —here he was, literally about to sell his soul in order to please his family. To avoid compromising his principles entirely, he decided to sign over to Sonya the right to manage his copyrights as well as his property, which she was already handling. That way, at least, he would not have to soil his own hands in these diabolical affairs of money. As a matter of form, she protested that he was trying to push over onto her what lie regarded as a foul sin, but at heart she was delighted. As a limitation upon this concession to filthy lucre, he decided to restrict his wife's rights to the titles published prior to 1881, the year of his "rebirth." But the titles published before 1881 included War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Cossacks, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and the Sevastopol Sketches: the cream of his literary production.

Sonya immediately saw the enormity of the task that lay before her, as well as the profits that could accrue to the family from it. Overworked as she was, as wife, mother and head of the household, she valiantly launched out in her new business venture. Capital was needed. She borrowed ten thousand rubles from her mother and fifteen thousand from Stakhovich, a landowner and friend of the family. In a pavilion next to the main house on Khamovnichesky Street, she opened the "Publishing Office for the Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy." Every time he passed the sign Tolstoy glowered. It was himself they were selling in there. He, whose writing should have been a gift to mankind! After publicly proclaiming his indifference to worldly goods, he might well be taken for a hypocrite now, incapable of prac-

ticing what he preached. And all this in order that his daughter could buy more dresses and his sons stuff their faces! Soon piles of books mounted inside the shed. A clerk was hired to take charge of their distribution to booksellers. The money began to come in. . . .

Fortunately, to offset the degrading effects of this commerce, the pure, the irreplaceable Chertkov had suggested another, perfectly in keeping with the master's principles. Together they would found a publishing company, the Intermediary, to produce small, inexpensive, high- quality books for the common people. A publisher, Ivan Sitin, agreed to print and sell these booklets. The secretarial work was entrusted to a friend of Chcrtkov's named Paul Biryukov, a cultivated young aristocrat who had abandoned a career in the navy to devote himself to the ideas of Leo Tolstoy.t Together, Tolstoy and Chertkov selected the texts. The first scries included three stories by Tolstoy: A Captive in the Caucasus, What Men Live By, and God Sees the Truth but Waits, and a story by Leskov: Christ Visits a Peasant. Other "popular" stories by Tolstoy followed, works by Russian and foreign authors, translations of the classical philosophers.

At the helm, Chertkov proved a remarkable organizer and a stern defender of the Tolstoyan faith. He cared less for the artistic value of the works than for their potential influence upon the masses. Often, to point some moral lesson more strongly, he demanded that Tolstoy revise sentences that might create confusion in a simple mind. Although annoyed by this uncompromising rigor, the author ultimately yielded to the arguments of the critic. Little by little, Chertkov was becoming a cumbersome incarnation of Tolstoy's own conscience. However, the little books of the Intermediary series—costing five kopecks apicce— were selling by the thousands all over Russia. The author gained nothing from them, except greater fame. In six years, more than twenty million copics were printed.

Not to be outdone, Sonya, too, printed, published and sold. But her firm, unlike the Intermediary, was distinctly profit-making. In February 1885 she went to St. Petersburg with her daughter Tanya, to apply to the administration for authorization to include in her husband's Complete Works such hitherto unapproved titles as Confession, What I Believe and What Then Must We Do? Permission was refused. However, she took advantage of her stay in the capital to call on Dostoycvsky's widow. The two authors' wives-turned-busincsswomcn amicably compared notes. Mrs. Dostoyevsky, who had more experience, gave Mrs. Tolstoy some sound advice. They talked cost price,

I Paul Biryukov, introduced to Tolstoy on November 21, 1884, later became his devoted biographer.

handling expenses, registration and profit margins as they sipped their tea. "In the last two years she has netted 67,000 rubles," Sonya enthused. "I was very surprised when she told me she only gives five per cent to the booksellers."¹²

She was even more affected by another encounter. While she and Tanya were paying a social call to her aunt Shostak, the empress was suddenly announced. Flutter in the drawing room. The hostess snatched up her cane and limped hastily to the door. The ladies sank into deep curtsies. "I came forward," Sonya wrote to her husband, "and Mrs. Shostak presented me to the empress. Then she presented Tanya. I said, 'Ma frfleI frankly admit that I was in a dither, but I kept my wits about me."

Amiable and languid, the empress began a conversation with Sonya, in French: "Have you been here long?" "No, Madame, only since yesterday." "Is your husband well?"

"How kind of Your Majesty to inquire. He is very well." "I hope he is writing?"

"No, Madame, not just now; but I believe he is planning something for the schools, along the lines of What Men Live By." At that point, old Mrs. Shostak intervened with a honeyed smile: "He will never write another novel. He said so to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy."

Turning to Sonya, the empress murmured: "And do you not wish him to? That surprises me!" Sonya, taken aback, could not think what to answer and, with a naive ignorance of etiquette, suddenly said: "I hope Your Majesty's children have read my husband's books." The empress nodded magnanimously and uttered, with a smile: "Oh, I believe they have."

After reporting this conversation word for word in her letter to Lyovochka and the children, Sonya bubbled:

"I can hear you now. You're saying, 'Maman's head's been turned.' Truly, this meeting was the last thing in the world I was expecting."¹³ Lyovochka's answer was acid:

"That certainly was a stroke of luck! You wanted it so badly, that meeting. I am highly flattered by your account, but I dislike it. Nothing good can come of this. I remember there always used to be a man in the Pavlovsk Park, sitting among the bushes imitating the song of the

• (My daughter.)

nightingale. One day I struck up a conversation with him and from his unpleasant way of speaking I gathered he was connected with some member of the imperial family. Take care that the same thing doesn't happen to you." And he added:

"Why did you speak to her of what I am not writing instead of what I am writing? Were you too timid?"¹⁴

Sonya returned to Moscow at the end of February 1885, and on March 12 Tolstoy left for the Crimea with his friend Leonid Urusov, vice- governor of Tula, who was in the final stages of tuberculosis.

lie was moved to sec Sevastopol again—the heights where he had camped, the sites of the enemy cannon, all those places where violence and terror had once reigned. As he went over his war memories in his mind he felt, to his own astonishment, "a flush of energy and youth." Finding a half-buried cannonball, he even persuaded himself that it had been shot by a cannon from his own regiment, and was childishly pleased at the thought. Everything that belonged to his past—even his soldiering days—was pleasant; everything that belonged to his present- even his children—was a burden. The moment he returned to Moscow, he wrote in his notebook: "Today I thought alxmt my poor family: my wife, my sons, my daughters, who live with me and carefully erect screens between themselves and me in order not to see what is true and good. ... If only they could understand that there can be only one justification for idleness made possible by others' labor: to devote all their leisure to thinking and understanding themselves. Instead of which, tlicy spend it in futile rushing about, with the result that they have less time for thinking about themselves than laborers burdened by overwork. ... I have wondered why so many intelligent and good men live so blindly and badly. The reason lies in the power that women have over them. They let themselves be carried along by the current because that is what their wives or mistresses want. The whole story is told in bed."¹⁶

lie, at any rate, did not intend to be the victim of woman's wiles, the victim of a bed. lie might occasionally give in to sensuality, but he immediately caught himself up again. He spent the entire summer at Yasnaya Polyana, working in the fields and writing stories for the Intermediary,! revising his essay What Then Must We Do? and working 011 a long story, The Death of Ivan Ilich, which was moving ahead by fits and starts, depending on his mood. Chcrtkov and Biryukov came to see him, and it seemed to him that they had a most beneficial in-

t In particular, Three Old Men and Ivan the Fool.

fluence on his daughters. In October 1885, having stayed on alone, he received a letter from the eldest, Tanya, that was so reasonable he could hardly believe his eyes. In spite of Sonya, the girl was timidly beginning to turn toward her father's ideas.

"For the first time you acknowledge that your view of the world has changed," he replied on October 18. "My only hope, the only joy I dare look forward to, is to find brothers and sisters among my family instead of what I have seen in it thus far: remoteness, systematic disparagement and contempt, not for me but for the truth—unless it is a fear of something, I don't know what. And what a great shame it is! Death will come tomorrow. Must 1 take away with me this vague sense of misunderstanding between myself and mine, worse than between strangers? I am afraid for you, because of your weakness, your natural tendency to indifference, and I would like to help you."

In Moscow, however, the smiles of his two elder daughters were not enough to reconcile him to his family's way of life. He sus))ected Sonya of sabotaging his theories behind his back, in her relations with the children. With remarkable candor, she had written what she thought of him the previous year. He had kept the letter, and ever)' time he read it he received a chilling impression of narrow-mindedness and defeat. "Yes, you and I have been following different paths since childhood," she said. "You love the country, the people, the peasant children, you love the primitive life you abandoned when you married me. I am a city dweller, and no matter how I try to reason with myself and force myself to love the country and the common people, I shall never be able to devote myself to them body and soul. I do not understand and never shall understand the peasants. What I love is nature and nature alone, and with nature I could joyfully spend the rest of my days. Your description of the little muzhiks, the life of the people, etc., your tales and your conversations—it is all exactly the same as in the days of your school at Yasnaya Polyana. But it is too bad that you care so little for your own children. If they belonged to some peasant woman it would be a different story!"¹⁶

That woman certainly did not understand him. She nursed him, copied his manuscripts, published his works, ran to St. Petersburg to plead with the censorship committee, but she was not, really, an ally. What bothered him most was that she was making so much money from his books. She had just placed an advertisement in the newspapers, to bring in more subscribers. He was ashamed. And yet he could not deny that he, like the rest of his family, lived on the profits. Exasperated beyond endurance, he began to write to Chertkov:

"At the gymnasium (and the younger ones at home), the children

learn things—in particular a catechism—that they will need to know later at school. . . . Not one of them reads what I have written on these subjects; either they don't listen to what I say or they make some sharp retort; they don't sec what I am doing, or they refuse to see. . . . During the last few days, the subscription and sale of my books has begun, on terms that are very advantageous for us and very hard on the booksellers. I go out and see a buyer looking at me, the humbug, the man who writes against property and, through my wife's business, extorts every cent he can out of the people who read him. Ah, if only someone could trumpet the ignominy of it all in the newspapers, loud and clear and devastating! ... In the family, my daughters are my one, slender consolation. They love me as I should be loved and they love what I love."¹⁷

He did not have the heart to send this letter; it became irrelevant before he had finished writing it. After supper on December 18, 1885 a quarrel broke out between him and his wife, presumably on the subject of the "lie" of their life together. Frightened by the loud voices, the older children came running and froze at the foot of the stairs leading up to their parents' room. Sitting side by side in the hallway Tanya, Ilya, Leo and Masha¹⁸ (age twenty-one, nineteen, sixteen and fourteen, respectively) listened to the family tempest, the most violent their ears had recorded to date. Their father was announcing to their mother that he had had enough, he meant to leave her and, once again, set off for Paris or America! "When you overload the cart the horse just stops, he can't pull any more!" he shouted. And, with fearful violence: "You poison the very air around you!" The walls were shaking. No one dared interfere. "Neither of them," Tanya wrote later, "would give an inch. They were both defending something more important to them than life: for her it was her children's welfare, and she loved them to distraction; he, in defending his soul, w^:as fighting for what he loved above all else: the truth."¹" A little later the children saw a servant go by carrying an empty trunk. They realized that their mother was getting ready to leave home. They rushed up the stairs and flung themselves upon her, weeping, "Stay, Maman, stay!" Sonya, her eyes hot with tears, let herself be persuaded. But the moment she calmed down, it was Lyovochka's turn to become hysterical. "He was trembling and shaking all over with sobs," she wrote her sister on December 20. "I felt sorry for him."

The next day Tolstoy, too unnerved to resume his regular life with her, dccidcd to take his daughter Tanya to the estate of some friends of his, the Olsufyevs, forty miles outside Moscow. Tanya was delighted by this escapade and bursting with pride to take her mother's place

beside her father. On his desk he left a letter, no more nor less than an open indictment of his wife, who was stunned by it:

"For the last seven or eight years every conversation between us has ended, after painful conflict, with this: I tell you there can be no understanding or love between us until you have readied the same point as 1 have, whether out of love for me, or instinctively, or by personal conviction. ... If my conscience and reason command me to do something, I cannot disobey them and remain at peace; nor can I calmly look on while those I love, who know what conscience and reason command, disobey them too. ... By some tragic misunderstanding you failed to realize the depth of the crisis that has altered my entire life, and you responded to it with open hostility', or as though it were some abnormal, clinical phenomenon you had to deal with. . . . Everything that was important and precious to me became hateful to you; our quiet, modest, admirable life in the country, the people in it. . . . Then you began to treat me as though I were mentally unbalanced. You have always been bold and resolute, but from that moment on your determination became hard as rock, as happens with people who arc nursing patients whom everybody knows to 1)e deranged. . . . Our move to Moscow, the organization of our new life, our children's education, all of that was so alien to me that I was not even able to protest against what seemed to me to be evil. . . . And thus a year went by, two years, five years. The children have grown and their corruption with them, we have drifted steadily apart and my position has steadily become more false and painful. . . .

"I can see only three alternatives: 1. Act upon my rights and distribute all my property to those to whom it rightfully belongs, I mean the workers; in a word, give it to anybody, simply to deliver my children, big and little, from temptation and damnation; but I would be forcing this upon them, and that would provoke their anger and irritation and frustration and the result would be even worse. 2. Abandon my family; but then I would be leaving them to their fate and depriving them of my influence, which I believe ineffectual but which does, perhaps, make some slight impression upon them; I would be condemning my wife and myself to live apart, and in so doing would be disobeying God's commandments. 3. Continue to live as I have done, trying to fight evil with love and kindness. ... Is that what must be clone? Is it possible that I am to endure this torment until I die? . . . My children do not even sec fit to read my books. They think my literature is one thing and I another. But every inch of me is in what I write. . . . You arc looking for the cause, look for the cure instead. If the children were to stop gorging themselves (vegetarian diet) I should be happy and

gay, and not mind the petty affronts and snubs. If the children were to keep their rooms neat, stay away from the theater, show some feeling for the peasants and women of the people, read serious books, you would see me in a transport of joy and all my ailments would vanish at once. But this is not what happens, no move is made in this direction, willfully, out of sheer stubbornness. A fight to the finish has begun between us. . .

To this diatribe Sonya might have replied that after marrying her when she was eighteen, taking her to live at Yasnaya Polyana, associating her in his writing and the management of all his affairs, and begetting a dozen children upon her, nine of whom were still living, he did not have the right to demand that she give up every comfort in life overnight in obedience to "God's commandments." And besides, which God? He changed them so often! Had he forgotten what he once said about the family? Love, marriage, childbearing, the education of children, respect for ancestral traditions, affection for parents—they were all themes he had glorified in his early books. And now, after summoning his wife to join him at the altar of the self-sufficient little family unit, he would compel her to forswear her role as guardian of the hearth. Furthermore, there was not one idea in his whole arsenal that he had not contradicted at some point in his career. Sonya was not sharing the destiny of one man but of ten or twenty, all swom enemies of each other: aristocrat jealous of his prerogatives and people's friend in peasant garb; ardent Slavophil and Westernizing pacifist; dcnouncer of private property and lord aggrandizing his domains; hunter and protector of animals; hearty trencherman and vegetarian; peasant-style Orthodox believer and enraged demolisher of the Church; artist and contemptuous scorner of art; sensualist and ascetic. . . . This multiplicity of psychological impulses made it possible for Lyovochka to put himself inside the skins of many characters and hence to be a matchless writer of fiction, but it also complicated his partner's task. So many husbands had succeeded each other beside her inside tlic same skin that in order to preserve some semblance of stability in her life she was forced to oppose the ever-shifting course set by Leo Tolstoy.

"With all my children around me," she was to write, "I really could not turn myself into a weather vane, spinning around to point wherever my husband's fickle mind led him. In him, it was an ardent and earnest search for the truth, in me it would only have been blind mimicry, and bad for the whole family."

She was convinced that by adopting Lyovoehka's ideas but without carrying them to extremes, she would ultimately shape their lives into something at once Christian and reasonable. But this moderate policy

could not content a nature enamored of cataclysms like that of the master of the house. lie complained that his wife did not love him enough to accept the poverty he was yearning for with his whole being. As a mother she could not bring herself to make such a sacrifice, which she might have acccptcd at the beginning of their marriage. When she fought for her inheritance she was not thinking of her personal comfort, but of the future of those she had brought into the world. She would never be able to dispossess them of everything, deprive them of a proper education, turn them into laborers, peasants and beggars. Hie vow of poverty could not be imposed from without. The soul had to be predisposed to it and hers was not. Since tolerance was the essence of the Christian, Lyovochka ought to respect the views of his family. His behavior in trying to force them to adopt his ideas was that of a sectarian. What mattered to him was not that his family should be happy, but that everybody should think the way he did. His altruism was simply another form of selfishness. Didn't he keep saying that a real wife was one who had the "ability to absorb and assimilate ideas until she saw everything through her husband's eyes"? Indeed, to Christ all humans were equally precious. So why should Sonya give in to him? She felt as imperturbably at peace with her conscience defending the status quo as he did preaching against the bourgeoisie. Which was the greater sin: to conform to the law obeyed by all or to pretend to be God's messenger on earth? Sonya saw the intervention of divinity, not in her husband's vaticinations, but in the enormous powers he had been given as a teller of talcs. In her eyes, he served the Almighty by accomplishing what lie had been set on earth to do, and he betrayed Him by philosophizing and making boots, and no demonstration by Lyovochka, no speech, no threat could make her see otherwise. She was sure that by opposing him, she was protecting him from himself. After all, if he had not written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, who would have paid any attention to his philosophical and social writings? His message would never have got beyond a tiny circle of disciples; he would have been a peasant preacher, a visionary heretic, like hundreds of others in Russia. The thinker's ever-growing public had been won for him by the novelist. Didn't he realize, he of all people, with his hatred of misunderstandings, that his importance as an apostle rested on a quid pro quo? She might have written all these things to him in reply to the letter he had left for her, but where would that get her? She opted for a softer treatment:

"I would give anything to know how you are. But I'm afraid to touch these painful wounds which are not only unhealed but, it seems to 111c, have started to bleed again. ... I am happy to think that away from me your shattered nerves have been calmed. Maybe you will even be able to do some work. . . . Give the Olsufyevs all my blessing. . . . You are comfortable with them. You don't hate and condemn them as you do me. You sec? I was the one who wanted to go away and it was you who left. As always, I am the one who stays behind, with my worries and my hurt feelings."²⁰ Restored to reason, Tolstoy admitted his guilt: "I do not tell you this to pacify you, but, truly, I sec how badly 1 have wronged you. The moment I understood this and expelled from my soul all sorts of imaginary grievances, and resurrected my love for you and Sergey, I felt well again!"

He returned to Moscow, determined to accept a compromise between the life according to society advocated by his wife and the life according to God which was becoming increasingly necessary to him. Three weeks later a sudden death deepened the household gloom. On January 18, 1886, little Alexis, age four and one-half, the youngest Tolstoy son, died of quinsy after thirty-six hours of gasping, rattling agony. "Dear Tanya," Sonya wrote to her sister, "can your heart imagine my sorrow? I buried Alyosha today." Tolstoy took a more lofty tone, as was his wont: "All I can say," he wrote to Chertkov, "is that the death of a child, which I once thought incomprehensible and unjust, now seems reasonable and good. Through this death we have been united in a closer and deeper affection than before."²¹ And to a distant cousin, Mrs. Young: "My wife has been much afflicted by this death and I, too, am sorry that the little boy I loved is no longer here, but despair is only for those who shut their eyes to the commandments by which we all are ruled."²²

For a few months things went more smoothly between the two, each trying to make allowances for the other. Tolstoy finished his essay What Then Must We Do? and his long story, The Death of Ivan llich. and wrote more stories for the Intermediary, a virulent attack upon Nicholas I—Nicholas Stick—and a short play—'The First Distiller.

That summer at Yasnaya Polyana, he rejoiced to see his children rallying around him. Following their father's example, they all set to work to help the muzhiks in the fields. Even Sonya, in peasant costume, occasionally joined them with a rake over her shoulder. The men's team, which included Tolstoy and his two sons Ilya and Leo, began haying at four in the morning. "My father was good at scything," wrote Ilya, "but he perspired a great deal and one could sec it tired him." The other team were not such early risers: the girls, the French governess, Sergey. "The women," Tanya recounted, "lined up in a row, spread the swaths of hay out in the sun, raked them into heaps and carried them to the 'lord's court.' But we were not working for the lord; we worked for the peasants, who received half the harvest in return for cutting the hay in the 'master's' fields." After a noonday snack in the shade of the trees, the men took up their scythes again and went back into the tall grass under the blazing sun. At dusk, escorting a disheveled and dog-happy Tolstoy, the company made its way back to the house, singing. Sometimes Masha dropped her rake, beckoned to one of the peasant girls and broke into a wild dance. "Of course," Uya Tolstoy observed, "everybody did not share Father's ideas, and we did not all have our hearts in the work."

The "little lords" and "little ladies" also harvested the crops. For a time every member of the family was vying to sec who could do the most good deeds. Tanya went to visit sick peasants and wrote in her diary, "It was not at all difficult for me to dress and bandage Alyona's dirty foot." Ilya worked the plot of the mother of a large brood of children. Tolstoy repaired a widow's isba. He himself admitted, moreover, that this charity campaign was a form of play-acting. Children and guests dressed themselves up in colored kerchiefs and boots; they worked as though playing a sport, and showed each other the blisters on their hands with tender self-concern. But the main thing, thought Tolstoy, was to act right, and the right feeling would come later.

The peasants were only amused by these bucolic distractions; but they were perplexed when Tolstoy gave them a lecture on drunkenness and asked them to sign a pledge not to drink any more. He also exhorted them to give up smoking, since he had given it up himself. At his order, they threw their tobacco into a pit he had dug for the purpose. But behind his back, they continued to puff at their cigarettes and befuddle their brains on vodka. He knew this and it made him as miserable as a lie told by someone he loved. When he asked Chertkov to join the "Anti-Alcoholism League," of which he was proud to be a promoter in Russia, Chertkov replied that he could not take the oath because Christ had said, "Thou shalt not swear"; Tolstoy was unconvinced.

In the midsummer heat, he accompanied Ozmidov, his daughter and another disciple to the Tula station, from which they were setting out to the Caucasus to found a "Tolstoy colony."| Shortly afterward, while he was trying to set an example of the joys of physical labor, he had an accident: he was carting hay for a muzhik's widow, was thrown off balance by a false movement, fell from the telega and hurt his leg. He paid no attention to the wound and it became infected. Periostitis

$ This colony failed after five months.

developed. Bedridden, the patient reverted to his wife, who set rap turously to work nursing her bearded baby as he lay shaking with fever. She delighted in the most intimate and repugnant tasks, and in his weakened condition he found her touching and let her do as she pleased. For the first time, he was not afraid of death: "I am dying of a leg injury," he wrote to Ozmidov. "The river of life has dwindled to a tiny rivulet."²³ And to Alexandra Tolstoy, "Feeling myself within the house of God is excellent. I should like to remain there always and, for the moment, have no desire to leave."²⁴ He mockingly told his son, "I lie here and listen to the women and have become so completely possessed by their feminine world that I catch myself saying, 'I must have dropped off.'"

He did not really believe he was dying, but it was fascinating to imagine death, to smell it up close, to hazard a peek into the tomb, knowing he could pull back in time; lie compared his present thoughts with those he had attributed to Ivan Ilich. As soon as he was better, he drew away from his wife again.

"Now that he is almost well and can go outdoors, he has given me to understand that I am no longer necessary to him," Sonya lamented on October 25, 1886. "Here I am, rejected again, like some useless object." It annoyed her, when both the children and their father began coming to her, "wearing their masks of self-righteousness," "looking cold and stiff," to demand flour or clothing or money for the peasants. When Lyovochka asked her for a few rubles for "Ganka the Ibief," a revolting, foul-smelling woman who lived in the village, she refused, saying her moneybox was empty. Then, at a frosty stare from Tanya, who was siding increasingly often with her father, she yielded, grumbling and humiliated, and Ganka the Thief went off bearing her pittance.

Sonya had some compensation for these little blows to her pride; at least Lyovochka was no longer neglecting her only for his muzhiks and his philosophy. He had begun to write a play about the peasants. The first act was finished on October 26, 1886, the second three days later. Sonya rccopicd the manuscript in a flush of victory; but she was not blinded by love. "It is good, but flat; I told Lyovochka there were not enough dramatic effects," she wrote. He listened, revised, went on writing. All five acts were finished within a fortnight. Title: The Power of Darkness. Stakhovich, who happened to be staying at Yasnaya Polyana, had real talent as an actor, and Tolstoy asked him to read the play to the peasants. Since the action took place in the country, he thought it would be interesting to observe their reactions. Some forty muzhiks were assembled in the main room and the reading began. They listened silently, hanging their heads and looking blank. Only Andrey, who ran the Tula station buffet, occasionally broke into a loud guffaw. I lis bursts of merriment became even more inappropriate as the story of Nikita and Akulina unfolded, each scene more grisly than the one before. At the end, an exasperated Tolstoy asked his public what they thought of the play. The spectators looked at each other uncertainly. What could they tell the master, seeing they hadn't understood a word of it? At last, one of the ex-pupils of the Yasnaya Polyana school mumbled:

"It seems to me, Leo Nikolayevich, that in the beginning Nikita was doing all right. But afterward, he went wrong."

Tolstoy could get nothing more out of these people whom he held to be the best judges of art. That evening he raged to Stakhovich:

"It was all that Andrey's fault! Until now he looked up to you as a sort of general, you tipped him three rubles at the station buffet. . . . And all of a sudden you begin to shout and imitate a drunkard. How could he help laughing? . . . And his laughing prevented the others from understanding the meaning of the play."²⁵

He sent The Power of Darkness to Chertkov to be printed in the Intermediary collection, and began a comedy, The Fruits of Enlightenment. Passing the year's work in review, Sonya could proudly tell herself that apart from the essay What Then Must We Do? and a few minor articles, her husband's entire output had been, as she hoped, literary.

In the first part of What Then Must We Do? Tolstoy describes the Moscow slums he had seen during the census-taking. Here his accuracy of observation and the unfaltering logic of his discernment are remarkable. From page to page the shocked and horrified reader breathes in the stink of the cesspools, blinks in the gloom and feels his skin itching from head to foot. But the novelist soon yields to the moralist, and the emotion he aroused in describing the evil is dissipated when he begins to set forth the remedies for it. As disorderly in manipulating ideas as he is incisive in describing facts, he rants, threatens and promises with the naive self-assurance of an autodidact. The root of all evil, as others had said before him, is property. The rich, who produce nothing and revel in vice, luxury and idleness, attract the poor to the towns and enslave them. "The poor come to feed on the crumbs of wealth," writes Tolstoy. "It is surprising that some of them continue to work, and do not begin to seek easier means of making money: commerce, hoarding, beggary, debauchery, swindling and even robbery." Wage-earning and slavery are synonymous. And whoever says slavery says deprivation. The reason the rich can get away with such scandalous conduct is that they are protected by State and

Church. 'Hie State is a murderous vehicle devised by the violent to dominate the weak. In a mankind-according-to-Christ, there should be no State. Nor any Church. For the Church deforms the teaching of Christ in order to adapt it to the demands of the State. It is aided and abetted in this devil's work by science and art. The true scholars and artists are not those who are supported by State and Church, but those who "claim no rights, and recognize only duties," those who fight, suffer and die for the truth. "There arc no fat, self-indulgent and self- satisfied artists," Tolstoy concludes.

How to combat the evil to which mankind is sinking ever more deeply? First, by rejecting all the machinery on which society is now founded. Turn one's back on the State, refuse to serve it in any way, take no share in the exploitation of others, give up money and land, abolish industry—a source of pauperism—flee the corrupting cities, tear the conccit of education out of your heart and return to a healthy rural existence. God wants everyone to work with his hands and be self-sufficient. The mind is improved by the body's fatigue. The truly wise are the "peasant thinkers" on the Syutaycv model, the muzhik in sheepskin jackct. Down with intelligence! Long live simplicity!

The tiling that immediately strikes one about this sermon is the enthusiasm the author feels for religious ideas which he believes to be new but which in fact go back to the heart of the Middle Ages—the Walden- sian, the Ix)llard and Anabaptist brotherhoods, who taught the invisibility of the Church and the uselessncss of the sacraments and preachcd that the people should l>c free in relation to kings, magistrates and priests. On the social side, advocating a sort of communism in Christian sheep's clothing, he errs through over-confidence in man. If everyone loved other people more than himself and the world were inhabited exclusively by followers of Leo Tolstoy, there would obviously be no need of laws, courts, police or government. If all people were equally intelligent, strong and skillful, everyone would work for himself and it would not be necessary to divide labor according to individual capacities at the risk of establishing further noxious inequality. If mere non-resistance could convince and ccasing to fight could convert, we might demobilize the army and throw open the frontiers.

Unfortunately, human nature is not made of such delicate stuff. Aggressiveness, jealousy, sloth, falsehood and violence arc solidly anchored in our hearts. To pretend that abolishing evil's outward means of coercion will do away with evil itself is putting the cart before the horse. Once again, in presenting his doctrine, Tolstoy assumes that the problem has been solved so that he will not have to solve it, and replaces reasoned argument with prophetic but haphazard intensity.

In his anger, he hurls himself against everything his contemporaries might be tempted to venerate. The more universally an idea is accepted, the more it infuriates him. He would impose a whole new scale of values upon the mass, reject all that has been said and done before him; if need be, recreate the world. In passing, he doles out a lesson in con jugal meekness to his wife: a mother is the only woman entitled to man's respect, all others are prostitutes and that's that. (The days when he recognized their usefulness to society are long past.) "The mother will not urge her husband to engage in false and misguided strivings whose only aim is to profit from the work of others; she will regard all such activities, which might tempt her children, with loathing and contempt. . . . Such are the women who dominate men and act as their guiding light."

Upon reading this paragraph Sonya must have felt that she could never be a "guiding light" in the sense Lyovochka meant. However much he insisted that his philosophizing was more important than his novels, she would never believe it. Besides, if she had begun to doubt her judgment, this year's admirable Death of Ivan Ilich was proof that she was not mistaken. After so many volumes of woolly philosophy, this simple, profound, piercing story showed that at fifty-seven, Tolstoy's creative powers were still intact.

The idea for the story, originally entitled The Death of a Judge, was given to him by the death of a man named Ivan Ilich Mechnikov, a judge at the court of Tula, in 1881. He had heard the details from Mechnikov's brother. His original idea had been simply to write a diary of a man struggling with and then abandoning himself to death. But gradually he saw what the story might gain in tragic depth by being told in the third person, particularly in changes of lighting effects and camera angles. And the diary grew into a novel.

Ivan Ilich is a perfect specimen of the conscientious official, who has no religion but is supported by a few principles handed down from his parents; he does not steal, he does not take bribes, he is not unfaithful to his wife, he lives an "easy, agreeable, honest" life. His rise through the ranks of the administration keeps pacc with the gradual disintegration of his marriage. Indifference soon settles in, followed by irritation and sullen anger. "At rare moments amorous impulses still drove them toward each other, but not for long," writes Tolstoy. "They were little islands, brief ports of call before sailing back out onto the high sea of their latent hatred." The hero's material circumstances are so vastly improved by an unexpected promotion that he is able to move into a luxurious apartment, perfectly suited "to his rank," and he becomes totally absorbed in decorating and furnishing it. Antique furniture, bronze figurines, plates 011 the wall ... An echo of Tolstoy's joys and tribulations while he was supervising work on the new house in Moscow? "When there was nothing left to decorate, they began to be a little bored." But Ivan llich had fallen from a ladder while hanging curtains and, after a time, the pain began to grow worse instead of better. This is the prelude to a period of unremitting anguish for the judge. He senses that something dreadful is going on inside him, "something more important than everything that had happened to him until then." He consults doctors, who reassure but cannot cure him. His wife and daughter refuse to take him seriously, or feign cheerfulness in order to keep him from worrying even more. A chasm opens up between him and all people in good health. They are only play- acting; he, for the first time, has touched the essence. Condemned to his bedroom, he faces the thought of death. "I was alive and now my life is going away. It is going and I cannot stop it. . . . Where shall I be when I am no more?" As his illness wears on, he begins to feel more alone, less understood, less loved. His presence is a weight upon the living, he is preventing them from being happy, amusing themselves, going about their business. His wife and daughter stop in to see him one evening on their way to the theater. He hates them for looking so strong and clean and healthy, with the loathing of a diseased body for all cool, white, sweet-smelling flesh. His only friend is a servant, Gerasim, who wipes and washes him and sometimes holds up his feet, which relieves the pain a little. He feels sorry for himself, he bemoans his fate, he tries to recall his former pleasant life, and he is appalled to discover that all the memories he took for gold are nothing but false coin. "The closer he came to the present, the more uncertain and empty seemed the joys he had known. . . . Perhaps I have not lived as I should have lived, he thought." No matter how he rationalizes, his failure becomes more and more patent. Now he knows that all the time he thought he was succeeding in his career, he was actually failing in his life, and his "service, well-ordered existence, family and social interests were nothing but lies." Then what is man's purpose on

earth? Whv live? Whv die? His wife entreats him to have extreme unc-

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tion. He submits. Then he is seized with terror. He screams. He grows calm again. lie begins to listen attentively. "Where is death? What death? He was not afraid any more, because there was no death any more. Instead of death, there was only light."

Beyond any doubt, this double story of the decomposing body and awakening soul is one of the most powerful works in the literature of the world. The author employ's the same precision in his clinical analysis of the disease (cancer of the abdominal region) as in his description of the successive stages passed through by the dying man's soul. A dying man who is in no way exceptional, or even likable, and yet we identify with him because through him we imagine what our own death will be. We think of ourselves while Ivan Ilich moans in pain in his bed; we pass our own lives in review as he draws up the balance sheet for his. At the end of his torment, two things dominate: the terror of what is coming and the emptiness of what has been. No philosophical dissertation can ever equal in depth this simple "documentary"—unemotional, sharp, cruel, devoid of all artistic effect—of a sickroom. The most fervent challenger of modern society, the world of officialdom and middle-class marriage is not the author of What Then Must We Do? but the author of The Death of Ivan Ilich.

The first persons to read it were overwhelmed by its cynicism and grandeur. Stasov wrote to Tolstoy: "No nation anywhere in the world has a work as great as this. Everything is little and petty in comparison with these seventy pages."²⁸ On August 12, 1886, Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary, "I read The Death of Ivan Ilich. More than ever, I am convinced that the greatest author-painter who ever lived is Leo Tolstoy. He alone can keep the Russians from bowing their heads in shame when all the great things that have come out of Europe are lined up in front of them. But patriotism has 110 part in my belief in Tolstoy's immense, almost divine importance."

Tolstoy's toughness, in this story which he wrote for the cultivated classes, is equaled only by his gentleness in the simple tales he was writing during the same period for the common people to illustrate his catechism: love of God, love of one's neighbor, charity, poverty. Some of these "moralities," such as What Men Live By and Three Old Men, have a biblical purity of inspiration. Written in the words of everyday life, they can be understood by children. And yet grownups find in them, if not a specific lesson, at least an impression of freshness, a taste of spring—which may be more important.

If Tolstoy idealizes the common people in these delightful tableaux, he unveils all their hideous reality in The Power of Darkness. Why this shift from moderation to violence, admiration to execration? The reason is that although he honors the superior "wisdom" of the muzhiks and exhorts all intellectuals to follow in their footsteps, he is sometimes overcome with aristocratic revulsion at the physical and moral filth in which these primitive beings live. True, the capitalist civilization is the only thing that keeps them in their bestial condition. But in their present state, most of them cannot serve as examples to the bourgeois. In The Power of Darkness the author unconsciously contradicts What

Then Must We Do? But who cares? One ambiguity more or less was not going to make any difference to Tolstoy!

The subject of The Power of Darkness was furnished by an actual occurrence, on January 18, 1880, in a village in the government of Tula: after murdering a child born to him and his daughter-in-law, Koloskov, a muzhik, was stricken with remorse and publicly confessed his guilt.

Out of this unremarkable material Tolstoy wove a work of black, brutal

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despair. All the characters are heavily underscored and lean on their shadows. Nikita the farmhand, handsome and weak; Anisya—hot- blooded, completely dominated by wild sensuality; old Matryona, who encourages her son Nikita to commit adultery; Akim, Nikita's father, a muzhik with a stutter who aspires to saintliness. 'llie sin of the flesh begets crime. Anisya poisons her husband in order to be free to love Nikita. But Nikita, not content with sharing Anisya's bed, also seduces her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Akulina. A child is born. Going berserk, Nikita crushcs the tiny bastard between two boards, while Matryona and Anisya look on. But he does not have their strength of character. He appeals to them: "I can't go on! Where can I hide?" He thinks he hears the child whimpering. To atone for his crime, he waits for Akulina's wedding-day and then, kneeling down in the middle of the crowd, tells the whole story, urged on by Akim, his stammering father, who sighs, "God! Ah! There, God! . . /'

To add credulity to this tragedy of the downtrodden, Tolstoy pored over his pocket notebooks, veritable dictionaries of the peasant language, and sprinkled his dialogue full of the popular expressions, the old, flavorful, crude proverbs that were his delight. He admitted that he enjoyed himself enormously writing these speeches; they virtually wrote themselves. The charm of the words made him forget the horror of the situation.

The emotion his play aroused in everyone who read it encouraged him to try to have it produced by one of the major companies. He began to negotiate with the actress Savina. On January 27, 1887 Stakho- vich, the man who had read the play to the muzhiks before, read it at a party in the home of the court minister Vorontsov-Dashkov, in the presence of Alexander III, the empress and the grand dukes and duchesses. His second audience grasped the torments of the peasant soul more clearly than the first had. The tsar found Tolstoy's play an admirable work of art and said that in order to ensure its success it should be acted by a joint company from both the Moscow and St. Petersburg imperial theaters. He even promised to attend the opening night. But on February 18 Pobvedonostsev, minister to the Holy Synod, wrote to Alexander III to say that he was so upset after reading The

Power of Darkness that he was unable to "recover his spirits." According to him, the entire play was nothing but "negation of the ideal," "degradation of the moral sense" and "an offense to good taste."

"To my knowledge there is nothing like it in any literature," he went on. "Even Zola never reached this level of vulgar and brutal realism. ... It is a catastrophe, that at this minute enormous numl>crs of copies of Tolstoy's play have already been printed and are being sold for ten kopecks in cheap booklet form by peddlers on every street- corner."²⁷

Unnerved by this furious outburst, Alexander III changed his mind and said, in his reply to Pobyedonostsev, that he had admired the play but had been "disgusted" by it at the same time. "My opinion," he added, "is that the play cannot be performed because it is too realistic and its subject too horrible." A few days later, in March, he sent a note to his minister of the interior saying, "This ignominious L. Tolstoy must be stopped. He is nothing but a nihilist and non-believer. It would be well to prohibit the publication of the play in book form, for the author has already sufficiently spread about and sold his rubbish among the people."

However, the Alexandra 'ITieater in St. Petersburg was going ahead with its plans to produce the play. Rehearsals were under way and enthusiasm among the actors was at fever pitch when, on the eve of the first night, the play was prohibited.* Shortly afterward the censor also prohibited its sale in printed form. Faithful to his principles, Tolstoy had already announced through the newspapers that anyone might reproduce his text without paying royalties to him.

• The Power of Darkness was not produced until 1895, in Petersburg, by the Alexandra Theater, and in Moscow the same year, by the company of the Skomorokli People's '1 heater. It was produced in France by the Th&Ure Antoine, however, in 1888.