Tolstoy

2. Tiie Kreutzer Sonata

For Tolstoy and his wife, the winter of 1886-87 was relatively happy. After a few arguments that resounded like muffled echoes of the great scenes of 1885, each decided, willy-nilly, to put up with the peculiarities of the other. Tolstoy continued to philosophize as he chopped wood and stitched boots, while Sonya made the rounds of the drawing rooms, entertained and sold her husband's books at a stiff price. "He has changed a great deal and takes everything quietly and tolerantly," she wrote on March 6, 1887. "Sometimes he even plays vint with 11s, or sits down at the piano. City life no longer drives him to despair." Months later, "He seems contented and happy and often exclaims, 'How good it is to be alive!'"

In fact these moments of felicity were rare. Most of the time Tolstoy was "mild and spiritless." Especially when he returned to a vegetarian diet after more solid fare. Sometimes he ate nothing but vegetables, sometimes nothing but meat, and sometimes he drank only rum diluted with water, but his digestive troubles continued as before. One evening at table he complained that Sonya was "a woman of money." She retorted that she was selling the twelve volumes of his Complete Works for eight rubles, whereas he had sold War and Peace alone for twelve. He raged, but found nothing to say. Looking at him, a man nearing sixty, with a wrinkled face, whitening hair and sharp gray eyes lurking under bristling brows, Sonya yearned for her free, strong, happy companion of old, the writer and artist of 1865.

He had started to work again, but was producing nothing but moralizing articles, including one very big essay, On Life and Death, which he was try ing to write in a style that would be simple enough for a peasant to understand. "Continued association with professors leads to prolixity, love of long words and confusion," he wrote, "but with muzhiks, to conciseness, beauty of language and clarity."¹ As usual, Sonya began to recopy the manuscript, but as soon as she had transcribed a few pages, Lyovochka would rewrite them completely. "What patience and what persevercnce!" she cricd, half annoyed and half admiring.

Now that her children were grown or growing up, she had to fight on several fronts at once to maintain her authority. In every one of the Tolstoys she discerned some trait inherited from Lyovochka. At the table she sat with a half-dozen facets of her husband grouped around her, behind masks ranging from infancy to young adulthood. In a conflict, some sided with their father, others with their mother. But since she had raised them all, it offended her to sec any of them on the other side.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, complained that he was a stranger in his own family. He was especially disappointed by his two older boys. "Among my children there will be no one to carry on my work," he said to Strakhov. "If I were a carpenter, my sons would be beside me at my bench. . . . Alas, it is exactly the opposite. One of my sons [Sergey] is finishing his studies at the University and wants to be a civil servant. The other [Ilya] will be a soldier, and his head is al ready turned by shoulder bars. The third—but what is the good of talking about them? . . . Neither the third nor the fourth nor my daughters will follow the same path as I. ... It would have been better for me to have had no children at all!"

Naturally, he held his wife responsible for Ilya and Sergey's failure to understand him. Wasn't she the one who had brought them up as aristocrats? He was forgetting that he had not chosen to interfere while there was still time. Moreover, it was inevitable, once the boys were removed from the family atmosphere and involved in Moscow university life, that they would be tempted to compare their father's strange ideas with the more commonly-hcld opinions of fellow students and professors. Tlicy unconsciously opposed the university world to the Tolstoyan world. Sergey, the eldest—rough, taciturn, music-minded— did not conceal his irritation, when he entered the house to find it teeming with obsequious disciples. He also thought it unfair of his father to hold his mother to blame for the luxury he himself enjoyed. "Leo Nikolaycvich," he wrote, "demanded that the family simplify its way of life, but failed to lay down any limits and seldom supplied concrete details. The questions of where and how the family was to live, how the property was to be disposed of, how the children were to be brought up, etc., were left unsettled."² Although he venerated his father, he also regretted the extremes he was led to by his doctrine. "How were we to reconcile life according to God, the life of the pil

grims and the life of the peasants, with the intangible principles that had been instilled in us from the cradle?" he wrote. "We children often felt that it was not we who didn't understand our father, but he who did not understand us, because he was always busy with 'personal affairs.'"

After an erratic career at the University, Ilya had fallen in love with a poor girl, Sofya Philosofov, and made up his rnind to marry her. Tolstoy hesitated a long time before asking his twenty-two-year-old son the question that was burning his lips. Finally, one evening, he slipped into the young man's room and went behind a screen, then said in a low voice:

"Now nobody can hear us, and we will not be embarrassed because we can't sec each other. Tell me, have you ever had intercourse with a woman?"

"No," Ilya replied.

Then, behind his screen, Tolstoy sobbed with joy. "I began to weep with him," Ilya wrote. "With that screen between us, quite unashamedly, we cried heartily for a long time."

Later, Tolstoy wrote a pastoral letter to his son on marriage:

"The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry to assist each other in this task. The most selfish and hateful life of all is that of two beings who unite in order to enjoy life. The highest calling is that of the man who has dedicated his life to serving God and doing good, and who unites with a woman in order to further that purpose."

Before sending the letter, Tolstoy read it to his family. The girls found it sublime, but were surprised that it made 110 mention of "the love of man for woman and the blessings of procreation." The recipient's feelings were in no way altered by this cold shower and on February 28, 1888 Ilya married Sofya Philosofov, with the uneasy blessing of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy.

Leo, the third son, born in 1869, was a restless, changeable boy who, after a brief flirtation with the Tolstoyan doctrincs, soon derided them. For the present, acute inertia was the only noteworthy feature of An- drcy and Michael, the youngest boys, really 110 more than children.

Disappointed in his sons, Tolstoy took what comfort he could in his daughters. Tatyana (Tanya), the eldest, was a light-hearted, obedient, bright girl with mannish features and a brusque manner. Painting was her passion, but she also wanted to elevate her soul. At first she was attracted by society, but quickly abandoned it in favor of her father's precepts. In 1885 he had written: "It is far more important for you to take carc of your own room and cook your own soup than to make

a good marriage." This sentence dominated her for the rest of her days. With the zeal of a neophyte, she forced herself to wash her own linen, care for the poor and follow a vegetarian diet. Her private diary hears witness to her strivings after perfection. If she saw Mikhailo the tailor and his apprentice Sergey sewing a "sleeveless bolero" for her, she immediately loathed herself for her selfishness and uselessness: "The money I give them cannot compensate for the fact that two human beings have bent their backs and labored for me all day, whilst I did nothing for them." If a few days passed without her meeting any beggars, she deplored the fact as a guilty respite for her conscience: "Everything is hidden from us, even this living reproach, so that it may be impossible for us to remember that there arc men who are starving and naked." She thought of death, and calmed her fears by recalling her father's words: "If you rcgTct the loss of your body, think that every gram of it will surely serve some purpose and nothing will be lost. Nor will your spirit die." If the coachman caught cold waiting for her while she played cards with friends, she asked herself, in shame, "When will these poor people cease their senile obcdicncc to those who pay them?"³

Nevertheless, in spite of her desire to be worthy in all rcspccts of the great man whose name she bore, she could not always stifle nature. She loved the theater, she liked young men to pay court to her, and found it both "odious and enjoyable" to order pretty new dresses and shoes. Also, she understood her mother, although she did not agree with her, and pitied her and endeavored, by a constant display of affection, to make life bearable for her at home. "Mainan is torn apart," she wrote. "She works hard for the money that we, that is, Ilya, Masha and I, consider superfluous; and yet we insist on having it, in clothcs and all sorts of other things, and she is continually irritated by our inconsistency. It hurts rnc so to see her fighting against the good, that is, what Papa believes to be good, and is good indeed; to see how intolerant she is with anyone who makes an effort to improve Ills life. ... I am talking nonsense. I sound as though I am judging her, when in fact all I feel for her is love, tenderness and compassion."

She wanted to be her father's favorite, and was hurt because he seemed to take more interest in Masha. She secretly observed her younger sister and found her deceitful, obsequious and intriguing. "She licks Father's boots!" she wrote in disgust. Out of pride, in order not to be like her, she forced herself to disagree with the great man when all the time she was wanting to say he was right. After she chanced upon Masha's diary, she vented hcT spleen in her own: "It is a great misfortune to have a nature like hers: lying, scheming and, at the same

time, senuous and ostentatiously lofty and noble." And later, "When she is away, Papa is much sweeter to me. Comparing us, he must naturally see that she models herself after him more than I do, is more attentive to him, believes in him more blindly than I do."

If the thought of marriage occasionally crossed her mind, she thrust it out of sight. No husband could ever measure up to her father's knee. "Why marry, as long as he is there? If I were to get married I should be terribly afraid of losing contact with him," she wrote. Besides, she was horrified by her mother's description of the sexual relations between couples. "I am very happy to think that I am a virgin and have not had to undergo that fearful humiliation all married women suffer, as Mother's remarks have made so clear to me; she was so ashamed the morning after her wedding that she did not want to leave her room. She hid her face in the pillow and cricd. I am proud not to have known that and I wish I may never know it!"⁴

On this point Masha agreed with her older sister. For her, too, the ideal husband was Papa. She looked like him, moreover; she had his penetrating little gray eyes, his too high forehead, his thick nose and high chcekbones. Six and one-half years younger than Tanya, she was less easy-going, less sociable, more tormented and possessive than her sister. She had felt her father's moral isolation at a very early age, and resolved always to remain by his side. Putting "Tolstoyan Christianity" into practice, she, like Tanya, but even more than Tanya, followed a vegetarian diet and went in for manual labor and deeds of charity. She wanted to bccome a schooltcacher and devote her life to the muzhiks. Sonya, who had scant affection for her, disdainfully replied, "You were born counts and countcsses and counts and countesses you will remain." But Tolstoy was touched by his daughter's noble aspirations, and wrote in his diary, "I feel great tenderness toward her. Her only. She makes up for the others, I might say."

Gradually, he began to give her his correspondence to file and his manuscripts to copy, and dictated his letters to her. Every time Masha entered the paternal study, Sonya choked with jealousy. After serving him faithfully as secretary for twenty-five years, she could not bear to see her own daughter take her place beside Lyovochka. It was as though her husband were being unfaithful to her with the child. She would probably have suffered less had he hired an outsider, if only because adultery is easier to accept than incest. "I used to be the one who copied everything he wrote," she recorded on November 20, 1890. "It was my joy. Today he assiduously hides everything from me and entrusts his manuscripts to his daughter to copy. He is systematically killing me, cutting me off from his personal life, and it hurts me dreadfully. . . .

I would like to commit suicide, run away, fall in love with someone else." Less than a month later, observing that young Paul Biryukov, Chertkov's friend and Lyovochka's disciple, had become sufficiently enamored of Masha to contemplate marriage, she was at first offended by his impertinence and then took a malicious delight in it: "I'd like to get rid of Masha. Why keep her here? Let her marry Biryukov. Then I shall have my old placc next to Lyovochka, I shall copy his manuscripts and keep his affairs in order."⁵ A short while later came this dreadful cry: "Masha is a cross Cod has given me to bear. From the day of her birth she has given me nothing but trouble. She is a stranger in the family."⁰

The stranger remained in the family despite the young man's sighs, and Sonya was both relieved and disappointed. In fact, Masha's departure would not really have clcarcd the air in the house. It was impossible, in the same time and place, to lead the social life Sonya delighted in and the communitarian existence Lvovochka dreamed of. At Yasnava Polyana the countess continued her custom of entertaining extensively, neighbors, friends and relatives, all people of good breeding, polished by culture and dressed with discrimination, who rolled up with their servants in tow. There were picnics, bathing parties, croquet and tennis matches, concerts, amateur plays. But in addition to these distinguished guests, there were what the servants called "the Dark Ones." They came to look at the master, tell him how much they admired him, extort some piece of advice or money from him and help with his manual labors. Sonya wrinkled up her nose in their presence, for many of them gave off an unpleasant smell. She perceived the same smell on her husband's clothes after lie had been with them, and would light her perfume burner; and he would say, with a laugh, that she was "chasing away the evil spirits with incense."

Among the spirits were individuals of all ages and conditions, earnest idealists and adventurers, the inquisitive and the insane, university students and illiterates, popes and muzhiks, officers who had left the army, passing foreigners. Their devotion to Tolstoy was equaled only by their lack of consideration for him. The more they admired the master, the less compunction they felt about importuning him. And he made no protest, believing that he did not have the right to withhold his word from the faithful. He was the lay equivalent of starets Ambrose, the sage of Optina-Pustyn. There was no pilgrims' inn at Yasnava Polyana, but this did not stop some of them from staying 011 for days, sleeping in a shed, isba or cupboard in the servants' rooms. Although most of these people were worthless, Tolstoy did not lose heart "One more, and another and another," he sighed. "And it al-

way-s seems to me that the next one will be someone new and rare who will know what the others do not and live better than the rest. But it is always the same, always the same weaknesses, always the same low level of thinking."⁷ When one of his visitors was manifestly a scoundrel he said to his wife, to excuse himself for having let him come, "If he really is a wicked man, I can be more useful to him than to those who are better than he."

Sonya was not satisfied with this edifying explanation: "How unattractive they all are, the followers of Leo Nikolayevich's doctrines," she wrote. "Not one normal man among them. As for the women, most of them arc hysterical."⁸ She citcd the example of Marya Schmidt, a former schoolteacher who was now devoting her time to copying Tolstoy's censored books; she followed him along the paths like a shadow and burst into tears whenever she parted from him. Then there was Feiner- mann, a Jew converted to Tolstoy, who had left his pregnant wife and child to receive the master's light and, even more, his hospitality; and Butkevich, son of a Tula landowner, who had been imprisoned twice for revolutionary activities and considered himself to be a spiritual brother of Tolstoy on that account. He ate at his table, but never uttered a word—he just sat, with sleepy facc and eyes hidden behind blue-tinted spectacles; and there was Ivanov the copyist, who had a nimble pen and aspirations to saintliness, but punctuated his periods of labor with long rambles on the highroads and vodka binges; and the peasant Osipov, who spent all his time reading in the orchard and did not even bother to look up at the master's approach; and the blind Old Believer who reproached Tolstoy for not living according to his doctrine and cried out "Liar! Hypocrite!" at the sound of his footstep; and the seventy-year-old Swede who went around barefoot preaching moral and vestimcntary "simplicity," and had to be turned out because he was beginning to be indecent; and the two ccccntric Americans who had set out around the world, one to the east and the other to the west, and had chosen the home of the author of What Then Must We Do? as their rallying point; and the morphine addict who provided mathematical proof of Christian dogma; ancl big, dumb Khokhlov, who followed Tanya around out of love of Tolstoyism; and all the rest, the talkers, the lazy, the ignorant, the failures, the servile. . . .

Maxim Gorky said later, after spending a clay at Yasnaya Polyana, "It is most curious to sec Leo Nikolayevich among his Tolstoyans. lie is like a great steeple whose bell is heard throughout the world, and all around him scurry contemptible, cringing little curs who try to bark in tune, casting anxious, jealous glances at each other to see who yapped the best, who has made the best impression on the master. To my mind

these people are polluting the atmosphere of Yasnaya Polyana in a miasma of cowardice, hypocrisy, sordid intrigue and speculation on his inheritance."

Tolstoy's voice did not, however, draw only the dregs of mankind. A few intelligent and sincere figures towered over the flea-bitten rank and file Tolstoyans: such were Chertkov and Biryukov, who were handling the Intermediary publications, or the delightful painter Gay, who was called "Granddad" by the children, or the faithful Strakhov, or Rayevsky the surgeon, or Kern, the forestry inspector, or Syutayev's son, a conscientious objector recently released from the Schliisselburg Prison, or Wilhelm Frey, who had gone to America as a communist, been naturalized there and come back spreading propaganda for the ideas of Auguste Comte, or young Prince Khilkov who, without ever meeting Tolstoy, had followed his precepts and distributed all his land to the peasants, keeping only eight acres for himself. . . . Here and there in Russia and in the provinces of Tver and Smolensk in the Caucasus, little Tolstoy communities were springing up to confront their precarious destinies.

Abroad, Tolstoy's word was also gaining a hearing among the intellectuals in quest of a new faith. In 1887 young Romain Rolland, a student at the Fcolc Normale, wrote to the sage of Yasnaya Polyana to convey his high regard and ask for particulars regarding the importance of manual labor in educating the spirit. Tolstoy replied on October 4, 1887, in a long letter in French:

"In our depraved society—the society of so-called civilized people- manual labor is essential solely because the chief defect of that society has been and still is that the people make every effort to avoid working themselves, and exploit the labor of the poor, ignorant and unhappy classes who are their slaves, just like the slaves in antiquity, giving them nothing in return. ... I shall never believe the sincerity of the Christian, philosophical or humanitarian pretensions of a person who sends a servant to empty his chamberpot. The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served by others as little as possible and to serve others as much as possible. . . . This is what involuntarily drives a moral and honest man to prefer manual labor to the sciences and the arts: the book I write, for which I need the work of the printer; the symphony I compose, for which I need the work of musicians; the experiments I perform, for which I need the labor of the people who manufacture laboratory instruments; the picture I paint, for which 1 need the work of those who manufacture pigments and canvas—all these things can be useful to men, but they can also be—and are, for the most part—utterly useless and even harmful. And while I am doing all these things whose usefulness is highly questionable and to produce which I must, in addition, make other people work, there are an endless number of things to do right in front of me, all of which are indubitably useful to others and for which I need no one but myself: a burden to carry for someone who is tired, a field to work for its owner who is ill, a wound to dress; not to mention those thousands of things within our immediate reach, for which we need no one's help, which give instantaneous pleasure to those for whom we do them: planting a tree, raising a calf, cleaning a well arc actions which are in- contestably useful to others and an honest man cannot fail to prefer them to the dubious occupations which are proclaimed by our society to be man's highest and most noble callings."

The year before, 1886, Paul DdrouRde had been in Russia to begin negotiating a Franco-Russian alliance, and had gone to Yasnaya Polyana out of curiosity. Paradoxically, the meeting between the apostle of non-violence and the author of Chants du soldat was most cordial. Tolstoy found that this "revengist" had his attractive side; but at table, when the guest said he hoped another war would soon return Alsace and Lorraine to France, nobody supported him. Then, at his request, Tolstoy took him out to the fields and questioned the muzhiks to see whether, in case there was a war, they would be willing to fight the Germans as allies of the Frcnch. "What for?" answered Prokopy, one of the peasants. "Let the Frenchman come work with us, and bring the German along with him. When we've finished we'll go for a walk. And we'll take the German with us. He's a man like all the rest." Tolstoy was jubilant, but DЈroulЈde took a disgruntled departure.

Other foreigners followed: scientists, authors, philosophers, travelers —Masaryk, professor of philosophy and future president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia; Loewcnfcld, director of the Schiller Theater; Stock- heim, specialist in tocology; the physiologist Charles Richet . . . Tolstoy saw them all. "It is the price of Lyovochka's greatness and the fame of his doctrine,commented Sonya.

This already numerous court of adulators and tourists swarming around Tolstoy did not lessen his preference for the iron-willed Chertkov. Even in his absence, the master's thoughts were filled by this man. He had just married Anna Konstantinovna Dietrich, a thin, pale student with unhealthily dilated eyes, who adored philosophy, worshiped her husband's ideas even more fervidly than he himself and dreamed only of becoming his collaborator. She helped Chertkov to transform their estate at Lizinovka into a ccntcr for nco-Christian propaganda. From his headquarters, the disciple sent missives to the master in which hymns of praise alternated with pious admonitions. Their intimacy was so complete that Tolstoy confided all his family troubles to him, in addition to his metaphysical torments. One day Chertkov wrote how fortunate he was to have married such a peerless spiritual companion and how he pitied Tolstoy for being deprived of this blessing. The letter fell into Sonya's hands and she flew into a rage: "That obtuse, scheming, false man, who has managed to ensnare Leo Nikolayc- vich, would like (no doubt in the name of Christian principles) to break the ties that have bound us so closely for twenty-five years," she wrote on March 9, 1887. "All relations with Chertkov must cease, he is nothing but deceitfulness and evil." Fortunately, Chertkov's visits were rare; he operated long distance, distilling his poison through the mail.

On July 3, 1887 the children arranged a little concert, featuring Lias- sotta, a pupil at the Moscow Conservatory of Music who had been engaged to give violin lessons to the third Tolstoy son. Liassotta ancl Sergey, playing the violin and piano respectively, gave a performance of the Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy, who was very fond of Beethoven, listened with tears in his eyes; then, during the presto, unable to control himself, he rose and went to the window where, gazing at the starry sky, he stifled a sob. Sonya received the benefits of his transports later that same evening, when they were alone: as she wrote immediately afterward in her diary, under the influence of the music he had become "the affectionate and tender Lyovochka of old." A few weeks later she discovered that she was pregnant. On September 23, 1887 it was a mother-to-be whom Tolstoy kissed on both cheeks in front of his entire family, assembled to celebrate the couple's silver wedding anniversary; but Sonya was too embarrassed to announce her condition yet. And Lyovochka, looking back over his long wedded life, commented laconically in his pocket notebook, "It could have been better!"

That summer a painter, Repin, came to stay at Yasnaya Polyana and painted two portraits and a large number of sketches of the master. Alexandra Tolstoy also came, and did her best to avoid arguments with Lyovochka over his anti-Orthodoxy. In spite of all the comings and goings in the house, and his worries about some of his peasants who had been ruined by a fire, Tolstoy worked steadily on a number of important articles, until he returned to Moscow with the family on Octobcr 26, 1887. While writing On Life and Death, he began planning a soul-staggering, "definitive" novel against sensuality. But perhaps his faithful flock would reproach him for cursing the evils of the flesh with his wife in an advanced stage of pregnancy; to parry their thrusts, he reminded them that procreation in the state of wedlock was lawful and even rccommcndable.

"It is not licentiousness," lie wrote to Chertkov 011 March 20, 1888, "but the will of God. ... If no more children were born, we could not go on hoping that the kingdom of God on earth will ultimately arrive. We are already corrupt, and it is a struggle for us to purify ourselves, whereas in the new generation pure souls arc coming to light in every family, and they may remain so. The river is cloudy and full of filth, but many springs flow into it and there is still hope that one day the water will all become dear."

Eleven days later, on March 31, in Moscow, after two hours of agonizing pain, Sonya gave birth to her thirteenth child, a boy, who was baptized Ivan (Vanichka). When the sixty-year-old father picked up the baby in his arms and bent his gray beard over it, the mother could not restrain her tears of gratitude. "It is a miracle from Lyovochka!" she wrote to her sister, on April 11. "lie is so glad it is a boy and is full of tenderness for it. I can't say whom he looks like. lie is long-limbed and has cloudy eyes and dark hair, but it seems to me it's always the same baby, just a continuation of the previous ones, not a new person."

Two weeks after his wife's confinement, the proud father decided that he needed to stretch his legs and set off to walk to Yasnaya Polyana with a pack on his back, accompanied by the young son of Gay, the painter. The hikers covered the hundred and thirty miles in five days, through rain, wind and sun. Arriving at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy felt twenty years old. When Sonya wrote, "Little Ivan is too thin, he is not developing well and I am terribly worried about him,"¹⁰ he replied with sublime confidence:

"Don't worry too much about Ivan, dear heart, God has given us a little one, and will provide nourishment for him too. ... I feel so good, so light and simple and affectionate toward you, as you toward me, I hope."¹¹

Back in Moscow, he heard the Kreutzer Sonata again, played by Lias- sotta and Sergey at a gathering of friends in the family drawing room. Repin, the painter, and Andrcyev-Burlak, an actor, were among those present. Subjugated anew by Beethoven's music, Tolstoy proposed that they interpret the feeling the music inspired in them, each using the tools of his own art. He would write a story called The Kreutzer Sonata, and the actor would read it in public in front of a picture painted for the occasion by the artist. The previous summer, at Yasnaya Polyana, the painter had told him about a stranger he had met in a train one day, who had recited the tale of his conjugal woes with tears in his eyes. Tolstoy seized upon this, combined it with one of his own unfinished short stories—T/ze Man Who Murdered Ilis Wife—and felt he had hold of an awesome, profound, challenging subject, the kind he liked these days. Since the story was to be recited by Andreyev-Burlak, he thought it would heighten the tragic tone to write it in monologue form. But Andreyev-Burlak died in May of that year, Rcpin forgot his promise to paint a picture and Tolstoy alone carried out his project.

Between March and May 1888 he sketched out the novel in which, for the first time, the character of the musician appears. Then he put the manuscript aside, but continued to think about this strange fable in which sexuality and family life were the villains. As always, when he had found an idea that seemed right to him, he needed to carry it to the extreme. The further his deductions led him into absurdity, the more strongly he believed he must be inspired by God. He, who had once written to Chertkov in praise of procreation in wedlock, suddenly began preaching the necessity for conjugal abstinence to the same correspondent. According to St. Matthew (19:12), Christ had said, "For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." All this meant, affirmed Tolstoy, was that in order to live in accord ancc with God's word it was necessary, if not actually to mutilate one self, at least to forget that one had an instrument for sex. To this end, it was advisable for husband and wife to sleep in separate rooms. If they were unable to resist temptation and, by mishap, a child should be born of their commerce, they must refrain from all further inter course so long as the mother was nursing her offspring. "Otherwise, the woman may perhaps become a good mistress, but she will certainly become an overworked mother and a sick, irritable, hysterical person." wrote Tolstoy on November 6, 1888, to Chertkov. "Therefore let everyone try not to marry and, if he be married, to live with his wife as brother and sister. . . . You will object that this would mean the end of the human race? . . . What a great misfortune! The antedilu vian animals are gone from the earth, human animals will disappear too. . . . I have no more pity for these two-footed beasts than for the ichthyosaurus."

Tn March 1889, during a visit to his friend Prince Urusov, he took up his manuscript again and revised it. "I read [The Kreutzer Somite] to Urusov," he noted. "He liked it very much. It is true that it is something new and powerful." Upon his return to Moscow, he received a package of books and pamphlets from America 011 the Shakers, a sect that preached the abolition of sexual relations, 'lliis coincidence struck him as a sign of divine approbation. "I read the writings of the Shak ers," he wrote 011 April 9, 1889. "Perfect. Total chastity. Odd to receive them just when I am concerned with the question." The next day he wrote to Chertkov: "I do not agree with the solution advocated by the Shakers, but I cannot deny that it is far more reasonable than that which results from our universally accepted institution of marriage. I shall not overcome this problem in a hurry, because I am a dirty, libidinous old man!"

The idea of innocence was so appealing to him that he wrote in his notebook, "Must propose the Shaker arrangement to [Sonya]." But he did not dare speak to her about it yet. If she had accepted, which of the two would have been more cruelly punished?

All summer long he worked on the book with grim passion. For the love of God he had given up property, hunting, meat and tobacco, one after the other. Now lie wanted to give up sex. For him, the enemy was woman; and the reason was that he was too strongly sensual not to be continually led into temptation. In physical pleasure he abandoned some part of himself; when the act was over he hated the woman who had gained that moment of power over him and he scurried back into his shell, determined not to come out of it again, for he was truly happy only in the solitary recital of his aspirations toward Christ and his grievances against his family, his literary projects and the gurgles of his stomach. Impenitent old Narcissus, eternally preoccupied with himself, he blew on his image in the water for the sheer pleasure of seeing it come back again when the ripples died away.

Superficially, there was nothing in common between Leo Tolstoy and Pozdnyshev, the hero of The Kreutzer Sonata who tells his fellow passenger in the train compartment how he murdered his wife out of jealousy. But the theories propounded by this character are so exact a copy of the author's convictions that, apart from the murder, the entire story might be autobiographical. A great deal of water had flowed under the bridge since Tolstoy propounded his views of love leading to domestic felicity in War and Peace. In Anna Karenina, he condemned adulterous passion while still glorifying marital affection, but the Levin/Kitty couple is already being undermined by malaise. In the third phase—The Kreutzer Sonata—even conjugal bonds are accursed. As coldly as he previously analyzed the death agony of Ivan Ilich, he now analyzes the death agony of the Pozdnyshev marriage. In passing, women in general and Sonya in particular are hauled over the coals. To give a touch of plausibility to his indictment, the author is continually enriching it with details from his own experience. Like Tolstoy, Pozdnyshev also shows his private diary to his fiancee: "I remember her distress, followed by alarm and despair, when she learned those facts. I saw her almost on the point of breaking off. Would she had only done so!" Elsewhere, Pozdnyshev-alias-Tolstoy tells how his wife refused to nurse her baby: "In this way she was deprived of her sole weapon against coquetry'. A wetnurse took the child; in other words, we took advantage of a woman's poverty, need and ignorance to tear her away from her own baby and give her ours and, in return for this service, put a beribboned cap on her head." And here is the old grievance of the move to Moscow: "Really, there are some curious coincidences: just when the parents cannot bear to live together a moment longer, it becomes essential to go to the city for the children's education." Or, better still: "When the children began to grow up and have definite personalities, they bccamc allies which each of us tried to draw into his camp. They suffered dreadfully, poor things, but in our un ending battle we had other things to consider besides their feelings."

It is hard not to imagine the irritation Tolstoy must have felt in Sonya's presence when Pozdnyshcv says, speaking of his wife, "1 watched her pouring out her tea, putting the spoon in her mouth and swinging her foot, noisily sucking on the liquid, and found myself loath ing her as though she were committing some hideous crimc. I did not notice, then, that these periods of animosity occurred with perfect predictability and corresponded to the other periods, which we call of love. Period of love, period of hate; period of violent love, prolonged period of hate; more feeble manifestation of love, shorter period of hate . . . We were two convicts serving life sentences of hard labor welded to the same chain, we hated each other, we were making each other's lives hell, and trying all the time not to see it. At that time I had not yet learned that this hell is the fate of ninety-nine per cent of all couples."

And how Pozdnyshcv's quarrels with his wife echo those of the author with Sonya. "I shout at her, 'Be quiet!' or something of the sort; she rushes out of the room and runs to the children. I want to hold her back and finish my explanation, I catch her by the arm. She pretends I have hurt her and screams, 'Children, your father is beating me!' I go back to my study, lie down and begin to smoke. ... I think of running away, hiding, going to America. . . . Around eleven o'clock her sister arrives as emissary. It begins as usual: 'She is in a dreadful State. What is the meaning of this?'"

The virtuoso's arrival on the scene, his playing of the Kreutzer Sonata, the birth of jealousy in Pozdnyshev's heart, and the murder, are all imaginary, of course. But from l>cginning to end, every line of the book reveals the author's disgust with marriage—nothing but 'legalized prostitution"; his hatred of women—"who take revenge upon us by playing on our senses"; his conviction that in order to obey the will of God, man must refrain from reproduction—"The strongest passion of all, the most perfidious, the most stubborn, is sexual passion, carnal love. ... As long as mankind shall endure, it has an ideal to strive for and its ideal is certainly not that of rabbits and swine, which is to multiply as often as possible, nor that of apes and Parisians, which is to enjoy sexual pleasure with the highest possible degree of refinement. . . ." Or, "Will the human race be wiped out because a dozen or a score of individuals refuse to behave like pigs?"

Novel of manners? Propaganda pamphlet against society? Confession? Profession of faith? The Kreutzer Sonata is all these. Violent, heart-rending, grotesque, tragic, admirable—it is a powerful book because of its fervent sincerity. Once again, the author has indulged in breast-beating; but this time he has added a final touch of refinement by dragging his wife through the mud with him. lie unhesitatingly offers up to the public the secrets of his periods of rut, his quarrels, his loathing; he flings open their bedroom door. And he knew perfectly well that his readers, who were accustomed to the autobiographical element in his writing, would identify Sonya with the victim, and that some would pity her and others mock her. How was it that he, who professed to be filled with loving kindness for his fellow creatures, who was continually afraid of inadvertently hurting anyone's feelings, did not imagine what an unspeakable humiliation lie would inflict upon his life-partner by publishing this book?

Whether unwittingly or out of conscious cruelty, he did more than merely publish it: he gave the manuscript to her to read and copy in her own hand. On July 4, 1889 he wrote in his diary, "Sonya is copying it and is very much affected by it!" Singular gift for a silver wedding anniversary. She read, cursed, wept. After twenty-five years of preaching to all Russia that woman's most noble calling was marriage and childbirth, how could this man publicly deny his ideal? How dared he tell others to be chaste when, at sixty, he had got her with child for the thirteenth time? She tried to reason with him, but he swelled out his chcst and spoke of his mission on earth, and she bowed to the majesty of the written word.

As soon as it had been copied the book was taken to Moscow, and on October 28, 1889 Koni read it to a small group of writers gathered in the Kuzminsky home; a second reading took place the next day in the editorial offices of the Intermediary; during the night, unpaid scribes made copies of the text and in less than a week nearly eight hundred lithographed copies were circulating in St. Petersburg; their numbers doubled, tripled, invaded the provinces. Before the book was even printed, before the censor had given its decision, the case was being hotly debated all over Russia. According to Strakhov, people no longer greeted each other in the street with "How are you?" but with "Have you read The Kreutzer Sonata?" Some hailed it as a work of genius, others as a scandal; the Church fulminated, and so did the partisans of free love, and single women, and mothers! ... A large number of articles appeared and even literary works, the most noteworthy of which is a story by Leskov, On "The Kreutzer Sonata."

In the midst of this turmoil, Sonya felt as though waves of mud were spattering her from head to foot. "Everyone feels sorry for me," she wrote, "from the emperor on down. . . . But why consult the opinions of others? Deep in my own heart, I always felt that the book was directed against me, mutilated me and humiliated me in the eyes of the whole world, and was destroying even, thing we had preserved of love for one another. And yet never once in my entire married life have I made a single gesture or given a single glance for which I need feel guilty toward my husband."

Her sole obsession now was not to become pregnant again. What a howl of derision would rise from the public then! For, need it be said, after stigmatizing all fornicators Tolstoy had been unable to ab stain himself. Upon leaving his wife's arms, he wrote in his diary, "And what if another baby came? How ashamed I should be, especially in front of my children! 'Ihey will compare the date [of conception! with that of publication [of The Kreutzer Sonata]."¹- To remove temptation, lie wanted Sonya to sleep alone. But she refused. So he must rely on his own willpower. When he readied out for her, she had mingled feelings of triumph and disgust. "The coldness and severity melted," she wrote, "and the end was the same as always! . . ." And, "He is being charming, cheerful and affectionate again. It is, alas, always for the same reason. If those who have read and are reading The Kreutzer Sonata could have one glimpse of Lyovoehka's love life, if they could sec what makes him so gay and kind, they would hurl their idol down from the pedestal they have put him on."¹³

At the beginning of 1890 the censor Still had not announced its decision. Pobyedonostsev wrote, "A powerful work. If I ask myself whether I must condemn it for immorality, I cannot bring myself to say I should."¹⁴ Fmpcror Alexander III found it a magnificent work, but the empress was shocked. I11 the end, under pressure from ecclesiastical circles, the minister of the interior forbade the publication of The Kreutzer Sonata both as a separate volume and in the Collected Works.

Tolstoy was not unduly incensed by this. He had said what be wanted to say. It was no more concern of his whether the book was printed or circulated in manuscript form. He was more disturbed, however, by the criticism he was receiving from a large body of readers. His mail had tripled. From all sides strangers were begging him to tell them whether he really desired the extinction of the human race. Chertkov himself was pestering the master: "In its present form," he wrote to Tolstoy, "this book [The Kreutzer Sonata] can only sow doubts in the public mind and fail to clear up its uncertainties, whereas you might have settled them by emphasizing a few Christian concepts."

Goaded by all this misinterpretation, Tolstoy undertook to write an afterword to the book. On a much smaller scale, it gave him as much trouble as the novel itself. How could Chertkov, who knew his master so well, imagine that in elucidating his thesis he would tone it down? Once he was well in his stride, Tolstoy made straight for the goal, mowing down everything in his way. Starting with the idea that in order to live a Christian life it was necessary to dominate the appetites of the flesh, his afterword recommended physical exercise, which diverted the mind from impure thoughts, and criticized gastronomy, which was conducive to sensuality. Continence, he affirmed, w^ras indispensable outside marriage and desirable within. Besides, marriage was not a creation of Jesus but an invention of the Church. "There has never been and never can be a Christian marriage, just as there never has been and never can be a Christian religious ritual or Christian professors of Christian fathers or Christian property or a Christian army, court or state."

While he was pounding out this diatribe, Sonya again bccame terrified of having been fecundated by her champion of sterility. "I am very much afraid I am pregnant again," she wrote on December 25, 1890. "Everyone will hear of this ignominy and they will all be maliciously repeating the joke that is making the rounds in Moscow, 'That is the real postscript to The Kreutzer Sonata.'"

She felt she needed to understand her husband better, and decided to recopy the diaries he had kept in his bachelor days. Some of the pages still offended her as they had done when she first read them. "Today I was copying Lyovochka's diaries," she wrote, "and stopped where he says, 'Love does not exist, there is only the body's need of physical communion and the reason's need for a companion in life.' Had I seen that sentence twenty-nine years ago, I would never have married him."¹⁸ "The conncction between those old notes in Lyovochka's diary and The Kreutzer Sonata is so obvious! And I am the fly buzzing in the spider's web and the spider is sucking my blood."¹⁰

When Lyovochka found out that she was ferreting about in his papers, he became angry. "Why stir up all that old trash?" he said.

She retorted, with vindictive glee, "Suffer for it, siuce you've lived so badlyl" Then he forbade her to continue copying. "I am very much annoyed," wrote Sonya, "because I had already finished a large part of it and had only a little more to do in the notebook I was working on. But I shall continue in secret, and I shall finish, whatever happens."¹⁷ She had lost all respect for him, she laughed at his virtuous poses, she even dared to question the virtues of a new vegetarian diet he had found in a German review: "No doubt the person who advocates this diet follows it as closely as Lyovochka, who preaches chastity in The Kreutzer Sonata and yet behaves like . . "¹⁸

Not content with contradicting him whenever she could, she wanted public absolution for the indignity he had inflicted upon her in The Kreutzer Sonata. By way of riposte, she wrote an autobiographical novel entitled, Who Is To Blame? Using the subject of The Kreutzer Sonata but arranging it to suit her own purposes, she described a man of the world, Prince Prozorovsky, a sensual brute who, at the age of thirty-five, marries a girl of eighteen, Anna, pure, mischievous, noble and pious. While they are still engaged, he is already casting lewd glances at her hips. After the wedding ceremony he cannot even wait to get inside the house, but takes the poor girl like an animal, in the carriage, in spite of the bumps and jolts. She is humiliated by this for the rest of her life. Later, a consumptive young painter falls in love with her—platonically—and the dreadful Prozorovsky, a violent-tempered man recking of tobacco, is unable to control his jealousy and kills the woman who had done no wrong.

Sonya was very proud of her story and read it to anyone who would listen.¹⁹ Her friends had some difficulty persuading her not to publish it. If she heeded them, it was only because more serious threats against her husband were looming on the horizon. She was ready and willing to attack him en jamille, but would not tolerate anyone else attacking him from outside, and even though she hated The Kreutzer Sonata, she was infuriated because the censor had prohibited the publication of Volume XIII of the Complete Works, which contained it. Friends in good standing in court advised her to try a personal appeal to the tsar to have the decision reversed. "If I liked The Kreutzer Sonata, if I believed Lyovochka would write any more artistic books in the

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future, I would go," she wrote.²⁰

Two things helped her to overcome her reluctance. One was the fact that the prohibition of Volume XIII would represent a substantial fi nancial loss, and the other was the fact that by openly militating for the book she would prove to the world that there was no connection between her married life and the abominable tale recounted by the

author. "Vanity is pushing me, more than anything else," she wrote in a moment of truthfulness. When he heard what she intended to do, Tolstoy tried to dissuade her. He did not want to owe anything to the emperor. Besides, that edition of his Complete Works was nothing but a low commercial enterprise, he said, completely at odds with his theories. His opposition tipped the scales for Sonya.

She set off for St. Petersburg on March 28, 1891, went to stay with her sister Tanya, contacted a few influential persons and, 011 March 31, wrote to the emperor:

"I humbly implore Your Imperial Majesty the favor of an audience, so that I may make a request of Your Majesty concerning my husband, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. With Your Majesty's kind permission, I shall state the conditions in which my husband might resume his former artistic and literary activities. I would also point out to Your Majesty the inaccuracy of certain allegations being made with respect to the present activities of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, which are painful to him and are undermining the creative powers of a Russian author whose health is already beginning to fail but who might yet add to his contribution to the glory of his fatherland.

I am,

Your Imperial Majesty's loyal subject, Countess Sofya Tolstoy."

Twelve days later her request for an audience was granted and, on April 13, decked out in ceremonial attire—black dress and hat with a black lace veil—she left the Kuzminsky home for the Anichkov Palace on the Nevsky Prospect. On the threshold she lost all contact with reality. All that marble, those plants, those purple azaleas, those wax-faced lackeys, those Negroes dressed in Egyptian costumes! A young messenger wearing a red uniform trimmed in gold and a plumed three- cornered hat led the caller up a wide staircase and into a little drawing room, and disappeared. She was so excited and her heart was pounding so hard that she almost fainted. "Very cautiously, so that no one should see me," she wrote, "I unlaced my corset and sat down to massage my chest." The messenger came back and announced, "His Majesty asks Her Excellency Countess Tolstoy to come this way." In a dizzy haze, she made her curtsy to the emperor. In spite of her agitated state, she observed that he was "tall, rather stout," had "hardly any hair" and that "his temples were too narrow." Some things about him reminded her of Chertkov. He received her cordially. When she had told him, without a blush, that her husband was about to give up his philosophical activities and settle down to write a book in the style of War and Peace, he exclaimed:

"Ah, how wonderful tliat would be! How he can write! How he can write! . .

She was emboldened to speak of The Kreutzer Sonata, presenting it as a highly moral work.

"The story does exaggerate," she said, "but the basic idea is that the ideal can never be attained. If total chastity is accepted as the ideal, then only in marriage can one remain pure."

This specious reasoning brought a smile to the tsar's lips. In the end he authorized the publication of the novel, but only in the Complete Works, as the relatively high price of those volumes would be a curb to their wide distribution. Then he expressed concern at the negative influence the Tolstoyans were having on the peasants, and Soma passionately defended her dear Lyovochka, and even the hated Chertkov. In order to break down the sovereign's last defenses, she asked him to be the first to judge her husband's literary productions in the future. He willingly accepted, asked after Sonya's children and invited her to pay her respects to the empress—a tiny woman with dark-brown hair plastered to her skull as though glued to it, wasp-waisted, squeezed to bursting-point inside a black woolen gown—who held out her hand, bade Sonya be seated, and spoke in a guttural voice that contrasted sharply with the affability of her remarks. Leaving the palace, glowing and relieved, Sonya could hardly keep from running.

That same day she took the train back to Yasnaya Polyana at three in the afternoon. She would have liked to be met as a conquering heroine, but Lyovochka greeted her as a defaulting ally. He reproached her for going too far, for making promises that he could not keep. Motionless, she listened to him storm, and he soon grew ashamed of his outburst. IIow could he criticize her, after letting her go? And fifteen days away! Too long! The infamous desire he denounced in The Kreutzer Sonata began to burn in his veins once again. "... I spoke to her angrily," he wrote in his diary, "but eventually it all worked out, particularly since, under the influence of a culpable impulse, I was glad to see her back."²¹ A few days later, fresh violation of the principle of chastity —this time, recorded by Sonya: "Lyovochka has sent Tanya to tell me that he is in bed and has put out the light. Innocent lips transmit these anything but innocent words. I know what they mean and I don't like it "²²

Soon afterward, she received a ministerial letter confirming her an thorization to publish The Kreutzer Sonata and the afterword to it in the Complete Works. When she read the official document, her pride overflowed: "Deep in my heart, I exult to think that I braved them all and went to the tsar and obtained from him—I, a mere woman—what no one else could have obtained/'²³ she wrote.

"I wanted to show myself in public so they could see how little I resemble a victim; I wanted people to talk about me; I did it instinctively! I was sure my appeal to Alexander III would be successful; I have not yet used up all my talent for arousing sympathy in others, I conquered the tsar with my words and the intensity of my feelings. But for the public, I also needed the authorization to publish The Kreutzer Sonata. ... If the book had been inspired by me, if it did portray my relations with Leo Nikolayevich, I should certainly have done nothing to further its circulation, anyone who thinks for a moment will realize that. The tsar speaks of me in the most flattering terms. . . . According to Princess Urusov, who had it from Zhukovsky, the emperor said I was simple, sincere and engaging; he had not supposed 1 was still so young and good-looking. All this is highly flattering to my woman's vanity and revenges me upon my husband who, far from trying to make me attractive in the eyes of society, has constantly sought to debase me."²⁴

While she was trumpeting her triumph all by herself in her corner, he was piling up stores of hostile notes about women: 'To say that a woman has as much strength of character as a man, or that one can find in women what one can expect to find in men, is to deceive oneself." (June 17, 1891.) "A pretty woman says to herself, 'He is learned, intelligent, virtuous and he does what I say, therefore I am superior to learning, intelligence and virtue.'" (August 1891.)

He was not pleased with what he had written during the last few years. Now, even The Kreutzer Sonata did not satisfy him: "To stir up so much mud, there must have been something culpable in my reasons for writing it," he said to Chertkov. For relaxation, he had put together a pleasant little comedy in the meantime, called The Fruits of Enlightenment, which Tanya produced at Yasnaya Polyana at the end of December 1889,® then played at Tula and Tsarskoye-Selo in April 1890, as the tsar had authorized the performance of the play by amateurs only. He had also written, or rather tossed off. a large number of articles and tales of the early Christians, such as Walk in the Light, and a long story, The Devil—yet another illustration of the negative influence of women, in which, through the diabolical workings of sensuality, a simple peasant girl drives a married man to suicide.t

• Tanya had just returned from a trip through France and Italy with her brother Serge)' and the Olsufyevs.

f The Devil was suggested to Tolstoy by the story of Friederichs, an official in Tula who had assassinated his peasant-mistress Stepanida, and by his own affair with a serf before his marriage.

But the work by which he set most store in this period was On Life. Originally, the essay was to have been entitled On Life and Death, but as he progressed, the author came to the conclusion that death did not exist. Throughout the thirty-five chapters of the essay he explains that true life does not begin inside a man until his animal, individual conscience is no longer supreme, in short, until he stops thinking about himself. Rebirth is dictated by love of one's neighbor. Seen in this light, even pain is useful because it opens the way to a higher existence. As to death, man fears it because he mistakes the demands of his animal instincts for the fundamental disposition of his soul. At the close of his meditation, thus, Tolstoy had acquired the same certainty as Ivan Ilich breathing his last: "Where is death? What death? lie was not afraid any more because there was no death any more. Instead of death, there was light."

Sonya was so fond of On Life that, with the help of Professor Tas- tevin, she translated it into French. Earlier, she had written in her diary, "I am copying Lyovochka's study On Life (and Death). When I was young, very young, before my marriage, I aspired to the good described in it with all my heart and soul, the fruit of total self-denial and the gift of oneself to others. I aspired to the ascetic life. But fate gave me a family and now I live for that."-'³

She was so happy every time her ideas approached those of Lyovochka. Why was she forever having to look after a thousand material details, the household accounts, the children's education, Michael's nightshirts, Audrey's shoes, meals for the teachers and servants, while he forged ahead unfettered, his head in the clouds, heedless of everyone and everything? Sometimes she raged at her husband, striding far ahead of her, in such a hurry, and sometimes at her family, who were holding her back and preventing her from catching up with him.

3. Famine and Strife

After the flareup over The Kreutzer Sonata the couple's relations were poisoned by resentment, in spite of all their conciliatory efforts. As Tolstoy's audience grew, he suffered increasingly from the conflict between his principles and his instincts. He continually saw himself in a false position, because he was eating, because he was loving, bccausc he was breathing, bccausc he could not forget that he had a body. After proclaiming the necessity for chastity in marriage, he held Sonya to blame for the fact that at the age of sixty-three he still desired her. And although she was very glad to have preserved at least this power over him, she despaired because she no longer had any place in his thoughts. He seldom spoke to her about his plans, did not share his work with her, listened in irritation when she presented some domestic problem to him, often upbraided her grossly, even in front of the children, and went out of his way to avoid being alone with her, cxccpt when in the grip of a sudden need of affection. In his eyes she personified two dreadful sins: lust and cupidity. All the money in the house passed through her hands, she was soiled by it; whereas he longed to have no possessions at all. True, he had turned over the supervision and management of the estate to Sonya, but he was still its legal owner. Everything in the deeds and abstracts, both land and buildings, was in his name. How was he to square that with his vow of poverty? While he was posing as a martyr to riches and comfort, Sonya complained that the family was dumping all the dirty work on her shoulders and then sniffing contemptuously at her for doing it. "I feel as though I am caught in a vise and cannot get out," she wrote on December 11, 1890 in her diary. "This business of managing the property, which has been imposed upon me in the name of Christian principles, is the heaviest cross God has given me. If saving one's own soul means damning that of others, then Lyovochka will be saved. But isn't that perdition for both of us?"

An incident that same winter of 1890 shattered the last vestiges of harmony between them. For some time, muzhiks had been cutting down the birch trees in one of the Tolstoy forests and taking the wood. Sonya, losing patience, decided to lodge a complaint with the district chief. It was her intention—approved by Lyovochka—to release the culprits as soon as they had been judged. They were sentenced to six weeks in prison and a fine of twenty-seven rubles. But when Sonya requested their release, she was told that this was a criminal case and it would be quite impossible either to withdraw the complaint or to change the sentence. Tolstoy promptly had an attack of remorse. Once again, property had engendered evil. And it was he, the apostle of abandonment of all worldly goods, who was responsible for a conviction for theft! He ought to have given all his trees to the poor wretches, since they needed them, instead of which he had delivered them into the hands of justice, whose utility he denied in his writings. Naturally, he had acted at the instigation of his wife! He rebuked her vehemently. She retorted that it had been his idea in the first place to give the muzhiks a scare by sending them up before the police.

He could not sleep. He paced up and down in his room, with drooping beard and moistened, tragic eye. "What astonished me is that he has continually sought to arouse my sympathy for him," she wrote, "but has not made the slightest effort to put himself in my place or understand that I never had any intention of doing any harm to anyone, not even to thieving muzhiks. That self-worship of his comcs across on every page of his diary. It is amazing to see how people simply do not exist for him except in so far as they concern him directly."¹

Until five in the morning he sighed, wept and inveighed against his wife, while she, exhausted, momentarily contemplated suicide: "Tell them all good-bye and go lie down peacefully on the railroad track." She was haunted by the memory of Anna Karenina. The author's wife, even in death. It relieved her to write this resolution in her notebook, and she dropped off to sleep. The next day the argument pursued its course in the rest of the family. The two older daughters thought their mother was wrong, but Tanya wrote in her diary, "I feel more sorry for Maman than for Papa . . . because she docs not believe in anything. . . . And then she loves Papa more than he loves her. She is as overjoyed as a child at the smallest word of kindness from him." Meanwhile, Tolstoy was writing, "It has become more than I can bear. My heart ached all day long. I should go away."² The next day, "I think I

should info nil the government that I am giving up my property rights and let it do what it will."

During the ensuing weeks, this idea ripened in his mind. He decided that it was no longer enough to leave the management of his property to his wife. If he wanted to suit his action to his thoughts, he should refuse to own anything at all in his own name. The best thing would be to distribute all his land to the peasants. But Sonya and the older sons were opposed to this. After lengthy confabulation, they reached a compromise: Tolstoy would bequeath all his goods and chattels to Sonya and the children, who would divide them up among themselves. The evaluation of the property and the contents of each share gave rise to heated debate around the family table. The apostle of dispossession now sat and listened in dismay as the true nature of his wife and children became apparent: they were haggling over a few rubles or an acre of ground. "Now one is not satisfied with something and the other is afraid of heaven knows what," wrote Sonya. "It is most trying. As for Lyovochka, his only contribution to the discussion is indifference and sulkiness." Tanya observed that her father, aghast at the turn events had taken, looked like "a condemned man who cannot wait to put his head through the noose." Sometimes he could stand no more and fled, shutting himself up in his workshop to make boots. Then Sonya would sigh, "I would so like to see him in good health, but he is ruining his stomach, even the doctor says so, eating things that are no good for him. I would like to see him doing an artist's work, but all he writes is sermons. I would like to see him tender, sympathetic, friendly, but whenever he is not being grossly sensual, he is indifferent."

The decision to divide up the property was made at Easter, but the actual bequest to the living heirs was not signed until over a year later: July 7, 1892. The bargaining continued bitterly until the last moment. The entire estate was evaluated at 580,000 rubles.⁰ It was divided into ten shares, and a legal document was drawn up allocating the first to Sonya and the others to the nine surviving children. Nikolskoyc (the Tolstoy homestead) was divided among Sergey, Ilya, Tanya and Masha; Ilya also received Grinevka; Leo had the Moscow house and a part of the Samara farm; Tanya and Masha received Ovsyanikovo and 40,000 rubles in cash; Audrey, Michael and Sasha were each given 3400 acres of fallow land in Samara; and Yasnaya Polyana went to the mother and Vanichka, the last-born, "for the children cannot take this estate away from their father," Sonya wrote, "and wherever I am he will be too."

• Or $1,642,300.

Of the entire family, only the two eldest daughters wondered whether, out of loyalty to their father's ideas, they should not refuse any part of this wild scramble. Tanya, who was more sensitive to worldly attractions, ultimately yielded: "I still need so many things and am so useless that in the end I shall have to be supported by somebody else," she wrote, to excuse her adherence to the plan; but Masha the violent, the sectarian, came forth with a lofty refusal. Her father was moved to tears; her mother, brothers and sisters said she was only doing it to put them in a bad light. "Yesterday, a really amazing conversation among the children," noted Tolstoy on July 5, 1892. "Tanya and Leo were trying to prove to Masha that it was a low, evil trick on her part to give up her share of the estate. Her attitude forces them to face the fact that theirs is truly base, and since they must needs be right at all costs, they invent explanations to prove that what she is doing is wicked and vile. Disgusting! I can't write. I have already wept and I feel like crying some more. They say, 'We thought of doing it ourselves, but it wouldn't have been right.' My wife tells them, 'Leave it all to me!' That silences them. Horrible. I have never seen more obvious and more clearly motivated hypocrisy. Sorrow, sorrow, what weight, what torture!"

Masha held her ground against the whole pack of heirs, in spite of their concerted baying. Her farsightcd mother decided to keep back her share, however, and let the income from it accumulate, just in case her daughter should change her mind one day. "The poor girl," she said, "cannot see things clearly, or imagine what her life would be like if, after living as she has, she were suddenly to find herself penniless."

There remained the ticklish question of royalties. Tolstoy meant to give them up too, but Sonya opposed him once again. "She doesn't understand, and the children do not understand," he wrote, "that every time they spend a ruble from the sale of my books they arc causing me shame and suffering. The shame I could bear, but why lessen the impact that proclaiming such a truth as this might have? I suppose it must be so. The truth will prevail without my help."³

On the following day, July 15, Sonya surrendered, and consented to her husband authorizing anyone and everyone to publish his later works. But when, a week later (July 21), he announced that he had written a letter to the press explaining the implications of his decision, she flew into a rage. White with anger, she screamed that she needed that money to keep the family going and that by giving up his rights he was making a public scandal of his dispute with his wife and children, that it was just one more indignity inflictcd on those who bore his name; that, moreover, he was not acting out of real conviction but for the sake of his own fame and glory, that he would stoop to anything to attract attention to himself. The apostle winccd and retorted that his wife was "the most stupid and greedy creature" he had ever met and that she was perverting the children "with her rubles." Then, pointing to the door, he shouted, "Get out! Get out!" Sonya, racked by sobs, ran into the garden and hid in the apple orchard so that the caretaker should not see her in tears; she sat down, panting, on the edge of a ditch. There she penciled a few words in her notebook, explaining that death was the only solution to the discord between herself and Lyovochka. Decidedly, Anna Karenina's example was contagious. This time, for sure, she would throw herself under a train. She got up and ran, stumbling in her skirts, toward the Kozlovka station. Her head achcd painfully, "as though clamped in a vise."

In the twilight, she saw a man dressed in a peasant blouse coming toward her. She thought it was her husband and there would be a reconciliation. A surge of joy drove her onward. But she was mistaken: the man in the peasant blouse was her brother-in-law Kuzminsky. Seeing the state she was in, he questioned her, tried to calm her and pleaded with her to return to the house. She walked a little way with him, then left him to bathe in the Voronka, hoping to drown herself. But the dark, chilly water frightened her. She went back to the forest. Suddenly she thought she saw an animal charging at her. Dog? Fox? Wolf? She screamed. Nothing, nobody. The animal had vanished in the evening mist. She told herself that she had gone mad. Then, feeling better, she returned to the house and went to see Vanichka in his bed. She loved him so, her frail little boy whose grace and gentleness and intelligence consoled her for the brutality of the others. Sometimes she feared he was too perfect for this world. She wrote, "What an exquisite child! I am afraid he will not live."⁴ She smothered him with kisses. Outdoors, on the terrace, Tolstoy was chatting and laughing with his big sons and daughters and their guests. "He will never know how close I came to killing myself," she thought, "and if he docs find out, he won't believe it."«

Late that night, after the guests had gone away, Lyovochka came to find his wife, took her in his arms and spoke to her tenderly. "I begged him to publish his statement and not to speak alxjut it any more," she wrote. "He told me he would not publish it until I understood that it had to be. I replied that I could not lie and would not lie and that it was impossible for me to understand that. Scenes like the one today are hastening the hour of my death. Let them strike, but let them finish me off quickly!"

The ensuing days brought more arguments followed by more reconciliations in bed. After these embraces, in which there was no real love, both repented in their respective diaries.

"Terribly displeased with myself," wrote Sonya on July 27. "Lyovochka woke me early in the morning with passionate caresses. . . . Then I took a French novel, Un coeur de femme by Paul Bourget, and read in bed until eleven-thirty, a thing I never do. This stupor that is creeping over me is unforgivable at my age. . . . What a strange man my husband is! The day after this quarrel began he made me a declaration of his passion and love, assured me that I had great influence over him and that he would never have believed so strong an attachment possible. But that is all purely physical. It is the secret of our division. I, too, am dominated by his passion, but in my heart of hearts that is not what 1 want or ever have wanted. I have always dreamed of a platonic relationship, a perfect spiritual communion."

And he was writing, in despair, "I live not purely but by my senses. Help me, my God. I have lost my way, I am suffering, I cannot go on."

Paradoxically, he began to be afraid of death again, just when he professed to be growing increasingly detached from material things. For some time he had begun every entry in his diary with the initials i.I.l. (if I live). He was wavering between heaven and earth. Nevertheless, this painful business of his royalties had to be settled. I11 order not to upset Sonya further, he resorted to the compromise he had adopted a few years before, whereby only the works subsequent to his "rebirth" would immediately become public property.

On September 16, 1891, he sent a letter to the most important Russian newspapers: "I hereby grant to all who wish it the right to publish, without payment, in Russia and abroad, in Russian or in translation, and to produce on the stage, all the works written by me since the year 1881 and published in Volumes XII (1886) and XIII (appearing this year, 1891), as well as those which have not yet been published in Russia or arc to appear in the future."

He would have liked Sonya to sign the letter abdicating Ills rights, to make it quite clear that the measure was not directed against her. But that was presumably asking too much of such a coarse-natured woman! She let him assume full responsibility for his action. What irked her most was that, as a bonus with his present to mankind, he was giving away The Death of Ivan Ilich, which she admired enormously and which he had offered to her 011 her birthday in 1886 for inclusion in Volume XII of the Complete Works. After reading the fateful announcement in the papers, she fumed: "Everything lie does comes from one source: vanity, thirst for fame, the need to be talked about as much

as possible. Nobody can change my mind about that."® She reproached him for his eternal talk about a Christian life, "when he does not have one drop of love, either for his children or for me or for anyone except himself."⁷ She claimed, not without reason, that the people to benefit from his absurd renunciation would not be the poor and needy—far from it—but the publishers, that is, the rich themselves!

'l'olstoy was too glad to be rid of his possessions to pay any attention to her nagging. Now, in theory, he was delivered from the evils of property, legally a pauper, hypothetically divested of all means of subsistence. Ah, the pleasures of utter destitution! But how was he to live? To be consistent, he should leave his handsome home, retire to some abandoned isba and earn a bit of bread by the sweat of his brow, or set off with the pilgrims on the highroad to Kiev, preaching the truth and begging his bread from door to door. But he could not bring himself to make such a radical change. As always, he contented himself with half-measures, and dug himself into an ambiguous position whose ludicrous side did not escape him. He affected semi-starvation and peasant dress, he drew the water from the well himself and clcancd his own room, but he did not give up his library or his saddle horses or his piano or the big drawing room in which his admirers congregated. Poor as Job on paper, he nevertheless continued to profit from his fortune, which had simply changed from his hands into those of his wife and children. Believing that he owed nothing to anyone, he was still living on them. Around him were the same chairs and tables, chandeliers, white-gloved lackeys as before; seated at the master's vast table and served by bowing attendants, he watched the disciples flocking in. The more there were, the greater his fame, and the more difficult it became for Sonva to feed them all.

In the village, Tolstoy often saw Timothy, the child he had had long before by his peasant mistress Axinya. A crude muzhik with steely eyes, a shapeless nose and heavy brows, he resembled him more closely than any of his legitimate children. He was a coachman 011 the estate. Tolstoy suffered occasional twinges of conscience at tin's reminder of his wayward youth. But, after all, it was the rule for a great noble to keep a few bastards on the premises, to prove his past virility. According to the custom of the time, the master's real children—those fortunate enough to bear his name—were not at all hostile toward Timothy and treated him as a brother who had lost out in his dealings with the law. Only Sonya still became indignant, now and then, at the thought of this left-handed descendant.

The spring and summer of 1891 brought an unusually large crop of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. Fet and his wife spent a few days in May.

The old poet was more charming than ever, with his plunging nose and graying beard in his long goat's face, and his small hands with their well- manicured nails. He was bubbling over with juvenile enthusiasm, but Lyovochka was too preoccupied with God to have any taste for such purely human lyricism.f "Fet read us some poems," wrote Sonya. "Love and more love . . . I lis feverish inspiration awakens poetical, ambiguous ideas and feelings in me, and I am too old for them."

The poet was succeeded by guests of lesser repute. As usual, the warm weather brought a new wave of admirers of every kind, professors, students, visionaries, opera singers, defrocked priests, repentant revolutionaries and government spies disguised as disciples. There were never fewer than fifteen at table. Stasov, a bearded giant with a leonine mane who was director of the St. Petersburg Public Library', set the tone of praise of the master of the house with his endless ranting about "Tolstoy the genius" whom he also called "Leo the Great." In the timcworn tradition, Sonya organized picnics and walks or rides, programs of charades, amateur concerts, readings. She bustled from drawing room to pantry, the overworked servants complained, the children's governesses quarreled, and still more people wrote announcing their arrival. . . .

Tolstoy devoted his afternoons to his guests. In the morning he was, in principle, invisible. lie withdrew at dawn to the vaulted ground-floor chamber in which lie had made his study. The walls were fortress-thick and kept out all outside noises. Light fell softly from two high, narrow barred windows. The furniture was composed of one large table, a few old chairs covered with imitation black leather, a simple bookcase and a hard, narrow divan. A scytlic and saw leaned against one wall. A basket of cobbler's tools lay on the floor. In this lair Tolstoy wrote or made boots, depending on his mood. Just then, he was working on a story, Father Sergey, making notes for a future novel (entitled, for want of anything better, Koni's Story, after the friend who had supplied the subject) and composing religious articles such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You. He admitted into his inner sanctum an occasional artist, who had begged permission to sec him at work, pen in hand; Rcpin painted a portrait of him writing, and Ginzburg sculpted a bust. Both were aware of the honor that had been conferred upon them. Repin also painted Tolstoy standing barefoot in the grass. The model did not like this picture. "Why not paint me without my pants, while he's at it?" he grumbled.

Toward midsummer, alarming news readied Yasnaya Polyana: an unusually prolonged period of drought had brought famine to some of the

f Fet was to die the following year.

central and southwestern provinces of Russia. A number of people, including the author Leskov, came to ask Tolstoy whether he did not think something should be done to help the suffering peasants. The master was annoyed by this appeal to charity—to begin with, because he had not had the idea first, and then because, together with the muzhik-philosopher Syutayev, he had long condemned private charity as a cheap means for the wealthy to ease their consciences, and lastly because, according to him, the principle of "non-resistance to evil" should apply to natural disaster as well. His reply to his colleague was sententious:

"There are crowds of customers for operations of this type [aid to the starving]: people who have lived all their lives without a thought for the common people, often disgusted by and disdainful of them, and who, at the drop of a hat, are consumed by solicitude for their inferior brothers. . . . Their motives are conceit, vanity and fear of the people's anger. ... To fight famine, all that is ncccssary is for men to do more good deeds. A good deed does not consist in giving bread to feed the famished, but in loving the famished as much as the overfed. Loving is more important than giving food. . . . Therefore, since you ask me what must be done, I reply: awaken, if you can (and you can), the love of men for one another, not now when there is a famine, but always and everywhere."⁸

Excerpts from this letter were published and aroused a storm of indignation in other newspapers. Tolstoy was called a "heartless doctrinarian." He himself, upon learning that the famine was growing worse, felt his paper turn to ash in the heat of reality. On September 19, 1891 he decided he would take his daughter Tanya and go to his brother's place at Pirogovo to investigate the extent of the damage and seek a remedy. In response to Sonya's ironic smile at his sudden devotion to a cause erstwhile held in contempt, he snapped, "I beg you not to imagine I am doing this in order to get talked about; the fact is that I simply can't stop thinking about itl"

She let him go, noting, "If he were doing it because his heart bleeds at the sufferings of the starving, I would fall on my knees before him, no sacrifice would be too great. But I didn't feel and do not feel that his heart was in it. I only hope he may move others by his pen and his clcvemess."

He toured the villages around Pirogovo, realized the extent of the disaster and planned an article on the famine. In October he decided to leave his wife in Moscow and return, taking his daughters Tanya and Masha—this time to the province of Ryazan where his friend Raycvsky was struggling heroically to organize emergency relief. Sonya

was horrified when he told her of his plan: "To spend the whole winter separated from them, and to think of them twenty miles from the nearest station, Lyovochka with his stomachaches and intestinal pains and the two little girls completely on their own! . . The "little girls'' were not overjoyed either, but for different reasons. As good Tolstoyans, they considered—especially Tanya—that after condemning philanthropy, their father should not begin to champion it. "We are about to leave for the Don," wrote Tanya on October 26, 1891. "I am not looking forward to this trip and am feeling completely unenthusiastie about it, because this action of Father's is inconsistent; it is not right for him to handle funds, take in gifts and ask Mother for the money he has just turned over to her. ... lie says and he writes (and I agree with him) that the people's hardships stem from the fact that they are robbed and exploited by us, the landowners, and that the whole point is not to rob them any more. That is right, and Papa did what he said, he stopped robbing them. In my opinion, there is nothing more for him to do. . . . He is too much in the public eye, he is too severely judged, to settle for second best when he has already reached first best."t

Despite this lack of spirit in the "troops," the father, his two daughters and his niece Vera Kuzminskaya went to Begichevka, the Rayevsky property in the government of Ryazan. When they arrived, after a tiring two-day train and sledge trip, they were overwhelmed by the miser}' they saw. Many peasants had died of starvation. Others had fled to seek work elsewhere. The survivors, dull-eyed skeletons, were too weak to move. Tattered children with swollen stomachs, their faces blue with cold, dozed on heaps of rags inside glacial isbas. There was no wood, so they burned the thatch off the roofs. Further rationalization was impossible in the facc of such privation. Tolstoy and his daughters went to work alongside Rayevsky.

Tolstoy bought firewood with the first money Sonya advanced, and organized the baking of brown bread. Then he set up free kitchens in the villages. "The mothers bring their children and feed them, but eat nothing themselves," Tanya wrote on November 2, 1891. "If those who are giving money to this cause could see their gifts going directly to help the victims, they would be amply rewarded for their sacrifices."

The kitchens multiplied rapidly. Tolstoy made his headquarters at Begichevka, in the Rayevsky home. From there he set out every day on horseback to visit the surrounding hamlets, make lists of the needy, supervise the fair allotment of supplies, clothing and firewood. His

| In English in the original.

daughters helped him unstintingly. His sons, too, joined the relief workers in other districts: Sergey and Ilya were in Chern, Leo in Samara.

Every evening when he returned to Bcgichcvka, freezing and exhausted, Tolstoy commented on the day's incidents to his daughters and the team of volunteers he had assembled. Some, like Tanya, reproached him for compromising himself by accepting gifts from persons who were part of the "System" and therefore despicable. He admitted, with tears in his eyes, that his present activities were not in harmony with his principles. But at the same time he said he could not stand by and do nothing when the people were in such a plight.

From afar, Sonya herself began to be affected by this compassion that had outweighed personal interest in her husband. In Moscow, where she was detained by her four younger children—Vanichka, Andrey, Michael and Sasha—her throat ached as she read her husband's letters from the front and the searing articles he was writing for the newspapers. After finding it unthinkable that he should leave her alone "for the whole winter," she now began to wish she could help him. Seated at the dining-room table with her own children, she imagined those of others in rags, dying of hunger, and felt the injustice of her own good fortune. "We have no contact with the people," she wrote. "We share in none of their misery, we help no one. ... I feci sorry for myself and my children, who are being morally stifled in this atmosphere and are deprived of all spiritual activity. What can I do?" For the first time in her life she felt tempted to convcrt to Tolstoyism. One sleepless night she resolved to make an appeal to public charity. She wrote her letter in a rush of emotion, showed it to a few friends, who liked it, and took it in person to the editors of the Russian News. On the following day, November 3, it appeared in full in that newspaper:

"My whole family has separated and gone to help in the relief effort for the starving people. . . . Compelled to remain in Moscow with my four young children, all I can do to help is send money and supplies. But the needs are immense and isolated individuals arc powerless to satisfy them. And yet, if we think of all the people who are dying of hunger in this moment, every hour we spend in a well-heated house and every piece of bread we eat are living reproaches. We all live in the lap of luxury here, we cannot tolerate the slightest discomfort for our own children: would we be able to endure the sight of exhausted, heartbroken mothers who must watch their children die of hunger and cold, or of old people who can find nothing to eat? Thirteen rubles will see one person through to the next harvest. ... If each of us, according to his means, could feed one, two, ten or a hundred people in this way, our conscicnces might be cased. . . . Therefore I have de-

tided to turn for help to all those who can and will contribute by their gifts to the work begun by my family."

Sonya's letter was reproduced in every paper in Russia, and translations appeared in a few in Europe and America. The money immediately started to pour in. The astonished Sonya saw a poor woman come into the room and cross herself before handing her one silver ruble; a young socialite sniffling beneath her veil and holding out an envelope full of banknotes; a child clenching a few kopecks in his fist. ... "I do not know what you will think of my idea," she wrote to her husband, "but I had had enough of sitting still and doing nothing to help you. . . . Since yesterday, I feel better, I keep accounts, hand out receipts, say thank you; I am speaking to the public and I am happy to be able to support your effort, even with other people's money."

In two weeks she collcctcd over thirteen thousand rubles. One of the first to subscribe was Father John of Kronstadt. Soon she was sending whole wagonloads of wheat, rye, peas and cabbage to the relief workers, as well as clothes and medicine. Tin's dealing in money and goods entailed a huge amount of correspondence, which she performed without a murmur. At Begichevka, Tolstoy was flabbergasted. Was Sonya at last going through the "rebirth" he had experienced ten years before? In his tiny, chilly room, in which there was neither rug nor curtains, furnished with one rickety table and a cramped iron bed, he thanked God for this miraculous reunion. In a letter he wrote to his wife on November 14, he inserted a sentence in French: "I am sure you cannot imagine how lovingly we think and speak of you." And later: "Ever)' night I see you in my dreams, my sweet friend."*

He was preparing to return to Moscow when his friend Rayevsky, worn out by his long cross-country chases, caught a chill and took to his bed. He died of influenza after two days of high fever. Tolstoy was hard-hit by this loss, coming 011 top of another, the previous month —his childhood companion Dyakov.

Rayevsky's death left him alone at the head of the relief effort; he would have to give up all thought of quitting now. In one month he had opened thirty kitchens supplying free food to fifteen hundred people. But he knew they were not enough. Some people were saying with a sarcastic smile that he was the "thirteenth apostle." He himself continued to complain that his present activities were contrary to his principles. "There is a great deal to be said against all this," lie wrote to Gay. "There is that money from my wife, and the other contributions; there is the problem of the relations between those who eat and those who give food. Sin is everywhere. But it would be impossible for me to stay home and write."¹⁰ Yielding to Sonya's pleadings, he returned to

her at the end of November to rest for a few days. Their reunion was suffused in tenderness and gratitude. "Went to Moscow," he noted. "Joy of relations with Sonya. Have never been more warm. I thank you, Father. I had prayed to you for this. Everything, everything I asked for has been given to me. I thank you. Suffer me to become still more closely united with your will. I want only what you want."¹¹ Ten days later he was back at Begichcvka resuming his struggle against hunger.

On January 23, 1892, Sonya, who decidedly seemed to have been touched by grace, joined him on the battlefield. She moved into the little curtainless room and was appalled at its filth and disorder. In a twinkling the entire Rayevsky house was swept and aired and put in order. Then she toured the kitchens. "When I arrived," she wrote in her diary, "I found ten people inside the isba. But they kept coming and soon there were forty-eight. All in rags, their faces emaciated and sad. They comc in, cross themselves and sit down on long benches in front of the tables which arc placed end to end. The woman in charge offers each in turn a tray full of rye bread cut in pieces, then sets a big soup tureen full of cabbage soup on the table. There is no meat in it, and it has a mild taste of hemp oil. . . . After the soup there is potato mash or peas, kasha, beet greens or barley porridge. Two dishes at noon, two at night. ... In the second kitchen I visited, I saw a young peasant woman with pale gray skin who looked at me so mournfully that I almost burst out crying. It was clearly very hard for her, as well as for an old man and several others among the group who were there, to comc and accept this handout."¹²

With a determination that compelled the admiration of all who saw her, Sonya tacklcd the bookkeeping, which had hitherto been kept in a state of utter chaos, and, with the help of the tailor's apprentice, cut out clothes, including thirty coats for the neediest children, from bolts of cloth sent from town. She stayed for ten days, and then returned to Moscow to her younger children, whom Tanya had been looking after in her absence.

Meanwhile, the government's uneasiness was mounting as Tolstoy's campaign gathered steam. More than anything else, it was the fever aroused abroad by the incorrigible author's articles that it found prejudicial to the Russian honor. He was becoming an international figure, denouncing his country's failings and waging his war on famine as though he himself were the government. These packages arriving from the four corners of Europe, the seven boatloads of corn being sent by the United States, the promise by the Minnesota millers to provide free flour for the muzhiks—they might all enhance the renown of the promoter of the campaign, but they cast public discredit on the im-

perial administration. To put a stop to the alarming reports being circulated, the government had already issued one communique: "There is no famine in Russia. Some localities have had a poor harvest; that is the truth." But this euphemism could not stand up to Tolstoy's broadside. Then the reactionary newspapers launched an invidious slander campaign against him; Pobyedonostsev submitted a report to the emperor accusing the writer of seeking to foment a peasant revolution.

Upon her return from Begichevka, Sonya learned that a new threat had sprung up during her abscncc. In November 1891 Tolstoy had written an article entitled "Help for the Hungry" for a publication called Philosophical and Psychological Questions. "The people arc starving because we eat too much. This has always been true, but this year's poor harvest has proved that the rope is stretched to breaking point. . . . The privileged classes must go to the people with the attitude that they arc guilty." This text, of Christian inspiration, had been so disfigured by the censor that Grot, the editor-in-chief, pronounced it unprintable, but at Tolstoy's request, he sent the uncensored proofs to French, German and English translators. On January 14 (26), 1892 the London Daily Telegraph published the articlc in full. Thereupon, an ultra-reactionary newspaper, the Moscow News, protected and directed by Pobyedonostsev, reproduced extracts of Tolstoy's message in a faulty Russian translation exaggerating its revolutionary tenor. A violent commentary accompanied this truncated and falsified version: "Count Tolstoy's appeal is based 011 the most rabid, wild-eyed form of socialism in comparison to which the pamphlets of the clandestine agitators are milk and honey. ... lie openly preaches social revolution. Using the overworked, lame-brained catchwords of the Western socialists, which the ignorant mob is always so eager to lap up, lie affirms that the rich subsist on the sweat of the people, consuming everything they possess ancl produce. Can we remain deaf to this propaganda, which is invisible only to those who have no eyes or refuse to see?"

Durnovo, minister of the interior, investigated the matter and submitted a report to Alexander III. Rumor in the palace had it that the tsar was very annoyed by Tolstoy's attitude, and had even said in public, "To think that I received his wife! A thing I have done for nobody else!" In a panic, Sonya wrote to Lyovochka on February 6, 1892: "You'll be the death of us all with your provocations. Where are your sacred love ancl 'non-resistance'? You have nine children; you have no right to ruin their lives and mine."

With her customary courage, she fought back. All her connections in St. Petersburg were alerted. She asked for an audience with Grand Duke Sergey, the governor general of Moscow, who advised her to publish a letter from Tolstoy in the Official Herald disclaiming the distorted version of his article on the famine. Tolstoy grumblingly consented to write it, but the director of the Official Herald refused to publish the letter on the ground that he was responsible for a government organ and did not have the right to Income involved in journalistic quarrels. Sonya then had hundreds of copies of the letter lithographed and distributed in Russia and abroad. Too busy giving relief to the muzhiks to be concerned about intrigues going on behind his back, Tolstoy ingenuously wrote to his wife, on February 28, 1892:

"For the love of God, do not trouble your head over such things, my dear. ... I write what I think—things that could not conceivably be acceptable to the government and upper classes—and have been doing so for the last twelve years; I do not write that way by accident, but on purpose; and not only do I have no intention of justifying myself, but I trust those who believe I should will, if not justify their own conduct, then at least clear themselves of the crimes they have committed; it is not 1 who am accusing them of these crimes, but life itself. . . . Please don't you begin to take the defensive: that would be reversing the roles."

In the meantime, State and Church continued their attacks upon Tolstoy. Informers watched his even' move. One of them reported: "He arrived here with a secretary and a confidential agent. . . . None of them eat meat, and when they sit down to table they do not say grace. This has caused the peasants to think that Tolstoy must be working for the devil, not God. . . . Surveillance has been carefully organized, so that every move he makes will be brought to my attention." Obeying orders from their sujjeriors, some of the popes in the disaster area preached a similar message to their parishioners and ordered the muzhiks to refuse relief under pain of damnation. One day a peasant woman flung herself at Tolstoy's feet and entreated him to give her back her child, who was being fed in one of the kitchens.

"Be it on my head only," she whimpered. "There is nothing to cat at home, but I do not want to send my child to perdition!"

In Moscow and St. Petersburg people were saying that the "thirteenth apostle" would soon be confined to his estate or sent abroad or even locked up in the Suzdal Monastery, reserved for disobedient clergy.

Seeing danger so near at hand, the pious Alexandra Tolstoy forgot her differences with her renegade nephew and decided, without telling him, to plead his cause to the tsar. Having obtained an audience with Alexander III, the old maid of honor said, in a trembling voice:

"Sire, they are preparing to ask you to imprison the greatest genius in all Russia in a monastery."

"Tolstoy?" asked the tsar.

"Yes, Sire."

"Would he be plotting an attempt on my life?" murmured the sovereign with a smile.

Alexandra left reassured. A little while later, receiving his minister of the interior, the tsar said, "I will ask you not to touch Tolstoy. I have no desire to make a martyr of him and provoke a general uprising. If he is guilty, so much the worse for him!"

And the storm blew over, without a moment's pause for thankfulness from Tolstoy. Perhaps, at heart, he was sorry for his state of comfortable impunity. The blows were always for others; but there are people for whom the worst punishment is no punishment at all.

A second year without rain forced him to continue his work among the underfed peasants. His mind was at peace there, as at Sevastopol years before, when the proximity of death had kept him from thinking about himself. Also, it made him happy to feel that he had Sonya's support in his crusade. He was almost prepared to treat her as a fellow believer. "Yesterday," he wrote her, "reading over your letters, I wanted with all my heart—the heart you say I don't have—not only to see you, but to be with you." Between tours of the kitchens, he continued writing The Kingdom of God 1$ Within You, which was to be the keystone of his entire ethical structure. "No book has ever given me so much trouble," lie confided to Chertkov.

Naturally, the book, which was completed in April 1893 after three years of work, was prohibited by the censor, but typed copies sped across Russia, leaped the frontiers and were immediately translated in Germany, France, England and the United States. In this essay Tolstoy claimed that the kingdom of God was within reach of every man and that to enter it he need only consent to dominate his animal nature. But, he added, "the doctrine of Christ could only be interpreted as a negation of life by mistaking for an absolute rule what is merely a guide to an ideal. It is in this sense that Christ's precepts seem irreconcilable with the necessities of life, whereas, in fact, they are the only means of living a just life." Having dealt with the critics who rcproached him for not having sufficiently liberated himself from his own instincts, he moved on to define spiritual perfection, which was, for him, "the asymptote of human life." "Mankind is always reaching toward it and can approach it, but can rcach it only in infinity." lie held that the teachings of the Church had deformed the simplicity of the Sermon on the Mount. As the ally of the State, it had become the chief obstacle to human happiness on earth. Therefore any fundamentally Christian mind should refuse all laws, both religious and secular, and adhere to the following precept: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." Inspired by the American Adin Bal- lou's books on non-resistance, Tolstoy now produced his famous theory of non-resistance to evil.

However, although he refused to resist evil by violence, he believed it his duty to denounce it whenever he encountered it in the world. His campaign against famine had given him a taste for public action. Now that he was certain of his convictions at last, he made up his mind to speak out every time the government overstepped its prerogatives. He had protested against the persecution of the Jews in 1890. In 1893 he wrote to Alexander III because Prince Khilkov, a disciple of his who had been exiled to the Caucasus, had been deprived of legal custody of his children.⁰ Other "cases" were in the offing, over which he was prepared to do battle with his wife at his side.

Unfortunately, their period of unison did not outlast the food shortage. As soon as the harvest improved and Tolstoy, "demobilized," returned to his home and habits, the conflict between them flared up again. After the cold shower of privation from which he had just emerged, his reaction to the ease and comfort of his family's way of life was even gloomier than before. On December 22, 1893 he wrote, "I feel oppressed, sick at heart. I cannot contain myself. I desire to perform some great deed. I should like to devote the rest of my life to God. But He does not want me. Or else He does not want to encourage me in the direction I have choscn. And it makes me so irritable! Oh, this luxury! This commerce in my books! This ethical morass! This empty agitation! ... I want to suffer, I want to trumpet forth this truth that is consuming me!"

And a few days later, on January' 24, 1894: "Lord, help me! Teach me to bear my cross. I have unceasingly prepared myself to bear the cross I know: prison and the gallows; now I see before me a completely different cross, a new cross, one I do not know how to carry. What is new and different about it is this: I am placed against my will in the position of a spiritual weakling and by my way of life I am compelled to destroy the very things I live for. ... I am unable to tear myself free from these awful cobwebs in which I have become entangled. Not

•The letter was posted on January 2, 1894.

for want of strength, but because my conscience will not let me; I feel sorry for the spiders that have spun them."

The chief "spider" was Sonya, of course. However hard he labored to live the life of an ascetic, eating vegetables and porridge, drinking nothing but water, fleeing his wife's guests, chopping his own wood, drawing his own water, he still felt the pernicious warmth of the house around him. He was so happy to escape from horrid Moscow to spend a few days at Yasnaya Polyana, where at least there were some peasants in sight! In March 1894, with his daughter Masha, he also went to visit his disciple Chertkov, with whom he felt a communion of thought so intense that he could not refrain from writing to Sonya: "I am very glad I have comc. ... He and I arc so close spiritually, we have so many interests in common and we sec each other so seldom, that both of us arc very happy."¹³

Nothing could have hurt Sonya more than that declaration. She had long considered Chertkov as her real rival in Lyovochka's affections. By pretending to serve the great writer's philosophy, this cunning, puritanical man was really trying to ensnare him, detach him from his family, encourage his most subversive tendencies, and appropriate his works for himself. He was the ringleader of that abominable gang of "dark ones," the spoil-sport, the preventer of new novels! As long as Lyovochka was in his power, there would be no more War and Peace or Anna Karenina. He had even begun writing to Masha and Tanya. He would finish the job of weaning them away from their own mother. In August 1893 she learned that most of Tolstoy's manuscripts, which she had entrusted to the Rumyantsev Museum, had been removed by Chertkov and taken "for safekeeping" first to his home and then to that of one of his friends, Colonel Trepov, in St. Petersburg.! Lyovochka, when informed of this underhanded appropriation, had no comment to make. He was subjugated, bewitched. The following summer he even had the nerve to propose that Chertkov and his wife should be invited to Yasnaya Polyana. Sonya indignantly refused, whereupon Tolstoy wistfully wrote to his great friend:

"She is afraid of yon because you are the one who helps me to preserve all the things she hates in me. If you ask, 'Does she want me to come?' I would answer, 'No.' But if you asked whether it is ncccssary for you to come I would answer, 'Yes, it is necessary.' I repeat to you what I told her: if there is bad feeling between you, you must both use all your strength to destroy it so that true love may grow in its place."¹⁴ Only a few days l>cforc, on April 21, 1894, he had written in his diary, "I

f The same Trepov who later became an implacable governor general of St. Peters burg. At that time, he was relatively tolerant of liberals.

am happy with Sonya. . . . What a mother and, in a sense, what a wonderful wife! Fct may have had something when he said that every man married the wife he needed." Was she going to force him to change his mind by her stubborn hostility toward the man he loved most? Once again, he called upon all his self-control, mastered his anger and behaved like a Christian husband. "I have been feeling ill for a week," he noted in his diary on May 15, 1894. "It began, I think, when I was so upset by Sonya's shameful outburst over Chertkov. It is all very understandable, but depressing, especially as I had lost the habit of this kind of incident and was so happy to have recovered my profound affection and good-will for her. 1 was afraid she had destroyed everything, but no; it is over, and my affection has returned."

A fortnight later he was saddened by the death of his friend Gay, the painter: "He was a delightful, gifted, grown-up child," he said. Gay's last painting, a Crucifixion, had been removed the previous March from its room in St. Petersburg because the tsar, offended by the stark realism of the canvas, had said, "What carnage!" Whereupon Tolstoy had written to Gay, "What a triumph!"

The man who had considered Gay's work an insult to religion did not long outlive him: on October 20, 1894 Alexander III succumbed to nephritis and complications. His death gave rise, in Tolstoy as in all the enemies of autocracy, to renewed hopes of reform in Russian domestic policy. Nicholas II, the deceased emperor's eldest son, was only twenty-six; he was about to marry a German princcss, Alix of IIcssc, whose name after conversion became Alexandra Fyodorovna; he was said to be mild, conciliatory and sensitive; surely he would endorse the liberal ideas of the intelligentsia and give the country a constitution. But in fact, Nicholas II was a weakling filled with superstitious respect for his father and ruled by the reactionary minister to the Holy Synod, who had been his tutor. When he received the representatives of the zemstvos on January 17, 1895, he wanted to make a show of strength and declared, as a dutiful pupil of Pobycdonostsev, "I have heard that voices have recently been raised in zemstvo meetings, of men carried away by the mad dream of electing representatives to participate in the internal administration of the country. Let it be known to all that I, dedicating all my strength to further the happiness of my people, shall defend the principle of autocracy as unswervingly as did my late father."

Despair was all the blacker as hope had been so high. Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "Important event. Insolent speech by the tsar. . . . I'm afraid this may have consequences for me." But, faithful to his principle of denying the legality of all temporal authority, he refused to sign his colleagues' petition to abolish the censor. He said, "This Ls what you should say to the monarch: 'You can do nothing as long as you are emperor. The only thing you can do for the people and for yourself is to abdicate.'"

Already conccrncd for the future of his country, he was beginning to be concerned for the future of his marriage as well. After a few months' respite, Sonya's jealousy of Chertkov had flared up again; she saw him as the cause of all her troubles. She had just turned fifty, and her disposition was growing worse. It seemed to her that the whole world was conspiring to contradict and thwart her. Her children gave her nothing but trouble: Leo's nerves were very bad, he had to have "electrical treatments"; Vanichka, poor, sweet Vanichka, was so delicate that she feared the worst at every sniffle; Sergey was living in sin; Ilya had made a bad marriage and was spending too much money; Tanya and Masha were completely obfuscated by their father's ideas and spent all their time with the "Dark Ones"; they never even thought of starting a family. "They are utterly lacking in moderation or judgment and have no sense of duty," wrote Sonya. "They take after their father there. But he at least has struggled all his life to improve himself, whereas they simply let themselves go."¹⁵

Day after day, she poured out the same old grievances into her notebook. Everything about Lyovochka irritated her, beginning with his aspiration to a simple life, which simply complicated hers. "This vegetarian diet means that two menus have to be prepared, which adds to the cost and makes twice as much work. The result of his sermons on universal love is that lie has lost all feeling for his own family and shares his private life with anyone and everyone. His—purely verbal—renunciation of earthly goods has led him to criticize and condemn others."

And elsewhere.

"He pushes everything off onto me, everything, without exception: the children, the management of his property, relations with other people, business affairs, the house, the publishers. Then he despises me for soiling my hands with them all, retreats into his selfishness and complains about me incessantly. And what does he do? He goes for walks, rides his horse, writes a little, goes wherever he pleases, docs absolutely nothing for the family and takes advantage of everything: his daughters' help, the comfort and adulation that siuround him, my submissiveness and my sufferings. And fame; that unquenchable thirst for fame to which he has sacrificcd everything and is continuing to sacrifice everything . . .'^Mfl

If she heard some pertinent criticism of him, she ran to note it down, to strengthen her case: "Today Chicherin said that there were two men in Leo Nikolayevicli, one writer of genius and one mediocre thinker who impressed people by talking in paradoxes and contradictions."¹⁷

Physically, she was increasingly repelled by him. She said he was slovenly. Was it in order to become one with the peasants that he went around unwashed like them? He used to be so particular, and now he smellcd like a goat. "It's like pulling teeth to get him to wash!" she wrote. "He told me his feet are caked with dirt and sores have formed underneath and arc beginning to cause him pain. . . . My aversion to my husband physically these days is making me very miserable, but I cannot, I simply cannot get used to it, I shall never get used to the dirt and the bad smell."¹⁸

Or sometimes, in a towering rage, her pen racing across the page, she would plead her cause, no longer to her family and contemporaries, but to posterity. With what passion she justified herself to the judges of generations to come! "His biographers will tell how he went to draw water for the porter, but no one will know how he never gave his wife one moment's rest or one drop of water to his sick child; how in thirty- five years he never sat for five minutes by a bedside to let me have a rest or sleep the night through or go for a walk or simply pause for a moment to recover my strength."¹⁹

It is true that she had added grounds for resentment at the time she consigned this grievance to paper. It was January 1895. Lyovochka had just completed a story, Master and Man, telling the adventures of two men of different social conditions who were caught in a blizzard and compelled by their impending death to discover the Christian truth within themselves, that is, their equality and dependence. Sonya greatly admired this straightforward, stern morality talc, in which human warmth and sympathy stood out in sharp contrast with the impersonal whiteness and cold of the snow. She was surprised to learn that instead of giving it to Chertkov's Intermediary or to her own Complete Works, Lyovochka had promised it to a review called Northern Herald. The editor of this publication, Lyubov Gurycvich, was "a scheming half- Jewess," who must surely have inveigled him by flattery. This time, he had offended both wife and publisher at once. She insisted that her husband break his promise and honor his double obligation to her. In the middle of the night the big house in Moscow resounded with her screams and sobs. Goaded beyond endurance, Tolstoy threatened to leave her for good if she did not stop. Then she began to suspect him of wanting to abandon her for the woman editor. Completely beside herself, she rushed out of the house in her bathrobe and bedroom slippers, with her hair flying about her face.

The snow lay deep on the ground. Not a living soul. Sonya wanted to die, never mind how, but quickly. Tolstoy, in vest and trousers, came running after her, caught up with her, seized her by one arm and dragged her back to the house. "I remember that I was sobbing and crying that I didn't care what happened, that they could take me to the police station or lock me up in an asylum," she wrote.

The next afternoon she tried to obtain by sweetness what she had failed to obtain by force: permission to copy the story and priority to publish it. Once again he balked, stubborn, bad-tempered and irrational, and once again she took to the street. But this time she put on a warm coat and hat and galoshes over her boots. As usual, her suicide attempt was inspired by her husband's books. Before, she had planned to throw herself under a train like Anna Karenina. After reading Master and Man, death by exposure now struck her fancy. "In the story, I had liked the death of Vasily Andrcyevich," she noted ingenuously, "and I wished to meet my end the same way." Thus, stumbling through the snow, she made her way toward the Sparrow Hills, where she was sure no one would come in search of her. But Masha had picked up her trace and finally brought her l)ack to the fold.

After two days of total prostration her obsession returned. She hailed a sledge in the street and asked to be driven to the Kursk station. Sergey and Masha took off in hot pursuit. She saw them coming just as she was paying the driver. No choice but to turn around and go back again, with one of them on either side. She had caught cold and the children forced her to go to bed. The doctors came running. One prescribed bromide, another Vichy water, and a third—who was a gynecologist—alluded to her changc-of-lifc "in cynical terms." Lyovochka, however, alarmed by this series of runaway attempts, had become more tractable. He came into the room where she was resting and knelt down to beg her pardon. On February 21, 1895 she was able to record, with pitiful pride, "The Intermediary and I have won Master and Man, but at what cost!"

By a diabolical coincidence, the very day she wrote those words in her diary, Vanichka, who had been sick once the previous month, fell ill again. Rash, sore throat, diarrhea; Dr. Filatov diagnosed scarlet fever. A premonitory silence settled down inside Sonya. She had always known that she would lose Vanichka before long. Not a week went by without some mention of him in her diary: "The bonds uniting me to him are so close! ... He is a weak child, delicate, and so sweet- tempered." "The spark of life is about to go out in my poor darling Vanichka." In the rare moments when she was not trembling for his health, she was explaining how he was destined for greatness, even

more, perhaps, than Tolstoy himself. She was not alone in thinking so. "The first time I set eyes on that child," said the Russian scientist Mechnikov, "I knew he must cither die a premature death or prove a greater genius even than his father." And Tolstoy marveled to hear the little boy of seven, so small, so gentle, with his skin the color of milk, saying to his mother when she told him that the house and trees and land at Yasnaya Polyana would one day belong to him, "You mustn't say that, Maman. Everything belongs to everyone."

Vanichka's fever had begun in the morning; toward evening he was burning and delirious; but as always, his thoughts were all for others: "It's nothing, Maman," he murmured. "It will soon be over. Don't cry, Nanny!" Thirty-six hours later he was dead. A sepulchral silence fell upon the house, suddenly shattered by a woman's sobs. Cowering in the children's room, little Sasha thought it was a wounded bitch screaming, with a voice like her mother's. On February 23, 189$ Sonya wrote in her notebook, "My darling little Vanichka died this night at eleven. My God! And I am still alive." She did not touch her diary again for two years. For once, Tolstoy was as stricken as she. "For the first time in my life, I feel caught in a situation there is no way out of," he stammered.

Looking at him on the day of the funeral, Sonya was alarmed: an old man. Bent, wrinkled, gray-bcardcd, the light gone from his eyes. With his sons' help he lifted the light coffin—open, in the Russian manner —onto a big sledge. Then he sat down with his wife among the flowers, near the dead child, and the horses moved off at a walk. The road to Nikolskoye cemetery where little Alyosha already lay buried was the same road he used to take thirty-three years before, when he went courting his fiancee at the Behrs' home outside Moscow. lie reminded Sonya of this, and she was terrified at the distance that separated the carefrcc girl of those days and this aged, disillusioned mother going to bury her child. Was that what they called a full life?

During the entire service she held Vanichka's icy head between her hands and tried to warm it with her kisses. ^rl"he real separation camc when the coffin lid was nailed down. No more Vanichka. She wrestled and fought against the hard fact. Back in the house Tolstoy murmured, "And I, who was hoping Vanichka would carry on God's work after me!"

The next day he tried to ease his pain by sublimating it: while Sonya wandered through the house like a demented soul, caressing the dead child's toys and clothes and looking for his ghost behind the doors, he wrote in his diary, "We have buried Vanichka. Terrible—no, not terrible: great spiritual event. I am grateful to you, Father, I am grateful

to you."²⁰ Days later, "Vanichka's death has ban like the death of Nicholas for me;t no, not the same, but to a far greater degree the manifestation of God, of the force of attraction of God. Thus, not only can I deny that this event was sad or painful, but I can say without hesitation that it was, if not happy—that is not a fitting word—at least merciful, coming from God, revealing the lie of life, bringing us closer to Him. Sonya cannot see it that way. For her the almost physical pain of loss has hidden its spiritual value."²¹ He enlarged upon his idea to Aunt Alexandra: "I feel his loss cruelly, but by no means as cruelly as Sonya, because I had—because I have—another, spiritual life."

lie wanted to persuade himself that Vanichka had not died in vain, that God had sent him into the world with a message, that he was the "harbinger swallow," herald of the melting snows and opening-up of hearts. ... In obedience to the desires of this evanescent angel, he redoubled his demonstrations of affection for his wife. "Never have I felt such a need to love in Sonya and myself, and such a hatred of everything that separates and hurts," he wrote in the same letter to Alexandra. "Never have I loved Sonya as I love her now. It is doing me much good."²²

But Sonya was still too deadened by sorrow to appreciate this new wave of warmth. She went to the church, questioned the priests, had strange dreams and saw absolutely no reason to go on living. Once she remained in the Arkhangelsky Cathedral praying, for nine hours, and came home through a driving rain. To jar her out of her apathy Tolstoy sent her to visit a prison, tried to interest her in the misfortunes of the political convicts. In vain. She responded to nothing but her own unhappiness. "The new feeling that has brought us together is strange," he told her. "It is like the setting sun. From time to time the little clouds of our quarrels, some coming from your side and some from mine, veil its rays. But I still hope that they will blow away before the night and the sunset will be radiant."²³ Listening to him, Sonya would shed tears of joy; but the next minute she sank back into her morbid brooding. Then, gradually, he gave up. Was it his fault if he still had something to live for? His faith in God, first. Tlien, his writing. On March 12, 1895, two weeks after little Vanichka's burial, he wrote in his diary: "I feel like writing something literary." He listed a dozen ideas, including Koni's Story (later Resurrection) and concluded, "Enough there to last me for eight years!"

The enormous success of Master and Man surprised and annoyed him, but it also encouraged him to take up his pen again. The Inter-

t His brother, who had died at Hv6res thirty-five years earlier.

inediary sold fifteen thousand copies in four day's. And Volume XIV of the Complete Works, which contained the story, was in its tenth thousand! Praise rained down upon him. "What can I say to you?" wrote Strakhov. "The cold clutched at my skin. . . . The mystery of death, that is the inimitable thing about you. . . . llie precision and purity of every stroke arc prodigious!" And Tolstoy noted, "Since I hear no criticism, only compliments, alxmt Master and Man, I am reminded of the anecdote of the preacher who, surprised by a storm of applause at the end of one of his sentences, stopped short and asked, 'Have I said something wrong?' My story is no good. I should like to write an anonymous review of it." To the young writer Ivan Bunin, who came to see him about this time, he reiterated his aversion for his latest work:

"It's unspeakable! It's so bad that 1 am ashamed to show myself in the street."

Then, referring to the recent death of Vanichka, he exclaimed:

"Yes, he was a delightful, wonderful little boy. But what does it mean to say he is dead? 'I"here is no death; lie is not dead because we love him, because he is giving us life."

Bunin was deeply impressed; he noted that at that time the master's face was "gaunt, his complexion dark, his features severe, as though cast in bronze." After a brief conversation, the two men went out into the night together. A sharp wind stung their faccs and fluttered the flame in the lamps. They walked diagonally across the snow-covered Virgins' Field. Bunin could hardly keep pace with the old man, who had broken into a run and was leaping the ditches and repeating in a jerky, savage voice, "There is no death! There is no death!"-⁴

A few days later, reading that his colleague Leskov, who died in the same month as Vanichka, had left a literary testament, he decided he would also make a will. In this document, dated March 27, 1895, he began by stating that he wished to be buried in a cheap coffin, without flowers or wreaths and without speeches or announcements in the newspapers. lie left his unpublished papers to Sonya and Chertkov, both deeply devoted to his work, to sort and classify together. His daughters, Tanya and Masha, were not to have any part in this work. Still less his sons; although they loved him, their views were too far removed from his. The faithful Strakhov, on the contrary, was to be allowed to collaborate with Sonya and Chertkov if any help were required. Tolstoy also asked that the private diaries he had kept before his marriage be destroyed, except for the few pages that were "worthy of preservation," and that everything that might cause embarrassment in the later notebooks be deleted. "Besides," he added, "Chertkov has

promised to do this while I am alive. In view of his great and utterly undeserved affection for me and his unique moral intuition, I am certain he will acquit himself irreproachably of this task."

How could lie fail to understand, writing those lines, what an affront he was inflicting upon his wife by allowing an outsider to decide what should and should not be published among all the things he had written on the subject of his marriage? How could he fail to foresee the dreadful struggle that would ensue between wife and disciple, each bent on securing possession of the master's private manuscripts? With the boundless naivete of the man of letters, he must have imagined that the posthumous labor he was commissioning them to perform would lead them to a reconciliation rather than discord. However, upon reflection, he returned to his original idea: "No, let my private diaries stay as they are. That way, at least, it may be seen that in spite of the degradation and shamelessness of my youth, God had not forsaken me and that—late in life, it is true; on the very threshold of old age—I did begin to understand him a little, and to love him." He also urged his heirs to relinquish their rights to his early works, but without making this an absolute order. There followed some lofty considerations on man's relations with God: "Do not use the soul to preserve and cultivate the physical being, but use the physical being to preserve and cultivate the soul." "To live for God means to dedicate one's life to people's happiness." The entry concluded abruptly on a different note: "It is one o'clock, I am going to dinner."

The day after this solemn interrogation of his conscience, one month after Vanichka's death, Leo Tolstoy, aged sixty-seven, took his first bicycle lesson. His brand-new machine was a present from the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers. An instructor came to teach him, free of charge, how to keep his balance. What could Sonya be thinking, on March 28, 1895, as she watched her husband pedaling awkwardly along the snow-edged garden paths? She was probably shocked to see him enjoying a new sport so soon after their bereavement. Was it callousness, selfishness or the reaction of a prodigiously vital organism against the creeping fear of doom? She envied and hated him for being so strong. That evening, Tolstoy's entry in his diary consisted of the three ritual initials—"i.I.l." (if I live)—and nothing else.

4. Sonya s Folly; What Is Art?

'ITie summer after Vanichka's death, Tolstoy went back to work in the fields, rode horseback, played tennis and pedaled his bicycle. His skill at the latter provoked the admiration of his children and the shocked disapproval of his disciples. The prudish Chertkov soberly noted, "Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle. Is this not inconsistent with his Christian ideals?" Tolstoy, however, convinced himself of the utility of his project by reading the Scientific Notes on the Action of the Velocipede as Physical Exercise, by L. K. Popov. He also noted in his diary, "I don't know why I like it [riding a bicycle]. N. [Chertkov] is offended and finds fault with me for this, but I keep doing it and am not ashamed. On the contrary, I feel that I am entitled to my share of natural light-heartedness, that the opinion of others has no importance, and that there is nothing wrong in enjoying oneself simply, like a boy." However, he refrained from showing off his new accomplishment in the presence of distinguished visitors, of whom there were a bumper crop that year—scholars, journalists, sycophants, busy-bodies . . . and a thirty-five-year-old Russian author, whose name was beginning to be known: Anton Chekhov.

In those days Chekhov admired Tolstoy as a writer but did not accept his philosophy. He came of a modest family and had muzhik blood," and he thought the "old wizard" of Yasnaya Polyana was wrong to want those at the top to bring themselves down to the level of the people in order to drink the sacred truth at its source; on the contrary, he thought it was the level of the people that should be raised, through education. "The devil take all the philosophies of all the great men," he wrote. "Every great sage is as despotic as a general and

• Ilis grandfather, Egor Chekh, had been a serf on an estate belonging to none other than the father of Tolstoy's disciple Vladimir Grigorycvich Chertkov.

as devoid of consideration, because lie knows he is safe. Diogenes spat in people's faces, knowing that no one could touch him; and Tolstoy says all doctors are scoundrels and shows no respect for major issues because he too, like Diogenes, cannot be hauled into a police station or attacked in the newspapers."¹ Elsewhere: "I was subjugated by the Tolstoyan philosophy ... for some seventeen years. But now something in me has protested; reason and a sense of justice have convinced me that there is more love in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and the refusal to eat meat."²

When he first came to Yasnaya Polyana, one bright August morning, he encountered an old peasant in a white linen blouse walking along the birch drive with a towel over his shoulder. It was Tolstoy, on his way to bathe in the stream. When the caller stated his name, the master's face lighted up. He put his young colleague at his ease with a few friendly words and invited him to come along to the bathhouse, where he undressed and plunged into the water up to his neck. The ripples hid the nakedness of his body, and his beard floated on the surface while he chatted away. Chekhov was entranced by such unaffected simplicity.

Tlie next day Tolstoy arranged a reading of passages from Resurrection for Chekhov and a few friends. Chekhov found the book moving and fascinating, but could not admire it unreservedly, as lie had Tolstoy's other books. Every time the characters stopped living their own lives and became the protagonists of Tolstoyan theories, he was disturbed by their double personalities. After he left, Tolstoy, very favorably impressed, defined him as follows: "He is full of talent, he undoubtedly has a very good heart, but thus far he does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life."³ Chekhov said, in return, "Talking with Leo Nikolayevich, one feels utterly in his power. I have never met a more compelling personality or one more harmoniously developed, so to say. He is almost a perfect man."⁴ But he still could not forgive him his ideas about religion, progress and non-resistance to evil.

That summer Tolstoy had the great joy of seeing his most cherished disciple, Chertkov, move with his wife into a little house less than three miles from Yasnaya Polyana. Thus they were able to meet every day. Chertkov urged Tolstoy to keep working on Resurrection, applauded him when he dashed off a virulent article against corporal punishment, t poked his nose into his diary and, when he caught the master straying from the "doctrine," called him to order with respectful stern-

t Entitled Shamel

ness. Sonya, still sore and bruised in her mourning, did not even have the energy to protest this appropriation of her husband by the "outsider." "She is exhausted," wrote Tolstoy, "she is mentally ill, it would be a sin to hold it against her. What a pity she will never admit her mistakes!"⁵ And he gave the following analysis of the suffering woman's condition to his son Leo: "She offers a striking example of the grave danger of placing one's life in any service but that of God. She is no longer alive. She is making herself miserable but cannot lift herself up into the sphere of the divine, that is, the spiritual. She would like to return to her former interests in life and her other children, but she cannot because her relationship with Vanichka, who was so young and so gifted, had elevated her, softened and purified her. . . . How easy it would have been for her, however, especially since she loves mel The trouble is that she loves me as I have not been for many years now and does not recognize me as I really am; I am a stranger to her, frightening and dangerous."⁸

One summer day his disciple Alyokhin, who was cutting hay at his side, advised him to leave his wife. He shrugged, but when the other man insisted, he flew into a rage and made a threatening gesture with his scythe. The next moment he threw the instrument away and fell sobbing to the ground. The witnesses of this scene, all confirmed Tol- stoyans, looked at cach other in dismay.⁷

In September, he had difficulty concealing his pleasure when he learned that Tsar Nicholas II, reversing his father's decision, had at last authorized the performance of The Power of Darkness in the imperial theaters. He was immediately caught up in a whirl of activity —casting, set-building, discussing the director's reflections on the meaning of the play. Returning to Moscow, he read it to the Art Theater company and sat in on rehearsals, but did not appear on opening night. The play was a triumph. The public rose to acclaim the missing author. Students rushed out to look for him, gathered in front of his house, demanded to see him, deafened him with their ovation.

This roar of approval reawakened Tolstoy's interest in the theater. He began to attend performances, less to admire other dramatists than to confirm his suspicions of their shortcomings. Shakespeare was still his pet hate; after seeing the Italian actor Rossi in King Lear and Hamlet, lie announced that he was revolted by "such affectation." On April 18, 1896, he walked out of a performance of Wagner's Siegfried before the end of the second act, muttering, "Fit for a circus, idiotic, pretentious!" He later explained to his intimates that German folklore was "the most stupid and tedious" of all and that the composer's music was utterly shapeless. "You listen," he said, "but you cannot tell

whether the orchestra has already started to play or is still tuning up."⁸ Excited by all the clumsy mistakes he found in the world's most famous dramatists, he set to work on a play of his own, The Light Shines in the Darkness. It was a semi-autobiographical analysis of the conflict between a man animated by a fervent sense of Christianity and those around him, especially his wife, who wants to go on living according to the law of the world. Curiously, when writing these four acts Tolstoy unconsciously exaggerated his hero to the point of caricature. After a few weeks he may have realized that his argument was in danger of blowing up in his face, and he put the play away unfinished. Or, unable to find the right ending for it, he may have decided to wait until his life provided material for a denouement.

Death was all around him. Nagomov, his niece Varya's husband; Strakhov the critic, who had been his admirer and friend . . .^ft Funerals alternated with baptisms and weddings. Some of the latter, he thought, were as sad as the former. The year before (July 10, 1895), his son Sergey had married a Miss Rachinsky; this year it was the other son, Leo, who married a Miss Wcsterlund (May 15, 1896); his daughter Tanya was in love with Sukhotin and to Sonya's great displeasure was compromising herself by seeing him too often. What was it made them all run like lunatics after common terrestrial love? He seemed to be the only person who was capable of denying himself a pleasure. On May 2, 1896 he suddenly decided not to touch his bicycle again. "I have stopped riding my bicycle," he proudly wrote. "I cannot understand how I could be so carried away [with this sport]!"¹⁰ Tanya, guessing the real reason for his sacrifice, wrote in her diary, "Papa has given up his bicycle. I am happy for him because 1 know how much he loves to deny himself things; and for myself as well, because now we will not need to worry about him all the time or wait up all evening while he is out in the rain or send people out looking for him everywhere, etc."¹¹

In May 1896, Tsar Nicholas II came to Moscow for his coronation, and Tolstoy thanked heaven he was at Yasnaya Polyana during these festivities, which he could not condone. Nothing seemed more absurd to him than the revelry among the common people which always accompanied the official installation of a tyrant on his throne. 'The inanity and ignominy of this ritual make me unspeakably miserable," lie wrote.^{12 r}Ilie tsar had commanded all his subjects to take part in the celebrations, so a fair was planned for May 18 011 the Khodanka parade- grounds outside Moscow. It was huge. The police were soon overwhelmed; the crowd that milled back and forth between the candy

J Author's italics.

and vodka stands was so enormous that over two thousand persons were killed in the crush. This catastrophe was universally hailed as a bad omen: the reign had been baptized in blood. Nevertheless, that same evening Nicholas II attended the ball at the French Embassy. "Dreadful occurrence in Moscow on the Khodanka parade-grounds," wrote Tolstoy. "Three thousand persons crushcd to death. I do not know how to react to this event. I am not in condition, I am losing my grip."¹³

A few lines earlier the same day he had noted, "Tanayev annoys me with his air of moral self-satisfaction, his artistic obtuseness (deep- seated, not just superficial) and his position as cock-o'-the-walk in this house." A burst of spleen, quickly repressed. Sergey Ivanovich Tanayev, pianist and composer, was a friend of the family of long standing. He had already come to Yasnaya Polyana the previous year. In 1896, wanting to spend the summer with the Tolstoys, he rented the pavilion in which the Kuzminskys usually stayed, for one hundred and thirty rubles, and thus became part of the master's daily life.

lie was a little man of forty, chubby and awkward, who wore his clothes too tight, had tiny eyes, a pug nose and a falsetto voicc. A limp beard encircled his puffed-up doll's chccks. Absent-minded and bashful, he was utterly lacking in poise. Young women intimidated him, especially if they were pretty. An old nanny lived with him, brushed his clothes and made his morning tea. He played with the children on the croquet lawn, went on walks and picnics, dined joyously at the big table with twenty other guests, played chess with the master of the house, charmed everyone with his simple manners and kindliness and, in the evening, never refused when asked to give a little concert. He had a very light touch on the piano and an unaffected sensitivity that delighted his audience. Even Tolstoy, who was increasingly coming to suspect music of being in league with the devil, could not suppress his emotion when he heard certain pieces. Annoyed with himself, he pooh- poohed Tanaycv's favorite composers, said that Bach and Beethoven were overrated and wondered whether art in general were a necessary part of experience. Impassioned debates ensued, involving the whole family.

It was Sonva's opinion that life was not worth living without music and poetry. When Tanayev played Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words she clasped her hands to her bosom and had to choke back her tears. Vanichka's death had left such a void in her heart that she had an unconscious need to transfer her excess affection to someone else. By a natural reflex of self-defense she clung to whatever was still able to give her pleasure: music, which she had always loved, and the company of a man younger than herself, refined, discreet, reassuringly ugly.

The consolation she had been unable to accept from her husband—a genius, to be sure, but so excessive, obstinate, sectarian, so selfish and sententious—she found in the company of this artist, whose opinions on every subject coincided with her own. She delighted in their serious, high-minded, poetic conversations; when he looked at her, she felt younger; when his fingers touchcd the piano, her feet left the ground; sometimes it seemed to her that Vanichka was encouraging her in this newfound affection; perhaps, if he had lived, he would have been like Tanayev. . . . She was so ccrtain of the innoccncc of her feelings that she did not even try to hide them. Her daughters, from youngest to eldest, looked on with disapproval. Tanya (thirty-two) observed that her mother pinned a rose on her blouse before the musician's arrival. Sasha (twelve) was horrified to hear her reciting, with bcatific gaze, a poem by Tyutchev that began with the lines:

Oh, how much more timid and tender love grows

As our days draw on toward their close.

The girl thought these lines must surely be connected in her mother's mind with that disgusting Tanayev. She was delighted to learn that Papa, who was always right, considered that this decadent poet's glorification of "senile, toothless" love was "repulsive." In fact, Tolstoy had long been aware of Sonya's pitiful attempts at coquetry. Although he loudly proclaimed his indifference to public opinion, he could not stand the idea of being made a fool of by his wife. He was willing to accuse himself of the most heinous crimes, revile and ridicule himself and her for the love of Christian sclf-mortification, but not to be mocked at behind his back. Strange coincidence, that his final downfall should comc at the hands of a musician, just like that of the criminal hero of The Kreutzer Sonata. Had he been giving voice to a premonition when he wrote the book? Was this the price of the humiliation he had inflicted upon Sonya five years before when he published it? But there was nothing of Trukhachcvsky in Tanayev. Oh, his colleagues would have a good laugh at his expense! Sentences from the book leaped up before his eyes: '"Hie moment his gaze crossed my wife's I saw the hidden beast in them thumb its nose at their position and all our social conventions."

Exasperated by the languishing airs assumed by Sonya, who was living a teen-age romance at the age of fifty-two, he becamc increasingly impolite to Tanayev: "Morning. Did not sleep all night. Heart bothering me . . . Unable to overcome my pride and indignation . . ." (July 26, 1896.) "I console myself with the thought that I ought to pity her, that she is suffering and that I am infinitely to blame. We talked of the

Gospels. Tanayev tried to prove to me, in jest, that Christ was in favor of castration. I lost my temper. Am ashamed of myself." (July 30, 1896.)

When summer was over Tanayev left, and the helpless Sonya remained alone to face her husband's recriminations. She protested that he was insane to imagine she had fallen in love with a man twelve years her junior, that they were just good friends, that music was the only thing that prevented her from losing her mind. But she confided her true feelings to Mrs. Annenkov, a family friend, in a letter written in September 1896:

"As to my attitude toward the man who has disrupted my married life, against his will and without his knowledge, I can only say that I try not to think about him any more. It is hard for me to sever my friendly relations with him and to offend such a fine person and good and gentle man; but I am obstinately compelled to do so. lie left Yasnaya Polyana a month ago and I shall undoubtedly see him fin Moscow] in a few days. I do not know what I shall feel when I see him again. Joy, perhaps, or perhaps nothing at all. Sometimes my heart rebels and I refuse to alxindon the artistic, musical happiness he gave me; I do not want to live without this relationship, so simple and tender, which has given me so many shining hours in the past two years. . . . But when I think of my husband's sufferings and his insane jealousy, I feel deeply bitter and ashamed and I don't want to go on living; it is better for me to die than to hear such offensive accusations made against me, who have always taken care to behave so that neither my husband nor my children should have any cause to blush for me. And it is ludicrous, now, to have suspicions of any kind about a woman at my time of life—over fifty-two years old. Anyway, that's not what I mean to say: there arc no suspicions, nor can there be; there is only his demanding, tyrannical nature and his possessive love of himself and his family, and I must try to submit to it. The future looks terribly bleak to me. ... I continue to pine and seek comfort in new interests, totally different from those I had when my sweet little boy was alive. Where will all this lead me? I have no idea."

When she returned to Moscow at the beginning of winter she immediately resumed her relationship with Tanayev. She took piano lessons to please him and deafened the house practicing scales. He appeared almost every evening before supper, with his paunch, red-tipped nose and honeyed smile. Or else she, meaning no harm, would drop in on him after running her errands in town. She was dressed to the teeth, in fur-lined velvet cloak and otter toque. Gliding along in the sledge with her daughcr Sasha, she would suddenly raise her head with

a bright smile, tap the coachman on the l>ack with her tortoise-shell lorgnette ancl call out:

"Take us round to Mertvy Street!"

Tanayev, seeing the mother and daughter comc in, would leap up from his piano, beaming to hide his confusion while Sasha sputtered with fury. Sometimes the child defied her mother and refused to go out driving or comc into the drawing room because she did not want to meet the musician.¹⁴ As for Tolstoy, he had to muster all his willpower and all his faith in God to accept such a humiliating situation. When he reached the boiling point, he, spurner of the flesh, denier of earthly passions and sworn enemy of human love, rushed to his diary to relieve himself:

"i.I.l. I am still as upset as ever. Help me, Father. Dwell in me, subjugate me, drive out, abolish the base urges of the flesh and everything I feel through the flesh. Talking of art a while ago, saying one could only create when thinking of the loved one. And the way she tries to conceal it from me! It does not make me laugh, it does not make me feel sorry for her, it hurts. . . . When one is in prison in irons, at least one can take pride in one's humiliation, but in this situation there is nothing but pain, unless I look at it as a trial ordained by God. Yes, teach me to bear it with equanimity, joy and love." (December 20-21, 1896.) "Sonya came in a moment ago. She spoke to me. It merely added to my pain." (December 21.) "What is bad is that I want to feel sorry for myself and my last years, which are being ruined for nothing." (December 22.) "My hands are cold, I want to weep and love. At dinner, my sons' vulgarity was most trying." (December 26.)

At the beginning of 1897, he thought his patience would come to an end, with "these games of all kinds, this continual eating ancl this senile flirtation." "I write it so that it will be known, even if only after my death," he fumed. "For the moment I cannot talk about it. She is ill, it's true, but her illness is being treated as a form of health and encouraged instead of fought. What will become of all this, how will it end? I pray all the time, accuse myself ancl pray!"¹⁸

He wrote to his daughter Masha and to Chertkov, making veiled allusions to his woes. Then, after a night of bad dreams in which he clearly saw "the same offense, over and over," his old desire came back to him: to go away, avoid having to look on any longer at "the life of degrading madness" to which his wife was subjecting him. She still glanced occasionally into her husband's diary and was infuriated by his comments about her improper conduct. In tones of outraged innocence she asked him what right he had to treat her in this manner in pages which strangers might read one day. Did he want posterity

to put her down as a strumpet? From accuser, he somehow found himself turned into accuscd. In self-defense he assured her that no one who had seen them together could believe she was unfaithful. But a few pages later lie wrote, "If she wants to come looking in this diary again, then she must take the consequences. I can't write if I must be thinking all the time of her and the readers of the future, trumping up a sort of clean bill of health for her. All I know is that last night I imagined that she died before I did, and I was terror-stricken."¹⁶ Hie moment he had told Sonya that he believed she was incapable of being unfaithful to him, she went tearing off to St. Petersburg where Tanayev was giving a concert. Aghast, Tolstoy also left, with his daughter Tanya, for the Olsufyev estate at Nikolskoye, from which he wrote to his wife:

"It is infinitely sad and humiliating that an utterly useless and uninteresting outsider should now be ruling our life and poisoning our last years together; infinitely sad and humiliating to be obliged to inquire when he is leaving, where he is going, when he is rehearsing, what he will be playing. It is horrible, horrible, base and shameful! And it had to happen just at the end of our lives, which had been honest and clcan until then—and at a time when we were drawing closer and closer together in spite of all the things that had divided us. . . . And suddenly instead of the good, healthy, happy ending of thirty-five years of life together, there comes this sordid nonsense, leaving its abominable imprint on everything. I know you are miserable too, because you love me and you want to behave deccntly; but thus far you haven't been able to, and the whole thing is making me ill; I am ashamed, I feel deeply sorry for you because I love you myself, with the best love in the world, not the love that comes from the body or the mind, but the one that comes from the soul."¹⁷

In a postscript he entreated her to awaken from her "sleepwalking" state and resume "a normal life." It must have seemed to Sonya that by taking her friendship with Tanayev so seriously, her Lyovochka was displaying a state of mental derangement at least as acute as the one he alleged her to be suffering from. Recriminations, explanations and exhortations between the two continued by letter and—for a novelty! —by telephone.

Tanayev, however, was oblivious to the upheaval he had caused in the master's life. Vague, good-humored and naive, he thought of Sonya as an elderly, respectable lady whose affection flattered him. She invited him to spend a few days at Yasnaya Polyana again that summer, and he ingenuously accepted, certain that he would be welcomed by all. When Sonya, with an air of false detachment, announced this news

at table Tolstoy told her in no uncertain terms that if the musician set foot in the house again he, Tolstoy, would leave it forever. She took this for a passing fit of pique and tried to argue with him, but after five sleepless nights and five days of deadlock he went to his brother Sergey's home to find some peace, and from there, on May 18, 1897, he wrote a furious and desperate letter to Sonya:

"I am disgusted to sec you taking up with Tanayev again. I cannot go on living with you in these conditions; I am shortening and poisoning my existence. ... If you cannot put an end to this situation, let us separate."

During the night he went back to his pen, to state the four solutions he saw to their conjugal plight:

"1. The best is for you to break off all relations with him, not gradually but all at once, and never mind what he may think, in order to release us once and for all from the nightmare that has been tormenting us for a whole year. No meetings, no letters, no portraits, no mushroom- gatherings. 2. Another solution is for me to go abroad, after separating entirely from you, and each of us would live his own life. 3. The third solution is, in order to break with Tanayev, for us both to go abroad and remain there as long as necessary for you to be cured of the cause of your torment. 4. The fourth and most terrible, which I cannot envisage without a shudder, is for us to try to make ourselves believe that things will get better by themselves, that there is nothing irremediable in this, and go on living as we have done the past year."

The fourth solution was the one he ultimately adopted. On May 25, weary, sick at heart and red-eyed, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana. Betrayed and not betrayed, unable to break away and unable to accept, he, the giant, felt "bound to earth by the tiny fine hairs of Lilliputians." Sonya was touched by him, but more concerned about how he would receive Tanayev. "Am I guilty?" she wrote on June 2, 1897. "I do not know. When I first grew friendly with Tanayev I thought it would be pleasant for me to have a friend like him in my old age, calm, kind, gifted." And the next day, "The morbid jealousy displayed by Leo Nikolayevich when he heard that Tanayev was coming has hurt me deeply and filled me with dread."

At last Tanayev appeared, chubby and amiable, drummed a few songs with his little sausage-fingers, and was tactful enough to go away again forty-eight hours later, leaving a trail of music and gratitude behind him in Sonya's heart: "Sergey Ivanovich [Tanayev] left today, my husband is calm and cheerful again. I am calm, too, because I have seen Tanayev. If my husband insists that I have nothing more to do with Sergey Ivanovich, it is only because he is suffering. But it would be

torture for me. I feel so little guilt and such a peaceful joy in these pure and simple relations with someone else that I could no more give them up than I could prevent myself from seeing, breathing or thinking."

With increasingly morbid pleasure, she associated her little dead boy with the living musician. In her dreams she saw Vanichka sitting on Tanayev's knee. Or they would be standing side by side holding out their arms to her in questioning supplication. She often went off by herself under the grape arbor to talk to the dead child, tell him her troubles and ask his advice. "I asked Vanichka whether my feelings for Sergey Ivanovich [Tanayev] were impure," she wrote on June 5, 1897. "Today, Vanichka tried to draw me away from Sergey Ivanovich, probably out of compassion for his father. And yet, I know my child cannot blame me and does not want to dq^rivc ine of Sergey Ivanovich, because he sent him to me in the first place."

A month later, yielding to her obsession, she invited Tanayev back to Yasnaya Polyana without consulting anyone. Her dread at the thought of her family's scathing disapproval only added to the delight with which she anticipated the encounter: "Fearing my husband's anger, I have not told him yet. Could he be jealous again? If Sergey Ivanovich were to imagine such a thing, he would be so shockcd! As for me, I cannot hide my joy at the thought of playing music again and having someone pleasant and cheerful to converse with."¹⁸

The next day Michael (age seventeen), who knew of Tanayev's impending arrival, made a reference to it at the dinner table in front of his father. Tolstoy scovvlcd and snapped, "First I've heard of it!"

Tanayev remained at Yasnaya Polyana from July 5 to 13. Again there was a festival of music. Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert joined forces to send Sonya into a swoon: "His playing tears me asunder. I was inwardly shaken with sobs as I listened to the Polonaise." She photographed her idol from ever)' conceivable angle and developed the plates herself while Lyovochka, seething, climbed back onto his bicycle and pedaled grimly off across-country to work off his anger. It ended, however, without any major explosion, and Sonya concluded that her husband had resigned himself. But what she did not know was that on July 8 he had again decided to run away from home and had written her a farewell letter. He did not go, but neither did he tear up the letter. In it, he justified his decision by his desire to live in accordance with his principles, yet it could not have been plainer that it was his wife's behavior that had actually driven him to such a state:

"My dear Sonya, the inconsistency between my life and my beliefs has long been tonnenting me. And I have been unable to compel you

to change a way of life and habits for which I myself am responsible. Nor could I leave you before, fearing to deprive my children of what little influence I may have had upon them in their youth and not wanting to wound you. But now I am equally unable to go on as I have done these past sixteen years, cither struggling and irritating you all or succumbing in turn to the temptations that surround me and that I have ultimately grown used to. Therefore, I have now decided to do what I have been wanting to do for some time: leave. . . . The chief reason is this: just as the Hindus retire to the forest at the age of sixty, so any- elderly religious man hopes to devote the last years of his life to God and not to pleasantries, punning, gossip and tennis matches; and so I, on the eve of my seventieth year, aspire with all my heart and soul to peace and solitude and, if not a perfect harmony between my life and conscience, at least something other than this howling clash between them. ... I ask you all to forgive me, should you be hurt by my decision; but you, Sonya, you above all, accept my going, do not come looking for me, do not feel resentment toward me, do not condemn me. The fact that I am leaving you does not mean I am not satisfied with you. I know that you literally could not, and cannot, see and feel as I do, and that it is impossible for you to change your way of life and make sacrifices for a cause that means nothing to you. I accordingly do not blame you. On the contrary, I think back with gratitude over our thirty-five years together, especially during the first period when you performed what you considered to be your duty in life with the maternal self-denial and energy that abound in you. You have given us, the world and myself, everything you were able to give, a great deal of love and maternal devotion, and you are to be revered for that. But in the later phases of our life together, the past fifteen years, we have drawn apart from each other. I do not believe it is my fault, for I know that I did not change cither for my personal pleasure or for fame and glory, but because I could not do otherwise. Nor can I hold it against you that you did not follow me; I think of you; I remember and always shall remember what you gave me with love. Farewell, dear Sonya."

Tolstoy hid this letter under the imitation leather upholstery of his desk chair. A few years later, when told that the chair was to be recovered, he removed the letter from its hiding place and gave it to Obolcnsky, with instructions to hand it to Sonya after his death.*

After giving up the idea of going into retreat like a Hindu, he rushed to the opposite extreme and, the moment his rival was out of sight, yielded to the "urges of the flesh" in his wife's arms. She, however, continued to feel herself a virgin, after her thirteen children. There was a lavender haze drifting through her head. All the gossip about Tanayev left her quite unconcerned: "I am proud to have my name associated with that of a man who is kind, upright and gifted. My conscience is clear before God, my husband and my children. I am as pure in soul, thought and body as a newborn child."¹⁹ After giving Tolstoy the animal satisfaction he claimed, she watched in amused astonishment as he reveled, at the age of sixty-nine, in his manly prowess. Her disrespect even went as far, on occasion, as to call him an "old man" in her diary. She wrote, "We women cannot live without someone to worship. ... I have uncrowned Leo Nikolayevich who is no longer my idol. I am still profoundly attached to him. . . . But happiness, true happiness—lie can no longer give to me."²⁰ On August 1 her daughter Sasha observed, "How cheerful Papa is this morning!" Sonya's wry comment in her notebook: "If she knew that Papa is always cheerful for the same reason—the love that he denies!" That day, Papa, who was decidedly "his old self" again, played tennis for three hours nonstop, rode over to Kozlovka on horseback and, on his return, was sorry he could not give his calves a little workout on the bicycle, which was being repaired. No more "old man" now! "What a vigorous nature!" sighed Sonya. "Yesterday, not without regret, he told me I had aged lately. I shall be worn out before him, in spite of my good health and youthful looks and the fact that I am sixteen years younger than he."²¹

Since she felt nothing but loathing for the physical act of love, she thought wistfully back to the delights of her sentimental conversations with Tanayev: "I am doing my duty toward my husband," she wrote on August 3, 1897, "and there is some satisfaction in that, but I am often very sad and then I have other desires." At the end of the summer, "Soon I shall be going to Moscow, I shall rent a piano and play, and I hope that Sergey Ivanovich will comc and play with me. That would be so lovely! The mere thought of it restores me to life!"

In the autumn the couple separated, Tolstoy staying on at Yasnaya Polyana while his family returned to Moscow. After rebuking her husband for not coming too, Sonya immediately began to invent pretexts for seeing Tanayev. She attended his concerts, invited him to tea, called on him at his home if he happened to say he was feeling unwell. When there were obstacles, she thought—pious soul—"God will help me, somehow. And if He doesn't, never mind!" But she was not above taking help from the devil too: a gypsy read her palm and offered to cast a spell on her aspirant and drive him mad with love. She hesitated before saying no. "I was terribly frightened," she wrote in her diary. "I suddenly wanted to buy her potion."

• After Tolstoy's death, Sonya found not one but two letters: she tore up the first as soon as she had read it, and the second is the one quoted here.

Upon joining his wife Tolstoy soon realized that she was more infatuated than ever with her pianist. The stormy scenes resumed, absurd, grotesque. At last a quarrel broke out that was so violent Tolstoy consigned it verbatim to paper and entitled it Dialogue. They were lying in bed one night when it began. At first a murmur, then the voices began to rise, a candle was lighted. Summoned by her husband to confess that she was still enamored of Tanayev, Sonya protested her innocence.

"All I ask," she whimpered, "is the right to have him here once a month! To comc in and sit down and play the piano for me, like any other friend could do!"

"That's just the point, what you just said proves that your feelings toward the man are out of the ordinary," retorted Tolstoy. "I don't know of any other person whose monthly visit could give you such joy. If that's the case, you would find it that much more agreeable to sec him every week, or every day! . . ."

• He finally called her a "concert hag," which made her wild with rage. Screaming, laughing, sobbing and hiccoughing, she bccamc hysterical.

"My head is splitting!" she stuttered. "There! . . . Right there! . . . Cut open the vein in my neck! . . ."

"I held her at arm's length," wrote Tolstoy. "Knowing that it usually helps, I kissed her on the forehead. It took her a long time to get her breath back. Then she began to yawn and sigh, and fell asleep. She is still sleeping now."

This crisis was followed by a long truce. Sonya's passion for the potbellied pianist began to wane. And Tanayev, who must finally have become aware of Tolstoy's resentment, began to space his calls.

But Tolstoy had not seen the last of love's devastations. That year, 1897, it seemed to him that every female at Yasnaya Polyana had been bitten by the devil. 'They are scampering about in every direction like cats 011 a hot tin roof," he wrote. "What a blessing to be married, but how good it would be to be rid of this galloping and miaowing on the rooftops!" When it wasn't the wife who had to be called to order, it was the daughters. He would never have believed that Masha and Tanya, his two darling girls, who had his teachings in the very marrow of their bones, could turn away from him, one after the other.

It began with Masha—noble, uncompromising, industrious, vegetarian, saintly Masha—who had given up her share of the inheritance out of respect for her father's principles. Of course, she had had boyfriends, but all of them were harmless little Tolstoyans like Biryukov, and not for one moment had the master dreamed that his favorite daughter might desert him for a mere disciple. Now, all of a sudden, here she was crazy about young Prince Nicholas Leonidich Obolensky, a distant relative and a handsome, lazy, affable and irresponsible boy with empty pockets and polished fingernails. His only affinities with Tolstoyism were that he did not drink or gamble and would not have hurt a fly. In grieving wonder, Tolstoy watched as Masha melted in admiration of the playboy from Moscow. Even Sonya, deep in the toils of her intrigue with Tanayev, observed that the "child" had lost her wits. To disenchant the poor girl, her father sent her a solemn letter enumerating the pecuniary difficulties she would have to face when she set up housekeeping:

"You are going to exchange your peace of mind and independence for the most agonizing and complicated sufferings. . . . Does he want to enter the service, and where? Where and how will you live? ... Do you intend to claim your share of the inheritance? . .

And a few days later:

"You must have guessed that your decision means failure to me; you know it full well; but on the other hand I am glad to think that it will be easier for you to live after abandoning your ideal, or rather after mingling your ideal with baser aspirations, by which I mean having children."²³

In spite of this double warning, Masha stood her ground, announced her engagement and, since Nicholas Obolensky had not a kopeck to his name, came forward twisting her skirts and hanging her head to reclaim her share of the inheritance she had previously disdained. Tolstoy clothed his disappointment in a dignified silence. But Masha's brothers and sisters protested vehemently, because they had been counting on dividing up her share among themselves. And Sonya exulted, with a bitter smile: she alone had known all along what would happen. You had to be crazy like Lyovochka to imagine that any normal woman could forget she had a womb.

Another obstacle arose when the time came to set the wedding date. Masha had stopped confessing and taking communion long ago, so the Church would not bless her marriage.. Prince Obolensky suggested they bribe a priest, which would cost only one hundred and fifty rubles. Tolstoy indignantly replied that any such monkey-business as that would be performed over his dead body. Since his daughter had decided to return to the common herd she must abide by its rules, even the most ludicrous ones, and in particular its religious ceremonies. It was a question of integrity. Weeping at her relapse, she yielded, confessed, took communion and, on June 2, 1897, in the presence of her family and dressed in her everyday clothes, married Nicholas Obolcnsky, the "sponger," the "long-eared lazybones," as Sonya callcd him.

"Masha is married," wrote Tolstoy on July 16. "I feel all the compassion for her I would feel for a purebred racehorse put to work hauling water."

His grief at Masha's departure was sharpened by his suspicion that his gentle, high-spirited Tanya was also about to elude him. After rejecting quantities of suitors out of devotion to the Tolstoyan ideal, she had fallen wildly in love with a man much older than she, Michael Sukhotin, who was married and the father of six children; he was in his fifties, had a middle-aged paunch and was both charming and witty. Tanya carried on a kind of platonic romance with him, met him secretly, suffered from the falseness of the situation but could not bring herself to break it off. "I am ashamed when I think of Sukhotin's wife and children," she wrote, "although he assured me that I am depriving them of nothing and although I know his wife stopped loving him long ago."²⁴ And also, "Papa is the great rival of all lovers and none has been able to vanquish him yet. But this love of mine is competing more strongly than any other has done so far."²⁵

Sukhotin's wife was very ill, and Tanya was sometimes horrified to catch herself hoping she would die, which, with admirable tactfulness, she did soon afterward, and on October 9, 1897 the thirty-thrcc- year-old virgin wrote to her father announcing her desire to many her widower. This was the last straw. His hatred of the ties of the flesh revived. With the fierce selfishness of an old man who cannot tolerate happiness in others except on his own tenns, he replied to his daughter on October 14:

"I have received your letter, dear Tanya, and I simply cannot give you the answer you would like. I can understand that a depraved man may- find salvation in marriage. But why a pure girl should want to get mixed up in such a business is beyond me. If I were a girl I would not marry for anything in the world. And as far as being in love is concerned, for either men or women—since I know what it means; that is, that it is an ignoble and, above all, an unhealthy sentiment, not at all beautiful, lofty or poetical—I would not have opened my door to it. I would have taken as many precautions to avoid being contaminated by that disease as I would to protect myself against far less serious infections such as diphtheria, typhus or scarlet fever. Just now it seems to you that life is not possible without it. Tin's is also tine of alcoholics and smokers, except that when they break the habit they discover life as it really is. You have not managed to avoid this intoxication, and now you feel it is impossible to live without it. And yet it is possible! After saying this, without any real hope of convincing you or inciting you to change your way of life and rid yourself of your addiction, and without any hope of avoiding the other diseases that will infect you later, I shall proceed to tell you how I view your state.

"Uncle Sergey told me that one day (I was not there) he went to see the gypsies with our brother Nicholas and some other people he hardly knew. Nicholas had had too much to drink. Whenever he went drinking with the gypsies, he would begin to dancc, badly, hopping about on one foot and flapping his arms convulsively in a way that was meant to be bold and reckless, and suited him about as well as a saddle on a milch-cow. He, a quiet, sober man, awkward, modest and homely, would suddenly begin to fling himself into contortions while the people around him laughed and seemed to be encouraging him. It was a dreadful spectacle.

"It happened that this particular day, Nicholas wanted to dance. Sergey and Basil Perfilyev begged him not to but he wouldn't listen, and, sitting on a chair, began gesticulating incoherently and awkwardly. They bcsccched him; but when at last they saw he was too drunk to hear what they were saying, Sergey simply told him, in a defeated and mournful voice, 'Then go dance!' And, heaving a sigh, he put his head down in order not to see this humiliating spectaclc which seemed to the drunken man (and to him alone) an admirable exhibition, joyful and delightful to all.

"Tliat is how I sec your desire. All I can say to you is, 'Then go dancer I take comfort in the thought that when you have finished dancing you will become as you were before, and ought always to be. 'Dance!' If it has to be, I can but repeat it. But I cannot fail to see that you have become irresponsible; your letter proves it. I cannot see what interest and importance there can be for you in the fact that you will be seeing him one hour more. By way of explanation, you tell me that you are thrilled at the mere thought of receiving a letter from him. This is confirmation of my opinion that you arc acting with the total unconsciousness of one possessed. I might have understood that a thirty-three-year-old virgin should choose to love a man past his prime, who is good, honest and not a fool, and should determine to unite their destinies. But then she would not attach such a price to one more hour of conversation or the approach of the moment when she might receive a letter, because she would know that neither the continuation of the conversation nor the contents of the letter could give her anything more. If there is this emotional strain, that means there is also an artificial stimulus, in other words, that the soul is not at ease. And when the soul is not at case, the thing to do is not to bind oneself to someone else, but to lock oneself up in a room and throw the key out of the window."

This time Tolstoy's aim was better. Wounded, Tanya bowed to her father's will. But she returned to the charge a few months later—she must have Sukhotin, she wanted to be his wife for better or for worse, she begged her parents to let her go. The marriage took place on November 14, 1899. Tolstoy sobbed as lie led his eldest daughter to the church. On November 20 he wrote in his diary:

"I am in Moscow. Tanya has gone away—God knows why—with Sukhotin. It is pitiful and humiliating. For seventy years my opinion of women has done nothing but sink steadily, and yet it must go lower still. The problem of women? One thing is sure! It is not solved by allowing women to run one's life, but by preventing them from destroying it!"

During 1897 Tolstoy was wrestling simultaneously with the follies of his wife and daughters and with a book by which he set great store: What Is Art? He had long felt the need to explain the tragic contradiction between the prophet and the writer in him. In his essay What Then Must We Do? he had already said that artists who neglected their vocation as educators were prostituting their talent. The older he grew the more self-evident this principle seemed to him. He defended it so vehemently to his family and friends that, in Sonya's words, "everyone's sole wish was that he would stop talking as soon as possible!" The advent of Tanayev at Yasnaya Polyana had strengthened his hatred of "immoral and idle" art. His attacks upon music, painting ancl literature as entertainment were so many kicks in the pants of this weakling Sonya had the effrontery to pretend she was in love with. He added the recriminations of the jealous husband to the vaticinations of the apostle. Sonya, who was rccopying the essay, noted on June 25, 1897, "So much fury and meanness, even in this text. I feel clearly that he is attacking an imaginary foe (would it be Sergey Ivanovich [Tanayev] he is jealous of?) and that his one and only purpose is to destroy him."

The truth was that Tanayev had simply precipitated a reaction prepared long before. It was inevitable that after condemning the pleasures of the senses Tolstoy should be brought to reject all forms of art that were not useful to the people. He might have qualified his verdict, attached a few judicious concessions to it, but it was not in his nature to be diplomatic. Just as he strove to reproduce every shade in a landscape or the expression of a face or state of mind, so, when it came to philosophical ideas, he saw everything in black and white. Starting out from premises that seemed sound to him, he lumbered ahead looking neither right nor left, preferring to end in an impasse rather than to swerve by so much as a hairsbrcadth from a straight line. If he happened to change his mind on the way, he did not gradually shift his course but tacked about all at once, proclaimed the opposite of what he had said the previous day, and called his about-face a conversion or rebirth. "Why talk in subtleties," he wrote in his diary, "when there are so many flagrant truths to be told?"

In aesthetics, the first of the "flagrant truths" was embodied in the statement that "art must not be regarded as a means of procuring pleasure, but as an aspect of social life." Therefore, for Tolstoy, the artist's duty was not to give form, color and rhythm to his flights of fancy, but to amuse the workers after their hard day of labor, and give them "rest, as refreshing as in their sleep. When an artist begins to say, 'I am not understood, not because I am incomprehensible (that is, bad) but because my listeners-readers-spcctators have not yet reached my intellectual level,' he has abandoned the natural imperatives of art and signed his own death warrant by ignoring the mainspring of creation." The criterion of quality was, hence, the approval of the masses, however ignorant and illiterate they were. The notion that a work might be beautiful and have no meaning for the masses was an invention of the wealthy, who, out of pride and perversity, had encouraged the artists to work for a narrow circle of so-called connoisseurs. And thanks to them, modern art was running to wrack and ruin. "The artist of tomorrow will realize that it is more important and useful to compose a talc, a touching little song, a divertissement or sketch or light interlude, or draw a picture that will delight dozens of generations, that is, millions of children and adults, than a novel, symphony or painting that will enchant a few representatives of the wealthy classes and then be forgotten forever."

Carried away by his theory, Tolstoy furiously set about demolishing the alleged geniuses of the race. French literature fared worst at his hands, not only because its authors positively indulged themselves in the study of amorous passion, but also bccausc its poets had so refined and polished their style that their products were no more than puzzles in code. Down with Charles Baudelaire, that convoluted, unclean versifier! Down with Verlaine the drunkard, incapable of expressing a thought clearly, recommending—heavens above!—"that gray song where Precise and Vague join hands!" Down with Mallarme, who was proud of being so obscurc when he ought to have been ashamed! And all those manufacturers of verse, Jean MorЈas, Henri dc Regnier, Maeterlinck. . . . What aberration had led the French to abandon their last great poets—Lccontc dc Lisle and Sully Prudhomme?

Tilings weren't much better in the field of painting: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, l'issarro, all compounders of fog, splitters of the sable hairs on their brushes, intellectuals refusing all contact with the people to wallow in an art for the initiated! Were there any blue faces, or landscapes composed of hordes of multicolored dots? There were not, right? Then into the wastebasket with the Impressionists! But they were not the only guilty ones. Those painters whose sole occupation was to represent "the pleasures and graccs of a life of leisure and idleness" must also be scrapped, along with those whose paintings had "a symbolical meaning comprehensible only to people of a certain class," and those whose pictures were "full of feminine nudity, such as arc to be seen in galleries and exhibitions."

The same depravity prevailed in the music of Beethoven, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner—"dedicated to the expression of sickly states of nervous emotion." All works that departed from the traditions of the people (folkdances or songs) were to be banished, except possibly "Bach's famous air for violin, one of Chopin's nocturnes and a dozen pieces or passages in Ilaydn, Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin . . One must not be afraid to denounce the public's blind veneration for ccrtain taboo titles, such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which was thought to be so admirable; Tolstoy did not believe it deserved its reputation, and to prove his point he asked two questions: 1. "Does the work give birth to elevated religious feelings?" Answer: "No; becausc no music of any kind can produce such feelings." 2. "If the work docs not belong to the category of religious art, then does it have another characteristic of good modern art, i.e., does it unite people in a community of feeling?" There again, the answer was negative. And the author adds, "Not only do I fail to sec that the feeling expressed by the Ninth Symphony is capable of uniting people who have not been especially trained to enter into this complicated form of hypnosis, but I cannot even imagine how a crowd of normal beings can be touched by this interminable, muddled and artificial work, in which only one or two short passages manage to emerge from an ocean of incomprehensible sound."

When he contemplated all the perversions of art, he felt sorry for the millions of good souls working twelve or fourteen hours a clay printing books, or wearing themselves out shifting the scenery of amoral plays in theaters, or those who had devoted their entire lives from the age of ten to suppling their fingers so that they could play some musical instrument, or those who did acrobatics and risked their lives in circuses. . . . According to him, the muzhiks were right to express surprise at the sight of a monument to Pushkin, who was not a saint, had been killed in a duel and "whose sole merit was to have written some frequently improper love-poetry." Similarly, he approved of the peasants in Brittany and Nonnandy who were offended by the tributes paid to the de-

praved Baudelaire or the drunken Verlaine. He said the artists of tomorrow must give up mystification, go to the people and revive their jaded inspiration through contact with them. With what pride this latter-day inquisitor watched the flames leaping at the stakes on which he had flung all the decadent and false works of those little Western witches!

The final version of What Is Art? is actually relatively mild: his true feelings were expressed in his diary of the period:

"Yesterday, I glanced through Fet's books—novels, short stories and poetry. I recalled the time we spent together at Yasnaya Polyana, our interminable four-handed sessions at the piano, and I plainly saw that all this music and fiction and poetry is not art, that men do not have the slightest need for it, that it is nothing but a distraction for profiteers and idlers, that it has nothing to do with life. Novels and short stories describe the revolting manner in which two creatures become infatuated with each other; poems explain and glorify how to die of boredom; and music does the same. And all the while life, all of life, is beating at us with urgent questions—food, the distribution of property, labor, religion, human relations! It's a shame! It is ignoble! Help me, Father, to serve you by destroying falsehood."²⁶ Or:

"The aesthetic is merely one expression of the ethical. ... If feelings are fine amd noble, art will be fine and noble too, and vicc-vcrsa."²⁷ And:

"How relieved all those people would have been who spend their time shut up in a concert hall listening to Beethoven's last symphony if the orchestra had played them a trepak or a czardas or something of that order instead!"²⁸

When What 1$ Art?, mutilated by the censor, came out at the beginning of 1898, it aroused a storm of protest. Most artists were simply dismayed by this profession of faith by the most illustrious author in Russia, confusing art with pedagogy and talent with right-mindedness. Abroad, translations soon appeared and indignation rose even higher: Tolstoy was called a renegade, an iconoclast, the enemy of freedom of thought. In the Revue des Deux Mondes RenЈ Doumic wrote, "Tolstoy absolutely refuses to acknowledge the value of form, through which the language of art differs from any other. The artist is the man who knows better than anyone else how to express feelings which anyone else may experience more deeply than he." "When Tolstoy speaks of French literature it is clear that he is speaking of what he knows not," observed J. K. Huysmans. "His weakness is to give art a moral purpose," noted Camille Mauclair. Rimy de Gourmont went him one better: "Art is its own purpose and goal." Mallarm6 explained: "It seems to me that the illustrious apostle is assigning a quality to art as a principle which is actually more its consequence." The soft-hearted Henri de Regnicr sputtered and fumed, "These are the ideas of an old man!" "Tolstoy has always got his muzhik in his pocket," Andre Suares later said. "Shopenhauer and Rembrandt are worthless because the muzhik doesn't understand them!"

Tolstoy was not displeased by this commotion. If they were all shouting so loudly then he must have hit the mark. Besides, the painter Repin, who had so often done his portrait, thought he was right. And so did all his friends and disciples. The truth was that he could not be mistaken because he was inspired by God, whereas those scribblers in France, England and Germany were all in league with the devil.

Now that he had defined the role of art in society, he felt like writing a piece of fiction. Resurrection, perhaps—he had been working on it for a long time, but rather halfheartedly; or the adventures of Iladji Murad—that would take him back to his youth in the Caucasus. In any case, his next novel must be an illustration of his theories. Would he himself be able to live in accordance with what he taught others? Suddenly, he wasn't so sure! This lust for life, this love of nature, this need to expend his energies in the open air, or in bed, this childish desire to tell stories . . . Was it moral? Was it necessary? At seventy, Tolstoy the philosopher began to have suspicions of Tolstoy the author.

PART VII

The Apostle of Non-violence

1. Resurrection; the Dukhobors

As though by design, cver>^f time Tolstoy was about to become engrossed in some fictional characters, a real-life injustice or calamity would strike his compatriots, tear him away from his dream world and thrust him back to his post of protester. Such vast numbers of people saw him as the incarnation of the conscience of the times that he was compelled, under pain of losing face, to adopt an unequivocal stand on ever)' event. I lis sincerity, moreover, was always absolute, and his courage owed nothing to his impunity.

Early in 1895, there was renewed talk in Russia of an old religious sect known as the Dukhobors, or "spirit-wrestlers," which Tsar Alexander I had exiled to the Caucasus long before. Their doctrinc resembled that of Tolstoy: like him they advocated chastity, vegetarianism, abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, pooling of all goods and property and non-resistance to evil. As a consequence of the latter, they refused to serve in the army, and this led to very harsh disciplinary measures against some of their members. When Nicholas II acceded to the throne, the government's reactionary tendencies increased, and the Dukhobors were placed under strict surveillance. In the spring of 1895 those in the Caucasus, who had been accustomed to carrying arms to defend themselves against marauding hillsmen, determined, at the instigation of their spiritual leader Verigin, to destroy their daggers, pistols and rifles and publicly proclaim their refusal to serve in the army. The auto-da-fe took place during the night of June 28-29, in all the lands held by the Dukhobors. The sectarians gathered to pray and sing hymns around the huge bonfires in which their instruments of death were melting, crackling and exploding. Cossacks were sent to "restore order"; they arrived at a gallop, circled the unfortunate wor-

shippers and beat them with nagayki whips until they had disfigured them. Then, by administrative order, the Dukhobors' lands were confiscated and their houses pillaged, four thousand of them were exiled to the mountain villages, and their leaders were put in prison.

Tolstoy was horrified when he heard of this brutality. No doubt it was his books that had given these poor folk the courage to proclaim their faith. His disciplc Biryukov left for the Caucasus on August 4 to investigate the matter at first hand. He returned with an articlc of such virulence that it could not conccivably be published in Russia. But Tolstoy had it printed anonymously (wise precaution) in the London Times, under the title The Persecution of Christians in Russia in 1895.¹

The following year, having learned that of the four thousand Dukhobors sent to live in the mountains, four hundred had already died of privation, he encouraged Chertkov, Biryukov and Tregubov, another of his disciples, to write a manifesto to attract public attention to the sufferings of these innocent people. The manifesto was callcd Give HelpJ and was followed by a postscript by Leo Tolstoy; this time the text was signed, adding to its moral weight. Large numbers of typewritten copies were made and sent to all the influential figures in the administration. The tsar himself received a copy through the mail. Retaliation was swift: the police searched the homes of Chertkov and Biryukov and confiscated masses of papers relating to the religious sects, destroying any that might compromise Pobyedonostsev; and shortly thereafter, in February 1897, Biryukov was exiled to a little town in Kurland, and Chertkov, who still had friends in court, was given the choice of accompanying his "accomplice" or leaving the country. He decided to go to England.

Tolstoy made a special trip to St. Petersburg to bid his disciples farewell. lie was not to see them again for many years. He felt sorry for them and envied them too: they, at least, were suffering for a just cause. When would he, too, be allowed to become a martyr? Speaking of Biryukov and Chertkov, he wrote, "The joy of spiritual communion . . . was so much stronger than the sorrow of separation that even now I cannot produce in myself that state of affliction which is considered proper in such circumstances. They are (both) so full of light, so happy and simple that they inspire absolutely no pity. What is going on inside them is far more important than an enforced change of residence."²

Sonya, who had accompanied Tolstoy to St. Petersburg, was so incensed at the punishment inflicted upon her husband's followers that she even forgot her hatred of Chertkov. Since he was leaving, she began to see all his fine qualities. "The place Tolstoy and his partisans will occupy in history because of this," she proudly wrote to her sister,

"will be far more enviable than that of Pobyedonostscv and company." She confided to her friend Mrs. Annenkov: "I wept a great deal, for I regard the men who have just been banished as our best and most devoted friends, and it is very hard for us to be separated from them." At this time she was still in the throes of her platonic infatuation with Tanayev; her husband, Chertkov, the children, the music, all swam together more or less harmoniously in her mind. But Tolstoy was grateful to her for siding with him on behalf of the Dukhobors.

Moreover, throughout his stay in the capital, he felt that public opinion was on his side. In the street, young people recognized him from his portraits, spoke to him, told him how they admired him; Koni's neighbors broke off in the middle of a party and came out to watch the great, taciturn writer go by in his muzhik dress; the day he left, he was acclaimed by a crowd at the station and had to come to the doorway of his compartment to bow, like a politician or an actor. The only person to give him a cold shoulder in Petersburg was his babushka Alexandra. lie could not resist telling her all the ill he thought of the tsar and his clique, any more than she could resist upbraiding him for his religious waywardness. They parted unreconciled. Tolstoy found her 'lifeless, utterly lacking in kindliness, pitiful" and "possessed of boundless pride."³ And she wrote, "It is sad to say, but he has no need of Him who is the onlv Savior. How is one to understand the merits and inconsistencies of this remarkable and mystifying character? On the one hand, love of truth, love of mankind, love of God and of the Master whose glory he will not or cannot admit; and on the other, pride, obscurity, lack of faith, the abyss."

After his Petersburg experiment, Tolstoy went through a period of discouragement and doubt. It had become clear to him that the government was cunningly contriving to exempt him from all punishment and prosecuting only his partisans. That was the best way to give him a guilty conscicncc and discredit him in the eyes of the public. They said—and it was probably true!—that when a minister suggested that Tolstoy should be exiled, the new tsar, Nicholas II, had taken the same line as his father: "I do not intend to add a martyr's crown to his glory." Frustrated, Tolstoy wrote to Gastcv, one of his followers, "You probably know that Chertkov and Biryukov have been sent into exile. That is all very well and good. The sad thing is that they won't lay a finger on me. They (the people in authority) are defeating their own purpose, however, for by leaving me free to speak the truth, they are compelling me to speak it. And I have the impression that much remains to be said."*