Tolstoy

Souls. Like Gogol's Chiehikov, on each successive occasion Tolstoy's Nekhlyudov discovers some new facet of human baseness, lechery, stupidity, cruelty or malpractice. Gogol had wanted to contrast the black creatures in the first part of Dead Sovb with white ones, who would incarnate the hopes of the human race in the second part, before emerging as virtually full-fledged angels in the third part of his Russian Divine Comedy. But try as he would, he could not add a Purgatorio or a Paradiso to the Inferno he had so masterfully portrayed. Tolstoy chose to combine his figures of light and darkness in the same story. Opposite the repulsive gang of authorities—ministers, judges, priests, police, prison warders—he aligns the people, simple and resigned. In his previous novels, the laboring masses had been represented only by peasants, but in Resurrection there are, in addition to the muzhiks on Nckhlyudov's estate, cobblers, masons, house painters, factory' hands, laundresses, servants and common criminals. For these underlings, the victims of a misbegotten society, the author has nothing but esteem and affection. He describes them with the same realism as he does persons of high degree, but is never sarcastic toward them. How could he sneer at them, the salt of the earth? He paints their external filth in the blackcst of hues, but sees nothing but light in their souls. There is Fyodosya, with her "gentle voice" and "limpid eyes," and Taras, who has "kindly blue eyes," following his unjustly sentenced wife to Siberia; and the peasant Menshov, who also has eyes full of light and a heart of gold. Even the drunkards and brutes have the excuse of their immense poverty. Hundreds of silhouettes file past the reader—mere sketches, but when superposed, they form a single collective character whose presence dominates the book. A "barefoot peasant in a torn caftan, holding the tatters of his hat with dignity in the crook of his arm"; a "muzhik dressed in rags and bark shoes, with a beard that had never been combed"; Anisya, "a gaunt woman with a bloodless but smiling face." Further on Nekhlyudov sees, in a sort of hallucination, "those cobblers he had watched working behind a basement grille; those thin, pale, unkempt laundresses with bare bony arms, ironing in front of gaping windows from which thick scrolls of soapy steam poured out; those two dyer's boys in aprons whom he had recently met, shoeless, wearing only linen rags wrapped around their feet, stained with dye from head to toe. With their shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, they were carrying dye pails that were too heavy for them, making the big veins swell out on their scrawny arms, and snapping incessantly at each other. Their sullen faces showed profound lassitude. The same expression could be seen on the dusty, black faces of the wagoners lurching about on their carts, the bloated faces of the

men and women begging alms at the street comers with their children, the features of the drinkers glimpsed through caf6 windows. There, around tiny tables cluttered with bottles and glasses of tea, in the ceaseless bustle of the waiters in white aprons, sat creatures with bnitish faces, inflamed by alcohol, covered with sweat, shouting and singing."

Between the gray horde of the victims and the glittering little clan of their executioners stand those who want to overthrow the established order: the revolutionaries. Tolstoy studies them here for the first time. As a partisan of non-violence, he should have felt nothing but aversion for them. And yet he draws and animates them with compassion. Among them arc aristocrats, bourgeois intellectuals, civil servants, a peasant, a laborer who is a great reader of Karl Marx. The more fanatical of these agitators are mistaken, to be sure, when they proclaim that one must "work for the masses and expect nothing from them," overthrow the government by force, impose a constitution upon an ignorant people to make them happy in spite of themselves. But their motives are never base. They are ready to suffer and die for others. Therefore they are entitled to the author's respect. Katyusha Mazlova herself admits that she "never knew or could imagine men more wonderful than those with whom she was walking now."

Nekhlyudov had tried to cany out a bloodless revolution among the peasants on his own estate. Thus, after lending his agricultural theories of one period to Levin in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy now bestows his latest views on the subject upon the hero of Resurrection. Inspired by the American socialist Ilcnry George, Nekhlyudov favors a single land tax, high enough to compel the large owners to cede their land to the State. The tax would abolish private property and the State would redistribute the nationalized land among all the peasants who cultivated it. It is odd that Nekhlyudov (alias Tolstoy) should have been so hypnotized by this pseudo-communistic Utopia that he failed to realize that in order to carry out such a redistribution it would first be necessary to change the government, or in other words, to make a radical and presumably bloody political reform. When Nekhlyudov finally decides to abandon his land to the peasants in return for a token rent, he has to struggle with their skepticism. With his usual honesty, the author recognizes the gulf between even the best-intentioned landowner and the people. "It all seemed perfect and yet Nekhlyudov had misgivings. lie saw that in spite of the profuse expressions of thanks uttered by some of them, the peasants were in fact dissatisfied and expected something more from him. ... He climbed into the steward's troika with a disagreeable sensation of having left the job unfinished." Moral: the lord's half-measures arc useless and even harmful; as long

as he has not given his muzhiks everything, he has given them nothing; one clay he will give up all his possessions, less in order to make them happy than to appease his own conscience. Then, without money, attachments or worries, he can set out, illuminated, for Siberia with Katyusha Mazlova at this side.

Most of Tolstoy's novels are dominated by the idea that a man's real life begins when the spiritual forces in him triumph over his animal nature. But in War and Peace and Anna Karenina this quest for perfection was not the only mainspring. The movement of those stories and their highpoints of interest were in the love affairs that swept the main characters along (Prince Andrey and Natasha; Pierre Bezukhov and Elena, then Natasha; Nicholas Rostov and Sonya, then Princcss Bolkonsky; Levin and Kitty; Anna Karenina and Vronsky, etc.). In Resurrection Nckhlyudov's love for Katyusha Mazlova is the preface to the novel, rather than the substance of it. Their love is the past. It is seen through mirrors. But since the reader does not have to follow several intermingled plot-lines at once, as in the great works that preceded it, the story gains in unity and drive. The action of the book actually begins when Nckhlyudov, looking at the prostitute being tried for theft, recognizes the little servant-girl he had seduccd in his youth. Later, he never feels involved with her in the ordinary way. He follows her out of pity, not passion, and out of a need to expiate, a desire to elevate himself by joining forccs with those who are most lowly. It is not sentiment that gives rhythm and warmth to this couple's story, but the denunciation of social injustice and the search for a remedy that will cure mankind's ills.

And therein, perhaps, lies the weakness in this beautiful book. All that is "reporting"—the courts, prisons, convicts' travels, life in a prison colony—is compcllingly convincing, but the saga of Nckhlyudov and Katyusha Mazlova seems rather trite alongside it. Like Nikolenka Irtenyev in Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, Nckhlyudov in A Landlords Morning, Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina, the Nckhlyudov of Resurrection is Leo Tolstoy. But the gap between protagonist and author has widened with age. The writer has put the ideas of a solitary thinker of seventy-two into the head of a hale and hearty man of thirty-five, high-living, lusty and frivolous. As Romain Rolland points out, one feels here "the juxtaposition of one very real person going through the moral crisis of another one, and the other one is the aged Tolstoy." To be sure, a moral crisis of this sort is conccivablc at any age. But here there has been nothing in what we know of the hero's character and life to prepare for it; it arrives on command, more, it would seem, at the author's will than as the conse-

quence of the psychological impulses of his spokesman; and once it has begun, it proceeds with mechanical regularity.

To hide his uneasiness at this arbitrary aspect of the revelation, Tolstoy makes lavish use of overdramatic expressions. When he first sees Katyusha Mazlova at the court hearing, Nekhlyudov "feels he is a dog who should be ashamed to look people in the face." Later, "he felt all the cruelty and indignity not only of that one deed, but of his entire idle, debauched, spiteful and arrogant existence." Returning home after the trial, he repeats to himself, "Shame and loathing! Loathing and shameft And when he sees a portrait of his mother in a black gown with shoulders bared and swelling bosom, he chokes with revulsion for all that is "flesh." He remembers that he had seen Missy, his fiancee, similarly revealed a few days before. "I shall tell Missy the truth: that I am a profligate, that 1 cannot marry her and have troubled her for nothing. ... I shall tell Katyusha that I am a filthy wretch, that I am guilty toward her and shall do everything in my power to lighten her burden." Having made this decision, nothing can move him from it. He is wealthy, enjoys a good reputation and is about to marry Missy —but he abandons everything to atone for an error made in the distant past; and not for one moment during the months of his calvary with Katyusha Mazlova, a care-worn woman with a vicious tongue and foul breath, does he question the choice he has made. Even when he learns she is about to relapse into sin, he does not entertain one moment of regret or discouragement.

How is it that Tolstoy, whose own convictions and feelings fluctuated so wildly, did not try to "shade" his hero a little? Nekhlyudov would have seemed so much more plausible to us had lie been a little less sure of himself! Moreover, he and Katyusha Mazlova follow different paths to illumination. Katyusha is reborn when she places herself at the serv ice of a political prisoner whom she does not love; she abandons Nekhlyudov, who has given up everything to save her, perhaps because she senses that a man like him must find his salvation alone. And so it is: Nekhlyudov, feeling that "his dealings with Katyusha are at an end," opens the New Testament and chances upon a passage that enlightens him. In a matter of minutes he is turned inside out, renewed, cleansed. Eor the reader, this conversion in extremis is hardly convincing. It docs not follow naturally from the story and it bears the mark of Holy Scripture less than that of the fatigue of an author who is in a hurry to dispose of his characters. After reading the book, Chekhov wrote to Menshikov, on January 28, 1900, "A11 admirable work of art!

♦ Here and in following quote, Trovat's italics.

The most interesting parts are the passages on the relations between Nekhlyudov and Katyusha, and even more, those on all those princes and generals and aunts and muzhiks and convicts and guards. The scene with the spiritualist general in command of the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress took my breath away, it is so powerful! And Mrs. Korchagin in her armchair, and Fyodosya's peasant husband . . . the one who said his wife was clutching. It's Tolstoy's pen that is clutching. But the novel has no end, or rather what ends it cannot be called an ending. To write and write, and then suddenly to throw it all away on a piece of scripture, is a little too theological!"

In fact, the end of Resurrection is astonishingly like that of Father Sergey and also like that which Tolstoy, in his diary, hoped would be his own: the departure, the break with society to mingle with the hordes of the lowly and be lost in the flood.

Ilis refusal to live in the world is even more singular when one thinks that his perception of it has never been sharper. It is not loss of appetite that drives him away from the table, but fear of his own gluttony. At seventy as at twenty, he writes with nostrils flaring, eyes alert and ears pricked; he told Sergeyenko, "No detail must be neglected in art, for a button half-undone may explain a whole side of a person's character. It is absolutely essential to mention that button. But it has to be described in terms of the person's inner life, and attention must not be diverted from important things to focus on accessories and trivia."¹² Applying this principle, he notes the physical peculiarities of his people in passing, characterizes old Korchagin by his "bull's ncck," Mazlenikov by his "white, fat fist," Katyusha Mazlova by her eyes as dark as wet black currants and her slight squint, Missy by her tapered thumbnail. He gives to each his own way of speaking: socialites, high public officials, muzhiks and guards, revolutionary theoreticians and convicts. For the latter, he uses the pungent expressions he noted during his prison tours. Even the inner monologues are in keeping with the characters' physical type and social rank. All in all, he never wrote with greater violence and less "artistry." He takes even less pains than usual with his style because he is not trying to tell a story: he is trying to stigmatize those who are responsible for the present plight of society. The crudencss of naturalistic detail is intended to convince the reader of the extent of the evil that must be remedied: the gabbling woman squatting over the garbage trough, the old man with a huge gray louse crawling across his cheek, the convicts' wrangling around the faucet during their washing-up period . . . The reminiscences of Nekhlyudov's and Katyusha's distant past are the only moments that contain any poetry. There is the unforgettable snowy Easter night, the

church filled with peasants in their best finery, Katyusha looking so pretty with a red ribbon in her hair; and the thaw, the white fog; and the vision of the girl sitting quietly behind a window; and the swell of desire in Nekhlyudov'S veins, while, "from the stream, strange snortings and cracklings came to him, the rattle of breaking ice" and the crow of the cock leaps out of the mist. All the grace and loveliness of the long-ago time of innocence merely deepen the squalor of the present. Tolstoy colors his drawing with his adjectives. His brush skims, adding a stroke here and there, deepening a shadow, encircling a silhouette: "There were four judges: Nikitin, the president, a waxen, smooth- shaven man with steel gray eyes in a narrow face; Wolff, with lips tightly compressed, leafing through the brief with his little white hands; then Skovorodnikov, tall and heavy with a pockmarked face, a learned jurist; the fourth, Bey, wearing a patriarchal air, came in last. The clerk and the State representative, a young man of medium height, dry and close-shaven with a swarthy complexion and black, mournful eyes, had come in at the same time as the judges."

There is one set of words that recur whenever Nekhlyudov is among people of the upper classes: "satiated," "fat," "scrubbed," "idle," "smug," "contemptible" . . . But when he goes among the people, everyone becomes "gaunt," "pale," "hairy," "worn," "querulous," "swollen," "wretched" . . . Tolstoy's love of the adjective is boundless. He would not cross out a single one to lighten his sentence or avoid a clash of vowel sounds. Little he cared whether he wrote well, so long as what he wrote was true! To an anonymous young poet who sent hiin a sample of his work around that time he replied, "I do not like verse and I think poetry is a pointless occupation. When a man has something to say he must try to say it as clearly as possible, and when he has nothing to say it is better for him to keep quiet."¹³

If Tolstoy is so scornful of the music of words, it is because the only thing that matters to him is the thought behind them. His sentences, badly built, strung together with "who," "what," "which," "the latter," "the one who" and "as a result," express what lie thinks all the better. After criticizing the old master's style, Chekhov wrote, "You read on and between the lines you sec an eagle soaring in the sky, and the last thing in the world he carcs about is the beauty of his feathers." True; Tolstoy's style is total freedom, absolute sincerity. He is the enemy of mystery in literature. His world is lighted full-face, brutally. Every shadow is defined by the position of the sun. No mirages, no phantoms, no sham. He bedevils his style for love of the truth as he bedevils his friends for love of the truth. If he could, lie would live and write like a peasant: hammer words the way you hammer wooden

wedges into a shoe sole. Make them stick, make it work, make it last for generations.

Written with a propagandist's vehemence, Resurrection shocked Russia into silence. Even the authorities did not dare to make an open attack upon this indictment of the vices of the regime. And all the money went to the Dukhobors. "Your novel is more than literature," Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote to Tolstoy on July 10, 1899. "I, at any rate, cannot recall ever reading anything in the least like it. I read and it seems to me that I am not reading but walking about, and I see these people, these cells and rooms, this piano and sidewalk . . Four days later Stasov confirmed this opinion: "Ah, what an amazing miracle it is, your Resurrection. All Russia is living and feeding on this book. . . . You cannot imagine the conversations and debates it is provoking. I think there are only a few imbecilic and decadent degenerates against you in all of Russia. . . . Such as those poor wretches Merezhkovsky, Minsky et al . . ,"¹⁴ And on January 2, 1900: "This event has had no equal in the literature of the nineteenth century. It is far greater than Les Miserables because there is not one shred of idealism or invention or literature in you, only flesh, living meat!"

Tolstoy, however, was skeptical. As usual, it seemed to him that his work was not polished enough. And then, he was rather ashamed of this success, which was addressed more to the novelist than to the philosopher. His excuse was that the Dukhobors would benefit greatly by it—he had paid the eighty thousand rubiest he received for the book into their fund. With coquetry he feigned self-belittlement to Prince Khilkov: "I suppose that, just as nature has endowed certain men with a sexual instinct for the reproduction of the species, she has endowed others with an artistic instinct, which seems to be equally absurd and equally imperious. ... I sec no other explanation for the fact that an old man of seventy who is not utterly stupid should devote himself to an occupation as futile as writing novels."¹⁵

Tolstoy celebrated his seventieth birthday at Yasnaya Polyana on August 28, 1898. There were forty people around the table, singing and making speeches. Tolstoy, with patriarchal beard and misty eyes, was aglow. But Preobazhensky cast a chill over the gathering when he proposed to drink a glass of white wine to the master's health, for, as Sonya was forced to explain, "One may not drink to the health of Leo Nikolayevich because he belongs to a temperance league." He was at the height of his fame, and was alternately delighted and disgusted by

| Or $226,500.

his physical prowess. When was lie sincere—glorying in the fact that he could still cut hay for three hours at a stretch, or regretting the impure thoughts that passed through his mind at the sight of a farm girl? "Lyovochka made my bed himself," wrote his wife, "and after riding over twenty miles still had enough energy to manifest his passion. I note this as proof of his remarkable vitality at the age of seventy."¹⁶

His fame brought an ever-increasing number of letters and visitors. All foreigners of note who were traveling in Russia came to see him, from the criminologist Cesare Lombroso ("A naive, narrow-minded little old man," said Sonya) to the poet Rainer Maria Rilkc, who seems to have made no impression at all. When Lombroso tried to explain to Tolstoy his theory of the "delinquent man" whose responsibility was attenuated by heredity, illness and environment, the author of Resurrection scowled, glared at him and burst out, "It's insane! All punishment is criminal I"¹⁷

The sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy was given permission to come into the master's presence, and made a life-size bust of him, with arms crossed and beard awry and a discontented expression on his face. Later, he sculpted him on his mare D61ire: the patriarch's shoulders are squared, his feet thrust home in the stirrups, his blouse bouffant, the reins in his hands. His face is rough, wrinkled and hairy, like a hunk of earth, crazed and moss-grown in patches. His cheekbones are high, his ears large. Under the protuberant brow, his eyes—black holes—stare into the distance: away! The "second tsar of Russia," as some called him, had not given up his scheme. His need for asceticism and vagabondage was most intense just after he had dazzled Sonya with his virility. On July 17, 1898, he wrote to his Finnish translator Jerncfeld, whom he had never seen, announcing in covert terms that he would like to come and live with him. Then he rccoilcd at the thought of the scandal that would follow his flight. "My whole soul reaches out," he told one of his friends, "but I cannot tear myself away from here. Do you know why? I am afraid T should have to step over a pool of blood, a corpse in the door. That would be so horrible that I prefer to go on with my hateful life, however burdensome!"¹* To Chertkov he wrote, on July 21, 1898: "Do not let anyone read this. ... I am a poor excuse for a man. I teach others and cannot live as I ought myself. For how many years have I been asking myself, must I go on as I am or must 1 go away? And I cannot make up my mind. I know that everything is decided by renunciation, and when I succeed it all becomes clear, but those moments arc few and far between."

He might have found another reason for indecision that year, in

addition to his fear of hurting his wife. Hundreds of peasants needed him: famine was threatening again, even in the richest provinces. 'I he district of Chern, where both Nikolskoyc and Grinevka—the estates of his eldest son Sergey and his second son Ilya—were located, was particularly hard-hit. He went there and, with Sergey and Ilya, set up relief kitchens and clothing distribution centers and wrote an article, Famine or No Famine. And yet he felt no communion of thought with these strapping young men, so deeply entrenched in their class privileges. "They make such a strange and unpleasant impression upon me, my children who own land and force other people to work," he wrote. "I feel guilty for them. In me it was not the result of reasoning, but of a very powerful emotion. Was I wrong not to give the land to the muzhiks outright? I don't know."¹⁹

After trying his hand at a few vague administrative jobs, Sergey had settled on his share of the estate in 1891. He was a gruff, tenderhearted, solitary man, and his marriage was not a success. Although a son had been born, he w^ras already contemplating divorce. Ilya w^ras also living a retired and idle existence on his land, and he, too, did not get along with his wife, by whom he had had several children. But while Sergey gave vent to his emotions at the piano, Ilya consolcd himself with the bottle. Looking at him, Tolstoy's pain became all the sharper because this "muzhik" with the gray eyes, shapeless nose and broad shoulders resembled him so closely. Riding side by side on their horses, they toured the most destitute villages of the district. On several occasions the police tried to prevent them from opening relief kitchens. They had to telegraph to the minister of the interior for permission to feed people who were starving.

One day Tolstoy wanted to revisit Spasskoye, Ivan Turgenev's home, which was only seven miles away from Ilya's. As he went through the abandoned grounds, he recalled the elegant old author with the white beard and woman's voice, with whom he had quarreled so bitterly and whose importance he now appreciated more fully. But he did not grieve long over this ghost at his heels: the forest was so beautiful and calm in the light of the setting sun that it positively beckoned one to eternal rest. He wrote to Sonya, "Cool grass underfoot, stars in the sky, the perfume of flowering laburnum and limp birch leaves, trills of the nightingales, buzzing of beetles, the cry of the cuckoo, the solitude, the easy movement of the horse beneath me and a sensation of physical and moral health. As always, I thought of death. It seemed clear to me that everything would be just as good—although in another way—on the other side, and I understood why the Jews imagine paradise in the form of a garden."²⁰

On his return to Yasnaya Polyana, already bitterly disappointed by Sergey and Ilya, his two older sons, Tolstoy ran afoul of the third, Leo, the high-strung intellectual who suffered from being only the pale copy of a great father, and who also wanted to write. At every opportunity he openly opposed his father in the press, but thus far his undistinguished articles had attracted little attention.

Now, however, he had written a novel, entitled The Prelude of Chopin, no more nor less than an insolent retort to The Kreutzer Sonata. Was it Leo's recent marriage to Miss Wcstcrlund that had given him the impudence to defend marriage after his father had condemned it? Did he pretend to balance his insignificant personal experience of married life against that of the patriarch of Yasnaya Polyana? And he was proposing to publish this balderdash! At the risk of making the author of his days look ridiculous! It was one tiling to preach Christian meekness, indiffercncc to the gossip of the world and respect for the opinions of one's fellow man; but there were some forms of attack, com ing from a son, that were not to be tolerated. Stung in both his paternal dignity and his author's pride, Tolstoy fumed with rage. Some very strong words were exchanged between the two Leos. On the evening of June 22 the father wrote in his diary: "Leo spoke to me of his novel. I told him in no uncertain terms that what he had done was not only extremely ill-bred (his favorite expression) but also stupid and devoid of talent!" Disregarding threats and pleas, Leo decided to publish his prose, and two years later, he did so. But The Prelude of Chopin sank without a ripple.

At the end of the year, however, the much-maligned Sergey gave proof of unexpected devotion when he agreed to accompany the Dukhobors to Canada. On December 21,1898 lie embarked at Batum 011 the steamship Lake Superior, with two thousand sectarians. Two more shiploads had already left during the previous weeks, making a total of six thousand persons. The crossing took twenty-four days. Tolstoy could tell himself that this monumental migration had been made possible by him, through the collections he had organized and, above all, the money from Resurrection which he had contributed to the Dukhobors' fund. There was proof of the power of mind over matter: one little idea was enough to feed the masses and stoke the engines of steamships; he was touched. And he confessed in his diary, "Sergey is very close to me, becausc he is trying and because he has feeling."

If only his two younger sons would make an effort to imitate their brother. But Andrcy and Michael were strangers to their father's world. Besides, he had to admit that he neither understood nor loved them. Andrey even claimed that during one entire year his father had

spoken to him only once, and then to say, "Go home." Both, after halfhearted and fitful studies, had joined the army. Indolent and spendthrift amateurs of the gypsies, they turned up at Yasnaya Polyana only to demand money from their mother. To the astonishment of all, however, Andrcy suddenly decided to settle down and, on January 8, 1899, married Countess Olga Dietrich, Chcrtkov's sister-in-law. After serving as a volunteer in Sumsky's regiment, Michael married a Miss Glebov in 1901.

Unions and separations, flirtations and quarrels, presentations of fiancees and arrivals of daughters-in-law, births; Tolstoy took increasingly little interest in all this flurry. Since his double disappointment over Tanya's marriage to Sukhotin and Masha's marriage to Olwlensky, he expected nothing more from his daughters. The first was living the life of a provincial dame at Kochcty, her husband's estate; the second had moved to Pirogovo with her husband. Onetime priestesses of the Tolstoyan cult, they were now slaving to satisfy the whims of their imbecilic spouses. He was still glad to sec them, however; but they no longer belonged to him, there were impure smells clinging to them. After he visited Kochety, Tanya wrote in her diary, "I am ashamed to have let Papa down, yet I cannot feel guilty about it. We did not have much serious conversation; I was afraid he would tell me that my marriage was a disappointment to him."²¹ And he: "Tanya's frivolity disturbs me; she has embarked upon a purely selfish love. I hope she will come back."²²

Wrapped up in his grief at the loss of his two older daughters, he paid little attention to the youngest, Alexandra, aged fifteen, who never took her eyes off him and drank his every word. Sensitive, willful and jealous, she had felt nothing but contempt for her mother ever since she had watched her sighing over Tanayev at the piano, and she wanted to become closer to her father. For her, he was an awesome and omniscient god, the master of all Russia, the only writer in the world. One day- just before Palm Sunday—Sonya came to her husband in his study and announced, her eyes sparkling with anger, that Sasha (Alexandra) refused to go to church. Tolstoy summoned his daughter. Alone with her, looking deep into her eyes, he asked why she had made such a decision.

"Because it's all lies!" cried Sasha between her sobs. "It is all false! I can't!"

A breath of fresh air wafted through the old warrior's heart. Just when he believed he had been abandoned by his entire family, here he was witnessing the birth of a new disciple, under his own roof. The least likely, the most delightful of disciples! A little girl with a stubborn forehead and braids, wearing a stiff skirt over her starched Sunday petticoats. "My father's face softened," Alexandra Tolstoy later wrote. "His eyes became gentle and loving."

"Go to church anyway, today," he said.

And he leaned over to kiss her. With pride and joy she bathed in the perfume of his harsh gray beard. From that day forward, she felt bound to her father by a loving conspiracy, and her sole desire was to take her mother's place at his side, her mother who— that she was sure of!—did not understand him.

2. Excommunication; the Crimea

After a year's residence under surveillance in the government of Kur- land, Biryukov was allowed to go to Switzerland. As soon as he reached Geneva he arranged with Chertkov, who was living in London, to found a Tolstoyan review, Free Thought. All the master's works that were forbidden by the ccnsor in Russia were brought across the frontier, where his two disciples saw to their translation and publication. He had virtually ccascd to write for anyone else. Orchestrated by them, his fame was assuming ecumenical proportions. The figure of the noble old man with the white beard, suffering, thoughtful countenance and knotted limbs, dressed in a linen blouse and Turkish trousers stuffed into soft leather boots, spread throughout the world in cheap picture-books. And in the opening days of the century he began, for the first time, to feel the weight of his years. lie still rode his horse, hiked for miles cross-country and did the work of ten in his study, but he seldom touched his bicycle any more, played hardly any tennis and often complained of pains in the stomach. He had even been forced, reluctantly, to give up gymnastics. And yet it seemed to him that as his strength waned, his soul only rose higher. "The moral progress of mankind is due to the aged," he wrote in his diary. 'The old grow better and wiser." And, "I am moved to tears by nature: the meadows, woods, wheat fields, the plowed earth, the hay. I tell myself: 'Am I living through my last summer?' If I am, so much the better."

Unlike some old people, for whom the approach of death brings greater indulgence toward themselves, his need to submit to a stern moral code was stronger than ever. The years had not weakened his love of perfection. Every evening without fail he would shut himself up in his study, open a notebook and, by the light of a single candle, without glasses, his nose buried in the page and his hand steady, record his

good resolutions, his failures, his resentments, his weaknesses and victories, and lay down rules of conduct as he had done when he was twenty. In addition to his diary, he had a notebook that never left his pocket, in which he jotted down candid impressions and thoughts. Very often the notes from it were expanded and enlarged upon in the diary. Everything he read, saw and heard was food for thought.

On March 23, 1900, his daughter Tanya, who was suffering from a frontal abscess, had to have her skull trepanned. Von Stein, the surgeon, thought he was doing the right thing when he invited Tolstoy who was waiting in the next room to watch the operation. He entered apprehensively, took one glance between the white-coated men at his daughter, who lay stretched out, livid, her skull bared and her face covered with blood, and nearly fainted. As he was being helped from the room Sonya aroused the whole hospital with her cries of indignation. But it was neither the horror of the sight nor the surgeon's tactlessness that had affected Tolstoy: it was the injustice, he said, all the care lavished upon a privileged few like his daughter, while so many died because they could not afford treatment. The next day, March 24, he wrote in his diary: "Yesterday, dreadful operation on Tanya. I saw clearly that all these clinics, built by merchants and manufacturers who have grown rich exploiting and continuing to exploit tens of thousands of lives, can only be evil. The fact that they heal one rich man after causing the death of hundreds if not thousands of poor ones, is abominable. It is also abominable that they arc learning, so they claim, to lessen suffering and lengthen life—for the means they employ in doing so are such (they say 'for the time being' and I say Tjy their very nature') that only a chosen few can be saved or comforted; and that is because medicine is less concerned with preventing—through hygiene —than with healing." I lis hatred of the wealthy had grown so intense that he added: "I cannot rejoice at the birth of a child into the wealthy class; it is the proliferation of parasites."¹

Despite his age, physical love was still a source of torment to him, and he classified the attitudes that a man could take toward desire as follows: "The best thing one can do with the sexual drive is (1) to destroy it utterly in oneself; next best⁰ (2) is to live with one woman, who has a chaste nature and shares your faith, and bring up children with her and help her as she helps you; next worset (3) is to go to a brothel when you are tormented by desire; (4) to have brief relations with different women, remaining with none; (5) to have intercourse with a

• In English in the original.

{ In English in the original.

young girl and abandon her; (6) worse yet, to have intercourse with another man's wife; (7) worst of all, to live with a faithless and immoral woman."² The list ended with the following sentence, encircled: "'Ihis page must be torn out."

However, if he considered it preferable not to divulge his opinions on this subject, he made 110 secret of his views on domestic and foreign politics. The quelling of the Philippine uprising by the United States, and the British expeditions against the Boers in the Transvaal shocked his sense of justice. "They are horrible, these wars that the English and Americans are waging in a world in which even schoolchildren condemn war!"³ he wrote. And he told a friend: "Above all else I place the ethical motives that impel and mold the course of history. ... If Poland or Finland were to rise [against Russia} and succeed, my sympathy would l>c with them as oppressed peoples."⁴ After watching the factory hands and freight gang at the Moscow-Kazan freight station, he flew into a rage against this exploitation of man by man, and wrote The Slavery of Our Times. The assassination of King Umberto of Italy inspired him to appeal to universal conscience: Who Is Guilty? And there were other occasional pieces: Letter to the Canadian Dukhobors, Patriotism and Government, Which Way Out?, Is It Necessary? He even started a Message to the Chinese.I He had been fascinated by them for some time, considering them to be the possessors of supreme wisdom. He devoured Confucius ("Everything else seems so trivial by comparison"⁵), meditated upon the paths to moral perfection proposed by "the king without a kingdom" and despaired at being unable to read his prcccpts in the original. Fortunately, there were less obscure languages; having heard that the best version of the Bible was that used in the Netherlands, he set out to learn Dutch. He made fairly rapid progress and marveled to rediscover the Sermon on the Mount as he felt his way along in his translation.

That year his religious convictions were confirmed by his indignation over Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. "It is perfectly clear to me," he wrote in his diary on December 29, 1900, "that Nietzsche was quite mad when he wrote it, not in any figurative sense but in the most literal and direct sense: his incoherence, leaping from one thought to the next, making comparisons without telling what he is comparing, his beginnings of reasonings that have no end . . . and all against a positively demented background, with this obsession that by denying the most noble principles of life and thought the author is demonstrating

t Subsequently abandoned.

his brilliant superiority! . . . But what kind of a society are we living in, where a man as mad as that, dangerously insane, can pass for a teacher?"

In contradiction to Nietzsche, who sang hymns to the will-to-power and wanted to elevate man into "superman," Tolstoy felt a profound joy in debasing himself before God. lie called himself "foul scum"^tf and affirmed that, whatever he did, he would never know for sure why he was bom or where he was going, as the Lord alone held the key to the mystery. Now, every day, he prayed to God in his own way, and conversed with him in his diary: "Lord, thou who art within me, give me light give me love . . ."⁷ However, while confessing his impotence and unworthiness, he was still convinced that his purpose on earth was to teach his fellow men. At times the "foul scum" lifted its head, and a breath from on high blew over him. With the tranquil assurance of the visionary, he stated his role: "I must remember that I am not an ordinary individual, but an emissary, and my vocation is as follows: (1) never to prostitute the dignity' of him whom I represent; (2) always to act according to his prescriptions (love); (3) always to work to accomplish the mission I have been given (kingdom of God); (4) whenever its interests conflict with mine, to sacrifice mine."⁸

While he was thus preparing himself for an ever wider ministry, the dignitaries of the Orthodox Church were discussing how best to combat his influence. As early as 1886, Mgr. Nikanor, archbishop of Kherson and Odessa, preached against "this latter-day heretical master"; in 1891, Butkevicli, archpricst of Kharkov, called him an "impious infidel"; in 1892, during the great famine, the priests of the country churches exhorted the muzhiks to refuse the renegade's bread; in 1896, Pobyedonostsev tried in vain to persuade the tsar to imprison him in the Suzdal monastery. And now at last, in 1900, Mgr. Anthony, president of the Holy Synod and Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, furious at his attacks against the Church in Resurrection, determined, at Pobycdonostsev's instigation, to excommunicato the culprit A confidential pastoral to the clergy was drafted, declaring Leo Tolstoy an outcast from the ecclesiastical community and forbidding the cclcbration of requiem masses, should he die impenitent. But after a few months of reflection, the members of the Holy Synod, meeting in plenary session, deemed it prudent to moderate the terms of the circular. On February 22, 1901 they adopted an official decision and ordered it to be posted on the doors of every church. It was signed by three metropolitans, one archbishop and three bishops:

"God has permitted a new false prophet to appear in our midst today, Count Leo Tolstoy. A world-famous author, Russian by birth, Orthodox by baptism and education, Count Tolstoy, led astray by pride, has boldly

and insolently dared to oppose God, Christ and his holy heirs. Openly and in the sight of all, he has denied the mother who nurtured him and brought him up: the Orthodox Church; and he has devoted his literary efforts and God-given talent to spreading doctrines which are contrary to Christ and the Church, and to undermining their fathers' faith in the minds and hearts of the people—the Orthodox faith, which upholds the universe, in which our ancestors lived and were saved and in which Holy Russia has remained strong until this day. In his works and letters, circulated in great numbers throughout the world by himself and by his disciples, and especially within the frontiers of our beloved fatherland, he preaches the abolition of all the dogma of the Orthodox Church and of the very essence of the Christian faith with fanatical frenzy; he denies the living and personal God glorified in the Holy Trinity, Creator and Providence of the universe; he refutes Our Lord Jesus Christ, God made Man, Redeemer and Savior of the world, who suffered for us and for our salvation, and who has been raised from the dead; he refutes the Immaculate Conception of the human manifestation of Christ the Lord, and the virginity, before and after the Nativity, of Mary, Mother of God, most pure and eternally virgin; he does not believe in the life hereafter or in judgment after death; he refutes all the Mysteries of the Church and their beneficial effect; and, flaunting the most sacred articles of faith of the Orthodox community, he has not feared to mock the greatest of all mysteries: the Holy Eucharist. . . . Therefore the Church no longer recognizes him among her children and cannot do so until he has repented and restored himself to communion with her."

Immediately after its publication, the pastoral of the Holy Synod aroused protest throughout Russia. Even those who disapproved of Tolstoy's ideas deplored this archaic procedure unearthed by the priests in the hope of discrediting Russia's greatest living author. What would other countries say to such medieval practiccs? And the moment for publishing the anathema could not have been more ill-chosen: for some time the Moscow University students had been agitating on behalf of some of their comrades in Kiev who had been sent into the army as common soldiers after a riot. The whole city was in a ferment. Groups were forming at every street corner. On Sunday, February 24, 1901, the day on which the excommunication was published in the Ecclesiastical News, Tolstoy was coming home from a visit to his doctor when he collided with a crowd of a thousand workers and students on Lubyanka Square. Someone recognized him and shouted:

"There he is, the devil in human form!"

Within seconds, he was surrounded and was being jostled and deafened by a joyful roar:

"Three cheers for Leo Nikolayevichl Ilail, the great manl Hurrah!"

He was losing his balance in the pushing, surging crowd, and a student helped him into a sledge. But the crowd would not let it move. Admirers seized the horse's bridle, and a mounted policeman had to clear a path for the apostle. Exhausted and delighted, he returned home in triumph. Hundreds of telegrams and letters of congratulations were already piling up 011 his desk. So many people came to the house that a book had to be put in the hall for them to sign. Delegations appeared bearing baskets of flowers. Little hectographed poems passed from hand to hand: "The Lion* and the Asses," or "Pobycdonostscv's Dream."

Processions were organized during the days that followed, groups of students flocked to the house to manifest their attachment to the "outcast." The authorities forbade the publication in the newspapers of any "telegrams or other expressions of sympathy for Count L. Tolstoy, excommunicated by the Church." But it was impossible to smother the news or stifle reaction to it. At a traveling art exhibition in St. Petersburg on March 25, the crowd congregated in front of Repin's portrait of Tolstoy, burst into applause and sent a message to the writer bearing three hundred and ninety-eight signatures. "For several days," wrote Sonya, "a curiously festive atmosphere has reigned in the house. A steady stream of visitors from morning to night. Whole crowds of them . . "⁹

Although a fervent Orthodox herself, she was nevertheless extremely- vexed at the sentence passed against her husband. As usual, while criticizing him herself, she would shield him with her own body against any blows from anyone else. She was swept along by the general enthusiasm: in a burst of bravura, she even wrote a letter of protest to Mgr. Anthony, the metropolitan of St. Petersburg—which was, of course, prohibited by the censor; but innumerable copies of it circulated in Russia:

"Having read in the newspapers yesterday of the cruel decree of the Holy Synod exiling my husband, Count Leo Nikolaycvich Tolstoy from the Church, I cannot remain silent. My indignation and grief have no bounds. ... If I put myself in the place of the Church, to which I belong and from which I shall never separate, which was founded by Christ to bless in God's name all the great moments of life (birth, marriage, death, sorrow and joy), and the duty of which is loudly to proclaim love and the forgiveness of sins, the opening of our hearts to our enemies, to those who hate us, and the necessity to pray for them— from the viewpoint of the Church, I say, the resolution of the Holy Synod is incomprehensible to me. Those who are guilty of betraying the

• The Russian word for both lion and Leo is "Lyov," which lends itself to an easy play on words.

faitli arc not those who go astray in their search for truth, but those who stand haughtily at the head of the Church and, instead of practicing love, resignation and forgiveness, transform themselves into religious executioners. God will sooner pardon those who give up their earthly possessions to live a life of humility and charity outside the Church than those who wear glittering miters and decorations and who condemn and excommunicate."

Reproduced abroad, this remonstrance created such a furor that Mgr. Anthony was compelled to reply. His letter was suave and unctuous, quoting Scripture, arguing that the Church could not bless blasphemers and pointing out that it was not the Holy Synod which had turned the count out of the Church but the count himself who had cut himself off from the communion of the faithful: "Priests were instituted by God and have not set themselves, as you say, at the head of the Church out of pride. Their glittering miters and decorations are of no consequence in divine worship. . . . May God bless and keep you, and your husband the count."

This soft-spoken retort made no impression upon the addressee. "Everything he says is true, but cold," wrote Sonya in her diary. "My letter was written from the heart, it has gone around the world and moved people by its sincerity."¹⁰

Tolstoy was both touched and embarrassed by his wife's generous impulse. He thanked her for the ardor with which she defended him, but he would have preferred her to keep still and do nothing. For him, a woman lost her best quality the moment she left the sidelines: the incorrigible misogynist confided to his diary on March 19: "When religious feeling wanes in a society', it means that woman's power is waxing." And: "Women have only two emotions: love of their husband and love of their children, and, as consequences of these two, love of dress on account of the husband and love of money on account of the children. All the rest is artifice, imitation of men, tools for seduction, coquetry, fashion." He wrote to his daughter Masha, "Maman's letter to the metropolitan has had a very good effect upon her. Nothing is predictable in a woman. In man, thought precedes and determines action; but in woman (especially very feminine women), action determines thought."

His own reaction to the excommunication had been a feeling of deep content. This measure gave him an inexpensive martyrdom, and he deprecatingly told the callers who came to congratulate him that he took no interest in these absurd ecclesiastical rantings. However, after thinking it over for more than a month, he determined to reply to his judges, in order to silence the materialists and atheists who were over-

joyed at his falling-out with the Church and were already trying to claim him as their own. In a letter of April 4, 1901, he condemned the decree of the Iloly Synod as unlawful and slanderous, reaffirmed that the dogma of the Holy Trinity and Irninaculatc Conception were incomprehensible to him, disposed of the sacraments as "base, crude magic" and taxed the ecclesiastical hierarchy with deforming the word of Christ. Then he stated his own crcdo:

"I believe in God, whom I conceive of as the Spirit, Love and Principle of all things.

"I believe He is in me as I am in Him.

"I believe that the will of God was never more clearly expressed than in the doctrine of the Christ-Man; but to regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege . . .

"I believe that the intention of our individual lives is to augment the sum of love for Him.

"I believe that this added measure of love will secure daily increasing happiness for us in this life, and in the other, a felicity all the more perfect for our having better learned to love before.

"I believe that there is only one means of progressing in love: prayer. Not public prayer in temples, which was explicitly condemned by Christ (Matthew, 6:5-13), but prayer as he himself has taught us, solitary prayer, which consists in restoring and strengthening, within oneself, an awareness of the meaning of our life and a lielief that we must be ruled by the will of God."

As soon as it readied the public, this noble affirmation released a new- wave of fervor. A flood of typed and handwritten copics poured into the big cities. Even young Sasha, aided by a cousin, was secretly hcctograph- ing her father's credo. Alexis Suvorin, director of the New Times, noted: "We have two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which is the stronger? Nicholas II is powerless against Tolstoy and cannot make him tremble on his throne, whereas Tolstoy is incontcstably shaking the throne of Nicholas II and his whole dynasty. He is anathematized, the Synod publishes a decree against him. Tolstoy replies, and his reply circulates in handwritten copies and is published in the foreign press. Let anyone lift a finger against Tolstoy and the whole world will be up in arms and our administration will turn tail and run!"¹¹

At the beginning of summer, Tolstoy's enemies hoped he would soon relieve them of his unwclcomc presence without necessitating any police action: for some time he had been losing weight, suffering from rheumatism ancl pains in the stomach, complaining of hot flushes in his head. In June 1901 he suffered an acute attack of malaria. The family came running. The doctors were so alarmed that the minister of the

interior began flashing coded telegrams to ever)' provincial governor and chief of police instructing them to forbid all demonstrations in the event of the author's death.

He realized his situation, however, and contemplated the ordeal ahead with equanimity. "I am at a crossroads," he murmured to Sonya. "I would be just as glad to go forward [to death] as backward [to life]. . . . And yet, I still have so much to tell them!" Then, moved to tears by the devotion of his wife, who was nursing him like a baby: "Thank you, Sonya. Don't believe I am not grateful to you, or that I don't love you." She kissed his hands, told him it was a joy for her to take care of him, and rcproachcd herself for having inadvertently caused him so much pain. . . . Ten days later, on July 16 he began to feel better, smiled to see the glad faces around him, asked for his diary and ruthlessly penned: "Woman's chief talent is to guess the role that pleases every person and then to play that role." Now that he was out of danger, he regretted, for the future of his doctrine, that his martyrdom had not been more spectacular. "If one wants to be heard," he wrote the same day, "one must speak out from the top of Golgotha, affirm the truth by suffering and, better yet, by death." His daughter Masha also showed a sudden and intense concern for the future of Tolstoyism—the will her father had written in his diary in 1895, giving all his copyrights to the public, had never been made legal. There were three copies, kept by herself, Sergey and Chertkov. In order that his will might not be contested after his death she asked Tolstoy, without telling her mother, to sign her copy of the document. As was to be expectcd, Sonya soon discovered her daughter's action and, on August 28, a scene of unprecedented violence broke out between the two women. Disfigured by fury, Sonya screamed that Masha was nothing but a hypocrite and a Pharisee, that she had been quite capable, when the time came, of demanding her share of the estate in order to support her "sponger of a husband" and that she had no right to come playing the disinterested onlooker now. And she entreated Lyovochka to destroy the paper he had so rashly signed. His wife's screaming and sobbing upset him so that he began to have palpitations. Fearing to aggravate his condition, the two rivals calmed down. Masha gave the will to her mother, but warned her that if her father's provisions were not respected, she would send the exact text to the newspapers.

A week later, urged by his doctors, Tolstoy agreed to go to the Crimea to convalesce in the sun. The immensely wealthy Countess Panin, a friend of the family, offered the patient her magnificent villa at Gaspra. Sonya would accompany Lyovochka, as would his daughter Sasha, the Obolenskys, P. A. Boulanger—the "nice Tolstoyan"—Dr.

Bertenson, a court physician, and the pianist Coldenweiser. A half- dozen servants completed the retinue of the apostle of poverty. I It- was so feeble that he had to be lifted into the carriage.

The Tula station was eleven miles away. They started out at night, in driving rain, over muddy roads. The groom lighted the way with a kerosene lamp. Tolstoy, exhausted by the bumps and jolts, nearly lost consciousness at Tula. Sonya wondered whether it would not be better to turn back. But Boulanger, who worked for the railroad company, reassured everyone by showing them the magnificent private car he had reserved for the party. Each person had his own room and toilet; there was a kitchen, a dining room and a drawing room with a piano. Tolstoy was too weary to protest against such lordly splendor, and resigned himself.

lie slept well and felt strong enough next day to look out at the countryside. When they came into Kharkov he was surprised to see an excited crowd thronging the platform, composed almost exclusively of students. IIow had they heard of his departure for the Crimea? Feverish acclamations rose up to him as he cowered in the car, alarmed and unhappy, and muttered, "Oh, my God! . . . Why? That is all superfluous!" Nevertheless, he was forced to receive one delegation after another, and reply to the compliments of the overexcited young people. Then the crowd demanded that he show himself at the window.

"He can't. He's ill," said Sonya.

"Just for one minute, for heaven's sake! Let him only show himself!"

As the train was about to pull away, Tolstoy came to the window. Every head was bared.

"Hurrah, Tolstoy! Leo Nikolaycvich! Good health! Bon voyage!"¹²

The train moved away and the students came running after it. Their ranks soon thinned, and the last of them disappeared, waving their arms, in clouds of smoke. Tolstoy, worn out, blew his nose, lay down and had another attack of fever.

At Sevastopol, fortunately, the public had not been told the day of his arrival, so there were only a few wild-eyed ladies at the station, who had been relaying each other for forty-eight hours, to welcome him with shrill wails and fluttering handkerchiefs. He rested there for a day, toured the city in a coach, dragged himself, groaning and wheezing, to the 4th Bastion where, as a l>oy, he had fired on the enemy, and went back to the hotel, his head burning with memories.

The next day two heavy coaches, each drawn by four horses, carried Tolstoy and the rest of the party toward Gaspra. The narrow road zigzagged along the rockface. At every turn the changing landscape drew cries of admiration from Sasha. Tatar villages with smoking chim-

neys, exuding a strong smell of kizyak and tallow, men in round sheepskin caps, veiled women with lacquered nails, forests, rushing streams, promontories and, suddenly, through a gap in the foliage, the sea.

Toward evening the coaches entered a dream garden and rolled along a flower-bordered drive. A huge castle in the Scottish manner, flanked by twin towers, stood waist-deep in wistaria. Behind, the rocky walls of Mount Ai-Petri, and before, an esplanade of roses, statues, copses, marble benches and a fountain splashing into a pool full of fish.

Countess Panin's servants were lined up before the door, and the German steward held out the traditional bread and salt of hospitality to the travelers. Tolstoy looked long and disapprovingly at the marble staircase, the carved doors, high frescoed ceilings, precious furniture and dark paintings with crazed varnish surfaces. His daughters were dismayed by so much luxury. But all was forgiven and forgotten when they reached the floor above and stood on a terrace looking out to sea. Beyond the lawns planted with cypress, walnut and rose laurel, sparkling waves reflected the transparent blue of the sky. Trellises loaded with ripe grapes stretched out beneath the veranda. The air was warm, fragrant, sweet. Unfamiliar birds called back and forth to each other, before going to sleep in the trees.

Stimulated by the change of air, Tolstoy promptly recovered. At the end of two weeks, he hired horses and went out a few times with his daughter Sasha into the surrounding countryside. He also resumed work on an essay he had started, entitled What Is Religion?, began writing his diary again, turned out dozens of letters to catch up with his correspondence, and began to receive callers, some with joy and others with annoyed reluctance. In the first category were a group of Russian authors of the younger generation: Balmont, Korolenko, Chekhov, Gorky; in the second, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, uncle of the tsar.

The grand duke's estate lay not far from Gaspra; it was guarded by sentinels. He came to pay a neighborly call, strolled through the garden with the sworn enemy of the monarchy, disarmed him by his simplicity and even told him to come to him if he had any trouble with the local authorities. "I am like the measles, I'm an outcast," Tolstoy told him. "I may make trouble for you; they'll be suspicious of you and criticize you for being seen with a man who is politically compromising."¹³ Tn spite of this warning the grand duke—who, although a traditionalist, bemoaned the fact that the tsar was so badly counseled—remained friendly with Tolstoy. And the author took advantage of this to ask him, as early as January 1902, to give a letter to the emperor which could, he believed, help to save Russia. The grand duke passed on the letter

and informed Tolstoy that Nicholas II had promised to read it himself and not show it to any of his ministers. "You see," he concluded, "how good our sovereign is, how sensitive to the sufferings of others; all the harm is done by his associates."

In his letter to the tsar, Tolstoy exhorted him to give the nation its freedom, in order to avert a civil war. "Autocracy," lie wrote with breathtaking audacity, "is a superannuated form of government that may suit the needs of a Central African tribe, remote from the rest of the world, but not those of the Russian people, who are increasingly assimilating the culture of the rest of the world. That is why it is impossible to maintain this form of government, and the orthodoxy that is attached to it, except by violence, or, in other words, by the methods being used today—by doubling the size of the Guards, by administrative expulsions, executions, religious persecutions, prohibitions of books and periodicals and all bad and brutal measures in general." llien, after summarizing the errors of the latest government, from "the exactions in Finland" to the "vodka monopoly," not forgetting "the restriction of provincial autonomy," lie observed: "You could not have perfomied these acts had you not been pursuing, on the ill-considered advice of your counselors, an impossible goal: not merely to halt the progress of the Russian people, but to drive it back to a completely retrograde, even more primitive condition."

There was, of coursc, no reply to this letter. But additional spies appeared around the house. Whenever Tolstoy set foot outside the grounds a shadow fell into step behind him. The comings and goings of his family were also under observation. Setting off for a walk, young Sasha often amused herself by "shaking" the spy assigned to follow her.

Police surveillance did not prevent the master's friends from calling upon him often. One of those he was most glad to sec was Anton Chekhov. After a long bachelorhood, Chekhov had just married a young and charming actress, Olga Knipper. But his health was too poor to permit him to take part in the busy whirl of his wife's life, so he had withdrawn to the Crimea to conserve his failing strength in the sun. Consumed by tuberculosis, he looked upon men and things with the equanimity of one who knows he must soon part from them.f He had seen Tolstoy several times before, at Yasnaya Polyana and in Moscow, and had never swerved from his skepticism of the Tolstoyan philosophy. Everything he had learned of life had convinced him that it was not by "putting on bark shoes" and "going to sleep on the stove next to the laborer" that one would save the people from their moral and physi-

t He died three years later, on July 2, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany.

cal indigence, but by building more schools, hospitals, means of communication, by raising their educational level and giving them important work to do in the State. But although he opposed the doctrines of his illustrious colleague, he respected the nobility of his purpose and his talent. At Gaspra his fondness for Tolstoy increased enormously, when he saw how the old man had aged. "His worst disease is age, which has now infected him completely,"¹⁴ he wrote to Maxim Gorky. And to his wife, "If—God forbid!—what I fear should happen, I'll notify you by telegram. But I would call him 'grandfather' in the text, otherwise I don't think it would reach you."¹⁵ The year before, he had expressed his filial affection for the great man in a letter to Menshikov: "I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. It would leave a great void in my life. In the first place, I have loved no man as I have him. ... In the second place, when there is a Tolstoy in the world of literature, it bccomcs a fine and easy thing to be a man of letters. And even if one knows one has done nothing and is still doing nothing, it is not too terrible because Tolstoy is creating for us all, and his work justifies all the hope and faith we put in literature. In the third place, Tolstoy's position is solid, his authority is immense, and as long as he is alive literary bad taste—pretentious and sentimental vulgarity, and all the frustrated little egos—will remain out of sight, hidden in the shadows. His domination alone can raise the different literary currents and trends to any height. Without him, there would be only a flock without a shepherd."¹⁶

On the terrace at Gaspra, looking out to the blazing sea, the two men had long talks together. Chekhov, dressed like a schoolmaster, with a mournful little beard, dangling eyeglass and hollow chest, struggled with his soft voice to contradict his host, as he drummed with his fingertips on the felt hat he had parked on his knees. Tolstoy sat beside him behind a cup of cold tea, looking shrunken in his peasant blouse, with a broad panama hat pulled down over his forehead, his legs encased in boots and his beard white and fluviatile, hardly listening to what the other man was saying; he talked on and on, condemning this and approving that, passing judgments without appeal. He liked Chekhov—"an atheist's head, but a heart of gold," he said; he was pleased by his "modest, gentle young lady's manner"; and he thought him very talented. He even said: "His language is extraordinary. I remember that it seemed most peculiar and 'awkward' to me the first time I read him, but when I began to pay closer attention, I was utterly captivated by it. . . . With no false modesty, I maintain that Chekhov is technically far superior to me."¹⁷ Chekhov was dead, it is true, when Tolstoy gave him this satisfecit; at Gaspra, the master took a harder line toward

his junior's work. Yes, of course, his stories and tales were admirable, although he greatly deplored the absence of any mystical principle motivating them; but he could not stomach his plays, which the Russian public devoured so eagerly. "He has so much talent," he said, "but in the name of what does he write? It is not so much that he has no overall view of the world, but that he has a wrong one, base, materialistic, self-satisfied."¹⁸ The Sea Gull was nothing but rubbish, he had not been able to force himself to read The Three Sitters, he was revolted by Uncle Vanya. One evening, he put his arm around Chekhov's shoulders and said, with brutal frankness: "Shakespeare's plays are bad enough, but yours arc even worse!"¹⁸ And on another occasion, somewhat more gently: "My dear friend, I beg of you, do stop writing plays!"²⁰ Chekhov bowed his head, smiled and choked back a dry little cough, but kept his temper. Then Tolstoy expounded his own idea of the theater:

"In my opinion, modern writers have lost the sense of what a play- should be. A drama is not meant to tell us a man's whole life, but to place him in a situation and tie up his destiny in such a way that his entire being will be clcar from the manner in which he unties the knot! Yes, I have criticized Shakespeare. But at least, in his plays, every character acts, and it is clear why he acts as he docs. . . ."

Chekhov went on listening, motionless and courteous, to this demolition of his entire dramatic production, which was compounded of mystery and half-intentions, acting on the spectator by some undefina- ble charm, inconclusive, devoid of any moral, utterly lacking in "utility." "It is my impression," wrote Sergey Tolstoy, "that my father would have liked to be more intimate with him, to draw him into his circle of influence, but he felt an unspoken refusal, an uncrossablc frontier, that prevented complete understanding." And in the end Tolstoy, disappointed, grumbled: "Chekhov is not a religious man!"

No more so was Maxim Gorky. But at least he had the makings of a "genuine man of the people." He was tall and ungainly, with a round head, hair swept back, a drooping mustache and turned-up nose, Mongol cheekbones and blue, luminous, childlike eyes. The first thing that struck one about him was an air of unsophisticated goodness. The government had exiled him for his Marxist affiliations, and he lived a little over a mile from Gaspra. A friend of the "barefoot ragamuffins," he had plied every trade—errand boy, baker's helper, dishwasher, gatekeeper, barman—educated himself by reading everything he could lay- hands on, and astonished the public with the earnestness and drive of

his first stories. Tolstoy appreciated his storytelling powers and conceded that he did not lack substance, but found his characters "contrived," "manufactured," their psychology artificial and the style weak in places. "There is much that is juvenile, unripe in your thinking," he said, "but you know life." Although he liked this authentic plebian, he could not prevent himself from treating him with condescension and the curiosity of someone from another world. "Suddenly," Gorky wrote, "the old Russian lord, the arrogant aristocrat would spring up behind the stage costume of muzhik l)card and rumpled blouse, and then the friends and partners in conversation would feel a chill down their spines and turn pale." Neither of them was at ease in this confrontation of the official representatives of two classes of society. The nobleman who aspired to be a peasant feared the mocking eye of his visitor, who had known true poverty; and at every word the visitor felt the intellectual superiority of his muzhik-clad host. They chatted away, however, about literature, music, God, politics and women. On the latter subject, Tolstoy always expressed himself, in Gorky's words, "with the crude- ness of a Russian muzhik." One day, out of the blue, he asked Chekhov:

"Were you very profligate in your youth?"

Chekhov, embarrassed, did not answer. The author of Resurrection glared out to the far-off sea and added:

"I was insatiable!"

He gave details. Coarse words tumbled out of his mouth. Gorky, who was present, was shocked at first, but then realized that "by calling a spade a spade" Tolstoy was simply striving to be accurate. His vulgarity was merely the result of his aversion to prettifying. In his speech as in his books, he wanted above all else not to lie.

A short time later he told Gorky:

"Man can endure earthquake, epidemic, dreadful disease, every form of spiritual torment; but the most dreadful tragedy that can befall him is and will remain the tragedy of the bedroom."

And to prove that he was qualified to speak, he gave his young colleague his own diary to read. Rare mark of confidence to a stranger! Or senile self-indulgence, in showing off his scars to the whole wide world. Everything about himself, so he imagined, was fascinating, instructive, essential. By opening his heart, he encouraged others to do as much. But Gorky remained on the defensive, more inclined to observe than to put himself on display. "His interest in me is ethnographical," lie wrote. "In his eyes I am a specimen of a little-known tribe and nothing more." In the end, this reserve tried Tolstoy's patience and, after a low-pitched altercation, Tolstoy suddenly cried out, drilling him with his eyes:

"I am more a muzhik than you are and my feelings are more like a muzhik's than yours!"

Copying this sentence into his notebook, Gorky added, "Oh, God! He must not brag of that, no, he must not!"

Alternately irritated and dazzled by the incorrigible old man, he went to see him day after day, followed him on his walks through the countryside or along the seashore, listened, contradicted, and returned home bewitched, a mountain of images whirling in his head. Here is Tolstoy, bristling his heavy eyebrows, screwing up his eyes and sighing, as he stares out to the open sea, "Ah, how well I feel! If only I could suffer a little!" Or jogging along under a gray mist, leaping ditches, shaking the drops of water from his beard, sniffing the earth and moss, tossing out moral aphorisms and literary pronunciamentos in all directions: "The body must be the obedient she-dog of the soul. Wherever the soul goes, there the body must follow." "Chekhov would write even better if he weren't a doctor." "The French have three waiters: Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and then Maupassant, but Chekhov is better than him." "With no false modesty, War and Peace is like The Iliad."

One evening, Gorky was taken aback by an abrupt question:

"Why don't you believe in God?"

"I have no faith."

"That's not true; by nature you are a believer, you cannot live without God. Soon you will feel it. If you don't believe, it's out of stul> bornness and spite, because the world isn't the way you would like it to be. Also, sometimes people do not believe because they don't dare. That happens to the young: they worship some woman but they don't want to let her see it, afraid she won't understand; they have no courage. Faith, like love, demands courage, boldness. You must tell yourself, 'I believe,' and everything will be all right."

This conversation took place in Tolstoy's study. Seated on the sofa with his legs folded under him, he smiled all-knowingly, blinked, ancl added after a short pause, one finger raised in the air: "You can't avoid that question by saying nothing."

"And I," wrote Gorky, "who do not believe in God, I looked at him, 1 don't know why, with a great deal of circumspection and a little fear, too; I looked at him ancl I thought, This man is like God.'"

He also wrote:

'This little man's limbs had grown knotted together with I don't know what deep, powerful roots of the earth. . . .He made one think of some very ancient personage, the owner of everything around him— owner and creator—returning after a hundred years' absence to the domain he had built. He strides along the roads and paths with the quick

step of a connoisseur of the earth; not one pebble, not one pansy escapes his penetrating eyes that look everywhere, measure, weigh, compare."

The "old wizard" was unable to convert Gorky to Christianity, just as Gorky was unable to convert him to Marxism. As early as 1900 Gorky wrote to Chekhov: "Leo Tolstoy docs not love men; no, he does not love them. The truth is that he judges them, cruelly and too severely. I do not like his idea of God. Is that a God? It is a part of Count Leo Tolstoy and not God, this God without whom men cannot live. lie says he is an anarchist. To some extent, yes. But although he destroys some regulations, he dictates others in their place, no less harsh and burdensome for men. That is not anarchism, it is the authoritarianism of a provincial governor."

Later, he employed more vehement terms in a letter to Korolenko:

"No man deserves more to be called a genius, no man is more complex, more contradictory, more admirable than he in all tilings, yes, in all tilings, in some broad and undcfinable way. ... He is a man who envelops all men, a man-mankind. But I have always been repelled by his obstinate, despotic drive to transform the life of Count Leo Nikola- yevich Tolstoy into the life of Our Father the Blessed Boyar Leo. You know, he spent a long time preparing to 'suffer.' ... He wanted to suffer, not only in order to measure his willpower, but with the manifest, despotic—I repeat the word—intention of increasing the authority of his doctrine, rendering it irresistible, dazzling the world with his pain, forcing—can you imagine, forcing!—people to share his ideas. . . . All his life he has hated death, all his life the 'horror of Arzamas' has been quivering inside him. Living, trembling antennae reach out to him from China, India, America, everywhere. His soul belongs to all, forever! Why should not nature make an exception to the rule, by giving him, him alone, physical immortality, yes, why not?"

Gorky returned to this impassioned portrait later, and elaborated upon it even further in a letter to Vengerov:²¹

"Count Leo Tolstoy is an artist of genius, perhaps our Shakespeare. But although I admire him, I do not like him. He is not a sincere person; he is exaggeratedly sclf-preoccupied, he sees nothing and knows nothing outside himself. His humility is hypocritical and his desire to suffer repellent! Usually, such a desire is a symptom of a sick and perverted mind but in his ease it is a great pride, wanting to be imprisoned solely in order to increase his authority. He lowers himself in my eyes, by his fear of death and his pitiful flirtation with it; as a rabid individualist, it gives him a sort of illusion of immortality to consolidate his authority. . . . What comic greed! Exactly, comic! For more than

twenty years this bell has been tolling a paean from the stecpletop that is contrary to my beliefs in every respect; for more than twenty years this old man has been talking of nothing but transforming young and lovely Russia into a province of China and young and gifted Russians into slaves. No, that man is a stranger to me, in spite of his very great beauty."

However, at the first sign of faltering in the dreadful old wizard, Gorky was panic-stricken. Even his detractors could not do without him. His health suddenly took a turn for the worse in January 1902; pneumonia set in; his temperature soared; his heart was reacting badly; doctors came running from St. Petersburg and Moscow to assist the local practitioners; the entire family was alerted and closed its ranks around his bed.

Reinstated in her role as chief nurse, Sonya spent every night by her husband's side until four, when she was relieved by Tanya and Sasha. Masha was on duty during the day. As soon as one center of infection died out, another would flare up. For weeks, gaunt, livid and gasping, Tolstoy wrestled with death. Every breath tore his lungs. He could not remain prone without suffocating, and cushions were placed behind his neck and shoulders to raise the upper half of his body. Sasha performed his toilette. She wrapped cotton around the comb before drawing it through her patient's hair—white hair, very fine, curling at his neck "like a baby's." Then she brushed out his beard, which was long, curling and tangled; at the smallest tug, he moaned in pain. But a wan smile flitted across his lips when the girl soaped his hands and washed his face and neck with a sponge and dried him with a towel soaked in cologne water.

In moments of respite, he summoned all his strength and dictated his thoughts and letters to Masha in a voice that was scarcely audible. lie was completely unmoved when he learned that the Nobel Prize, for which his name had been proposed, had gone to Sully Prudhomme. After all, in What Is Art? he himself had ranked Sully Prudhomme among the foremost poets of France. Swedish authors wrote to express their regret at this unjust decision. Between two bouts of fever, he replied, on January 22, 1902, in French:

"I was very pleased to learn that the Nobel Prize was not given to me. First, becausc it spared me the great problem of disposing of the money, which, like all money, can lead only to evil, in my view; and second, bccause it has given me the honor and great pleasure of receiving such expressions of sympathy from so many highly esteemed although unknown persons."

Once again the government busied itself with preparations for Tol-

stoy's death. Should obituary notices 1x5 allowed or forbidden? Ilow- was the body to be convey ed to Yasnaya Polyana without any danger of public demonstration? Should booksellers be allowed to display photographs of the dead author? 'l'he Holy Synod, anxious to announce that the outcast had recanted, dispatched a priest to Gaspra, who solicited permission to speak to the dying man. Informed of this initiative by his son Sergey, Tolstoy murmured:

"So these gentlemen refuse to understand that even in the face of death two and two still make four!"

The metropolitan, Anthony, also wrote to Sonya privately, exhorting her to reconcile her husband to the Orthodox Church. She mentioned this offer of succor to Lyovochka, who said:

"There can be no question of a reconciliation. I die without resentment or hatred. But what is the Church? What reconciliation can there be with an indefinite object?"²³

On his advice, she did not answer the metropolitan. The infection was spreading, both lungs were affected. He was given injections of morphine. He could hardly breathe, his pulse grew weaker. One night the doctors told the children that they had abandoned hope. Sonya, exhausted by her long nights of vigil, could not take her eyes off the face from which life was retreating with every breath. She wrote in her diary, 'The situation is almost (one might as well say totally) hopeless. Sleepless night. Pain in the liver. Anguish. Sudden burst of energy, the effect of valerian and champagne. . . . Dear Lyovochka, the only time he dozed off at all was when I lightly massaged his stomach and the area around his liver. He thanked me and said, 'Darling, you must be worn out.' "²³

That night no one in the house got any sleep. Three doctors were installed in the dining room and tiptoed to look at the sick man from time to time. At dawn loud moans were heard, but they came from another room: Olga, Andrey Tolstoy's wife, was pregnant and had been fearing a miscarriage after a recent fall. The first pains came, just when her father-in-law was at his worst. At seven in the morning a child was born, dead. As one of the doctors carried the tiny corpse away, the old man was still clinging to life, and, as though this sacrifice of young flesh had appeased the angry gods, Tolstoy's agony abated. He mumbled, 'There, everything is in order. You will give me a shot of camphor and I shall die." Then he dozed off. The crisis was over. The next day, the infection began to retreat. He said to Dr. Volkov: "Well. I see I must go on living!" "Do you mind?" Sonya asked.

"What do you mean? Not at all! It's fine with me!" he retorted gaily.

"An excellent thing, a long illness! It allows one to prepare for death. . . . I am ready for anything: life or death. . .

Soon he was able to go out onto the balcony and breathe the sea air. To Sonya's surprise and irritation, after begging for death, he became much engrossed with the state of his health: "From morning to night," she noted, "every hour on the hour, he is worrying and nursing his body. . . . He used to speak of death, prayer, his relations with God ancl eternal life. Now I observe with horror that he has lost every trace of religious feeling. With me he is demanding and unpleasant."²⁴ She felt utterly alone, abandoned and slightly ridiculous now that her nurse's work was over. If at least he were still able to desire her! But now he was too weary and old for her to hope that spark would ever rekindle in him again. A few months before, she had noted 111 her diary, "With Leo Nikolayevich things have happened exactly as I predicted. When his old age compelled him to give up sexual relations with his wife (which happened just a little while ago!), I did not see rising up to replace them the thing I had always so ardently desired: a tranquil and tender friendship. Instead, there was a total void."²⁵

Unconcerned by Sonya's anguish, Tolstoy was gratefully digging his way back into life. He was full of plans: articles on the religious question, a message to the young, a commentary on Henry George's theories of agricultural reform. . . . Once again he became completely engrossed in the events of the world he had been so close to leaving. He was stunned by a student's assassination of Sipvagin, the minister of the interior who had quelled an uprising with such a heavy hand the previ ous year. He wrote to Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich: "This is an awful thing, because of the anger, hatred and thirst for vengeance it will stir up, but it had to happen, and it is a precursor of still more dreadful things to come, as long as the government does not changc its policy."²⁶ On the other hand, when Chekhov asked him to join in protest against the tsar's decision to veto Gorky's election to the Academy he growled: "I don't consider myself a member of academics!" and plunged back into the book he was reading.

When he seemed definitely out of danger, the family dispersed. Even Sonya left Lyovochka to the charms of his convalescence and took the train to Moscow to settle a few publishing matters and, so Sasha claimed, make the rounds of the concerts. Upon her return, on May 1, 1902, she thought she was being punished for her sins: Lyovochka had a relapse—typhoid fever. Once more into the breach. A fresh batch of telegrams was fired off in all directions, the family returned to mass itself around the patriarch, the doctors reappeared, devoted and anxious, and Sonya remorsefully immersed herself once again in the atmosphere

of vigils, medicine and presentiments. ^r11ie eldest son, Sergey, was more help than the others. Tall and strong, he guessed the sick man's every wish in advance and could pick him up in his arms like an infant. Ilya too was full of consideration. Only Leo, the intellectual, was a disappointment to his father: once again he had taken it into his head to publish a book on the evils of Tolstoyism. What annoyed the old man was not so much that the upstart puppy should combat his ideas, but that he should do so with so little talent, and bear the name of Tolstoy! Ilis daughters, on the other hand, gave him every satisfaction. Sasha, Masha and Tanya bent over him with angelic faces. It grieved them to see him failing. And in fact, he was feeling better. Was it possible? It was; for the third time in ten months, he was wriggling off the hook. Perhaps he really was immortal! His appetite returned, he sat up in an armchair, went into the garden, leaning on a cane, delighted in the almond trees and magnolias in bloom and the sun sparkling on the sea. But how he had aged! "Poor dear!" wrote Sonya. "I find it hard to look at this world celebrity, who is a skinny, pitiful little old man in his private life."²⁷

At last, on June 25, 1902, the Tolstoys left Gaspra for Yasnaya Polyana. They were to travel from Yalta to Sevastopol by boat and from there by rail. A crowd of onlookers was milling about in the port. Kuprin, the novelist, had managed to slip on board the ship, and saw a man climb out of a carriage wearing an overcoat that was too short for him, a bowler and boots. On the deck, someone introduced him to the master. "I recall that I was staggered," said Kuprin. "Instead of a gigantic, venerable patriarch looking like Michelangelo's Moses, I saw an old man, rather short, whose movements were precise and careful." As Tolstoy moved toward the section of the ship in which the poor people were herded together, a passage opened up before him. "He moved on as a king, who knows nothing can stand in his way." Later, he was surrounded by friends wishing him a good crossing. "Then," continued Kuprin, "I saw a different Tolstoy, a Tolstoy who was almost a coquette. In a moment, he was thirty years old: firm voice, keen eyes, elegant manners . . ."

A Pullman was waiting for the prophet at Sevastopol. Flowers, ovations, women wailing and fainting, he was used to them now.

Back in his birthplace once more, he saw that the beauties of the Crimea, great as they were, could not do him one-tenth as much good as the scenery, silence, climate and peasants of his own home. The doctors unanimously advised him to live in the country all year round; to his great joy, the project of winter trips to Moscow was abandoned. At Yasnaya Polyana, he moved out of his damp, vaulted rooms on the ground floor into two sunny rooms upstairs. He no longer shared a

room with his wife, but slept in a sort of monastic cubicle, furnished with a bed, a stool and a washstand. Mis study was next to it, giving on to the balcony.

Sonya had been so anxious during her dear Lyovochka's illness that she now lived in continual fear of a relapse. Twenty times a day she felt his pulse, inquired into the condition of his stomach or throat, entreated him to keep well covered. Still opposed to his vegetarian diet, she secretly fortified his vegetable broth with meat to build up his strength. She knitted caps for him and cut and sewed warm shirts. Although somewhat annoyed by this oppressive solicitudc, he was happy to be the center of the family's attention. Every time he went out, his walk became a little longer. He cautiously resumed his gymnastics. Then, one morning, with Sasha's help, he heaved himself into the saddle and set out for a ride, aglow with satisfaction. "It seemed that his capacity for loving life, flowers, trees, children, everything around him, had actually increased since his illness," wrote Sasha. Back from a ramble, he came up to her with sunburned face, white beard and hair in a tangle and eyes shining with joy, his shirt collar open over his protruding collarbones, and thrust out his hat filled with mushrooms.

"Smell them," he said. "They smell so good!"

That day she knew he was well again.

He began to write, "as though he were hurrying to do as much as he could before he died," said Sonya.

The end of 1902 and the year 1903 were a time of peace and hard labor for him. He did not set foot outside Yasnaya Polyana. He produced an anthology of the major moralists entitled Thoughts of the Wise Men, a few short stories including The False Coupon, two plays (The Light Shines in the Darkness and The Living Corpse) and an essay, Shakespeare, in which he settled the English dramatist's hash once and for all. "After reading, one after the other, the plays considered to be his most beautiful—King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Ilamlet and Macbeth—not only did I derive no pleasure from them, but I felt an overpowering repugnance, a boundless tedium, and I wondered whether it was I who was mad, to find empty and offensive these works that are held by all cultivated people to be the summit of perfection, or whether it was the cultivated people who were mad to attach such importance to Shakespeare's works." I Ie also wrote a few pages of reminiscences, at the request of Biryukov, who was diligently preparing his biography. And he continued to work on his novel Hadji Murad, the first draft of which dated from 1896; some passages were now in their fifth revision.

As always, he had embarked upon an enthusiastic period of pre-

liminary documentation for this book. His own recollections of military life at the Starogladkovskaya stanitsa and Fort Stary Yurt did not provide a broad enough basis for the adventures of the Circassian chieftain. He collected over eighty books on the subject—from Poltoratsky's Memoirs to those of Loris-Melikov, and including Vederevsky's book, Prisoner of Shamil—read them, took notes, squeezed the juice from them. He asked his friends to obtain information from the chief participants in the Caucasian campaign. His concern for authenticity went to the extent of trying to find out the color of the horses Hadji Murad and his escort rode on their last raid. At court, Alexandra moved mountains to satisfy his curiosity about the private life of Nicholas I. "I absolutely must find the key to him," he wrote on January 26, 1903. "That is why I am collecting information, reading everything that relates to his life and personality. Mostly what I need are details of his daily life, what are called the anecdotes of history: his intrigues at a masked ball, his relations with Nclidova, his wife's behavior toward him. ... Do not blame me, dear friend, for busying myself with such trivialities when I have one foot in the grave. These trivialities occupy my leisure time and give my mind a rest from the serious thoughts that fill it."

Hadji Murad is historically irrcproachablc, and yet its form is that of a pure fantasy. It is a strange thing that Tolstoy should have written this tale, devoid of all religious considerations, whose extraordinary beauty alone is enough to content the reader, at a time when his thoughts were increasingly bent on the propagation of his faith and books intended for mere entertainment seemed pointless and even harmful to him. With the seventy-year-old fatuousness that Kuprin had observed on the ship deck, it is almost as though, after paying philosophy its due, he wanted to prove to himself at the end of his career that the artist in him was not dead. Immediately, in recounting the adventures of Hadji Murad, the old man recovered the fresh, lusty love of life he had felt writing The Cossacks forty-five years before. But between his first and second Caucasian novels, the problem had gained in depth and the painting in dimension.

In The Cossacks, Tolstoy was studying the conscience of a young aristocrat attracted to the rough, free life of the mountaineers, wanting to become one of them and realizing that he was incapable of doing so. The main themes of Hadji Murad are the defeat and oppression of a free and proud people by the artificial Russian civilization, and the destruction of a man who tries to escape from his family, traditions and faith in order to satisfy his will to power. The action takes place around

1850. Hadji Murad, the hero, is a combination of bravery, integrity, cruelty, cunning and childlike candor. He is savagely opposed to colonization, but he so hates Shamil, the leader of the Moslem forces, that he decides to offer his services to the Russians in order to defeat him. He thinks that he will be allowed to govern the Caucasian tribes in the name of the "white tsar" in return for his treason. At first, the Russians welcome this unexpected and distinguished ally with open arms, and lavish favors and promises upon him. But when he fled from his own people, Hadji Murad had left his family at Shamfl's mercy. His one desire is to go back with an army and deliver his two wives and his son Yusuf, who are being held as hostages. The suspicious Russians are opposed to an operation in which they see no military or political advantage. As time passes, Hadji Murad feels himself more and more a prisoner. He is covered with honors, but is entangled in administrative machinery that hampers his every movement. Out of his native clement, he grows bored, feels stifled, loses his sense of justification, like the lovely thistle-flower wrenched from its stalk and trampled underfoot, with which Tolstoy opens the book. To return to his family and the unrestricted life that was his natural environment, he eludes his Russian guards and sets out on a wild chase from which he knows he has no hope of emerging alive.

Tolstoy does not even try to excuse this traitor and renegade. But he makes him worthy of our pity, and consequently closcr to us, by a mathematically precise analysis of his destruction by power. The thirst for power is a disease that corrodes the finest metal. Obsessed by his desire to supplant Shamil, Hadji Murad prepares the way for his own downfall. He is the victim of his own lust for power and of the people who possess it: Shamil on one side, and the tsar on the other. Allying himself with the former proves as disastrous for him as being the enemy of the latter. "It is not only Hadji Murad and his tragic end that interest me," Tolstoy said to Shulgin. "I am fascinated by the parallel between the two main figures pitted against each other: Shamil and Nicholas I. They represent the two poles of absolutism—Asiatic and European."

Of course, the despot with the greatest power also has the heaviest load on his conscience. To l>e tsar is to be, a priori, guilt)' before God and man. But, as portrayed by Tolstoy, Nicholas I is certainly more horrible than cither his predecessor, Alexander I, or his successors Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II. His icy face hides such depths of evil and conceit that there seems to be no possibility' of communication between him and ordinary human beings. Intoxicated by the flattery of his court, he sees himself as a knight-errant in the modern world,

but with consummate hypocrisy he writes an edict at the bottom of a report on a Polish student accused of striking his professor: "Deserves death penalty. However, thank God, it does not exist here and I shall not be the one to reinstate it. Run him twelve times down the gauntlet between one thousand men." As he knows, twelve thousand strokes mean certain and hideous death. But appearances will be saved! As benefactor of his people, the tsar orders all the peasants who refuse baptism to be judged by court-martial. As model husband, he has an official mistress and various affairs with young ladies of good society. As a practicing Orthodox, his main belief is that he can get away with anything, from adultery to crime.

In his physical description of the emperor, Tolstoy emphasizes his "gigantic stature," his "big white hands," his "long white face" which is "exceptionally cold," his "dull eyes," his "lifeless" expression, meant to symbolize the destructive principle of despotism. And these outward signs of power are repeated in the autocrat opposing him. Like Nicholas I, Shamil is "tall in stature, straight and powerfully built," giving "an impression of strength"; like Nicholas I he has "a pale face," "carved out of stone, utterly immobile," and "eyes that look at no one"; like Nicholas I lie is vain of his "big white hands"; and both of them play their part of all-seeing, all-powerful master to perfection. "Chernyshev," we read, "knew that whenever Nicholas I had an important decision to make, he required only a few moments of reflection, and then it was as if inspiration suddenly visited him; the best solution presented itself unsought, some inner voicc dictated what he must do." Here is Shamil: "He closed his eyes and was silent. His counselors knew that this meant he was listening to the voice of the Prophet within himself, dictating what he must do. After five minutes of triumphant silence, Shamil opened his eyes and said . . ."

In fact, Shamil is not a person and still less Nicholas I: they arc- both incarnations of a svstem. Their close associates are also con- taminated by power—witness Prince Vorontsov, governor general of the Caucasus, who will stoop to any compromise or commit any massacre to further the policies of the government. Or Chernyshev, the minister of war, whom the tsar himself accounts "a thoroughgoing scoundrel." Or Loris-Melikov, notorious intriguer ... All these gentlemen carry their toadying to the point of imitating the monarch's dress and manners: Nicholas I wears "a black dolman with shoulder straps but no epaulets," so we see Vorontsov "dressed in his usual black military coat with shoulder straps, but no epaulets." Prince Basil Dolgoruky, undersecretary of state at the war office, has "a bored and doltish facc adorned with side-whiskers, mustachc and curls on his temples, like Nicholas

I." At the next level below, the aides-de-camp copy the ministers, and have 'little mustachcs and locks of hair brushed toward their eyes, like the emperor Nicholas Pavlovich."

Even though he is a traitor, Hadji Murad continues to command respect, in contrast with all these crcaturcs who have lost sight of any meaningful form of life in their scramble to obtain power over the largest possible number of their fellow men. A refugee in the Russian camp, he dominates it by his physical chann, oriental courtesy and disdain for the flatter}' of the beribboned officials, young arriviste officers and coquettish and curious provincial ladies who would like to draw him into their nets. He is indifferent to the intrigues woven about him. He is surprised at nothing, even though this is his first contact with what it is customary to call civilization. Supported up by the memories of his former primitive, independent existence, he achieves moral strength by refusing to live like his conquerors. 'I'o be sure, he is wide-eyed as a child when Vorontsov gives him his watch, but displays no interest at all in the scantily-clad women he meets at the governor's ball. Tall and slender, with close-shaven head and black eyes "set too far apart" and a limping stride, he is like a superb beast of the forest who has strayed into an artificial garden and knows no law but self-preservation. Without the slightest scruple he betra>-s Shamil and surrenders to the tsar's troops, and later kills the brave Cossacks assigned to serve as his escort. Hemmed in on all sides, he defends himself to the death with irrational doggedness. He goes down sword in hand, as he had always hoped to do. And the author seeks no compassion for him.

But there is more to this book than just the story of Hadji Murad himself. Just as the candles in a chandelier light up one after the other at the touch of a flame running along a hidden wick, so in this book characters apparently very remote from each other receive and emit light because of a mysterious bond that unites them. Starting with a trivial incident of guerilla warfare, Tolstoy demonstrates its repercussions at every level of the social hierarchy. From the lowliest to the most high, hundreds of people are affected by the decision of a single one. Guided by the author, we move from Hadji Murad to the tsar's intimate advisers discussing his case, to Nicholas I himself, whose cruel, cold heart is swiftly unveiled to us, to Vorontsov, who has his own problems, to the unyielding Shamil, to Iladji Murad's son in captivity, to the Cossacks, attacking, pillaging and burning enemy aouls, to Avdcycv, a simple soldier killed in a raid, to Avdcycv's village where they are threshing oats on the barn floor, to Avdeyev's wife who bursts into tears when she hears of her husband's death but is glad at heart

bccause she is pregnant with the child of the clerk in whose house she is employed. . . .

The field of vision spreads beyond the Caucasus to envelop all Russia. In a few pages a whole vast panorama is presented to us. Who is the hero? Hadji Murad, Nicholas I or Avdeyev the soldier? Impossible to determine. Or to determine what the author was trying to prove. Setting all moral considerations aside, his creation remains a hymn to life, nature, the sap that rises in men and plants. Can one discuss the distinction between good and evil in relation to a beheaded thistle? Written in a language as spare and precise as that of Pushkin, without digression, without a trace of self-indulgence, compact, nervous, virile, this novel gives proof that Tolstoy's artistry had reached perfection. And yet Hadji Murad was not published during his lifetime.! The censor would never have passed this broadside against the autocracy, war and the treatment inflicted upon the Caucasian tribes by the Russians. After revising his manuscript for the last time in 1904, he put it away without regret. At his age, the opinion of generations to come mattered more than that of his contemporaries.

He also refused to publish his third play, The Living Corpse, in which he returned to a subject dear to his heart: the failure of marriage and release through flight. Observing that his wife does not understand him after ten years of marriage, and actually prefers a man of "the common mold" to himself, Protasov feigns suicide, flees his family, breaks all ties with society and sets up house with a gypsy, Masha. The warmth and simplicity of his relations with Masha are contrasted with the artificiality of love sanctificd by orthodox marriage. But his hideaway is discovered. Trapped in the machinery of the law, his only escape this time will be to make his suicide real. Once more Tolstoy sets out to demolish marriage, human justice and society. Protasov combines the features of the heroes of The Kreutzer Sonata (hatred of the legitimate couple) and of Resurrection (attraction of life with a woman of lower estate, need to reject the hypocrisy of socicty and vanish into the crowd).

'Ilie author experienced all of these feelings, one might say, on a permanent basis. But his pleasure in his work temporarily helped him to bear the guilt inspired by his comfortable surroundings. "I have utterly abandoned myself to the temptations of fate," lie wrote to Biryukov on September 2, 1903; "I am living in luxury and physical inactivity. And I therefore suffer continually from remorse. But I comfort myself with the thought that I am living 011 good terms with all my family and writing pages which I think arc important."

t The book was not published until 1912, two years after Tolstoy's death.

Among these important pages were Hadji Murad and The Living Corpse, but also articles and short stories—T/ie False Coupon and After the Ball—and letters to prominent people. There was a pogrom in Kishinev in August 1903, and he expressed his indignation in very sharp terms. A declaration he had composed was given to the governor of Kishinev:

"Profoundly shocked by the atrocities committed at Kishinev, we extend our heartfelt sympathy to the innocent victims of mob savagery and express our horror at the acts of cruelty perpetrated by Russians, our scorn and disgust with all who have driven the people to such a pass and have allowed this dreadful crime to be committed."

In December of that year he learned that his aunt-babushka Alexandra Tolstoy was critically ill. His friendship for her had cooled considerably of late because of her insistent efforts to bring him back to the Orthodox Church. He had delighted in wrestling with her while she was robust and militant on her feet, but he could not restrain his Sympathy when lie knew she was on her deathbed. lie wrote a tender letter to her on December 22, thanking her for all the good she had done for him during their "half-century of friendship." Deeply touched, she answered that in reading his letter she had heard once again "that note of utter sincerity" that had resounded between them in the days of their youth. A few months later, on March 21, 1904, the old maid of honor, aged eighty-six, passed away in her apartment in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. With her disappeared the faithful friend and confidante, ever-ready to do battle for the cherished nephew whose ideas she abhorred. However, Tolstoy was not as deeply affected by her death as those around him had feared. He felt his own end so close at hand that lie no longer had any inclination to weep for others. In August 1904, another trial affected him more powerfully: at the age of seventy-eight, his brother Sergey was dying in agony, of cancer of the tongue. He, too, had becomc estranged from his younger brother when Leo began to preach his neo-Christian gospel, his condemning him for exhorting others to practice abstinence and poverty while he lived on in sin and plenty. But family tics ultimately prevailed over ideological differences, and relations between the two old men had improved toward the end.

Although he hated the Tolstoyans, Sergey often came to Yasnaya Polyana. And Leo, who did not bear grudges, went to see him at Pirogovo. Sergey's estate, with its graveled walks, neatly trimmed hedges and trees aligned in military precision, was the complete opposite of ragged and untidy Yasnaya Polyana, where the vegetation proliferated in defiance of any order or control. Unlike his brother, who dressed like

a muzhik and made his own boots, Sergey lived as a lord in the old manner, authoritarian, aloof, elegant, hot-tempered. His peasants bowed to him from a distance and were afraid of him. His wife (the ex- gypsy Masha) did not dare raise her voice in his presence. His three daughters, unmarried and in their forties, never dreamed that a suitor might one day comc along who would be bold enough to ask their taciturn, chilling father for their hands. Besides, they had all read their uncle's Kreutzer Sonata and saw marriage in the grimmest possible light—which did not prevent one of them from murmuring, in French, "We are just a covey of old maids and our children will be a covey of old maids, too," without noticing the inconsistency between the two terms of her proposition. Their father, otherwise a misanthrope, doted on them, but it was difficult for him to show his emotions. He shut himself up in his study for days on end, calculating the income from his property. Sometimes he was heard through the wall, uttering heartrending sighs, "Ah, ah, ah!" His wife was used to them: "It's Sergey, thinking about something," she said. When he came out of his study he hurriedly slammed the door behind him, to prevent any flies from entering it; he had a honor of flies and gnats. Also of artists, professors, tradesmen, favor-seekers, socialites and ostentatious people. He was eccentric and sardonic; his nephew Ilya compared him to old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace.

When the end drew near, Tolstoy went to Pirogovo to spend a few day's. The gypsy and his three daughters wanted the dying man to confess and take communion, but they were afraid to suggest it because he had long since given up practicing any form of religion. At their entreaty, the younger brother and excommunicated author undertook this mission for them, and, to satisfy his family, Sergey agreed to see a priest.

On the day of the funeral, in spite of his age, Tolstoy helped carry the coffin to the coach. When he returned to Yasnaya Polyana, he told Sonya how he had parted from his "incomprehensible and beloved" brother. And in his Reminiscences, intended to fill the gaps in the biography Biryukov was writing he added: "In his old age, toward the end, Sergey became fonder of me again and set great store by my attachment to him. He was proud of me, he would have liked to agree with me but he could not; and he remained as he had always been, utterly unique, utterly himself, very handsome, aristocratic, proud and, above all, a more upright and honest man than any I have ever known."

3. The Russo-Japanese War

Although deprived of the amusements of the big city, Sonya led a very active life at Yasnaya Polyana. She sorted her husband's huge correspondence, answered some letters for him, catalogued the books lie received from publishers, compiled press clippings and glued them into albums, exposed, developed and printed her own photographs, picked up all the bits of paper lying about the house and burned them, weeded the driveway in front of the house . . . She learned to type; then she developed a passion for painting, and copied the family portraits in the drawing room; she also had a try at literature and published in the periodical Life a prose-poem she had written; it was entitled "Moan" and signed, "A weary woman."¹ Her passion for music continued unabated: whenever she had an hour to spare, she sat down to play, badly, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn or Tanayev. . . .

This round of secondary activities did not interfere with her masterful administration of the estate, nursing of her husband, keeping of her diary, and her duties as hostess to the guests who made pilgrimages to Yasnaya Polyana. After lunch, while Lyovochka was taking a nap, she sometimes turned guide, to show a group of sight-seers through the house. It was as though the great man had already died and she were the keeper of his museum; as though a light were being reflected upon her, from the depths of the Beyond. How she loved him, how she admired him, when he was not there to disappoint her. But the moment she was face to face with him again, at the dinner table, in the drawing room or outside in the grounds, she was irritated by everything he did. One day he jibed at the stupidity and smugness of the medical profession. Had he forgotten that she was a doctor's daughter, or was he offending her on purpose? "It makes me furious," she noted. "Now, yes, he is in good health; but after the Crimea, where nine doctors

struggled with such devotion and intelligence to save his life, he ought not—if he were a decent and honest man—to treat them in such a way." Even so, she would have held her tongue had he not added that, according to Rousseau, doctors were all in league with women. "At that, I exploded. If he doesn't believe in medicine, why did he call for the doctors and wait for them and do what they told him?"² When her anger subsided, she lccturcd herself: after all, her husband was a genius. Could she, with her tiny brain, understand and judge him? "I must remember that his mission is to teach man, to write and prcach," she wrote in her diary four days later. "His life and ours and those of all who are close to him must serve that end and it is therefore our duty to take the best care of him that we can. We must close our eyes to his compromises and absurdities and contradictions, and see only the great author, the prcachcr and master, in Leo Nikolayevich."

This excellent resolution could not stand the test of everyday reality. It was a lamentable tug-of-war; whenever Lyovochka happened to be well-disposed toward his wife she was too busy to notice, and whenever she tried to draw closer to him she was cut by his indifference. These contretemps provide much material for the diaries of both. But Sonya, who had no other goal in life than to protect her marriage, was often the more bitter of the two. "I go into Leo Nikolayevich's room," she noted on November 17, 1903. "He is getting ready for bed and before lying down he pulls up his nightshirt and massages his stomach with a circular motion. His scrawny old man's legs are pitiful to behold. 'There/ he said, 'first I rub my stomach this way, and then that.' I see I shall never have another word of comfort or tenderness from him. What I predicted has come to pass: the passionate husband is dead; the friendly husband never existed; how could he be born now?"

A few weeks later these minor personal grcivanccs paled before an event involving the entire country: on January 27 (February 8), 1904, after long diplomatic tension, hostilities suddenly broke out between Russia and Japan. Without declaring war, the Japanese torpedo boats attacked the Russian fleet lying at Port Arthur, and put seven big ships out of commission; the disaster touched off an explosion of patriotism in Russia. Tolstoy was alarmed by this return of violence. "I am still not well," he wrote the following day, January 28, in his diary. "Liver ailing, and a cold ... I have thought deeply about this war that is beginning. I would like to write that at the beginning of something as dreadful as war, everybody offers hundreds of suppositions as to the meaning or consequences of the conflict, but not one person thinks about himself. . . . This is the best and clearest evidence that nothing can provide a remedy for evil, except religion."

In the days that followed he could think of nothing else. Five continents were waiting for him to speak: he began a pacifist article entitled Bethink YourselvesI But he sensed that even his great authority was not strong enough to stop the bloodshed. He read the papers feverishly, questioned peasants returning from town, rode to Tula himself to sec the dispatches from the front as soon as they came in. The villages resounded with accordions and weeping women. Drunken draftees staggered from door to door. The parents of those being sent complained to the master: one had been drafted illegally, another's papers were not in order . . . Tolstoy tried to remain calm, but he was sputtering with indignation.

"I cannot read these articles that glorify the grandeur and beauty of acts of bloodshed in order to excite the people's patriotism," he growled.

But as soon as a guest arrived from Tula, he asked:

"Well? What? What news from the front?"

Sonya did not dissimulate her anger with the Japanese for having struck treacherously, without warning. The cook at Yasnaya Polyana was mobilized to serve in General Gnrko's kitchen. Andrey, Tolstoy's fourth son, enlisted. His motives were not, it must be said, solely patriotic: he had just abandoned his wife and two children for another woman and, suddenly guilt-stricken, hoped to redeem himself through ordeal by fire. His brother Leo contented himself with loudly demanding a war to the death. Their father disapproved of both. But Sonya was proud to accompany Andrey to the rccruiting station at Tambov. He looked so handsome in his non-commissioned officer's uniform, his cap tilted to one side and his chest and back tightly molded in a sand- colored shirt, cantering his horse stylishly at the head of his unit! However, when they had all been sandwiched into the cars and the train pulled out, she was overcome by despair. The crowd wept and moaned. There was no more talk of patriotism. In an effort to put some heart into the draftees and their families, a general callcd out, "You show 'em what you're made of out there!" "Those words," Sonya wrote, "rang out, vile, out of place, absurd."

The North American Newspaper of Philadelphia had asked Tolstoy, which side he was on; he replied, "I am for neither Russia nor Japan; I am for the workers of both countries who arc being deceived by their governments and forced to take part in a war that is harmful to their well-being and in conflict with their conscience and religion." Despite his pacifist attitude, however, the old veteran flinched at the blows being struck at his country. lie confessed to Georges Bourdon, a French journalist who had come to interview him for Le