Tolstoy

Figaro, that he was not always able to rise above the battle, and felt every Russian defeat in his bones. The inferiority of the Russian army was apparent from the first engagement. The theater, forty-five hundred miles away, was linked to the center of the country by a single railroad which was unfinished and would have been inadequate anyway, so the expeditionary forces were necessarily ill-supplied with food and ammunition. After several setbacks, the stronghold of Port Arthur, besieged by land and sea, fell to the Japanese on December 20, 1934 (January 2, 1905). Learning the news, Tolstoy mourned:

"Ah, that's not how they fought in my dayl Surrendering a fortress when you have ammunition and an army of forty thousand men! It's a shame!"

And he wrote in his diary for December 31:

"The surrender of Port Arthur has made me miserable. I suffer from it. Patriotism. I was brought up in that sentiment and I have not freed myself of it. Nor have I rid myself of personal selfishness or family and even class egotism. All these forms of selfishness are within me, but these is also within me a consciousness of the law of God and that consciousness holds the selfishness in check, so that I cannot yield to it completely. And, little by little, it atrophies."

February 1905 brought the disaster of Mukden; in May of that year, after an exhausting seven-month toil across three oceans, the Russian Baltic fleet entered the straits of Tsushima and met the enemy fleet, whose ships were faster, better armed and better protected. There was an uneven battle during which the best Russian ships were sunk or captured, despite heroic resistance. Casualties rose above seven thousand. Filled with mortification and grief, Tolstoy was no longer able to keep the balance between Russians and Japanese. "I care more for the Russians," he told Makovitsky. "My children, the muzhiks, are among them. The interests of one hundred million peasants are bound up with the army, and they do not want it to be beaten." Trying to explain to himself the causcs for this military disaster, he wrote in his diary on May 19, 19^5: "It has become plain to me that things could not and cannot happen any other way. No matter how poor Christians we are, we cannot avoid the fact that war is contrary to the Christian doctrine. Recently (during the last thirty years), this has become more and more obvious. That is why, in any conflict with a non-Christian people for whom the highest ideal is patriotism and military heroism, a Christian people must be defeated. ... I am not saying this to console myself for the fact that we have been beaten by the Japanese. The shame and humiliation arc as sharp as ever."

Pursuing this line of reasoning, he came to consider that his country's defeat was due to excessive materialism, the overemphasis on technology, and neglect of the great truths of the Sermon on the Mount. In his search for the guilty parties he even began sliding imperceptibly toward anti-Semitism. "This debacle," he wrote 011 June 18, "is not only that of the Russian army, the Russian fleet and the Russian State, but of the pseudo-Christian civilization as well. . . . The disintegration began long ago, with the struggle for money and success in so-called scientific and artistic pursuits, where the Jews got the edge on the Christians in every country and thereby earned the envy and hatred of all. Today the Japanese have done the same thing in the military field, proving conclusively, by brute force, that there is a goal which Christians must not pursue, for in seeking it they will always fail, vanquished by non-Christians."

He later went so far as to declare that the entire tragedy of mankind resulted from a racial incompatibility between Christ and St. Paul: "I should like to write something to prove how the teachings of Christ, who was not a Jew, were replaced by the very different teachings of the apostle Paul, who was a Jew."³

At last, thanks to the initiative of Theodore Roosevelt, negotiations began at Portsmouth and the peace between Russia and Japan was signed in August (September 5) 1905. Russia lost Port Arthur and the southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and abandoned all claims to Korea and southern Manchuria. Receiving a telegram with the news, Tolstoy's features darkened and he muttered:

"Great news that is. I'm ashamed of myself, but I must confess that I have to struggle against my patriotism. I had always hoped the Russians would win."⁴

As was to be cxpected, there was trouble in the country even before the war had ended. The reverses suffered by the Russian army were proof to all of the improvidence of the government, incompetence of the administration and general weakness of a regime that merely looked as though it were solidly established, The extreme conservatism of the authorities no longer corresponded to the needs of the people or the aspirations of the most advanced class. Student demonstrations, workers' movements, strikes in industrial centers were violently suppressed by the ill-advised tsar, but his measures for restoring order not only failed to intimidate the revolutionary movements, they positively incited them to intensify their struggle. Secret societies sprang up everywhere, universities and factories were flooded with anti-government propaganda and, now and then, some political assassination of stupefying boldness was brought off to prove the real strength of the enemies of autocracy: murder of the Grand Duke Sergey, the governor general of Moscow; murder of the minister Plehvey . . .

On Sunday January 9, 1905, thousands of workers, led by a pope named Gaponc, made an orderly march upon the Winter Palace to present a petition to the tsar demanding an eight-hour day and a constitution. They were savagely dispersed by the guards, leaving many dead and wounded behind, and were hunted down and fired upon until late at night. The result of Bloody Sunday was to precipitate into the opposition all the liberals who had still been hanging fire, unwilling to speak out openly against Nicholas II. Foreign indignation at this senseless massacre encouraged the revolutionary leaders to take immediate advantage of the general discontent. There were more strikes, in factories and printing presses and on railways; there were barracks mutinies and rural insurrections; a few homes were burned down by the peasants; and on June 27, 1905 the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied in protest against their unpalatable rations, killed several of their officers and steamed into Odessa, where striking factory workers were battling with the government troops. The left-wing revolutionary violence was echoed at the other extreme by the pogroms of the reactionary League of the Black Hundreds.

In October, the nation was paralyzed by a general strike, which had spread from Moscow. No railways, no post, no telegraph, no newspapers, no public transport, no electricity. Under pressure of events, Nicholas II consulted Count Witte, the successful peace negotiator of Portsmouth, and on October 17 he published a manifesto granting his subjects freedom of conscience, speech and the press, freedom of assembly and freedom to form associations, and promising respect for human dignity and the individual. He also promised to liberalize the electoral system and announced that henceforth no law could become effective unless it was approved by a parliament elected by universal suffrage: the Duma. The public at large hailed this body of liberal measures with enthusiasm, but men of sharper political acumen greeted it with suspicion, and both arch-reactionaries and arch-revolutionaries were equally incensed by it, for opposing reasons. "There is nothing in it [the manifesto] for the people," wrote Tolstoy. And the disturbances resumed, more vehement than ever, with a round of strikes, mutinies at Kronstadt and Sevastopol, and police action to cripple the St. Petersburg workers' union.

A second revolt broke out in Moscow in December, and there was renewed fighting in the streets; regiments of the guards stormed the barricades, drove the rebels into corncrs and cut them down. Count Witte was considered too temperate and was replaced at the head of the government by a strong man: Stolypin. Six months later, the first Duma was dissolved.

At Yasnaya Polyana the news of these fratricidal conflicts disturbed Tolstoy even more than the war with Japan. lie was in favor of a certain amount of reform, but he condemned the violence of the left- wing terrorists and mocked at those who claimed they could make all men happy by removing the emperor and putting some equally ambitious and insignificant republican leader in his place. "All this fighting, imprisonment, hatred—it all recks of blood," he wrote on September 4, 1905.⁵ But he had attacked tsar and Church so often that he found himself, against his own will, co-opted into the ranks of the revolutionaries whose bloodthirsty methods appalled him. Aware of this anomaly, he struggled to justify himself at either end. After Bethink Yourselves'. he wrote an article entitled Present Events in Russia, a Letter to Nicholas II and a Letter to the Revolutionaries. He told both that they were wrong to try to settle their differences by a show of strength and that any social reform that was not preceded by a spiritual reform was doomed to fail. Neither oppressor nor oppressed paid any attention to him. He was preaching in the desert, and he did not really care. This was not the first time that being the only man to believe as he believed gave him a feeling of infallibility and supremacy. An aristocrat in revolt, a well-endowed Utopian, an anarchist capitalist, he was equally at home lashing out against the partisans of the imperial regime and the tsar's adversaries. For him, as he had so often reiterated, all forms of government were suspect because they were all founded on the submission of the masses to a pre-established order. The Marxists repelled him because their sole aim was to satisfy the people's material needs, and they were not above recourse to violence in achieving their ends; the monarchists infuriated him because they were defending social inequality and religious dishonesty; the liberals drove him wild because they were verbose intellectuals who claimed to be the peasants' brothers and did not even know how to hold a scythe. He stormed at his son Sergey, who supported the liberal, or "young men's," party:

"You want a constitution, they want monarchy, the revolutionaries want socialism, and you believe you can fix things for the people? Well, I can certify- to you that the lives of men in general will not improve until every single man strives to live well himself and not interfere in the lives of others!"®

His son-in-law Sukhotin had been elected to the first Duma; this provoked a caustic comment in his notebook: "The subjects of a constitutional State who believe they are free are like prisoners who

believe they are free because they have been allowed to chose their warden."⁷

On another occasion he wrote:

"The intellectuals have brought a hundred times more harm than good to the people's lives."⁸

Tolstoy solemnly repeated these phrases to the American, English, French, Swedish and German press correspondents who thronged to Yasnaya Polyana to seek the opinion of the seer of seers. They questioned him about politics, and he answered them with religion; they talked about the tsar, the ministers or the leading revolutionaries and he referred them to God; they spoke of the imperatives of the moment and he proclaimed that the true moment was that of the Beyond. Besides, at the mere sight of all these news-hungry foreigners, he felt himself turning more and more into a Slavophil. Russia had no use for the West. She must follow her own path, lighted by God. To him it was not beyond the realm of possibility that God was Russian. "If the Russian people are truly uncivilized and barbarian, then we have a future," he wrote in his diary. "The Westerners are civilized barbarians, so they have nothing more to live for. It would be as aberrant for us to imitate them as for a stalwart, hard-working, healthy young man to envy a rich Parisian who is bald before thirty and sits in his townhouse moaning, 'Ah, how tedious it all is!' He is to be pitied, not envied."⁰

lie predicted that if the Russian revolutionaries began to ape the West, they would be degraded by politics as soon as they came into power: "Smugness, pride, vanity and, above all, contempt of their fellow men."

This refusal to take sides was beginning to alarm the Tolstoyans themselves. In England, Chertkov received the text of the manifesto The Government, the Revolutionaries and the People, read it with astonishment and wrote to Tolstoy imploring him to tone down his derogatory remarks about the Marxists. Tolstoy paid no attention, feeling that he had divided his blows very equitably between the adversaries. The article was not published until later, with minor changes. With the same conccrn for equity, he dccided to break off all relations with Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, whose amiability and broad- mindedness he had found so congenial in the Crimea. "There is something unnatural about our relationship and I think it is better not to go on with it," he wrote to the grand duke on September 14, 1905. "You are a grand duke, a rich man and a close relative of the tsar, I am a man who rejects and condemns the established order and the authorities and I make no secret of it."

The grand duke replied on October 1 that he quite understood and

indeed agreed wholeheartedly with Tolstoy but was compelled to keep silent because of his position at court. "I suffer all the more from my silence," lie confessed, "because ever)' one of the government's flaws is so blindingly clear to me and I see no remedy except in a radical change from everything that now exists. But my aged father is still alive and, out of respect for him, I must be careful not to offend him by my views or my behavior. . . . Thus I shall say au revoir to you, dear Leo Nikolayevich, but not farewell."*

Tolstoy was touched by this letter. Were there then good men in every station of socicty? Yet, back in the citics, the blood was still flowing. "The revolution is in full swing," Tolstoy wrote on October 23, 1905. "They arc killing on both sides. . . . The contradiction, as always, lies in wanting to stop violence by violence." A little later he confessed to Chertkov that he was weary of the battle and wished to extricate himself: "The more savage this revolution becomes, the more I want to withdraw into myself and have 110 more part, whether by- act, word or even opinion, in the whole dirty business."¹⁰

In the thick of the social upheavals, an unhoped-for event occurred to gladden the hearts at Yasnaya Polyana. Since their marriages, both Tanya and Masha, dogged by ill-luck or some mysterious malformation, had had an uninterrupted series of miscarriages and stillbirths. But on November 6, 1905, to the stupefaction of one and all, Tanya—who was nearly forty—gave birth at the homestead to a living, normal girl child, who was given her mother's name.f When Sasha told him the news, Tolstoy snapped at her for seeming so affected: "What an idiot you are!" he muttered. "What are you crying about?" But then he had to blow his own nose to hide his tears. Shortly after, Michael Sukhotin, the baby's father, who had been ordered by his doctors to move to a warmer climate, left for Rome with Sasha, Masha and her husband Obolensky, the "sponger."

"I advise you," Tolstoy wrote to Masha on March 22, 1906, "to get the most you can from Europe. I personally don't want anything from it at all, despite the cleanliness and neatness that are its main features. To my great regret I observe that we are continually borrowing bits of it: political parties, electoral campaigns, blocs, etc. Abysmal! . . . The only possible result of all these constitutions is to allow a different set of people to exploit the majority. The faces will change, as they do in

⁰ Two years later Tolstoy changcd his mind and wrote to the grand duke: "I am ashamed, now, when I think of the letter I wrote in 1905. Today I would not have written it. You cannot imagine how one's views changc as one approaches old age, that is, death. What matters most to me now is a loving communion with all men, be they tsar or beggar."

\ Tanya had five stillborn babies before this one.

England, Francc, America and everywhere else; and in their eagerness to make greater and greater profits from each other, men will come more and more to abandon the soil, which is the only basis for a rational and honest existence, and will hand over such drudgery to slaves from India, Africa, Asia, Europe or anywhere else. Materially, the European way of life is very clean; morally, very dirty."

A peasant named Voronin from the government of Kostroma wrote seeking his advice as to the best choice to make in the present political situation, and Tolstoy told him, mincing no words: "I advise you to join no party, except the Tolstoyan party if there is one."

He would have been happy to see his family's names on the roster of members of that party, but apart from his daughter Sasha, every single Tolstoy had rejected his doctrine. His sons Leo and Andrey (discharged after a few months in the army),! even had the nerve, one day, to declare to his face that the death penalty might be defensible in some cases. Carrying contrariness to such lengths was, Tolstoy felt, an insult to his gray head. "I told them," he wrote, "that they had no respect for me and hated me. I left the room and slammed the door. And for two days I have been unable to forget it."¹¹ Once again he was stifling in the atmosphere of Yasnaya Polyana and wanted to flee this easy, aristocratic life filled with dcccit, idle talk, food and money. But he could foresee what would happen. "It is plain to me," he told his daughter Sasha, "that after two days Sofya Andreyevna would come after me with her flunkeys and doctors and everything would begin all over again."

In August 1906, while he was bemoaning his inability to get rid of his wife, she fell critically ill. She had long been complaining of pains in her stomach, and they suddenly grew worse. She took to her bed, the doctors diagnosed a fibroma and recommended surgery, but she was too weak to be taken to the hospital, so an eminent surgeon, Professor Snegirev, came to the house and brought his assistants, a nurse, even an operating table with him. Alerted by telegram, the family came running. When she saw all her sons and daughters around her bed, Sonya felt that she must be dying. After having nursed so many, it was something new for her to be nursed in turn; weakened by spasms, fever, hunger and thoughts of death, she became so tractable that Tolstoy hardly knew her. She apologized for upsetting the household routine, murmured words of tenderness to the family and her old servants. When her husband came into the room she tried to smile reassuringly and sometimes, taking his wrinkled hand, she kissed it and begged him

I Andrcy was discharged for a navous disorder and sent home in January 1905.

to forgive her for all the wrongs she had done him. Overwhelmed by this spiritual elevation, Tolstoy withdrew to wander tearfully through the house with hanging head, return to his study and scribble a few words. "Sonya's condition is growing worse," he wrote on September 1, 1906. "I felt deeply sorry for her today. She has become so reasonable, sweet and considerate that she is touching. . . . My three sons—Sergey, Andrey and Michael—are here, and my two daughters, Masha and Sasha. The house is full of doctors, which is very trying. Instead of submitting to the will of God in a sublimely religious state of mind, they all give way to selfishness, revolt, pettiness . . ." He deplored his sons' determination to keep their mother alive. Didn't they understand that their tactless meddling might destroy the majesty of a such beautifully Christian leave-taking? "Seen that way, death is not the end of something, but a complete revelation," he added with a flourish of enthusiasm.

Sonya sent for a priest, confessed and took communion. Pointless mimicry, of course, all that, and Tolstoy would have preferred her to die in the pure Tolstoyan faith, but one must not demand too much of a poor weak woman, whose religious upbringing was reasserting itself at the last moment. He generously noted in his diary: "Not only did I consent to this request, I helped her to carry it out. There are beings who cannot raise themselves to an abstract, purely spiritual communion with the principle of life. They need a cruder form."

But the surgeon was still hesitating: peritonitis had set in. After explaining the clanger, Professor Snegirev asked Tolstoy whether he gave his permission to operate notwithstanding. In a fresh burst of hatred for the medical profession, the old man refused. "But if we don't operate, she will diel" cried the surgeon. Tolstoy glared at him and growled: "Do as you please."¹²

Sincc Sonya's soul appeared to be saved, it little mattered to him whether her body was or not. If these fools were to heal her, with their scalpels and drugs, she might never regain her present exemplary spiritual attitude. Perhaps this was the ideal moment for her to leave the world. . . . His indignant sons stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then he seized his cherry stick and walked to the door, announcing that he was going to pray in the forest, and told them to ring the bell twice if the operation were a success and once if not. Then he changed his mind: "No; don't ring at all. I'll come back when I'm ready to!"^ia 'Hie vigil began. Now and then, Sasha stole over to the bedroom door and, peering through a crack, saw the scoured floor, white-coated figures and cotton wadding in a basin, heard the clink of metal instru-

ments, inhaled the smell of ether, and went away, full of dread. Suddenly the door was thrown open and the surgeon appeared, sweating and red-faced; the nurse threw a blanket over his shoulders; he called for champagne, swallowed a few gulps, straightened himself and announced that all was well.

Sasha sped away to the forest. She found her father sitting in a clearing in the oaks, and called out:

"Papa! It's a success!"

"What a blessing! What a blessing!" he said.

"But," wrote Sasha, "what showed on his face was not joy, but great pain."

He did not follow his daughter back to the house, but stayed on alone in the clearing. Alive, his wife no longer interested him. He was in no hurry to see her again. For the moment, his only dealings were with God. He prayed and dreamed 011, to the munnur of the leaves. At last he went to see Sonya, who was regaining consciousness ancl whimpering with pain. He took one glance at her and hurried out of the room, horror-stricken:

"My God! What a dreadful thing!" he said. "Why can't they let people die in peace! A poor woman lashed to her bed with her stomach cut open and no pillow! It's torture!"¹⁴

That very evening, hiding in his study, he recorded his disappointment at the reprieve the doctors had granted to Sonya, who had been so beautifully prepared to meet her maker. "Sonya was operated on today," he wrote. 'They say it was a success. It grieves me to think of it. This morning she was spiritually very beautiful. What composure in the face of death!" Further 011: "In dving, Sonya reveals herself to us."¹⁵

The operation was indeed a success; the tumor was not malignant and Sonya quickly recovered. But it seemed to Tolstoy that her spiritual strength failed as her physical strength increased. Soon every trace of the gentle, happy woman on her deathbed had disappeared. The robust matron of sixty-two, round-cheeked, bright-eyed, eating with hearty appetite, once again bustled about the house scolding the servants and keeping accounts, playing the piano and sewing shirts. A few weeks after the operation, on October 10, 1906, a disheartened Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "Our life here is too tawdry to be borne; they amuse themselves, they pamper themselves, they go off here and there, they study this and that, they quarrel, they worry about things that arc no business of theirs; but they do not live bccause they have no duties. It is abominable! I!!"

The autumn rains and mud cut Yasnaya Polyana off from the world.

That year the Obolenskys were staying in the pavilion. One evening, coming in from a walk, Masha, who had a delicate constitution, complained of chills and headache. She had caught cold, and went to bed shivering with fever. The doctors diagnosed double pneumonia. In a few days, racked by fits of coughing, she had become unrecognizable. Her eyes were fixed and glittering, her cheeks on fire, her mouth dry and discolored, she could hardly lift her hand. Her pulse weakened. But she remained perfectly conscious.

When the doctors announced that they could not save her, Tolstoy seemed surprisingly resigned. As on the occasion of his wife's operation, lie stifled any impulse to sorrow, thinking of the joy in store for the dying woman. "Even though she is my best friend, the one I love best of all those around me," he wrote to Chertkov, "selfishly, I am not frightened or saddened by her death. . . . Only, forgetting rational reactions aside, I suffer and I am sorry for her because, at her age, she would undoubtedly have preferred to live. . . . Death has become so close to me lately that I 110 longer fear it, and it seems natural and necessary. It is not opposed to life but related to it, a continuation of it. And therefore although it is natural to fight death with one's instinct, one must not fight it with one's reason. Any reasoned, intelligent battle against death—such as that waged by medicine—is unfortunate and evil in itself."¹⁰

On November 26 it was clear that Masha would not live through the night. Her husband, father, mother and Sasha were gathered by her bedside. The room was dimly lighted, by a single shaded lamp. In the deep silence the young woman's breathing became more and more irregular. Conscious to the end, she opened her eyes, took Tolstoy's hand, held it to her chest and whispered, "I am dying." A little later her breath stopped and her features stiffened. It was over. She was thirty-five years old. Tolstoy left the room, shut himself into his study and opened his diary.

"November 27. It is one o'clock in the morning," he wrote. "Masha just died. Strangely enough, I felt no horror, fear or sense of anything out of the ordinary occurring, or even pity or affliction. That is, I thought I was required to produce some special feelings of tenderness and grief in myself, and I succccded; but in my heart of hearts, I was more at peace than if I had been witnessing some evil or unjust deed committed by someone else, or even more by myself. Yes, it is a physical event and therefore unimportant. My eyes never left her, all the time she was dying: amazingly calm. She was a human being reaching the highest point of her fulfillment, before it is my turn to do so. I watched this high point and rejoiced in it. But then it moved beyond

the area that is accessible to me (life); that is, it ceased to be visible to me. But I know it was still going on. Where? When? These are questions that torment our understanding here on earth, and yet they have no bearing on real life, which is outside spacc and time."

On the day of the funeral he followed the coffin all the way to the little Kochaky cemetery in which his ancestors, and two of the children who had died in infancy—Nikolenka, Petya—were already buried. When the procession passed through the village, the peasants came out of their isbas and pressed coins into the priest's hand for a requiem in memory of the woman who had eared for them and loved them so well. The professional mourners were sobbing. The road was long and muddy. At the cemetery gate the procession came to a halt. Tolstoy would not go any further; he took his leave of the coffin and returned to the house. "I watched him go," wrote his son Ilya. "He walked through the melting snow with his old man's gait, taking short quick steps, with his toes turned out. He did not look back once." As soon as he readied the house Tolstoy opened his diary again and wrote, "November 29, 1906. They have just taken her away, carried her off to be buried. Thank Cod, I am not depressed."

Sonya displayed more grief than he, although she had never really cared for Masha-thc-Tolstoyan; but she was made of simpler stuff, and was incapable of rejoicing in the loss of a child. She admired her husband for being able to return to his regular occupations so quickly: writing, going for walks, riding his horse . . . And yet, while lie made an outward show of perfect serenity, sometimes, at nightfall, sorrow got the best of him, and he felt the absence of his favorite daughter like a craving. She had been the only one who had found the way to his heart, the only one in whom, now and then, he had seen a reflection of himself. "I live on, and I often recall Masha's last minutes," he wrote a month later. "She is sitting up, her pillows all around her, I am holding her dear hand, so thin, and I feel the life going, going. . . . Those fifteen minutes were among the most important and mast serious of my whole life."¹⁷

PART VIII

The Solution

I. Days Pass, and a Birthday

After Sonya's recovery and Masha's death, there was a long lull in Tolstoy's life. Even politics seemed to have calmed down, as though to spare the old patriarch's nerves. To continue meditating, writing, even living, at his age, he needed an absolutely rigid schedule: he felt that this routine was what kept him in good health. Up early in the morning, he washed with cold water, emptied his basin, straightened his bed and covered it with a crocheted blanket embroidered with a Greek key motif, swept the floor and, in the winter, carricd logs and lighted a fire in the stove. Then he went for a short walk in the woods, sat on a bench to jot down some philosophical thought or literary' project, and was back in his room at nine. He ate his breakfast alone (coffee and dry bread) and read the newspapers: two Russian dailies and the London Times.

In the meantime Philichka, a red-headed, grimy muzhik who wore an immense black cap and was nicknamed "Tolstoy's mail clerk," had climbed onto his horse and gone to fetch the mail at the railway station. He returned with a sackful and poured out the contents on the master's desk. Tolstoy drank the last of his coffee as he opened envelopes—thirty or forty missives a day, from the four corners of the earth. Waves of writing, washing up at his feet, showing him the extent of his popularity and his powerlessness. How to help all these strangers who needed him? True: for every moving appeal there were dozens more from visionaries, autograph hounds, hysterics, unsuccessful authors, inventors of perpetual-motion machines and blinkered Tolstoy- ans asking whether it was right to kill microbes, eat honey produced by the labor of the bees or use glue manufactured from the bones of animals. Tolstoy initialed the envelopes "NA" (110 answer), "S" (silly) or "A" (appeal for help). Sometimes he wrote out a reply him-

self, but as his writing had become ver}' poor he usually scribbled a few lines for his daughter Sasha to copy in legible form.

In the early days, Tolstoy's secretariat had been a rudimentary affair: Sonya, the two elder daughters, Ivanov the scribe and various guests all shared in the copying. Tanya, however, had bought a typewriter and begun to type some of her father's letters. Sasha also learned to type, and the Remington became the standard means of dealing with correspondence and manuscripts. All incoming letters and copies of replies were recorded and filed.

The only exception to this rule was made for Chertkov. Everything Tolstoy wrote was sent to him for publication in England, where, as guardian of the master's thought and defender of his fame, he saw that every new work came out simultaneously in the various languages; and if Tolstoy were rash enough to send an article directly to some foreign periodical, he received such an avalanche of reproof that he humbly begged pardon of the tyrannical servant of his glory. One day he said to Sasha with a sad smile:

"By the way, Chertkov asks that no one be allowed to read his letters and that they be returned to him immediately."

When his daughter bristled at these high-handed ways, he entreated her, with a weary and embarrassed air, not to poison his relations with the exile.

After finishing his letters, he worked 011 his own projects until two in the afternoon. He still refused to wear glasses, so he sat on a chair that had been Tanya's when she was a child in order not to have to bend over so far to bring his eyes close to the paper. He gripped the pen in his fist, the forefinger bunched up with the rest instead of extended along the penholder. With a rubber pad under his seat, his head lowered and his elbows spread apart, he looked like some old bearded schoolboy laboring over his homework. "When he wrote," Sasha noted, "he pushed his lips out as though he were blowing. Then he would put a full stop and raise his thick, beetling eyebrows." No one was allowed to disturb him during his hours of crcation. He demanded absolute silence, for the slightest noise, he said, prevented him from concentrating. If he needed anything, he rang a turtle-shaped bell or knockcd on the wall with his big walking stick. Most of the time he rang to tell them to drive away the dogs barking on the lawn or the hens cackling beneath his windows, and a servant was sent around the house waving a branch to scatter the animals. When silence was restored, Tolstoy went back to blackening of sheets of paper with his flowing hand. He usually filled only a quarter of the page, and often preferred to use scraps of paper torn from letters he had received.

Sometimes, rather than change the order of the sentences in a difficult passage, he cut the whole manuscript into strips, marked them with tall, angular numbers, and gave them to Sasha with a sheepish growl: "Careful! Don't lose any of the bits! I made a lot of noodles today." "He did not finish his words," she said later, "and wrote without punctuation; any he did put in was always in the wrong place. Sometimes he made grammatical errors."

One imagines the pride with which Sasha, just turned twenty-three, bore off the precious scraps of paper to the "Remington room," reserved for secretarial work. Behind the library and drawing-room doors, guests were laughing and exchanging trivial remarks; she, meanwhile, sitting bolt upright behind her typewriter, was the first to learn the new word of Leo Tolstoy. In addition to this routine work she also copied her father's diary, and thus she learned what he thought of his intimates and himself. Before, he had been more willing to share his secrets with everyone around him, but now it occasionally troubled him to think that a mere girl, his own child, should be following every twist and turn of his most private thoughts. But Chertkov had demanded that the diary be typed and a copy sent to him, and it was impossible to oppose that man's will. Pitifully trying to maintain the illusion that he was writing for himself, Tolstoy told his daughter:

"Take the diary without telling me, don't let me know it's being typed; otherwise, I wouldn't be able to write it!"¹

At two o'clock a bell rang for lunch. With a brisk step, "hopping a little," Tolstoy went into the big dining room where the table was set. White cloth, silver, servants in livery and white gloves. When the master came in everyone stood and all talk ceased. Tolstoy made a pleasant remark to everyone present, and sat down to the right of his wife. In addition to the family, there were his secretary, his private physician Dushan Makovitsky, his grandchildren's tutors and governesses, friends, passing foreigners, neighbors. Some thirty persons in all. Two menus: one for ordinary people and one for the master, usually consisting of a soft-boiled egg, raw tomatoes, and macaroni and cheese. He ate rapidly, paying no attention to what was on his plate. His guests never heard him express any opinion of his food. As he had lost all his teeth, his cheeks wrinkled into deep folds as he chewed. On his bad days, he was aggrieved by the material comforts around him, cast murderous glances at the servants and the crystal, did not join in the conversation and hurried away from the table. When he was in a good mood, on the other hand, he charmed his guests with the vivacity of his conversation. Leaping from one subject to another, he stated his views on everything in simple, colorful language, flew into a rage at

the slightest sign of disagreement, pressed his argument to the point of absurdity, apologized for speaking so sharply and, his features alert and his eyes darting around the room, basked in the wonderment of his audience.

After the meal he took a walk on the grounds. But before he could start, he had to cross a barrage of suppliants. They had been sitting for hours, in front of the house, on the bench, under the old elm, patiently waiting their turn. Pilgrims on the way to the monasteries of Kiev, muzhiks from villages far and near, simpletons, professional beggars, a whole ragged little tribe who bent down and murmured words of blessing as the master drew near. He questioned them, gratified them with a few evangelical words of counsel and gave them a few kopecks. A big jar in the upstairs drawing room was kept full of coins especially for the purpose. Most of the visitors thanked him when they received their pittance. But some grumbled that he could give more, since he was so rich.

"But they told me he was a kind man!" one woman exclaimed, looking with contempt at the palm of her hand.

In addition to the poor, there were callcrs of higher degree, who had come by coach from the Yasenki station. They were all "problem" people. They had souls, and they intended to tell him about them. Sasha wrote, "One is a landowner who agrees that private property is a sin but docs not know how to expiate; one is a student wanting money as a 'revolutionary expropriation'; one is a lunatic who wants Tolstoy to support her Esperanto propaganda campaign; one is a young man who has gone astray and wants us to put him back on the path of righteousness; one is a peasant who has refused to perform his military' service on religious grounds and wants to tell his tale of woe. . . . And then there are the sight-seers, who simply comc to look at 'the great writer of the Russian nation.'"

For them all, Tolstoy was a national monument, and no one had any right to prevent them from coming to look at him. Some feigned a neophyte's admiration in his presence, but others did not even trouble to do that: they asked impertinent questions of the author and his family and snooped about the house in search of material for a "feature" story. Biographers, annalists, souvenir hunters, they all went away with their notcl>ooks full, and one subsequently heard that they had known the master intimately and were writing their memoirs. Some came back once or twice and performed some small service, and although no one liked them, they eventually edged their way into the little clan around Tolstoy. One grew accustomed to their faces, one forgot to be careful what one said in front of them; and then one day,

using what they had seen and heard, they might peacefully set about demolishing their host. "Usually," Sasha noted wistfully, "people can choose their friends and acquaintances according to their tastes. This was not so with us. Because of my father's name, we saw many people who had no value, and were simply full of their own importance."

After making his way through these groups, Tolstoy set off at last, on foot or 011 horseback, for the Zasyeka forest. Sonya worried about him during these rambles and had insisted that he be followed, at forty paccs, by a servant or his secretary or some friend. He grumblingly resigned himself to this silent escort. He often paused to take notes and, during the warm months, to pick flowers. He was always the first to appear with violets, forget-me-nots and lilies-of-the-valley. Clutching his bouquet in his fist, he sniffed at it with a sly, voluptuous expression on his face: "What a delicate fragrance! Like bitter almond!"

His companions on these jaunts through field and forest were amazed at his ability on horseback. At eighty, mounted on his faithful D

'Ton all right?"

"Yes, I'm still in the saddle," she would gasp.

He laughed:

"Well, hang on!"

On these occasions he usually wore a peculiar white muslin hat, stretched on a wire frame. A canvas blouse, shapeless trousers and soft boots completed his attire. Sometimes he exchanged the muslin hat for a cap. From the distance, he looked like a young man disguised as an old one, with a false beard and eyebrows made out of cotton batting. One day Ddlirc, who was very high-spirited, took fright passing by a foundry, shied and fell. Without abandoning the reins, Tolstoy slipped his foot out of the stirrup, leaped to one side and landed 011 his feet, unhurt.

"Don't say anything to Maman!" he growled, turning to Sasha.²

When he returned from his outing, around five o'clock, he drank a glass of tea, shut himself up in his study and, lying on the leather couch, daydreamed, read, took notes or napped. But at the first sign of anything amiss—a cold or excess fatigue—this all changed. He wrapped himself up in his dressing gown, covered his shoulders with a russet camel's-hair shawl, pulled a black silk skullcap down over his head and sat in semi-darkness, yawning cavernously, at such length

and so noisily that when the windows were open he could be heard in the garden.³

Toward seven he reappeared, after the rest of the family had already sat down for supper. This time his meal was more copious: borscht, rice or potato dumplings, dessert, and, on very rare occasions, a drop of white wine in a large glass of water. After supper, the women sat sewing in the drawing room under the big lamp with the pleated paper shade, while he played chess with one of his sons or a visiting friend. Writers came to see him: Dmitry Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Hippius ("I would like to like them but I can't"), his translator Halperin-Kaminsky . . . Often, there was music. There were two pianos in the room and the ttagere sagged under the weight of the sheet music of Haydn, Mozart, Chopin, Glinka and Beethoven. Most often, it was the pianist Goldenweiser, a close friend of the family, whose swift fingers swept the keyboard. Or some noted guest such as Wanda Landowska, who came in 1907.* However he bewailed the evil effects of music, Tolstoy could not resist its charms. When a melody pleased him, his face softened into an expression of gentleness and suffering. Seated in the old Voltaire armchair, his head to one side and his eyes closed, he sighed and wept, unable to restrain his emotions. Under the blue light of the big paper lampshade, there was "something immaterial and seraphic" in his profile with its white beard and hair. Once the spell was broken, he resented the composer and performer who had so unsettled him:

"My tears mean nothing," he growled. "So what? There is some music I cannot listen to without weeping, that's all, just as my daughter Sasha cannot eat strawberries without getting hives! Anyway, sometimes I weep when I laugh, too. It's nerves, nothing but nerves!"⁴

Tea was drunk, once again, around ten in the evening. At eleven, after wishing everyone a good night, Tolstoy withdrew. "His handshake was very special," noted Gusev. "He held the other person's hand a long time and gave him a friendly look, straight into his eyes." Alone in his study, he lighted his candle, sat down in his child's chair in front of the writing table and took out his notebook. Everything he had jotted down in it he now expanded in his diary, adding thoughts and impressions that had come to him in the meantime. Then he drew a line beneath his report and wrote the date of the following day, with the customary "i.I.l."

Having thus examined his conscience, he went into the next room and took off his clothes, meditated, prayed, lay down on his little iron

• She had brought her own harpsichord.

'