Tolstoy

[24* Tolstoy's grave at Yasnaya Polyana

bed and calmly surveyed his surroundings. On the night table stood a little bell, a clock under a glass dome, a candle, matches. Above his head, a portrait of his daughter Tanya. A washstand in one corner. More portraits: his father in uniform, Masha, who had died the previous year, Sonya . . . Everything was in order. He lay his cheek against the pillow, pulled up the blanket decorated with the Greek key design, closed his eyes and waited for sleep to come.

This uneventful life was being recorded on all sides. The most zealous chroniclers were the new secretary, Nicholas Nikolayevich Gusev, whom Chertkov had recommended to Tolstoy; Goldenweiser; and Dr. Dushan Makovitsky, who had recently been hired as the master's personal physician. All three kept their diaries with scrupulous punctuality. Gusev, at twenty-five, was an impassioned Tolstoyan who wrote so fluently that Tolstoy allowed him to answer some letters and acknowledge consignments of books in his own name. Instead of restricting himself to a conventional expression of thanks, Gusev composed four-page epistles enthusiastically expounding the master's doctrine. In his capacity as disciple, he also received and conversed with callers. And yet, despite his admiration for Tolstoy, he had not read War and Peace. "Tolstoy, as an artist, does not exist for me," he said. "Tolstoy himself repudiates his past works." His major drawback was a resistance to hygiene. Sasha, who worked with him in the "Remington room," said she could not stand the smell in hot weather.

At thirty', the pianist Goldenweiser, who lived nearby and came to the house nearly every day, was a very different type. "He was sad, as Tolstoyans nearly always were, and tall, and something dogged and ineradicably tedious emanated from him," wrote Maurice Kues, the Swiss tutor of Tolstoy's grandson. The author liked to play chess, converse and go for walks in the woods with the pianist. Goldenweiser, a carcful biographer, noted the most minute details of these occasions. He did not fail to record that Tolstoy had a faint lisp, that his toes pointed out and his heels touched the ground first when he walked, that he was miserly in small things (paper, candles) and had a very characteristic smell, "reminiscent of cypress."

A still more impressive observer was Dr. Makovitsky. Although Tolstoy claimed to have nothing but contempt for medicine, he had been attended by a private physician since 1898. Dr. Bertenson, who had accompanied hiin to the Crimea, was followed by Drs. Nikitin and Berkenheim, and now by Dr. Makovitsky, a Hungarian Slovak who had left his native land and come to live at Yasnaya Polyana out of love for the apostle of non-violence, whose entire opus he knew by heart. He was a puny little man, anemic and bald, with a waxen face ending in a short little pepper-and-salt beard. But this unprepossessing envelope enclosed a soul of fire. He would willingly have laid down his life for his idol. Tolstoy said of him, "Dushan is a saint. But since there are no true saints, God gave him one fault: hatred of Jews."

True enough, the mild and pacific Dushan Makovitsky was so rabid an anti-Semite that his state sometimes bordered on insanity. He was endowed with a colossal memory and, on the slightest pretext, could rattle off statistics demonstrating the superiority of Slavs over Israelites. He scolded Sasha if he heard that she had shopped in a Jewish store.

"Oh, Alexandra Lvovna, aren't you ashamed of yourself? Why buy from the Jews, why? Why not support your own? Don't you see how the Jews hate you, how they lord it over you?"³

It pained him that Goldenweiser, who was a Jew, should be treated as a friend of the family.

lie was amazingly active for a man of such puny appearance. Every morning he held consultations in the village at Yasnaya Polyana in an isba fitted out as an infirmary, after which he set off on his rounds in a telaga to see patients scorcs of miles away who could not come to him. Whenever he had a free moment he ran to Tolstoy's side and hearkened to catch the Word as it fell. No founder of a religion ever had a more fervent hagiographer by his side. The very idea of wanting to consider the doctrine objectively was sacrilcgc to him. His mission on earth was to record and witness, and in order to escape the notice of the master, who did not like people to write down every word he said, the doctor had devised an ingenious form of notation. He wrote on stiff cardboard squares inside his pockct, feeling his way along with a minute pencil sharpened to a very fine point. With practice, he had become a past master at this form of blind-writing. Often, at teatimc, Sasha saw Makovitsky's left hand on top of the table, while his right was scratching away out of sight. "Dushan," she would say in a low voice, "I'll tell Papa!" "Oh, no, Alexandra Lvovna, don't do that," he stammered, blushing and pulling his right hand out of his pocket.

A few seconds later he resumed his watchdog pose. His right hand disappeared, his eyes unfocused. His mind a-quivcr, he was recording, recording for posterity.

"Thus we were deprived of the great joy of having a private life," wrote Sasha, "of talking nonsense, joking, singing, not having to be careful of everything. Instead, we knew that every word we spoke and every gesture we made would be recorded on the spot.""

Dushan Makovitsky and Gusev helped Tolstoy to compile the texts of famous authors he wanted to use in his next book, The Circle of

Reading. It was probably his work on this anthology that reawakened his taste for pedagogy. He wrote a brochure, The Teachings of Jestis Explained to Children, prepared a Circle of Reading for Children and suddenly started evening classes for the little muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana. At first, fifteen of them came to the library, where, this time, Tolstoy sought to teach, not science or history or grammar, but religious and moral principles, using the simplest methods possible. They listened, they appeared to understand. The old man was jubilant. "Lately," he wrote in his diary on March 17, 1907, "I have been completely occupied giving lessons to the children. The farther I go the more clearly I see the difficulties of the task, and at the same time the greater the success I look forward to."

Sonya shrugged. "Leo Nikolayevich has a new hobby," she said. "He is droning away, teaching Christian truths to the children; they repeat after him like parrots. But they will turn into drunkards and thieves all the same!" Although he was offended by his wife's skepticism, Tolstoy had to admit that his pupils were not angels, despite their sweet faces and high piping voices. He would have liked to find a sort of fundamental innocence in them, the purity of souls preserved from civilization; but instead, he ran headlong into all the wicked impulses he had learned to recognize in the adult. One afternoon he returned from his walk in a very agitated state and said to his daughter, "It's dreadful! Dreadful! I am walking along, it is a gorgeous morning, the birds are singing, the smell of clover is spreading through the air . . . and suddenly, I hear the most terrible swearing. I come closer; there were some children behind an acacia tending the horses, and they were hurling the crudest insults at each other. It brought tears to my eyes."⁷

The number of pupils dwindled steadily. Tolstoy did not know whether to attribute this loss of interest to the children themselves or to their parents, who did not like to see them being indoctrinated by the master. Although the revolution had been smothered, the villagers still harbored deep resentments against the landowners. Strikes and insurrections had given way to isolated acts of violence. Sonya's own brother Vyacheslav Behrs, chief works engineer on a project near St. Petersburg, was murdered by unemployed workers. The peasants on Tolstoy's son Michael's farm had set fire to the barns containing the farm machinery. Another fire was started by muzhiks on the Sukhotin property. On the land of a neighbor, Mrs. Zvegintsev, prowlers shot and killed two house-servants sent to ask them for their passports. At Yasnaya Polyana itself, marauders often robbed the vegetable garden, and the night watchman complained of being shot at while trying to catch them in the act; and one hundred and twenty-nine of Tolstoy's

beloved trees were cut down by the peasants, who appropriated the wood. On the advice of her son Andrey, Sonya requested official assistance from the governor of the province, D. D. Kobeko. The police raided the village and arrested a few peasants for possessing firearms. Only too happy to blow up the case, the governor placed sentinels on the property and even inside Tolstoy's house. Thus the apostle of nonviolence found himself under uniformed protection. The situation was made all the more paradoxical by the fact that Yasnaya Polyana was the only estate in the district to receive such official help. Now the enemies of Tolstoyism could chortle to their heart's content, to see what a fool the prophet had made of himself. He fumed at his wife:

"Why can't you understand that the presence of police who arrest and imprison peasants is intolerable to me?" "Then do you want them to shoot us here?" she retorted. "This is hell. Pure hell. This is the worst possible atmosphere to create. To think that there are seven armed men on this property!"⁸ The wives and parents of the incarcerated peasants came to plead with the master to intercede on their behalf. No matter how often he told them that it had all been decided without consulting him, that in obedience to his ideal of poverty he had given all his rights to his wife and children and was no longer the owner of Yasnaya Polyana and therefore could do nothing to help, they did not believe him. "They cannot accept the fact that I am not the master here—since I live here —and they hold me responsible for everything that happens," he wrote in his diary on September 7, 1907. "It is very hard." In his notebook: "The governor has just comc, with all his suite. Revolting and pitiful." Now two tall, heavy, coarsc guards stood preening themselves in the entryway, revolver on hip. In their vicinity, Sasha detected an unpleasant odor of "bad tobacco and male perspiration." She begged her mother to send them away, to pardon the muzhiks and have mercy on her father. But Sonya was adamant. Then Tolstoy dispatched his daughter to Tula, to see Governor Kobeko and give him a letter. She was received by Deputy Governor Lopukin. After glancing over Tolstoy's appeal, he turned to Sasha and concluded with a smile:

"The countess, your mother, has asked us to protect your family at Yasnaya Polyana, and we are only obeying her orders."

And he showed her a letter from Sonya asking that the guards be kept on the premises at all costs. When Sasha returned to the house, she ran to her mother and sobbed out:

"Even if we lose everything, everything, not just a few old oak trees but Yasnaya Polyana itself, we can't put Papa in such a position!" "I can expect nothing but trouble from you!" Sonya replied curtly.

"1 know you don't care a rap whether Yasnaya Polyana is torn to rack and ruin. But I don't have the right to talk like that: I have children!"

The police remained at Yasnaya Polyana for two years, and Tolstoy suffered leaden remorse all the time they were there. "If someone were to speak to me about myself as a stranger, living in the lap of luxury, surrounded by armed guards, despoiling peasants and having them thrown into prison while he preaches and practices Christianity and hands out fortunes in money and performs all these ugly deeds hiding behind his beloved wife, I should not hesitate to call that man a criminal," he wrote.t Once again, he wanted to run away. But when the moment came to take the plunge, he hung back and invented excuses: "However powerfully I desire to obey the call of my ideal, I do not feci capable of it; it is not that I so love fine food or a soft bed or the pleasure of riding horseback, but there are other reasons: I cannot be the cause of a woman's unhappiness, provoke the anger of a person who is convinced she is doing her duty. . . ."⁹

On October 22, 1907, Gusev was arrested as a revolutionary propagandist and Tolstoy wrote to Governor Kobeko and Count Olsufyev to obtain his release. When he was freed, at the end of December 1907, the old man embraced him and said, "How I envy you! How I should like to be put into prison, a real prison, good and stinking! ... I see that I don't deserve such honor!"¹⁰

Badly shaken by these emotions, he had several slight strokes, accompanied by temporary loss of memory, during the winter of 1907- 8. But his ardor for battle was undiminished. He anxiously followed the policy of Stolypin's new government, which had opted for strong- arm tactics. Before the 1905 revolution, the death penalty had hardly ever been applied in Russia, and ordinary criminal offenses were punished by prison sentences or hard labor. But punitive action was intensified after the terrorist crimes began. Most of those charged with political murder were executed. Tolstoy looked in the papers every day for the notices on the executions. In this violent settling of accounts between the tsarist society and its adversaries, his compassion went equally to victims and executioners. He would have liked to write something on the subject. "I should like to show in this book that 110 one is guilty," he said. "I should like to explain that the judge of the court who signed the order and the hangman who put the condemned man to death were both led to do so perfectly naturally—as naturally as we drink tea here together, while so many others are shivering with cold and soaked by rain."¹¹ But a novel would not have enough impact on

t July 1908.

the public. The question was too serious to be argued by fictional characters. Professor Davydov, the lawyer Muravyev, the young Tol- stoyan Biryukov were sending Tolstoy secret documents, photographs of the hanged men. ... So many mistakes! So much arbitrary action! So much violencel To abolish violence, one had to begin by abolishing private property. On July 26, 1907, Tolstoy had written to the prime minister, P. A. Stolypin, to warn him:

"Two courses are open to you. Either you will continue in the way you have begun, condoning and even directing the policy of exile, hard labor and capital punishment, and, without accomplishing your aims, leave a hated name behind you and, which is more serious, lose your soul; or, taking the lead among all the countries of Europe, you will strive to abolish the oldest and greatest injustice of all, which is common to all peoples: the individual ownership of land."

At Tolstoy's request, Stolypin's brother, a reporter on the New Times, conveyed this letter to its destination, and also undertook to reply to the writer on behalf of the overworked minister:

"As regards the idea of abolishing private property, my brother said it would be utterly impossible to make such a transformation—particularly as he is now completely committed to the idea that he can put Russia on the road to prosperity by establishing and consolidating small holdings; that is, by following a course exactly opposite to yours. You know how children love property, what joy they derive from their first horse, their first dog. The only way the common people can experience this same thrill of joy is if they have their own land, around their own house, fenced in by their own stockade. . . ."¹²

Tolstoy wrote to the minister again in January 1908, but with 110 hope of being understood. In May of that year, opening the newspaper Russia, he read the following announcement: "Today, May 9, on the Stryelbitsky Esplanade in Kherson, twenty peasants were hanged for armed trespassing upon a property in the district of Elizavctgrad." lie crumpled the paper and groaned: "It's impossible! We can't go on living this way! No! No!" That same day he decided to launch a fresh appeal to the government: I Cannot Be Silent. Early that year Thomas Edison had sent him a dictating machine from America, in token of his esteem. Until now he had not been able to use the machine: when the moment came to speak, he became nervous and rattled and could not find his words. This time, he determined to get the best of his stage fright and, standing in front of the machine, his voice blurred by tears, slowly began to dictate. The speech went well. Sasha typed it out on her

Remington. On May 31 the revised and corrected text was ready for the press:

"People now talk and write of executions, hangings, murders and bombs, as they used to talk and write about the weather. Schoolboys, hardly more than children, go out to expropriate and kill as they used to go hunting. ... It is impossible to live this way, for me at any rate, and I shall not do it. . . ."

Further along, he called upon the government to stop the growing carnage and begged, as a special favor, to be persecuted for his opinions.

"Let mc be put in prison," he wrote, "or better yet (so good that I dare not hope for such happiness), let mc be dressed in a shroud like those twelve or twenty peasants, and pushed off a bench so that the weight of my body will tighten the well-soaped slipknot around my old neck."

This manifesto was prohibited by the censor, but extracts appeared in the Russian press; the newspapers publishing them had to pay large fines. Innumerable printed, hectographed and handwritten copies were already circulating. Abroad, the full text was published simultaneously in several languages. All Europe was soon talking of the great Tolstoy's protest against the tsar's method of expediting justice. The mail at Yasnaya Polyana multiplied tenfold overnight. Most of the letters congratulated the author for his courage, some insulted him and called him destructive. A package arrived; when he unwrapped it Tolstoy found a little box containing a piece of rope as thick as his finger. There was a note with the packagc: "Count, here is the reply to your message; you can do it yourself, no need to bother the government about it, it isn't so difficult! And you will be doing a favor to our nation and our young. —A Russian Mother."

Tolstoy's admirers did not want to let the year 1908 go by without a full-scale celebration of his eightieth birthday. For some it would be a tribute to the greatest Russian author, for others a means of making money by publishing articles and photographs, and for still others a political maneuver calculatcd to discredit the government. An organizing committee was set up in St. Petersburg in January. Response to its appeal was enthusiastic, in Russia and abroad; subscription lists went as far as England for contributions to a "Tolstoy Fund." All this fuss displeased the old man. "All my life I have hated anniversaries of every sort," he said. "It's a ridiculous habit. At this advanced age, when there is nothing left to think alxnit but death, they want to bother me with that!"¹³

The government was equally unhappy, for whenever Tolstoy's name

appeared in the press, it could expect the worst. As usual, alarm in official circles took the fonn of an exchange of coded telegrams between the capital and the larger provincial cities. Old Princess Dondukov- Korsakov warned Sonya that Orthodox churchgoers would be outraged if religion's public enemy No. 1 were to be publicly honored. There were grumblers in the opposite camp as well, for to a true Tolstoyan this form of manifestation could be nothing but trickery. Bodyansky wrote to Gusev that Leo Nikolayevich "ought to be imprisoned for his birthday, which would have given him deep moral satisfaction." Tolstoy replied to Princess Dondukov-Korsakov that he quite approved of her protest and that the festivities being arranged were "more than painful" to him, and to Bodyansky he wrote, "Indeed, nothing could have satisfied me as fully or given me as much happiness as to be put in prison: a good, proper prison that stinks, where people suffer from cold and hunger."

Thus enlightened from both sides as to where his duty lay, he announced his refusal to Stakhovich, who was a member of the organizing committee: "I have an urgent request to make of you; do everything you can to stop this jubilee and release me from it. I shall be eternally grateful to you."¹⁴

The committee deferred to his request, but it was too late to silence the public, which was in a fine frenzy of anticipation over the celebration. So, even though the newspapers confirmed the announcement that all demonstrations were being cancclcd at the request of Tolstoy himself, government and Church redoubled their precautions. The bishop of Saratov even issued an order forbidding his faithful to honor "the anathematized infidel and revolutionary anarchist Leo Tolstoy," "the Russian Judas, reviled and accursed," "morally rotten to the core," "intellectual murderer and corrupter of the young . . ."

Just then, as it happened, the Russian Judas was in rather poor health. He had had more strokes, which had so muddled his wits that when he regained consciousness lie could not remember what he had been doing when the attack came. Then he developed phlebitis, in July. The doctors forced him to stay in bed with his leg encased in ice and raised on wooden trestles. The date of his birthday was drawing near but he was thinking more and more of death. Too weak to write his diary, he dictated it:

"Difficult situation. Pain. The last few days continual fever and pain, it is hard for me to bear. I must be beginning to die. It is hard enough to live in the absurd and luxurious state in which I have been compelled to spend my life, but it is even harder to die in it: the fuss and bother, the medicine, the deceitful reassurance and rallying, when

it is all impossible and useless, for the only result is a worsening of the state of the soul."¹⁵

Just in case, he specified his last wishes: all his books to become public property, 110 requiem mass, a plain wooden casket and, for his last resting place, that spot in the Zakaz forest near the ravine, "where the green stick was buried."

Four days after making his arrangements to die, his temperature dropped. Me realized that he had been spared once again. Was he happy? He said not—life was a burden, he had lost all desire to work. But on August 17, he noted seven fresh themes for novels in his notebook, one of which concerned a young priest who, "having read Tolstoy," has a sudden revelation of the great problems of mankind.t

On August 28, 1908, visitors began arriving early in the morning, although the celebration was supposed to be confined to the family. The horses' bells disturbed the old man, who was writing in his study as usual. The post office was submerged by letters, telegrams and packages from all over the world. At noon, Tolstoy appeared in an upholstered wheelchair to rcccive his family's birthday wishes. He was wearing a snowy white blouse, his carefully combed beard flowed across his chest and his hair had been cut very short, which made his ears look enormous. Except for Leo, who was in Switzerland, all his daughters and sons were there. Sonya, very excited, her face flushed and her back rigid, was scuttling about in all directions in a ruffled gown, seeing to the last-minute arrangements. Her head shook with a slight nervous tremor and she peered out at the world from misty, short-sighted eyes.

The old man was brought to see his presents. Boxes of candies, books, portraits of the author embroidered on handkerchiefs, an album of original drawings offered by the Russian painters Repin, Pasternak, Levitan . . . From France he received twenty bottles of aperitif bearing the motto, "Le meilleur ami de I'estomac"; the Ottoman tobacco company sent a chest of cigarettes with his portrait printed on them (he returned them immediately, with a letter stigmatizing smokers); a group of restaurant waiters in St. Petersburg had taken up a collection among themselves and offered him a magnificent samovar. . .

At last, the bell rang for dinner. More than thirty people sat down to the table, arranged in horseshoe shape. The sons read out a few of the one thousand and seven hundred messages of congratulation sent by scientists, authors, students, artists, shopkeepers, engineers, farmers, factory workers, prisoners, aristocrats and even clergymen. "We

J None of them was ever written.

wish you many more years of life in your struggle against the power of darkness," signed: "The faculty of the St. Petersburg Poly technical Institute." "The Art Theater makes its bow to you today, great teacher," signed: "Stanislavsky and the company." "Do not be silent, old man inspired by God," signed: "A peasant." "May God prolong your life, strong sower of truth and love," signed: "A group of cartwrights." "To the seeker after God, greetings!" signed: "A Catholic priest." The English writers Thomas Ilardy, George Meredith, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw sent a message of friendship. Similar missives continual to arrive, from France, Germany, Australia. There were tears in Tolstoy's eyes. The noise of voices and clinking of glasses made him giddy. He was sitting at a separate table, his leg propped up in front of him. In his weary face the pale pupils glittered beneath the thick roll of his eyebrows. After the meat course, the servants brought in bottles of champagne wrapped in napkins. Corks popped; the guests assembled around the old man, glass in hand.

Meanwhile, more delegations kept arriving outside, and were assembling on the lawn. An open-air banquet had been arranged for them. Tolstoy rolled toward them in his wheelchair, working the rubber wheels with both hands. They surrounded him. How to quench the thirst of all these people, so avid to hear the word? The first disciples, listening to Christ long ago, must have worn just such expressions of naive respect. They were waiting for the sage of Yasnaya Polyana to pronounce his Sermon on the Mount. But at his age, it was asking too much. Besides, he had never been able to speak in public. lie muttered a few trivialities, thanked everyone, shook hands, kissed the children, smiled through his legendary beard for the numerous photographers. A brass band was playing under the lindens. A cameraman was filming the scene for posterity. Worn out, Tolstoy soon slipped away from his admirers and shut himself up to play chess with his son-in-law Sukhotin, who let him win—this made him very happy. To end the day, he asked Goldenwciser to play Chopin's Etudes on the piano. The music stirred him profoundly. He withdrew to his room. As his daughter Sasha was wishing him a good night, he murmured:

"My heart is very heavy!"¹⁸

Then Sonya camc to tuck him in, with the blanket with the Greek key design she had crocheted herself. The expression on his face when he looked at her was one of heart-rending tenderness. He resembled a child, in spite of his white hair and his wrinkles. The birthday was over, and there had been no toy fine enough to occupy his mind any longer. Sonya tucked the blanket under her aged husband's shoulders. He grunted with comfort:

"It's so good! It's so good! As long as it doesn't end with a catastrophe!"¹⁷

And he sent her away. Before going to sleep he wrote in his notebook: "To cat when one is hungry, drink water when one is thirsty; those are great pleasures of the body; but to refuse food and drink and everything the body desires is more than a pleasure, it is the joy of the soul!"¹⁸

2. Re-enter Chertkov

One of the guests congratulating Leo Tolstoy most warmly on that August 28 was none other than Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov. Tlie previous year he had been allowed to return to Russia, after ten years in exile. From his long residence at Christchurch in England he had brought back an unshaken confidence in the master's doctrine, an even greater measure of inflexibility than before, and a touch of British stiffness in his demeanor. Although his hairline was receding and he had put on a little weight, he still cut an imposing figure. I lis sufferings for the faith gave him uncqualcd prestige in the eyes of all the Tol- stoyans and of Tolstoy himself. True, young Biryukov had also been forced to leave the country, but he had been returned to grace in 1904 and had been living with his family near Yasnaya Polyana ever since, so he had far less authority than the Christchurch exile.

Beyond the seas, Chertkov had campaigned energetically for the cause. His subjugated master had long sincc delegated virtually all his powers to him. Not one line by Leo Tolstoy could appear without his agent's imprimatur. Chertkov alone dealt with the publishers, both Russian and foreign, chose translators, supervised their work, decided publication dates. Sole minister of a pontiff too old and feeble to contradict him, his power was increased by his utter sincerity. If he sometimes differed with Tolstoy, it was always in the name of Tolstoyism. He regarded himself as the incarnation of the doctrinc. He was Tolstoy, relieved of his temptations, but also of his genius: a caricature, a reflection in a deforming mirror. A perfect refutation of the thesis he imagined he was defending. One torrid day, Tolstoy saw a mosquito land on Chertkov's bald pate and smacked it. The disciple looked reproachfully up at his master:

"What have you done, Leo Nikolayevich? You have killed a living creature! You should be ashamed of yourself!"

"My father became embarrassed," wrote Sasha, who was present, "and there was a moment of general uneasiness." To justify his meekness with the aggressive Chertkov, Tolstoy said, "That man has sacrificed everything for me. Not only did he give up his wealth and his position in society, but he has devoted all his energies to the publication of my works, he has been deported . . ."*

Thus, with Chertkov's devotion inspiring Tolstoy to gratitude and his gratitude, in turn, feeding Chertkov's demands, the more rights Chertkov claimed to Tolstoy's work, the more Tolstoy felt obliged to him. This readiness to see himself as someone's debtor expressed the old man's eternal tendency to self-accusation. He had felt guilty his whole life long: to his wife, because he could not live according to his ideal and give her the life she desired; to the peasants, because they were poor while he had everything he could ask for; to his readers, because he prcachcd virtue while living in vice; to his disciples, because they were sent into exile while he stayed on at Yasnaya Polyana.

And although the minor disciples did not question Chertkov's supremacy, the most important ones, such as Biryukov or Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy's English translator, criticized his tyrannical and scheming nature. "It was very painful to me," wrote Biryukov, "to sec how he [Chertkov] tyrannized Tolstoy and sometimes forced him to do things that were completely at odds with his ideas. Tolstoy, who was sincerely attached to Chertkov, visibly suffered from this subjugation, but resigned himself without a murmur bccause it served the principles most dear to him."² Maude commented: "I never knew anyone with such a capacity for enforcing his will on others. Everybody connected with him either became his instrument, quarreled with him or had to escape. . . . [But] discarding physical violence seemed to leave him the freer to employ mental coercion, and he was expert in its use."³ As Maurice Kues, the Swiss tutor, portrayed Chertkov: "Together with a profound and sincere faith, the kind that leads people to renounce the world for an ideal, he had all the essential attributes of a sectarian: the blind inflexibility in matters of doctrine, and the aridity, the stubbornness and crudeness, refusing to recognize any subtleties or shades, and the heartless indifference to human contingencies."

Everything vague, uncertain, profound, sensitive ancl tragic in the master corresponded, in the disciple, to narrow, restrictive conviction, a total barrenness of heart and a lack of tact that was all the more inexplicable in a man who had received such an elegant education. A believer in non-violence, he nevertheless considered that every means of imposing the ideas he served, short of actual physical force, was fair play. He would have sacrificed Tolstoy's peace of mind without a qualm to ensure the fame and posterity of the Tolstoyan cause. Instinctively, he knew that true apostles are a nuisance, because their acts may at any moment belie their words. Therefore, he thought, it was his duty to keep watch over the old man, filter all his rash remarks and writings, transform him into a statue, a public monument, and appoint himself custodian of it.

He spent his first days in Russia with Tolstoy; then, after a short trip back to England where he had business to clear up, he settled in the neighborhood of Yasnaya Polyana. Sasha sold him half of her property at Telyatinki, and on it, two miles from the Tolstoy house, he built a big, very ugly, two-story wooden villa, in which the rooms opened off a long corridor as in a hotel. The upper floor was set apart for the "collaborators," that is, those performing any form of work at the Chcrtkovs'—secretaries, gardeners or dishwashers. These collaborators, of whom there were a score, all practicing Tolstoyans, disdained creature comforts and cleanliness and slept in their coats on straw pallets on the floor. Downstairs, however, Chertkov and his wife, his mother and his son Dima occupied more decently furnished rooms. When the disciple showed his old master around the new residence, Tolstoy leaned over to his daughter Sasha and murmured: "It pains me. ... It pains me to see Chertkov build such a house, too big and too handsome, and spend so much money on it!"

At that time Chertkov began an enormous anthology': The Collected Thoughts of L. N. Tolstoy. Hunting through Tolstoy's fiction and philosophy, letters and private diaries, for the best phrases to define and illustrate his doctrinc, he hired a team of avant-garde intellectuals and placed them under the supervision of the philosopher F. A. Strakhov.® This little band spent the whole of every day going through the patriarch's works with a fine-tooth comb to cull out the main ideas. The day's sittings were then examined by Chertkov, who dccidcd what to accept and reject. Sometimes he fulminated against a suspect passage, accusing Tolstoy of some anti-Tolstoyan heresy and demanding the deletion of a line or the replacement of one word by another, and Tolstoy generally consented to his inquisitor's dictates.

At noon, all the inhabitants at Telyatinki, among whom there were also some ordinary laborers, farm hands and shepherds, gathered around the big rcfectory tabic. Forty famished people held out their bowls to the steaming cauldrons. In theory, this Tolstoyan colony was

• No relation to Tolstoy's friend, the critic N. N. Strakhov, who died in 1896.

governed by the sacred laws of equality, mutual assistance and love. But Sasha Tolstoy, who often dropped in for a neighborly call, observed that the "brothers" were divided into three classcs, like passengers 011 a train. At the top of the table sat Chertkov and his family; in the middle were the Collected Thoughts team—secretaries and typists; and at the far end, the laborers and peasants and laundresses and night watchmen. Those in third class, who were given nothing but "porridge in oil," envied those in the first class who fed on pork chops, stew and preserves. Strange remarks were heard among the humble:

"Look at Alyosha, he's trying to get into firstl"

"What about you, have you finished ogling the cutlets?"

Chertkov's mother, an aristocrat accustomcd to associating with the court, lived by herself at Tclyatinki, took tea in her room and demanded starched white cloths, silver tableware and porcelain cups; and Chertkov himself always had an air of elcgance about him, in spite of his coarse canvas blouse and heavy shoes. His only son, Dima, on the other hand, was revoltingly filthy and undistinguished; his Tolstoyism was confincd to refusing to study and wash. Covered with vermin, he scratched himself as he talked and was always sprawling on the sofas in his muddy boots. To his father's mild remonstrances he retorted that in order to become one with the muzhiks it was neccssary "to live simply in everything."

Chertkov usually arrived at Yasnaya Polyana in the morning, while Tolstoy was working. It was a rule that no one could enter his study during his hours of creative activity without an invitation from the master; but this injunction, which was all very well for the hoi polloi, could not, of course, apply to the great disciple. He entered, peered over the old man's shoulder, read what he was writing, approved, criticized:

"It would be better to changc that passage."

"Ah, you think so?"⁴ murmured Tolstoy. And, irritated and uncomfortable, he gave in once again.

Chertkov often brought a photographer with him, who interrupted the writer to take photos for the Tolstoyan propaganda campaign. Sonya, who adored photography, began by rebuking her husband for allowing her fewer "shots" than the outsider. But she soon had more serious cause for complaint. She quickly came to realize that by taking root at the source, Chertkov was intercepting everything that flowed from Tolstoy's pen. Not only did he see Lyovochka's articles before anybody else, he even appropriated the manuscripts. He had access to the diary day and night. Sonya was revolted and frightened by this intimacy. She felt that her rights were being usurped and her loyalty

betrayed. In the past, she had been able to tell herself that in spite of their quarrels and misunderstandings, her husband was attached to her by his desire. But now she was a withered woman of sixty-four with badly deranged nerves, and he an octogenarian no longer tormented by sexual desire. When he looked at her, all he saw were her wrinkles. Ilis respect for her as the mother of his children must also have vanished, after the "Tanayev affair." The pianist had returned to Yasnaya Polyana in February 1908. He had played the Songs Without Words for the countess; she wept. What had Lyovochka thought then? She was sure he had told all to his beloved confidant. Chertkov was probably well aware that she was 110 longer either bedfellow or advisor to her husband, and he was exploiting her past mistakes to consolidate his own domination. But she was not going to give up without a fight. She had not lived forty-six years of her life with a genius, sharing his work, keeping his house, copying his manuscripts, giving him children, nursing him and loving him, to step aside now for some mere valet of Tolstoyism. Her life was meaningless unless she could remain the admirable and irreplaceable consort of the great man to the end. It was her very ration d'etre she was defending against Chertkov. But Chertkov was also defending his raison d'etre against her: he, too, considered that his sacrifice and his efforts had earned him the exclusive right to represent Tolstoy in the eyes of posterity. For him, too, nothing else mattered except his place at the master's right hand. Certain he understood the essence of the doctrine better than anyone else, he wanted to preserve it from all corrupting influences. To do that, he thought, the author must be kept from backsliding under his wife's influence, now that he had grown old and feeble.

In this struggle for supremacy, the two antagonists began recruiting allies. Sonya would have liked to see all her children lined up behind her. But Sergey and Tanya maintained a judicious neutrality and Sasha was beyond recall; and although Ilya, Andrcy, Michael and Leo sided with their mother, they most often did so by letter, for they seldom came to Yasnaya Polyana. On his side, Chertkov had the pianist Gol- denweiser, Varvara Feokritova, who was helping with the copy-work, Dr. Dushan Makovitsky, and the Tolstoyan secretaries. Last and most important, he won Sasha's confidence.

When lie left Russia, she was a mere child of thirteen to whom he attached scant importance. Now she was a young woman of twenty- three, solidly built, with a heavy chest, rough gestures and a boyish appearance, who loved horses and dogs. Her broad face was illuminated by an unflinching, loyal gaze. She had a violent temper, was incapable of deception and was equally extreme in her loves and her hates. Since

she adored her father she might, like Sonya, have resented Chertkov's intrusion in the house, and in fact his high-handed ways had offended her at first. But since the fight had to be waged two against one, she preferred to join forces with Chertkov against her mother rather than with her mother against Chertkov. For one thing, her mother had never liked her. There was more than a lack of spiritual rapport between them; there was positive physical incompatibility. As soon as they were in the same room they infuriated each other, provoked each other in an electrically charged atmosphere. The servants had told die girl that when Vanichka died the grief-maddened countcss had moaned, "Why him? Why not Sasha?" and Sasha never forgot that fatal sentcncc. Later, she had seen her mother making a fool of herself over Tanayev and humiliating the admirable man whose reputation ought to have been dearer than life to her. She had witnessed heartrending quarrels between her parents. A hundred times, she thought that if she had been in Sonya's place, she would have known how to make Tolstoy happy. Perhaps she even imagined herself as his wife. Certainly, her father's age, which she could not help observing every day, removed any tracc of ambiguity from her fantasy. But her passionate wish to care for him, serve him and protect him—he, so weary and good!—nonetheless proceeded from an unconfcssed desire to supplant the unworthy partner by his side. She showed no interest in young men. She had no wish to marry. Ilcr sole desire was to becomc ever more closely united with the justice-losing patriarch whom she adored without reservation—his ideas, his white hair, his smell, his moments of weakness and his fame. She took his side at every opportunity. Her brother-in-law Obolcnsky wrote, "She used all her will and tenacity, and her growing influence over her father, to inflame their hostility [between Tolstoy and Sonya]."⁵

Tolstoy tried to ignore this struggle for possession of him. To preserve his own peace of mind he did everything to avoid sccnes with both Sonya and Chertkov. He wanted to devote the little life he had left to meditation. His country's future disturbed him: "We arc on the verge of a gigantic upheaval, in which the Duma will play absolutely no part," he said. "There arc only two weapons to use against the Russian government: bombs or love."

In January 1909, Parthenios, bishop of Tula, came to call on him and made another vain attempt to woo him back to Orthodoxy. As the frustrated prelate was about to depart, Sonya drew him aside and asked whether it was tTue that the Church would refuse her husband a religious burial. Parthenios uncomfortably answered that he would have to obey the instructions of the Holy Synod, but added, with a benevo-

lent smile, "Nevertheless, countess, do send word to me in case I.eo Nikolayevich should fall seriously ill."

When his wife informed him of the bishop's helpful attitude, Tolstoy immediately imagined that there was a plot between her and the clergy, became alarmed and wrote in his diary, on January 22, 1909, "I hope they are not going to invent some scheme to make people believe that I 'repented' before I died! For this reason, I declare, and I repeat, that I could no more return to the Church and take communion on my deathbed than I could use profanity or look at obscene pictures on my deathbed; consequently any reference to my repentance and communion before death would be untrue."

He felt that his strength was failing, which made him worry even more; he had a second attack of phlebitis in March. Was this the end? I Ie honestly believed it was. But his temperature dropped again a week later and he immediately began to curse his wretched body, whose use he was nevertheless grateful to regain. Lying between cool sheets in his l>cd, he felt himself powerless, in spite of his eighty years, to prevent a return of sexual desire, and the thought horrified him. On March 15 he was preparing to breathe his last, and on March 16 he wrote in his diary:

"It would be a hundred times easier to struggle against physical desire if carnal relations and the feelings that lead to them were not made to look poetical; if marriage were not presented as an admirable institution that makes people happy, whereas in at least nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of ten thousand, if not in all, it ruins their entire lives; if, from childhood to adulthood, people were persuaded that the sexual act (merely imagining a loved person in that posture is enough I) is an ignoble and bestial one that is meaningless unless it is uppermost in the minds of both partners that they are going to assume the heavy and complex responsibility of bearing a child and raising it to the best of their ability as a result of their intercourse."

Copying over these lines, Sasha must have been relieved to have no love in life but her father.

When the mild weather came he began to feel quite well again. On March 31 he was able to shufile through the snow-covered garden, lie was thinking of his sins, and particularly the most glaring of all, personified by Timothy, the natural child he had had by the peasant woman Axinya. In later years, she had married a muzhik, Ermil, but that had done nothing to alleviate Tolstoy's guilt. Timothy was a walking reproach, grooming the horses, climbing up onto the driver's seat, taking the reins: "Where am I to drive you, master?" And what about the legitimate children, who knew all? What must they think of

their father? A fornicator, a swine, a devil! "I looked at my bare feet," he wrote, "and I remembered Axinya. She is still alive. They say that Timothy is my son, and I have never even asked his pardon, I have not repented, I am not repenting every hour of the day, and I set myself up to criticize others!"®

His convalescence was saddened by the departure of Chertkov, who was expelled from the government of Tula for "subversive activities." Notified of the dccrce on March 6, the disciple managed to postpone his removal until the end of the month. He went to live with one of his aunts, at Krekshino, near Moscow. Sonya, secretly rejoicing to be rid of her rival, protested loudly against the arbitrary decision to punish him, and the gullible Tolstoy was touched by his wife's generous impulses. "Ah, if only she could rise above herself!" he wrote. But some of his friends were wondering whether Chertkov's eviction might not have been prompted by the very person who was now taking his defense. She sent a circular letter to Russian and foreign newspapers:

"A fresh act of violence has been committed in our neiglilx)rhood, and has stunned the entire population of the region. . . . Chertkov's crime is plain: it is his friendship for Tolstoy, and the fervor with which he serves his ideas. And what ideas? That it is wrong to kill, that we should love everyone, that it is wrong to oppose evil by violence, that the bloodshed of the revolution must be stopped, etc. Chertkov's expulsion and the punishment inflicted on all who dare to read and cncouragc others to read Tolstoy's books are expressions of petty resentment toward an old man, whose creations have contributed to the glory of Russia. Everyone knows how dearly Leo Nikolaycvich loves Chertkov. ... I have carefully observed Chertkov's life and teachings and although I do not share the majority of his views or those of Tolstoy, particularly as regards the denial of the Church, I can affirm that the object of all Chertkov's efforts has been to communicate the love of one's fellow man and the need for moral betterment to all. More than once he has dissuaded young peasants from revolution and other acts of violence."

Neither Sonya's expostulations nor the efforts of Chertkov's influential friends succeeded in having the decision against him repealed. "I miss Chertkov," Tolstoy sorrowfully noted in his diary on April 15, 1909. He began to languish, like an abandoned wife. Sonya worried about him. She had grown so nervous that she could not sit still for more than ten minutes, or listen to a conversation or conccntratc on a book. Life seemed a tissue of insoluble problems, and if she were to stand idle for one minute, sickness and poverty would immediately descend upon the family. To occupy her mind, she developed photo-

graphs. Every window ledge was cluttered with basins full of chemicals. She ran from one to the other, her fingers yellow with acid stains, muttering:

"Of course, Lyovochka has an easy life. He doesn't care about anything. He just goes peacefully on his way."

Silent, patient, his musclcs taut, Tolstoy waited out the storm. Watching his wife flutter about the house, he was torn between pity and anger. He had so much to say to her! But if he opened his mouth she would contradict him, and their conversation would end in a fight. To get some of the weight off his chest and maintain his self-possession, he resorted to a system of posthumous letters. "You will receive this letter after I have ceased to be," he wrote to Sonya on May 13, 1909. "Pardon me for all the wrong I have done you throughout our long life together, especially in the early days. I have nothing to forgive you. You have been as your mother made you, a good and faithful wife, and an excellent, admirable mother. But because you were the way your mother made you, and remained that way and did not want to changc, because you refused to try to improve yourself, to move ahead toward greater goodness and truth, because you clung with a kind of obstinacy to everything that was worst and most contrary to what I considered desirable, you did a great deal of harm to others and to yourself, you lowered yourself more and more until you reached the lamentable state you arc in now." This letter did not get beyond the state of a rough draft.

In June, Tolstoy went to Kochety to visit his son-in-law Sukhotin, escorted by Sonya, Dr. Makovitsky, Gusev and a servant. At the station, a coach was waiting to drive them to the estate. Along the road, Tolstoy noticcd that the peasants took their caps off as they passed. "In their placc," he said, leaning toward Gusev, "I would spit at the sight of these horses and these huge estates, while they don't even have a post to prop up their collapsing shanty." After a tour of the countryside he wrote in his diary, "A painful sensation of poverty, no, not poverty, of debasement, of animal apathy in the people. The revolutionaries' cruclty and madness are excusable. . . . Conversation in French and tennis, and alongside them starving slaves in tatters, limp from overwork. I cannot bear it, I feel like running away."

But he did not run away, and he even found life so pleasant in his daughter's house, where he was petted and spoiled and respected, that he let Sonya return to Yasnaya Polyana alone. But what Tanya had not told her mother was that Chertkov, forbidden to live in the government of Tula, was looking for a house along the frontier of the government of Orel, near Kochety. "My plans are indefinite," Tolstoy wrote to

Sonya on June 28, "because I don't know yet whether I shall be able to meet Chertkov, which I desire as intensely as he does himself, poor man!" At last, the beloved disciple located an isba for rent in the village of Suvorovo, two miles from Kochety. 'lhe moment Tolstoy heard the news, he climbed 011 his horse ancl rode through the woods with pounding heart, straight to the little house in which the man of his life was awaiting him. "Radiant meeting," he was to record in his diary. He went to Suvorovo several times, always in the same state of exaltation. "I shall put off my departure," he said. Sonya, however, was beginning to complain and reluctantly he set out for Yasnaya Polyana on July 3, 1909.

The homecoming was stormy. Sonya began by upbraiding Lyovochka for seeing Chertkov behind her back. Then she rebuked him for deciding to attend the World Peace Congress in Stockholm.

"I must use my position to speak up and say what no one else, perhaps, would dare to say," he explained to his wife.

She replied that at his age he had no business going so far away. She was probably right to fear the fatigues of the journey, the official receptions and lectures, but, as always, she had no diplomacy. At the slightest sign of disagreement she began to threaten, whine and sob. Sonya was suffering from neuralgia in her shoulder ancl claimed that he was to blame because he was mentally torturing her.

"Promise me you won't go. What does it cost you to promise?" she wailed.

"I cannot give it up, Sonya! It's my duty to go," lie said.

"Ow, ow! You're trying to kill mel You are a cruel man, you have no pity!"⁷

"If she could only know, realize," he wrote on July 12, "how she alone is poisoning the last hours, days, months of my life!"

Sasha encouraged him to stand fast, but perhaps she only did so in order to contradict her mother; if Sonya had been urging him to attend the World Peace Congress, his daughter might well have been indignantly opposed to the idea. lie 110 longer knew what to think or whom to follow, and nevertheless, obeying the dictates of his conscicncc, he prepared his address to the Stockholm Congress on the incompatibility between the Christian spirit and military service.

The conflict over the trip had not yet died down when another arose, more complex and more serious. Chertkov had allowed Three Deaths and Childhood to be published without payment of royalties, ancl as both had been written before 1881, they were covered by the agreement between Sonya and her husband under which she retained the copyright. At the instigation of her sons Ilya and Andrey, who were

hard up just then, she talked of suing the overenterprising publishers. But her nephew Ivan Deniscnko, who was a magistrate, advised her that she could not be sure of winning the case, and Tolstoy threatened to revoke his power of attorney if she went to court. In a white fury Sonya screamed at him:

"You don't care whether your family is driven out to beg! You want to give all your rights to Chertkov and let your grandchildren starve to death!"⁸

One scene followed another, each more violent and absurd than the last. "They came to wake me up," Tolstoy wrote on July 21. "Sonya had not slept all night. I went to her. It was quite insane. She claimed that Dushan [Makovitsky] had poisoned her, etc. I am exhausted, I can't take any more, I feel absolutely sick. I sec that it is impossible for me to preserve a reasonable and affectionate attitude, utterly impossible. ... I have given serious thought to going away. All right; show your Christian spirit, it's now or never. I have a terrible desire to run away. I doubt that my prcscncc here is of any use at all. A costly sacrifice, that serves no earthly purpose to anyone. Help me, my God, guide me! All I want is to do thy will, not mine."

Now Sonya was demanding, not only that he stay away from the Congress, but also that he make her the sole heir to all his work, whether written before or after 1881. As he would not yield on either point, she lost all self-control and pretended to poison herself with morphine. He tore the flask out of her hand and threw it down the stairway, while she burst out sobbing. Back in his room he forced himself to think calmly, and finally decided to decline the invitation to Sweden. "I went to tell her," lie wrote. "She is pitiful; I feel truly sorry for her. But how instructive. All I had to do was a little work on myself. Ilie moment I had made this effort to master myself, everything was straightened out.""

Sonya calmcd down a little, Sasha reproved her father for capitulating, and Tolstoy saw that the truce would be short-lived. While Dr. Makovitsky was massaging his leg, he said, "I speak to you as to a close friend. I should like to leave home and go somewhere, abroad. How can I manage a passport? No one must know about it, at least for a month." Dr. Makovitsky told him that it was possible to arrange travel on those conditions, but that he had heard the countcss say that she now intended to go to Stockholm with her husband. The old man frowned and growled that that was mere noise: "I do not want to be dependent upon a hysterical creature," he concluded. "Her illness is mental, not physical, it is based on egoism."¹⁰

Fortunately, the arrival of Lyovochka's sister Marya Tolstoy on July

29 succeeded in quieting Sonya, for she loved and respected the pious old woman, a nun in the convent of Shamardino. More guests came, as in other years, to spend a few days or weeks at Yasnaya Polyana. Despite his fatigue and ill health, Tolstoy took pleasure in discussing art with the painters Botkin and Parkhomenko (the latter was doing a portrait of him), land reform with the Assembly representatives Tenishev and Maklakov, and mathematics and geometry with the Russian physicist Tsinger. One evening in August he was playing chess with Goldcnwciscr when a police commissioner and his men arrived at the house. By order of the minister of the interior, he had come to arrest Gusev, the author's secretary. White with anger, Tolstoy demanded to see the warrant. It was presented: Gusev was ordered into exile for two years, to Cherdyn in the government of Perm, for "revolutionary propaganda and circulation of forbidden books." While the dogs barked at the police wagon, the inhabitants of Yasnaya Polyana gathered around the unfortunate young man. Tolstoy helped him to pack his bag and Sasha slipped a copy of War and Peace into it, which the fervent Tol- stoyan still had not read. Sister Marya, the nun, did not understand what was going on, shook her old head under her tall black headdress and spat in the direction of the commissioner:

"Pah! Pah! Why do they arrest such a good man?"

After the police had cscortcd their prisoner away, Tolstoy swallowed his tears and shut himself up in his study. The next day, August 5, he wrote in his diary, "Yesterday the bandits came for Gusev and took him away. The parting was perfect, both his attitude toward us and that of everyone else toward him. Yes, it was all perfect. Today I wrote a protest about it."

This protest was published in a great many newspapers, and the minister of the interior instructed the high commissioner of police to convey his dissatisfaction to the governor of Tula at the way in which his subordinates had handled the case: "Instead of arresting Gusev at the police station, where you might easily have summoned him, the police decided to enter Count L. Tolstoy's property and allowed the accused only one hour in which to prepare for his departure. This behavior on the part of the local authorities—utterly unjustified by the circumstances—has merely fanned the flames of Count L. Tolstoy's notoriety (which was, of course, to be exacted) and provoked a scries of emotional articles in the press designed to cast the said Count Tolstoy in the role of a victim of arbitrary government action."

After Gusev's arrest, Tolstoy's desire to see Chertkov grew more intense. Sonya held out for a while, but finally relented and made prepa-

rations herself for her husband's departure for Krekshino,! where the exiled disciple was still living. On September 3, 1909, Tolstoy set out, with Sasha, Dr. Makovitsky and Ivan Sidorkov, a servant, at his side. Such was the patriarch's fame that Pathd-News had applied for permission to film him leaving Yasnaya Polyana. Despite his refusal, reporters and photographers had hidden in the bushes. A camera had been set up on the station platform and the cameraman was cranking away. Furious, the old man stomped past the lens with his head hunched between his shoulders.

Upon reaching Moscow he had to withstand a fresh onslaught of journalists. The travelers stayed in the old family home on Khamov- nichcsky Street, which Sasha found ugly, dilapidated and gloomy in comparison with the palace of her memory. Her brother Sergey and sister-in-law Marya now lived in it. The next day Tolstoy wanted to look at the city he had not seen for eight years. "He was amazed at the tall houses, trolley's and traffic," wrote Goldenweiser. "He was frightened by the immense human anthill, and every step brought fresh confirmation of his long-standing hatred of so-called civilization."

He did admit, however, that civilization had its good points, when he was taken to Zimmermann's Music Shop to hear Chopin played by Paderewski on the mechanical piano. "It's marvelousl A wonder!" he said. "How does it work?" He was still talking about it on the train to Krekshino. The day after he arrived at the Chertkovs', the mechanical piano joined him: a gift from Zimmermannl He did not have the strength to refuse it, and the instrument was installed in the big drawing room.

But people had not come all that way to hear recorded music. A brotherhood of the faithful had gathered about the Chertkov's' and was waiting for the sanctifying visit of the messiah. Peasants, country schoolteachers, neighbors . . . The first days were spent in philosophical or educational discussions. As always in the Chertkov household, masters and servants ate together at the same table, to the great discomfiture of Ivan Sidorkov, the manservant Tolstoy had brought with him.

Back at Yasnaya Polyana, Sonya was already sorry she had let her husband fly away to his tryst with his disciple. Nothing good could come of their meeting. Tolstoy had not been a week at Krekshino before she turned up herself, and was greeted with forced enthusiasm. She had twisted her ankle on the way and the pain made her particularly shrewish; nothing pleased her in this sordid phalanstery. She peered

t Krekshino was twenty-four miles from Moscow.

at her tablemates through her lorgnette and when her eyes came to rest on Sidorkov, the servant, the poor wretch tried to shrink into his bench, hoping to offer a smaller target for his mistress's displeasure. However, she controlled her ill-humor during the ensuing days and tried to fit herself into her hosts' way of life. She did not dream that Lyovochka, encouraged by his disciple and daughter, had just drawn up a will bequeathing everything he had written after January 1881 to the public and instructing that all his manuscripts be turned over to Chertkov, who alone would decide the terms of their publication.

Tolstoy would have preferred to go straight back to Yasnaya Polyana, but Sonya insisted on stopping off in Moscow. At the station, the old man was again terrified by the crush of journalists and photographers. But on the evening of his arrival he consented to go to a film showing in the Arbat district. It was his first experience of an event of this type and he marveled at the moving shapes on the screen. But the program was disappointing. "Views of places, a melodrama, and something comical at the end." Leaving the theater he said, "What a wonderful instrument this could be in the schools, for studying geography and the way people live. But it will be prostituted. Like everything else." The next day Sasha, accredited by him and by Chertkov, made a secret call on Muravyev, the lawyer, to submit the will drawn up at Krekshino. Muravyev read the paper through several times and shook his head:

"At first glance I would say this has absolutely no legal validity. I don't see how one can bequeath one's property to the public. I shall have to think about it and do some research into the law. Leave the paper with me, I will write to you."

News of Tolstoy's presence in Moscow had already got around; reporters and busybodics were telephoning constantly to ask what train he was leaving on. This surge of interest ancl concern flattered Sonya's vanity and worried her daughter.

On the morning of September 19, 1909, a large hired landau came to Khamovnichesky Street to pick up Tolstoy and the rest of the party and take them to the station. The author, Sonya, Sasha and Chertkov got into it. Sergey and his wife, Maklakov and other friends climbed into cabs behind them. Dr. Makovitsky was out of the country, so Sonya had found another doctor, named Bcrkcnhcim, to make the trip with her husband. A small crowd had gathered in the courtyard. There was even an old general standing in front of the porte-cochere. He re moved his cap and bowed low as the landau went by. Strangers were lined along the road. As the team moved forward, heads were bared. A murmur rose up to the old man, who had tears in his eyes.

When the coach reached the Kursk station, point of departure for the

Tula train, Sonya and Sasha exchanged alarmed glances. A crowd of several thousand was milling in the square. University students, high- school girls, factory workers, housewives, befeathered socialites, soldiers, townsmen in bowler hats. The horses shied at the dark sea in front of them, dotted with pink spots. A shout rose up:

"There he is! Glory to Tolstoy! Ilail the great warrior! Hurrah!*

The coach could not move. They had to dismount. Tolstoy gave his arm to his wife, who was limping. Chertkov, wearing a white panama hat, tried to clear a passage to the platform. Maklakov and a broad- shouldered policeman walked on either side of the author. Students were shouting:

"A chain! Make a chain!"

^rIhey seized each other by the hands. Buffeted on all sides, Tolstoy, pale and staring, his features tense, moved forward between two rows of green-striped blue caps. Young eyes were fixed upon him in blind devotion. Unknown mouths were yapping his name. He felt faint with joy and with the fear that the scene would end in a monstrous crush, as at Khodanka. At the entrance to the station the pressure became so great that the chain broke. Caught up in the mass, Tolstoy, Sonya and Sasha were tossed about like corks.

"In the name of heaven! Hold them back! Protcct him!" cried the girl.

"For the love of Leo Nikolayevich! I beg you! You're crushing him!" wailed Sonya.

The platform onto which the travelers erupted violently was even more tightly packed with people. They had climbed onto the wagon roofs and shinnied up the posts supporting the glass roof. Bouquets of flowers were passed from hand to hand. The police were utterly powerless to control the situation. However, thanks to their sergeant escort, who thrust out right and left with his elbows, Tolstoy and Sonya, clinging to each other, somehow managed to edge their way toward the train. The old man was bent and staggering, his lower jaw was trembling; he was summoning all his strength to hold out until the end.

At last everyone was inside the train, safe and sound. Tolstoy fell onto the scat and closed his eyes. Now that the danger was past, Sonya kept repeating, with shining eyes and scarlet cheeks:

"Like kings! They followed us like kings!"

Chertkov mopped his face and fanned himself with his hat.

The crowd outside was still shouting:

"Hurrah! Hurrah! Glory!"

On Chertkov's counsel, Tolstoy went to the window. The roar grew louder. Voices rang out:

"Silence! Silencc! lie's going to speak!"

"Thank you," Tolstoy said, in a steady voice. "I did not expect so great a joy. I am deeply stirred by this expression of sympathy. . . . Thank you."

"Thank you!" replied the crowd. "Hurrah! All hail to our good Leo Nikolayevich!"

Cameramen were filming the sccnc. The train began to move. Standing at the window, Tolstoy continued to wave at the crowd dwindling into the distance, its voice melting into the harsh grating of the wheels. He was surprised at the pleasure this ovation had given him, for he thought he had long since become immune to the temptation of pride. He sat down again, happy and weary. lie was given some oatmeal porridge to revive him.

Chertkov got off at Serpukhov; he was not allowed inside the government of Tula and so could go no farther. When the train started up again, Tolstoy lay down to rest and had a stroke. His pulse was so weak that the doctor seemed worried. When they reached Yasenki he opened his eyes and tried to speak, but his tongue was paralyzed and he could only utter disconnected words. He was carried to a coach that was waiting at the station. Throughout the trip home he stared into space, drawing circles with his fingers and muttering:

"Moses . . . Pygmalion . . . Moses, Moses, religion . . ."

Leaning against him, Sonya covered him with a carriage rug, rubbed his hands to keep them warm and prayed through her tears.¹¹

He was still delirious when the coach pulled up at the door of Yasnaya Polyana.

"Hot water bottles, wine, leeches, an icepack for his head," prescribed the doctor.

Then, with Sonya's help, he l>cgan to undress the patient. Seeing her husband half-naked, staring wildly with his mouth hanging open, Sonya thought the end had come. Then she remembered all the enemies around her. With Lyovochka gone, she would be stripped, trampled underfoot. They would use the dead man's diaries to make her out a shrew. And the person who would work hardest to ruin her would surely be her youngest daughter, who had been bewitched by that Chertkov! Quick, quick, she must prevent them from carrying out their dirty plot. Beside herself with fatigue and anxiety, Sonya paced back and forth around the bed, casting hunted glances on all sides.

"Lyovochka! Lyovochka!" she burst out "Where are the keys?"

"I don't understand. Why?" stammered the old man.

"The keys, the keys to the box you keep your manuscripts in."

"Maman, leave him alone, for pity's sake," said Sasha. "Don't force him to try to remember things."

"But I have to have those keys," Sonya went on. "What if he died and they stole the manuscripts! . . ."

"No one is going to steal them. Leave him alone."¹²

The doctor gave him a hot enema. Then he administered an injection. Sonya moaned:

"Now the end has come!"

But later in the night, Tolstoy regained consciousness, gave a weary smile and dropped off to sleep. The next morning he wrote in his diary: "Trip. Almost crushed to death by huge crowd. Chertkov saved me. I was afraid for Sonya and Sasha. . . . Readied Yascnki. I remember getting into a coach but what happened after that, until 10 a.m. on September 20, I have no recollection. They tell me I began to talk nonsense, then I lost consciousness. How easy and nice it would be to die like that!"¹³

The next day he went horseback-riding. And a few days later he returned to his articles and correspondence. He had just received a letter from an unknown Hindu, calling him the "Titan of Russia" and signing himself "a humble follower of your doctrine." The Hindu's name was Mahatma Gandhi. Tolstoy replied, asking him to convey his expression of fellow-feeling to his "beloved brothers, the Indian workers of the Transvaal."

Back in Moscow, Chertkov was not standing idle. At his behest, the lawyer Muravyev was drafting a new will. He drew up several versions, all legally valid, and Strakhov agreed to take them to Yasnaya Polyana and submit them to Tolstoy for approval. The basic idea in all was the same: the copyrights had to be left to some specific person, so that this person, designated by name, could, by his refusal of the inheritance, cause the signer's works to revert to the public domain. The conspirators chose a day when they thought Sonya would be in Moscow, but Strakhov found himself face to face with her in the train taking him to Yasenki. Sonya stared at him in icy mistrust, and he had difficulty in hiding his discomfort. They reached Yasnaya Polyana together. Taking Tolstoy aside, Strakhov showed him the papers drawn up by the lawyer. But in the meantime, the old man had changed his mind. lie wondered whether it would not be better to abandon the idea of a will. "This thing is preying 011 my mind," he told his caller. "It is not necessary to adopt any special measures for the propagation of my work. Take Christ as an example—strange as it may seem that I should pretend to compare myself with him—lie did not worry about people appropriating his ideas for themselves, he boldly offered them to all and he mounted the cross for them. And his ideas were not lost. Besides, no word ever disappears without leaving a trace, if it expresses some truth and the man who spoke it had faith in its truth."

Then Strakhov explained that if he did not conform to the legal regulations governing inheritance, and if he did not provide otherwise, all his copyrights would be inherited by his family. What a storm that would arouse among the Tolstoyans, to hear that after condemning all property, their master had not had the courage to deprive his wife and children of the incomc from a work which, by its very csscnce, was destined to become public property. Shaken by this argument, Tolstoy withdrew to think it over. After a few hours, he announced to Strakhov that he had reached his decision. Trusting the integrity of his daughter Sasha, he would bequeath his copyrights to her, on condition that she turn them over at once "to the people." This decision would apply- not only to works written after 1881, but also to those published prior to that date.

When these arrangements were explained to Sasha, she protested that she was unworthy, and that her mother, sister and brother would hate her for depriving them of the inheritance. But she yielded to her father's urging. At heart, she was proud to be the one chosen to carry out this great mission. The prospect of seeing her mother choking with jealousy was compensation enough for all the storms ahead. Tolstoy- made her promise that after his death she would use the money from the sale of his posthumous works to repurchase the land at Yasnaya Polyana from Sonya and give it to the muzhiks. Strakhov left, satisfied.

On November 1 he came back with Goldenwciser and the new text, whereby Alexandra Lvovna Tolstoy (Sasha) became the sole heiress to her father's copyrights. The two men arrived during the night. Everyone in the house was asleep except Tolstoy. He received Chertkov's emissaries in his bedroom, read the document over and copied it out in their presence. But he kept starting up at every moment, listening. Sonya was a light sleeper. Wasn't she suddenly going to burst through the door in her nightgown with a lamp in her hand and unmask the conspirators? Several times he went to make sure no one was hiding behind the door. In spite of the reassurances of Goldenvveiser and Strakhov, he felt he was doing something wrong. After he signed the paper, the two men witnessed it and Strakhov put it in his portfolio to take back to Moscow.

The next day, Sonya, suspecting nothing, behaved very cordially to the two guests. Strakhov had pangs of remorse; but he consoled himself with the thought that the night before he had, in his own words, successfully completed an undertaking destined to have historic consequences.

In January 1910, young Dorik Sukhotin—Tanya's step-son, who was staying at Yasnaya Polyana—came down with measles, and Sasha, who often went to see him in his bedroom next to the "Remington room," caught them from him. But her case was complicated by double pneumonia. She began to cough blood. Tolstoy spent anguished hours by her side. When she asked for a drink, he held out the glass in his trembling old hand. "The water spilled out and ran down my chin," she wrote. "I covered his dear hand with kisses. He sobbed and took hold of my long hand that had grown so thin. I felt the touch of his beard and my hand was moist."

In March she was able to get out of bed. But the doctors, fearing consumption, advised her to convalesce in the Crimea. Two months, they said, should bring back her strength. She was terrified at tbe thought of being away from her father for so long: "What if I were never to see him again?" They insisted. It was decided that her friend Varvara Fcokritova would go with her. On April 13, the day of departure, Tolstoy wept. "I am sad, I don't know what to do with myself," he wrote in his diary the next day. "Sasha has gone. I love her, I miss her, not for the work she does but because of her soul. . . . The tears came to my eyes, out of weakness. In the night, a physical oppression that affected my mind, too. ... I must not write any more. I think I have done all I can in that field. And yet, I want to write, I want terribly to write. ... It is midnight. Going to bed. Still in a bad frame of mind. Look out! Leo Nikolayevich, hang on!"

He soon found that with his daughter gone, the atmosphere of Yasnaya Polyana became more bearable. Sasha's absence and Chertkov's enforced removal restored Sonya to a semblance of balance. She still complained of her health (migraine, nervous fatigue, fear of losing her sight), kept producing shirts and hats which no one needed, wailed that her sons were spending too much of her money, wore herself out preparing an edition of her husband's Complete Works in twenty-eight volumes, wrote a story of her life and predicted that the entire family would end in the poorhouse; but as long as her agitation and lamentations remained within these familiar limits, Tolstoy did not suffer from them. Perhaps he would even have felt lost in more peaceful surroundings. He corresponded regularly with Sasha, told her everything he did and assured her of his affection.

"You arc so near to my heart, dear Sasha, that I cannot help writing to you every day." (April 24, 1910.) "No letter from you today, my dear friend Sasha, but I want to write to you anyway." (April 25.)

"How are you spending your time? I would like to think that you are striving for spiritual improvement there, too. That is more important than anything else. Even though you're young, you can do it, and you must!" (End of April.)

As in every other year, the advent of the warm weather brought a flood of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy wore himself out seeing them. Sometimes his old sense of social injustice welled up and he rushed to his study, seized his diary and wrote: "No dinner. Aching pain caused by a sense of the shameful life I live surrounded by people who work and slave and only just manage to avoid dying of cold and hunger, they and their families. Yesterday, fifteen people gorging themselves on pancakes, and five or six fathers and mothers slaving away, breaking their necks to get all that swill ready and on the table. . . . Also yesterday, riding past some stonecutters, I suffered the tonnents of a soldier running the gauntlet."¹⁴ Almost every day he found some pretext for being upset or miserable. One time it was a young guest in schoolboy uniform who confessed that he was a spy paid by the police to denounce terrorists; another time it was a real revolutionary, come to reproach him for not "fighting with bombs"; another time it was a Tolstoyan accusing him of living on his family like a parasitic Croesus; another time it was two Japanese who, thinking it would make him happy, told him how much they admired the Christian civilization. One evening the Japanese accompanied him to the village, where he and his friends were going to show the peasants one of the wonders of the modern world, a phonograph. Men, women and children came out of their isbas and assembled on the green. From the box the joyful sounds of a balalaika orchestra issued forth. The muzhiks looked at each other in amazement. Then, urged on by the master, they began to dance a hopak. The Japanese were in ecstasy. Soon after they left, Chertkov's son and the writer Sergeycnko arrived. Rejoicing to see these two emissaries, reminders of his best friend, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "I felt a breath of Chertkov pass. It is very pleasant. Going to bed."¹⁵

In spite of this steady stream of visitors, he worked hard. A story, The Khodanka, articles, the introduction to The Ways of Life, hundreds of letters . . .He was corresponding with Bernard Shaw, whose plays he considered "crude and untrue"; with Gandhi, whom he deeply admired, "except for his Hindu patriotism, which spoils everything"; with strangers, who criticized him or asked him for advice. To replace Gusev as his secretary, Chertkov had recommended Valentin Fyodoro- vich Bulgakov, a sensitive, cultivated young man whom the master liked for his integrity and gentle manner. Why, lie even showed sympathy for Sonya's complaints! "They" had told him she was selfish, devious and

domineering, but he found her simple and understanding. Ilis worship of Tolstoy did not prevent him from viewing the protagonists in the drama impartially. Of course, he, too, kept a diary. Before his departure for Yasnaya Polyana, Sergeyenko had supplied him with specially made notebooks and carbon paper to place between the pages. He was to write his daily notes in invisible ink, tear off the copy along the dotted line and send it to Krekshino; by this means, Chertkov hoped to be informed of Tolstoy's every word and deed by a reliable witness. However, Bulgakov soon lost patience with this form of amusement, which was altogether too much like espionage; he continued to keep his diary, but stopped sending secret reports to his "chicfs."

He liked Yasnaya Polyana, he found it "an aristocratic place." Every morning, when he saw Tolstoy in his rough white linen blouse, with his hands stuck through his belt, his broad white beard and keen eyes, he experienced a feeling of religious joy and awe. The master often took him along on his walks, and questioned him, eager to learn the opinions of a boy of twenty-four on the problems that were tormenting him. Although he despised "novelty" and "progress," the old man marveled at the new technical inventions. Within a few months he had been introduced to the phonograph, the mechanical piano and the cinema. On a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, the author Leonid Andreyev spoke of the future of the latter device and Tolstoy said he would certainly write a scenario for a film. At dinner the following day, he returned to the subject, and said he had been thinking about it all night:

"Just imagine, with this technique one could reach huge masses of people, all the peoples of the earth! . . . One could write four, five, ten, fifteen films."¹⁶

A few days later he went out to the Kiev road to watch the Moscow- Orel automobile race. He had never seen these diabolical contraptions before, rumbling, coughing, spitting, shrouded in smoke and dust. The drivers, wearing their sporty caps and huge goggles, recognized him and chccrcd. One of them stopped to let Tolstoy peer into the motor; he shook his head and wished the driver good luck.

"I suppose," he later said to Bulgakov, "I will not live to see airplanes. But those fellows [pointing to the village children] will ccrtainly fly. Personally, I would rather see them till the soil or wash clothes." And that same evening, he anxiously confided to Dr. Makovitsky: "Automobiles, in our Russian world! There are people who have no shoes, and here are automobiles costing twelve thousand rubles."¹⁷

The next day he was to leave for his daughter Tanya's home at Kochety, with Bulgakov and Dr. Makovitsky. Sonya, who was not going with them, helped him to pack. At the station a cameraman was grinding feverishly away. Although the party had bought third-class tickets, they had to travel in second class bccausc all the third-class compartments were full. Tolstoy worried over this irregularity and mistakenly supposed that it was another plot of Sonya's, to spare him added fatigue.

"It's illegal, illegal," he repeated irritably.

He protested so vociferously that one of the conductors finally found him a seat in a third-class car. Once he was settled on the hard bench, he calmed down and began to stare out into the immensity of the landscape. Sitting opposite him, Bulgakov observed him with love. "His head and the expression of his face and eyes and lips were strange and wonderful!" he wrote. "The depth of his soul shone out of his features. It was not his wicker traveling hamper, nor that third-class compartment that was the right setting for him—it was the whole vast pale blue sky which this great man sat staring out at unwaveringly."¹⁸

3. Last Will and Testament

The first few days at Koehety were sheer delight. For Tolstoy, far from Sonya, nature was beautiful, people were kind and his cares light as air. Ilis letters to Sasha, still convalescing on the shores of the Black Sea, were all variations on a new theme: the joy of living. "I walk in the park, the nightingales arc singing all around me, the lilies of the valley are so lovely that I cannot refrain from picking some and my joyful soul is filled with good feelings, each better than the last."

After this burst of light-hcartcdncss, however, his old remorse came back to him: "Once again I am painfully oppressed by the luxury and idleness of the rich," he wrote. "Everybody is working, but not I. Painful, painful . . And he would run to write a letter to Sasha: "I feci an increasing need to describe all the folly and ignominy of our lives of luxury and brutality, surrounded by starving, half-naked people being eaten alive by vermin, living in chickcn coops."²

He was suspicious of the very kindness some masters showed toward their servants or peasants. It was merely a disguised form of domination, worse than outright despotism. The charms of Koehety were beginning to pall when—giving new life to everything—Chertkov arrived. The two men embraced tearfully. For eight days they engaged in a sweeping exchange of confidences, punctuated by the discreet click of camera shutters. Some of the master's photos were taken by Chertkov himself, others by a photographer he had chosen. They parted on May 20, promising to meet again soon.

A week after his return to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy had the joy of welcoming Sasha back from the Crimea, completely cured, hale and hearty, with her hair cropped short like a boy's (her head had been shaved during her illness), and her faithful Varvara Fcokritova by her side. At the sight of these two minions of Chertkov, Sonya's anxiety

welled up again. While Saslia's big manly hands were moving over the keyboard of the Remington, her mother prowled about the house, scolding the servants and feeling an outcast in her own home. She announced to one and all that she was exhausted, that nobody ever gave a thought to her, that the management of the estate was too much for a woman of sixty-six. "Who's forcing you to do it?" said Tolstoy. He recommended a trip, to take her mind off her troubles. "You're driving me away!" she cried. "You're trying to get rid of me!" And she fled, uttering dire imprecations. People were sent after her, on foot and horseback. They found her some distance from the house, sitting at the bottom of a ditch. She came back in a dogcart, relaxed and full of forgiveness.

A second incident followed immediately upon the first, this time causcd by the young Circassian guard, Akhmet, whom Sonya had hired some months before to guard the estate in place of the police agents furnished by the governor until 1909. Akhmet cut an imposing figure in his black tunic decorated with cartridge belts, a sword at his side and a Persian-lamb cap perched on his head. But he was a narrow-minded brute, who stopped the peasants from walking on the "lord's" woods and fields, terrorized them with threats and occasionally beat them and molested their wives. On June 4, he arrested a muzhik, Vlasov—a former pupil of Tolstoy's—for stealing a sapling, and dragged him, tied to his knout, all the way to the house to be reprimanded by the countess. Hearing of this, Tolstoy felt "a weight on his heart." He would not allow a savage Circassian in Sonya's employ to interfere with a peasant he knew and loved, on account of "a branch he had pickcd up without permission." He asked Sonya to fire the guard, whose presence was, moreover, an insult to his theories on the evils of property. She refused, wept and wrote in her diary: "He is torturing himself and he is torturing me." He, meanwhile, was writing: "Emotions, upsets. It's very painful. Keep wanting to cry." The next day, feeling ill, he came home from his walk earlier than usual and lay down, his pulse weak and his memory uncertain. Seeing how feeble he had become, Sonya did not have the heart to try to prevent him from going to spend a few days in Chertkov's new home, at Meshcherskoye, near Moscow. This represented such a sacrifice for her that after making it she wondered what demon had induccd her to give in.

He left on June 12, with Sasha, Dr. Makovitsky and Bulgakov. Varvara Fcokritova stayed on at Yasnaya Polyana, ostensibly to keep Sonya company, but actually to guard her and see that she remained calm. Once again, on meeting Chertkov, Tolstoy felt ten years younger. The Meshcherskoye house was dirty and run-down and, to his satisfaction, full of Tolstoyans. With Chertkov and Sasha, he visited a nearby

insane asylum, talked to the inmates, questioned the doctors and attended film projections for the patients. "They were showing stupid melodramas on the screen," wrote Sasha. "In the darkness I could make out my father's white shirt and beard; I felt the hall around me full of crazy people and I wanted to run away as fast as I could. But my father was talking away to Chertkov, as calm as could be, and he did not even seem to sense the danger. I remember him saying on several occasions that madness is only an extreme form of egoism—the egoism of a person who concentrates all his thoughts and interest upon himself." Perhaps he had Sonya in mind when he formulated that definition. But just then he felt so much at peace that the thought of his private life evoked nothing but forbearance and understanding. "I must try to fight Sonya consciously, with kindness and love," he wrote in his diary on June 20. "At a distance, it seems possible. I must try to succeed at closc quarters." And to her he wrote: "IIow time flics! Only five days before we leave. We have decided to start out on the twenty-fifth. It is nice to be away visiting, but it is also nice to be at home. Farewell, dear Sonya, I embrace you!" Diplomatically, he served up the honey ljcfore the gall; in a postscript, he told his wife the "good news" that the government was allowing Chertkov to return to Telyatinki—almost next-door to Yasnaya Polyana—to visit his mother for a few days.

Back at Yasnaya Polyana, meanwhile, Sonya was finding her solitude oppressive. Offended because Chertkov had invited her to Mcshchers- koye in the vaguest of terms and had not even offered her a room of her own, she brooded over her grievances and orchestrated her ire. When she heard that "the monster" would be in the neighborhood again, she suddenly lost control. Her head on fire, she ordered Varvara Fcokritova to cable her husband: "Sofya Andreyevna's nerves in very bad state. Insomnia, weeping, pulse: one hundred. Please telegraph. Varvara." Another telegram followed a few hours later, signed by Sonya herself, on the night of June 22-23: "Entreat you hurry back—on twenty-third." Sasha, who guessed that her mother was not seriously ill, begged her father not to set their departure ahead, especially since they were expecting the cellist Erdcnko that day. Tolstoy obeyed, and wired back: "More convenient return tomorrow. But if indispensable will comc tonight." The "more convenient" revolted Sonya. "I recognize Chertkov's cold hand there," she cried, and ordered Varvara Fcokritova to reply immediately, with the command: "Indispensable. Varvara."

Then, in her nightgown, with hair undone and breast heaving with sobs, she flung herself upon her diary and poured out her despair.

"What is the matter with me? Hysteria, attack of nerves, cramps in the chcst, is it the beginning of madness? I don't know. . . . This de-

pression came over me as a result of Leo Nikolaycvich's long absence, lie has developed a revolting, senile crush on Chertkov (falling for men was more in his line as a boy!) and now he is absolutely at that man's beck and call. Chertkov is what is keeping us apart. He is an ingenious, despotic, heartless man, who has reached a far more advantageous and distinguished position in life as Tolstoy's intimate friend than he could have had as an insignificant, silly officer of the guards. I am wildly jealous of Chertkov where Tolstoy is concerned. I feel he has stripped mc of the one tiling that has kept me alive for forty-eight years. . . . Even form of suicide has crossed my mind. ... I am thinking of going to Stolbova and lying down under the train on which it would be convenient for Leo Nikolayevich to come home. ... I have consulted Florin- sky's book on medicine to see what the effects of opium poisoning would be. First excitement, then lethargy. No antidote. I must write to my husband who has just been to an insane asylum and ask him to find out all the details about the place, since Chertkov will undoubtedly find it convenient to have me committed to it."

But whether she killed herself or was institutionalized, all she really- cared about was seeing that Chertkov was punished for his devilry. One of her sons would make sure that vcngcance was done. "You, Andry- ushka," she went on in her diary, "avenge your mother's death; you loved her, you saw through her enemy!"

When he reached home at ten o'clock that evening, Tolstoy found his wife in bed in a state of feverish agitation. He spent part of the night with her, and then went to write in his notebook, "It's worse than I expected. Nervous breakdown and ovcrcxcitement. Indescribable. I did not behave particularly badly, but not very well cither, I was not kind."

Despite Tolstoy's efforts to avoid further disputes, Sonya attacked him at every turn with his "love" for Chertkov, and wept continually. One moming she was found on her knees behind a cupboard in the library with a vial of opium in her hand. She sobbed:

"Just one little swallow!"

"However," wrote Sasha with pitiless objectivity, "she waved the vial of opium around her mouth but did not drink any. At first I tried to take it away from her, then I suddenly felt disgusted."

After being given a no-nonsense treatment by her daughter and admonished by Dr. Makovitsky, she dried her tears and promised to control herself in future. The next day, June 26, she asked her husband to show her what he had written about her in his last diary. He reluctantly consented. Opening the notebook, she came across the entry for

June 20: "I must try to fight Sonya consciously, with kindness and love." She immediately flew into a rage:

"Why do you say you want to fight me? What have I done wrong?"

Refusing to listen to Tolstoy's explanations, she demanded to know where the diaries of the previous ten years had gone. He was eventually forced to admit that Chertkov had them. She ordered him to tell her where Chertkov had put them and he answered that he had no idea. Then she rushed out into the garden, wandered about under driving rain and came back soaked to the skin. When her husband urged her to change her clothes, she cried:

"No, I shall stay like this, I'll catch cold and diel . . . That's all they want! . . . I'm going to have an attack this very minute! . . ."

Tolstoy did not sleep at all that night, and the next day he consulted Dr. Korsakov's treatise on psychiatry. On every page lie seemed to recognize some trait of Sonya's. "The insane are always better at achieving their purposes than the sane," he noted on June 27, "because they have no morality to hold them back, neither shame nor truth nor conscience, nor even fear." He dreaded the effect upon Sonya of the news that Chertkov would be in the neighborhood for any length of time—even temporarily. He was expected at any moment. Returning from Telyatinki in the evening of the twenty-seventh, Bulgakov announced that the disciple and his mother had arrived. Sonya was terrified by the thought that the "devil" had returned to his lair, and she determined to take Lyovochka away—anywhere, so long as he was removed from the sphere of evil radiation. In a few hours she persuaded him to go with her to Nikolskoye to visit their son Sergey, whose birthday it was. At the same time, she asked him to alter the description of the hero's wife in By Mistake, one of his stories, becausc she bore a physical resemblance to the author's wife. Tolstoy obediently changcd a few words and the "forceful black-eyed brunette" became a "blue- eyed blonde."

Their departure for Nikolskoye was set for the following day, June 28. That morning, while everyone in the house was still asleep, Chertkov camc gliding furtively through the mists to renew his acquaintance with his idol's haunts. He brought a letter, intended to placate Sonya: "I have heard that you have recently been speaking of me as an enemy. I think this feeling can be attributed to a passing irritation, caused by some misunderstanding that a face-to-face conversation would soon dispel, like a bad dream. Leo Nikolaycvich contains in himself so many things that represent life's most precious treasures for both you and me that a solid and indestructible bond must inevitably have been forged between us." He was about to hand this letter to a servant when Tol-

stoy, catching sight of him through tlic window, came out of his bedroom, embraced him and led him away on tiptoe into the grounds. Walking and talking with his disciple, he suddenly noticed that they were headed toward Yasenki, and the family was to catch the train at Zasyeka. By the time they had returned to the house, Sonya had already- left in a coach. lie caught up with her in Chertkov's trap, excused himself like a guilty schoolboy, climbed up beside her and patiently bore her ill-humor. During the entire train trip, whenever he got out to stretch his legs at a station, Sonya got out with him.

"I am with you, I shall go with you every time," she said, "otherwise, you might stay behind on the platform on purpose."

At Sergey's house at Nikolskoye there were too many people and too much noise, and the weary old man was sorry he had come. Sonya, however, who cared about appearances, put on a show of gaiety at her son's; but as soon as she returned to Yasnaya Polyana, on June 30, she abandoned herself once more to her idte fixe: the private diaries of the last ten years. A visit from Chertkov on July 1 drove her into a frenzy. The sight of him affected her brain like an electric shock. Her blood boiled, her mind began to race, she lost all sense of propriety. His behavior, however, was always icily correct. In the evening, after paying his respects to the mistress of the house, he withdrew with Tolstoy and Sasha into the author's study. Sonya was certain that the triumvirate was conspiring against her, and in effect, behind the closed doors, father, daughter and disciple were talking in hushed tones of the will and the diaries. After a moment, Sasha heard a rustle outside the balcony door: Sonya was there, in the dark, straining to hear. She had taken off her shoes to make less noise. She screamed:

"Another plot against me!"

Tolstoy was so upset by this nocturnal apparition that Sasha took him into the next room. Alone with Chertkov, Sonya, her eyes glittering with hatred, demanded to know where the diaries were and by what right he was keeping them. Unabashed, Chertkov counterattacked. His courtesy vanished. In a cutting voice he informed Sonya that she had no business interfering between master and disciple: "What are you afraid of? That I shall use the diaries to unmask you? Had I wanted to, I could have ruined you and your family too, without the slightest difficulty. The only thing that has stopped me is my affection for Leo Nikolayevich." Moving toward the door, he added, "If I had a wife like you, I would have blown my brains out long ago or gone to America."³

Sonya caught up with him and, in the presence of her husband and daughter, insisted that he at least promise to return the diaries when asked to produce them.

"Yes," said Chertkov, "but I will give them to Leo Nikolayevich, not to you."

He wrote out the following note to Tolstoy:

"In view of your wish to resume possession of the diaries which you gave me to keep, asking me to delete from them the passages you had marked, I shall hasten to finish this work and shall return the diaries to you immediately thereafter."

"And now," said Sonya, "I want Leo Nikolayevich to give me a paper promising to turn the diaries over to me!"

"That's all we need!" exclaimed Tolstoy. "A husband signing papers to his wife."

He muttered:

"I promised that you would have those diaries and you'll have them."

lie was so obviously insincere that Sonya wrote in her own diary, "I know there is only one purpose behind all those notes and promises: to hoodwink me. Chertkov will drag out his imaginary work on the diaries and won't ever give them to anyone."

But the following day, she played the gracious hostess to Chcrtkov's mother, "a very handsome woman, not quite normal, and extremely aged," who talked at length of her soul, her mourning, her land, and believed that Christ dwelled in her entrails. Sonya spent a pleasant day with her, but suffered agonies to see Chertkov sitting on a low sofa next to Lyovochka. They were whispering away, their knees were almost touching. "They were so happy in their intimacy together," she wrote, "and I was in torments of spite and jealousy."⁴ And that evening, to top off all her other sufferings, the conversation turned to suicide and madness. Sonya interrupted:

"Can't we change the subject?"

"Really, Sonya, I don't understand you," said Tolstoy. "We're talking about my article!"

"You did it on purpose! I wasn't in the room a minute before you brought up the subject again. You might have a little more consideration!"

She could not sleep that night, she was haunted by the vision of Chertkov sitting so close to Lyovochka. Her overwrought imagination produced pictures of the white-bearded old man and his corpulent disciple united in a monstrous intercourse.

In spite of her fatigue, by dawn she had determined to continue the battle. Oozing duplicity, she made a formal return call on Chertkov's mother, but went on afterward to sec Mrs. Zvegintsev, who had a great deal of influence in St. Petersburg, and asked her to persuade the authorities to banish Chertkov from the government of Tula again. Out

of ten tries, she thought, one at least would have to work. Also, her son Leo, who had recently arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, was some consolation to her. lie was an anti-Tolstoyan of long standing, who had already put Chertkov in his place once and even called him an imbecile for trying to preach to him. The moment seemed propitious for a direct attack.

During the night of July 10-11, Sonya again demanded that Lyovochka give her the diaries Chertkov was keeping. She swept up and down the balcony outside her husband's bedroom, threatening and pleading until he begged her to go away and let him get some sleep. Then she accused him of wanting to drive her away, cried out, "I'll kill Chertkov!" and rushed half-naked into the grounds. After some time passed without any sign of her, the old man began to worry; in his nightshirt, candle in hand, he went to wake his son Leo and Dr. Makovitsky and sent them out in search of the poor woman. They found her lying full length in the wet grass. She told them she had been driven away "like a dog" and would kill herself unless her husband came in person to ask her to go back to the house. Leo, who was always spoiling for a fight, ran to tell his father that he had no right to lie in his warm bed indoors while his abandoned, insulted wife was threatening to kill herself. Dragged along by his forty-year-old son, Tolstoy reluctantly trailed into the grounds. After soothing Sonya and bringing her back to the house, he wrote 111 his diary, "Only just alive, only just. Dreadful night. Until four in the morning. Leo was the worst of them all. He shouted at me as though I were a boy and ordered me to fctch Sonya back from the garden " The couple went to sleep, shattered, each in his own room.

To offset Leo's pernicious influence on his mother, Chertkov sent an urgent appeal to the calm and equable Tanya, who arrived with her husband on July 12, and was horrified to see how far relations between her parents had deteriorated within a few weeks. Sonya, looking old and haggard, stared about her like a madwoman; Tolstoy was bent and shriveled, and whenever he wasn't paying attention, his face assumed an expression of childish bewilderment. Tanya, who was twenty years older than Sasha, urged her to be more tolerant, but could not alter the girl's inflexible determination to treat their mother as a fake. And indeed, oncc the crisis was past, Sonya quickly bccamc her old self again. The very day of the Sukhotins' arrival, she was trying to win the secretary, Bulgakov, to her side. After offering to drive the young man over to the Chertkov home in her trap, she suddenly turned a tear- stained face to him and begged him to make them give her back the diaries.

"Let them copy them all," she said, "every word. But at least, let them give back Leo Nikolayevich's original manuscripts to me. I used to be the person who kept the diaries. Tell Chertkov that if he gives them back to me, I shall grow calm again. I will like him again, and he can come to see us as he used to do and we will work together to serve Leo Nikolayevich. Will you tell him? For the love of Cod, will you tell him? . . ."

Although a staunch Tolstoyan, the boy was shaken. "There was absolutely nothing fake about her tears or her emotion," he wrote. "I confess I was deeply moved. At any price, even if it meant returning the manuscripts to Sonya Andreyevna, or by any other means, I wanted peace to be restored to Yasnaya Polyana."

When they reached Telyatinki, Sonya was ceremoniously received by the great disciple's mother, while Bulgakov retired with Chertkov and his advisor Sergeyenko and explained that, in all fairness, they must conscnt to the countess's request.

"What?" cried Chertkov, rolling his eyes. "Ilave you told her where the diaries are?"

He stuck out his tongue in fury. His handsome, regular features were distorted into a gargoyle's mask. Bulgakov protested that he was unable to tell anything because he didn't know anything. Reassured, Chertkov told him, "Go, now. Go have tea next door. You must be hungry." He pushed him out and closed the door behind him. After consultation, he and Sergeyenko decided to hold their ground. But Tolstoy was beginning to weaken. "She is suffering, poor thing," he wrote on July 12, "and it is no effort for me to feel sorry for her and love her at the same time."

Was he merely battle-weary, or was this an attempt to conform to his doctrine of non-resistance? In all probability, his philosophical principles were conveniently summoned to cover up his wavering will. He wanted peace and quiet so badly! Two days later it was decided: he would take the diaries back from Chertkov; but, instead of giving them to Sonya, he would deposit them in a bank in Tula, where they would remain until his death. To make sure his intentions were clear, he wrote a long letter to his wife:

"1. I shall give no one the diary I am now writing, and shall keep it with me.

"2. I shall take back my earlier diaries from Chertkov and shall keep them myself, probably in a bank.

"3. If you are worried lest future biographers who may be unfriendly to you should make use of the pages in my diary which were written in the heat of the moment and record all our conflicts and quan-cls, I

would remind you, first of all, that such expressions of fleeting emotion, in my diary as in yours, cannot pretend to give a true picture of our relations; but if you arc still afraid, I shall be happy to take this opportunity to say, in my diary or in this letter, what my true relations with you are, and my view of your life.

"My relations with you and my view of your life arc as follows: as I loved you when I was young, so I never stopped loving you in spite of the many causes of estrangement between us, and so I love you now. Leaving aside the cessation of our conjugal relations (a fact that could but add to the sincerity of our expressions of true love), those causes were as follows: first, my increasing withdrawal from society', whereas you neither would nor could forgo it, bccausc the principles which led me to adopt my convictions were fundamentally opposed to yours: this is perfectly natural and I cannot hold it against you. ... In recent years, you have grown more and more irritable, despotic and uncontrollable. This could not fail to inhibit any display of feeling on my part, if not the feelings themselves. That is the second point. And in the third place, the principal, fatal cause, was that of which we arc both equally innocent: our totally opposite ideas of the meaning and purpose of existence. For me property is a sin, for you an essential condition of life. I forced myself to accept the painful circumstances of our life in order not to leave you, but you saw my acceptance as a concession to your views, and this only deepened the misunderstanding between us. . . . As for my view of your life, it is this:

"I, a debauchcd man, profoundly depraved sexually, and no longer in his first youth, married you, a girl of eighteen, pure, good and intelligent, and in spite of my wicked past you lived with me for almost fifty years, loving me, living a life full of care and pain, giving birth to children, bringing them up, caring for them and nursing me, without succumbing to any of the temptations to which a woman like you, beautiful, solid and healthy, is always exposed; and your life has been such that I can have absolutely nothing to reproach you with. As for the fact that you did not follow me in my moral development, which is a unique one, I cannot hold that against you, cither, for the inner life of any human is a secret between himself and God, and no one else can call him to account in any way; I have been intolerant with you, I was mistaken and I confess my error. . . .

"4. If my relations with Chertkov arc too trying for you now, I am ready to give him up, although I must tell you that it would be more unpleasant and painful for him than for 111c; but if you ask it of me I shall do it.

"5. If you do not acccpt these terms for a peaceful and good life, I

shall take back my promise not to leave you; I shall go away. And not to Chertkov, you may be sure! In fact, I would even lay down as an absolute condition that he must not come and settle near me. But go I certainly shall, for I cannot continue living like this. I might have gone on with this life had I been able to look at all your sufferings unmoved, but I am not capable of that. . . . Stop, my dove, tormenting not only others but yourself, for you are suffering a hundred times more than they. That is all. July 14, in the morning. Leo Tolstoy."

He immediately showed this letter to Sonya, who was both delighted and disturbed by it. She feared some maneuver designed to fetter her still more tightly. To reassure her, Tolstoy sent Sasha to Chertkov with instructions to bring back the diaries in exchange for a note signed by him. The girl set out, furious with her father for yielding on this capital point, and soon came back empty-handed, for in his troubled state he had forgotten to mention the return of the diaries in the note he had given her for Chertkov. He at once drafted another: "I was so upset when I wrote to you this morning that I mistakenly supposed I had told you the most important thing, which is that you are to give the diaries to Sasha immediately. I ask you to do it. Sasha will take them to the bank. I am loath to do it, but so much the better. Be brave and steadfast for the good, you also, dear friend."

Sasha set out again, with an ugly smile on her face, while her father wrote, "I am not sure this is right, and I may have been too weak and conciliating, but I could not do anything else."

When the girl reached Telyatinki, the Tolstoyan general staff was already assembled around a table, with Chertkov presiding: in addition to the master of the house, there were the two Goldcnwcisers, Scrgey- enko, and Olga Dietrich, Andrey Tolstoy's ex-wife and Chertkov's sister-in-law. Hypnotized, Sasha took her place in their midst. They distributed the seven notebooks and went through them looking for any passages that were derogatory to Sonya, who would be sure to destroy them if she ever got her hands on the diaries. Every time they spied a criticism, confession of depression or disgust, or description of a quarrel, they avidly copied out the paragraph. When this anthology of hatred had been compiled, the editors lay down their pens and looked at one another with the satisfaction of men who have done their duty. Then the diaries were tied up, wrapped in heavy paper and, as Sasha was getting back into the coach, Chertkov derisively made the sign of the cross over her head three times with the package.⁶ He also gave her a letter for her father in which lie deplored that the master's true friends were prevented from coming to his assistance, as were the disciplcs of Christ on Golgotha on an earlier occasion: "The thought

of the death of Christ came to my mind today with strange intensity. I thought of the insults, offenses and gibes heaped upon him and the long, slow death to which he was subjected; I saw his closest friends and relatives, powerless to approach him, compelled to witness the tragedy from afar; and I thought of his words, in the depth of his agony: 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do/"

While this was going 011, Sonya, twitching with impatience, had stationed herself at the window on the top floor of the house at Yasnaya Polyana, from which she could watch all the roads at oncc. Her son Leo was mounting guard at the entrance to the estate. But Sasha, guessing that they would be lying in wait for her, took another road back, entered through a ground-floor window and gave the diaries to her friend Varvara Fcokritova, who handed them to Tanya. Too late! Sonya, alerted by Leo, came bearing down upon her eldest daughter, tore the package away from her and hugged it to her breast like a mother who has found her long-lost child. Then she unwrapped the seven notebooks bound in black oilcloth ancl feverishly began to read them. Hearing Sasha's outraged erics, Michael Sukhotin, Tanya's husband, came running; he reasoned with his mother-in-law, took the diaries away from her, put them into an envelope and sealed it and put it away in a cupboard. Two days later he deposited the manuscripts in the name of Leo Tolstoy at the Tula branch of the national bank.

Still suspicious, Sonya demanded that her husband give her the key- to the strongbox containing the diaries. He refused and left the house. As he passed beneath her windows, she cried out: "Lyovochka! I drank a vial of opiuml"

He rushed up the stairs, reached the landing gasping for breath, opened the door and fell upon his weeping wife:

"I said it on purpose," she whimpered, "but I didn't drink it."^fl Heartsick, he went to find Sasha and told her: "Go sec Maman and tell her that her behavior is forcing me to leave. I shall certainly go if she continues. As for the diaries, tell her I shall give the key to Michael Sergeyevich [Sukhotin]."

After a sharp scolding, Sonya calmed down sufficiently to tolerate, at least in theory, an occasional visit from Chertkov at Yasnaya Polyana. But as soon as she caught sight of him, she lost all self-control. True, the diaries were 110 longer in her rival's possession, but neither did she have the right to look at them. She had won only a half-victory. "He shies and snorts, knowing I have my eye on him and have seen through his self-righteous posing. lie would like to get even with me. But I'm not afraid of him,"⁷ she wrote. Then she turned on her husband: "By obstinately refusing to let mc have those notebooks he is keeping a

weapon ready to wound and punish me with. Ah, this sham Christian life, this meanness toward his fellow men, instead of the simple goodness and loyal openness that would hurt no one!"⁸

Life in the house was becoming so difficult that, with the approval of Sasha and Tanya, Tolstoy sent for mcdical help. On July 19, the famous psychiatrist Rossolimo, and Dr. Nikitin, a friend of the family, arrived at Yasnaya Polyana. Leo growled, "My mother isn't the one who needs treatment; her health is fine; but my father has gone into his second childhood."⁹ Courteous and disdainful, Sonya allowed the two men to examine her. They stayed overnight and concluded the following day that the countess was not suffering from a mental illness, but from "double degeneracy: paranoiac and hysterical, chiefly the former." For treatment, they recommended baths, walks and, above all, the separation of the couple. Sonya adamantly refused to leave Lyovochka, because she was sure that Chertkov would arrive within the hour to take her place beside him. The doctors yielded. While they were getting back into their coach, she stood, imperturbably repeating, "I shall stop being ill when the diaries have been returned to me!" And Tolstoy, filled with his old mistrust of medical men, wrote in his diary that evening, "Rossolimo is astonishingly stupid, in the way of scientists: absolutely no hope!"

The truth was that he had a guilty conscience. Two days before, on July 18, he had made a secret trip to Chertkov's house to rewrite his will, the final version of which was proving extremely ticklish to draft. After they thought everything had been provided for, Chertkov, alarmed by Sasha's recent illness, asked Muravyev to draw up a new will whereby, if she were to die before her fatlier, the copyrights would go to her elder sister, Tanya. This was the version Tolstoy had rccopicd and signed in the presence of three witnesses on the day before the psychiatrist's visit He hoped he had seen the last of this distasteful affair, when Chertkov informed him that the words "of sound mind and in full possession of his memory" had been omitted from the final draft, which might enable the heirs to break it on a point of form. So it had to be done over again. Anxious to avoid arousing Sonya's suspicions, Tolstoy decided not to go back to Telyatinki, but to arrange a meeting with the witnesses on July 22, in the forest. Sergeyenko—Chertkov's friend and advisor—his secretary Radinsky and Goldenweiser set off 011 horseback to meet the patriarch. They saw him waiting for them, on his faithful mare, the glossy-coated Dtflirc. Wearing a broad white hat, his white beard fanning out over his white blouse, he stood out, magnificent in his age and dignity, against the background of quivering leaves. The group rode on a little way under the trees, looking for a

suitable spot. Then they dismounted. The old man sat on a tree stump and unscrewed the top of an English fountain pen he had brought with him. Scrgcyenko handed him a blotter pad and a big sheet of paper. Radinsky held the paper he was to copy over, word for word.

"We look like conspirators," said Tolstoy as he braced the pad on his knees.

And he began to write, slowly and carcfully. It was cool beneath the branches. Sunspots flickered across the white page. The tethered horses swished their tails to drive away the flies. Far away, birds chattered, and furtive feet scampered through the underbrush. When he had finished, the old man signed his name, and the three witnesses followed suit. He thanked them, gave them the will and murmured, "What a trial all this has been," remounted his horse and rode home.

When he reached the house, Sonya's piercing glare made him fear she had guessed everything. Curiously, she had insisted that Chertkov comc to the house that evening, but as soon as she saw him she lashed out, "He won't give mc one day's rest!" forgetting that she had asked him to come. "There he is again!"

When Chertkov turned up at Yasnaya Polyana again the next day, her temper plunged from bad to worse. She caught him talking to Tolstoy in hushed tones, and they refused to tell her what they had been whispering about. With good reason: Tolstoy had just announced to his disciple that, in a letter appended to the will, he was giving Chertkov sole authority to revise and publish his work after his death. Furious at being left out of their secret, Sonya proffered some vague threats, went to her room and melancholically stroked her opium vial, but decided against suicide: "I don't want to give them all—Sasha included—the satisfaction of seeing me dead," she wrote in her diary. Transferring her fury to the "devil," she added, "I feel like killing Chertkov, or sticking something into his bloated body to release tlie soul of Leo Nikolayc- vich from his deleterious influence."

Too excited to sleep, she then dccidcd to leave the house the next day for good, and began to pack her bags. When her suitcases were all shut and strapped, she wrote a farewell letter to Lyovochka: "I have tried to make the best of my misery, and to go on seeing Chertkov, but I can't do it. Cursed by my daughter, rejected by my husband, I am abandoning my home because my rightful place in it has been usurped by a Chertkov, and I shall not return to it unless he goes away."

There had to be a press release, too. She wrote it out, weeping: "An extraordinary event has just come to pass at peaceful Yasnaya Polyana. Countess Sofya Andrcycvna has left the home in which, for forty- eight years, she affectionately cared for her husband, having devoted her

entire life to him. Her decision was prompted by the fact that Leo Nikolayevich, in the weakness of his extreme old age, has now come completely under the pcmicious influence of Mr. C . . . ; he has lost all will of his own, allowed C ... to speak in crude and vulgar terms to Sofya Andrcycvna and has continually maintained mysterious relations with him. The countess, who has been suffering from a nervous illness necessitating the consultation of two specialists from Moscow, is no longer able to tolerate the presence of C . . . , and, heartbroken, has abandoned her home."

After preparing this version of the facts for the public, she spent the morning of July 25 in her traveling suit, looking solemn and sullen. Her son Andrey was to arrive that afternoon; a trap had been ordered to fetch him at the station. At two o'clock, Sonya got into the trap and said good-bye to her family. Tolstoy, thinking she was going for a drive, offered to go with her. But she refused, and left alone. In her handbag she carricd her passport, a revolver and the vial of opium. At seven o'clock she was back: her son Audrey, whom she had met at the station, had persuaded her to return home. At the sight of her husband she fell into his arms, apologized for the fright she had given him and immediately demanded to know what he and Chertkov had been plotting. He changed the subject. To Sasha, he said mournfully, "She's a pitiful old woman, one has to feel sorry for her, she was laughing and crying." More deeply touched than he cared to admit, he thought once again of asking Chertkov to remain away from Yasnaya Polyana for a time. "I think I need not tell you how I suffer, for you as much as for myself, at the thought that we will not be seeing each other any more," he wrote on July 26; "but we must give up our meetings, it is necessary. . . . For the time being, let us write to each other. I shall not hide my letters or yours, if I am asked to show them."

Chertkov immediately replied that he would abide by this resolution, but regretted it as a compromise on the part of the mystical spirit:

"I fear that your desire to appease Sofya Andreyevna may lead you to go too far, and cause you to renounce the independence that is essential to anyone seeking to obey, not his own will, but the will of the Master. . . . The danger threatening you is that you may make your actions dependent upon the wishes of another human instead of upon the voice of God, which resounds in our souls at every moment. And that is why I am prepared without a murmur never to sec you again if you arc sure you arc obeying the voice of God; but it would be unspeakably hard and painful for me to forgo a single opportunity to meet you if it is only because of a promise binding you to some human being."

Tolstoy humbly accepted this lesson in Tolstoyism, but stood his

ground. This was not the moment to add fuel to the fire. With Audrey's arrival, Sonya had gained a considerable ally—now there was a boy who had his feet on the ground! He enjoyed the good things of life, favored the established order and was opposed to all philosophers, and he was determined to protect his mother against those who were claiming she had lost her mind.

"In spite of his non-resistance, all Papa can manage to do is hate- people and hurt them!" he shouted. "I don't care a damn about the opinion of an old man in his dotage!"

On July 27 he entered his father's study and challenged him: "Nasty- things are going on in this family. Maman is in an awful state. We want to know whether you have made a will."

Tolstoy's heart missed a beat, but he controlled himself, returned his son's insolent stare and said in a steady voicc: "I do not see any reason to answer that question."¹⁰ Andrey went out, slamming the door. Since he could not force his father to talk, he tried his sister, but Sasha pretended not to know anything about anything. It may have been easy and even pleasant for her to lie to her exasperated brothers and her mother, but Tolstoy was sick at having to feign innocence within a ring of inquisitors.

The diary in which he ordinarily gave vent to his feelings was no longer enough, as every single person around him now claimed the right to read it. On July 29, lie began a new diary, entitled Diary for Myself Alone, which 110 one knew about and which he hid in his bootleg or under his shirt, lliis need to record his most intimate thoughts coincided with a fresh attack of conscience. Increasingly often, he was wondering whether he had been right to disinherit his family and had not betrayed his own teachings by acting in accordance with a law system to which he was theoretically opposed. To justify himself in his own eyes, he invoked his sons' mediocrity. "I can be completely sincere in my love of Sonya, but it is impossible with Leo," he wrote in his Diary for Myself Alone on July 29. "Andrey is simply another of those men about whom it is hard to believe they have a God-given soul (yet it exists, we must not forget). . . . But one cannot deprive millions of people of what is certainly necessary to their souls ... in order that Andrey may drink and carry on, and Leo scribble books." But the following day he confessed how deeply torn he was: "Chertkov has involved me in a conflict that is painful and repellent to me."

His feelings of guilt increased after a conversation on August 2 with his biographer and friend Paul Biryukov, who was visiting Yasnaya Polyana. He was counting on his dear "Posha" to congratulate him upon leaving his opus to mankind. But Biryukov criticized the secrecy

with which the whole affair had been handled, and thought Tolstoy should have called the family together and openly stated his intentions. Wasn't he big enough to brave the opinion of his own family? Shaken by this admonishment, the old man wrote that evening, "I see my mistake very clearly. I should have called all my heirs together and announced my decision to them instead of acting in secret. I am writing Chertkov to the same effect."

But Chertkov wouldn't hear of it: a series of letters was brought to Yasnaya Polyana by Goldenwciscr or Bulgakov, explaining how it would have been impossible to make the document public without giving his wife a fatal shock: "She has spent so many long years taking so many precautions and exercizing such care in conceiving, forming and preparing her plan to obtain control of all of your works after your death that a disappointment during your lifetime would be a blow too great for her to bear; she would spare no one and nothing, and I am referring not only to you and your health and your life, but to herself."

Turned about-face once again, Tolstoy answered his disciple:

"I am writing you on this scrap of paper because I am walking in the forest. I have been thinking about your letter since yesterday evening, and all morning too. It aroused two feelings in me: disgust at the manifestations of vulgar cupidity and selfishness that I had cither not noticed or had forgotten; and sorrow and remorse for the pain I caused you by my letter saying I regretted what I had done. The conclusion I drew from all this is that Paul Ivanovich Biryukov was not right, nor was I right to agree with him, and I fully approve of your reaction; however, I am still not pleased with myself. I feel that we might have done better, although I don't know how."

Sonya was exasperated by this steady stream of emissaries between Yasnaya Polyana and Telyatinki. She called Bulgakov and Golden- weiser "walking post officcs." One day, stung by jealousy, she said to her husband: "You and Chertkov are writing secret love letters to each other." When he rebuked her, she triumphantly brandished a copy of a passage from one of his early diaries, dated November 29, 1851: "I have never been in love with a woman . . . but I have quite often fallen in love with a man. . . . For mc the chief symptom of love is the fear of offending the loved one or of not pleasing him, or simply fear itself. . . . I fell in love with a man before I knew what pederasty was; but even after I found out, the possibility never crosscd my mind. Beauty has always been a powerful factor in my attractions; there is D . . . [Dyakov], for example. I shall never forget the night we left P . . . [Pirogovo] together, when, wrapped up in my blanket, I wanted to devour him with kisses and weep. Sexual desire was not totally absent, but it was impos-

sible to say what role it played, for my imagination never tempted me with lewd pictures. On the contrary, I was utterly disgusted by all that."

After reading the paper, Tolstoy turned pale and shouted, "Go away! Get out of here!" Sonya did not budge, so he rushed into his own room and locked the door behind him. "I stood there petrified," Sonya wrote in her diary. "Where is love, then? Where non-resistance? Where Christ? ... Is it possible that old age can so harden the heart of man?" When Dr. Makovitsky, alerted by Sasha, came to examine the old man, lie found him prostrated, his heartbeat irregular, his pulse over a hundred.

"Tell her that if she's trying to kill me, she'll soon succeed," murmured Tolstoy.

Far from subsiding, Sonya continued to repeat her wild accusations of homosexuality, to Dr. Makovitsky, Sasha or anyone else within earshot. She found out that Tolstoy occasionally met Chertkov in the pine woods during his walks, and began to follow him, spying on him from behind the trees and questioning the village children to discover whether the count had been alone or with another man. At home, she waited until he left his study to search through his papers. She was looking for evidence of his betrayal, his wickcdness and his immorality. Sometimes she realized that she was going mad and thought with horror of her brother Stcpan, who had died in an asylum the year before. Then, needing a moment of respite, she wrote, "I wondered whether I might not make peace with Chertkov. . . . Perhaps I will end by no longing hating him. But when I think of actually seeing his face again, and when I think of the joy that would be written on Leo Nikolaye- vich's face to see him again, then my heart fills with agony, I feel like weeping, and a desperate protest cries out within me. The spirit of evil is in Chertkov, that is whv he frightens me and makes me suffer so."¹¹

Andrey and Leo were seriously contemplating having their father declared feeble-minded, in order to invalidate the will they suspected him of having made despite his protestations to the contrary. Hated by some, ill-treated by others and spied on by all, Tolstoy looked upon his divided tribe in horror. No matter what he did now, he infuriated either his family or his disciples. He preached universal love, and had become the apple of discord in his own family. What a failure his life was, in spite of the great principles he professed to follow. He made one last attempt to deceive himself: unable to reach any decision, he wrapped his cowardice in a cloak of religion.

"In my position," he told Bulgakov, "inertia is the lesser evil. Do nothing, undertake nothing. Answer every provocation with silence.

Silence is so powerful! . . . One must reach the point, as it says in the Gospels, of being able to love one's enemies, to love those who hate one."

Thinking of Chertkov and Sasha, he added:

"But they go too far, they go too far."

"No doubt you regard this as a challenge, useful to your spiritual progress?" asked Bulgakov.

"Yes, yes, of course! I have thought a good deal lately. But I am still a long way from being able to act, in my position, like Francis of Assisi."¹²

lie wrote in his Diary for Myself Alone, on August 6, "I think I would like to go away, leaving a letter, but I'm afraid for Sonya, al- thought I think it would be best for her too." A few days later, "Help me, Father, universal Spirit, source and principle of life, help me, at least in these last days and hours of my life on earth, help me to live before Thee, serving Thee alone."

Tanya returned to Yasnaya Polyana in the midst of this nightmare, and in an unguarded moment Tolstoy told his eldest daughter about his will. She was not surprised, and even approved of it; but a little while later, she said she was sorry he had felt it necessary to give up the rights to the books written before 1881. In any event, one glance was enough to tell her that if he remained at Yasnaya Polyana much longer in that atmosphere of spying and hysteria, he would die of a heart attack. She invited him to come, alone, for a rest at her home at Koehety. He accepted enthusiastically, but Sonya insisted upon coming with him. She preferred to make him miserable by her company, rather than know he was happy somewhere else. On August 15 he left, with his wife, Sasha, Tanya and Dr. Makovitsky.

Their first days at Koehety were so enjoyable that Sonya forgot all about her grievances. She began to relax, basking in the solicitude of her son-in-law and spoiled by her grandchildren. But on August 18, she read an item in the newspapers which her family had been hiding from her for the past four days: the minister of the interior had just given Chertkov permission to settle permanently in the government of Tula. "It's my death warrant!" she cried. "I shall'kill Chertkov! I'll have him poisoned! It's either him or me!" And she took her pulse: "One hundred and forty! . . . My chest hurts, my head hurts!"

To quiet her, Lyovochka had to promise that he would not see Chertkov any more, or let himself be photographed by him "like an old coquette ... in the woods and ravines." While she was proudly recording this victory in her diary, he was writing in his: "I have had a con-

versation with Sofya Audreycvna and, although it was an error, have consented not to allow any more pictures to be taken of me. One should not make such concessions." But lie told her the same day that he would continue writing to his disciple, and she immediately sccntcd another danger: "I could not sleep all night for thinking that henceforth it is not his diary that will be filled with nasty remarks about me and evil schemes against me (under cover, of course, of Christian humility), but his correspondence with Mr. Chertkov (Leo Nikolayevich has cast himself in the role of Christ and given the part of his favorite disciple to Chertkov)."

Driven by her obsession, she hunted through every word Tolstoy had ever written in search of passages revealing his penchant for men. Perhaps the most significant was that paragraph in Childhood where the author goes into raptures over the beauty of Sergey. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," she wrote in her diary. "Falling for a little boy in childhood and having a crush on Chertkov-the-fair-inamorato in old age are one and the same thing." When she looked in the mirror she could not understand how Lyovochka was able to prefer that obese balding bearded man to herself. Gone were the days when her amorous, impetuous husband came to take her by surprise, as she stood undressed for her bath on the edge of the stream.¹⁸ "My birthday," she wrote on August 22, 1910. "I am sixty-six years old and have as much vitality, intensity of emotion and, so people tell me, youthfulness as ever."

Tolstoy's birthday followed six days later. Eighty-two years old. lie hoped that this day, at least, would bring a lull in the storm. But a quarrel broke out between them because he maintained in her presence that celibacy and chastity were the Christian ideals. She remarked that he had no business talking that way after fathering thirteen children. One thing led to another, and the venerable couple, quivering with rage, were soon digging up all their old resentments: the division of the estate, the copyrights, Chertkov; they didn't overlook a single one. The ensuing reconciliation was sincere 011 her side, but inspired on his by a profound sense of pity. "My relations with Sonya arc becoming more and more difficult," he wrote that day. "What she feels for me is not love, but the possessiveness of love, something that is not far from hatred and is lDeing transformed into hatred. The children saved her before. An animal love, but full of self-denial. When that was over, there remained only immense egoism. And egoism is the most abnormal state of all, it is insanity. . . . Dushan Makovitsky and Sasha refuse to admit that she is ill. They are wrong."

Two days later Sonya, furious at being treated "like a Xantippe" by everyone, determined to leave Kochety and return to Yasnaya Polyana.

At her father's request, Sasha went with her. The moment Sonya entered the house, she took down the photographs by Chertkov and Sasha and replaced them with her own. Then she sent for a priest, to exorcise the disciple's diabolical spirit from Lyovoehka's study. The pope appeared at four in the afternoon of September 2, wearing his sacerdotal garb and accompanied by a sacristan who carried a little chest. He sprinkled the room with holy water, swung his censer toward the four corners and intoned a series of purgative prayers in a cavernous voice, including one rather strange one celebrating I lis Majesty the emperor's victories on the battlefield, which shocked Sonya's Tolstoyan pacifism. Sasha left again the following day, and reported these aberrant goings-on in the house to her father. He was much saddened to hear of them and his sorrow increased at the news that Sonya was already restless and threatening to return to Kochety.

On September 5 she was back, and their quarrel flared up again. Reproaches, curses, imprecations, nocturnal flights into the garden. The old man lumbered after her as she howled, "He's a monster! A murderer! I never want to sec him again!" Between rounds in their match, he tried to read and write a little. He was disappointed by the new novels. Charles Salomon had brought him Gide's Retour de Venfant prodigue, which he found "empty and bombastic."¹⁴ Nor did he care for Gorky's Mother ("Worthless!"). On the whole, he remained faithful to the literary preferences of his youth and adulthood. Among foreign authors, he continued to revere his beloved Rousseau, for the unqualified, agonizing sincerity of his confessions; Pascal, whose mystical writings reminded him of his own; Moli&re, because his theater was accessible to all; Stendhal, who had taught him to see and portray war; Hugo, the giant, who, like himself, proclaimed that art must be useful; the bantering Anatole France; Zola, the champion of social rights; Dickens, friend of the weak and poor, whose genius was tinged with humor and melancholy; and Maupassant, "the only one to have understood and expressed the negative side of relations between men and women."¹⁵ Gorky and his friend Posse once asked Tolstoy how he could have any esteem for that "virtually pornographic" author, to which the old man replied: "True talent always has two shoulders: one is ethical, the other aesthetic. If the ethical shoulder hitches itself up too high, then the aesthetic shoulder dips down to the same degree, and the talent Incomes misshapen."¹⁸ Curious statement from a man who maintained elsewhere that the artist should be a professor of morality before all else.

On September 6, 1910, lie sent a poignant letter to Gandhi, then a lawyer in Johannesburg in the Transvaal, explaining that there was a

monstrous inconsistency between the law of love professed by Christian nations and the violence they practiccd, in the guise of government, army, courts and all administrative institutions. With one foot in the grave, he continued to exhort his Asian brethren not to resist evil with evil. Perhaps they would succeed where the Christians had failed. Sometimes lie wondered what his far-off correspondent, who took him for a seer, would have thought had he been able to observe the master's struggles with a half-demented wife and children wallowing in materialism. Chertkov had just sent him an extract from the diary of Varvara Feokritova, who had made a note of one of Sonya's rash threats uttered in her presence: "Even if my husband made everything over to Chertkov I would not give up my rights to his unpublished works, because they arc not dated. Everybody will believe me if I say they were written before 1881. Besides, I don't care what he does, because my sons and I will surely try to break the will (if there is one); our case is very strong; we shall prove that he [Tolstoy] had become feeble-minded toward the end and had a series of strokes, which is no more than the truth and the whole world knows it, and we will prove that he was forccd into writing that will in a moment of mental incapacity and that he himself would never have wanted to disinherit his children."

While thus plunging Tolstoy into a state of anguish, Chertkov was also writing to Sonya, in an attempt to return to her good graccs: "I am convinced that so unexpected and sudden a change in your attitude could not have comc about through your own volition. It seems to me that it must be due in part to a few most regrettable misunderstandings which we have been unable to clear up, and in part to the calumny of third persons who have transmitted to you their feelings of hostility toward me."¹⁷ She haughtily replied that she could not forgive him for appropriating her husband's diary: "His diary is the most intimate reflection of his life and therefore of my life with him; it is the minor of his soul, which I had grown accustomed to feel and to love, and it should not fall into the hands of an outsider. And the notebooks were removed by stealth, unknown to me, by persons whom you sent to take them, and they remained with you in a wooden house exposed to all the dangers of fire or confiscation, long enough to be copied ten times. . . . How many times have I asked you what arrangements you have made with regard to Leo Nikolayevich's papers and manuscripts in the event of his death? You have always maliciously refused to answer. You love neither truth nor light. . . . You published the works of Leo Nikolaye- vich, that is your claim to merit. But why do you always insist upon having all his manuscripts in your possession? I sec it as a proof of your cupidity, not minel You will tell me that he gives them to you himself.

But it is by that action and many others that I recognize your growing ascendancy over a man whose will is steadily weakening, an old mail who has already ceased to care for most of the tilings of this world. Your despotic personality has subjugated him (in a conversation I had with your mother, she shared my opinion regarding your tyranny). Your pernicious and insidious influence and my husband's excessive regard for you have estranged him from me. . . . You arc the one who has given him the idea that one should cither run away from a wife like me or kill oneself. . . ,"¹⁸

On September 12, after refusing to eat for two days in order to punish Lyovochka for treating her so harshly, Sonya left, alone, for Yasnaya Polyana. During her short stay at Koehety she liad managed to antagonize even placid Michael Sukhotin, who had shouted at her, "Your only claim to fame, which is to be Tolstoy's wife, will be destroyed if he leaves you! Tolstoy has run away from his wife, they'll say, because she was making his life hell!" Now that she was gone, her adversaries, led by Sasha, tried to consolidate their authority over the old man. "What I want is for my father not to give in to my mother," Sasha wrote to Bulgakov. Chertkov, tearing his hair because he could not talk to his master in person at such a critical moment, wrote letter after letter exhorting him to be firm. "Received a letter from Chertkov who joins in the chorus of advice telling me I must not give in, but I don't know whether I shall be able to hold out," wrote Tolstoy on September 19. "I plan to return to Yasnaya on the twcnty-second." September 23 was their forty-eighth wedding anniversary and he had promised to be with her 011 the great day: "Twenty-second, morning. Leaving for Yasnaya, in terror at the thought of what awaits me there. Do what you must . . . And above all, say nothing, do not forget there is a soul-God in her."

Sasha and Dr. Makovitsky returned to Yasnaya Polyana with him. The meeting was ominous and awkward. But the next day Sonya appeared in a white silk dress with a part)' smile on her face, ordered hot chocolate for breakfast and asked Bulgakov to photograph her with her husband. Lyovochka could not refuse this one favor, she said, after posing for Chertkov so often. The picture, appearing in the newspapers, would put an end to the rumors of conflict between the author and his wife. Tolstoy unwillingly consented to pose for the camcra. A screen was put up to concentrate the sun's pale rays on the couple. With his head under the black hood and the rubber pear in his hand, Bulgakov timidly suggested that his models move right and left, face each other, look happy. But Tolstoy, exasperated by this farce, paid no attention. The photographs were no good, and had to be taken over again

the next day, in the same clothes and pose. It was cold, a sharp wind was blowing. Bulgakov took forever to arrange his camcra. At last, he counted: "One . . . two . . . three." Standing before him, with ravaged features, staring fiercely into space, one hand in the pocket of his blouse, Tolstoy seemed unaware of his wife, who was clutching his arm in her white dress, supplicating and imperious, devouring him with her eyes. The shutter's click fixed for all time the tragic image of these two disunited beings, one trying to restrain the other.⁰

Sasha, of coursc, was furious at her father for consenting to have his picture taken with her mother, as though they formed some sort of model couple; and even more because he had not replaced the photographs by his daughter and Chertkov that had formerly adorned his study. In the angry amazon with the blazing eyes, Tolstoy sorrowfully recognized the bellicose Spirit of his wife.

"IIow you resemble her," he sighed.

In his Diary for Myself Alone: "They are tearing me apart. Sometimes I feel like leaving the lot of them."

Later, when a repentant Sasha came to him with pencil and paper in hand, he murmured:

"It isn't your shorthand I need, but your love."

Whereupon father and daughter wept and made up. The next day- Tolstoy returned the portraits by Sasha and Chertkov to their former places. And it was Sonya's turn to perform. As it happened, Sasha had just left with Varvara Fcokritova to visit Olga Dietrich, Audrey's ex- wife, at Taptikovo, and Lyovochka had gone for a walk in the forest. Brandishing a child's cap pistol, Sonya stormed into the study and fired at Chertkov's picture, then tore it up and threw the pieces clown the toilet. When her husband came back from his walk she fired a second time into the air, to frighten him. Then, as he showed no sign of alarm, she ran sobbing into the garden. In turn, Dr. Makovitsky, Bulgakov and old Marya Schmidt went out to admonish her. She eventually consented to go back to the house ancl Marya Schmidt, who was worried by her state, sent a servant on horseback to inform Sasha that her mother had gone raving mad. Sasha returned from Taptikovo in the night of September 26-27 to find her father dropping with exhaustion ancl her mother astonished at all the fuss being made over such a trifle.

"You crazy girls, why have you come back so soon?" she said.

Sasha retorted sharply. Sonya resented their impertinent insinuations. In the heat of the argument, she banished Varvara Feokritova like a thieving servant and screamed at her daughter:

• This is the last portrait taken of Tolstoy alive.

"I'll throw you out of here as I did Chertkov!"

Sasha, about to leap upon her mother like a wildcat, managed to control herself and went into her father's study to announce that she was going to spend a few days with Varvara Feokritova at Telyatinki, where she had a little house not far from Chertkov's, in order to restore peace and quiet in the family. She was certain her father would come with her. But he only said, wearily:

"Yes, do go."

She and her friend left the next morning. With relief, Sonya watched the "two pests," as she called them, retreating into the distance with their "horses, dogs and parrot." Tolstoy wrote: "I am in a comical and contradictory position. Without false modesty I may say that I formulate and express the most important and significant ideas, and at the same time, I spend the best part of my life yielding to or resisting the whims of women. As far as moral perfection is concerned I feel like a youngster, a schoolboy, and a not very assiduous schoolboy as yet."

Chertkov was sending a complete correspondence course to the schoolboy: "You have allowed yourself, on my account, to l>e forced into an ambiguous and to a certain extent false position, unconsciously, no doubt, and trying all the while to do right." On the other side, Sonya was deafening him with a stream of words in which the same vindictive allusions and the same protestations of love recurred again and again. "We have been left alone, the two old folks," she noted with satisfaction. "He is flabby, and his intestines are out of order." And: "When the others aren't there he becomes the way he used to be, kind and coaxing with me and, I think, mine." But he was irritated beyond words by these attentions that were mingled with so much mistrust. After reading Maupassant's story En famille, he conceived a desire to write a novel "demonstrating the triviality of existence," the central figure of which would be "a man who is spiritually alive." He waxed enthusiastic: "Oh, it will be fine!" But he drooped at the thought of such a tremendous undertaking. "Impossible to work because of her [Sonya], because of the feeling that obsesses mc about her, because of my inner struggle. And of coursc that struggle and the possibility of victory arc more important than any work of literature could be."

On October 3, he was much agitated by the arrival of his son Sergey and daughter Tanya, who had decided to convince their mother to separate from him. They accused her of torturing their father and threatened to have her put under surveillance by a board of guardians if she would not consent cither to leave or to mend her ways.

To escape from their screaming and shouting, Tolstoy went out for a ride with Dr. Makovitsky. When he returned, after a seven-mile canter,

he lay down fully dressed on his bed, without pulling off his boots. At seven in the evening, when he had not appeared for supper, the countess served the soup and then, apprehensive, went to his room. He was lying unconscious on the bed, his jaws jerking and emitting a muffled mooing noise at intervals. Sonya's cries brought the whole household on the run; the Sukhotins, Sergey, Biryukov, Bulgakov, Dr. Makovitsky. They undressed him. He was mumbling, "Society . . . society . . . reason," and slowly waggling his sluggish fingers across the blanket as though trying to write. With remarkable presence of mind Sonya, following Dr. Makovitsky's instructions, put hot-water bottles on her husband's feet and a compress on his forehead, made him drink coffee and rum and waved smelling salts under his nose. Suddenly he went into convulsions. His legs thrashed so violently that three men— Biryukov, Bulgakov and the doctor—could not hold him down. His head slid off the pillow, his features contracted, his eyes were glassy and his throat filled with a gurgling rattle. Kneeling before him, Sonya clasped his feet in her arms and prayed aloud, "Not this time, my God, not this time! Spare him!"

Alerted by the coachman, Sasha came speeding over from Telyatinki. Chertkov came too, defying orders. But he did not dare to let the countess see him, and installed himself in Dr. Makovitsky's room downstairs. His secretary, Belinsky, reported to him every fifteen minutes. No doubt Chertkov had worked out a plan of action in case the master died: produce the will, thrust the widow aside, get his hands on the last manuscripts.

In spite of her anguish, Sonya, too, was thinking how to protect her rights. Taking advantage of the confusion around her, she seized a little portfolio of papers, and it required the intervention of Tanya, who had seen her in the act, to make her put it back. Sasha was more skillful, and managed, without her mother's notice, to steal a little notebook she found inside her father's blouse. The patient had five convulsions, each lasting for three minutes. At eleven o'clock that night he resumed consciousness, asked what had happened and dropped off to sleep.

The following clay he was out of clanger, but very weak, and was forced to stay in bed. Her husband's survival could only be the result of divine grace, Sonya thought, requiring a compensatory act of contrition on her part. Just as Sasha was about to return to Telyatinki, a servant came to tell her that the countess was waiting for her on the front steps. She found her mother standing, coatless and red-eyed, her head shaking from side to side.

"Forgive me!" said Sonya. "I give you my word of honor I shall never offend you again."

She also promised her daughter that she would cease tormenting Lyovochka and entreated her to come back, with Varvara Feokritova, and live at home. She looked so pitiful that even Sasha—tough, suspicious Sasha—burst into tears. The two women exchanged moist kisses and sighs of endearment. A great hope dawned over Yasnaya Polyana. Sasha returned to the fold with Varvara Feokritova, and Sonya, pushing her spirit of sacrifice to sublime heights, invited Chertkov to call on October 7, as though nothing had happened.

She had presumed upon her powers. When she heard the springs of the disciple's carriage in the drive, her heart began to pound so wildly that she nearly fainted. Snatching her binoculars, she watched out of the window, to make sure that her husband did not show too much joy at his approach. He came out onto the steps. She had made him promise not to embrace the villain. Did the two men know they were l>eing watched? They shook hands. Hiding, Sonya spied on them all day. That evening she wrote, "Impossible! That creature is the devil in person! I shall never be able to bear him!"

In view of Sonya's agitation after Chertkov's departure Tolstoy wrote to his disciplc's wife that it would be better, in the interests of all, not to repeat the experiment. He was particularly unwilling to provoke Sonya just then, having noticed a few days before that one of the notebooks of his Diary for Myself Alone had disappeared. Had he mislaid it or had someone taken it without his knowledge? He suspected his wife; and he was not mistaken. She had found it in the boot in which he always hid it, and had made off with it while he was asleep. Naturally, she said nothing to him about her find. But her pemsal of his notes confirmed the existence of a plot against her concocted by her husband and Chertkov. Now she was sure a will had been made, excluding her from the inheritance, and she had special reason to find this intolerable at that particular moment: a publishing company, Prozveshenye, had just offered her the fabulous sum of one million rubles for exclusive rights to publish the works of Leo Tolstoy after his death. A million rubles!! Enough to provide for her sons and daughters and twenty-five grandchildren for life! Well; that will, whatever it contained, had to be destroyed. She explained this to her husband on October 12, but he would not listen. Then she wrote a letter, which she left on his desk on October 14:

"Every day you inquire after my health with a compassionate air and

t Or $2,831,600.

ask how I have slept; and every day you are merely driving so many fresh nails into my heart, shortening my life and subjecting me to unendurable torture, and I can do nothing to lessen my own pain. Fate has decided that I should learn of this new blow, this evil deed you have perpetrated by depriving your numerous offspring of your copyrights—although your partner in crimc has not done as much to his own family. . . . 'l"he government that both of you have slandered and maligned in your pamphlets will now lawfully take the bread out of the mouths of your heirs, and give it to Siting ancl other rich publishers and businessmen, while Tolstoy's grandchildren will starve as the result of his malevolence and vanity. And it is the government, again—in the form of the State Bank—that receives Tolstoy's diaries for safekeeping, so that his wife may not have them. ... I am aghast (supposing that I should survive you) to think what evil may grow up out of your grave, and in the memories of your children and grandchildren."

When, trembling with apprehension, she went to her husband's study to hear his reaction to this, he coldly remarked, "Can't you leave me in peace?" She tried kind words and tears. He was immovable. How was he to confess that he had dispossessed her of her rights not only to the works written after 1881, but to War and Peace and Anna Karenina and The Cossacks as well? "When she rhapsodizes to me about her love ancl kneels down before me ancl kisses my hands, it is very hard for me," he wrote. After she left, he felt his pulse (an automatic reflex among the Tolstoy's) and noted: "Ninety." Then he corrected his article On Socialism and went for a ride. Every time he went into the forest alone, Sonya was sure he was going to meet Chertkov. On October 16, she set out on foot across the fields toward Telyatinki, lay down in a ditch a little way from the entrance to the estate and trained her binoculars on the house. She was watching for the tryst. But Lyovochka did not come. At nightfall, chilled to the bone, she made her way back to Yasnaya Polyana and sat down on a bench beneath a pine, where she was found by a servant with a lantern. When she told Lyovochka what she had done and begged him to swear he would never see the "disgusting" Chertkov again, lie growled: "I do not want to obey your whims and fancies. I want freedom; at eighty-two years of age I refuse to be treated like a little boy, tied to my wife's apron strings! I retract all my promises."

Shortly afterward a Tolstoyan peasant named Novikov came to see him, and, feeling in a mood for confidences, he told this "Dark One" how difficult his wife was making life for him. "Among us," said

t A well-known publisher of the time.

Novikov, "we settle quarrels with our womenfolk more simply, and you never see any fits of hysteria. I am not a partisan of the stick and have never had recourse to it myself, but even so, one can't do everything a woman wants!" Tolstoy gave a hearty laugh and told the anecdote to Dr. Makovitsky and Sasha; and, with just a touch of malice, Sasha in turn told him how Ivan, the coachman at Yasnaya Polyana, criticized the master for overindulgence and told everyone that, "In our village, when a woman starts acting up, her man gives her a good hiding with the reins and she turns soft as a glove!"

After Novikov left, Tolstoy could not stop thinking about the simple, rough life the peasant had described to him. Oh, to go out there, plunge into the world of the common people, earn his living sewing boots, and live on kasha ... To prove that he had not used up all his strength, he took up gymnastics again. One day, hanging from a clothes cupboard, he pulled it over onto his back, was bent double and nearly collapsed beneath the weight. "Wearing myself out needlessly! Eighty-two-year-old fool!" he wrote after this incident. However, he was convinced that the time had come for him to begin his new way of life: if a man can hold up a clothes cupboard single- handed, no obstacle can stand in his way. On October 24 he found a letter in his mail from a St. Petersburg student named Alexander Barkhudarov, reproaching him for the inconsistencies between his theory and his practice, on the basis of quotations from Merezhkovsky's book, The Life and Works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, published the previous year. There was a second letter, merely abusive, from a German woman in Breslau. How strange that these two criticisms should reach him just when he was wondering whether he ought not to break away and seek rebirth. He wrote to Novikov forthwith:

"Couldn't you find me an isba in your village, never mind how small it is, as long as it is by itself, and warm, so that I will disturb you and your family no longer than absolutely necessary? If I were to send you a telegram I would not sign my own name, but T. Nikolaycv. I await your answer. ... I warn you, this must be kept between ourselves."

The next day he wrote in his Diary for Myself Alone: "Suspicions, espionage, desire that she should furnish me with a pretext to go; and when I think of the state she is in I feel sorry for her and cannot." He told Sasha of his plan and proposed that she come with him.

"Oh, yes!" she said, flushing with pleasure. "But I wouldn't want to get in your way. In the beginning, it might be better if I let you go alone."

"Yes, yes; besides, I keep telling myself that your health is not good enough, you will catch a cold, you'll start coughing . . ."

"That's nothing!" said the girl. "I will feel much better living in more simple surroundings."

"If that is true, then it will be very pleasant for me to havic you with me, as a helper. Here is how I plan to proceed; I shall buy a ticket to Moscow, send somebody over to Laptevo⁰ with my things, and get off the train there myself. If I am discovered, I'll go on farther. There, now; for the moment, this is nothing but dreams. I shall certainly worry myself to death if I leave her, her condition will torture me. But then, the atmosphere here is becoming harder for me to bear every day."¹*

He also wanted to know what Dr. Makovitsky thought of his plan. The doctor saw no objection to it, either as disciple or as physician. But old Marya Schmidt, whom he also took into his confidence, reacted very differently.

"My dear Leo Nikolayevich, you'll get over it, this is only a passing weakness," she said.

And Tolstoy sadly realized that his conscicncc would not allow him to take such a brutal and selfish step.

That day there was a large gathering at Yasnaya Polyana. One of the guests was Mrs. Almedingen, an author of children's books, who had actually come 011 behalf of the Prozveshenye publishing company to try to persuade the countess to sell her rights to the posthumous publication of her husband's complete works. Although neither Mrs. Almedingen nor Sonya alluded to the scheme in front of Tolstoy, he guessed at it and was annoyed by it.

On October 26, the arrival of Andrey, followed by Sergey, destroyed his last trace of good humor. Andrey particularly—that narrow-minded reactionary—was a bane to him; and as for Sergey, a neighbor in the country' had just challenged him to a duel, after some absurd quarrel; very probably, nothing would come of it, but Sonya sighed and moaned and made a great display of maternal anguish. "It is very painful for me to find myself in this madhouse," the old man wrote. But he put on a smiling countenance for his sons the next day, which cost him a considerable effort. The dinner-table conversation touched on every subject except Chertkov and the will. Sonya, in her Sunday best, sat in state between her two tall bearded sons. Tolstoy soon slipped away from his guests and went for a ride with Dr. Makovitsky.

A light snow was falling from the gray sky. The ground was frozen and slippery, and the riders had to dismount to cross a gullcy. Dr. Makovitsky took both horses by the bridle and forced them to jump

⁰ Station on the Moscow-Kwsk line, a few vcrsts from the village in which Novikov lived.

the stream with him. 'I'olstoy, tucking up the flaps of his short cloak, slithered down the slope, clinging to the branches of the pine trees, and then toiled up the opposite bank on all fours, grunting with effort.²⁰ After a ten-mile ride he returned home exhausted and stooping, his eyes blank and his beard damp with snow.

In the meantime, Bulgakov had brought a letter from Chertkov. Sonya wanted to know what was in it. Tolstoy refused to tell her, "on principle." A quarrel broke out. Once again, with her head shaking from side to side and her eyes bulging, Sonya demanded that her husband tell her whether it was true that he had signed a will disinheriting her and her children. Once again, his only answer was equivocal and cowardly silence. She was making him feel permanently guilty, yet he could not turn against Chertkov. Caught between the woman who personified his life and the man who personified his doctrine, he himself no longer knew which way to turn.

Toward eleven that evening he withdrew to his study with his mind in a whirl, and wrote in his diary, "It looks bad, but at bottom it is good. Our relations are weighing upon me more and more." Then he read a few pages of The Brothers Karamazov—the chapter dealt with OmitTy Karamazov's hatred of his old father. Which of the two families, Karamazov or Tolstoy, was the more horrible? His thoughts began to stray, full of obscure unease, and he laid the book down open on the round table. No doubt about it, he did not like that book: "I cannot overcome my repulsion for all I find in it that is anti-artistic, superficial, attitudinizing, irrelevant to the great problems," he had written to Mrs. Chertkov a few days before.²¹ No, no, Dostoyevsky was not one of the great writers. How could critics presume to talk about the author of The Brothers Karamazov in the same breath as the author of War and Peace, even if only to oppose them? Mcrezhkovsky's book was ridiculous! Besides, Tolstoy couldn't care less what they said about his writing. His life was what mattered. Would he ever find a way out of his present predicament? He prayed to God for help, lay down and, at half past eleven, blew out his candle.

4. Flight

On October 28, 1910, at three o'clock in the morning Tolstoy awoke with a start. A door creaked open, footsteps approached, a gown rustled as it brushed against a piece of furniture. From his study, a ray of light shone beneath the closed door. Sitting up in bed, the old man held his breath and listened. Soon he heard a shuffle of paper, and knew that Sonya was going through his desk drawers. "So, day and night, she has to know my every word and deed, and have everything under her control,"¹ he thought with a shudder of disgust. Motionless, he waited until his wife went away and then tried to go back to sleep, but he could not: his overwrought brain refused. lie lighted his candle and sat on the side of his bed, with his legs hanging down. Drawn by the light, Sonya came into his bedroom. Was he ill? Did he need anything? At the sight of his solicitous jailkeeper, in her nightgown, with her hair undone, her pasty face and her black, sharp eyes, a fresh wave of anger rose up in him. However, he controlled himself, reassured her and advised her to go back to bed.

After she left, his heart was pounding so wildly that he was afraid he would have an attack. Automatically, he felt for his pulse: ninety- seven. Suddenly, it was clear to him that he could not go 011 living like this, under the double surveillance of Sonya, demanding that he act for the good of the family, and Chertkov, demanding that lie act for the good of his soul.

All the inconsistencies of his entire life spread before his eyes and his mind reeled in horror. He preached universal love—and made his wife miserable; poverty—and lived in luxury; forgetfulness of self—and recorded his every twinge; fusion with God—and wasted his life in domestic bickerings; contempt for fame—and curried his celebrity with correspondence, receptions, photographs; the worship of truth—and

was driven ever)' single day to the shabbiest dissimulation. How many times had he wanted to get away, since that June 17, 1884 when he had walked for hours down the road to Tula, trying to escape from his conjugal inferno? But he had always comc back, unhappy and contrite. Today he would have the strength to carry it through to the end. Yes; flight was the only way to resolve this painful conflict between his ideas and his action. Once he had broken out of the circle, left both friends and enemies behind and recovered his solitude, he would find that peace of mind he needed to prepare for death. There was not a moment to lose! He struggled into his dressing gown and put on his slippers; then he went into his study and wrote a farewell letter to Sonya, based on a draft he had prepared the previous evening. He dated the letter October 28,1910, 4 a.m.:

"My departure will causc you pain, and I am sorry about that; but try to understand me, and believe that I could not do otherwise. My position in the house is becoming—has already become—intolerable. Apart from everything else, I cannot go on living in the luxury' by which I have always been surrounded, and I am doing what people of my age very often do: giving up the world, in order to spend my last days alone and in silence. Do understand this, I beg of you, and do not come rushing after me, even if you should learn where I have gone. Your coming would only make things worse for yourself and for me, and would not alter my decision.

"I thank you for the forty-eight years of honorable life you spent with me and I ask you to forgive all the wrongs I have done to you, just as I forgive you, with all my heart, those you may have done to me. My advice is that you should reconcile yourself to your new situation resulting from my departure, and not bear me any ill-will because of it. If there is something you want to tell me, tell it to Sasha, who will know where I am and will see that the message reaches me. But she cannot tell you where I am because I have made her promise not to tell anyone. —Leo Tolstoy.

"I have instructed Sasha to get my things and my manuscripts together and to forward them to me. —L.T."

After completing his letter, he tiptoed away to wake up Dr. Makovitsky:

"I have dccidcd to leave. Comc with inc. We will not take much with us, just the bare essentials."²

Makovitsky showed no sign of surprise. Not for one moment did it occur to him that his cighty-hvo-ycar-old patient, who had had several serious strokes, was endangering his life by setting out on such a journey. He was an ideologist first, and a doctor afterward. What an honor

for him to assist the patriarch in his flight! Instead of enjoining Tolstoy to be calm and go back to bed, he gratefully prepared to follow him. The old man returned to his bedroom, dressed warmly, put on his boots, went back downstairs and knocked on Sasha's door. When she- saw him standing there in his peasant blouse with a candle in his hand and a businesslike expression on his face, she immediately understood. But neither did she make a move to restrain him. Her joy at his de cision, which would give her mother such a blow, silenced all her fears for her father's health.

"I'm leaving now," he told her. "Come help me pack."

She alerted Varvara Feokritova, and the two flowed up the stairs, light as shadows, to join Dr. Makovitsky in the study. Tolstoy quietly closed the doors to Sonya's room. Fortunately, she had gone back to sleep. But what if she woke up and came in and demanded cxplana tions? Straining to hear every sound, his hands trembling, Tolstoy himself tied up his bundles, showed Sasha what was to go in the trunk, urged his accomplices to move quietly and keep their voices down.

After half an hour, the preparations were still unfinished; he became impatient, announced that he could wait no longer, put on his heavy blue coat and brown wool cap and mittens and started off to the stable to order the horses harnessed. But it was so dark outdoors that he strayed off the path, collided with a tree trunk and fell onto his knees. He spent minutes hunting for his headgear, which had fallen off in the wet grass. Then, not having found it, he went back to the house bareheaded and distraught. Sasha gave him another cap and he set out again, carrying an clectric torch. A few minutes later, Makovitsky, Sasha and Varvara Feokritova followed him to the stable, carrying packages and dragging his trunk. Heavily laden, they struggled through the black mud; halfway, they saw the gleam of a lamp. It was Tolstoy coming back to light their way. Taking the lead, he flashed his pocket lamp on and off, which made the night seem even blacker.

In the stable, he tried to help Adrian Pavlovich, the coachman, harness the second horse to the shaft. He took the bit and held it up to the horse, but his hands were weak and refused to obey him; in despair, he sat down on his trunk and dropped his head.

"I'm sure we will be caught," he mumbled. "Then all will be lost. I won't be able to get away without a scandal."

At last, the coach was ready. He heaved himself inside with Makovitsky.

"Wait, Papa!" cried Sasha. "Let me kiss you!"

"Good-bye, darling," he said hurriedly. "We'll meet again soon."

He told the driver to start. 'Hie groom mounted a horse, holding a

lantern to show the way. The coach jolted along in the ruts; the night was chilly and damp; they circled the house, where Sonya was still sleeping. Dawn was breaking as they reached the village. There were lights in a few isbas; the first curls of smoke were rising skyward. Tolstoy was still afraid his wife would come after them and kept turning around to look. It was very cold and Dr. Makovitsky made him put on a second cap. "Where to go?" murmured Tolstoy. "Where to go, the farthest possible?" Dr. Makovitsky suggested Bessarabia, where they could stay with the Muscovite laborer Gusarov, a genuine Tolstoyan. But the trip would be long and tiring. The old man said nothing. He had told Sasha he would stop off to see his sister Marya first, at the Shamardino convent. Afterward, he would trust to inspiration, or circumstance.

At the Shchekino station they had to wait an hour and a half for a train. His fear that Sonya would catch him grew greater with every minute. Who would get there first, she or the locomotive? The locomotive won. He heaved a sigh of relief. He and Dr. Makovitsky went as far as Gorbachevo in second class, but there they had to change trains and they continued in third class. The car was filled with passengers, more than half of whom were smoking bad tobacco. The smell and the stuffiness of the car bothered him and he went out onto the rear platform, only to find five more smokers; finally he took refuge on the front platform, where he turned up his overcoat collar and leaned back on his walking stick, which was equipped with a folding seat. "What can Sofya Andreyevna be doing?" he muttered. "I pity her." A little later he added, "How good it is to be free!" The wind blasted across the platform. A stream of icy air whipped the old man's face. Cinders scared his eyes. It required all Dr. Makovitsky's urging and authority to bring him inside the car after three-quarters of an hour.

lie was soon identified by his fellow passengers: peasants, factory workers, a surveyor, a high-school girl . . . Flattering notoriety, which he forbade himself to enjoy. The surveyor drew him into a discussion of Henry George's single tax scheme, Darwinism, non-violcncc, science, education. After that, a muzhik said, "What you need, Father, is to get away from the affairs of this world, go into the monastery and labor to save your soul!" Tolstoy answered with a smile of complicity. Behind him, a worker began to sing, accompanying himself on the accordion. The train inched along. The old man's features were sharpened by fatigue; now and then his mind began to wander.

At last, at ten minutes before five, they readied Kozelsk, the closest station to Optina-Pustyn. Tolstoy immediately wrote two telegrams, one for Sasha and one for Chertkov, announcing his arrival: "Spending night at Optina. Shamardino tomorrow." Both were signed with the

code-name, Nikolayev. He also wrote a letter to Saslia, telling her about the trip and asking her to send him the books he had been reading (Montaigne's Essays, the second volume of The Brothers Karamazov, Une Vie by Maupassant), a pair of small scissors, some pencils and his dressing gown. As for the scene she must inevitably have with her mother, he gave her a piece of advice: "I beg you, my darling: few words, but be gentle and firm."

The travelers hired a carriage to the Optina monastery. The roads were full of potholes, the wind glacial, the sky black, the moon glim mering intermittently through the clouds; they had to ferry across a river. Dr. Makovitsky watched Tolstoy apprehensively. At the convent hostelry they were received by the head monk, an affable man with a flamboyant beard and a mane of red hair. A vast room with two beds, clean and well heated, was made ready for them. Tolstoy drank tea with honey but ate nothing, asked for a glass to hold his fountain pen during the night, wrote a long entry in his diary and, around ten in the evening, undressed for bed, worn out and happy. When Dr. Makovitsky moved to help him take off his boots, he growled:

"I wish to take care of myself!"

But he had difficulty pulling them off. As he struggled and puffed, bending double, he added:

"I want to live with the utmost simplicity, spend money parsimoniously . . ."⁸

'Ihen he stretched out and closed his eyes, thinking of those he had left behind in the old white house at the end of the birch drive.

At Yasnaya Polyana on that October 28, Sonya rose at eleven and, as soon as she was dressed, went to her husband's bedroom. Empty! Alarmed, she ran into the Remington room and asked Sasha:

"Where is Papa?"

"Gone," answered the girl drily.

"Where?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know? Has he gone for good?"

"He left a letter for you. Here."

Sonya jerked upright, snatched the letter out of her daughter's hand, tore open the envelope and read the first few lines, moaned, "My God, what is he doing to me?" and ran out into the garden. Sasha, Bulgakov, who had just arrived from Chertkov's, and a few servants rushed off in pursuit. In the distance they caught glimpses of her gray dress weaving between the trees. She was running toward the pond as hard as her old legs would carry her. When she reached the planks of the laundry-raft