Leo Tolstoy: The Later Years

BY

ERNEST J. SIMMONS

CHAPTERS XLIVLXIV

Foreword

Five years ago, after extensive research, Ernest J. Simmons began his two-volume life and appraisal of Russia’s great writer, Leo Tolstoy. In the first half of this biography, chapters of which were serialized in the Atlantic in 1945, he traced the gusty, exuberant career of the young Tolstoy. Leo was the fourth son of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman. Leo’s mother died before he was two; and he knew little of his good-natured but ineffectual father, who died when the boy was eight. Leo, his three brothers, and a sister were brought up by their aunts in a golden age on the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, with its thousands of acres and hundreds of serfs.

For the future novelist the road to wisdom lay through the valley of excess. Intensely passionate, vain, hypersensitive, Leo loved society and yearned to be comme il faut like his brother Sergei, but his coarse peasant features and his awkwardness did not make him popular with students and the well-bred girls of Kazan when he matriculated at the university there in 1844.

Young Tolstoy took pride in his physical strength. Studies interfered with his gymnastic exercises, and with sudden contempt he broke away from the university and returned to his estate, where for a time he played at being a bucolic philosopher and at reforming the serfs. But the serfs objected, and in the face of their recalcitrance the fleshpots of Moscow and Petersburg seemed more inviting.

He struggled against these temptations, mercilessly flagellating himself for weaknesses of the flesh. With sudden resolution he left the city wasteland and accompanied his Army brother, Nikolai, who was returning to his battery in the Caucasus. There, in the intervals of frontier life, Leo found time to write his first book. Childhood, which was widely acclaimed on its publication in Petersburg. But in the rough-and-tumble life of the Army his spiritual resolution was as hard as ever to sustain.

During the Crimean War, Leo received a commission in the artillery and fought gallantly at Sevastopol. He wrote a series of Sevastopol Tales, and on his return to Petersburg after the war he was welcomed as a literary hero by Turgenev and other contributors to the Contemporary magazine. But Leo was too strident to fit with ease in a literary coterie.

Again Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana with reforms in mind. With great zeal he plunged into the work of educat - ing peasant children. But in 1861, as he approached his thirty-third birthday, he reached the point in his struggle between spiritual perfection and material happiness when neither education nor work nor literature could satisfy the urge within him. In September, 1862, after a stormy courtship, he married Sonya Bers, the eighteen-vear-old daughter of a childhood playmate. In the next fifteen years, Sonya bore him nine children, and Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karening.

In 1876 he turned again to the spiritual quest from which he had been diverted during his fifteen years of happy marriage. Tolstoy’s friends and admirers were shocked when he abandoned literature for religion, and his family resented his efforts to encourage the Christian life by personal example. Confession and What I Believe describe his religious struggle and the essence of his new faith. In What Then Must We Do? he stated the case of the poor against the rich, and predicted a “workers’ revolution.”

LEO TOLSTOY: THE LATER YEARS

by ERNEST J. SIMMONS

44

TOLSTOY’S fame abroad had already begun to bring foreign newspaper men to Yasnaya Polyana. Knowing his hostility to both the government and the Church, the newsmen no doubt hoped for some revealing copy about the Russian enigma. Besides, Tolstoy had now definitely become news for all the world.

But apart from foreigners and old friends like Strakhov and Fet, the most numerous visitors during 1890-1891, much to Sonya’s disgust, were Tolstoy’s followers. “The dark ones have arrived,” runs one entry in her diary (December 17, 1890). “There is stupid Popov, an Oriental-looking, lazy, weak fellow; and stupid, fat Khokhlov, a merchant. And these are disciples of the great man! The wretched spawn of human society, chatterers to no purpose, idlers without breeding.”

The heir apparent of the kingdom of the “dark people,” Chertkov, also visited in the winter of 1890. In sharing their spiritual experiences and in conducting the affairs of the new faith, personal meetings of Tolstoy and Chertkov were less essential, for they maintained and even increased their voluminous correspondence over 1890-1891.

Hardly a work was undertaken by Tolstoy without writing to Chertkov about it, keeping him posted by mail on progress made, and sometimes sending him early manuscript drafts. Anything that came from Tolstoy’s pen, however trifling, had now become sacred for Chertkov. At times he referred to Tolstoy in his letters as if he were already dead and among the immortals. In 1889 he had begun a systematic collection of all of Tolstoy’s thoughts, which he referred to as his “Vault.” He and several Tolstoyans worked at this task, selecting and arranging the thoughts under subject headings with the intention of publishing a work in many volumes. There was little friction now to disturb the harmonious business and spiritual relations between them.

Towards the end of 1890 exaggerated stories had appeared in the press of the gay holiday festivities at Yasnaya Polyana and of a ball there in which Tolstoy, advocate of the simple life, had danced, dressed in a frock coat. Incredulous letters from the faithful soon began to arrive. His exasperation over this state of affairs was primarily directed against Sonya and was expressed in his aloofness from the family and in his frequent cold impersonal treatment of her.

As usual, Tolstoy’s most intimate thoughts on his tribulations were set down in his diary. In June, 1890, he wrote: “. . . I live tied to a wife’s petticoat and subservient to her, leading, with all the children, a dirty, despicable existence, which they all lyingly excuse by the fact that I cannot transgress love.” His sincerity in wishing to live fully the life he preached can hardly be doubted, nor can his belief that his family prevented him from doing this. Despite the charges of his wife, he felt keenly his responsibilities to his family. His dilemma was to repudiate those responsibilities and live the life he yearned after, or accept the responsibilities and repudiate his own life of the spirit. His situation was further complicated by the belief that his family’s way of life was morally wrong and would prove harmful to them, and that he ought therefore to do his utmost to save them, not by exercising authority, but by his own example. Finally, he always felt that to leave his family in order to live his own life would amount to evading a moral problem he ought to solve. In this situation his efforts amounted to a compromise, little understood by his family, and entirely misunderstood by the public. He endeavored to approach closer and closer to his ideal of life in an atmosphere that was quite alien and unsympathetic to it.

For some time Tolstoy had refused to have anything to do with his property, for he considered it an evil. He now decided that the idleness and moral sickness of his family were in part at least caused by wealth. And this wealth ultimately came from him. In the public press he was being called a “pharisee,” and propertyless Tolstoyans living thriftily in communes wondered why the master remained the possessor of a large estate. To deprive himself and his family entirely of the property would have fulfilled the letter of his convictions, and this was what he wished to do. Had he attempted such a solution, however, he knew that his wife would appeal to the government, which would be only too eager to declare him incapable of managing his affairs. He then tried to persuade Sonya to rid him of this evil by taking over all his property in full ownership. “So you wish to hand over that evil to me, the creature nearest to you,” she said in tears. “I do not want it and I shall take nothing.” His ultimate decision was a compromise — to rid himself of the property by dividing it among his wife and children, just as though he were dead.

This decision was hastened by an unhappy event in the winter of 1890. The bailiff of Yasnaya Polyana caught several peasants felling trees; they were arrested, sentenced to six weeks in jail, and fined. They had come to Sonya to plead for a pardon, but she refused to do anything for them. The incident shocked Tolstoy—here were peasants being punished for taking from him what he regarded as theirs and as necessary for their existence.

After this incident steps were soon taken to bring about Tolstoy’s compromise decision to divide his estate among the family. There was no strong opposition to this solution. The official act did not become effective until September 28, 1892. The total evaluation of the property was 580,000 rubles (about $290,000) and it was divided into ten equal parts to be distributed by lot between Sonya and her nine children. Although Masha refused to take her portion (part interest in Yasnaya Polyana and a money allotment), her mother kept it in trust for

45

AOLSTOY fully realized that to surrender the ownership of his estate was not a final solution of his dilemma. The struggle between truth and the material welfare of the family continued. A still more vexatious problem, and one that had troubled him for a long time, was the income from his writings. In particular, it pained him to think that the works produced since his change of faith, containing the very thoughts by which he lived, should be sold for money, which in turn was used to support and facilitate the harmful way his family lived. Since he had already given Sonya the right to publish his works written before his religious change, he felt at the time that he could not retract this permission.

Sonya vigorously opposed this latest “madness” of her husband. The income from his writing was considerable and the expenses of the family were constantly growing. Again stormy scenes, recriminations, weepings, and reconciliations. But he insisted, and on September 16, 1891, the announcement appeared in the newspapers as a letter to the editor. In it Tolstoy gave free permission, to all desiring to do so, to publish in Russia and abroad, in Russian and in translation, and also to perform on the stage, all his works written since 1881; and he gave the same permission for any of his works appearing in the future. Although she agreed, Sonya never became reconciled to this step, and even after her husband’s death she complained against this act which had deprived a numerous and not rich family of its rightful income.

The effort to defend the welfare of her children against what she considered the ruinous demands of their father’s faith was only one phase of the emotional struggle that had long been going on between husband and wife. The family quarrels of 1890— 1891 aggravated Sonya’s growing hysteria, and no doubt another contributory cause was her physiological condition — her approaching “critical age.” In these circumstances, her husband’s aloofness was regarded by Sonya as a deliberate desire on his part to cast her aside as of no further use. With the lesson of The Kreutzer Sonata ever in her mind, she now understood all his attempts at intimacy as sheer physical lust. Her attitude towards him fluctuated between an overpowering desire for pure loving relations and a positive dislike.

In the summer of 1891 Sonya had already begun to plan for a winter in Moscow. It was time for Mikhail and Andrei to enter a Gymnasium, and Tanya, she felt, would never make a match in the country.

Before the time of departure, however, there were rumors of an approaching famine because of crop failures in central and southeastern Russia. Millions of peasants faced starvation. In a letter in July to his friend Leskov, who sought advice on what to do to aid the famine sufferers, Tolstoy wrote in part: “A good deed does not consist merely of feeding the hungry with bread, but of loving both the hungry and the satisfied. For it is more important to love than to feed, because one may feed and not love, but it is impossible to love and not to feed.” Yet he concluded by urging Leskov, a distinguished author, to write something that would touch the hearts of the rich and obtain their aid for the faminestricken.

Tolstoy visited his brother Sergei at Pirogovo on the edge of one of the famine districts towards the end of September, and shortly thereafter he made several other inspection tours. The conditions of the starving, disease-ridden peasants appalled him. During his travels he met I. I. Rayevski, a Tula official and friend, whom he advised to set up free food kitchens in the villages. Rayevski in turn invited him to settle at his estate, Begichevka, in the Ryazan Province, and help him organize relief in the surrounding regions. Tolstoy agreed.

The news came as a shock to Sonya. It had been such an effort to win his consent to go to Moscow for the winter; now he decided to spend it in a remote district a hundred miles from Yasnaya Polyana, and with his two oldest daughters. What would become of his indigestion and of the girls living in that wilderness? And she would be all alone in Moscow with the young children. He was even asking her for money to help the starving after giving away all his copyrights. Her first reaction was to oppose the whole undertaking.

But the cause was a humane one. Sonya’s better instincts prevailed. She finally consented, and her husband compromised by agreeing to spend some time in the city. Sonya went to Moscow with the young children, and on October 26 Tolstoy, with his two daughters Tanya and Masha, and his niece, Vera Kuzminski, set out for the village of Begichevka in Ryazan. He was to spend a good deal of the next two years there in humanitarian work that endeared him to the Russian people.

Before Tolstoy busied himself with the matter, the famine had remained a kind of state secret. The government did not desire to advertise the country’s misery at home or abroad. At a gathering, Alexander III replied to a question on the existence of a famine: “In Russia there is no famine, but there are localities suffering from a failure of crops.” And “failure of crops” quickly replaced “famine" in the newspapers. To Tolstoy it was a famine, and he persisted in using the word in his discussions of the subject. In fact, it was partly through his publicizing it that the Russian famine of 1891-1892 became known to the world. His humanitarian efforts strangely increased the hostility of the government, Church, and reactionary individuals.

On the basis of detailed information collected by Rayevski in the district that lay towards the southern part of the provinces of Tula and Ryazan, Tolstoy and Rayevski began to organize free food kitchens. They selected the centrally located hut of one of the poorest families in a village and offered to supply the householder with his food if he would bake bread and cook for the old, the weak, and the children up to the number of thirty or forty persons. Then provisions of flour, bran, potatoes, cabbage, beets, peas, lentils, oatmeal, and salt were collected. If one kitchen did not suffice in a village, a second was set up. A list was made of people who ought to be fed, and strict supervision was maintained over those who were admitted to the kitchens and over the quality of the food.

Within a month thirty kitchens were opened in twenty villages, and fifteen hundred people were receiving two meals daily. Although no meat was served, a special effort was made to keep the diet reasonably varied and yet inexpensive. This came as a surprise to the peasants, who firmly believed that rye bread was the most appetizing, wholesome, and the cheapest form of food. By serving bread in smaller quantities and accompanying it with dishes such as cabbage soup, porridge, potatoes, peas, and millet broth, it was possible to provide a cheaper meal than by serving bread alone in necessarily larger quantities.

With the varied menus, a peasant could be fed for an average of seventy-five cents a month, but on a straight diet of bread it would cost a dollar and twelve cents a month. The peasants were loud in their praise of the kitchen diet, and declared that they had never eaten better food.

As the winter came on, the increasing misery of the peasants and the widening of the famine belt doubled Tolstoy’s anxiety. His was only one small district. Reports of famine conditions were coming in from other regions. His two oldest sons, Sergei and Ilya, were organizing relief in Tula Province, and young Leo had gone to Samara to set up kitchens. Above all, large sums of money were needed to buy up quantities of food for distribution. At this juncture unexpected aid came from Sonya.

46

SHORTLY after her arrival in Moscow, Sonya’s attitude towards the relief work of the family changed, despite her chagrin at being left alone with the younger children in the city. She wrote her husband on November 1: “I am now entirely reconciled to your activities and I am in sympathy with them.”

Sonya quickly found something to do. She wrote a letter to the editor of the Russian Gazette, a letter that her husband might have been proud of, and which seemed to follow his advice to Leskov to write something that would “touch the hearts of the rich.” With unconscious art she described the efforts of her family, quoted a passage from a letter of her daughter Tanya about the unbelievable conditions that existed in the famine district, and concluded with a stirring appeal for help. The letter was published. Gifts of money, linen, clothes, and provisions came pouring in. Within a few weeks she collected a sum amounting to over twelve thousand rubles.

The letter had been reproduced in all the Russian newspapers, translations appeared in the European and American press, and inquiries and gifts came from abroad. Sonya was in her element talking with tearful donors and listing contributions. Soon she was sending money and materials to her husband and sons, and she busied herself buying up large quantities of foodstuffs for the hungry. Sonya had become a very important part of the relief work of the Tolstoy family.

From the outset Tolstoy himself had fully realized the need of arousing the public. The conspiracy of silence fostered by the government had left the cities partly unaware of the critical situation, and urban dwellers who had some knowledge of it were peculiarly apathetic. As early as September he had sent one article on the famine to a magazine. Learning at the end of November that his article had been definitely rejected by the censors, he instructed Sonya to send copies to English, French, and Danish admirers for translation and publication in their countries. He hoped by this means to bring the article to the attention of Russian newspapers and thus force them to reproduce it.

A translation of the article, with deletions permitted by the author, appeared in the Daily Telegraph in London on January 26. Eight days later the “Moscow rats,” as Granny called them, devoted the lead article of the reactionary Moscow Gazette to Tolstoy, a violent attack consisting of an extensive excerpt from his article in the Daily Telegraph, translated back into Russian, accompanied by a commentary on the author and his purpose. In one place the commentary declared: “The letters [Tolstoy’s article was in the form of letters] of Count Tolstoy do not need a commentary: they are frank propaganda for the overthrow of the whole social and economic structure of the world, which, with a most understandable purpose, the Count thinks of in terms of Russia alone. The Count’s propaganda is propaganda of the most unbridled socialism, before which even our underground propaganda pales.” Tolstoy’s device had achieved its purpose, but in a manner he did not expect and did not wish.

This attack at once created a public furor. Government and Church circles in Moscow and Petersburg evinced alarm, and high society buzzed with excitement and with a breathless sense of something terrible impending. Conservatives were clatedat last, Tolstoy, the revolutionist, unmasked; the faithful were depressed. Newspapers were categorically forbidden to reprint anything in the Moscow Gazette article or to comment on it. The fantastic price of twenty-five rubles was offered for a copy of the issue containing the article.

Of course, the person most alarmed was Sonya. When the safety of the family was threatened, she lost all sense of perspective and was capable of going to any extreme to protect her nest. Her sympathies were naturally on the side of the authorities and high society, and now, fearing the arrest of her husband, she was quite wiling to compromise him by protesting publicly, if need be, his usefulness to the government and his loyalty to the Emperor at a time when she knew he was writing a book — The Kingdom of God Is Within You — that condemned all governments.

Sonya, however, had genuine cause for alarm. What she did not know at the time was that the Minister of the Interior, I. N. Durnovo, had sent a report to the Emperor on the account in the Moscow Gazette. He wrote that the contents of Tolstoy’s article “must be considered tantamount to a most shocking revolutionary proclamation,” and since this might cause an “undesirable disturbance in certain minds,” he advised that Count Tolstoy in the future should be forbidden to publish in the foreign press any article directed against the government. If Tolstoy refused to agree, the Minister concluded, “then unfortunately it will be necessary to take other means to prevent the harmful consequences of such propaganda.” Alexander III scribbled on the report: “No action at this time.”

Nevertheless, to Sonya came dark rumors that she could not fail to take seriously. Her sister Tanya in Petersburg had access to government circles through her husband, and shortly after the newspaper article, she wrote Sonya: “ Did you know that the Council of Ministers had met and that they had already decided to propose exile abroad, but the Emperor stopped it in time?”

That the danger of arrest was real may be gathered from Granny’s account of the situation. When she heard the rumor that the Minister of the Interior designed to incarcerate Tolstoy in the dread dungeons of Suzdal Monastery, that graveyard of forgotten victims of the Church, she at once took action, resolved, she said, “to use all my influence to save him [Tolstoy].”A visit to the Minister brought no results; he was being deluged with denunciations of Tolstoy, he protested, and could no longer keep the matter from the Emperor. Granny next sought an audience with Alexander III. He graciously called on her instead. She immediately came to the point.

“ In a few days a report will be made to you about shutting up in a monastery the greatest genius in Russia.”

“Tolstoy?” he tersely remarked.

“You have guessed it, Sire,”she answered.

“Does that mean he is plotting against my life?” the Emperor asked.

At this Granny inwardly rejoiced, for she realized that the Emperor would not accept the severe punishment suggested by the Minister for the offense that he would charge against Tolstoy. Such turned out to be the case, and she concluded her account by saying that the Emperor answered the report of the Minister by firmly declaring: “I ask you not to touch Tolstoy. I have no intention of making a martyr out of him and thus earning for myself universal indignation. If he is at fault, then so much the worse for him.”

47

MEANWHILE aid from abroad for the famine sufferers increased. Three shiploads of provisions were sent from the United States, and within two months American financial contributions reached the total of some $500,000; in England a special committee was set up to raise funds, and a part of the money was specifically allocated for the use of Tolstoy; and an independent effort of the English Quakers resulted in a contribution of £26,000. The famine, partly through the efforts of Tolstoy, had become world news, and the Russian government could no longer ignore or soft-pedal it. The government now discreetly encouraged private and public aid, and it issued an order that the County Councils were to assist peasants who deserved help but to withhold it from those who refused any work offered them. A kind of " boondoggling” sprang up, and some of the peasants almost preferred to starve than perform the nonsensical jobs invented for them.

With his understanding of peasant psychology and of their conditions of life, Tolstoy avoided the mistakes of the County Councils in the task of relief. It was not merely the immediate question of the famine; so many of these peasants were constantly undernourished and their diet hopelessly unvaried. They were also in rags: he was shocked at the sight of the children of a widow going around in the cold almost naked. They had little fuel to warm themselves in their damp, wretched, one-room huts, in which the whole family and the livestock lived in the winter. He noted that they literally got inside the ovens of their stoves to keep warm.

Then there were drunkenness and laziness to combat, the ignorant opposition to improvements to overcome, and the need to explain, if not justify, the frustrations of those peasants who aspired to a better life. In the face of these conditions, he clearly realized that at best all his efforts amounted to a compromise, and he told his co-workers in relief that either the peasants would remain in a state of slavery or else they would revolt, and he prophetically declared that revolt was the more likely.

Tolstoy’s guiding principles in his relief activities were two: to provide work for those capable of working, in order that the peasant economy should not break down entirely, and through his kitchens to feed the starving, young and old, the weak and the sick. Contrary to the fumbling efforts of government officials, however, he maintained that the work provided should be the kind that the peasants were used to, that the proper conditions for such work should be maintained, and when required, materials should be furnished.

On the whole, Tolstoy achieved a huge measure of success in abiding by these principles. By March, 1892, he and his helpers had organized 187 kitchens in four districts, which fed daily some ten thousand people. Huge quantities of wood for fuel had been bought and distributed. Large quantities of flax and bast were given free to the peasants for the manufacture of sacking and shoes. Separate kitchens were set up for children from one to three years of age, in which special nutritious foods were provided. Seed was distributed in preparation for the spring sowing. Clothes and material for making clothes were given out to the needy. A few schools were set up in villages and many small sums of money were supplied as gifts to individuals to take care of debts, funerals, the cost of books, and so on. It was a fine record of achievement for the less than six months of effort.

Throughout most of the winter and spring of 1892 Tolstoy remained at Begichevka to direct the work of relief. He returned to Moscow during this period for several short visits, at the insistence of his wife. Sonya worried over him and her two daughters, and with reason, for the famine district was ridden with disease. A surprising improvement in the relations between husband and wife may be observed in their correspondence during these months. The reason is obvious. Sonya had identified herself with her husband’s work, and her own considerable efforts in raising funds and buying provisions contributed to the success of his enterprise. Here she was closely joined with him in mutual service to others — a Christian ideal of which he had often dreamed.

48

SUCH visits to the city during the relief work were as brief as Tolstoy could make them. Back at his “general staff headquarters,” as the Rayevski house came to be called, he would plunge into manifold activities. Much of his time was spent in listening to individual petitions of peasants—125 separate requests, he reckoned, were made on a single day. Many were heart-rending. A peasant and his young son kneeled before him and begged for aid. Tolstoy himself kneeled and with tears in his eyes beseeched this poor muzhik, beaten by want, not to humble himself in this fashion. Another petitioner, a peasant woman, implored him not to let her daughter take food at the kitchen. Surprised, he finally drew from her that she feared her child would lose her soul to the devil if she received food from Antichrist. This belief was one of the major annoyances that Tolstoy had to contend with in his relief work. The Church grew alarmed over his activities among the peasants in the famine district, simply because he was Tolstoy.

Under the impetus of the priests, a whole folklore grew up in the region about Tolstoy as Antichrist. “What kind of a Count is this, dressed in peasant fashion, going about the huts?" one of the inhabitants demanded. “Has he no shame! Always on foot, or riding about on horseback in storm and blizzard! He’s not a human being, he’s Antichrist! Where does he get such power? He merely waves one arm — money pours down like rain! He waves the other — a cart with bread rolls right up to him! The bread he gives us comes from the devil ... !” Tolstoy told with some humor that upon entering one of the villages, a youngster ran after him all the way down the road, shouting: “Antichrist! Antichrist!”

In general, however, the peasants were not deeply influenced by the whisperings of their priests. They were starving and Tolstoy gave them good food, and they blessed him for it. The devotion of the peasants to Tolstoy was openly manifested when a government commission for aid in the famine halted at Begichevka. The rumor quickly spread that this imposing, uniformed group intended to arrest Tolstoy. A crowd of angry peasants immediately gathered about the Rayevski house, determined to prevent the arrest, and they were dispersed only with difficulty. When he left Begichevka at the beginning of the harvest, the touching farewell of the grateful peasants, many of whom accompanied him along the road, convinced him that they appreciated his efforts.

In July, 1892, Tolstoy prepared for the press what he hoped would be a final accounting of his relief efforts. In all he had set up 246 kitchens feeding 13,000 people daily, and 124 kitchens for children, feeding 3000 daily. Up to April of that year, the contributions that had come to him personally had amounted to 141,000 rubles. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana, feeling weary but curiously empty once he had relieved himself of the huge responsibilities he had shouldered.

This whole experience had morally wrenched Tolstoy. At the outset of his relief work he wrote to Granny that the months spent in feeding the hungry had been the happiest of his life.

But it was not in Tolstoy’s nature to be satisfied with this kind of positive accomplishment. He was partly convinced that what he was doing was wrong; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he disapproved of the way that circumstances obliged him to feed the hungry. Had he not long since taken a stand against private charity? And here he himself was distributing the vomit thrown up by the rich, as he expressed it, in order to save the starving. Had he not condemned charity as corroding and debasing the moral nature of the poor? The more you give them, the less they will work, and the less they work, the greater will be their need.

With a genuine sense of guilt, he felt it necessary to write disciples and friends to explain that he knew what he was doing was morally wrong and actually harmful to the very peasants he desired to help. After all, he was not a saint, he declared. No, he was only a weak man. The discord between his words and acts might seem to the unthinking a lie or a hypocrisy, but in reality it was only a sign ot weakness. What he was trying to be, he pleaded, was a good man, a worthy servant of God. And nearly always these letters of self-condemnation concluded with the firm statement that the starving must be fed, and he could not do otherwise than help.

The cold theory that the only way famines could be ended forever was for the well-to-do to change their lives, draw nearer to the common people, and return to them what they had taken from them, he confined to his articles; the hungry he fed by taking money from the well-to-do. With all his doubts, Tolstoy could not deny his nature.

49

FAME, insatiable fame, that is what he has always striven for and what he will continue to strive for.” This was a theme that Sonya frequently harped upon now in her more hostile moods towards her husband. Tolstoy would have frankly admitted to the temptation of fame, but it. was a devil that he constantly guarded himself against. In letters to friends during the famine relief work, he decried the public praise accorded his efforts. Whether he liked it or not, however, he had become a public, in fact an international, celebrity. One after the other the books and articles forbidden by the censor appeared promptly in many foreign countries, both in Russian and in translation, and often copies found their way back to his native land by illegal means. Admirers pointed to him as not only the conscience of Russia, but the conscience of the world.

At the beginning of January, 1894, the annual conference of Russian scientists took place in Moscow. Young Zinger, son of the distinguished mathematician, gave Tolstoy an interesting account of the learned papers that had been read, and he urged him to attend a session the next day, when the elder Zinger, a good friend of the Tolstoys, would talk on geometry.

Tolstoy appeared at the meeting with his daughter Masha, and young Zinger ushered him through a side entrance to a room off the platform. Unable to hear the speech clearly, he edged onto the platform. He was recognized at once and a murmur ran through the whole audience. Zinger concluded his address with much difficulty, and at the end the distinguished scientist and chairman of the conference, K. A. Timiryazey, conducted Tolstoy to a place beside him on the platform. There he sat in his characteristic peasant blouse among the learned gentlemen in their frock coats. Bedlam broke loose in the audience and the cry rose: “Hurrah for Tolstoy, hurrah!” The roar grew louder and louder, and at last, frowning and obviously embarrassed, he was obliged to stand and acknowledge the tribute.

“My God, what are you doing to our old gentleman! Aren’t you ashamed!” exclaimed Masha, standing at the end of the hall, shutting her eyes and holding her hands over her ears. “It’s Leo Nikolayevich’s own fault,”shouted a friendly scientist at her side. “Why does he appear so rarely in public? Then you’ll agree, Marya Lvovna, that there is something fine in all this. Is it not true?” She nodded agreement.

Any satisfaction Tolstoy may have obtained from such recognition was mingled with sadness over the persecution now being suffered by his followers. From 1893 both Church and government officials began to intensify their activities against Tolstoyans and others who had been only slightly influenced by his teachings. The refusal of army service was the chief offense in the eyes of the authorities, for this represented a potential danger to a great military power. But pretexts for persecution were not hard to find among government officials, who, afraid of making a martyr out of the internationally famous teacher, tried to reach him through his obscure pupils. The police were content now to keep the master under strict surveillance. Tolstoy deliberately made a friend of one of the police spies sent to watch him during the summer of 1894 at Yasnaya Polyana, and his arguments reduced the agent to repentance and to abandoning his sleuthing.

The government’s intensification of its persecution of Tolstoy’s followers may be attributed in part to the publication of his highly significant book, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which first appeared in a Russian edition in Berlin at the beginning of January, 1894. He had started it four years before, intending to write merely an article, but as the work assumed greater importance in his eyes, it took on the proportions of a full-length book. Of course there was no hope of its being published in Russia. Strakhov wrote Tolstoy that the censor of foreign books declared, when The Kingdom of God had been submitted to him in a French translation, that this was the most harmful of all books that he had ever had an occasion to ban.

In this remarkable work Tolstoy carried his Christian anarchism to its ultimate development. The core of the book dealt with his theory of nonresistance to evil, which he now applied to governments. He reached the conclusion that they were all essentially immoral and existed for the advantage of the rich and powerful, persecuting the masses of mankind through their use of force in wars, in maintaining prisons, and in collecting taxes.

Tolstoy devoted much of the first part of the book to a consideration of criticisms of the doctrine of nonresistance to evil, which he had first advocated in What I Believe (1884), while at the same time he paid tribute to those who had preceded him in publicly professing this belief. Many of these criticisms came from foreign countries, but some belonged to native clerical and lay writers, although What I Believe had been officially banned in Russia. With some humor he pointed out that even the government encouraged the refutation of a book supposed to be unknown, and arguments against it were set as themes for theological essays in the academies.

All the critics, he maintained, had ignored the approach of What I Believe — Christ’s teaching as a philosophical, moral, and social doctrine-and had persisted in regarding Christ solely as the founder of a religion of worship and personal salvation. And further, Tolstoy declared, the critics accused him of preaching moral perfection, whereas he had made it clear that every condition, according to Christ’s teaching, is merely a stage on the path towards unattainable inward and outward perfection and is therefore of no significance itself; blessedness lies only in progress towards perfection.

He then condemned Christian churches of all denominations for perverting the true teaching of Christ in order to maintain their power over the masses upon whom their economic existence depended. Nor did he accept the conviction of many intellectuals of that time that the real import of Christ’s teaching rested in its supposed advocacy of service to all humanity. Christian teaching, said Tolstoy, had nothing in common with socialists or communists or any preachers of the universal brotherhood of man which was based on the advantageousness of such a brotherhood. For the true Christian teaching had a firm and clear basis in the individual human soul, while love of humanity was only a theoretical deduction from analogy.

Tolstoy also considered the contradictions that exist between our life and our Christian consciousness. He asserted that the chief reason for all the misunderstandings was the belief that Christ’s teaching could be accepted without changing our

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THE remainder of The Kingdom of God was concerned with an examination of the powers and activities of governments that enable them to prevent the masses of mankind from resolving, in favor of Christ’s teaching, the contradiction that exists between their present life and their Christian consciousness. Force or violence he singled out as the chief instrument that governments employ to maintain themselves in power and the people in subjection to the un-Christian life thrust upon them. Every manifestation of governmental force was treated, but most extensively military conscription and war. The result was one of the most scathing denunciations of war ever written.

But Tolstoy did not accept revolution as a way out. The violence of revolution he abhorred, and history had taught him that in such forcible changes of government the masses are the sufferers and under the new government oppression in no way lessens but sometimes even increases. There is a further danger in revolution, he declared. The one sphere of human life on which governmental power does not now encroach, — the domestic, economic sphere, — “thanks to the efforts of communists and socialists, is being gradually encroached upon, so that labor and recreation, housing, dress, and food will all (if the hopes of the reformers are fulfilled) gradually be prescribed and allotted by the governments.”

The only escape from the violence and oppression of governments, Tolstoy concluded, was for all mankind to live according to the true precepts of Christ. Man must understand that “his life does not belong to himself or his family or the state but to Him who sent him into the world, and that he must therefore fulfill not the law of his personality or family or state, but the infinite law of Him from Whom he has come — and he will feel himself absolutely free from all human authorities and will even cease to regard them as able to trammel anyone.”

Tolstoy did not hesitate to blueprint the way of salvation for the man aroused to an understanding of true Christianity. His first precept was to remember that the only guide for a Christian’s actions is to be found in the divine principle that dwells within him, which in no sense can be checked or governed by anything else. Man must not suppose that the amelioration of life would come about, as the socialists preached, by some spontaneous, violent reconstruction of society. The freedom of all men could be brought about only by the liberation of individuals separately.

Every man, hearkening to the dictates of his conscience and abiding by the teaching of Christ, must quietly refuse to serve the government in any way: he must refuse to take an oath, to pay taxes, or to serve in the army. If he is persecuted for thus violating the law, he must not oppose violence by force. In short, Tolstoy anticipated a growing movement of civil disobedience based on the principle of nonresistance to evil, which he was convinced would eventually undermine the whole structure of government. He believed that such a forward movement of humanity towards a more conscious assimilation of the Christian conception of life already existed. This moral progress, he felt, ultimately would influence public opinion, and once such an informed public opinion gained the ascendancy, it would transform all the activity of men and bring it into accord with Christian consciousness. Then truly would the kingdom of God on earth be achieved by every man first realizing that the Kingdom was within himself.

It is impossible in a brief analysis to suggest the persuasiveness of Tolstoy’s closely reasoned argument, which runs to almost five hundred pages. There is hardly any refutation of the many issues he raised that he himself did not anticipate. The fault he committed in all his didactic works, that of generalizing on the basis of special conditions that existed in Russia, is everywhere in evidence in this book. There was a manifest unfairness in his failure to give credit to the democratic progress of governments of Western Europe and America, although he bluntly declared that the only difference between a despotic government and the republics of France and America was that, in the former, power was concentrated in the hands of a small number of oppressors and the violence was cruder, whereas in the latter, power was divided among a larger number of oppressors and was expressed less crudely. The movement today among one or two of the most democratic governments to establish peacetime military conscription would have been regarded by Tolstoy as proof positive of his contention that they have no more essential regard for Christian conscience than the most autocratic governments.

In his arraignment of the abuses of modern governments — mere Genghis Khans with telegraph wires, he described them, using a phrase of Herzen — and in his condemnation of violence and the folly of war, he struck responsive chords all over the world and exercised a tremendous influence on various reform movements. He saw clearly that the whole history of the last two thousand years had consisted essentially of an alteration of relations between the moral development of the masses and the demoralization of governments. He placed his faith in this moral development of the masses as a final answer to the universal oppression of the many by the few. Progressive forces today tend to seek an answer in the organized political and material development of the masses. Tolstoy’s critical thought directed against nineteenth-century political, economic, and social institutions was entirely in the tradition of progressive critical thought that came after him. His extreme views on the complete abolition of property, the outlawing of war, the establishment of universal peace, and the economic self-sufficiency of the masses have been reflected later in the more temperate thinking on the need of public ownership of utilities, international disarmament, world peace through a United Nations, and universal economic democracy.

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AT the conclusion of the famine relief work there also ended the happy and contented feeling in husband and wife that had resulted from their mutual efforts in this cause. During 1894 nothing occurred to divert the tense undercurrent of unpleasant relations. Sonya lived in the fast-fading happiness of their early married life, her husband in the present family existence, which prevented him from serving God as he wished. With masculine unfairness he posed the problem to himself in his diary: he wrote that if the views of husband and wife on the world and life did not agree, then it was necessary for the “one who thought less to submit to the one who thought more. How happy I would be to submit to Sonya, but this is really as impossible as for a goose to climb back into its own egg. She ought to submit, but she does not want to — there is no intelligence, no humility, and no love.”

Throughout January and most of February of 1895 criticisms of her husband appeared in Sonya’s diary with increasing frequency, obviously leading up to another of her hysterical outbursts. The immediate cause of it all was the publication of Master and Man, a brilliant short story, the first purely artistic work Tolstoy had written in several years. Three years before, the attractive editor of the Northern Messenger, Lyubov Gurevich, — “that scheming, half-Jewess,” as Sonya called her, — had visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. He had liked her and had agreed to give her something for her magazine. When he finished Master and Man, he instructed Strakhov to submit it to the Northern Messenger for publication, of course not taking any money for the story. Sonya wanted it for a supplement to the thirteenth volume of her edition. Tolstoy agreed to give her the story, and he also intended to give it to the Intermediary for separate publication. But her haste to obtain a copy of the manuscript so that she might publish it before or at least simultaneously with the others angered him.

One evening harsh words were exchanged on this subject, and in a fury Tolstoy ran up to his room, declaring that he would leave the house forever. The thought flashed through Sonya’s mind that he wanted to abandon her for Lyubov Gurevich. Determined to leave the house before him, she dashed out into the snow-covered street, although she was clad only in slippers and a dressing gown. With a dressing gown thrown over his drawers and waistcoat, Tolstoy ran after her, begging her to return. She kept screaming: “Let them take me to the police station or a lunatic asylum!” He finally managed to drag her back home.

The next day the quarrel broke out again, and she left the house, determined to lose herself in the woods or in the Sparrow Hills outside of Moscow and freeze to death, like the master in the story that had caused all this anguish. Masha followed and succeeded in persuading her mother to return. Another attempt two days later to run away was frustrated by the children. The immediate result of these adventures in the freezing, snowy streets was a severe cold. As she lay ill in her room, weeping bitterly, her husband entered, knelt down, and asked her forgiveness. “If only a drop of the love that was in him then could always remain, I might still be happy,” she wrote. Calm descended on the household once again, and Master and Man was given to Sonya for her edition. She ended the account of this whole painful incident in her diary by writing: “I’m correcting the proof with joy in my heart and perceive with emotion the artistic greatness of the work. At times my eyes fill with tears of happiness over it.”

Two days later (February 23) Sonya set down the following brief entry: “My dear Vanichka died at 11 o’clock at night. My God! to think that I am still alive!” More than two years passed before she resumed her diary.

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VANICHKA, the last child of the Tolstoys, died at the age of seven from scarlet fever. According to many accounts, he was a most unusual youngster. Of all the children he looked most like his father: he had the same bright, pensive eyes and the same earnest spirit. His whole appearance conveyed the impression of transparency. The thin little body, pale face, and long curly hair were offset by a radiant nature. His extraordinary sensitivity recalled this quality in Tolstoy as a child. Vanichka was always anxious for everyone’s happiness, and he expressed his joy by freely giving away his prized possessions. With an understanding exceptional for his tender years, he would surprise grownups by talking quite intelligently on abstract and spiritual themes. All who came in contact with him were charmed by his joyous nature, a fact reflected in the many tributes sent to the family at his death. He was obviously his parents’ favorite.

Sonya’s grief over the death of this child drove her to the edge of madness. Her extreme devotion seemed psychologically unnatural in the light of the many children she had borne and raised. After quarrels with the older children or her husband, she took refuge in her affection for Vanichka, an affection that he always responded to with almost mature understanding and sympathy. There had hardly been an entry in her diary or a letter to her husband over the last few years in which her endless concern for Vanichka had not been expressed. And time and again she sounded a note of foreboding that he would be taken from her, not simply because of his uncertain health, but because of her superstitious fear that so exceptional a child must inevitably die young.

Sonya’s extreme anguish intensified her husband’s grief. But quite characteristically he soon came to accept the death of his favorite child as the will of God and therefore a good. Shortly after the funeral he wrote in his diary: “They have buried Vanichka. It is terrible. No, it is not terrible, it is a great spiritual event. I thank Thee, Father. I thank Thee.” He wrote Chertkov and Strakhov that the loss of one so dear to him was compensated by the spiritual ecstasy he experienced. More important for him: he cherished the hope that this family tragedy would reveal the path of truth to his wife and at last unite them spiritually in their declining years.

Their relations became warm and close after Vanichka’s death. Like a spiritual father he watched tenderly over Sonya to detect the slightest religious change in her, and he joyously announced these symptoms and his hopes to disciples. “Especially during the first few days,” he wrote to Chertkov, “I was blinded by the beauty of her soul revealed as a consequence of this loss.” And in his diary he wrote: “The pain of bereavement at once freed her from all that darkened her spirit. It was as if the doors had been rent asunder and laid bare that divine essence of love that exists in our souls.”

As the months wore on, Tolstoy’s hope of a spiritual transformation in his wife after Vanichka’s death gradually waned. Sonya’s grief was not the kind that finds its outlet or compensation in a profound religious experience.

His first realization that the period of spiritual closeness with Sonya had vanished was recorded in Tolstoy’s diary less than a month after Vanichka’s death: “She suffers and especially because the object of her love has left her, and it seems to her that her goodness was in this object and not in the love itself. She cannot separate one from the other; she cannot regard life in general or herself from a religious point of view.”

However deeply Tolstoy regretted the loss of this last hope of real spiritual unity with his wife, it did not lessen his love for her or his concern over her emotional and physical suffering. For her grief continued in an extreme form for months. When Sonya complained at this time that certain passages about her in his diaries were offensive, he read over all his diaries and dutifully eliminated these statements, for which she lovingly thanked him. “I have never felt myself so guilty and exposed,” he wrote at the conclusion of this task. “Oh, if this would only draw us still closer together. If she would only free herself from belief in trifles and would believe in her own soul, in her reason. . . . The events now are joyful to me. She saw and will see the power of love-the power of her love over me.”

Tolstoy hastened to convey his exaltation in a letter to Sonya. He explained it as an entirely new love. “It is such a holy, fine feeling, that I ought not to speak about it, but I know you will be glad to hear it, and I know from the very fact that I express it that it will not change.”

Sonya was grateful. She wrote of her joy over his letter, and she expressed her conviction that their quarrels had not been serious. “The very basis of our relations-an inner feeling for each other — remains serious, firm, and harmonious. We both know what is good and bad, and we both love each other. Thank God for this.”

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EARLY in 1897 disaster overtook the inner circle of the Tolstoyans. They had learned at the end of 1896 that persecution of the Dukhobors, a religious sect whose fate they were closely following, had reached an intolerable degree. One of the sect had been beaten to death in a disciplinary battalion; numerous families, dispersed among unfriendly villages of Caucasian hill tribes, were perishing from hunger and cold. Of the four thousand exiled in 1896, four hundred had already died from various privations. Horror gripped Tolstoy and he at once sent the. sufferers a thousand rubles out of his “charity fund.” The fund consisted of royalties from Tolstoy’s plays performed by the state theaters. He did not wish to accept this income, after renouncing all financial rights to his works, although these royalties would have reverted to the government, of which he also disapproved. Upon the suggestion of his wife, who managed the affair, he agreed to accept money from this source and to use it solely for charitable purposes.

Chertkov and the disciple Biryukov, later joined by another disciple, Tregubov, decided to appeal to the authorities and the public on behalf of the persecuted Dukhobors. Tolstoy encouraged them and associated himself with the project by writing an epilogue. This appeal, entitled “Help!” was sent to many leading citizens, government officials, and the Tsar. The participants fully realized the risk they ran and they were prepared to accept the consequences.

They did not have long to wait for repercussions. Shortly after the appeal was circulated, Chertkov and Biryukov were arrested and exiled for five years. Chertkov was allowed to select England as his place of exile; Biryukov was sent to Bausk in Courland. Three months later the police arrested Tregubov in Tiflis and also exiled him to Courland for five years.

Tolstoy, as usual, escaped direct punishment. He and Sonya hurried to Petersburg to bid farewell to Chertkov and Biryukov. An exalted feeling of martyrdom well earned suffused the exiles, who gathered with a little band of the faithful at Chertkov’s quarters each evening to hear the master’s final words of wisdom.

The exile of Chertkov and Biryukov, the two most active of Tolstoy’s disciples, caused a stir in various circles. The government’s arrows of misfortune were striking closer to the master. The war between Tolstoy and the Russian government and Church was a matter of general public interest. Whatever the issues involved, there was something magnificent in the figure of this old, gray-bearded prophet standing alone against the whole organized force of a reactionary Church and State. At times his was the only voice that spoke aloud and unafraid for the cause of justice in a vast country shackled by an absolute autocratic despotism. His most powerful weapon was moral suasion acting upon Russian public opinion and — what was more feared by the government — on international public opinion.

During the summer of 1897, when Tolstoy was at Yasnaya Polyana, there was no Chertkov in a neighboring village to consult with daily on the spiritual empire they were building. Tolstoy also missed the frequent visits of the industrious and gentle “Posha” (Biryukov). Masha’s marriage to Prince Nikolai Obolenski on June 2 deepened her father’s sense of loneliness. She was the only one of his children up to this time to accept unquestioningly his way of life, and she translated her convictions into service for others. She was tireless in work in the fields, in teaching the village children, caring for the sick, and performing endless tasks for her father. The bond between them went deeper than the love of parent and daughter; it was a spiritual bond. And she knew that her marriage must inevitably weaken if not sever this bond. For her, it seemed like repudiating holy vows.

Despite the absence of dear and familiar faces, summer life at Yasnaya Polyana continued, on the surface at least, as of old, with its hordes of visitors, games, tennis, walks, music, and literary evenings. New disciples made the pilgrimage. The usual assortment of accomplished artists-musicians, painters, and sculptors — turned up. Hardly a day passed that twenty or more people-family and guests-did not sit down at the long table for dinner. And nearly all these visitors, as was so often the case, felt their contact with the great Tolstoy worth commemorating in letters, articles, or memoirs which were subsequently published.

In August, Tolstoy entered in his diary: “Lombroso was here—a limited, naïve little old man.” This was the distinguished Italian anthropologist and psychiatrist-Cesare Lombroso. While attending a medical conference in Moscow, he had expressed a desire to visit Tolstoy. The head of the police suggested that this would be disagreeable to the government, and, making small circles with his finger near his temple, indicated that Tolstoy was not entirely right in his mind. Seizing this lead, the quick-witted Lombroso said that it was precisely in his capacity as a psychiatrist that he wished to see and study Tolstoy. Mollified by such a scientific purpose, the head of the police, with a knowing look, smilingly approved of the visit.

Lombroso had preconceived notions about literary geniuses and their habits of work, but these were all contradicted by this meeting with Tolstoy. On the day of his arrival he watched the sixtynine-year-old genius play tennis for two hours with his daughter. Tolstoy then invited his guest to go swimming in the Yasnaya Polyana pond and offered to race him. Lombroso almost drowned trying to keep up the pace, and Tolstoy was obliged to help him to the shore. “When I expressed surprise at his strength and endurance,”Lombroso related, “he stretched out his hand and lifted me right off the ground, just as easily as though I were a little dog.” Later, in one of their discussions, Tolstoy impatiently listened to Lombroso’s exposition of his favorite theory concerning innate criminal types and the necessity for protecting society from them. “He remained silent throughout all my arguments,”Lombroso wrote, “and finally, knitting his terrifying brow, he turned on me a threatening glance from his deeply sunken eyes and declared: ‘All this is nonsense. Every punishment is criminal.’” Despite their disagreement, Lombroso formed a high opinion of the simplicity of Tolstoy’s life and his unfailing kindness towards the scores of petitioners who daily sought his aid.

When Lombroso returned to Moscow, the head of the police asked him how he found Tolstoy. “It seems to me,” he answered, “that this madman is infinitely cleverer than many of the stupid people here who possess power.”

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ART is modest, Tolstoy once said, but his theorizing on the subject in What Is Art? is perhaps the most immodest contribution to the study of aesthetics that has ever been written. He finished this famous work in 1897 and it marks the culmination point of fifteen years of thought and study, a fact unknown to or disregarded by captious critics who treated What Is Art? as something that had leaped full-born from Tolstoy’s brain at a dyspeptic moment when he had arbitrarily concluded that there would be no more cakes and ale for the artists of the world.

With his radically new outlook on life, Tolstoy could not be satisfied with the theory of art that he had formerly accepted, and this dissatisfaction inspired his prolonged study of the subject. His main endeavor was to erect a system of aesthetics that would accord with his new understanding of man and his relation to the world. In a real sense, What Is Art? may be regarded as the aesthetics of his whole moral philosophy of life. Yet he knew that any system he might set up must be comprehensive enough to justify all sincere works of art.

The problem turned out to be much more complicated than he had anticipated. His first effort in this direction, in 1882, left him entirely unconvinced. And over the next fifteen years, during various periods of time, he struggled with the subject, defining and redefining his position. In all his theorizing, however, one can detect a growing emphasis upon the ethical principle as the immanent organizing factor in the artistic process. And this view ultimately became the starting point for the aesthetic theory that he finally elaborated in What Is Art? The growing popularity of such movements as Decadence and Symbolism during the last decade of the nineteenth century offended both his artistic and his moral sense and provided him with a new impetus to finish his book on art. He worked almost exclusively on it through a large part of 1897 and finished it in December.

In this book, Tolstoy approached the subject as he approached the study of every human endeavor: art is a human activity and hence it must have a clear purpose and aim, discernible by the aid of reason and conscience. And as a human activity, he declared, art cannot exist for its own sake and therefore its value must be weighed in proportion as art is serviceable or harmful to mankind. Again and again in his researches he was confronted with that unholy trinity of the aestheticians — beauty, truth, and goodness, and of these the greatest was beauty. For he found that the commonest definition, repeated in various forms, was that art is an activity that produces beauty.

But just what was meant by beauty, no two theorists seemed to agree. The word was used subjectively and according to the variable tastes of the persons who employed it. In general, Tolstoy’s study of aesthetics led him to conclude that there was no such science, because it failed to define the qualities and laws of art which in turn could be applied to artistic productions by way of accepting or rejecting them. This chaos has resulted, he maintained, because the conception of art has been erroneously based on the conception of beauty.

Tolstoy, then, propounded his own definition of art: —

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling — this is the activity of art.”

Before Tolstoy applied his definition as a kind of touchstone of true art, he felt it necessary to distinguish between the subject matter and the form of art. He realized that upon this distinction rested the solution of what was for him the fundamental problem —the relation of art to morality. First he took art apart from its subject matter and pointed out that what distinguished real art from its counterfeit — and much that passed for art he condemned as counterfeit — was the infectiousness of art. If a person who is subjected to an artist’s work experiences a mental condition which unites him with the artist and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art. And the stronger the infection, the better is the art as art. From this point of view, he declared, art has nothing to do with morality, for the feelings transmitted may be good or bad feelings. But the one great quality that makes a work of art truly contagious is its sincerity.

Up to this point Tolstoy had been concerned with an internal test in appraising art. Next he applied an external test in an effort to determine whether a work of art is refined or genteel (the art of the few, the upper classes), or universal (the art of the people). Those who admire exclusive art, which is so often considered the only art, do so because they have trained themselves to admire it and not because it is necessarily great art. He pointed out that the majority of the art productions of the upper classes which are admired by them when first produced are never understood or valued by the great masses of mankind. This refined art is intended only for ihe pleasure of genteel people and is incomprehensible as a pleasure to the workingman. For almost the only feelings, with their offshoots, that formed the subject matter of the art of his own class, he said, were three significant and simple ones—the feeling of pride, the feeling of sexual desire, and the feeling of weariness of life.

Tolstoy next made the point that as soon as the art of the upper classes separated itself from universal art, a conviction arose that art may be art and yet be incomprehensible to the masses. But all great works of art, he insisted, are great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. The majority of people have always had the taste to esteem the highest works of universal art, such as the epic of Genesis, the Gospel parables, and folk legends, songs, and tales, because they invoke the simple feelings of common life, accessible to everyone, and yet they do not hinder progress towards well-being. Art of this kind, he said, makes us realize to what extent we already are members of the human race and share the feelings of one common human nature.

In applying the touchstone of feeling to art, it is essential to differentiate what are the best feelings and what are evil. Only in this distinction, Tolstoy maintained, will the intimate and inevitable connection between morality and art become apparent. For if art unites men, the better the feelings in which it unites them, the better it will be for humanity.

He candidly admitted that the definition of the best and highest feelings will differ from age to age. Each age, he pointed out, has possessed a dominant view of life which may be described as its “religious perception.”And the true religious perception of the Christian age, he insisted, is Christ’s teaching, which permeates the whole life of man today; and if we accept this religious perception, it must inevitably influence our approval or disapproval of the various feelings transmitted by art. The best and highest feelings of art, then, are those which invoke the precepts of Christ — love for God and one’s neighbor. When this religious perception is consciously acknowledged by all, said Tolstoy, then the division of art into art for the lower and art for the upper classes will disappear, for art which transmits feelings incompatible with the religious perceptions of our time will be rejected.

As examples of this highest art “flowing from love of God and man (both of the higher, positive, and of the lower, negative kind) in literature,” Tolstoy mentioned: Schiller’s The Robbers; Hugo’s Les Misérables and Les Pauvres Gens; Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, The Christmas Carol, and The Chimes; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Dostoyevsky’s works, especially The House of the Dead; and George Eliot’s Adam Bede.

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TOLSTOY did not limit the subject matter of art to these highest and religious feelings, as some of his critics supposed. Another division of art, the universal, which he had already described, conveys feelings of common life accessible to everyone — such feelings of merriment, of pity, of cheerfulness, of tranquillity, and so forth. The scope of the artist must in no sense be restricted.

The whole world of feelings, Tolstoy wrote, must be the artist’s sphere of activity. Yet he did insist that a folk tale, a little song, or a lullaby that delights millions of children or adults is incomparably more important than a novel or symphony that will divert some few members of the wealthy class for a short time and then be forever forgotten. Almost untouched, he said, is this region of art in which the simple feelings are made accessible to all, and this region, like the highest religious art, tends to unite all mankind.

Tolstoy, the great author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. whimsically remarked in one place in the book that he knew that his theory of art would be considered an irrational paradox at which one could only be amazed. He did not understate the case. The critics quickly belabored it into an undeserved oblivion, although a few reviewers praised it highly, and George Bernard Shaw, with an aesthetic fissure in his brain as deep and wide as that of Tolstoy, hailed the work with delight.

Critics might be pardoned for a certain degree of asperity in the face of the sympathy that Tolstoy expressed in his book for the truculent judgment that “critics are the stupid who discuss the wise.”

For the most part, the critics evaded his altogether excellent definition of art and concentrated their shafts on his withering application of it to certain generally accepted great works of art. For with his stubborn intellectual honesty, he did not shrink from the most extreme consequences of his reasoning. In his selection of examples of good and bad art, he did not claim for himself absolute authority. He humbly admitted that his own taste was probably perverted by false training. And he specifically asserted that he attached no special importance to his selection of examples. His only purpose in mentioning them, he said, was to make his meaning clearer.

With breath-taking execution he consigned all his own artistic productions to the category of bad art, with the exception of two stories, “God Sees the Truth but Waits” and “ A Prisoner of the Caucasus.” And when he placed Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in this same category of bad art, he did not imply that all the works of these artists are bad. We know from other sources that he ranked some of their works as great art.

Tolstoy never remained satisfied with What Is Art? He felt it to be weak in various places, and he returned to the subject often in his diary and in letters. There lurked in his mind a feeling that something in the “mysterious and important" matter of art had never found its proper place in his aesthetic theory. But in this book, as in so many of his controversial works, the current of his thought joined the stream of nineteenth-century liberalism that has flowed down to our own day. He clearly saw and condemned many of the abuses of art that were later condemned by progressive minds, and his blistering attack on the middle-class cult of unintelligibility in art has been echoed many times since.

Now, whenever artists gathered in the Tolstoy home, which was often, they were put through the wringer of What Is Art? and usually came out very flat and white. For Tolstoy was formidable in argument, though in his old age he quickly grew impatient with opposition, and, like Dr. Johnson, if he failed to bring his opponent down with a well-aimed shot, he would hit him over the head with the butt end of the gun.

At the very beginning of 1898 a group of distinguished artists sat on after dinner. Rimski-Korsakov and his wife were among them. They had come to Moscow to attend a performance of the famous composer’s opera, Sadko, A discussion on art soon raged. Tolstoy kept thundering away at beauty and its futility as a fundamental touchstone of art. Rimski-Korsakov warmly opposed him. The dispute ended with Tolstoy condemning all the musical views of Rimski-Korsakov. When the frayed and irritated guests finally departed, Tolstoy pointedly and loudly replied to the usual polite amenities of leave-taking uttered by the composer’s wife: “No, you’ve not at all wearied or disturbed me but today I’m glad that I have seen obscurity with my own eyes.” The next day, like a repentant drunkard, he jotted down in his diary: “When will I remember that much talk is much bother.”

56

AFTER Vanichka’s death in 1895 Sonya had acquired a passion for music as a kind of escape from her grief. Even her husband hoped that this new interest would help her regain her emotional equilibrium. The distinguished pianist and composer S. I. Taneyev, who had rented a wing of Yasnaya Polyana during the summers of 1895 and 1896, also became a frequent visitor at the family’s Moscow house. Sonya could not see enough of Taneyev, and her partiality soon became clear to everyone except Taneyev, who seemed unaware of the deep feeling behind Sonya’s pursuit of him. In general the musician was indifferent to women.

With growing anxiety Tolstoy watched the unbelievable behavior of his wife — her repeated invitations to Taneyev, the agitated way in which she pursued him with questions on the musical world, their frequent meetings at the homes of acquaintances and at concerts, from which she would accompany him to his carriage. Her husband knew that this was an extreme manifestation of her hysteria, that it was simply the case of an ill woman transferring a love for music to a representative of the art. Yet at times he wondered, and then he could not suppress a feeling of jealousy. It was a mere whim, he comforted himself, and would soon pass.

The children also were distressed over their mother’s actions; servants, friends, and even strangers were beginning to gossip, Rumormongers were maliciously whispering of the ironic fate of Tolstoy, placed in the terrible position of the betrayed hero of The Kretzer Sonata, whose wife had fallen in love with a musician. But the hero in real life was sixty-eight and the heroine fifty-two, and they had been married thirty-four years! It all seemed like a monstrous practical joke.

This intimacy, .which had first become noticeable during Taneyev’s stay at Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1896, increased during the next two years. Sonya defined her feeling as love. The bachelor Taneyev, carefully watched over by his old nurse, hardly looked or acted one of the masculine sides of an eternal love triangle, nor would one have imagined him capable of inspiring sinful thoughts in any woman. He was twelve years younger than Sonya. He was not attractive, having a small head with small eyes set in a red face trimmed with a small beard, the whole mounted on a fat body. And his thin piping laugh only served to accentuate a naturally cold and stiff personality. He no doubt valued his associations with the Tolstoys and this fact perhaps encouraged the attentions he paid Sonya, whose endless adulation he also relished.

Though there is no concrete evidence that Sonya possessed sinful thoughts about Taneyev, she continued to give every indication that she was in love with him. She had been complaining for some time of weariness and the approach of old age, and now she suddenly felt a new “zest for life.” With evident satisfaction she recorded in her diary the surprised comments of people on her youthfulness. She walked more lightly, her body felt healthier, and she found a renewed joy in gay evening parties or in skating with one of Taneyev’s pupils. She noted in her diary her annoyance at the presence of other people when Taneyev visited, and then with the poetic mystery of a young girl in love for the first time she added: “S. I. [Taneyev] and I had no chance to talk to each other, but we exchanged a few phrases comprehensible to ourselves alone.” When Taneyev was absent, she was inconsolable, and she contrived every imaginable pretext to call on him. Her whole being was transformed when he played. “His playing made my heart bleed,” she wrote in the diary. “As he came to the end of the Polonaise, my eyes filled with tears and I nearly burst out sobbing.” Here was love transforming with its magic touch a woman of fifty-three into an irrational girl of eighteen.

“Even the purest love finally leads to the desire for intimacy and possession,” Sonya once observed in her diary. But nowhere in the records of her attachment to Taneyev is there any clear indication that she nourished such a desire. Besides, Taneyev at best was but a passive receptacle for her ardent feelings. Despite a pathetic attempt to observe all the proprieties in an attachment that she wished to represent as a sincere friendship and nothing more, her older children saw something deeper and soon resented the frequent visits of Taneyev. Their outspoken criticism of their mother’s behavior pained and angered her.

Perhaps Sonya’s unrequited passion deserved pity and understanding from her family rather than censure and harsh words. Though undoubtedly she was emotionally and psychologically ill, her temperament and extreme actions, like the failings of many sick people, constantly irritated those who most wanted to aid her. Her love for Taneyev clearly helped to fill the gaping void left in her emotional life by the death of Vanichka, a void that her husband could not satisfactorily fill because of their spiritual disharmony. Taneyev and Vanichka morbidly fused in her mind. She related in her diary how she talked with her dead son and asked him if there was anything evil in her feelings for Taneyev. “Today Vanichka seemed to turn me away from him. He must have felt sorry for his father; but I know he does not blame me, for it is he who sent me Taneyev, and he will not wish to take him away from me.” The two were coupled in her dreams — Vanichka and Taneyev stretching their arms out to her, and in another dream she saw her dear son sitting on Taneyev’s knee.

During the course of this abnormal relationship, Sonya could not resist comparing her husband and Taneyev. With a suggestion of elation, she noted in her diary on June 10, 1897: “I’ve knocked over Leo Nikolayevich as my idol.” She was still devoted to him, yes, but he could no longer bring her

“real happiness.”Had he been displaced by another idol? She did not say, but she made it clear how keenly she was missing the company of Taneyev that summer. In her loneliness, her thoughts turned to suicide, and she almost wept over the letter she composed in her mind to explain her untimely end to friends: “I don’t wish to suffer any longer, and I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” she exploded. ”I must either live without suffering, or die-and dying is the better course!” Then immediately following this outburst is a declaration that is pathetic in contrast. “And now I’ve got to write the menus again: soupe printcinière — Oh, how I hate it! Every day for thirty-five years it has been soupe printanière! I don’t want to hear any more of soupe printanière; I want to hear the most difficult fugue or symphony.”

Unconsciously she contrasted the composer’s pure relations with her to the physical passion of her husband. Tolstoy’s cheerfulness during the day merely forewarned her to expect a night of passion, and obsessed with her own pure desires, she wrote: “It has an entirely different effect on me;

I feel ashamed and sad, and I yearn for a poetic, spiritual, even a sentimental relationship with someone—only to get away from this eternal sex.”

Then in another entry she deliberately drew a comparison: “He needs me only at night, not during

the daytime; I grow sad and cannot help longing for last year’s dear friendly companion [Taneyev].”

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IN Tolstoy’s eyes marriage was a relationship that united people for life in complete fidelity to each other. Accordingly Sonya’s feeling for Taneyev seemed to him an expression of infidelity. He tried hard to regard the affair in its proper perspective and to accept it as an affliction that he must bear in accordance with the moral and spiritual philosophy he professed. At times Sonya was puzzled by his polite and considerate behavior towards Taneyev, when she knew how intensely he disliked the composer. But she did not know the effort of will it had cost him to achieve this “love for one’s enemies,” an ineffable sweetness, he mentioned in his diary, “greater in proportion as the love is unattractive to you.”

During 1897 and 1898, Tolstoy suffered intensely. He wrote to Chertkov, without mentioning any names: “I have tried everything: anger, prayers, expostulations, and lately, forbearance and kindness. Yet things get worse. I suffer from humiliation and cruelty, though I am ashamed to admit it.” The letter struck him as too indiscreet and he did not send it.

Far from being deterred by his remonstrances, Sonya invited Taneyev to visit at Yasnaya Polyana only a couple of weeks after he wrote her, pleading that she break off her relations with the composer. The visit-resulted in another quarrel, although Tolstoy, to her surprise, behaved towards the guest with the utmost civility. Either misled by this or incapable of resisting the desire to see Taneyev, she invited him again about a month later. “I haven’t told Leo Nikolayevich yet, in case it upsets him,” she noted in her diary. “My God, will he be jealous again! . . . Wouldn’t Sergei Ivanovich be surprised if he knew! But I can’t help being delighted at the thought that there will be music and pleasant conversation with such a cheerful, decent man.”

One of the children at dinner dropped a hint of Taneyev’s impending arrival. Tolstoy’s anger frightened Sonya, though there is just the suspicion, as she tried to calm him, that she secretly enjoyed what she interpreted as a jealous rage. On July 8, 1897, he wrote Sonya a letter in which he informed her that he was leaving her. But he did not give her the letter nor did he leave.

Tolstoy did not destroy this letter. He kept it, not among his papers, but hidden under the upholstery of one of the armchairs in his study. On the envelope he had written: “To be opened fifty years after my death.” Ten years later (in May, 1907) when he heard that Sonya was going to have the furniture newly upholstered, he recovered the letter, put it in another envelope, on which he wrote: “To be given to Sofya Andreyevna after my death,” and handed it over for safekeeping to his son-in-law. When the envelope was opened by Sonya after his death, there were two letters in it. After reading one of them, she remarked: “More foolishness and jealousy and reproaches,” and she tore it into small bits. The second letter, also dated July 8, 1897, she at once gave to the press. In order to save his wife from public censure over the real reason for his desire to leave her, Tolstoy had written two letters, one intended for his wife alone and the other for the world, if she cared to make it public.

In the letter that Sonya published, he wrote: —

“I have long been tormented by the incongruity between my life and my beliefs. To oblige you to change your way of life, your habits, which I taught you myself, was impossible; to leave you has also been impossible up to this time, for I thought that I should be depriving the children, while they were still young, of the influence, however small, which I might have over them, and should be causing you pain. But to continue to live as I have been living these sixteen years, at one time struggling and harassing you, at another yielding to those influences and temptations to which I was accustomed and by which I was surrounded, has also been impossible for me at last; and I have now made up my mind to do what I have long wished to do, to go away; first, because with my advancing years this life grows more and more burdensome to me and I long more and more for solitude; and secondly, because the children have now grown up, and my influence is no longer necessary and all of you have livelier interests, which will make you notice my absence less.

“But the principal reason is . . . [that] I, who am now entering upon my seventieth year, yearn with all the strength of my spirit for that tranquillity and solitude and, though not perfect accord, still something better than this crying disharmony between my life and beliefs and conscience. . . .

“My leaving does not mean that I am dissatisfied with you. I know that you could not, literally could not, and cannot, see and feel as I do, and hence you could not and cannot alter your life and make sacrifices for the sake of what you do not believe in. I do not find fault with you; on the contrary,

I recall, with love and gratitude, the long thirtyfive years of our life together, especially the first half of it, when, with maternal self-abnegation which is characteristic of you, you bore so zealously and patiently with what you thought was your appointed burden. You gave me and the world what you were able to give. You gave much maternal love and self-sacrifice, and I cannot fail to esteem you for that. But during the latter period of our life, during the last fifteen years, we have fallen away from each other. I can believe that I am to blame, because I know that I have changed, not for my own sake or for the sake of other people’s opinion, but because I could not help it. And I cannot blame you for not having followed me, but I thank you and I lovingly recall and ever shall recall all that you have given me. Good-bye, dear Sonya.”

If Sonya had known the contents of this letter in July, 1897, it is doubtful if she would have, or even could have, given up Taneyev.

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WHEN Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1898, ill and in need of a rest, he found his domestic situation unchanged. Much against his wishes, Sonya went off to visit her friends the Maslovs at their country estate Selishche on July 12. She knew that Taneyev would be staying there at the same time. Overwhelmed by this new overt act, Tolstoy once more thought of going away from home, but again he overcame the temptation of taking a step that might so easily prove to be irreparable.

Sonya returned by way of Kiev, stopped there with her sister Tanya, and finally persuaded her to come to Yasnaya Polyana for a brief visit. It had been a “pure delight ” to listen to Taneyev’s playing at Selishche, but now at home Sonya expericnced a feeling of guilt, which was increased by her sister’s unsparing criticism of her pursuit of the composer. A few days after her return, she entered in her diary: “I walked through the woods alone and bathed and wept. At night the same talk of jealousy began again; and again there were shouting, abuse, and reproaches. My nerves could not stand it; something that kept the balance in my brain gave way and I lost my self-command. I had a terrible attack of nerves. I trembled all over, sobbed, raved, and kept starting up in fright. I do not well remember what happened to me, but it ended in a kind of numbness.”

The conversation that brought about Sonya’s violent attack of nerves that night was actually written down by Tolstoy in the form of a letter which he intended for her sister but never sent. He called it “A Dialogue.” Tolstoy began by saying that he had gone to bed with his wife that night in a “good and pleasant frame of mind,” consoled by what his sister-in-law had told him during the day and by her belief that all this unhappiness would soon end. As they lay in bed together, Sonya soon began to accuse him of talking about her and Taneyev to her sister. He begged her to drop the matter since he did not wish to discuss it and hoped that it would quiet down and be done with.

The argument continued. Tolstoy kept insisting that she recognize her feeling for Taneyev for what it was, until Sonya, with some justification, exclaimed in desperation: “The same thing over and over again. It is simply torture!” All she wanted, she declared, was “that he should come once a month and sit awhile and play for me, as any good acquaintance might.”

“Yes,” he replied, “and by those words you are proving that you have a particular feeling for this man. There is, after all, no other person whose monthly visits could give you joy. If this one visit a month would be pleasant, how much pleasanter would be a weekly or a daily visit. You have confessed involuntarily to your particular feeling. And unless you settle the question of whether it is good or bad, nothing can be altered.”

Recriminations followed recriminations, and Tolstoy scornfully described her “as one of those ladies who never miss a concert at the conservatory.” This appeared to be the last straw for Sonya and she became hysterical.

A long silence ensued, and Tolstoy continued: “Then I remember God; I pray and think to myself: she cannot renounce her feeling, she cannot bring the influence of her mind to bear on her feeling. With her, as with all women, feeling dominates, and any change that takes place in her feeling will perhaps do so independently of her mind. Perhaps Tanya is right, and this will take place gradually in its own peculiar feminine way, incomprehensible to me. I ought to tell her this, I think to myself, and, full of pity and a desire to soothe her, I tell her that perhaps I am mistaken in putting the question in my own way. Perhaps she will arrive at the same thing after her own fashion, and that this is what I am hoping for.”

At that moment, however, her irritation reached an extraordinary pitch and she poured out a torrent of harsh words and wild threats, ending in a fit of hysterics. He concluded: “Sobbing, laughing, and whispering meaningless, and alas, feigned protests, such as ’My head is ready to split . . . just here at the parting . . . cut a vein in mv neck. Oh, this is the one. . .’ She tried to frighten me with this and a great deal more rubbish. I held her. I know that always helps. I kissed her brows. She could not get her breath for a long time. Then she began to yawn and sigh, and at last she fell asleep and is still sleeping.

“I do not know how this madness can end. I cannot see any way out. It is evident that she values this feeling as much as her life and does not want to acknowledge it as wrong. And without acknowledging it as wrong, she cannot get rid of it and will continue to do the things the feeling demands, things that are tormenting and shameless for the children to witness, if not for me.”

Sonya’s feeling for Taneyev did change “gradually in its own peculiar feminine way,” but not through any effort of her own will or because she finally recognized it as a “bad feeling.” Taneyev put an end to the affair. For several more years she kept up the chase, attending concerts in order to sit with him, and making summer pilgrimages to Selishche to be near him. She observed that he began to avoid her, and she imagined that he had heard of her husband’s jealousy or that he had received a letter from him, but Tolstoy never once uttered a word to Taneyev about his wife’s attitude towards him.

Finally came an affront too obvious for her to ignore: he left her box at a concert and went to sit in the gallery. This took place in April, 1904. She wrote him to demand an explanation. He evaded the issue. She wept, grew melancholy, and could not sleep. Painful exchanges of letters took place, she hoping for a favorable explanation of his behavior, he cautiously avoiding one. Eventually he offered her a silly explanation, which she gratefully accepted, that he had left her at the concert because his thoughts kept turning on her but he valued the music of Tchaikovsky more. But something had snapped in her feeling for him; her happiness was gone and only memories remained. The man who at one time seemed to her to possess all the possible virtues, she could now describe as “thickskinned and gross, both in body and spirit.”

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MEMBERS of the family and their guests all copied the manuscript of Resurrection, which he had begun in 1889. Duplicate sets of corrected proof had to be prepared for translators. Anguished telegrams arrived from the editor of Niva to beg for final copy for the next weekly issue of the magazine. Cablegrams and letters from abroad offered huge sums for the publication rights. Racing against time, Tolstoy kept to his study for days on end, mangling successive sets of proof, repeatedly rewriting whole sections, and hurrying off last-minute changes to the editor in an installment just about to go to press. He deserted the family, often took his meals alone at odd hours, and saw few visitors. The atmosphere of the household was tense and strained by the mighty effort. Finally, on December 18, 1899, he wrote in his diary: “Completed Resurrection. Not good, uncorrected, hurried, but it is done with and I am no longer interested.”

Twelve years before, the eminent jurist A. F. Koni, while visiting Yasnaya Polyana, had planted in Tolstoy’s mind the seed of this novel by relating an incident connected with his law practice. One day an agitated young man had come to his office to ask aid in conveying a letter to a girl who had been sent to prison, for the jail official had refused to do this unless he were permitted to censor the letter. Koni agreed to help him and subsequently learned the details of the case.

When her parents died, the girl had been taken in by a wealthy lady who owned the farm they had rented. Although given some education, she was eventually relegated to the position of a servant in the family. When she was sixteen a relative of her benefactor happened to visit the estate. This visitor, the same young man who had appealed to Koni, seduced the pretty, well-formed girl, and when her benefactor observed her pregnant condition, she drove her from the house.

Abandoned by her seducer, the girl placed her newborn child in an asylum, and after a hopeless attempt to earn an honest livelihood, she became a prostitute and sank lower and lower. Detected in stealing a sum of money from one of her drunken “guests” in a brothel, she was arrested. On the jury that tried the case fate placed the young man who had seduced her. Their meeting in such circumstances produced a powerful impression on him and awakened his conscience to the injustice of his behavior. He decided to marry the girl, who had been sentenced to four months in prison. Koni concluded the tale by relating that they were actually married, but shortly after her sentence expired the girl died from typhus.

The story deeply moved Tolstoy and he urged Koni, an extremely talented person, to write it for the Intermediary. Koni promised to do this. When a year had passed and he failed to fulfill his promise, Tolstoy asked to be allowed to make use of the story. For the next ten years he worked at it by fits and starts, but only when the need for money arose in 1898 to aid the Dukhobors to emigrate to Canada did he turn to the novel with renewed determination and zest. Abroad, arrangements went forward, largely under Chertkov’s direction, for the simultaneous publication of translations in England, France, Germany, and America. Foreign editors were eager to buy first rights, this money also going to the Dukhobor fund. As soon as Tolstoy finished a final batch of corrected proof in duplicate, a set was sent to Chertkov in England. It was not so easy to prevent foreign firms from pirating, a fact that caused Tolstoy much embarrassment. Twelve different translations appeared in Germany alone in 1900. In 1899 and 1900, fifteen editions were published in France. Obtaining faithful translations was difficult, a misfortune Tolstoy’s works had nearly always suffered abroad.

The extreme liberties taken with Resurrection were of the order of those in a German translation of Anna Karenina, in which the motto of that book, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay,”was altered to “Revenge is sweet; I play the ace!" While the French version of Resurrection was appearing in the Echo de Paris, Parisian readers characteristically complained that the love scenes of the hero and heroine, which they relished, were too infrequent. The editor had no scruples about omitting the next regular installment and substituting for it one in which the hero and heroine are again occupied with each other.

In America, on the other hand, the editor of the Cosmopolitan, who had bought the first serial rights, did not hesitate to tone down or delete love passages that he thought might offend that magazine’s respectable middle-class readers. Chertkov promptly broke this contract and a lawsuit was threatened, which naturally added to Tolstoy’s worries. In the end he was happy at the thought of reverting to his rule of taking no money for his writings, unwilling perhaps to realize that the rule itself had been the cause of all his troubles.

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TOLSTOY was seventy-one when he finished Resurrection, the last of his great novels. At this age he had a right to expect some diminution of his creative powers, and it is clear that the work falls short of the artistic eminence of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Further, the concluding parts suffered from obvious haste in composition. Though written in his former manner, Resurrection is unlike his previous novels in several respects. Although there is the same fresh and realistic treatment of his own gentry class, this kind of life, which he knew so well, is brilliantly contrasted with a new element—the life of the protesting, revolutionary intelligentsia. And the struggle between the moralist and the artist that had been reflected in its initial stages in the last pages of Anna Karenina is everywhere in evidence in Resurrection. Rarely does the moralizing element appear unadorned with the rich, variegated garments of real life. The essence of all that Tolstoy had thought and suffered since his spiritual change is condensed in the pages of the book. It is unashamedly a purpose novel, but then so are nearly all great novels. The principal purpose of Resurrection is to reveal the evil consequences of the violence of government and the hypocrisy of the Church.

Any appraisal of the novel according to the new standards that Tolstoy had announced in What Is Art? does not discredit him as an artist or as a theorist on art. To be sure, such an appraisal inevitably contains a large element of subjective judgment, but the popular judgment of time and posterity lends its increment of support. According to Tolstoy’s principal criterion of real artinfectiousness Resurrection holds up extraordinarily well. The novel deals with feelings profoundly experienced by the author and re-created so that they infect readers and cause them to share these feelings with him and with each other. And the novel also abundantly possesses those other aspects of real art which Tolstoy had listed in his treatise-sincerity, individuality, and clarity. Yet he would have been the first to admit, and perhaps sadly, that the book is not popular art, not art for the masses. It belongs to the exclusive art of the leisured and cultured classes. With this limitation, Resurrection is real art. But does it belong to the category of the best art, according to Tolstoy’s definition? That is, do the feelings it conveys make for the highest perception attainable by man — positive feelings of love of God and of one’s neighbor? In this respect, too, Tolstoy can claim a large measure of success. More than any of his other novels, Resurrection evokes in us feelings of brotherly love and of the common purpose of the life of all humanity-a striving to achieve spiritual and moral perfection through service to others.

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TOLSTOY’s preoccupation with Resurrection during 1899 did not deter visitors, though he saw less of them. Both in Moscow and at Yasnaya Polyana the family had for some time been leading a kind of public existence and gradually they had become conditioned to it. Guests continued to arrive and leave. On one occasion two tall, refined, and distinguished-looking gentlemen entered. They were S. P. Dyagilev, editor of the well-known periodical, the World of Art, and future ballet producer, and D. V. Tilosofov, his chief collaborator. Greetings were warm and gay. Conversation took on a new life — politics, art, the doings of important people in the government. Finally the two guests, who had come all the way from Petersburg, got around to the real purpose of their visit. They were organizing a celebration in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great poet Pushkin. Would Tolstoy lend his aid by contributing an article to the issue of their magazine commemorating the event?

The name of the poet was enough to set Tolstoy off on a brilliant exposition of what he admired and condemned in Pushkin’s works. Though he felt deeply about some of these productions and praised generously, it was clear that he did not share the reverential attitude of his two visitors towards Russia’s illustrious poet. But the visitors brought him back to the point — would he aid in the celebration? Frowning and immediately dropping his agreeable manner, he flatly refused. With an intolerance that often took the form of paradox when his opposition was aroused, he brusquely declared that such celebrations were superfluous, that there were no immortals, and that each man lived for his own age alone. A writer, he said, is like a potato that is absorbed by the organism, digested, and then discarded. His contemporaries assimilate all that is of value in his creations, rework all that is precious in this spiritual food, and then when it is of no further use they cast it aside, consign it to oblivion. Dyagilev and Filosofov soon departed, plainly annoyed by Tolstoy’s refusal to aid their project and offended by the manner in which he expressed his disagreement.

Among the many young writers who came to burn incense, Chekhoy and Gorky were regarded by Tolstoy as the most talented. Their fiction was taking the country by storm at the time Resurrection began to appear. In an account of his first visit, Gorky remarks that he was put through a kind of examination, for Tolstoy wanted to know all the facts in his life. Then he got around to Gorky’s writings. Some he praised, others he severely criticized. Foma Gordeyev he simply could not finish — “everything in it was invented.” Varenka Olesova in Gorky’s story of that name Tolstoy condemned as not true lo life. “If a girl is over fifteen and healthy,” he admonished, “she likes to be embraced and touched. Her mind is fearful of what is unknown and of what she does not yet understand — that is what is called modesty and bashfulness. But her body is already aware that the unknown is inevitable and legitimate, and despite the mind, demands the fulfillment of its law. In your work you have described this Varenka Olesova as healthy, but she feels anemically— which is not true to life.”

Next he turned on the heroine in the short story “Twenty-six and One,” and spoke of her in such improper language that Gorky, who had spent much of his life with “creatures who once were men,” felt embarrassed and a bit offended, though later he decided that Tolstoy used coarse words in this instance only because he found them more precise and pointed. All through the examination, however, Tolstoy was kind and full of attention. Embracing Gorky as he was about to leave, he declared, “You are a real muzhik! You will have a hard time among the writers, but fear nothing, and speak always as you feel no matter if it comes out coarsely. Wise people will understand.”And in his diary on that day, he entered: “Gorky was here. We talked very well. I liked him. A real man of the people.”

Chekhov, whose literary star had risen earlier than Gorky’s, had already endeared himself to Tolstoy, who took delight in reading favorite stories by him to the family and guests. If Tolstoy regretted Chekhov’s lack of any real focus in life and art, he could not fail to appreciate his warm, sympathetic nature and artistic humility. Although Gorky at this time was forcing comparison with Chekhov among literary critics, there can be no question that Tolstoy preferred Chekhov’s writing. “’Gorky lacks a sense of proportion, he told his disciple Goldenweizer. “He has a familiar style which is unpleasant.” But of Chekhov, all of whose stories he had recently reread, he declared: “His mastery is of the highest order.”

Yet Tolstoy left Chekhov under no illusions about his opinion on Chekhov’s plays: he emphatically did not like them. He saw a performance of Uncle Vanya at the beginning of 1900 and it shocked him. Chekhov, in his own charming, guileless manner, related to a friend what Tolstoy had told him about his play: “You know, he does not like my dramas. He swears that I’m not a playwright. There is only one thing that comforts me. . . . He said to me: ’You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse. Shakespeare, however, grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck and leads him to a definite objective, not permitting him to wander off the road. But where are you going with your heroines? From the divan where they lie to the closet and back.'”

At this point in his account Chekhov laughed so hard that his pince-nez fell off his nose. “But, really, Leo Nikolayevich is serious,” Chekhov continued. “He was ill. I sat with him at his bedside. When I began to get ready to leave, he took my hand, looked me in the eye, and said: ’Anton Pavlovich, you are a fine man.’ Then, smiling, he let my hand go anti added: ’But your plays are altogether vile.’ ”

Chekhov’s self-effacement and his unfailing sense of humor would never have allowed him to be offended by this perverse yet thoroughly understandable reaction of Tolstoy to his dramas. Besides, Chekhov worshiped Tolstoy and appreciated his true significance as few were able to in Russia.

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THE family life of the Tolstoys continued to revolve in the customary domestic pattern of marriages, births, and deaths. Twenty-two-year-old Andrei married Chertkov’s sister-in-law, Olga Konstantinova Diterikhs, on January 8, 1899. The family gathered in Tula for the event. Sonya forebodingly wrote in her diary that she was sad and agitated. “Andryusha, as in a dream, is deeply moved but does not understand why he is marrying and what this will mean. I understand Olga still less. Marriage is always terrible, mysterious, and touching. I wanted all the time to weep.”

Tanya married ten months later (November 14, 1899). Her departure from the family circle affected Tolstoy and his wife incomparably more than that of Andrei. With her bright, artistic spirit, Tanya was the general favorite in the house. She was partial to her father’s views, and after Masha’s marriage he no doubt cherished the hope that Tanya would remain with him, a faithful and understanding helper in his work. After all, he had reason to hope, for she had reached the age of thirty-five without marriage, though she had had many suitors of whom he had been a bit jealous.

Then Tanya decided to marry Mikhail Sergeyevich Sukhotin, a man much older than she and with six grown children left him by his first wife. No one in the household favored the marriage. Sonya was deeply chagrined. She had entertained hopes of a brilliant match for Tanya. She wrote her sister after the wedding: “You cannot imagine how grief-stricken and sick at heart Lyovochka and I were while accompanying Tanya. . . It was all

so gloomy, just like a funeral and not a wedding. When Tanya came to say good-bye to Lyovochka, he wept so that it was painful to look at him.” A few days later Tolstoy wrote in his diary with unaccustomed bitterness: “Tanya has departed with Sukhotin, and why? It is sad and offensive. For 70 years I have been lowering and lowering my opinion about women, and still it has to be lowered more. The woman question! How can there help being a woman question? But it bears no relation to the fact that women should begin to direct life, but to the fact that they should stop ruining it.”

The large house that for so long had echoed loudly and merrily to the voices of children was now almost denuded of them. Only Alexandra and, as her exasperated mother called him, “wild Misha” remained. And less than two years later the troublesome Misha married a childhood sweetheart. With the fledglings, all but one, grown and departed from the nest, their father could now look back, perhaps not without a twinge of remorse, on time and effort not well spent. They had received the customary education of children in their circle of society, but their father, after his spiritual change, distrusted and even scorned this worldly education. He continually cast a shadow over the social life they enjoyed. Pleasures that their companions took for granted would suddenly be poisoned for them by an instinctive feeling of guilt induced by the silent disapproval of their father.

Tolstoy always hoped his children would perceive that there was another life, and he eagerly and constantly searched their behavior for indications of any change. In this respect, his two older daughters had gladdened his heart, but when they married, though his love for them did not lessen, there was a real obstacle in their relations with him. No one of his sons took up the challenge of a new life for very long, and their actions often caused him grief and suffering. If he nourished a hope that any one of his sons would become his spiritual heir, that hope had died with little Vanichka.

Sonya’s diary during 1899-1900 reflects a marked improvement in her relations with her husband compared to the anguished trials of the preceding three years. She was mortally afraid of going down to posterity as the despised scold in her husband’s life. “They always distort the private life of famous men in their biographies,” she said to Goldenweizer. “I’m sure they will make me out a Xantippe. You must defend me, Alexander Borisovich.”There was little scolding in her diary over this period, no hysterical outbursts, and her morbid concern with the subject of sex almost vanished. At times, she remarked, women like to play at romance in a sentimental fashion with their husbands. On such occasions she felt a “spiritual tenderness” for him. “But he is affectionate,” she sadly concluded, “only when in him tenderness awakens, and then, alas, it is not the same kind!” Husband and wife were growing old together, perhaps not always gracefully, but with an apparently new determination to respect each other’s domain of activity.

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THE year 1901 was eventful for Leo Tolstoy. It began with two epistolary articles on faith and prayer in answer to the questions of an unknown worker who had renounced the Orthodox Church. Meanwhile, the Church’s patience with Tolstoy had run out. Such articles were disseminated throughout the country in hectograph copies and also in published form, for Chertkov saw to their printing in England, whence they found their way back to Russia through various illegal channels. Then, too, Resurrection had shocked and embittered ecclesiastic officialdom. The mutilating government censor of that novel had not hacked vigorously enough, for he had left a damning residue of ridicule of church ritual and of the Procurator of the Holy Synod, Pobedonostsev.

The Church was merely an arm of the government — Pobedonostsev, a lay figure and close to the throne, was the connecting link — and its hostility towards Tolstoy reflected in a real sense the attitude of secular authorities. The temper of dissatisfaction, which had been rising throughout the nation for a long time, had recently been accelerated by repressive measures. Tolstoy had become a national symbol of this popular dissatisfaction. As a contemporary figure pwt it, Russia had two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy, and in the public mind a struggle was being waged between them to see which of the two would prove the more powerful. It made little difference that Tolstoy had no sympathy with either the hopes of the liberals for legislative reforms or the violence of the revolutionists. All knew that he was an open, courageous, and irreconcilable critic of the whole political and social order. Unrest existed everywhere, and the situation in Moscow and Petersburg grew ominous.

It was at this juncture that the Church decided to act against Tolstoy— unquestionably with government sanction. The blow they struck was no doubt intended to deflate his tremendous popularity, for the ecclesiastical hierarchy could reasonably suppose that in the sacred matter of religious faith the vast masses of the people would support their holy judgment. The Church could enter where the government feared to tread, and not only Russia, but the whole Christian world would condemn the sinner and iconoclast.

On the initiative of Anthony, Metropolitan of Kiev and Ladoga, the Holy Synod agreed to a formal announcement separating Tolstoy from the Church. Pobedonostsev drafted the edict, and it was published in the Synod’s journal, the Church Gazette, on February 24, 1901, signed by seven of Russia’s leading ecclesiastics.

The edict began with a reminder that the efforts of heretics, false teachers, and all the powers of hell have never prevailed against the Holy Church.

“But in our days,” the document continued, “God has permitted a new false teacher to appear— Count Leo Tolstoy. Well known to the world as a writer, Russian by birth, Orthodox by baptism and education, Count Tolstoy, seduced by intellectual pride, has arrogantly risen against the Lord and His Christ and His Holy heritage, and has plainly in the sight of all repudiated his Orthodox Mother Church which reared and educated him, and has dedicated his literary activity and the talent given to him by God to disseminating among the people teachings opposed to Christ and the Church, and to destroying in the minds and hearts of people their national faith, that Orthodox faith which has been confirmed by the universe and in which our forefathers lived and were saved, and to which Holy Russia till now has clung, and in which it has been strong. In his works and letters, distributed in great numbers by him and his followers throughout the whole world, and particularly within the borders of our dear land, he preaches with zealous fanaticism the overthrow of all the dogmas of the Orthodox Church and the very essence of the Christian faith.”

There then followed an itemized listing of his heresies: that he denied God worshiped in the Holy Trinity, Christ as a God-man who was raised from the dead, the conception of the Lord Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, the virginity of Mary; that he did not acknowledge a life and retribution beyond the grave; that he rejected all the Sacraments; and that in particular he subjected to derision the greatest of Sacraments, the Holy Eucharist. “Therefore,” the edict concluded, “the Church does not reckon him as its member and cannot so reckon him until he repents and resumes his communion with her.”

Whatever it may be in intent, the edict is not, in canonical language, a formal excommunication; for at the end it appears to leave the door open for reconciliation. But Tolstoy regarded it as a statement of excommunication, and so did the public. The day following its publication in the Church Gazette, it appeared in nearly every Russian newspaper, and the telegraph wires carried the astounding news to the four corners of the globe. The government, however, had first taken the precaution to forbid the Russian press to print any comment on the edict of the Holy Synod.

The edict created a sensation, but not the kind the Synod had anticipated. To a people in a rebellious mood, the excommunication of one of their champions served only as another and greater indictment of oppressive authority. The day on which the edict first appeared was a Sunday. People swarmed the streets of Moscow, for the student unrest at that time was at its height. Tolstoy had gone with his friend Dunayev to Lubyanskaya Square. A crowd of several thousand had gathered there. Sonya said in her diary that someone recognized Tolstoy and ironically shouted: “There goes the devil in human form!” All eyes were turned on him and a cheer roared from hundreds of throats: “Hurrah for Leo Nikolayevich! Long live Leo Nikolayevich! Hail to the great! Hurrah!” Only with the aid of mounted police did Tolstoy extricate himself from the turbulent, acclaiming crowd.

Quantities of sympathetic letters and telegrams poured in from people in Russia and abroad; many statements came expressing indignation over the action of the Synod, often bearing hundreds of signatures, and in one case over a thousand. Deputations, sometimes bearing flowers and gifts, waited on him to convey their regrets. Messages of protest, sent to both Tolstoy and the ecclesiastics who signed the edict, represented all groups, from aristocrats and intellectuals to simple factory workers. Before one of Repin’s canvases of Tolstoy, hung at a Petersburg exhibition, demonstrations took place. Crowds gathered before the portrait, adorned it with garlands of flowers, and shouted, “Down with Pobedonostsev!” and “Hurrah for Leo Nikolayevich!”

The portrait became so persistent a focus for public manifestations of feeling on behalf of Tolstoy that the authorities had it withdrawn from the exhibit. This was the famous canvas, entitled “Tolstoy at Prayer,” portraying him.standing barefoot in the woods. He jokingly remarked to Goldenweizer: “Repin painted me décolleté, barefoot in a shirt! I have to thank him for not having taken off my trousers too. And he never even asked me if I liked it. But I have long since got used to being treated as if I were dead.” Perhaps with no little personal satisfaction and a certain amount of cheerful irony, he finally sent a letter to the press “to thank all those people, from high officials to simple workers,” for the sympathetic messages they had sent him because of the action of the Holy Synod.

The daily mail brought not only letters of sympathy or congratulation. There were anonymous threats of murder and angry epistles, scolding him as a heretic and praising the Synod’s edict. His books were banned in a number of public libraries, sermons were preached against him in churches, and perhaps the unkindest cut, with a comic touch about it, was his exclusion from the Moscow Temperance Society against the vigorous protests of some of its more enlightened members.

The excommunication shocked members of the Tolstoy family and aroused some of them to indignant protest. Sonya rushed to the defense of her husband with perhaps more indignation than judgment. She straightway dispatched identical letters to Pobedonostsev and the three Metropolitans who had signed the edict. Asserting her own unalterable faith in the Church, she declared that this public separation of her husband from it had inexpressibly shocked her. She then rubbed it in a bit by describing the numerous expressions of sympathy and love from all over the world that this act had evoked. And she ended with a barbed statement that there were many outside the Church who led a more truly Christian life than certain high ecclesiastics “wearing diamonded miters and stars.”

Tolstoy was perhaps more surprised than pleased by his wife’s courageous defense of him, for he knew how stubbornly she adhered to her Orthodox faith and what little tolerance she had for many of the people on whose side she now found herself in this cause.

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TOLSTOY’S first reaction to the excommunication was rather scornful, like that of the lady who sent him a piece of holy bread and a letter, in which she wrote that she had just received the Sacrament and had taken the Host for his benefit, and she concluded: “Eat it in health and pay no attention to these stupid priests.” The numerous callers who came to see him he laughingly greeted at the door with the words that he positively declined to accept congratulations.

On the other hand, Tolstoy saw clearly that the excommunication was an attempt on the part of the Church and government to combat his influence among the people. In reality the Synod’s act increased his influence, made his home in Moscow a center of inspiration to the downtrodden and persecuted, and prompted him to intensify his agitation against the political, social, and religious abuses in a state run by police.

Some three weeks after his excommunication, Tolstoy returned good for evil. Disturbed by the news of various demonstrations aimed at the government, he wrote an article, “An Appeal to the Tsar and His Officials,” which was delivered to them. With frankness and admirable clarity, he stated the case of the people against the government. Tranquillity would not be achieved, he said, by following the recent naïve order of the Minister of the Interior to the police to disperse the crowds promptly, and to fire at them if they did not disperse. The time might well come, he warned, when soldiers and police would refuse to commit the terrible crime of fratricide. Thousands of people had been unjustly persecuted by a despotic regime which had for years not only stood still but receded and separated itself more and more from the people and their demands. What was needed, he declared, was not for the rulers to defend themselves against those who really did not wish to injure them, but to search out the causes of social discontent and remove them.

He then formulated the four principal demands of the people: To grant the peasants equal rights with all other citizens; to abolish special enactments that would permit the Common Law to be disregarded; to remove all barriers to education; and to abolish all limitations of religious liberty. After itemizing in some detail the various abuses perpetrated by the government and Church, he concluded by stating that the removal of the causes of complaint would pacify the majority of the people and free them from those terrible sufferings and (what was worse than sufferings) crimes which would inevitably be committed on both sides if the government continued to concern itself solely with the suppression of disturbances, leaving the causes of these disturbances untouched.

If Nicholas II had given heed to this simple bill of rights, he might have anticipated the revolt that took place four years later or even the 1917 Revolution that swept him and all his family into oblivion. The article is interesting from another point of view, for it illustrates Tolstoy’s practical wisdom and good judgment. Clearly foreseeing a bloody revolt, he put aside his own maximum program of Christian anarchism and offered to a government that he felt had no right to exist at all the minimum terms that might prevent its total destruction.

But the government of the Tsar could learn nothing, and it certainly could not forget that in Leo Tolstoy it had a subject more to be feared than to be accepted as a guide. He received no acknowledgment of his article, and no attempt was made to follow his advice.

Tolstoy finally decided to reply to the Synod’s official statement separating him from the Church. His answer, dated April 4, 1901, was actually published by the Church Gazette and by two other unofficial Church periodicals, but with significant deletions which the censor found impossible to print “without offending the religious feelings of the faithful.” Reprinting even this censored version was forbidden in Russia, and the answer was published in complete form at this time only in England.

Having made clear what he considered to be true and what untrue in the Synod’s statement, he admitted that he did not believe in what the Church said it believed in, but insisted that he believed in much that the Church had attempted to persuade people that he did not believe in. “I believe in this,”he wrote. “I believe in God, whom I understand as Spirit, as love, as the Source of all. I believe that He is in me and I in Him. I believe that the will of God is most clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man Jesus, whom to consider as God and pray to, I esteem the greatest blasphemy.

“1 believe that man’s true welfare lies in fulfilling God’s will, and Ilis will is that men should love one another and should consequently do to others as they wish others to do to them — of which it is said in the Gospels that in this is the law and the prophets. I believe therefore that the meaning of the life of every man is to be found only in increasing the love that is in him; that this increase of love leads man, even in this life, to ever greater and greater blessedness, and after death gives him the more blessedness the more love he has, and helps more than anything else towards the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth: that is, to the establishment of an order of life in which the discord, deception, and violence that now rule will be replaced by free accord, by truth, and by the brotherly love of one for another.”

After this confession of faith, Tolstoy rose to heights of noble sincerity in the conclusion of his answer to the Synod. “Whether or not these beliefs of mine offend, grieve, or prove a stumbling block to anyone, or hinder anything, or give displeasure to anybody, I can as little change them as I can change my body. I must myself live my own life, and I must myself alone meet death (and that very soon), and therefore I cannot believe otherwise than as I —preparing to go to that God from Whom I came — do believe. I do not believe my faith to be the one indubitable truth for all time, but I see no other that is plainer, clearer, or answers better all the demands of my reason and my heart; should I find such a one I shall at once accept it; for God requires nothing but the truth. But I can no more return to that from which with such suffering I have escaped, than a flying bird can reenter the eggshell from which it has emerged.”

(To be concluded)