Leo Tolstoy: The Later Years

BY ERNEST J. SIMMONS

CHAPTERS LXV - LXXXVI

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, 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. After two years Tolstoy 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.

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. But he 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 educating 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-year-old daughter of a childhood playmate. In the next fifteen years, Sonya bore him nine children, and Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

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.”

Tolstoy transferred the ownership of his estate to his wife and children in 1890, and the following year he publicly renounced the copyrights to all his books. The demands of his faith aggravated Sonya’s growing hysteria, and the squabbling in the Tolstoy household increased. When his struggle with the Church culminated in his excommunication in 1901, the strain undermined his health, and on the advice of his doctors he went to Gaspra in the Crimea to recuperate.

LEO TOLSTOY: THE LATER YEARS

byERNEST J. SIMMONS

65

DURING the months at Gaspra death knocked more than once at the door of Tolstoy’s sickroom. All members of the family gathered around on several occasions, prepared for the end. Doctors summoned from Yalta, Moscow, and Petersburg were in constant attendance, and at times their professionally grave faces signaled that hope was running out. But the wonderful constitution of Tolstoy, who as a youth had dreamed of being the strongest man in the world, triumphed over successive attacks of angina pectoris, inflammation of the lungs, and typhoid fever, complicated by rheumatism, liver complaints, and a weakened heart.

All these afflictions Tolstoy bore with patience and humble spiritual resignation. He cheerfully tried to obey the regimen prescribed by his physicians, despite his distrust of medicine, and he accepted the endless care of his family and devoted followers with a sense of embarrassment over the trouble he was causing them. His thoughts were fixed on death and any fear he may have had of it he had conquered. Spiritually he prepared himself for the end and calmly anticipated the moment when the spark of life in his pain-racked body would be extinguished.

Both the Church and the government were almost as much concerned as the family, though for different reasons, with the course of Tolstoy’s illness. The authorities kept informed of events at Gaspra through spies. Alexandra gives an amusing account of being trailed by one and then suddenly turning the tables and tracking the tracker so assiduously that in confusion and humiliation he was obliged to desert the field. There was real point in Tolstoy’s observation at the time that the only sensible place of residence for a Christian in Russia was prison.

In January, 1902, when it seemed that there was little chance for Tolstoy’s recovery, the government took the most elaborate precautions. The telegraph company was forbidden to accept wires with inquiries about his health, and the press was instructed, “in the event of the death of Count Tolstoy,” not to make any references to the excommunication by the Synod and in all reports of the event to observe “ the necessary objectivity and circumspection.” Confidential memoranda were even prepared by the Synod and the Ministry of the Interior, forbidding church services or public demonstrations, and detailing the formalities to be observed in transporting the body from the Crimea to Yasnaya Polyana.

At this same time Pobedonostsev fathered a plot that did credit to his reputation as the most reactionary and Machiavellian influence in the government. Because there was a private chapel, the local clergy had free access to the Panin estate, where Tolstoy lay ill. Pobedonostsev instructed the priest in charge to have one of his assistants in the house when Tolstoy neared the end. As soon as he had died, the priest was to leave the house and at once declare to all that Tolstoy bad recanted his beliefs and passed away a true son of the Orthodox faith. The government would then see to it that these glad tidings were immediately spread throughout the world. Members of the family got wind of this base business and were indignant. They planned to circumvent the plot by concealing the news of Tolstoy’s death long enough to send telegrams to the press abroad with the message that he had died true to his convictions.

The Church was obviously interested in reclaiming Tolstoy either by fair or by foul means. Within a short time Sonya received a letter from Metropolitan Anthony, exhorting her to persuade her husband to return to the faith and die a Christian. “A quiet death under the influence of the rites of the Church,” Tolstoy had observed, “is like death under morphine.” Though Sonya knew how hopeless it was, she told him of the Metropolitan’s request. Write Anthony, he instructed her, that this is my last prayer: “From Thee I have come, and to Thee I shall return. Thy will be done.” When she remonstrated about his attitude towards the Church, he continued: “Let there be no talk of reconciliation. I die without any enmity or evil. But what is the Church anyway? How can there be a reconciliation with such an indefinite thing?" And he ended by asking her not to answer the Metropolitan.

Not until June was Tolstoy able to return to Yasnaya Polyana. Despite the precautions of the authorities, the trip became a triumphal procession. Crowds waited at the station stops to present him with flowers.

Tolstoy’s health improved during 1903, though he suffered periods of weakness and illness. With returning strength he resumed his practice of long walks and rides. On Délire, a spirited young horse that had belonged to his daughter Alexandra, he would ride along the narrow trails in the Zakaz woods that he knew so well, and in the summer he brought back bouquets of wild flowers that he loved or a hatful of firm mushrooms with rose-tan stems, carefully placed on large fresh leaves.

Because of Tolstoy’s uncertain health, the family had decided to remain at Yasnaya Polyana, and some phases of the customary Moscow winter life of the Tolstoys were transplanted to the country. The comparative remoteness of the estate and the wretched traveling conditions did little to discourage the usual stream of petitioners and visitors who used to make their way to the city house. The ancient gray-bearded Tolstoy had become Russia’s most famous museum piece, which foreign visitors felt they must inspect before leaving the country.

Throughout this year Tolstoy revealed in his diary and letters to close friends and adherents his continued efforts to achieve spiritual peace through a rational comprehension of the precise balance between matter and spirit, between the tribulations of this world and the promise of the next world. Many pages of his diary are filled with inconclusive speculations on the meaning of life as he struggled to arrive at a satisfactory definition.

The family, however, still remained an obstruction to Tolstoy’s effort to liberate the true spiritual life in himself. He could not fuse his existence with theirs, because their joys and sorrows depended upon a worship of the material things of life, which he was struggling to surrender. The apparent literary jealousy of his son Leo, and Andrei’s desertion of his wife and two children, hurt him deeply but seemed also the inevitable price that must be exacted from people leading their kind of life. He was equally distressed by constant pressure from his wife to give her first publication rights of new artistic productions for her collected edition of his works.

Sonya’s editions had been an everlasting torment to him, although he refused to have anything to do with the profits from them. He knew that he could not justify her activities, though her position was theoretically that of any other publisher who had free access to his uncopyrighted works. And now Sonya listened avidly to the offer of a million rubles for a permanent copyright of his writings and to one from another publisher of a hundred thousand rubles for a copyright limited to two years. Her efforts to persuade him resulted in his firm determination not to publish henceforth any new artistic works, and with minor exceptions he abided by this decision.

The cross Tolstoy bore was perhaps a light one, and at times there might be a suspicion that the cross was bearing him. But if he considered it a moral duty to accept his life of comparative comfort as a cross which he had no right to abandon, his position was not made any easier by those who actually practiced the beliefs he advocated and even suffered in their cause. Their example always inspired a kind of reverential admiration and his own failures an unsparing self-condemnation.

Since neither husband nor wife had encouraged the pious practice of discreet dissimulation and the little white lies instinctively employed to lessen the emotional wear and tear of marital discord, each suffered from a full knowledge of the other’s private griefs and unspoken censure. Angry thoughts were incompatible with the spiritual peace Tolstoy sought, and he tried, though not always successfully, to maintain an attitude of love and kindness towards his wife. “Tonight,” Sonya noted in her diary, “when I had covered him up and bade him good night, he tenderly stroked my cheek, as though I were a child, and I rejoiced at his paternal love.” She treasured this chaste love, and gloried now in her solitary room where she could dream “pure, maidenly dreams.”

But at times, contemplating their separateness and the curtain he had drawn between their intimate life and his retreat into his spiritual self, she felt a sudden wave of mingled fear and sadness. She entered his bedroom at night and he asked her to massage his stomach. “His thin, ancient limbs look pitiful,” she observed. And she reflected that never did she hear a word of comfort from him now.

“There has come to pass that which I have foreseen,” she wrote. “My passionate husband is dead, a husband-friend there never was. . . . Happy wives live to the end in friendship and sympathy with their husbands! But the unhappy, lonely wives of egoists, of great men, are the wives of whom posterity makes future Xantippes.”

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DURING 1904 Tolstoy’s brother Sergei died, and also Granny, the adored woman of Leo’s early manhood, his unfailing aristocratic friend at Court, and the ancient confidante and unyielding critic of his religious views. Nikolai, Dmitri, and now Sergei. Leo was the last of the four brothers. The living go on dying, he reflected. But are the dead forever dead? An immortal something, the manifestation of God in man, lives on. Of that he was certain. As more and more of those near to him left this earth for the world of light, his own mind, curious but unafraid, embraced the concept of death with a new sense of urgency.

For Tolstoy, however, these personal bereavements lost their significance in the face of the terrible impersonal deaths of thousands now being slain in battle. In January, 1904, the Russo-Japanese War had begun when units of Japan’s fleet attacked Russian ships without warning in the outer harbor of Port Arthur.

The news shocked Tolstoy. The merits of the issue did not concern him, except as they substantiated his long-held and frequently expressed convictions concerning the moral bankruptcy of governments and the conspiracy of their rulers to send thousands of subjects to destruction for the sake of a bit of land, national honor, or the capture of world markets. What did concern him was that two peoples who professed religions that forbade killing were now slaying and maiming each other solely because they had been ordered to do so.

Despite his previous writings on the subject of war, Tolstoy felt it essential to speak out once more. His many followers expected it, and his moral conscience obliged him to state his position at length on the present conflict. An extensive pamphlet, entitled Bethink Yourselves! was published in England by Chertkov in 1904. Translations appeared quickly in various European languages. Even the staid London Times opened its columns to a rendering.

With masterly polemical skill. Tolstoy supported his arguments by introducing the direct evidence of conscientious objectors and the nearly illiterate letter of a doubting Russian seaman at Port Arthur, who, after hearing a priest speak of the “Christloving army,” naïvely implored Tolstoy to answer his question: “Is it true or not that God loves war?” At such a perilous time in Russia, it took a great deal of personal fortitude to oppose his country’s so-called patriotic war and to denounce — as Tolstoy did in the pamphlet—the Tsar and Aleksei Kuropatkin, commander-in-chief, for condemning thousands of peasants to futile slaughter.

The revolt that Tolstoy had warned the young Tsar would take place if social and political changes were not forthcoming broke out in 1904-1905. It required no prophet to foretell it. Though an unpopular and disastrous war hastened the outbreak, decades of reactionary rule and black oppression in a European time-scheme of relative progress had made an uprising of the Russian people inevitable.

This violent national activity had its repercussions in isolated Yasnaya Polyana. Alarms ran through the village. In remote districts the houses of landowners had been burned down and their owners, in some cases, murdered by the peasants. Serious strikes occurred at near-by Tula. Fears swept through the Tolstoy household. English, American, French, Spanish, and Hungarian correspondents rushed to Yasnaya Polyana to obtain the reactions of Russia’s first citizen to these significant events. He received them with gracious politeness, though not untinged with the suspicion that he felt for all journalists. More often than not they found themselves talking about God and immortality rather than about the burning political events in Russia. Meanwhile, intellectuals hoped Tolstoy would head a petition to the Tsar for a constitutional government; others asked him to write an open letter to the Tsar’s soldiers, pleading with them not to shoot down their brothers.

It was characteristic of Tolstoy that at a time of great crisis in his country he refused to throw his tremendous influence on the side of any of the contending parties. He had repeatedly condemned the abuses of tsardom and he had no less uncompromisingly denounced the extremes of the radicals. The proponents of the middle way - the constitutional reformers - had some reason to hope for his support in their efforts to establish a government based on the democratic franchise and public opinion. But his instinctive dislike for all organized effort to solve the ills of mankind obliged him to go his lonely way. When the North American Newspaper cabled him for his reaction to current Russian agitation for representative government, he categorically replied that these efforts would only delay true social amelioration, which, he added, ”can be attained only by the religious and moral perfection of all individuals.”

67

AT least, Tolstoy’s position in this national crisis had the dubious virtue of consistency. For years he had warned his country of the danger of revolution, and on several occasions he had made direct appeals to the Tsar to correct what he considered to be the abuses that were leading to social revolt. He did so not because he had any love for autocracy, for he condemned all governments. But he was willing to compromise with his own ultimate ideals, for he feared the violence of revolution and what he believed to be the illusory hopes it offered the people more than he hated the abuses of autocracy. His warnings had been ignored, and now that revolution had come, he felt it necessary to revert to his original Christian anarchist position. In his eyes all governments were ultimately despotic, and he saw no point in changing one for another. When one of his questioners pushed him to tell what he thought of parliamentary government, he answered: “To ask me what I think about parliamentary government is just like asking — I won’t say the Pope — but some monk his opinion as to how prostitution ought to be regulated.”

With some justice Tolstoy’s critics among the liberals charged him with evading the principal issue that the country had to face — autocratic rule or constitutional rule. In a period of emergency they considered the antithesis he set up between politics on the one hand and individual religious and moral regeneration on the other as highly unrealistic. But he doggedly adhered to the one unchangeable conviction that he had been advocating for the last twenty years - nonresistance to evil by force. This was the axiom by which all political, social, and economic questions were to be solved. Tolstoy did not preach that it was right not to resist evil. Quite the contrary, one should resist it spiritually, passively, by civil disobedience, but not by force, that is, by violence.

It made no difference to him what the motive for the use of physical force might be, or that constitutional governments might employ it in the interests of the good of the greatest number. All governments owed their very existence to the use of physical force, therefore all governments were evil.

Both radicals and liberals were disgusted with Tolstoy’s stand. They understood little about his ideological consistency; they knew only that the doctrine of the moral self-perfection of man became ridiculously quixotic in a time of grave revolutionary crisis. In particular, the Marxian Social Democrats, who had wooed him for some time because more effectively than any of their members he had widely exposed the evils of the Russian government, the Orthodox Church, and capitalism, now turned on him with fierce criticism. In his writings he had repeatedly made clear his objection to materialism as a philosophy of life. “Socialism,” he once said, “is unconscious Christianity,” and he frankly accepted the fact that some of the aims of the socialists were his own. In a sense, he and the Marxian socialists might be said to have shared the same ultimate ideal — the withering away of the state. But for Tolstoy, this ideal could be realized only by man’s moral selfperfection and not by an organized communistic process of material development. “ Economic ideals,” he wrote, “are not ideals.”

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FROM the Marxian point of view, perhaps the fairest and most understanding appraisal of Tolstoy’s contribution to the Russian revolutionary movement was made by Lenin himself. In his first article, “ Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” written in 1908, he summed up the contradictions in Tolstoy’s doctrines as follows: “On the one hand, an artist of genius, contributing not only incomparable pictures of Russian life, but literary productions of the first rank that belong to world literature. On the other hand, a landowner, wearing the martyr’s crown in the name of Christ. On the one hand, an extraordinarily powerful, direct, and sincere protest against social lies and hypocrisy; on the other, a Tolstoyan, that is, a worn-out, historical sniveler called the Russian intellectual, who, publicly beating his breast, cries: ‘I am bad, I am vile, but I am striving after moral self-perfection; I no longer eat meat and now live on rice cutlets.’

“On the one hand, relentless criticism of capitalist exploitation, the exposure of governmental violence and of the comedy of justice and governmental administration, revelations of all the depths of contradictions between the growth of wealth and the achievements of civilization, and the growth of poverty, the brutalization and suffering of the working masses. On the other hand, weak-minded preaching not to resist evil by force. On the one hand, the soberest realism, the tearing away of all masks of whatever kind. On the other hand, advocacy of one of the most corrupt things existing in the world, that is, religion — an attempt to replace the official state clergy with priests by moral conviction, that is, cultivating a clericalism of the most refined and hence most loathsome kind.”

Lenin maintained that Tolstoy had thoroughly identified himself with the peasants, with their moods, hopes, and aspirations. In fact, he declared that Tolstoy’s contradictory views were a veritable mirror of the contradictory conditions surrounding the historical activities of the peasantry in the revolutionary movement, which in turn accounted for their failure as a class in the 1905 Revolution. Tolstoy, like the peasants, concluded Lenin, was unable to realize that the old order which all abhorred could be destroyed only by a class-conscious socialist proletariat. While recognizing the great debt of the revolution to Tolstoy’s writings, Lenin flatly declared that “Tolstoyan nonresistance to evil [was] the most serious cause of the defeat of the first revolutionary campaign.”

Lenin, however, did not give sufficient weight to the significant part played in Tolstoy’s thinking by his utter repudiation of violence in any form. It was the keystone of his whole doctrine. Had he been inclined to compromise with it, he might have met the radicals halfway on certain levels of activity.

“ It is difficult, Leo Nikolayevich, to remake me,” wrote one of his radical friends from exile. “This socialism is my faith and my god. Of course, you profess almost the same thing, but you use the tactic of ‘love,’ and we use that of ‘violence,’ as you express it.”

This was a pithy summing up, in Marxian terminology, of the essential difference between the doctrine of Tolstoy and that of the revolutionists. Curiously enough, future history seemed to be on the side of both, for if the “tactic of violence” brought about a positive good in the 1917 Revolution, it resulted in a negative evil in the terrible Second World War that followed, which Tolstoy prophesied in January, 1910, when he wrote in his diary: “Anarchism is not the teaching by which I live. Rather it is the fulfillment of the eternal law, not permitting violence or participation in it. Will the consequences be either anarchism or, on the contrary, slavery under the yoke of the Japanese or the Germans?”

Violence creates violence and there is no end save universal destruction, and the only alternative to this, Tolstoy said, is the eternal law, the “tactic of love.” Many of his friends among the Social Democrats also detested violence, but they were inclined to forgive it if the motive in their opinion was a good one, such as the killing of those in power who opposed the revolution. When this proposition was put up to Tolstoy by one of his socialist-minded friends who asked: “Is there not a difference between the killing that a revolutionist does and that which a policeman does?” Tolstoy answered: “There is as much difference as between cat dirt and dog dirt. But I don’t like the smell of either one or the other.”

With the bloody events of 1904-1905, the power of Tolstoy’s pen over the Russian people began to wane. Widespread violence seemed to break the magic spell of his doctrine of non-violence, and thousands of the little people, whose hopes were lost in the ultimate failure of the rebellion, licked their wounds in no spirit of Tolstoyan Christian charity. They had learned from bitter experience the physical law that when two forces meet the greater will prevail. Next time the greater force would be on their side. Passive resistance in the face of bayonets or bullets took more moral courage than they possessed. As for peacefully waiting for change - well, time flies and death also waits. Tolstoyans quietly began to join the ranks of radical revolutionists.

But Tolstoy was serving God, not the leaders of the revolution. He was passionately concerned with all the unfinished business of world thought — those insoluble questions about God, life, death, violence, and poverty, which the leaders of mankind, like bored parliamentarians, always lay on the table for future consideration. He once related, by way of illustrating the fact that even genuises err, a conversation he had had with the skeptical and pessimistic old butler of the Olsufyevs. It was in the country and he remarked to the servant, referring to the weather and the gathering of the harvest: “God knows what He does.” To this the butler replied: “Yet He too makes mistakes!” Whatever God’s failings, Tolstoy refused to admit any mistake in the doctrine he preached in His name. And in the midst of the turmoil of 1904-1905, he doggedly continued to belabor the public with his polemical articles, though they could reach the Russian people only in contraband copies.

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ACTUALLY, the lone position Tolstoy had taken in the bitter social and political struggle served to increase his loneliness in the family circle. The spirit of revolt against authority in the country in general seemed to have invaded the household. During the summer of 1906, for example, the wrangling became almost unbearable to him. Leo and Andrei gave their allegiance to the most reactionary political thought and treated their father’s sincerest beliefs with scant respect; and Sonya insisted upon her property rights in utter disregard of her husband’s feelings.

Overt acts on the part of members of the family threw Tolstoy into despair. On one occasion a letter arrived from a peasant youth, expressing Christian views close to his own. After tea, he began to read it to the family. Andrei noisily jumped up from the table and brusquely announced that he was not interested in the letter. And his brother Leo demonstratively arose and followed him out of the room.

Incidents such as this were not casual quarrels. They marked an intensification in the development of the family tragedy, in which certain of the sons openly identified themselves with their mother’s cause in the struggle with her husband. They were on the side of property; they aimed to protect their interests in the estate and to defend established law and order against their father’s “anarchism.”

A danger affecting all the members of the household suddenly cleared the atmosphere of strife. At the beginning of September, an illness that Sonya had been complaining of for some time took a critical turn. A physician from Tula and Dr. Makovitski, who had become Tolstoy’s house doctor, diagnosed a tumor of the womb. An operation was essential. The distinguished surgeon V. F. Snegiryov was hurriedly summoned and soon arrived with assistants, a nurse, and even an operating table.

Telegrams brought absent members of the family to Yasnaya Polyana. The house filled up and took on the aspect of a medical clinic. Tenseness gripped everyone. In the face of death Sonya seemed transformed, sloughing off all earthly dross, and humbly composing herself to meet the end.

Tolstoy rejoiced over this sudden change in his wife, and there arose in him once again, as at the time of Vanichka’s death, the hope that she was undergoing a spiritual rebirth. The fussing of the doctors, the thoughts of the operation, all these efforts to frustrate one of life’s greatest experiences disgusted him. When Snegiryov asked Tolstoy’s permission to operate, saying that it was a matter of life or death, he was reluctant, to give his consent. If her time had come, then an operation seemed to him like an unholy interference with the will of God. In the end, he evaded the issue, declaring that the decision must rest with his wife and children. Preparations were made. Tolstoy went to Chepyzh, a forest adjoining the estate, to be alone and pray. He left directions to ring the big bell outside the house twice if the operation were successful, if not . . . well, he would come anyway.

The operating table was set up in the middle of the room; physicians in white coats talked in whispers and moved about softly; then Sonya, moaning in pain, was carried in and the door was shut. Soon all was silent. Then Dr. Snegiryov’s loud voice could be heard, first severe, later nervous and irritated. Suddenly Alexandra heard him burst into vile and indecent swearing. “. . . you German mug . . . son of a -, accursed German!” The catgut which a German dealer had supplied for stitching the wound turned out to be poor in quality and tore in Snegiryov’s hands. Finally, the door flew open and the doctor, exhausted and purple in the face, dashed out. Someone threw a wrap over him and led him downstairs, and someone else followed with a bottle of champagne. The operation was pronounced a success.

Alexandra ran off to Chepyzh to tell the glad news to her father. So did Ilya and Masha. They saw him at the edge of the woods.

“Successful! Successful!” they shouted.

“Good, go back, I’ll come in a minute,” he replied with suppressed emotion, and turned back into the woods again to pray.

Later, when he emerged from his wife’s room, after she had recovered from the anaesthetic, Ilya recalled that he was choking with indignation and declared: “My God, what a horrible thing! A human being cannot even be left to die in peace! A woman lies with a slit stomach, tied to a bed, without pillows, and she groans more than before the operation. There’s torture for you!”

Perhaps because he was expecting it, Tolstoy soon detected Sonya’s reversion to type. Only two days after the operation he entered in his diary: “It’s terribly sad. I’m sorry for her. Great sufferings and virtually in vain.”For him spiritual harmony had become more desirable than life itself. Perhaps his deepest yearning had been to find in this woman whom he had once so passionately loved the perfect spiritual mate of his old age. That hope now seemed lost forever.

And now, after Sonya’s peculiarly delicate operation, her seventy-eight-year-old husband at last repudiated that sensual intimacy with her that had meant so much to him in the past. He told Makovitski: “ I’ve been in love many times, but I can say that I never remember about love. . . . Perhaps this is not an important matter.” And in his diary, before Sonya had fully recovered, he wrote the following passage, which may well have come under her own eye: ” What can be more vile than sexual intercourse? One need only describe this act with preciseness in order to invoke the most terrible repulsion. Therefore, among all people who have emerged from an animal condition and entered a spiritual life, shame has always manifested itself among its members in connection with the sexual act.”

Shortly after his wife’s illness, his daughter Masha, that spiritual child searching with him for the unattainable, died from pneumonia (November 27, 1906). Though the passing of no one in the family could have left him with a greater sense of personal loss, Masha’s going did not shake his conviction that death was an unfolding, the beginning of life.

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THE family griefs and quarrels of 1906 and also of 1907 must be viewed against the thunder-and-lightning background of national strife, for, as in the preceding two years, the tension that continued to exist everywhere was still reflected in the Tolstoy household. Though the revolution had been crushed, the government’s bungling attempts to introduce reforms merely succeeded in stirring up further social opposition without being able either to control or to satisfy it.

Tolstoy realized that one of the most difficult things for man to do is to change his pattern of thought, especially when it has been sanctioned by time and experience. People in the government, he said, were always telling him how necessary government was, just as the owners of pubs and keepers of brothels consider their establishments necessary. In dismay he watched while the revolution, instead of replacing a bad old idea with a good new one, strove merely to sugar-coat the old conception of governmental power with glittering promises. The reformers were beginning to loom in his eyes as a graver danger than the defenders of tsarist bureaucracy. Both sides justified the killing of each other in the struggle for power by the same argument they killed for the common good.

In the present struggle Tolstoy saw the dilemma of his country as an obligation to select one of two paths of social existence: either to limit the power of government by transferring more of it into the hands of the people, or to eliminate all power on the basis of the dominance of one religious-moral law in the hearts of people. His own choice was clear; it involved one of those new ideas which mankind found so difficult to accept in place of the old idea of rule that for centuries had dominated the mind. Though he was discouraged with his previous efforts, and somewhat skeptical of the value of the printed word, his conscience obliged him to continue to appeal to the people in another series of articles and pamphlets during 1906-1907.

It never occurred to Tolstoy that in the realm of political and social thought life had outstripped him, and the wave of history had carried far beyond him. Politics, which he loathed, and which his own generation mostly ignored, had become the passion of an aroused nation. It was a dirty but necessary business, in which the end justified the means. Born an aristocratic landowner, he had lived most of his life in a little village in the middle of Russia, isolated from the new developments and thoughts that were filling men’s minds. His own class, and the peasantry among whom he lived, he understood from long experience, and with his rare powers of observation and psychological penetration he made scores of representatives of these classes live in his fiction with a wonderful truthfulness to life. And even in his controversial works, his arguments carry a convincing authenticity when based upon a knowledge of those layers of society with which he was entirely familiar.

But neither in his fiction nor in his controversial writings does Tolstoy evince any deep knowledge or understanding of the rising middle class and the proletariat, which were beginning to dominate the future destiny of his country. Lenin put his finger on precisely this fault in Tolstoy’s relation to the revolutionary movement. How little he grasped the thought, temper, and desires of the young members of the proletariat who were to forge the successful Revolution of 1917 is strikingly illustrated by an incident that took place in the summer of 1907. In a village near Yasnaya Polyana, he engaged in a discussion with several youths on the theme of how the workers might best free themselves. He first made the point that the workers had confirmed their own slavery by serving the rich and the government, and that they would free themselves only when they refused such servitude and lived according to the law of God, of love.

Tolstoy tried to implant in the souls of these young men a sense of humility and a belief in service to others and in love for their neighbors. But they had experienced hunger, they had been kicked around, they had read revolutionary pamphlets, they knew what they wanted from life, and it had little relation to what Tolstoy wanted. Yet these were the youths who in ten short years would destroy the whole flimsy superstructure of the old Russia he knew and build on its foundations a new civilization. And they were fully aware then, in 1907, that a revolution could not be won on Tolstoy’s slogan of “God s law, humility, and love,”instead of liberié, égalité, and fraternité.

Like some sage whose wisdom is timeless, however, Tolstoy would have been no more convinced by the successes of the 1917 Russian Revolution than he had been by the accounts he had read of the French Revolution. He knew only that power corrupts and that this was just as true of a democracy or a socialist state as of an absolute monarchy. For him political progress could not be measured in terms of democratic or socialist progress, for he saw both the hypocrisy behind universal suffrage and the ever present danger of power, even though held by the few elected by the many.

His writings are full of prophecies of democratic and socialist states turning into monstrous dictatorships; of nonmilitary democracies becoming powerful military states: of civilized countries championing fiendish theories of racial superiority; of all the wonderful advances of science being turned into frightful instruments of war to kill most expeditiously millions of peoples. All this, he foretold, will be achieved in the name of political, social, and scientific progress. And there will be no end of such “progress,” he warned, while humanity continues to worship the law of man as higher than the law of God.

71

THE news that most excited Tolstoy in the summer of 1907 was that Chertkov, who had finally been permitted to return to Russia from exile in England, planned to spend a couple of months in the neighborhood of Yasnaya Polyana. Chertkov now felt it necessary to be close to his spiritual father and made arrangements to rent a house for the summer near Yasenki, a village about three miles from Yasnaya Polyana.

Since his daughter Masha’s death and the family’s increased hostility to his views, Tolstoy, in his spiritual loneliness, tended to turn more and more to the masterful comfort of Chertkov. Though perhaps inevitable in the circumstances, it was a fatal tendency for all concerned, except Chertkov. For this huge, handsome man with the suffering eyes of a saint and the iron will and temperament of a Savonarola had the habit of quarreling with those whom he could not dominate and of absorbing utterly those who submitted to his powerful personality. Few were more capable of unintentional wrong in the name of righteousness.

When Tolstoy received a telegram announcing the arrival of Chertkov and his wife and son, he was agitated to tears and rode horseback to Tula to meet them. They remained at Yasnaya Polyana until their own house was put in order.

It had been a long time since so much Tolstoyan atmosphere had hung over the neighborhood. Besides the Chertkovs, sympathizers or fervent followers such as Goldenweizer, Gorbunov-Posadov, director of the Intermediary, and Nikolayev, the Henry George specialist, settled down for the summer in houses near-by. Visits were exchanged between Tolstoy and Chertkov nearly every day. There were long serious discussions on doctrine and publications. Tolstoy inspected the prodigious and still growing manuscript of the “Vault” of his thoughts, which Chertkov had been compiling for years, and tears came to his eyes as he viewed this huge labor of love. The devoted friends had a spiritual feast, and frequent were the notations on “joyous meetings with Chertkov” in Tolstoy’s diary.

Sonya felt that the “dark people” had taken over the estate, and she resented them more than ever. She could not fail to notice her husband’s changed disposition and new interest in life when surrounded by his followers, as though he had been starved for their kind of Tolstoyan affection and interest. Nor could she fail to notice and to be jealous of these almost daily visits to Chertkov by a husband who seemed to have so little time to spare for her.

Sonya resented Chertkov’s attitude towards her husband and his assumption of privileges, such as interrupting Tolstoy in his study, which not even members of the family dared to do. In fact, Chertkov’s whole behavior was arousing her suspicions of his ulterior motives. Their ancient quarrel over the publishing rights of her husband’s works still smoldered, and she suspected that Chertkov was trying to procure for his own future private use all of Tolstoy’s manuscripts that he could lay his hands on. In April of 1907 she wrote him a sharp note to ask if he did not have in his possession certain diaries of her husband that had disappeared from Yasnaya Polyana. This action irritated Tolstoy, who was finding it increasingly difficult to keep peace between Chertkov and Sonya.

At the beginning of fall the storm clouds broke in fury. For some time tension had been growing between the Yasnaya Polyana peasants and the stewards of the estate. In order to increase profits, the stewards had raised the peasants’ rent, fined them heavily for spoiled crops, and impounded their animals for wandering in the estate gardens. One night in early September a caretaker surprised several peasants attempting to steal cabbages from the Tolstoy garden. Some shots were fired, whether by the peasants or the caretaker was not definitely proved. This incident, along with other misdeeds of the peasants, prompted Sonya, with the support of Andrei, to appeal to the governor of Tula for protection. The authorities, only too happy to render such assistance in this particular instance, promptly arrived, investigated, arrested several peasants, and left two armed policemen on the estate to keep order.

A report of the affair got out to the public. Newspapers printed sensational accounts under such headlines as “Home of L. N. Tolstoy Attacked!” And conservative and religious periodicals ran articles in which they maliciously pointed out that the great teacher of nonresistance to evil by force had cried to the police for help the moment his own skin was in danger.

The skirmishing that had been going on in the family for years on this question of property was nowended and the lines had been formed for the final battle. Tolstoy believed that property was the root of all evil, and it had now become the chief evil in his relations with his family. His position was anomalous. He had legally signed away all his rights to his estate to the family and had publicly renounced the copyrights of his works. Yet old Yasnaya Polyana peasants whom he had known as boys often took him to task for not giving away his land; disciples sometimes reproached him for continuing to live on a wealthy estate when he had repudiated property; and there was constant bickering going on over the rights to his books.

No doubt the accumulation of vexations, and the harassment of family quarrels over the question of property during 1907, prompted Tolstoy to make a public statement. And he also wanted to put an end to the interminable requests he received from all over the world for gifts of money.

He sent to the newspapers the following letter: “ More than 20 years ago, because of certain personal considerations, I renounced the possession of property. Real estate belonging to me I transferred to my heirs, just as though I had died. I also renounced property rights in my productions, and those written after 1881 became public property.” He then added that he sometimes received money from abroad and from people in Russia for charitable purposes, and this he distributed to the poor, as the need arose, to the best of his ability. And after requesting people not to turn to him for material aid, he concluded: “I less than anyone am able to fulfil I such requests, for if I have really acted as I here testify, i.e., I have ceased to possess property, then I cannot help with money those who appeal to me. If, however, I am deceiving people in saying that I have repudiated property and really possess it, then it is even less likely that they should expect aid from such a person.”

Public reaction to this attempt to clarify his position was hardly an anodyne to his painful feelings on the subject. He received malicious and ridiculing letters; and newspaper reactions were equally scurrilous, playing largely on the theme: Was the great man being simply naïve or hypocritical?

Tolstoy had made his point at the expense of public ridicule. In some respects the effort was intended as much for his wife and sons as for the public. Yet Sonya, when her husband had renounced his estate, had assumed all the responsibility for it in the interests of the family. But the more faithfully she tried to fulfill her duties in this respect, the wider grew the rift between her and her husband. What was she to do? Only that which duty obliged her to do — fulfill her responsibilities to herself and her family. They had been the responsibilities of her whole married life. She had not changed. Only her husband had changed, and because of it she seemed to him always at fault. Yet every new resolute step she took to resolve the problems of the family’s existence caused him moral suffering, undermined her own spiritual equilibrium, and served to aggravate her tendency to hysteria.

72

BY 1908 Premier Stolypin’s forces, apparently fully entrenched in power, felt safe in reverting to many of the repressive measures practiced before the revolution. The civil liberties promised the people were now curtailed, and any infringement of law and order was punished, often with severity. Opposition was outlawed, and it seemed that the radicals’ distrust of the liberal promises of the Tsar’s government had been fully justified.

Tolstoy now became a special object of attack by reactionary authorities who once again felt secure in their power. Still afraid to strike a person of his international renown, they continued their old policy of wounding him by striking at his followers and all who deliberately or unwittingly furthered his beliefs. Those caught publishing, possessing, lending, or distributing his anti-government or anti-military works were prosecuted. As always, nothing could be calculated to wound him more deeply, and each such case threw him into a turmoil of moral agitation. He wrote again and again to government officials and influential friends to ask their assistance for these victims.

Those final acts of violence — executions — distressed Tolstoy most of all.

“Today, May 9,” he read in a newspaper, “on the Strelbitski field at Kherson, twenty peasants were executed by hanging for a bandit attack on the estate of a landowner in the Elizavetgrad district.” This was more than Tolstoy could bear. He began his famous article, “I Cannot Be Silent.” A weight fell from his shoulders as he set to work. The self-assurance and satisfaction of an effective participant in a noble cause took possession of him. In a little more than two weeks he finished “I Cannot Be Silent” and sent it off to Chertkov with the plea that it be published at once.

On July 3 several leading Russian newspapers dared to print selections from the article, and for weeks it continued to appear in fragmentary form in the provincial press. At Tula a complete version was issued by an illegal press. Owners of nearly all the newspapers that handled the article in any form were either fined or imprisoned. Abroad, the article appeared in translation in hundreds of newspapers and periodicals in various countries.

The immediacy of the theme and the emotional intensity and high seriousness with which it was handled contributed to the tremendous success of “I Cannot Be Silent.” Tolstoy’s great literary talent, his sense of drama, of vivid description, of human psychology, made doubly impressive this anguished outcry against man’s inhumanity. He struck a note that won a response from all thinking people. The crimes of the revolutionists are terrible, he declared, but they do not compare to the criminality and stupidity of the legalized violence of the government. The delusion, however, is the same on both sides. And the excuse, he added, “is that an evil deed committed for the benefit of many ceases to be immoral; and that therefore, without offending against the moral law, one may lie, rob, and kill whenever this tends to the realization of that supposed good condition for the many, which we imagine that we know and can foresee, and which we wish to establish.”

Since the government claimed that these executions were carried out for the good of the Russian people, then, as one of the people, Tolstoy insisted that he could not escape the feeling that he was an unconscious participator in these terrible deeds, that his personal safety and chattels were protected by the horrors being perpetrated by the government.

“And being conscious of this I can no longer endure it, but must free myself from this intolerable position!

“It is impossible to live so! I, at any rate, cannot and will not live so.

“That is why I write this and will circulate it by all means in my power both in Russia and abroad - that one of two things may happen: either that these inhuman deeds may be stopped, or that my connection with them may be snapped and I put in prison, where I may be clearly conscious that these horrors are not committed on my behalf; or still better (so good that I dare not even dream of such happiness) that they may put on me, as on those twelve or twenty peasants, a shroud and a cap and may push me also off a bench, so that by my own weight I may tighten the well-soaped noose around my old throat.”

The article created an uproar. As the famous painter Repin put it, in a statement for the newspapers, Tolstoy voiced the things which had been boiling in the hearts of all Russians. A stream of letters poured in to Yasnaya Polyana, by far the majority of which acclaimed his courage and applauded his uncompromising condemnation of the government’s executions. The sentiments of most of them are reflected in the words of one humble correspondent from Moscow who wrote: “You have removed a stone from our hearts, as it were, for you seem to speak as a symbol of faith and we repeat your words in our hearts, because we are unable to speak so and can only feel.”

A few of the letters, most of them anonymous, abused Tolstoy and his article. A neat box arrived which contained, if not a “well-soaped noose,” a stout coil of rope with an accompanying message: “COUNT. An answer to your article. Without troubling the government you may do it yourself; it is not difficult. In this way you will do good to both our country and our youth. A RUSSIAN MOTHER.” He humbly replied, regretting any unhappiness he had caused, and beseeching her to write him and explain the cause of her unkind feelings towards him.

73

PREPARATIONS for celebrating Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday on August 28 had already got under way as early as January 7, when an Initiating Committee was set up in Petersburg. The idea caught like wildfire and spread throughout the country. The progressive press responded enthusiastically and organized a large meeting with delegates from various newspapers and periodicals. A “colossal” and “super” celebration was planned, something far surpassing the celebration in honor of Pushkin.

Tolstoy was not merely a national but an international figure, and members of the press waxed lyrical over the publicity possibilities. Soon there began to appear in the newspapers nearly every day, under such headings as “Tolstoy Jubilee,” “A National Holiday,” and “Grandiose Celebration,” accounts of preliminary plans and interviews with celebrities on the significance of Tolstoy.

After various unsuccessful efforts to halt the proceedings, which Tolstoy felt would stir up more hatred than love for him, he wrote an open letter to the press to beg that the preparations cease. Confronted with this public request, the Initiating Committee had no alternative other than to desist.

Nevertheless, August 28 brought a flood of birthday greetings from Russia and all over the world, and they continued to arrive for days. Some two thousand telegrams alone were received. They came from institutions and organizations, from all manner of individuals — titled nobility, great public figures, and even members of the Church, and convicts in prison. An Englishman presented in person a message of greetings and lofty praise signed by hundreds of his countrymen, including such figures as Meredith, Hardy, Wells, and Shaw. Ironically enough, his old Sevastopol battery sent congratulations to this man who now loathed war, and from the students of the University of Kazan came greetings to one of its dismal failures as a student but now its most illustrious alumnus.

It seemed as though the whole world had united in honoring this man, not simply as the author of universally loved novels, but as a great moral teacher, the articulate conscience of humanity, the symbol of mankind’s ceaseless striving for moral improvement. The thousands of messages clearly indicated that those beliefs closest to his heart, which he had advocated untiringly for almost thirty years - the purifying of religion, nonresistance to evil by force, and the freeing of the soil from private ownership - had found a response in the hearts of people all over the world.

Tolstoy could not help but be affected, even to tears, as he read communication after communication expressing sympathy for his ideas and admiration and love for him. Unlike most great moral teachers, he had received visible evidence before his death that his teaching had won a world audience.

74

CHERTKOV, having finally cleared up his affairs in England, had settled near Yasnaya Polyana in June, for what seemed a permanent stay. He had bought part of Alexandra’s Telyatinki farm and set about building a large house that would accommodate his numerous entourage. Tolstoy viewed the project with misgiving and the considerable expenditure of money with dissatisfaction. Wryly he remarked to his secretary: “Chertkov is building next to me, but my abode will soon be far away.”

Now Chertkov went into the business of Tolstovism on a big scale. As heir apparent, he had to have his own little court. He made converts easily out of the local peasantry, for he paid quite well for their services, and few served him on the farm without finding it personally advantageous to adopt the outward aspect of the conventional Tolstoyan, however deficient they were in the spiritual observance of doctrine. His household soon contained more than thirty people, from farm workers and domestics to typists and secretaries, who were always mysteriously busy with copying Tolstoy’s manuscripts and working on the seemingly endless “Vault” of his thoughts, the usefulness of which the master was now beginning to doubt.

The wellspring of all wisdom for Chertkov was only two miles from Telyatinki, and he fell the urge to imbibe almost daily, especially since Tolstoy’s health at this time prevented him from visiting his friend. He “is virtually living in our house and hardly ever leaves Leo Nikolayevich alone,” Sonya complained in her diary. Often he came shepherding a barefoot brigade of novices to meet the master. If Sonya happened to enter the room when hor husband was talking to these converts, “ he grew silent, looked at me quest ioningly, so that I, understanding his desire that I should not be present, felt it necessary to leave.” Chertkov sometimes brought an English photographer to snap Tolstoy in various aspects for his collection of pictures of the master.

Chertkov read every word from Tolstoy’s pen, often suggesting changes with an unctuous insistence that forced compliance. And he followed him around with a notebook in hand, taking down any of his conversation that he thought significant. Visitors to Yasnaya Polyana who did not evince commendable respect for Tolstoyan principles would sometimes provoke his displeasure. Tolstoy’s secretary, Gusev, tells of the visit of a neighbor, Mme. A. E Zvegintsev, whose company Sonya enjoyed as one of her own social set. Because of the disturbances in the neighborhood at this time, she came well protected by guards and carrying a small revolver, which she deposited on a shelf in the entrance hall. Chertkov, arriving after her, spied the revolver with horror.

“What effrontery to visit Leo Nikolayevich with a revolver!” he exclaimed to Gusev. “Have you a copy of ‘Do Not Kill’? Bring it here, please.” And he wrapped the pamphlet about the handle of the revolver, and copies of other forbidden literature of Tolstoy were stuck into the pockets of the unsuspecting lady’s coat.

“What a limited creature is Chertkov and what a narrow point of view he has in everything!” Sonva wrote in her diary, after she had overheard him warn her husband that his habit of occasionally making the sign of the cross might lead people to think he had returned to the Orthodox faith. “All Chertkov has to do is to take notes, to collect, and to photograph, and that only.”

With Chertkov as a constant irritant in the matter, the old quarrel over publishing rights look a serious turn. During an illness in August, Tolstov, thinking that he might die, dictated several wishes to Gusev for his diary, among which was the hope that his heirs would make all his writings public property. If this wish were carried out, of course it would mean that Sonya would have to surrender the rights he had given her to his works written before 1881. That all his productions should become public property had long been one of his fondest desires.

Sonya had no intention of doing anything of the kind. More than ever she jealously guarded her rights to the early works. The quarrels over this subject between husband and wife during 1908 were frequent and bitter in the extreme. Often all present were drawn in, including Chertkov, who customarily took out his little notebook and jotted down bits of the argument for his diary.

The public protest evoked by “ I Cannot Be Silent” had no effect on the government’s harsh policy towards those who opposed its power. And Tolstoy’s followers and those who published or distributed his banned works continued to suffer, for such persecutions mounted during 1909. The police, on directions from above, were obviously conducting a planned campaign against the spread of his influence.

At the beginning of March the police struck their hardest blow — Chertkov was given three days to clear out of the province of Tula. The vague charge of “pernicious activities” was lodged against him; it was also rumored that a neighboring landowner had complained to the authorities of his proselyting among the peasants of the district and of his urging them not to pay taxes. Any reason would have been sufficient for the police if they had decided that it was desirable to prevent the chief disciple from being so accessible to the master. So great was Tolstoys indignation that he actually refused to shake hands with the officer who came to arrange Chertkov’s departure, for him an unforgivable act of impoliteness that made him groan at night when he woke up and recalled it. Chertkov and his numerous menage moved to Kryokshino, the estate of his relatives the Pashkovs, situated in the Moscow district.

Early in June Tolstoy set out to visit his daughter Tanya at Kochety, her husband s estate. He undertook this tiring trip of almost a hundred miles partly because, with the coming of summer, the domestic atmosphere at Yasnaya Polyana had again grown troubled, and partly to see Chertkov. For Kochety was on the edge of Tula Province, and by renting a hut just inside the boundary of the neighboring Orlov Province, he was able to have two of those “joyous meetings” with his devoted disciple without breaking the law.

Tolstoy prolonged his stay at Kochety, much to Sonya’s annoyance. She had accompanied him on his journey but returned alone, and now the big house seemed dismal and empty without him. All the glory and excitement had vanished. With this grim foretaste of what his death or going away would mean to her, she sadly wrote him: “Dear Lyovoohka, we live without you at Yasnaya Polyana like a body without a soul.”

On Tolstoy’s return, life began again at Yasnaya Polyana — and so did the family bickering. Whenever it was possible Tolstoy kept out of the quarrels and brooded in silence. With misgivings he had noticed his wife’s growing nervousness and her hypercritical attitude to much that went on in the house.

One thing Tolstoy decided in the course of these quarrels — to make his works public property after his death by drawing up a legal will. Whether this crucial idea was first proposed to him by one of his friends or disciples will never be known for certain, though it appears likely. As early as June 23 of this year he wrote to Chertkov, who had apparently already broached the idea, that it was repugnant to him, and that he would rather send all his writings to the devil if it would prevent any hard feelings.

But shortly after this he appears to have come to the conclusion, because of the many discussions and quarrels on the subject, that he could not fully trust his heirs to carry out his wishes concerning the disposal of his literary property. Ordinarily he would have instinctively rebelled at calling to his aid the law, an arm of the government. But he had compromised with the government before on issues that seemed to make for the greatest good of the greatest number, and ensuring that his works would become public property after his death would appear to be such an issue. He would use the law not to protect private property, but to safeguard his works as public property.

75

IT WAS partly with the purpose of drawing up a legal will that Tolstoy set out to visit Chertkov at Kryokshino on September 3. With him went Alexandra, Dr. Makovitski, and a family servant. Tolstoy, in excellent spirits, was as excited as a child over the trip, which would take him to Moscow for the first time in eight years. Persistent movie photographers pestered him at the station, and so did numerous people on the train who recognized him.

At the Moscow terminal Chertkov and a delegation from the Intermediary welcomed him. A murmur of “ Tolstoy!” ran from person to person on the platform, and only with difficulty did the carriage make its way through the crowd shouting greetings to him. That night he stayed at the family’s old Moscow house. The next morning, at Goldenweizer’s suggestion, he went to Zimmerman’s music store to see the latest in mechanical inventions — a player piano. On the way, the swarming streets and city din filled him with horror and confirmed his disgust for modern civilization.

Arriving at the station, the party boarded a thirdclass carriage and was soon at Kryokshino, only some twenty miles distant.

The Chertkovs lived in the “Tolstoyan” fashion that had prevailed in their establishment at Telyatinki. A host of assistants, laborers, and servants dined with the family, a custom that much embarrassed the old Tolstoy retainer who kept leaping to his feet every time any of the gentlefolk came near his chair.

In this atmosphere, saturated with his own moral and religious influence, the low spirits that had depressed Tolstoy during recent months vanished. He was surrounded by loyal followers who accepted his every word as law and reverenced him as a living saint among sinning mankind. Visitors from near-by Moscow who had learned of his presence there were endless. He sometimes avoided them in long solitary walks through the countryside, though he was usually followed at a respectful distance by the devoted and devious Chertkov.

When Tolstoy had been at Kryokshino about ten days, Sonya arrived, having been delayed by an ailing leg. Her nervous presence introduced an alien element into the harmonious Tolstoyan atmosphere. Though everything was done to mollify her, an unpleasant scene took place. She insisted that they go home on the eighteenth and stay overnight in Moscow. Tolstoy wished to remain until the nineteenth and return directly to Yasnaya Polyana in order to avoid any possible demonstration that his appearance in the city might cause. A fit of hysteria on Sonya’s part decided the matter.

Before he left, however, Tolstoy planned to finish up the business of the will, which he had discussed with Chertkov. He drafted the contents himself and a clean copy was made by Alexandra. In it he stated that all his published or unpublished works, written after January 1, 1881, and all unpublished works written before that date, “constitute, after my death, no person’s private property, but to be freely publishable and republishable by all who may desire so to use them.” He further requested that all his manuscripts and documents extant at the time of his death be handed over to Chertkov, “to the end that, after my decease, he may dispose of them as heretofore, and that they may be freely accessible to all who may desire to make use of them for publication.” And he finally requested Chertkov to select a person or persons who, in the event of his own death, would carry out Tolstoy’s behests.

On the day of departure from Kryokshino, Tolstoy and the witnesses gathered in a small room. He was agitated, partly perhaps from a fear that Sonya would enter and surprise them at this business. He read over the text of the will, signed it, and so did three witnesses, friends and followers — A. B. Goldenweizer, A. V. Kalachev, and A. P. Sergeyenko. Tolstoy believed that he had executed a legal document.

The time had come for leaving. At the little station a small crowd had gathered, including movie photographers. Sonya asked her husband to walk up and down the platform so that they might be photographed together, and he complied unwillingly. A larger crowd and more photographers awaited them on their arrival at Moscow. At home the telephone rang continually and utter strangers kept inquiring about Tolstoy, for this time the news had spread all over the city that he was there. In fact, the newspapers announced the time of departure of the party on the morrow.

The next morning crowds began to gather outside the house, among them the ubiquitous motionpicture photographers. Tolstoy with Sonya, Alexandra, and Chertkov left in a carriage. People in the crowd bared their heads. Tolstoy kept bowing. The photographers in another carriage dashed ahead, grinding away on their mounted camera.

At the station a crowd had long since assembled and kept growing by the minute. All classes of the city’s population were represented. As the carriage approached, the cry went up: “He’s coming! He’s coming!” Several hundred dashed forward and surrounded the carriage. All hats came off and a loud “Hurrah!’ roared from thousands of people who had jammed the square and station.

The Moscow triumph almost proved fatal, for the excitement and strain on Yolstoy’s feeble strength had been too much for him. Soon after the train pulled out he slipped into unconsciousness. They thought he was dying. When they got him home Dr. Makovitski and Alexandra worked frantically to bring him to, while Sonya hovered over him, begging him to tell her where the key to his drawer was, for she feared he would die and the manuscripts would be stolen.

With his still remarkable recuperative powers, however, Tolstoy quickly recovered and again plunged into his literary labors, beginning several articles and a short story. Towards the end of September he wrote Chertkov: A letter from a Transvaal Hindu moved me.” The unknown correspondent was none other than M. K. Gandhi. He had been deeply impressed and influenced by Tolstoy’s writings, especially The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and in a subsequent letter to Tolstoy, he called himself “a humble follower of yours.” His civil-disobedience campaign and his passiveresistance doctrine owe much to Tolstoy, though the master would no doubt have disapproved of Gandhi’s later political activities and dealings with the British government.

But the tense feeling in the household was not conducive to the peace of mind Tolstoy required for his literary work. If anything, since his return from Kryokshino, the domestic situation had deteriorated. Sonya’s nervous habits increased, her criticism of her husband and his disciples grew more bitter.

76

THE question of inheritance rose once again to plague Tolstoy. Before Alexandra left Moscow, on the return from Kryokshino, she had taken the precaution to submit the will drawn up at Chertkov’s estate to a lawyer, N. K. Muravyov, to determine its legality. After examining the document, he decided that it would not be accepted by the courts for various reasons, but principally because, according to Russian law, property could not be left to “no one”; it had to be left to some definite legal person who would dispose of it as Tolstoy wished. Subsequently several consultations were held in the lawyer’s office by Chertkov, his close friend and assistant F. A. Strakhov, and Goldenweizer, and several drafts of a model will were drawn up by the lawyer to be submitted to Tolstoy. He was to be asked to select one or reject them all if they did not meet with his approval.

Strakhov arrived at Yasnaya Polyana on October 26, when, according to information he had received, he believed that Tolstoy’s wife would be in Moscow. By chance, she was returning home on the same train that brought him there. He managed to fulfill his commission, however, without revealing to Sonya the purpose of his visit. Alone with Tolstoy, he explained in detail the legal objections to the previous will and presented the drafts of the model text.

Tolstoy read over the drafts, selected one, and wrote at the bottom that he agreed with this form. But after thinking a little, he said:  The whole affair is very painful to me. And it is all unnecessary — to secure the spread of my ideas by such measures. Now Christ — although it is strange that I should compare myself with him — did not trouble about anyone appropriating his ideas as his personal property, nor did he record his ideas in writing, but expressed them courageously and went on the cross for them. His ideas have not been lost. Indeed, no word can be completely lost, if it expresses the truth and if the person uttering it profoundly believes in its truth. But all these external measures for security come only from our non-belief in what we are uttering.” And with this statement he left the room.

Strakhov was in a quandary. He felt that Tolstoy now wished to drop the whole matter of a will. Before he reported to Chertkov that his mission had been unsuccessful, he decided as a last resort to present fully the views of the little group of friends on this subject. When he could get Tolstoy alone again, he brought up his previous statement. You mentioned Christ, he argued with him. He did not have to trouble about the dissemination of His ideas because He did not write and received no payment for His ideas. But you write, he continued, and now your family receives payment for your works. And if you do not secure the public use of your writings, you will be indirectly furthering the rights of private property in them on the part of your family.

It has been painful to your friends, said Strakhov, to hear you blamed because you transferred your estate to your wife, in spite of your denial of private property. Now it will be even more painful to them to hear people say that in spite of his knowledge that the public repudiation of his copyright had no legal validity, Tolstoy took no steps to ensure that his wish would be carried out, and thus assisted the transference of his literary property to his family.

Tolstoy admitted the strength of Strakhov’s arguments and asked for some time to think the matter over. After several hours he called Strakhov and Alexandra into his study and said to them: “I shall surprise you by my final decision. ... I want, Sasha, to leave everything to you, understand, everything, not even excepting what I reserved in the declaration in the newspapers.” Did this mean that his wife would have to forfeit the income from those works which she had been accustomed to regard as her own, the astonished Strakhov asked. Tolstoy hastily added: “All this Sasha will arrange for her [Sonya] during her lifetime in accordance with my desire, in short, arrange things so that my will does not bring about any change in relation to her.”

Strakhov hurriedly telegraphed the triumphant news to Chertkov. The friends were delighted with this new decision. It meant that Tolstoy would leave all his works, not even excepting those published before 1881, which he had formerly assigned to his wife, to his daughter Alexandra, who, with Chertkov as a literary executor, would faithfully fulfill Tolstoy’s determination to make all his writings the property of the public.

Muravyov drew up a new will with these specifications. On November 1 Strakhov and Goldenweizer went to Yasnaya Polyana with the document. All felt uneasy, even guilty, about the unsuspecting Sonya. Tolstoy carefully locked the two doors of his study, and after reading over the text signed it and the two witnesses signed.

In a household where there had never been any secrecy, especially between husband and wife, there now existed a kind of conspiracy. Sonya quickly sensed this fact, even if she could not at first understand all its reasons and implications. And it completed her isolation in the family. She felt desperately lonely. Her husband was surrounded by devoted followers who now regarded her with open hostility, the wife who was “poisoning” the last days of her saint-like husband. With a pain in her heart, she saw how happy he was in their company, how gloomy in hers. When she entered the room the conversation stopped among these disciples, the cheerful expressions on their faces turned sour. She felt hopelessly alone in her struggle against these followers of her husband, who, she believed, had designs on her property and that of her children.

When Sonya took her complaints to her husband, he would grow furiously angry and threaten to shoot himself, and then she was terrified that he might do it. His own efforts to be kind and considerate — and there were some — were now fumbling and inadequate. Their forty-seven years of married life seemed to her a dismal failure, and her only comfort was to dwell upon the happy early part of that union. In these circumstances Sonya’s behavior grew more and more irrational as her nervous forces were exhausted by factors that she could neither control nor understand.

77

EXISTENCE at Yasnaya Polyana was daily becoming less compatible with the serenity Tolstoy sought. His wife’s nervous energy kept the household in a state of constant activity. Things often went badly with the management of the estate. Two of his sons, in financial difficulties, were pressing her for loans.

Every small circumstance seemed to increase the old, gnawing dissatisfaction that Tolstoy felt over the disparity between the life around him and that which he wanted to lead.

Though obviously against Sonya’s wishes, Tolstoy decided to escape again from the trying situation at Yasnaya Polyana and visit Chertkov, who had moved to Meshcherskoye in the Moscow district, in order to be nearer the master. He left on June 12, accompanied by Alexandra, his new secretary, Bulgakov, and Dr. Makovitski, and he represented the visit to his anxious wife as a brief one. However much he yearned to leave permanently, he could not take this step. That year (1910) an earnest Kiev student and disciple had enthusiastically written him: “Abandon your estate, give your property to your relations and the poor, leave yourself without a kopek, and as a mendicant go from town to town.”

Tolstoy answered: “Your letter has profoundly moved me. What you advise me has been my sacred dream, but up to this time I have been unable to do it. There are many reasons . . . but the chief reason is that my doing this must not affect others.”

As at Kryokshino, Tolstoy’s spirits rose as he settled into the pleasantly familiar atmosphere of Chertkov’s household at Meshcherskoye. Here was the calm and discriminating solicitude he needed for spiritual concentration. He could even overlook the unique annoyance perpetrated by Chertkov’s semiinvalid wife: a ladder from Tolstoy’s second-story window to the ground, which had to be used by his visitors during the invalid’s rest hours for fear of disturbing her by going up and down the stairs. In fact, despite his age, he longed to try the ladder himself. His recovered gayety served to remind the severe sectarians surrounding the host that they ought not to live by Tolstoyism alone. He soon had them laughing at his sallies and singing cheerful songs of an evening, led by Bulgakov’s strong tenor.

At home Sonya’s rage was increasing. She had the house filled with painters and plasterers, was rearranging all the furniture, and staying up till the small hours of the morning working on her edition. Tolstoy’s kind letters from Meshcherskoye were not any palliative. Her brief answers gave no hint of the coming storm, which apparently burst in full fury over the bit of information he unsuspectingly wrote her in his letter of June 19. He had just received “the welcome news,” he said, that the authorities had permitted Chertkov to be at Telyatinki during the period of his mother’s visit there, which was to begin on June 27.

Something snapped in Sonya after she got this letter. She reacted in a violent manner, physically and emotionally. On June 22 Tolstoy received a telegram: “Sofya Andreyevna intensely nervous attack, insomnia, weeping, pulse hundred. Asked me to telegraph. Varya.” This telegram had been dictated by Sonya to Varya M. Feokritov, her typist and a close friend of Alexandra, but Varya added the last four words on her own as a hint that the message was really Sonya’s. Detecting this hint, Alexandra pointed it out to her father, and after talking it over and deciding that Sonya was in all probability simulating illness, he sent a wire to the effect that it would be more convenient to come on the twenty-fourth.

According to Varya, when Sonya received this telegram she cried: “Don’t you see that this is Chertkov’s expression, that he won’t let him go. They want to kill me, but I have some opium. . . .” And she ran to the cupboard, seized a vial of opium and spirits of ammonia, and declared that she would poison herself if her husband did not come back. Meanwhile, she had sent another telegram: “Implore you to come quickly, on the 23rd.” And since Varya had by now become thoroughly alarmed over the threats of suicide, she agreed to send in her own name a third telegram, also dictated by Sonya: “I think it necessary.”

When he received this message, Tolstoy decided to leave at once and reached Yasnaya Polyana late at night on the twenty-third. He wrote in his diary: “Found things worse than I expected. It is impossible to describe the hysteria and exasperation. I restrained myself pretty well, but was not gentle enough.”

78

SONYA’S behavior was not merely the result of Tolstoy’s failure to return immediately. A complex of psychotic wounds combined with adverse material factors over the whole course of her married life had brought an inherently unstable nature to the point of mental and emotional collapse. A morbid purity fixation had been outraged before marriage by reading, in her future husband’s diary, of his youthful debauchery, and this condition had been further aggravated by the events of the wedding night and the nature of subsequent sexual relations. Tolstoy’s virtual repudiation, after his religious experience, of the kind of existence they had been living for years tremendously widened the rift between them and increased Sonya’s feeling of material insecurity, just as his struggle at that time to cease sexual intimacy increased her sense of emotional insecurity.

With the coming of old age, the severance of the sexual bond, and his desire to withdraw within himself spiritually, Sonya’s isolation from her husband was complete. Since she could not share his spiritual life, she was denied the usual compensations that old married couples enjoy. And now, on top of all this, the fear that he would leave her had entirely undermined what little stability she had left. In a frenzy of desperation she sought for a symbol of her failure and found it in Chertkov. She wrote in her diary: “I was wretched because of this long, unaccustomed separation from Leo Nikolayevich. He has a repulsive, senile love for Chertkov (in his youth he used to fall in love with men), and he is completely subject to his will. ... I am insanely jealous of Leo Nikolayevich’s intimacy with Chertkov; I feel that he has taken from me all that I have lived for during 48 years.”

The situation that had developed at Yasnaya Polyana would probably have been rejected by Tolstoy the novelist, as “too sensational,” untrue to the experience of life.” Here was a woman of sixty-six who, after being married for forty-eight years, was accusing her eighty-one-year-old husband of homosexual relations with a man of fifty-six! Sonya was now willing to go to almost any lengths to drive the hated Chertkov out of her husband’s life.

In her moments of mental derangement, often accompanied by physical illness, she unquestionably suffered terribly. In her calmer moments, however, she was overwhelmed with remorse and pity for her husband. Some in the household were convinced that her ravings and absurd actions were cunning dissimulation, practiced to gain her own ends, not realizing that dissimulation was a symptom of her peculiar illness. Desperately she tried to enlist all on her side, freely pouring forth her woe even to complete strangers. But the only real supporters she had were her two sons Leo and Andrei, and motives other than those of devotion to their mother played a part in their defense of her cause.

However exaggerated were Sonya’s fears of Chertkov, she had real reasons to dislike and distrust him. But even though his relations with Tolstoy were by now most unusual, only the overwrought mind of Sonya could have delected anything perverted in them. Tolstoy once wrote in a light vein: “If there were not a Chertkov, it would be necessary to invent one; for me, at least, for my happiness.”Chertkov was his special defender before the world, and no man knew so intimately the master’s teaching or could interpret it so successfully.

Chertkov seemed to be the principal irritant in the unhappy domestic strife at Yusnaya Polyana. But the assumption that peace would reign if he removed himself from the scene, as a gentleman normally would in a quarrel between husband and wife, was altogether too simple. The causes of the dissension went much deeper. Besides, he had a spiritual vested interest in Tolstoy and his teaching. He had given up the best years of his life to this cause, and now he had no intention of allowing “the crazy will of a woman,” as he expressed it, to endanger his favored position at the right hand of the master. As the chief editor of Tolstoy’s enormous literary production and the continuator of his teaching after his death, Chertkov looked forward to occupying himself for the remaining years of his life with a most congenial and sacred trust. And he was prepared to exert himself to the utmost to defend these prerogatives against Sonya and any members of her family - even against Tolstoy himself.

With Chertkov’s return to Telyalinki, a feeling of tension gripped all in the family in expectation of another mad scene as Sonya continued in a highly nervous state. She turned every visit of Chertkov into a painful experience for all. Whenever a carriage drove up, she began to tremble, fearing her “enemy” had arrived again. She shadowed him and her husband through the house, refusing to let them talk alone for a moment. If Chertkov delayed his departure in the evening, she would ostentatiously arise and loudly announce: “It’s time to go to bed!”

This campaign did not daunt Chertkov, though it kept Tolstoy in a continual state of worry. But Sonya failed to stop with these tactics. She shouted threats against Chertkov, that she wanted to kill him, to drive a knife into his fat body. Losing all sense of discretion, she plotted with her neighbor Anna E. Zvegintsev, who disliked Chertkov, to denounce him to the authorities and have him again removed from the district. Still more disturbing, she read aloud to members of the family and guests a passage in Tolstoy’s diary, which he wrote at the age or twenty-three, of his love for men, and she openly accused him and Chertkov of unnatural relations.

Tolstoy and the older children thought the time had come to call a physician to examine Sonya. On July 19, Dr. D. V. Nikitin, a family friend, and Dr. G. I. Rossolimo, a neuropathist, arrived. Dr. Rossolimo’s diagnosis of the illness was: ‘A degenerative dual constitution: paranoial and hysterical, with a predominance of the former. At the present time there is an episodic aggravation.” Separation from her husband for a period, and baths and walking, were prescribed. Sonya was outraged.

79

A CRESCENDO of scenes culminated in her leaving home on July 25, because her husband, she said, had driven her out of the house and her daughter had spat at her. She wept at departing, forgave Alexandra, and took some poison with her. Behind her she left a letter for Tolstoy, in which she thanked him for her former happiness and declared that, since the doctors had advised separation, she was going away to leave him free to have all the secrets and meetings with Chertkov that he desired.

But Sonya was careful to depart in the carriage that was being sent to Tula to meet Andrei, and in a few hours she duly arrived back at Yasnaya Polyana with her son. She feared her husband’s derision, but he came to her, she wrote in her diary, kind and touched, and thanked her with tears in his eyes for having returned. Then she immediately brought up the question of Chertkov again, and he grew angry.

Sonya, however, had won out once more, for the next day Tolstoy wrote Chertkov to say that, though it pained him, he felt that they ought not to meet as long as his wife’s sickly condition lasted. His iriend accepted the blow with bad grace, and took the occasion, in replying, to sermonize Tolstoy in Pols toy an accents on the danger of abandoning the freedom of action necessary to accomplish, not his own will, but the will of Him who sent him.

The strain was telling on Tolstoy. His sleep was disturbed by worry and Sonya’s frequent visits at all hours of the night. It was impossible to work. His attempt to treat her tirades with silence only exasperated her the more. He began to feel that there was something ridiculous, humiliating, and shameful in allowing himself to be cut off from Chertkov. Death would seem to him like a welcome relief, he wrote in his diary. For some days he had been thinking about trying to get away from her and go to Kochety for a rest, and Tanya, who was visiting Yasnaya Polyana, strongly encouraged this step. But whenever it was mentioned Sonya had hysterics.

On August 14 Tolstoy wrote in his secret diary: “Always worse and worse. She did not sleep last night. She jumped up in the morning. ‘With whom are you talking?’ Then she told me horrible things: sexual irritation. Terrible to say. . . . Terrible, but thank God she is pitiful and I can pity her. I will endure. God help me. She has worn everybody out, and herself most of all.” Shortly after this Tanya entered her father’s room and found him with his face in his hands, sobbing. He repeated to his daughter some of the things Sonya had said to him. She had demanded that they resume what had long since ceased — marital relations!

This last experience was too much for Tolstoy, and he firmly decided to leave for Kochety the next day.

To the dismay of the whole family, Sonya insisted on accompanying her husband to Kochety. Tanya, feeling that the purpose of her father’s visit to her estate would be frustrated, sternly warned her mother that she expected her to be on her best behavior.

For several days relations between husband and wife improved in the cheery surroundings of Kochety, until Sonya read a news account reporting that the government’s ban on Chertkov’s living at Telyatinki had been entirely removed. It almost seemed as though the authorities, aware that Chertkov’s presence near Yasnaya Polyana was a vital factor in a scandalous family feud, had decided to let him remain there as a part of their indirect campaign against Tolstoy. He and his daughters had known of this news for nearly a week, but had feared to tell Sonya. Now her despair was terrible. “I will kill him!” she shrieked at her husband.

With a new firmness Tolstoy resisted all Sonya’s hysterical attempts to get him to return to Yasnaya Polyana with her or even to name a definite date. Finally, “ insanely sobbing,” as she described herself, she left without him on September 12. He did not join her until September 22, in time to be on hand for their wedding anniversary.

Dressed in a white silk gown, Sonya stood with her husband before a screen on the day of their fortyeighth wedding anniversary. Bulgakov nervously clicked the shutter. But the picture did not turn out well, and the next day she insisted that another be taken. Tolstoy’s dislike for this business made no difference to her. Had he not let Chertkov take scores of pictures of him?

Besides, a newspaper, she heard, had published a rumor that they were divorced. She would send this photograph to the press and prove to the world that Tolstoy still loved her. “She needs only one thing,” he had written in his diary a week before, “that people should think that I lore her. That is what is so terrible.” She clung to his arm, turned her face full towards him, and tried to elicit with her faded smile an answering smile from him. But he stared stonily ahead, profound discontent frozen forever on his careworn face.

At this moment, however, Chertkov at near-by Telyatinki, sulking like Achilles in his tent, was indignant over Sonya’s blistering rejection of an attempt he had made at reconciliation. He testily wrote Tolstoy that he had made a big mistake in allowing “a spiritually alien person” to interfere in their relations. Depressed by reproaches and accusations from this quarter too, Tolstoy entered in his secret diary: “They tear me to pieces. I sometimes think I ought to get away from them all.”

Finally Tolstoy, worn out with the emotional strain of the past months, fell dangerously ill. He had convulsions and a prolonged period of unconsciousness. Sonya, in a frenzy of despair, clasped her husband’s twitching legs and softly whispered: ‘Lord, only not this time, only not this time!” And she said to Alexandra, who had been hurriedly called: “I suffer more than you. You will lose a father, but I will lose a husband for whose death I am to blame!” For all her sincere and terrible grief, she could not resist the desire to purloin Tolstoy’s portfolio, containing papers; she hid it in her cupboard. The children observed her in this act and hastened to secure from her his secret diary and the key of his desk. When Tanya demanded the portfolio, she returned it, saying that she did not want Chertkov to get it.

80

TOLSTOY made a quick recovery. But Sergei, Tanya, and Alexandra held a council, and Sergei warned his mother that if she did not come to herself, the family would place her under the control of doctors and separate her from her husband. For if Tolstoy died, said Sergei, the whole world would believe that it was her doing. Thoroughly contrite now, Sonya a few days later even melted to the point of inviting Chertkov to call.

Any hope of tranquillity Tolstoy expected was blasted, for Sonya found a misplaced copybook containing the entries, running from July 29 to September 22, of his “Diary for Myself Alone.” She came upon this little book which he had tucked away in one of his boots. Of course, she did not scruple to read it, despite the plain statement on the first page that it was intended only for himself. In it were various frank reflections on the family strife and also plain allusions to his will and to some of its terms.

The hysterical scenes began all over again. Sonya’s discovery confirmed all her suspicions, which was a typical reaction for a person with her mania. For days, she wrote in her diary, she went about with only one thought — suicide. Her husband would give all his works to the public and thus would take “ the bread from the mouths” of her twenty-three children and grandchildren. He was holding a threatening dagger over her - if he should die before her edition of his works was published, she might well lose all the income. Of course, that “wicked Pharisee,” Chertkov, was the cause of it all. “I must end these tortures more quickly,” she wrote, “or tomorrow Mr. Chertkov will be carrying away not manuscripts, but me to a lunatic asylum!

At last Tolstoy had begun to feel the futility of continuing this seemingly endless struggle with Sonya by love and kindness. He wondered whether his very presence was not actually hindering her recovery.

He had begun to make secret plans, to tell Alexandra and to ask her to inform Chertkov. Should he go, each of them would use a pseudonym in all communications. A feeling of tense expectancy took possession of him. Habit, duty, and love for Sonya demanded that he stay. When he whispered his intention to dear old Marya Schmidt, this frightened worshiper exclaimed softly: “Darling Leo Nikolayevich, this will pass; it is only a momentary weakness.” And he replied: “Yes, yes, I know that it is a weakness, and I hope that it will pass.” He sincerely hoped. But at the same time he waited for a real reason for leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever, and he knew in his heart of hearts that he would take advantage of it. And the unfortunate, tragic Sonya soon gave him that reason.

On October 28 Tolstoy wrote in his diary what had happened in the early hours of that morning: —

“I lay down at half-past eleven. Slept till three o’clock. I awoke, and again, as on previous nights, I heard the opening of doors and footsteps. On other occasions I had not looked at my door, but now I glanced at it and saw through the crack a bright light in the study and heard a rustling. That was Sofya Andreyevna searching, probably reading. The day before she had asked, insisted, that I should not close my doors. Both her doors were open, so she could hear my slightest movement. Day and night, my every word and movement must be known to her and under her control. Again footsteps and a cautious opening of doors, and she went out.

“I don’t know why this aroused in me an unrestrainable aversion and indignation. I tried to go to sleep again but could not. I tossed about for an hour, lighted a candle, and sat up. The door opened. Sofya Andreyevna came in and asked: ‘How are you?’ and she was surprised to see my light. My aversion and indignation grew. I choked and counted my pidse — 97.

“ I could lie there no longer and suddenly took the final decision to go away. I wrote her a letter and began to pack only what was necessary for the trip. I woke Dushan and then Sasha, and they helped me pack. I trembled at the thought that she would hear and come out — scenes, hysteria, and then there would be no getting away without an uproar.

“By six o’clock everything was somehow packed, and I went to the stable to tell them to harness. Dushan, Sasha, and Varya finished the packing. It was still night — pitch dark. I missed the path to the wing of the house, stumbled into a thicket, pricking myself, ran into the trees, fell, lost my cap and couldn’t find it, made my way out with difficulty and got back to the house. I found another cap and with a lantern made my way back to the stable and saw to the harnessing. Sasha, Dushan, and Varya came out with me. I trembled, expecting to be pursued. But at last we drove off. At Shchyokino station we had to wait an hour, and I thought she would appear at any moment. However, we took our places in the railway carriage and started. My fear passed and pity for her arose in my heart, but no doubt that I had done what I had to do. Perhaps I am mistaken and am merely justifying my actions. But it seems to me that I have saved myself—not Leo Nikolayevich, but that something of which there is still a bit left in me.”

81

ON the morning of October 28 Sonya rose late, as was her custom. She went to greet her husband. He was not in his room — strange at that time of the day. An old fear gripped her. She ran to Alexandra.

“ Where is papa?”

“He has gone away.”

“How has he gone away? When?”

“Last night.”

“Impossible! Sasha, dear . . .”

“Well, do you think I’m fooling? I’m telling you what has happened.”

“Has he gone away for good?”

“Probably for good.”

“Alone?”

“No, with Dushan.”

“Darling, Sasha, dear. . . ! Tell me — where has he gone to?” Sonya clasped her hands imploringly. Her knees sagged.

“ I don’t know where he’s gone,” Alexandra answered. “He told me nothing, only gave me a letter for you.”

“My God!” murmured Sonya. She tore open the letter and began to read: —

“My departure will grieve you. I am sorry for that, but please understand and believe that I could not act otherwise. My position in the house is becoming and has become unbearable. Apart from anything else, I can no longer live in these conditions of luxury in which I have been living, and I am doing what old men of my age commonly do: leaving this worldly life in order to live out my last days in peace and solitude.

“Please try to understand this and do not follow me if you learn where I am. Your coming would only make your position and mine worse and would not alter my decision. I thank you for your honorable forty-eight years of life with me, and I beg you to forgive me for anything in which I have been at fault towards you, as I with all my soul forgive you for any wrong you have done me. I advise you to reconcile yourself with the new position in which my departure places you and not to have an unkindly feeling towards me. If you want to report anything to me, give it to Sasha. She will know where I am and will forward what is necessary. But she cannot tell you where I am, for she has promised me not to tell anyone.”

Sonya could bear to read only the first sentence. She rushed out of the house and dashed towards the pond. Alexandra, Bulgakov, and several servants ran after her. Reaching the little platform from which the women rinsed the laundry, she slipped, fell on the planks, and rolled off into shallow water. Alexandra and Bulgakov with the aid of a servant pulled her out and with difficulty got her back to the house.

The hysterical Sonya’s ravings and crude suicide attempts made the rest of that day at Yasnaya Polyana a mad experience for the whole household. She tried to jump but of the window; and again she dashed for the pond and was hauled back. A penknife, scissors, and heavy objects with which she feebly tried to injure herself were taken away from her. She had to be watched every moment. Roaming from room to room she wailed that she could not live without her husband. Her passionate outbursts of grief were a curious mingling of sentimentality and hate. Clasping to her breast her husband’s pillow, a small one that she had made for him, she covered it with kisses, moaning: “Dear Lyovochka, where is your worn little head lying now? Do you hear me?”

And the next moment she screamed: “He’s a beast! He couldn’t have acted more cruelly! He deliberately wanted to kill me!”

In fact little serious concern for her absent husband was reflected in Sonya’s grief. Her attention was centered primarily upon herself, an accepted phase of the derangement from which she suffered. She seemed now to realize the awful truth that the glory in which she had basked for years had vanished, and that the world would attribute Tolstoy’s flight from home to her behavior. She sent a servant to the station to find out what train Tolstoy had taken and dispatched a telegram to it: “Return at once. Sasha.” But the servant revealed this fraud to Alexandra, who exposed it by a telegram of her own. To a chance reporter disguised as a friend, Sonya did not hesitate to show Tolstoy’s farewell letter, apparently believing this to be her best defense before the world. To Alexandra, however, she declared her intention of running down her husband. If she found him, she said that would be the end of his escapes, for she would watch him day and night, even sleep at his door if necessary.

All the children except Leo, who was abroad, were summoned in this emergency. They quickly gathered at Yasnaya Polyana and decided to send for a doctor and a nurse to keep their mother under constant observation. This new doctor, a menial specialist, found no evidence of paranoia in Sonya, but rather a neuropsychic hysteria.

Her agitation hardly lessened. She wrote Tolstoy a pathetic letter the day after his flight: “ Lyovochka, darling, come home and save me, dear, from a second attempt at suicide. Lyovochka, friend of my whole life, I will do everything, everything you wish; I will renounce all luxury entirely; I’ll be friendly with your friends; I’ll cure myself; I’ll be kind. Dear, dear, come back; you must save me. Even the Gospel says you can never, in any circumstances, desert your wife. My dear, darling, friend of my soul, save me, return. Come back if only to say farewell to me before we part forever.” Poor Sonya’s repentance was too late.

82

AT LAST he was on the road! The great adventure bad begun. But the setting was not the one he had so often imagined of the Brahmin, bent with years, trudging his solitary way along a dusty path to some lonely wilderness refuge. Tolstoy sat gloomily in a smoky, crowded, noisy, third-class railway coach. He seemed more like some aged modern Don Quixote with Dr. Dushan Makovitski, his faithful Sancho Panza, off on a hopeless quest of spiritual knight-errantry.

What a complex series of material circumstances, psychological factors, rational speculation, and moral urges had created this unique situation. On the one hand, from the time of his youth Tolstoy had indulged in dreams of abandoning civilization and living like a peasant, joining the carefree Cossacks, becoming a holy pilgrim, or entering a monastery. And after his spiritual regeneration these dreams found real substance in his desire to lead a simple life of “bread-labor” and service to others, which was so much at variance with his comfortable Yasnaya Polyana existence. In one form or another both the dreams and the positive plans for an entirely different life were reflected in the hopes and yearnings of his imaginary characters — Olenin, Pierre Bezukhov, Kornei Vasilyev, Saryntsov, and Father Sergei.

On the other hand, unhappy experiences of Tolstoy’s married life both aided and hindered the fulfillment of his dreams and spiritual desires. They aided in the sense that he often fell he could no longer live with his wife and must go away, and always, of course, it was to go away and realize his ideal existence. Again and again he expressed this intention in his diary, and on several occasions, notably before Alexandra’s birth in 1884, and at the height of Sonya’s affair with Tanoyev in 1897, he very nearly left home. And in the latter instance, it is significant that he never destroyed the farewell letter to his wife, as if he sensed that his determination, though unfulfilled, was unaltered.

Yet these unhappy experiences also hindered him from going away, because he accepted them as a cross he must bear, out of love for Sonya and duty to his family. The unpleasant incident in his study in the early hours of the morning of October 28 suddenly simplified this inhibiting complex and provided the essential impulse to action. He left home to get away from Sonya, whom love and kindness could not change, but he had left also to realize his dream of a new life. On his own moral terms it was a weakness, as he had admitted to Marya Schmidt. He had lost his spiritual struggle and regained his humanity.

How hard it had been to take that step after so many years of doubt and hesitation. And somehow Tolstoy fell that it was irrevocable — there was no returning. Conscience, however, still tugged at him. He had been on the train only a short time when he turned to the silent, faithful Dushan and said mournfully: “ I wonder how Sofya Andreyevna is now? I’m sorry for her.”

With an effort Tolstoy finally put these sad thoughts out of his mind. “How fine it is to be free,” he declared, as though trying to cheer up his anxious companion rather than himself. Soon he began to take an interest in the passengers sitting around him. The coach was full of peasants and workers. They had long been taking an interest in him, for some had recognized him and the word had gone around that this was the great Tolstoy. Naïvely he had imagined that he could escape from Yasnaya Polyana and hide himself from Sonya in some remote place, forgetting that his face was one of the best known in Russia Reporters and police agents were quickly on his trail, and headlines — “Leo Tolstoy Leaves Yasnaya Polyana!" — shouted their news to the world before he even had time to select that peasant hut to which he would withdraw from the world “to live out his last days in peace and solitude.”

If Tolstoy’s features had failed to betray him, his conversation would have given him away. For he was soon engaged in an animated discussion with a peasant, a surveyor, and a student, and the subjects of course were his favorite ones — religion, the single tax of Henry George, the use of violence, and education. Warming up to the debate, he rose to his feet in order more forcefully to drive home his points, almost shouting so that he could be heard above the customary medley of train noises.

The discussion turned into a lecture as passengers from both ends of the coach left their seats and gathered around to listen to Russia’s most famous man. Tho student assiduously took notes. This man, who a few hours before had stealthily run away from his wife to seek a peaceful retreat, now stood in a crowded third-class railway coach and expounded the eternal law, like some Biblical prophet with his massive, gray-bearded head, emphatically declaring that he did not believe in a God who created the world but in One who lived in the consciousness of people.

After an hour of this Tolstoy grew weary and was content to sit quietly and listen approvingly to the accordion playing and tuneful songs of a group of workers at the rear of the coach. He had decided to visit his sister at the Shamardino Convent. The nearest station was Kozyolsk. Although it was only some seventy miles from Yasnaya Polyana, the trip consumed more than six hours. Dr. Makovitski, who detested Russian trains, bitterly declared that this incredibly slow ride under the most uncomfortable conditions helped to kill the ailing Tolstoy. Reaching Kozyolsk late in the afternoon, they drove by cab to Optina Monastery near Shamardino. Going to the monastery inn and asking for a room, Tolstoy said to the monk in charge: “My being here may perhaps be disagreeable to you. I’m Leo Tolstoy, excommunicated by the Church. and I’ve come to talk with your elders and tomorrow will go to my sister at Shamardino.”

The monk politely replied that all were welcome there, and Tolstoy was assigned a comfortable room. He had sent a telegram and a letter to Alexandra to inform her and Chertkov of his whereabouts, and after posting his diary, he went to bed, “to try to sleep,” as he wrote his daughter.

83

EARLY next morning A. P. Sergeyenko, one of Chertkov’s assistants, arrived at the monastery inn for the obvious purpose of obtaining information on Tolstoy’s condition and state of mind, which he would report to his employer, Chertkov had already written a letter for the press to explain the reasons that had obliged Tolstoy to leave home, and to express his own joy over this event. Sergeyenko’s account of what had happened at Yasnaya Polyana after Tolstoy’s departure, especially Sonya’s attempt to drown herself, depressed Tolstoy. And in this disturbed frame of mind he wrote Alexandra a rather bitter letter, in which he said. “ The chief thing is that they [his children] should understand and try to suggest to her [Sonya] that for me with her spying, eavesdropping, eternal reproaches, her ordering me about, her constant control over me, her feigned hatred of the man nearest and most necessary to me, together with her evident hatred of me disguised as love — life was not merely unpleasant but simply impossible. If anyone should wish to drown, it is certainly not she but I. Let her know that I desire only one thing — freedom from her, from this falsity, pretense, and the hatred which fills her whole being.”

Tolstoy walked around the familiar grounds of the monastery. If only they would not require him to go to church, he thought, how pleasant it would be to live the peaceful life of these monks. He wanted very much to talk with the celebrated ascetic, Father Joseph, but as an excommunicate he felt awkward about intruding where his presence might not be desired.

In the afternoon he visited his sister Masha at Shamardino Convent. They both wept as he told her of his life at Yasnaya Polyana over the last few months and why he had felt it necessary to leave. Masha did not criticize his decision; she had long been aware of Sonya’s hysterical behavior.

The next day, while he was again visiting his sister, Alexandra arrived with Varya Feokritov. The distance between Yasnaya Polyana and his first haven seemed to be lessening. Though he had asked his daughter not to attempt to join him until he summoned her, she had felt it necessary to come. The detailed account she gave of events at home alarmed him even more than the recital of Sergeyenko. And when she said that her mother had guessed where he was and threatened to pursue him, a kind of panic seized him. He decided to push on as soon as possible.

Alexandra brought her father several letters from the family, which did nothing to raise his drooping spirits. Tolstoy replied in a general letter to all the children. He wrote in a kindly spirit and tried to explain why he could not have acted otherwise. At the same time he also answered Sonya’s letter which she had written on the day he left home. Any lingering hope she may have cherished that he would quickly return to her was stifled in the first sentence: “A meeting between us, and still more my return now, is entirely impossible.” He pleaded with her to reconcile herself to his absence and try to understand his position. Her present mood and attempts to commit suicide, he said, made his return unthinkable, for she obviously still lacked control of herself, which had been the reason why he had gone away.

Yet he held out hope for her: “Try to direct your strength towards pacifying your soul,” he wrote, “and not towards getting whatever you want, and then you will obtain what you desire. . . . Do not think,” he added, “that I went away because I do not love you. I love and pity you with all my soul. But I cannot do otherwise than I am doing. . . . Farewell, dear Sonya, and may God help you! Life is not a joke, and we have no right to throw it away at our own caprice, and to measure it by length of time is also unreasonable.”

That evening Tolstoy, Alexandra, and Dushan sat around the table in his room at the inn and with the aid of maps and train schedules planned their next move. He decided to go south to Novocherkassk and stay with relatives, the Denisenkos. From that point the plans became vague.

At four o’clock the next morning Tolstoy woke Alexandra. They must be off. He had already aroused Dushan. Sleep had deserted him that night, for the fear that Sonya might arrive at any moment tormented him. They were soon on their way to the Kozyolsk station, where they boarded an early morning train. The last lap of his great adventure in search of peace and solitude had begun.

84

THERE were no peasants and workmen in the second-class car, in which Tolstoy now traveled, to engage him in heart-warming discussions about religion, the land question, and education. He asked Alexandra for a newspaper and was much chagrined at reading all about his flight from home. In fact, nearly everybody on the train was reading and talking about it. His daughter overheard cynical remarks of unsuspecting passengers concerning her mother and father. In no time the news ran through the whole train that Tolstoy was on board, and Alexandra had to speak sharply in order to drive away would-be visitors from her father’s compartment. A man with a red mustache walked up and down the aisle, stupidly disguised, now in the uniform of a railway employee, now in civilian clothes—the ubiquitous police agent. Tolstoy’s secret plan of escape seemed to have become the common property of all.

Late in the afternoon Tolstoy experienced a severe chill. Dr. Makovitski took his temperature. It was slightly over a hundred. His fever rapidly increased. Fear gripped the little group, but Tolstoy, sensing their worry, tried to cheer them up. It seemed dangerous to continue the journey. Since the train stopped at Astapovo for a considerable wait, Dr. Makovitski hunted up the stationmaster and persuaded him to provide a bed for Tolstoy in his little house on the side of the railroad tracks. The sick man was at once helped to bed.

After a spell of slight convulsions, Tolstoy slept quite well and awoke the next morning, Monday, November 1, feeling much better and with a lowered temperature. He dictated a telegram to Chertkov about his illness, but declared his intention of continuing his journey. When Alexandra suggested that she inform the family, as she had promised to do if he should become seriously ill, he implored her not to. The only person he had any desire to see, he said, was Chertkov, and she at once telegraphed him to come.

Towards evening Tolstoy’s condition grew worse; pneumonia had set in. Now thoroughly alarmed, Dr. Makovitski and Alexandra decided to call Dr. Nikitin from Moscow without seeking Tolstoy’s permission. Alexandra sent a telegram to Sergei to ask him to secure the services of the Moscow physician at once.

Chertkov arrived with Sergeyenko on Tuesday morning. The two friends greeted each other with deep emotion. Chertkov kissed his hand and they both wept. Tolstoy plied him with questions about Yasnaya Polyana, and the family. The agony of his past experiences with Sonya apparently still fresh in his mind, he asked him, according to Chertkov’s account, to do everything possible to prevent her from coming to him. When Chertkov reported that Sonya had agreed not to try to see her husband against his wish, he grew calmer. What Chertkov did not report was that Sonya, in the midst of her first grief over her husband’s departure, had made an effort to be reconciled with his friend and her enemy. She had sent Bulgakov to Telyatinki to ask him to call.

“Why should I go?” said this high priest of spiritual love. “Merely in order that she should humble herself before me and ask my forgiveness? ... It is simply a trick to get me to send a telegram to Leo Nikolayevich for her.”He refused to go. But Sonya was so convinced he would grant her wish that she had already indiscreetly sent a telegram to her husband to announce that she had become reconciled with Chertkov.

That evening Tolstoy’s son Sergei arrived. He had set out for Astapovo at once upon receiving his sister’s telegram asking him to send Dr. Nikitin, At first Sergei hesitated to enter the room, for Tolstov was still under the delusion that the family knew nothing of his whereabouts. His father was happy to see him but obviously disturbed over his arrival. Sergei calmed his fears by saying what was partly true — that he had learned his father was at Astapovo from a conductor on the train.

Since the sick man’s condition did not show improvement, a physician from a neighboring town was called in. Tolstoy hopefully asked if he would be able to resume his journey within two days. When the doctor said that it would be more like two weeks, he turned his face to the wall. He was entirely unaware that the secret he so wished to preserve was humming in all directions on the telegraph and telephone wires. Police officials demanded to know from railroad officials why Tolstoy had not been removed to a hospital. Reporters from Moscow and Petersburg wired the stationmaster for detailed reports of the sick man. And one of these reporters had already informed Sonya that her husband was dangerously ill at Astapovo. She immediately hired a special car for herself, members of the family, and her doctor and nurse. They arrived at Astapovo very late at night on Tuesday.

85

STILL fearful that Sonya would come, Tolstoy had asked Alexandra to wire his sons to prevent this, “because my heart is so weak that a meeting would be fatal, though otherwise I am better.” This message was handed to Sonya after she arrived. On Wednesday morning the family held a council in the special car and decided that a meeting of their mother and father might be injurious to him. So long as there was a chance of his recovery, they would allow her to see him only if he desired it. All the doctors, and there were eventually five of them in attendance, emphatically supported this position. With some complaining, Sonya agreed, for she said that she did not wish to cause her husband’s death. They further decided that they would keep from their father any knowledge of the presence of the family at Astapovo, since he would guess that his wife was with them. Arrangements were made to live in the special car, which was placed on a siding. By now the stationmaster had moved out of his little house and given it up entirely to the sick man and his attendants.

By Thursday the attention of the world press centered on little Astapovo. The place swarmed with reporters, smoking, drinking, bored with the hourly bulletins and the absence of any sensational news. They held up anyone coming out of Tolstoy’s room for a story, or ran down members of the family for a bit of human interest. Sonya was the only one willing to talk, and she talked to them at random, in her most irresponsible manner, even declaring that Tolstoy had left home as a kind of publicity stunt to attract attention to himself. Embittered by the fact that she was not allowed to see her husband, she persuaded the unsuspecting Alexandra to let her into the anteroom so that cameramen could film her as though she were really going to see Tolstoy. She wandered aimlessly around the station under the guard of her sons or her nurse.

At times she was escorted to the stationmaster’s little house and would peer hopelessly through her husband’s windows. Then the window in one of the other rooms would be opened and she would learn the latest news of his condition. Returning to the special car she gave vent to her tears. If only he could have read and answered the last letters she had written him. In them she had begged for mercy, protested her innocence in everything, and tried to explain away all her recent suspicions, spying, and eavesdropping as a result of “an irrational and passionate love” for him that had suddenly taken possession of her during those last months!

The tiny station restaurant labored overtime to feed the crowds and even tried to serve vegetarian meals for the Tolstoyans. The telegraph office was swamped with messages from all over the world. Government officials and police were frantically communicating with one another, wondering whether extra precautions should be taken to preserve order.

Meanwhile, Tolstoy, lying in his sick room, constantly attended by doctors and nurses, with Chertkov, Alexandra, Sergei, and Tanya in the anteroom, ready for any call, was entirely ignorant of all the worldly commotion over his illness. There was something tragically ironic in his leaving his beloved Yasnaya Polyana to seek an obscure life of peace and solitude only to find himself as never before the center of attention, care, and international interest.

From Thursday to Saturday Tolstoy’s condition fluctuated, inspiring alternate hope and despair among all who attended him. The pneumonia was accompanied by violent hiccoughing and severe heartburn, which caused him much discomfort, and the accumulated nervous exhaustion of the past months left him no vitality to combat disease. There were extended periods of delirium and semiconsciousness. He kept asking for someone to write down his thoughts. Though he struggled hard to dictate, nothing came or only a jumble of words. Then he would demand to have his statement read back to him and grew agitated when this could not be done. Chertkov solved the difficulty by reading back passages from his Circle of Reading, which calmed him.

Once, in a delirious state, he implored Alexandra to catch his words. She could make out nothing of what he said. “Come closer,” he begged, “it is so simple.” She bent down and strained at the sense, but all she could understand was: “To seek, always to seek.” At another time he tried to say something to Tanya. She asked him to repeat it and finally caught the words: “On Sonya . . . on Sonya much is falling. We have arranged badly ...”

On Saturday Tanya sat by his side while one of the doctors prepared a camphor injection. Shortly after the injection he suddenly sat upright and said in a distinct voice: “But I advise you to remember one thing: there are a multitude of people in the world, but you regard only one, Leo.”

86

DURING all his illness Tolstoy showed no fear of death, nor any regret over the thought that he might die. In a letter to Chertkov shortly before he left home, he had expressed the hope that he might meet his end in full possession of his faculties so as not to be deprived of the precious moments of dying, which may be so beautiful. But those beautiful moments were now denied him. His mind was often clouded and he was tormented by the memory of the recent tragic struggle with his wife and the fear that she might confront him with another hysterical outburst.

That Saturday night, when his condition was very bad, he said to his son Sergei: “I will go somewhere so that no one can interfere with me.”Then he added in a loud tone of conviction: “To escape . . . I must escape!" Soon afterwards he called to Sergei and muttered some words which only Dushan could make out: “Truth . . . I love much.”

Towards midnight Tolstoy began to sink very rapidly and the doctors lost all hope. Since he was now in much pain, they decided to give him a morphine injection. He objected to this but after the injection he grew quiet for several hours. The room was in semidarkness, illuminated by a single candle. Chertkov sat at the head of the bed, Sergei at the foot. The door leading to the next room had been opened. In there waited several people, among them Tanya, Alexandra, and the brothers. Doctors came and went quietly. Only the labored breathing of the dying Tolstoy could be heard in the oppressive stillness.

At about two o’clock in the morning one of the doctors suggested that Sonya be called. Chertkov at once left the room. She entered, her face frozen in grief, and for a few moments stared at the bed from a distance, as though afraid to approach. Then she swiftly went to her husband, kissed his forehead, sank on her knees and murmured: “Forgive me!” Fearful that he might wake and recognize her, a doctor led her into the next room.

The effects of the morphine wore off about three o’clock, and Tolstoy began to move about and groan. His pulse action was barely perceptible and he did not regain consciousness. His breathing became slower and softer. Sonya came in again, knelt by his bed, and uttered words of love that he could no longer hear. His breathing ceased. Complete silence reigned, suddenly broken a few moments later by the sharp voice of one of the doctors announcing: “A quarter to six.” It was November 7. Dr. Makovitski, “holy Dushan,” faithful to the last, went up to the bed and closed Tolstoy’s sightless eyes.

Throughout cities and towns of Russia hundreds of thousands of people waited patienlly before the news centers, anxiously following the frequent bulletins from Astapovo. Finally the flash came: “Tolstoy is dead!” A hush fell over the crowds. All took off their hats. Some wept softly.

Two days later the train bearing the coffin arrived at Zaseka station near Yasnaya Polyana. Several thousands of people had assembled. Many thousands more would have come if the government had not forbade the railways to supply extra trains. Stout shoulders carried the coffin all the way to the house. A long file of silent people marched behind. In front two villagers bore a banner on poles, on which was inscribed: “Leo Nikolayevich, the memory of your kindness will not die among us orphaned peasants of Yasnaya Polyana.”

For hours people filed by the open coffin in the house to take their last farewell. Then the coffin was closed and carried by Tolstoy’s sons to the Zakaz woods near-by. All knelt bareheaded. “Eternal Memory” was sung, but no priests were present at this first public funeral in Russia without religious rites. Sonya stood with her family. She bore herself silently and with restraint. Chertkov was not present.

They buried Tolstoy in the spot he had selected, where his beloved brother Nikolai, when they were children together, had hidden the little green stick. On it was written that wonderful secret which, when known to mankind, would bring about a Golden Age on earth. Then all human misery and evil would vanish, and all men under the wide dome of heaven would be happy and love one another.

(The End)