by A. N. Wilson
Whether he liked it or not, Tolstoy was caught up in the drama of his country’s history. He was not a passive observer. He was part of it. For the remainder of his life his concerns grew wider in scope, larger in sympathy. He could not be silent. He could not be inactive. He could not be in any doubt where his duty lay. For his wife, by contrast, the areas of concern all became smaller and more localised. From this time onwards, her diaries, hitherto sporadic and sketchy, became voluminous, obsessive. They begin to reveal a mind hysterically out of control. From Tolstoy’s point of view a great tragedy was being enacted: a Christian Empire, blasphemously claiming to act in the name of Christ, was moving inexorably towards self-destruction. For Sofya Andreyevna, there was also a tragedy to watch as her family was torn apart by illness, death and quarrels. It would not have been in her nature to move through the menopause calmly. She began to feel herself threatened, and Tolstoy gave her good grounds for such fears: threatened financially as Tolstoy recklessly signed away his copyrights; threatened emotionally as he overtly conceded that he needed the companionship of his disciples more than that of his wife.
Towards the end of 1894, the principal cause of anxiety to her was the illness of her son Lev (Lyova) who was in a Moscow lunatic asylum suffering from fits and nervous depression. Eventually, they realised that he was suffering from malaria, but his mother did not know this. She felt confident that she knew who was to blame.
‘My poor Lyova. How deeply he has suffered from his father’s unkindness! The sight of his sick son spoilt his easy, sybaritic life,’ she wrote cruelly.8
In January 1895, a group of Tolstoy’s friends, Chertkov, Biryukov, Popov, Tregubov and Gorbunov-Posadov, called at Yasnaya Polyana and, after some chat, posed for a photograph. Sofya Andreyevna exploded with wrath. She claimed that they had tricked the old man ‘on the sly’ into having the photograph taken to make it look as though there were some Tolstoyan ‘institution’. ‘The public would seize upon it and they’d all want to buy pictures of Tolstoy with his disciples – that would make them laugh. But I was not going to let them drag Lev Nikolayevich from his pedestal into the mud.’9
She was just jealous. The wrath which followed was something which she was able to orchestrate. She could not stop it, but she could direct it, like a beaver carrying sticks to a dam. She allowed the row to continue a whole week, as she screamed, collected ‘allies’ from among the children or the servants, and singled out anyone who disagreed with her as an enemy or a spy. Normally, Tolstoy was provoked by his wife’s bad temper into fits of no less undignified rage. But on this occasion, he behaved calmly, perhaps sensing that there was something disquieting in her overreaction. It was a taste of things to come. Even Sofya Andreyevna herself recognised that the photographer who had committed this heinous sin was a perfectly pleasant young man. When he realised how unhappy she was, he handed over the negatives and allowed her to destroy them.
‘When it all gets too difficult, I fly into a rage,’ she said, ‘and I say harsh things which I then regret; but by then it is too late, and that makes me even more miserable.’10
The misery was exacerbated by the illness of the younger children. Vanya, little Vanichka the youngest, had an upset stomach and a high fever. Tolstoy, who was trying to finish a story, took the opportunity to leave Yasnaya Polyana. He and Tanya went to stay with their friends the Olsufyevs. It was on their snow-bound estate at Nikolskoye, and subsequently during a week in Moscow, that he completed his remarkable conte, Master and Man.
The title of the tale (Khozyain i rabotnik) recalls the world of Christ’s parables. The words could almost be rendered ‘householder’ and ‘labourer’ were it not for the fact that the essentially Biblical irony of the story depends upon our being free to ask, ‘Who is the master?’
At first, it would appear that the master is Vasily Andreyich Brekhunov, a petty merchant in a provincial town who is anxious, despite the fact that it is past the feast of St. Nicholas, to make a journey to a neighbouring landowner who has promised to sell him some timber at about a third of its market value. To accompany him on this business trip, he engages a peasant called Nikita, one of Tolstoy’s most engaging and memorable characters. Nikita has a drink problem: at present it is under control, but it always needs watching, and that is why merchant Vasily Andreyich is able to engage him so cheaply. Nikita also has a marital problem. His wife is having an affair with a cooper. Yet, in spite of all his deficiencies of circumstance and character, Nikita is one of those who are at ease with life, like Yeroshka in The Cossacks or, at the opposite end of the social spectrum, Stiva in Anna Karenina.
It is a quality which (lacking it totally himself) Tolstoy regarded with a particularly sympathetic awe. The only other character of any consequence in the story is Mukhorty (Bay), the pony who accompanies the two men on their adventures and pulls their sleigh. It is quite inevitable, once they have set out on their journey, that things happen as they do. The snows and winds become more severe. Drifts have obscured all familiar landmarks. Darkness is beginning to fall.
They come to a village which Vasily Andreyich says must be Grishkino, ‘and Grishkino it was. . . .’ ‘And sure enough, when they got through the snowdrift, they drove into a street. In the furthest yard, on a rope, there desperately fluttered about in the wind some hanging, frozen linen. . . .’ I give this stilted rendering of the original to convey the suspense of the sentence, which is lost if (with more naturalness) we translate: ‘On a rope in the furthest yard there was some frozen linen, hanging from a rope and fluttering about desperately in the wind.’ In the Russian, we wait expectantly to see what was hanging from that rope. It could be anything or anyone. Tolstoy uses a familiar Dickensian trope of clothes become animate: ‘shirts, one white and one red, drawers, leggings and a petticoat. The white shirt was struggling with particular desperation, waving its arms about.’11
We are to meet this shirt a couple of times more as the travellers circle the village, trying to find their road. The suspense becomes almost unendurable. There is no reason except the hope of making a quick buck which spurs Brekhunov along. Every instinct makes us yearn for him and Nikita to spend the night in the village. There is a tantalisingly short break in a peasant’s cottage for tea (poor Nikita dare not, as his master does, touch the vodka) and then off again into the snow. When they are thoroughly lost, and it is dark, and Vasily Andreyich has blamed Nikita for everything, the little merchant thinks that he can escape on his own, leaving the peasant to perish. But he returns. And finding Nikita cold and close to death, Vasily Andreyich undergoes a transformation of vision. In a moment which is oddly reminiscent of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Vasily Andreyich derives comfort merely from hugging this large peasant man. He throws himself on Nikita’s body and restores it to life and warmth. ‘Nikita is alive and that means that I am alive too,’ he says to himself with pride.
And he remembers about money: the shop, the house, sales, purchases and the Mironov millions; it is difficult for him to remember how this same individual, whom people called Vasily Brekhunov, had been interested – as he had been – in all that.
His thoughts about Vasily, i.e. himself, are these:
‘So what! [Chto zh! – O.K.!] In this matter he has not known . . . he has not known anything of what I know now. I now know without any doubt at all. NOW I KNOW.’ And once again, he hears the summons of him who had already called to him. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ With joy and loving kindness now his whole being speaks. And he feels that he is free and nothing can hold him down any more. . . .12
Once again, as when we meet the animated shirts on that washing line, we sense the proximity of Dickens. This is a death which keeps company with those of Barkis, Jo the Crossing Sweeper, or Little Nell. But it is also full of strong Tolstoyan ironies. With the loftiness of our aristocratic narrator, we realise that there is something absurd in Vasily’s pretensions to be a ‘master’ when his wife is of the peasant class, and he himself is only removed from that class by
one generation. His claim to be Nikita’s superior rests wholly on a little shop and bits of money which (semi-honestly) he has scraped together over the years. Soon we discover that the chaotic, shambling figure of Nikita is much more the master of the situation when exposed to the elements. Nikita knows how to handle a horse, and he has some sense (more than Vasily Andreyich) of where they are going. But then again, we learn that when two men are lying out exposed to the elements and dying of cold, such human distinctions count for very little. Our true master, like the khozyain or householder of the Gospel parables, is our Father in Heaven.
Vasily Andreyich Brekhunov (brekhun means a liar) dies having discovered that his life has been based on a misconception of the truth. Nikita survives to see his children and his children’s children. And in the final sentences which follow Nikita’s death, Tolstoy looks towards the unknown future life, of whose existence, in his non-fictional works, he had begun to concede the possibility. ‘Is it better or worse for him there, where he has woken up – this time after his actual death? Is he disappointed, or has he found the very thing he has been waiting for? We shall all find out soon enough.’13 Again, one gets the feeling that this conclusion owes a large amount to Dickens – whose novels all presuppose a state of future blessedness in which innocent sufferers are consoled – than to any elaborately worked out metaphysic. For sophisticates, the ‘points’ of the tale will seem too heavily laboured. I am not of their number. Tolstoy must have known, when he finished it, that he had achieved something which, in this particular mode, could not be bettered. Even those who deprecate the moralising conclusion would concede that there could be few more vivid accounts of weather in the whole of literature. These are large sayings, however, and the actual publication of the story restored Tolstoy to the levels of petty (though murderously intense) acrimony which, as a domestic figure, he found himself inhabiting.
Some husbands can’t be trusted with other women or, the moment their wives turn their backs, they reach for the whisky bottle. Tolstoy’s comparable weakness was a tendency, when not strictly supervised by his wife, to make impulsive and unwise decisions relating to the copyright and publication of his work. If it had not been for Sofya Andreyevna, War and Peace would have made him no more money than Katkov chose to pay him for serialisation. ‘Volume rights’, as such, would have been almost valueless in an age in which readers collected serial publications and had them bound at their own expense.
Having finished Master and Man, Tolstoy desperately needed – most writers do – an immediate response to what he had written. This is most satisfyingly achieved by selling the work in question: it shows that the appreciative first reader is prepared to put money where their mouth is. Alone in Moscow with Tanya, Tolstoy could not show the story, as he had done so many of his previous works, to his wife. Instead, he handed it to an editor: the handsome (female) editor of the paper called The Northern Herald: Lyubov Yakovlevna Gurevich, who, needless to say, asked if she could buy it. The deal was struck.
When Sofya Andreyevna joined her husband in Moscow, he sheepishly admitted what he had done. There was – as he could have predicted – an explosion of fury which was volcanic even by his wife’s excitable standards. She accused ‘that scheming half-Jewish Gurevich woman’ of having buttered him up. Since he had allowed the woman the story without payment, he might as well have given it to Chertkov for his ‘cheap little Intermediary’.14 At least, that way, the story would have reached a wider audience. This was the worst of all worlds. Chertkov’s peasant readers could not afford to buy The Northern Herald. The Countess had lost her story for Volume XIII of the Collected Works. It was not a loss which she would concede without a fight.
Master and Man had already reached proof stage. In order to pacify her, and to show that he did not intend to exclude her from his literary career, Tolstoy urged her to help him correct proofs, as she had done in the past. Now, however, merely to read the thing excited in her feelings of rage and grief. He did not love her, that was it! He was indifferent to her. If he loved her, he would let her have the story for Volume XIII. Throughout the fortnight there were disturbingly tempestuous swings of emotion between the two of them. Rage would be punctuated with outbursts of physical passion. But after these frantic, often angry couplings, there would recur the debilitating sense that ‘there are no mutual feelings between us’.15
At length, the wrangling proved too much for Tolstoy. His wife announced that she did not care what agreements had been made, she was going to have the story for her Volume XIII. She grabbed the proofs and started to copy them out at fever pitch, a sort of lunatic parody of the self who had laboured so faithfully to copy War and Peace. This was insane behaviour, and Tolstoy said so. In that case, she reasoned, he must be having an affair with the half-Jewish witch. Why else allow her to publish the tale? At this, Tolstoy lost his temper. He ran upstairs, collected an armful of clothes and said that he was going to leave the house. He would not be returning. The marriage was at an end.
To his wife, this merely proved that he was in love with Gurevich, and that he was running away to his mistress. With childish petulance, she could not allow him to leave her. If anyone was to be allowed the dramatic gesture, it must be her, Sofya Andreyevna! She would abandon him, oh yes. Although she was wearing only a nightdress and a dressing gown, she ran out into the snowy streets and the below-zero temperatures. Tolstoy, finishing his packing in a dressing room, heard what she was doing, and chased after her. He was only wearing underclothes and a waistcoat: no shirt.
As he ran after her up the pavement, she shrieked, ‘I don’t care! Let them take me away and put me in prison or a mental hospital!’16
Tolstoy dragged her back towards the house. It was not easy. They kept falling over on the snow, and as they cascaded into another drift, she would express the hope that, like the merchant in the story which had sparked off the row, she would die of exposure. She was put to bed when they got back to the house, but in the next couple of days made a number of other attempts to ‘escape’, running out into the street improperly clad. Those who, thickly muffled against the sub-zero temperatures, have had a taste of winter in Moscow can catch the full horror of what these escapades suggested about Sofya Andreyevna’s state of mind.
Even by their own volatile standards of behaviour, these outbursts were tempestuous enough to worry Tolstoy. ‘I’m sorry for her and I love her,’17 he wrote in his diary. The gynaecologist was summoned and muttered (‘cynically’ in Sofya Andreyevna’s view) about her ‘time of life’.18 Some medicine was prescribed. Tolstoy came and knelt by the bed, and sobbed and asked her forgiveness for his unkindness. The other children gathered around with tearful or bewildered expressions. Tolstoy’s sister, now a nun, told Sofya that everything which she had said in her frenzy was true ‘but that I’d gone too far’.19
She got her own way. The story was taken away from The Northern Herald and published jointly in Chertkov’s Intermediary and Volume XIII of the Collected Works.
Her own marital and gynaecological disorders had left little time for noticing the children’s illnesses. Among the sad faces anxiously encircling their mother’s bed was that of little Vanya who, ever since the New Year, had shown signs of being feverish and upset in his stomach. The day after Sofya pulled off her triumph and got the rights in Master and Man, Vanya developed scarlet fever. A doctor came – a different doctor – and diagnosed a sore throat and diarrhoea. The next day, at eleven o’clock at night, Vanya died. He was not quite seven years old.
It was like a terrible bath of cold water cast over the heads of two scrapping dogs. When the little boy died, their quarrel forgotten, Tolstoy took his wife’s arm and led her into Tanya’s empty bedroom. They sat on the sofa and hugged one another, ‘nearly unconscious with sorrow’.20
It would seem as though Vanichka was a very remarkable child, even if we allow for the pious exaggerations of his grieving parents. Sasha, his elder sister by four years, wrote, ‘He was more just and wise
than grown people. With some deep intuition, he sensed the truth and reached out for it as a plant reaches towards the sun. How many times, not knowing that he did it, he taught the older ones around him.’21 This was an impression made not just upon the family, but upon visitors and friends. The famous scientist Mechnikov said of Vanichka, ‘I knew, the first time that I ever saw him, that he would either die or become a greater genius than his father.’22
Once, when she had been combing his hair and looking at his face in the glass, his mother had been surprised by Vanichka saying, ‘Mummy, I feel that I really am like Papa!’ Such is our cynicism that we probably find accounts of Vanichka’s virtue mawkish. Whether we do or we don’t, we can find in his desire to imitate his father (and, perhaps, his actual uncanny resemblance to Tolstoy) a good indication of how the balance of power, in the nursery, had shifted. The older children had only come to an appreciation of Tolstoy’s ideas (if at all) when they reached the years of discretion. Vanichka seemed to have imbibed Tolstoyan ideas instinctively. ‘No, Mummy! Don’t say Yasnaya Polyana will be mine! Everything is everyone’s!’ If this isn’t enough to make us sick, we read, some weeks before he died, of his tying labels to his few possessions and attempting to give them away. ‘To our cook, Simon Nikolayevich, from Vanya’ etc.23
