by A. N. Wilson
The will-war was an undercover operation fought by secret agents, hidden documents, concealed letters. The diary-war was a more open affair with explosives and offensives being hurled across the barricades with overt gusto. One of the sad features of the war is that it just was not worth all the pain. It might have been worth fighting such battles over the journals of the Duc de Saint-Simon, or those of the brothers Goncourt. But Tolstoy’s later diaries are stupendously tedious, full of the usual old reflections about Henry George’s land tax, the moral beauties of Chertkov, the love of God and the hell of family life. But these dull notebooks were the occasion of the most furious conflicts between Chertkov and the Countess Tolstoy.
Chertkov was convinced that Tolstoy’s diaries were among the most important documents in world literature. He did not like the early volumes, which reflected all the Master’s vulnerability, changeability and creativity. These are the records of a great imaginative genius, trying on different guises, and wrestling with the impossibility of his own nature. No. What Chertkov liked were the later diaries, the ponderous reflections of the great prophet, laced with hypochondriacal descriptions of the Master’s digestive processes and his increasingly besotted devotion to his more intrusive or eccentric disciples. For some time, Tolstoy and his followers had been smuggling pages of the diary out of Yasnaya Polyana. During the years of Chertkov’s exile in England, a substantial collection of Tolstoy’s journals were copied and housed in Bournemouth. On his return to Russia, Chertkov arranged for the complete set of originals from 1901 onwards to be packed up and moved to his family estate at Kryokshino. (The wickedness of owning property did not apply to Chertkov himself.)
Sofya Andreyevna saw the diary question differently. Ever since the first moment of horror when Tolstoy made her read his diaries before her wedding, she had been a besotted addict. She had made copies of all the early diaries, and continued to copy out passages of interest in the later volumes, as well as keeping copious diaries of her own.
Sofya shared Chertkov’s view that every sentence to drop from the pen or the lips of the Master was worth preserving. But since she was his wife rather than just a preternaturally possessive hanger-on, she considered herself justified in controlling what happened to these words when they had reached the page. Furthermore, as well as loving Tolstoy more deeply than anyone else, she also hated him with a greater depth and a greater knowledge than anyone else. She could see quite clearly the story which the Tolstoyans were going to tell. She penitently believed, after he died, that her behaviour in the last year of his life had killed Tolstoy. At the same time, she could never cease to be aware that being married to Tolstoy had made her so unhappy that it had driven her mad. The injustice of being written down by posterity as a Xanthippe to Tolstoy’s Socrates rankled in sane moods and insane. ‘They are sure to make me out a Xanthippe,’ she once said to Goldenweiser. ‘You must take my side, Alexander Borisovich.’18 In fact, Goldenweiser was one of the arch-detractors.
Tolstoy’s wife therefore carried out the diary-war on two fronts. On the one hand she battled constantly to get the actual notebooks containing her husband’s diaries into her own hands. This obsession, more than anything else, was what drove her crazy in the last year of Tolstoy’s life. She could not banish it from her mind, and became convinced that he was hiding bits of his diary in order to send them off to his fancy-boy Chertkov. At the same time, she had been for years determined to set the record straight by writing a full diary account of her own, so that posterity might know the truth.
Countess Tolstoy’s diary, at its moments of greatest emotional intensity, reminds us less of Socrates and Xanthippe than of Dickens’s Fanny Squeers: ‘I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes.’ This is exactly the tone of Sofya Andreyevna’s louder pages. Nevertheless, her diary remains an extremely moving document, whereas Tolstoy’s, oddly, is not. She remained capable of seeing why it was that anyone should be interested in Tolstoy in the first place. He had forgotten that long ago. She could see that he was a great literary genius. ‘I have done nothing but copy out Hadji Murat,’ she wrote a year before he died. ‘It’s so good! I simply couldn’t tear myself away from it.’19 Tolstoy’s diary for the same day revealingly points out the contrast: ‘Generally my state of mind is one of dissatisfaction with myself, but not of depression. I can’t write but I’d like to, and I’m thinking.’ By ‘write’ he now means ‘write twaddle’. His wife’s self-obsession was certainly strong, but it was outmatched by Tolstoy’s own.
There is something particularly touching, and revealing, about her copying out Hadji Murat – the last work in which the old Tolstoyan greatness is manifest. It has had a distinguished list of admirers. For the philosopher Wittgenstein, it was one of the few works of Tolstoy which he could admire, and John Bayley has said that ‘some portraits in the story are as life-giving and complete as those in War and Peace’.20
When Tolstoy said that he wanted to portray the old Caucasian warrior chief, Hadji Murat, by the technique of ‘peepshows’ of his various guises (Hadji Murat as husband, as fanatic, etc.), he was partially recognising within himself that the wholeness of his artistic vision was breaking up. This nearly always happens to literary geniuses when they survive into old age. Paradise Regained is all bits. It does not aim for the cohesion of Paradise Lost. Hardy the novelist of comprehensive Aeschylian view gives place to Hardy the poet whose lyrics provide us with snapshots and frozen moments. Hadji Murat is like this.
In returning to the Caucasus for his last great work, Tolstoy turns back, like Orpheus in the Underworld, to cast a loving eye on the vanished and divided self who went with Nikolay to the Caucasus in 1851, and discovered the artistic vocation. Although the prophet Lev intervenes in the story to make us disapprove of wicked governments, violence and warfare, it is in essence as heroic a tale as one by Sir Walter Scott. While he was writing it between 1896 and 1904, so little did its subject matter accord with mainstream Tolstoyan pacifism that he felt obliged to work on it ‘on the quiet’21 and, by the time he had completed the Shakespeare essay and persuaded himself that literature was evil or a waste of time, Hadji Murat was laid aside. It was his wife who cherished it. In the end, art became intolerable for Tolstoy because it made war on the ego. One thinks in this connection of that other stupendous example of great art by an old man – Titian’s ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’. In this painting Titian proclaims the death to self which is the prerequisite of art, as of the good life. The artist’s martyrdom (different in kind from that of the political dissident or the saint) was not one which Tolstoy was prepared to undergo.
His horror, shortly after getting married, had been that marriage was the enemy of egoism. ‘Where has my self gone?’ he had asked, back in June 1863, ‘the self I once loved and knew, that sometimes jetted out of me with such eruptive force, to my own pleasure and terror?’ This was not meant to be funny when he wrote it at the age of thirty-five. He was still writing in the same vein at the age of eighty-one in a letter to Chertkov: ‘However much this eighty-year-old physical being of mine and all its perceptions and doings differs from my eight-year-old physical being with its perceptions and doings of that time, my consciousness of me, distinct from everything else, is completely and absolutely identifiable. . . . And my consciousness of me, connected in the first place with my own distinct being alone, transfers its consciousness to other beings by means of what we call love . . .’22
Not everyone was at the receiving end of what Tolstoy called love, least of all, in those last years, his wife. The diary-war provided a dreadful nemesis for Tolstoy’s extreme egotism. While Chertkov and his wife fought over his diaries and kept records of their own, pens were scratching busily all over the household of Yasnaya Polyana and the surrounding district. More or less everyone who was literate was keeping a record. After the arrest of Gusev, Chertkov provided Tolstoy with another secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, a young
student from Moscow, who was a devotee of Tolstoyism. Chertkov gave Bulgakov instructions that he should keep a full log of events and sayings at Yasnaya Polyana. The top copy was written in invisible ink, and beneath it there was a carbon which was posted every few days to Chertkov. In addition to his constant visits and letters, Chertkov could thus guarantee almost continual observation of the Tolstoy household.
Bulgakov was a good observer, and he paints the Master with rather more warts than Chertkov intended. He makes it clear that even in his dotage Tolstoy had moments of finding Chertkov a bore. He gives us glimpses of Tolstoy’s jokey side. For instance, when there was to be a performance of some ‘folk theatre’, Sasha was longing for a part. She obviously wanted to play the young heroine, but, with true Tolstoyan humility, she asked for the part of some crone. ‘Don’t you want to play the part of the village policeman?’ asked her father. ‘No!’ she replied with horror.23
Bulgakov’s diary depicts for us more vividly than most of the accounts the underlying tension of day-today life at Yasnaya Polyana. At meals, the master of the house and the mistress were always bickering, or eyeing each other with suspicion. Tolstoy complained ceaselessly about the ‘elaborate’ diet. Sofya Andreyevna justified it ‘on the grounds that a vegetarian table needs variety’. Tolstoy took to elaborate sotto-voce apologies to guests which were designed to get a ‘rise’ out of his increasingly hysterical wife.
When the painter N. N. Ge came to a meal, Tolstoy whispered, ‘I think that in fifty years people will say: “Imagine, they could calmly sit there and eat while grown people walked around waiting on them – their food was served to them, cooked for them.’ ”
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Sofya Andreyevna. ‘About their serving us?’
‘Yes,’ said Lev Nikolayevich and repeated aloud what he had said.
Sofya Andreyevna began to protest.
‘But I was only saying it to him,’ said Lev Nikolayevich, pointing to Ge. ‘I knew there would be objections and I absolutely do not wish to argue.’24
But, had he not wished to argue, he would not have said it. They had had the argument a thousand times. Bulgakov noticed the strands of sheer hatred which run through the whole situation. He recognised eventually that Chertkov was aiming at ‘the moral destruction of Tolstoy’s wife in order to get hold of his manuscripts’. He saw that Sasha was consumed with malice towards her mother, and devoted herself to provoking Sofya ‘as to a kind of sport’. He saw without being quite able to see. He showed, without needing to say it that, like the disappointed man in Belloc’s poem, Tolstoy had reached the position where those who loved him best despised him most. George Steiner was clearly right when he said that Bulgakov’s fairness and truthfulness cost him the favour of Chertkov, and that it was for this reason that he was not made privy to Tolstoy’s escape plans.25
The latter years of Tolstoy are so scandalously horrible, and show up all the chief actors in the drama so poorly, that it is hard not to be gripped by it. And since they were all keeping records, and since nearly all the survivors wrote histories or memoirs, it is hard for biographers to resist the temptation to tell the whole story in minute detail. It is a good example of how too much ‘material’ can actually distort the truth. Two of the greatest Tolstoy biographies of the twentieth century both devote infinitely more space to Tolstoy’s dotage than to the days of his prime. Simmons gave nearly two hundred pages, and Troyat well over a hundred, to descriptions of Tolstoy’s pathetic last days, leaving us with the impression that the most interesting thing about Tolstoy was not his literary genius but his acrimonious relations and hangers-on.
Some of the quarrels had highlighted the anomaly of Tolstoy’s position, showing that his stature in the world at large as a thinker and reformer was something of which his wife had almost no conception, or that if she thought about it, the image of her husband as an anarchist prophet filled her with horror. (It was her son and ally Andrey who said at the time of the Revolution that had Tolstoy not been his father he would have liked to see him hanged for sedition.)
One such ‘significant’ quarrel was the one which occurred in 1909 when Tolstoy was invited to attend the eighteenth International Peace Congress which was being held in Stockholm. As one of the most famous pacifists in the world, it was inevitable that the Peace Congress should have elected Tolstoy to honorary membership, and equally inevitable that they should have asked him to attend. No one expected that he would. He was eighty-one years old. He had repeatedly refused to do any public speaking. He was known to be in poor health. While he was away from Yasnaya Polyana (and from his wife who remained there) and staying in Moscow, Tolstoy let it be known that he would attend the Congress. The organisers were extremely embarrassed when he further leaked it to the world press that he intended to address the Congress. There were rumours and counter-rumours. Some said that he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But the organisers of the Congress were worried that Tolstoy’s extreme anarchist views would bring their more moderate aims into disrepute. Using Chertkov and the full network of publicity which they had built up across Europe, Tolstoy let them know that he believed that the only honest course for something calling itself a Peace Congress was to advocate the abolition of all standing armies throughout the world; and this was not the policy of the Peace Congress.
Thoroughly satisfied with himself, having stirred up this international hornet’s nest, old bronchitis-is-a-metal returned to Yasnaya Polyana to find his wife in a state of hysterical rage and embarrassment. By now, she was a psychological wreck, and had lost all control of herself. ‘My mind is unhinged,’ she admitted, ‘it has all been a bad shock to the nervous system.’26 Having watched her reach a fever pitch of unhappiness, screaming and shouting and threatening to poison herself with morphine, he – able to say with the full confidence of moral superiority that he merely wanted world peace – backed down. He would not attend the Congress after all.
Knowing his antipathy to foreign travel, his own physical weakness, and the fact that he could not do public speaking, it is almost incredible that he had ever intended to go to Stockholm. The demon in him which loved to be provocative stirred up that row – the agitation in Sweden, the buzzing of the world press, the excitement of the secret police in Moscow, the mental torture of Sofya Andreyevna. Then, with a shrug, he could, as his disciples would see things, submit to the ‘tyranny‘ of his wife.
So it went on, this unedifying series of horrible disputes and emotional eruptions. Tolstoy himself wrote and spoke as if it was all going on around him, and in spite of him. His propaganda exercises against the Government, his outbursts and pamphlets, brought him nothing but adulation from the crowds. The last time he and his wife travelled together to Moscow by train they were almost mobbed by five thousand people at the station shouting ‘Hurrah, Lev Nikolayevich!’27 His odious, humourless disciples infested every corner of the house, and whispered poison about Sofya in the old man’s ears. No wonder she went mad. No wonder, in a way, that he did too. He was not as hysterical as she – though there were outbursts of rage. And there was within him someone who was crushed and hurt and exhausted by all the hatred in that house, and who longed for peace. But his means of escape showed quite clearly that his insatiable appetite for self-dramatisation was not yet dead.
Chapter Twenty
Escape
1910
He died when he had got too far, so far that the masses could not follow him . . . in a region of eternal snows, where the night tasted of cool stars and where he was alone with himself and his strength. . . .
Alfred de Vigny on Julian the Apostate
Eight years after Tolstoy died, his wife was heard to remark, ‘I lived with Lev Nikolayevich for forty-eight years, but I never really learned what kind of man he was.’1
Like many of her comments, it is an extremely intelligent one. The more evidence we possess about Tolstoy, the less he makes sense. No doubt, had he made any sort of sense to himself, he would never have b
ecome the incomparable artist he was.
When in old age Pavel Biryukov and others questioned him about his early life, Tolstoy merely tried to rehearse for their benefit memories which had become ossified into legends. Childhood flashed back to him in arbitrary bits in his last decade: a child in a bathtub, absorbed in the exact texture of the wet wood and the soap; a child with its father; a child with its aunts; but, however hard he tried to remember her, never a child with its mother. The one natural memory which, as well-balanced and unimaginative individuals the majority of us carry through life, is the icon of ourselves as unweaned children. In Tolstoy’s case the ‘female figure with a child’ eluded him.
Now, entered upon his ninth decade of existence, he was all but alone. Alexandrine, the dear ‘old girl’, was gone; Aunt Toinette was gone; brothers Sergey, Dmitry and Nikolay were gone. Six out of his thirteen children were dead. At such a stage, old family links are very precious; none more so to Tolstoy than that with his sister Marya.
Unlike Tolstoy, his sister had been able to submit to the Orthodox religion as a means of purgation. It was always said in the family that, as the last-born, she had been responsible for her mother’s death, and that she lived with a permanent sense of guilt about this. Whether or not this was true, there had been plenty, in her unhappy marriage, in her love affairs, to torment her essentially orthodox and deeply religious temperament. In later years (like their aunt Pelageya) she had become a nun, and settled in the austere Shamardino convent which had been founded as an adjunct to the Optina monastery by Starets Amvrosy. It was a huge place, with no less than six hundred women in it.
