Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  On one occasion when Tolstoy visited her in her convent cell, Sister Marya introduced him to an elder called Starets Joseph. He told Tolstoy that he had too much pride of intellect and that until he stopped trusting in his mind, he would never return to the Church.

  Yet, in spite of the great differences between them – she, an obedient daughter of the Church, he, an excommunicated and unrepentent heretic – the two siblings were very close. ‘Your brother Lev, who loves you more the older he grows,’2 was how Tolstoy signed one letter to Marya in 1909. This was nothing less than the truth. And she, moreover, loved him. Tolstoy ribbed her about her willingness to take the vow of obedience. ‘There are six hundred fools here, all living according to someone else’s judgement,’ he said one day when visiting her convent. But they shared a thirst for God. ‘God grant that everyone might believe as strongly as he did,’ she prayed after his death – even though the elders and monks forbade her to pray for Lev Nikolayevich’s soul, on the grounds that by then it was in hell.3

  More important than the outwardly religious bent which both their lives had taken, there was the deep spiritual link of their shared childhood. Aunt Masha, as she was known to the children, was a frequent and welcome guest at Yasnaya Polyana – her childhood home as well as Tolstoy’s. There was an amusing occasion once when she was staying as a guest and had been placed in the large, dark, familiar room which had been occupied by her own father. It was autumn, and Marya Nikolayevna was getting on in years. Every evening, she made her devotions in the corner of the room where, from childhood memory, she knew the icons to be. But one evening she actually looked at the corner to which she had been bowing and genuflecting so vigorously. The icon had gone. There was nothing there except a cluster of large houseflies. She summoned the maid. ‘What has happened to the icon?’ ‘All the icons have been moved to her ladyship’s room,’ she was told. ‘There were only flies in that corner – and I only swep’ ’em out this morning.’ For three days she had been bowing and praying to a swarm of flies. The story reveals how every inch of the house was familiar to her.4

  ‘Now there is no one left who calls me Victoria,’ was the Queen’s sad reflection upon the death of Prince Albert. Tolstoy and his sister clung together, as their lights went low, with a similar sense of loss, a sharing into which neither the disciples nor the children could enter. She was the last true survivor of the Ant Brotherhood. She and he were the last people living who had been held in the arms of their mother – their ever-forgotten mother, for whose image Tolstoy had searched vainly in his memory all his life.

  Existence at Yasnaya Polyana had by now become intolerable for the old man. What had begun, thirty and more years previously, as a brave attempt to lead the good life and to follow the commandments of Jesus had resulted in a situation almost as acrimonious, almost as full of human corruption and wickedness as the quarrels and rivalries which erupted among the followers and patrons of St. Francis of Assisi, who had tried the same experiment six centuries earlier. Tolstoy was by now emotionally exhausted. He had believed, and still believed, that property was theft. If he had not done so, it would not have been possible for both sides in the war of the wills to have tugged at the title of his literary estate with such voracious claws. He had preached peace, and he was surrounded by daily, hourly discord. He had insisted, with fervent sincerity, that the only thing in which he believed was the law of love, which is the love of God. He was the prisoner in a nettlebed of hatred. Escape was the only answer.

  His wife, who was by now seriously mentally sick, kept up a ceaseless watch, so that there was never a moment when Tolstoy did not feel himself being peered at. ‘She is very pitiful to me. When I think how alone she must feel during the nights, most of which she is sleepless, and how, with a hazy, sickly awareness, she realises she is not loved and is a burden to everyone except the children, I cannot help feeling sorry for her.’5 Nevertheless, her constant questioning of him caused him to have frequent bursts of bad temper, followed by periods of remorse. If he went to bed, he would hear her pacing about the house, in and out of the Remington room, going through every one of his papers for evidence that he was conducting some sort of conspiracy behind her back. On his study wall, there was a photograph of Sasha and one of Chertkov. Sofya took them down. Tolstoy, for a quiet life, did and said nothing about them. But on her next visit Sasha asked him why he had allowed his wife to take down the photographs. She began to shout at her father. He turned round and walked away. ‘You are acting the way she does,’ he said sadly. Then he burst into tears.6 Then he put the two pictures back on the wall. The next day, Sofya searched the house for a pistol – found one, and began firing at the picture of Chertkov. It turned out only to be a toy pistol so no damage was done.

  Shortly after this, Tolstoy had a mild blackout, with pains in his chest. He began to feel she might kill him. On October 6, 1910, he had a letter from Chertkov. There was the usual routine with Sofya Andreyevna. What had Chertkov said? When he told her, she cried and wanted to know what he really said. She was then shown the letter. It proposed a visit. If Chertkov came, Tolstoy must promise not to kiss the monster. Yes, yes, he promised. But still she wept and screamed. Later in the month, she managed to find a private diary he was writing, but one of the notebooks which she had discovered during an earlier rummage was not where she had last seen it. She confronted him with this renewed evidence. ‘This proves that there is a conspiracy against me.’ ‘What do you mean, a conspiracy?’ ‘Your diary has been given to Chertkov.’ ‘No. Sasha has it.’ So it went on, this crazy existence, in which the Countess was never still, and hardly ever seemed to fall asleep.

  Tolstoy bided his time, but not for much longer. He had his plans hatched, and he was ready to go. On October 21, three peasants visited the Master, and he confided in them his difficulties. He took a secret gratification in their simple attitude to the problem, and told Sasha about it afterwards with some glee. ‘We do things the country way,’ said Ivan the coachman. ‘If any woman tries any nonsense, her husband uses the reins on her – and she gets as soft as silk.’7

  Tolstoy still had within him some of the alacrity of a good military tactician who, seeing the moment to strike, seized it. The moment came during the night of October 27–28, 1910. As he lay awake, he realised that there was an unusual stillness in the house. Getting up and tiptoeing to her door, he discerned she was asleep. At last! Only hours before she had been pacing about, opening doors, and searching through drawers and closets. She had come into his bedroom and held a candle over his face. ‘How are you?’ she had demanded. But now, at last, she was still.

  Tolstoy got up, and dressed, went to wake Doctor Makovitsky – his dear Dushan – and told him to pack any necessary medicines. Then he went and woke Sasha. She was astonished to see her father standing by the bed holding a candle. ‘I’m leaving immediately, for good – help me pack.’ A maid was delegated to pack clothing; Sasha collected up a few manuscripts. ‘You can keep those,’ said her father. ‘And the diary?’ ‘I’m taking that with me.’ All the time Tolstoy was terrified that his wife would wake up. ‘You stay here, Sasha,’ he told his daughter. ‘I shall send for you in several days, when I decide definitely where I am going. I shall most probably go to Mashenka [i.e. his sister Marya] to Shamardino.’8

  It was six o’clock in the morning before everything was collected up in the carriage. It was still pitch dark. As the carriage moved off, Sasha jumped in and kissed her father. ‘Goodbye my darling,’ said the old man, ‘we shall see each other soon.’

  The carriage disappeared into the night.

  They drove to Shchyokino station, where they had to wait for an hour for the train, at every second fearful that pursuers would come from Yasnaya Polyana. Once they were on the train Tolstoy turned to the faithful Dushan and said, ‘I wonder how Sofya Andreyevna is now? I am sorry for her.’9

  Thirty-three years before, he had described Anna Karenina, sitting in a train, trying to read an English novel, and
finding it unsatisfactory because the characters had more to do than she did. Tolstoy did better on that train than read a novel. He wrote his diary: a vivid account of everything that had happened since three a.m. The extraordinary thing about the next few days of Tolstoy’s life is not so much that others have given full accounts: that we should expect, for the events are dramatic and the central figure is so august and mysterious. But what is profoundly extraordinary is the fact that Tolstoy was writing the whole thing down himself. Why? Was it a crazy habit, like that of the imprisoned shoemaker in A Tale of Two Cities who could not stop the movement of his hands, even when the shoe was taken from him?

  Or was it that events did not really happen as far as Tolstoy was concerned, however dramatic they might be, unless he wrote them down? Or was it the great storyteller’s zest to make peace, at last, with his public? Over the last thirty years, there had been many admirable stories, but interspersed with much sermonising, pontificating, huffing and puffing. Did he want us, in the end, to enjoy the excitement of a good yarn, with himself – as in all his good stories – at the very centre of our attention? Or was he merely confused? Like most of his actions in the previous quarter-century, his escape from Yasnaya Polyana had the very opposite effect from the one which he professed – and probably believed – that he intended. He thought that he wanted to slip quietly away. But within hours of his escape, the news had been telegraphed to Moscow and St. Petersburg: LEV TOLSTOY LEAVES YASNAYA POLYANA was a headline which appeared almost before Tolstoy reached the first changing post on his journey. Even on the train, he did not try to keep his identity secret. Seated in the third-class compartment, he could have sat quietly reading his diary, and passed for some dirty old yurodivy. But he engaged the young peasant next to him in a discussion about the land tax of Henry George, and then began to lecture the whole carriage about pacifism and non-violence. By the time he had got to his station – Kozyolsk – the word had spread up and down the train, and crowds of people were huddled around the door of his compartment to listen to the famous prophet’s words of wisdom. The journey took six hours, and Doctor Makovitsky found it exhausting.

  From Kozyolsk, they took a cab, the three of them, and presented themselves at the guesthouse of the Optina monastery. Again, Tolstoy could have said ‘I am a poor old man who needs shelter – could you take me in?’ But he announced himself as ‘Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, excommunicated by the Church. I have come to talk with your elders and tomorrow I shall go to my sister at Shamardino.’ The monk told him that all were welcome to stay there, and showed him to his quarters, in the monastery inn. Before going to sleep Tolstoy sent a letter and a telegram to Chertkov and to his daughter, telling them of his whereabouts. The very next morning – when Tolstoy had been away for less than twenty-four hours – a delegate called A. P. Sergeyenko arrived at the monastery inn with messages from Chertkov.10

  There was a letter from Chertkov: ‘I cannot put into words the joy it was to me that you went away.’ He also gave Tolstoy an account of what had been happening at Yasnaya Polyana in his absence. Miraculously, Sofya Andreyevna slept through until eleven a.m., which must give rise to the speculation that Dr. Makovitsky, privy to Tolstoy’s escape plans, had put something in her tea. Sasha, as ordered, had given her mother a letter from Tolstoy, asking his wife to understand the fact that he found his situation – i.e. living with her – intolerable, and begging her not to come after him. Sofya did not stay to finish the letter. ‘Goodbye Sasha,’ she had called out, with her usual unwillingness to play down the dramatic possibilities of any moment, ‘I am going to drown myself.’11 She ran down the road to the pond where the peasant women did their washing, and threw herself in. Since she had on more than one occasion tried to ‘commit suicide’ there before, she knew that it was never more than waist-deep. Tolstoy had no patience with this play-acting any more, and he wrote a sharp letter to Sasha: ‘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 . . . and the hatred which fills her whole being.’12

  In the opinion of Sister Marya, it was a fatal mistake to have written this letter. Her brother Tolstoy should have stayed quietly in the monastery and not brought Sasha into things – Sasha who only made everything worse. The brother and sister met that afternoon. Tolstoy went over to see her in her cell at Shamardino. And Lev (had not their childhood nickname for him been Lev the Howler?) burst into tears on his sister’s shoulders and told her all that he had been suffering in the past weeks. All he wanted now, he told her, was solitude. They decided that the best plan would be for Tolstoy to rent a small izba in the monastery grounds. In this way, he would be able to lead the life of religious seclusion which he had so long craved, while his sister kept an eye on him.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said, as he left her cell. ‘We’ll see each other tomorrow.’13

  But they never saw each other again. Sasha no sooner found out where he was than she set out for the Shamardino convent herself. Soon enough, they would all be on his trail! He wrote another letter, this time to his wife, in which his anger towards her had softened:

  ‘Do not think I went away because I do not love you. I love you and am sorry for you with all my soul, but I cannot act otherwise than I am acting. Farewell dear Sofya. May God help you. Life is not a toy, we have no right to throw it aside on a whim. . . .’14

  It is hard to know what this was supposed to mean. Tolstoy, who had been so awe-struck by the strange phenomenon of life ever since he had become conscious of his own existence, so sure of the fact that life was full of significance, had never been able to grasp what that significance was. Now, as it hastened to its close, few lives seemed fuller than his own of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  By four a.m. he had left his room in the monastery inn, and made for the railroad station with his doctor. Discovering his room empty an hour or so later, Sasha and Varya rushed after him, and just boarded the train in time. Where were they going? The Caucasus! Or, there was a Tolstoyan colony in Bulgaria! Anywhere!

  Everyone in the railroad carriage recognised Tolstoy. His ultra-private, secret escape story was in all the newspapers. The conductors tried to make things easy for the fugitives, when the second-class compartment became too much for the old man. They moved him to another compartment, and gave him gruel to drink. But he had started to shiver, and showed signs of developing a chill.

  ‘Don’t lose courage, Sasha,’ he said, squeezing his daughter’s hand. ‘Everything is all right, very much all right.’15

  Doctor Makovitsky said that it was essential that Tolstoy be given some hot liquid to drink, and at the next stop, Sasha was dispatched to fetch boiling water from the station master’s house. The train slowed down, and the name of the station appeared on the sign-board – a name which was to live for ever in literary history: Astapovo.

  Sasha made her way down the platform, and was aware that she was being followed by two men. They turned out to be policemen, inquiring whether ‘Lev Tolstoy was travelling with this train’. Sofya, and those members of the family who took her side, had ordered the police search.

  Tolstoy was now too sick to continue his journey, and the station master at Astapovo offered to accommodate the travellers in his own house. Tolstoy could walk, with the help of someone holding each arm, but he was very weak. A crowd had gathered as he was helped to the station master’s house. As he passed, they took off their hats as a sign of respect. Some bowed, as if a wonder-working icon were being carried through their midst.

  Once they had got him to bed, Tolstoy slept well, and his fever abated. In the morning, he wanted to press on with their journey, but his doctor would not hear of it. Tolstoy sent for Chertkov. He also dictated a letter to Tanya and Sergey, begging them to understand that he could not send for them and not their mother: therefore he sent for no one from Yasnaya Polyana who was not with him already. ‘Both of you will understand that Chertkov, for whom I have sent, is in a unique position with r
egard to me. He has devoted his entire life to the service of the undertaking which I have served for the last forty years of my life.’ He then reclined on the pillows and began to dictate some more general thoughts to Sasha. ‘God is the infinite all. . . .’

  Tolstoy’s wife, meanwhile, was not sure of her husband’s whereabouts until a newspaper reporter telegraphed her, asking for an interview. He assumed she knew that her husband was dying of pneumonia in the station master’s house at Astapovo. The children tried to dissuade her from going, but it was hard to see how they could – or as several of them were to say afterwards – why they should. Tolstoy in his weakened and terrified state might assert that Chertkov, whom he had known for twenty-seven years (nearly ten of which had been spent by Chertkov in English exile), had devoted his ‘entire life’ to the cause. But Sofya Andreyevna, who had copied and recopied all his great literary masterpieces, protected him against editors and predators, managed his household and farms and money, been his lover and his slave, and borne him thirteen children, could also have been said to have some claim on Tolstoy’s gratitude and affection. The fact that it had all ended in hatred and bitterness was – Ilya, among the children, argued – all the more reason why the two tragic old people should be reconciled at the end.

  Always practical, and always one to do things in style, even when distracted by madness and grief, the Countess ordered a special train to take her, her family and entourage to Astapovo. She brought with her a doctor and a nurse, and three of her children – Andrey, Mikhail and Tatyana. Sergey went ahead of the others, and was admitted to his father’s presence. Tolstoy found it touching that his son had come – ‘he kissed my hand’, he said pathetically. But the Tolstoys could never assemble without dissension. The purpose of Sergey’s visit had been to state that under no circumstances should his mother be allowed to see their father. ‘It will excite him too much.’