by A. N. Wilson
The Tolstoyans were flocking round. They were allowed to be with the Master: Gorbunov, and Nikitin, and Goldenweiser. Chertkov, who had come on November 2, was a constant presence. Tolstoy, unaware that a special train was transporting his family to Astapovo, and completely unaware that the whole station was swarming with newspaper correspondents and photographers, and even a movie camera, suggested that his heart was too weak to stand a visit from his wife. November 2 was the last day that he wrote in his diary. ‘It was a hard night,’ he wrote. He had been addicted to the habit of chronicling his own existence for the last sixty-three years.16 Now at last his pen was still and his tongue had begun to babble. ‘The muzhiks. . . . you know how they die. . . .’ he murmured as someone was trying to straighten a pillow. Then he passed into a sort of delirium. One of the sentences which he muttered in this state was ‘Search, always go on searching.’
His wife had brought with her a little pillow of which Tolstoy was especially fond. Although the faithful forbade her to come into the room where he lay, they did take the pillow, and put it under his head. As soon as he recognised this object, he was aware that people had come from Yasnaya Polyana. He became anxious. Who were they? Sasha awkwardly admitted that Tanya had come to Astapovo. He was still conscious. The news that his beloved Tanya had come filled him with joy, and she was summoned to the bedside. But among these lovers of the truth, it was still felt necessary to keep up the fiction that Sofya Andreyevna was at home. Tolstoy agitatedly asked Tanya about his wife. ‘What is she doing? How does she feel? Isn’t she going to come here? Tell me, tell me! What could be more important than that?. . . .’ He was frantic by now. Tanya, having been briefed to say nothing, was non-committal and left the room.17
Outside, on the platform, Sofya was working herself into a characteristic paroxysm of rage. Questions which were of importance, such as whether she was to see her husband before he died, mingled in her mind with questions which were unimportant, such as the cost of her special train. It had been pulled into a siding. Five hundred roubles! But she would not sit in it. She paced up and down the track, and mingled with the crowds on the platform. Each train brought more crowds to the scene, journalists, and men with cameras.
Monsieur Pathé, the pioneer of newsreel movies, cabled to his cameraman Meyer: TAKE STATION, TRY TO GET CLOSEUP, STATION NAME. TAKE FAMILY, WELL-KNOWN FIGURES, CAR THEY ARE SLEEPING IN. . . .
This was faithfully done. Meyer managed to get everything but the deathbed itself on his film, which survives to this day. We can see Sofya Andreyevna hysterically pacing up and down, and pressing her face against the window of the room where Tolstoy lay. These were decidedly not the images which she wished to be presented to posterity. She seemed to catch on by instinct to the fact that the camera can never tell the truth. Hence, when her daughters came out and begged her to return to her siding, and not to mingle with the crowds, Sofya bargained with Sasha. She begged the girl to let her go into the small porch of the station master’s house while the Pathé movie camera was rolling, so that it would at least appear that she had been able to go into the house to see her husband before he died. Still Sasha refused. Her mother returned to mingle with the crowds and to talk at random with the reporters, in no fit condition to do so. Sometimes, she railed against her husband and her family, with every word taken down and misreported. Sometimes she wept and spoke only words of love for her husband.
Those who sat around the bed, who would not admit Tolstoy’s wife, were even less inclined to admit representatives of the Church who had excommunicated him. Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg had telegraphed on November 4, urging Tolstoy to return to the Orthodox faith. On the following day, on the Patriarch’s instructions, Abbot Varsonofy, and another monk from the Optina monastery, arrived with instructions to bring about a deathbed conversion for the edification of the journalists waiting outside.
As the old man sank into unconsciousness, a propaganda war raged about his head. The Tolstoyans refused to admit the Abbot to the death chamber. The governor of Tula, and various eminent representatives of the Government, sent from St. Petersburg, had also been refused admission. Tolstoy was in pain, and suffering from periodic bouts of hiccoughs. His strength was waning, and the doctor had begun to inject him with morphine. Sometimes he rallied, and appeared awake. Once, in the early evening of November 6, he sat upright. Sasha leant over him. ‘Shall I fix your pillows?’ she asked.
‘No. I just wanted to advise you to remember that there are in the world many people beside Lev Tolstoy and you are only looking at this one Lev.’ Did he really believe it? His own singularity, even when it was about to forsake him, was an obsessive preoccupation. Later that evening, he became much worse. They gave him oxygen, camphor. . . .18
‘Seryozha!’ he called to his son Sergey. ‘The truth! I love many. . . . How are they?. . . .’ He then drowsed off. Towards midnight, however, he had a relapse and was much worse. Only at this very last point would they open that door and allow in Tolstoy’s wife.
Chertkov, who had been sitting by the bed, arose and left the room. Tolstoy’s sons stood awkwardly around. His daughters were a little nearer the bed. The tiny room was crowded with people, as the pathetic figure of Sofya was allowed to squeeze through. She fell to her knees by the bed. Weeping, she whispered, ‘Forgive me, forgive me!’ One of the doctors was afraid she would wake the old man. What would it have mattered if she had? But she was led from the room, and stood in the freezing porch for two hours, from half-past three until half-past five on the morning of November 7. Then the door opened, and her son Sergey was standing there. He led her back into the room. ‘I have never loved anyone but you,’ she said to the figure in the bed. But by now he was fast ebbing away. After only a few more breaths he was gone. Sofya stood up, and leaned on the body with her head on its chest. There was no movement, no breath, no heartbeat.
The most vociferous and the most respected critic of the Russian Government was silent. In all the major universities throughout the Empire, there were student demonstrations to mark the death of the great rebel. In the two capitals, there were big rallies of protest against the death penalty. All over the Empire, hundreds of thousands of people waited at the news centres and the telegraph offices to hear the news that Tolstoy was dead. In the street demonstrations which took place, all over Russia, the revolutionary movement felt itself revived.19 When Lenin seized power seven years later, it was surely significant that an ill-informed western press should describe it as a Tolstoyan Revolution.20 Like most journalistic reports, it could not have been further from the truth. But such was the association in the mind of the whole world of Tolstoy with revolution.
While Tolstoy’s body lay at Astapovo, it received some of the attention which might have been given to an old-world corpse. (The sculptor Merkurov came to take a death-mask.)
Pasternak, the painter who had done the illustrations for Resurrection, came down from Moscow to do sketches, bringing with him his son Boris, the future novelist and poet. But it was not really an old-world corpse any more. It was a modern one. A Tolstoyan medical student had been asked by the faithful to inject the Master with formaldehyde to make him look better for the cameras. The photographs were taken. In death, he looks completely at peace. His death-photograph is the only one in which he does not appear to be staring at the camera with a mixture of aristocratic disdain, conceited fascination and plain animal fear, as though the black box might have been an explosive device. But the sense of peace and stillness in the dead Tolstoy’s face which seems so spiritual, so calm, and so grand can probably be attributed to a cunning bit of facial massage by those who laid out the corpse and a judicious use of formaldehyde. By the time that Pathé’s news cameras were rolling two days later, he was anything but natural. The train bearing his coffin arrived at the station of Zasyeka at six-thirty a.m. on November 9. There was a vast crowd waiting to see it arrive. Tolstoy’s four sons carried the open coffin out into the road and it made its slow journey bac
k to the house at Yasnaya Polyana. It is estimated that the crowds numbered three or four thousand. There were peasants with banners, ‘Dear Lev Nikolayevich, the memory of your goodness will not die among us, the orphaned peasants of Yasnaya Polyana.’ When it reached the house, the coffin was put on a table near the entrance hall. A high proportion of the thousands wished to file through the cramped corridors of the house to pay their respects to the corpse before the funeral, which was to take place at two forty-five p.m. Tolstoy had long ago asked to be buried on the edge of a ravine in the Zakaz wood where, all those years before, his brother Nikolay had buried the green stick on which was written the secret of how peace could come to the earth, and evil could be banished. In the end, Tolstoy had come no nearer discovering this secret than anyone else, but the return to the place of the green stick had an obvious appropriateness. Whatever muddled instincts had made him run out into the night less than a fortnight before, he had, at least in part, been running back towards his childhood, towards his sister, the last link with the Ant Brotherhood.
In spite of the fact that Andrey Tolstoy had pleaded with the Bishop of Tula to allow them a full Orthodox funeral, permission for this was forbidden by the Church authorities. Tolstoy’s was therefore the first public burial in Russia since the conversion of St. Vladimir which was not attended by the rites of the Church. But it could not be described as a secular funeral. The huge crowd was full of reverence. They defied their priests by singing the ancient Russian funeral hymns. When the coffin passed them by, everyone except the police removed their hats and many fell to their knees. It is one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of public sympathy in the history of the world. No novelist has ever been given such a funeral, but it was not for his novels that they honoured him. It was for the deeds which now seem to us half mad and quixotic; it was for those volumes of his work which most readers now leave unread. Of the thousands of people who stood and watched as Tolstoy’s coffin was carried through the glade and buried in that favourite childhood spot, no more than a handful had so much as heard of War and Peace. ‘And on they went, singing “Eternal Memory.”’
Notes
References are to the bibliography which follows. For example, ‘Fischer 23’ means that the source of my information is to be found on page twenty-three of Louis Fischer’s The Life of Lenin. If more than one book by a single author is listed in the bibliography, the reference is amplified by the date of publication. Thus ‘Bayley (1966)’ would refer to John Bayley’s Tolstoy and the Novel (1966); ‘Bayley (1971)’ would refer to his Pushkin (1971).
The following short titles are used in the notes:
JE: The Complete Works of L. N. Tolstoy (Jubilee Edition, Moscow 1928–1964)
Porter: Cathy Porter (ed. and trans.), The Diaries of Sofia Tolstaya (1985)
SW: Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917 (Oxford 1967)
Simmons: Ernest J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (1949)
PRP: L. N. Tolstoi. Perepiska s russkimi pisatelyami v dvukh tomakh (Moscow 1978)
Since very few people have access to the complete ninety-volume edition (JE) I have attempted, in the case of references to Tolstoy’s diaries and letters, to give merely the dates. Further references can then be followed up by the reader in whatever edition is to hand.
Chapter One: Origins
1.
Gusev (1954). Except where otherwise stated, all the biographical details in this book derive from Gusev’s five monumental volumes.
2.
JE 9.106
3.
Ibid. 271
4.
Two delightful family histories, written by kinsmen, are the books of Serge Tolstoi (1980) and Nikolai Tolstoy (1983). The latter in particular is highly recommended.
5.
Crankshaw (1976) 18
6.
SW 183–98 and Ulam (1981) 3–66
7.
Volkonsky op. cit.
8.
Pushkin III.7 (trans. author)
9.
Ulam (1981) 65
10.
JE 34.375
11.
Ibid. 376
12.
Ibid. 384
13.
Ibid. 386
14.
JE 9.211
15.
JE 34.357
16.
q. de Jonge (1972) 70
17.
JE 34.395
18.
Zernov (1945) 57
19.
JE 32.99
20.
JE 34.387
Chapter Two: Joseph and his Brethren
1.
Gusev (1954)
2.
Fischer 23
3.
Aksakoff 25
4.
Herzen 94
5.
Mackenzie-Wallace II.6
6.
JE 34.370
7.
Zagoskin 91
8.
Zborilek 6
9.
Rousseau 249
10.
Ibid. 278
11.
Vatsuro I.46
12.
Nuzhin 33
13.
SW 168
14.
Aksakoff 25
15.
SW 171
16.
Ibid.
17.
Shklovsky 81
18.
Simmons 69
19.
JE 46.32
20.
Ibid. 127
21.
Tolstoy’s early biographers, such as Biryukov, either did not know or censored the fact that he had venereal disease. Of his modern biographers, Simmons says that ‘the thought of leaving Kazan caused Tolstoy no regret’, which is probably true; Martine de Courcel tells us that ‘the constraints and university programmes seemed to him each day more ridiculous’, a remark for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Henri Troyat imaginatively suggests that Tolstoy ‘had a sudden revelation that he could no longer go on taking courses in the Law department’. This writer tells us that Tolstoy had been ill, but that the illness was ‘not serious’. We are not told by Troyat what the illness was.
22.
Crankshaw (1976) 73
23.
Pipes 78
Chapter Three: The History of Yesterday
1.
Gusev (1954)
2.
Diary, March 10, 1906
3.
JE 45.182
4.
Diary, April 17, 1847
5.
Vatsuro II. 97
6.
JE 4.123
7.
Ibid. 164
8.
Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin, I.54
9.
Diary, June 14, 1847
10.
Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, trans. Charles Johnston
11.
Letter to S. N. Tolstoy, February 13, 1849
12.
Letter to S. N. Tolstoy, May 1, 1849
13.
Mirsky 254
14.
JE I.279
15.
Ibid. 280
16.
Ibid. 281
17.
Porter 62
18.
Ibid. 67
19.
Sterne 48
20.
JE I.290
Chapter Four: Kinderszenen in the Caucasus
1.
Gusev (1954)
2.
JE 46.59
3.
Hingley (1977) 61
4.
SW 311ff.
5.
Ibid.
6.
JE 46.77
7.
Ibid. 80
8.
JE 59.169
9.
JE 3.67
10.
Ibid. 68
11.
Mirsky (1949) 235
12.
JE 3.74
13.
Ibid. 86
14.
Ibid. 71
15.
JE 46.82
16.
Ibid. 87
17.
JE 59.127
18.
Diary, November 29, 1851
19.
Katarskii 103
20.
Kingsmill 87
21.
Ibid.
22.
Letter to T. A. Yergolskaya, November 12, 1851
23.
Eykhenbaum (1922) 75
24.
JE 59.196
25.
JE 1.28
26.
Ibid., 35, 36 etc.
27.
Ibid. 56
28.
JE 45.89
29.
Letter to N. A. Nekrasov, July 3, 1852
30.
Letter to N. A. Nekrasov, November 18, 1852
31.
Zander 53
