The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year

by Jay Parini

  ‘Disgraceful,’ I said, surprised at my own vehemence.

  ‘I’m what you might call living contraband,’ he said, smiling. It was the first time he had smiled since I’d called on him. He reached out again, taking my hands in his.

  ‘My dear Valentin Fedorovich, you have been offered a great gift. You will see Leo Nikolayevich every day. You will take meals with him. You will walk in the forest by his side. And you will find your soul warmed daily by his fire. I hope that you will love him as I do. And that you will learn from him.’ He let go of my hands and walked to the window, parting the curtain to look at the falling snow. ‘What he says will ring in your head forever.’

  I don’t know why, but I began to think of my father as he spoke. My father has been dead for a year. He often spoke to me in his soft, guttural voice, delivering fatherly advice. I took none of it seriously, but I appreciated his efforts. He knew that, since my conversion to Tolstoyism, I was hungry for God, hungry to learn, to discuss ideas, to perfect my soul. My father admired all of this, but he said I had to be careful. A civil servant for thirty years, he had managed to avoid thinking about anything. But I refuse to accept his intellectual bankruptcy as my legacy. I want to become, like Chertkov, a disciple.

  A servant in a rough wool jacket entered. This deficiency of proper attire is Chertkov’s compromise with Tolstoyan values. He is not a willing member of the class into which he was born, though he has not relinquished all the trappings. Krekshino is a fine house, with spacious grounds and several outbuildings for horses. I had seen perhaps half a dozen servants – and assumed that a dozen more hid themselves in the bowels of the kitchen, or elsewhere on the grounds. The furniture in the house is unpretentious but solid – mostly English and French. I did not like the heavy velvet curtains that darkened the rooms.

  ‘Tea, sir?’ the young man asked.

  I accepted a steaming glass of China tea with a nod of appreciation.

  ‘Come here,’ Chertkov said, motioning me to the large leather chairs beside the fire. I watched as he dropped to his knees and worked a large, old-fashioned bellows, fanning the logs in the iron grate to a flame. The chimney seemed to roar, inhaling the sparks. ‘We must become friends,’ he said. ‘We have so much to accomplish, and there are many enemies.’

  His cheekbones flared when he spoke, and he seemed always to be repressing a burp. Dressed in a fresh muslin blouse with a shiny leather belt, he looked like other Tolstoyans I have met. His boots were unstylish but well made – a gift from Leo Nikolayevich, he told me. ‘He made them with his own hands – a craft he has learned in recent years. He makes boots for everyone.’

  Chertkov sipped his tea in an almost prissy manner. Although I very much admired him, liking him would require an act of will.

  ‘Here is a letter from Leo Nikolayevich,’ he said, handing me a sheet covered with Tolstoy’s messy scrawl. ‘He has not been well. You can tell from the unsteady hand. It is partly Sofya Andreyevna’s fault, I must tell you. She has destroyed his ability to sleep with her constant nagging.’ Anger bloomed in his chest. ‘She is a desperate woman. There is no telling what he might have accomplished were he married to a more suitable person, someone who shared his idealism and convictions.’

  ‘I have heard that she’s dreadful.’

  He nodded gravely, soaking this in. ‘You will take many meals at Yasnaya Polyana, but Sofya Andreyevna makes few concessions to her husband and his friends.’

  ‘She isn’t a vegetarian?’

  He shook his head with disgust. ‘Neither are her sons. Only Sasha can be trusted – among the children, that is. Confide only in her or in Dushan Makovitsky, your mother’s friend. He is a good man.’

  ‘Dr Makovitsky says that Sasha does much of her father’s secretarial work.’

  ‘She types everything for him. There’s a little room down the hallway from his study called “the Remington room.” You’ll doubtless spend a good deal of time there. Sasha needs help. The volume of letters seems to increase monthly with people frantic to get a word of advice from Leo Nikolayevich. He replies personally to most of them.’ Chertkov smiled again, revealing chiseled teeth with dark spaces between them. ‘Leo Nikolayevich adores his daughter, by the way. This drives Sofya Andreyevna mad.’

  ‘Does the countess type?’

  ‘No, but she used to copy all of his work by hand. She was so possessive about it – and meddlesome.’

  I felt uneasy now. One does not like to come between married people, whatever the circumstances.

  ‘You will help with the secretarial work, of course – mostly filing and answering letters. The point is that Leo Nikolayevich needs a man with your intellectual gifts around him. Somebody, like yourself, who has read and understood his work. Gusev was invaluable that way.’

  I had heard a good deal of Nicholai Gusev, who was Tolstoy’s secretary for some years. The government of Tula exiled him from the province, as they did Chertkov, for ‘subversive activities,’ a sentence that might well fall on my head one day. I do not mind. Exile is a great Russian institution. The Russian soul has been tempered, like blue steel, in Siberia.

  ‘Take these letters to Leo Nikolayevich, if you will,’ Chertkov said, handing me a small, tightly sealed packet. ‘One can’t be sure what gets through to him, I’m afraid.’ He bit his lip. ‘Sofya Andreyevna does not respect his privacy.’

  ‘She would actually intercept his letters!’

  He nodded, suppressing a grin. ‘I have another little task for you. A secret task, I should say.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘I have instructed Sergeyenko, my secretary at Telyatinki, to give you several English notebooks constructed for a special purpose.’

  I wanted to look aside but didn’t dare.

  ‘Sergeyenko will show you how to use them. In brief, you will keep a private diary for me. Write with an indelible pencil and use transfer paper. The interleaves can be torn out of the notebooks quite easily. Bring these weekly to Sergeyenko, who will send them to me here. I want to know exactly what happens at Yasnaya Polyana.’ A queer yellow light filled his eyes. ‘Let me know who is visiting Leo Nikolayevich. Tell me what he is reading, and make a note of what letters go out or come in. And let me know what Sofya Andreyevna has been saying.’

  A long pause followed, during which I restrained myself from comment. ‘Naturally,’ he continued, ‘I’d like to know what Leo Nikolayevich is writing. Too much of his time, I fear, has been wasted on this anthology of his. You might help by taking on some of these editorial duties. Do more than he asks of you. Urge him to get back to his philosophical work.’

  ‘Is he writing another novel?’

  Chertkov belched into a silk handkerchief. ‘Novels are for women, for pampered, bourgeois women who have nothing better to do with their time.’

  ‘But Anna Karenina –’

  ‘It’s a decent example, but still quite foolish.’

  ‘Vladimir Grigorevich, I …’

  He stared at me with tiny eyes that did not seem human. They were the eyes of a weasel.

  ‘I liked Anna Karenina.’

  ‘You’re a young man, Valentin Fedorovich! Young men like novels. I did, many years ago. My mother, in fact, was a friend of Turgenev. Fiction is for people who have not yet properly begun their search for God. What subjects intrigue these novelists? I will tell you. Lust and adultery.’ His upper lip curled, exposing his teeth like alder roots in a swamp.

  I dipped my head forward and mumbled.

  Chertkov drew his lips into a sidelong sharklike smile. ‘I like you very much, dear boy. I’m sure that Leo Nikolayevich will be grateful to you for whatever help you can give him.’ As he spoke, he pulled thin black leather gloves over his hands to hide a particularly raw patch of eczema. I felt sure, at last, the job was mine.

  ‘I hope I will be able to help him,’ I said.

  ‘You will. I see that.’

  I grinned stupidly, and Chertkov, as if annoyed with me, stood up. ‘Good-bye now,’ he
said. ‘I look forward to receiving your diaries. And remember: Don’t let anyone find out about them. Not even Leo Nikolayevich. It would distress him.’

  We shook hands, exchanging a few words about my preparations for the trip to Tula, by train, the following week. He escorted me into the dark front hall. Our footsteps echoed off the high ceiling and slate floor. A servant held out my coat and hat for me.

  ‘I would not entrust you with this position if I didn’t believe you were one of us,’ Chertkov said, his black-gloved hands resting on my shoulders. ‘I’m terribly worried, you know. Leo Nikolayevich is frail and nervous, though you will never hear a word of complaint from him. It is painful that I should have to live apart from him in his last days.’

  I nodded, but his comment did not seem to require affirmation.

  ‘I’m grateful to you, Vladimir Grigorevich,’ I said.

  He deflected my comment with a wave of one hand.

  ‘Godspeed,’ he said, pushing the door open against a swirl of snow. ‘And remember what I said: write everything down!’ He kissed me on either cheek and pushed me into the fierce January wind. A black sleigh waited for me in the drive, with a driver bundled in so much fur that he did not look human.

  We drove off at a trot along a winding road through a line of bare elms. Huddled in my kaftan, with the light snow ticking on my forehead, I felt exalted and terrified – like Elijah being whisked to heaven in a whirlwind fire.

  3

  L. N.

  LETTER TO PYOTR MELNIKOV, A WORKER FROM BAKU

  YASNAYA POLYANA, 22 JANUARY 1910

  It seems to me that two issues concern you: God? – what is God? – and the nature of the human soul. You also inquire about God’s relation to humankind, and wonder about life after death.

  Let me take the first question. What is God and how does he relate to humankind? The Bible says a lot about how God created the universe and how he relates to his people, meting out rewards and punishments. This is nonsense. Forget it altogether. Put it out of your mind. God is the beginning of all things, the essential condition of our being, and a little bit of what we take to be life within us and revealed to us by Love (hence we say, ‘God is Love’). But, again, please forget those arguments about God creating the world and the human race and how he punishes everyone who disobeys. You must erase that from your mind in order to consider your own life freshly.

  What I have said is all we know of God, or can know.

  About the soul, we can only say that what we refer to as life is merely the divine principle. Without it nothing would exist. There is nothing physical about it, nothing temporal. So it cannot die when the body ceases to exist.

  You also – like all of us – want to know about life after death.

  In order to understand me, pay close attention to what I say next.

  For mortal man (that is, for the body alone) time exists: that is, hours, days, months, and years pass. For the body alone, there also exists the physical world – what can be seen, touched by the hands. What is big or little, hard or soft, durable or fragile. But the soul is timeless; it merely resides in the human body. The I that I spoke of seventy years ago is the same I I refer to now. Nor does the soul have anything physical about it. Wherever I am, no matter what happens, my soul, the I that I refer to, stays the same and is always nonphysical. Thus, time exists only for the body. For the soul, time and place and the physical world have no reality. Therefore, we can’t really ask what will happen to the soul or where, after death, it will go, because the phrase will be suggests time, and the word where suggests place. Neither time nor place has meaning for the soul once the physical body has ceased to be.

  That speculations about life after death or heaven and hell are shallow and mistaken should by now be clear. If the soul were going somewhere to live after death, it would have been somewhere before birth. But nobody seems to notice that.

  My feeling is that the soul within us does not die when our body dies, but that we cannot know what will happen to it and where it will go – even though we do know that it cannot die. About punishments and rewards: I think our life here has meaning only when we live in accordance with the commandment to love one another. Life becomes distressing, troubled – bad – when we ignore this commandment. It would seem that whatever rewards and punishments our deeds warrant, we shall receive in this life, since none other can be known.

  4

  Sofya Andreyevna

  I know it for sure now. They’ll do anything to come between me and my husband. It would be hard enough, God knows, without them pursuing us like Furies. What’s worse is they think I don’t know about their plan to write me and my children – Leo Tolstoy’s children and grandchildren! – out of his will. I always know what’s going on behind my back. I can tell it by their looks, their whispers and winks, even their deference. They somehow imagine I don’t notice the secret messages delivered when my back is turned. Only yesterday a servant carried a letter from Sergeyenko to Lyovochka right under my nose, but, of course, I recognized his big, loopy handwriting on the envelope! Do they think I was born yesterday?

  They spread rumors about me to the press. Last week an article appeared in Moscow claiming, ‘Countess Tolstoy has become estranged from her husband. They barely talk. They do not share a similar view of politics or religion.’ What nonsense! And it has all been spread by Chertkov and his friends, who have succeeded in coming between me and Lyovochka, in spite of our forty-eight years of marriage. In the end, however, I will triumph. Our love will triumph.

  I’m treated as a stranger here. But am I not the very person who bore Leo Tolstoy his thirteen children (not bad for a preacher of chastity!), the woman who sees that his clothes are washed and mended, his vegetarian meals prepared to his liking? Am I not the one who takes his pulse before he falls asleep each night, who gives him enemas when his bowels are blocked, who brings him tea with a large slice of lemon when he cannot sleep?

  I am a slave. An outcast in my own household. To think that I was the daughter of a famous Moscow physician! My father admired Leo Nikolayevich for his position in the aristocracy, yes, but also for his literary accomplishments. Who wouldn’t? Even then, it was obvious that he would become an important writer. He was the talk of Moscow and St Petersburg. I can remember my mother saying to me, ‘One day you will read about Count Tolstoy in the Encyclopedia.’

  When my sisters and I were teenagers, Papa would put tapers in the window once a week, as was the custom then – to signal our ‘at home.’ We waited, Lisa, Tanya, and me. We all loved Count Tolstoy desperately, though Papa and Mama assumed that Lisa, as the eldest, was the obvious mate for him. I was the middle girl, slender and dark-eyed, with a soft, reedy voice and teeth like ivory. I was the envy of Lisa, who was a cat – clawing and mewing, slinking about the house. Lisa had brains, yes. She was an ‘intellectual.’ But she was pompous and, if I do say so myself, a fraud.

  Tanya could have been more dangerous. She was all mischief and commotion, eyes black as coal, with hair cut straight across her forehead like an Oriental whore. When she walked across the room, every muscle in her body signaled to the world. I hated her then. Who could tolerate the fetching way she would dance and sing, her grandiose schemes for ‘making it’ in the theater? As if Papa would let one of his daughters spread her tail feathers on the Moscow stage! Poor Papa.

  I don’t think I was as difficult as the others. Nor should it have surprised anyone that Count Tolstoy chose me over my sisters. Though not brazen about it, I had accomplishments. I could play the piano – not like I do today, though not so badly either. My watercolors were passable. I could dance as well as most girls of my rank and position. And I could write like the wind – stories and poems, diaries, letters. Then, as now, Lyovochka had an instinct for self-preservation. He has always known how to get what he needs.

  I first met the count when I was ten. He had come to visit Papa in the Kremlin, where we had an apartment, his dark mustache drooping, his uniform p
erfectly pressed, the boots so shiny you could see his knees reflecting on his toes. A ceremonial sword hung from his belt. He was about to join his regiment in the Danube, he said, affecting a quiet, slightly melancholic swagger. I stood meekly in one corner while he and Papa talked.

  They sat in the front parlor, directly across from each other. Papa couldn’t see me, but I could see the count, his knees pressed together, his hands large and red, folded awkwardly on his lap like sea crabs. As Papa spoke, the count’s eyes seemed to flash with attentiveness. His stare, then as now, was compelling, irresistible. He hunched forward on the low cerise chair. The yellow epaulets and the double row of brass buttons on his uniform were almost too much for me to bear!

  He and Papa talked for two hours in muffled tones, as if plotting the overthrow of the monarchy. What was all the hush about? Were they deciding which of us girls would be the future Countess Tolstoy? I don’t think I could have wondered such a thing. After all, I was only ten years old. But my heart went out to Leo Tolstoy. I decided then and there that, one day, I would be his wife. When he left, I stole back into the parlor and tied a pink ribbon around the back leg of the chair he’d sat on.

  After that, Papa spoke often of the young count, for whom he had a special affection. Once he let me borrow his novel Childhood. I read it in one long night, by candlelight, while my sisters slept. Every sentence blazed like a match tip. The images whirled in my head for weeks. No wonder all of Moscow was agog.

  But that was years before any of us was really old enough for marriage. Suddenly, we were ready. Lisa was, anyway. And Mama was fed up. This courting business – the gentlemen callers, the endless teas and tension – had gone far enough. She wanted Lisa off her hands as quickly as possible.