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

by Jay Parini

  Frankly, I did not understand a word of it. Philosophy has never been my strong suit. I am a practical man.

  Leo Nikolayevich said, ‘This is what I have felt so keenly about myself. It is especially true if one lives a longish life, as I have.’ After a few moments, he added, ‘Too long, in fact! It’s a great misfortune to outlive one’s interest even in oneself.’

  At each stop we disembarked to walk about the station. An old man gets very stiff between stops, so these ambulations are a necessity for Leo Nikolayevich. There was also the matter of relieving his bladder. I worry when he does not urinate frequently or properly. Infections can be lethal in a man of his age.

  At one station, Leo Nikolayevich pointed to a policeman and whispered in my ear, ‘Look! a typical policeman’s face!’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Just look at him.’

  I strolled past the man, pretending to mind my own business. He looked like most policemen: fat faced, full of jowl, but good-natured in appearance. It was a little embarrassing, but Leo Nikolayevich kept staring at me, as if to say, ‘Well? Was I correct?’ I nodded, and he broke into spasms of laughter.

  I cannot understand him sometimes.

  The conductor behaved badly, spreading word at each stop that Tolstoy was aboard. As a result, voyeurs pushed their noses against the window, ogling. A few would shout, ‘How are you, Leo Nikolayevich?’ and he would remove his hat in response.

  At one station, a man rushed up to him and said, ‘Tolstoy!’

  ‘Not really,’ he replied. The imp danced in his old, gray eyes.

  ‘Not really?’ the man said.

  ‘Not really,’ Leo Nikolayevich repeated.

  The man begged his pardon and withdrew, looking perplexed.

  A telegram had been sent to Chertkov, asking him to seek permission from the government to visit Leo Nikolayevich at Kochety. During our last visit there, Chertkov had stayed four versts away, in Suvorovo, which is not in the province of Tula but in Orel. Leo Nikolayevich adored the irony of this situation, which reminded him of the exiled Voltaire, who constructed a castle in Ferney in such a way that his drawing room was in France but his bedroom in Switzerland. I, personally, find such connivances disagreeable. One should obey – or consciously disobey – the spirit as well as the letter of the law.

  We changed trains at Orel, where there was an hour’s layover. Our baggage was carried to a small room off the first-class buffer, where I heated up some oatmeal porridge for Leo Nikolayevich, who had not eaten anything all day but a bit of stale bread that he carried in his pocket. Asparagus is in season, to my delight. It is especially good for clearing an old man’s urine. I asked for a dish of freshly steamed tips; when it arrived, it was nearly time for our departure. I complained to the station manager, who said I could take the dish with me.

  Bulgakov led Leo Nikolayevich down the long platform to our carriage, followed by thirty or forty spectators. Leo Nikolayevich sat in the window of the third-class carriage once again, nibbling the slightly undercooked rusks. A young boy pressed his nose to the window, staring more at the asparagus than at Leo Nikolayevich, who insisted that I pass several rusks to the boy through the window. Taking them, the boy scurried off to eat them in private like a dog.

  I overheard a man speaking to the conductor: ‘So the great Count eats asparagus!’ He spoke with a contemptuous note in his voice. ‘Who would have guessed? Asparagus!’ he said again.

  I wanted to confront the fellow for his insolence, but I decided not to call attention to the issue. It would have been too painful for Leo Nikolayevich, who prefers to ignore slights and insults.

  Late in the day we arrived at Blagodatnoye Station, where Tanya stood on the platform, waving her parasol like a figure in a French Impressionist painting. She was beautifully dressed, a real countess. Her father’s entire being came alive when he saw her. They embraced like children, with tears moistening their cheeks.

  Tanya took us to Kochety, some fifteen versts from the station, in a plush droshky drawn by four black horses. The sun stood on the horizon’s edge, red and sharp. We had to shield our eyes.

  Though he has often visited here, Leo Nikolayevich seemed enchanted by everything, remarking on the cool, green fields on either side of the road, the well-kept farms, the colorful dresses worn by women in the local villages. As it was Sunday, people were decked out in their finest. Leo Nikolayevich smiled almost continuously, exposing his red gums.

  When we arrived at the Sukhotins’ – a magnificent house that sits in its own spacious park – Leo Nikolayevich declared that he was going to stay a very long time. ‘I shall love every moment of it: no passersby demanding five-kopeck pieces, no fugitives from the law seeking counsel, no mothers at war with their daughters….’

  I do not actually like the hordes of third-rate revolutionaries, fanatics, and fortune hunters who cram the doorway of Yasnaya Polyana each day requesting an interview with ‘the Count.’ That he does not banish them all is to his credit. I do not share this largeness of spirit.

  We rested before dinner, which was worth waiting for. So many delicious courses, served on English china! Leo Nikolayevich was animated, talking more than eating. I caught a glimpse of the young, carefree count who, back in the 1850s, had dazzled Parisian society with his wit and knowledge, with the sheer force of his character. Here was the man whom even Ivan Turgenev could not withstand.

  On our last visit to Kochety, a drawling, simpering woman who was remarkably undeferential to Russia’s greatest author had said to Leo Nikolayevich, ‘Do try to be kind to my son, since he can’t bear you. Chat about horses – or something that will interest him. Perhaps he then will forgive you for being so eccentric.’

  Leo Nikolayevich had grinned and nodded. Later, he claimed that he had enjoyed the woman. ‘Simplicity on such a grand scale is rare. She has a kind of purity I admire.’ I did not, myself, see the purity.

  Before retiring, Leo Nikolayevich wanted to walk in the park, alone, to ‘gather his thoughts before sleeping.’

  ‘I’ll go with you, Papa,’ said Tanya, taking his arm.

  ‘Let me go alone,’ he said.

  Nervously, Tanya agreed.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked her. ‘Wolves?’

  ‘You might stumble.’

  ‘And the sky might fall!’

  She looked mildly sullen.

  ‘My darling, you worry too much about your poor old father. I have already lived a very long time. There is no need to trouble yourself.’

  He walked off, leaning on a cane, into the cool air.

  I sat comfortably in the drawing room with a glass of tea on my lap while Sukhotin nattered on about the rights of landowners and government levies.

  More than an hour passed without a sign of Leo Nikolayevich, and it was now dark.

  ‘I suspect that something has gone wrong,’ Tanya said, breaking our conversation at a convenient point. She clasped her hands in front of her chest like a young matron.

  ‘Not to worry, dear,’ Sukhotin said, growing red in the cheeks – the effect more of brandy than of panic. ‘Let me dispatch servants throughout the park. They will find him.’

  He toddled off to the front hall, where he rang a bell that summoned the household staff. He rattled off orders like an old military officer.

  ‘He has only been gone for an hour,’ I said.

  ‘He could be dead!’ said Tanya. ‘He might have fallen into the pond!’ She began to sob into a red silk kerchief.

  ‘He has probably just had a little fainting spell,’ Sukhotin said, entering with the bluff self-assurance of a man of inaction. ‘They’ll find him, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘He is probably sitting on a bench,’ I said. ‘He wanders around Yasnaya at all hours. This is nothing unusual.’

  But they could not hear me.

  Bells rang in the distance, and a brass hunting horn was blown. Servants scattered throughout the park, crying, ‘Count Tolstoy!’ in a wild chorus
that returned in mingling echoes.

  When a good while had passed without results, I became afraid that my cynicism would be shown up. Putting on a cloak against the night chill, I set out myself on the least obvious path to the most desirable place. I knew that the large meadow behind a stand of pines was his most likely goal: Leo Nikolayevich likes to emerge into a clearing from a densely wooded area.

  In less than half an hour, I found him. He was sitting on a tree stump, humming a familiar folk melody about an old crow that flies off by itself into a dark wood, never to return.

  ‘You’ve upset everyone at the house, Leo Nikolayevich.’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘Tanya thought you were dead.’

  ‘She overestimates my good luck.’

  I sat beside him on the stump, which was vast and moldering. It was not comfortable.

  ‘Why did you come looking for me?’

  ‘They were fussing about you. I was afraid.’

  ‘You worry too much, Dushan. You must live as though your life does not matter.’

  ‘It’s your life that matters,’ I said.

  ‘That’s foolish. I don’t matter in the least. What matters is the lovely air we breathe. Smell it, Dushan.’

  I sucked in a breath. Was it lilac?

  ‘I am enjoying myself tonight,’ he said.

  ‘You are causing trouble.’

  ‘Yes, that always pleases me, doesn’t it? A sign of vanity. I must pray about that.’

  ‘We had better find Tanya,’ I said, taking his arm.

  Once we were inside, Tanya scolded her father. ‘You must not go out alone, Papa. Not in the dark.’

  He winked at me. ‘All right, all right. And I shall try to walk on my feet and not on my head.’

  ‘That is not funny, Papa.’

  Another day we sat together in the damp, green park. Leo Nikolayevich took me to look at a flowering chestnut tree that had, for mysterious reasons, caught his attention.

  ‘How marvelous it is!’ he said, holding my arm. ‘It all seems terribly new, as though I were seeing it for the first time. And the birds. Have you ever heard such wonderful singing?’ He talked rapidly, more to himself than to me. ‘And a little while ago I saw two eagles high above the clouds, and two kites!’ It is the geographic setting of Kochety that is most attractive to him.

  ‘If Napoleon had fought in the Novosil district he would certainly have stayed at Kochety,’ he said. ‘It is the highest point and has a view on all sides.’

  Once, when I was walking in the woods with Leo Nikolayevich, he told me about the time he and his brother-in-law, Stepan Behrs, had gone to visit the battlefield at Borodino. He was doing research, preparing to write the great battle scenes of Borodino, the scenes that have made War and Peace part of the consciousness of Russia.

  He spent days tramping those empty, green, rolling fields, picnicking in the little copses, sunbathing on the crests of hills, all the while imagining the dead. How many bones had been plowed under? What blood had colored that soil?

  Reading Tolstoy’s account of that battle, years ago, remains a primary experience of my life. I resolved then to combat violence, especially the insanity of state violence. I do not believe that young men should ever die in war. There must always be another solution.

  I lay on my back, ill with typhus in Hungary, reading Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Though my own life was in danger, I did not care. I did not even notice! I lived with Pierre as he stumbled from cannon to cannon, as he watched the Russian spirit drained and nearly vanquished. I was smitten with Prince Andrey on those fields. The anguish of the old general, Kutuzov, upon whose shoulders the responsibility for so many dead would lie, was my anguish. Those vignettes, so infinitely personal, live on. They will live on long after Leo Tolstoy is dust.

  The afternoon was spent in the cool of Sukhotin’s library, modeled on that of an English gentleman, complete with a leather couch from London, a finely tooled desk that had once ‘belonged to an Edinburgh lawyer,’ and a pair of George III globes. The bookshelves are crammed with the obvious English, French, German, Italian, and Russian volumes, though I suspect that they have never been opened. Leo Nikolayevich skimmed a number of Parisian editions of the French classics, then settled on Rousseau, his favorite author. He lost himself in a copy of Émile until it was time for tea.

  ‘It’s fascinating to try to guess what our grandchildren will read,’ he said later, as we drank a scented Indian tea in the blue parlor with Bulgakov and Tanya. ‘In my time there was a definite range of classic books, and one knew exactly what it meant to be an educated man. Now there are so many books, one is naturally confounded.’

  I said that, surely, the one author whom everyone would read in the future was Leo Tolstoy, but he merely shook his head and grinned.

  On the sixth day of May, a telegram arrived from Chertkov, saying that he had received permission to visit Kochety. Leo Nikolayevich was overjoyed, though he was able to resist gloating. It is tedious when someone – even Leo Tolstoy – cannot restrain his happiness.

  Chertkov arrived midmorning, while Leo Nikolayevich was working in his room. One is normally careful not to disturb him when he’s working, but I felt no hesitation that day. He looked up with childlike gratitude, then rushed down the stairs to greet this man whom he refers to as ‘a dear person and precious friend.’

  They met on the front steps, kissing affectionately on either cheek. Vladimir Grigorevich paid the driver, while Leo Nikolayevich went inside the front hall and blew his nose. I saw that his face was damp with tears. He appeared quite shaken by the experience, and I felt sorry for him. He is a man of such overwhelming emotions. I understand this, though I rarely experience anything like it myself.

  The two friends went up to the bedroom where Vladimir Grigorevich was staying, and they remained there until the bell was rung for lunch.

  But, alas, Leo Nikolayevich’s euphoria was short-lived. I heard the wheels of a coach outside, dogs barking at the hubs, much shouting and clamor of servants. Out stepped Sofya Andreyevna and her son, the dutiful and boring Andrey. That woman has an instinct for knowing when her husband is about to enjoy himself.

  19

  Chertkov

  I thought of England this morning. The early light, soft and gray, had a wet, acidic tang. I stood at the window in my nightdress, watching through the mist, when a bright yellow oriole flashed into sight. Today I would see Leo Nikolayevich. And God had sent this oriole as a harbinger of joy.

  I sat down on the bed, trembling. The years in England did much to gird my soul. I read and thought deeply. I made endless speeches on behalf of Leo Nikolayevich. I was greeted warmly everywhere from Southampton to Birmingham and Newcastle. Once, I even traveled into Scotland to address a group of Glaswegian shipbuilders who had a Tolstoy ‘study group.’ Most impressive. One cannot imagine that sort of thing happening in Russia. The only thing I disliked about England, apart from the essentially frivolous nature of the English mind, was the forced separation from my Master.

  People are mistaken when they say I love the man. What I love is the Tolstoyan firmness, the call to truth and justice. The lineaments of his prose entangle, embody, render visible the elusive matter of these virtues.

  We met at a time when my soul was just awakening. I looked on my life of luxury and privilege with contempt, seeing that I had contributed to the injustice of the world. I had added to its misery by remaining ignorant of what is cruel and unjust.

  It was my assignment to a military hospital that alerted me to the truth. I found the hospital crammed, not only with the sick but with political prisoners of various stripes: pacifists, mystics, revolutionaries, Christians who refused to accept the violence of the state, brave men who did not find the tsar’s barbarous policies acceptable and dared to say so.

  I resigned from the regiment and went to live by myself on an estate in Voronezh owned by my mother. It was a modest country house, with an adjoining farm. I felt marvelously solitary t
here, but I could not recover my former balance. The world seemed thin as rice paper, so fragile that at any moment ‘reality’ – which now looked like a tragic illusion – might break.

  Bleakness overwhelmed me. I wakened each night with sweat beading my face, my breath shallow. I could feel my pulse throbbing in distant parts of my body, sounding in the void of the universe like deadly drumming. I was suffocating, but I clung to life as a drowning man clings to a piece of driftwood.

  Both life and death seemed intolerable, terrifying. I shook like an old man, kneeling by my bed there, praying to a God whom I did not trust.

  It is not an easy thing to alter the trajectory of your life. People have expectations on your behalf. You come to believe them yourself. When I began to live my life according to new principles, my family and friends dismissed it as youthful folly. Friends and relatives turned against me when I persisted. They said I would end up like the Decembrists, whom I emulated – in Siberia or on the gallows.

  My mother and I had tea, once, at a fashionable Moscow restaurant. The luxury of the establishment offended me deeply, and she knew that, which was why she insisted on meeting me there.

  ‘Your father,’ she said, ‘would have been crushed.’

  ‘By the fact that I have chosen to live according to a set of principles, instead of wasting my time and money?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Father is dead.’

  ‘Thank goodness. It would have been too awful for him.’

  ‘I embarrass you,’ I said. ‘Fortunately, what you think about me – or anything – hardly matters.’

  She affected tears. It was deeply boring but difficult to ignore.

  ‘The fact is that you find my refusal to become a playboy and spendthrift distasteful,’ I said.

  ‘You are a young man, Vladimir. Someday you will regret the way you speak to me now.’

  ‘I daresay you’re right, as usual,’ I said, trying to control my snicker.

  ‘Do as you choose, Vladimir. You will anyway. But remember. You are a Chertkov.’