by Jay Parini
‘You’re like an old coquet,’ she said. ‘It upsets the whole family, the way his pictures of you adorn every mediocre paper in Russia. You should have more pride!’
Papa, rather sheepishly, obliged her, saying he would no longer allow Chertkov to photograph him. This appeared to satisfy her, but Papa quickly made matters worse by saying that he did, however, reserve the right to address Chertkov by letter as often as he pleased.
This little maneuver pitched Mama into a turmoil. ‘Look at the way he insists on having the last twist to every argument!’ she said. ‘It’s diabolical!’
The next day she seized me, saying she hadn’t slept all night. ‘All I can think of,’ she said, quite breathless, her cheeks bright with fury, ‘is that, from now on, his letters will be full of unfair remarks about me, schemes and frightful lies – all written under the guise of Christian humility. Your father thinks he is Christ, Sasha. That’s a sin, you know. A soul can be condemned to hell for that.’
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘Papa is extremely humble.’
‘He’s an egomaniac! He thinks he’s Christ, and he lets Chertkov play the role of chief disciple. It would be comical if it weren’t sick.’
Mama lay in bed at Kochety for days, feeding on sweets, drinking tea and chocolate, hunting through her husband’s early novels and stories for signs of perversion. In Childhood she found a description of a man called Sergey. She called Papa into her room and read the passage aloud to him in her ludicrous, stentorian way.
‘How is it that he prefers Chertkov, that obese, balding idiot, to me?’ Mama asked one morning as we sipped tea in her dressing room.
‘He still loves you, Mama. Why else would he stay?’
She ignored the implications of my question. ‘I remember when I would be naked, standing by the Voronka, ready to bathe,’ she said. ‘And he would surprise me, overtake me. He would roll me into a high patch of weeds, where he would ravish me.’ Her eyes rolled as she spoke. She appeared quite mad, like Othello just before he murdered Desdemona, his big, white eyes burning in a dark, twisted face.
I did not enjoy hearing this. This was not the sort of thing one said to a daughter.
I could not have made it through these tense days at Kochety without Varvara, who never allowed the atmosphere of deceit and madness to bother her. She is like a running brook beside my field, watering my roots. Without her, I would shrivel.
Papa questioned me about Varvara in a most peculiar fashion one day when I was about to take his dictation. He asked me if I thought I loved her.
‘Yes, I am fond of her,’ I said.
‘But do you love her?’
‘I love her.’
He seemed happy to hear this. I am sure he does not think our friendship is ungodly. He is not perverted, as Mama claims; indeed, he realizes that loving men is the same as loving women in all ways but the most technical.
Mama’s birthday occurred on the twenty-second of the month. She was sixty-six and looked every minute of it. Papa’s birthday came six days later, his eighty-second. It should have been a time of great celebrating, but Mama insisted on rehearsing the old, troublesome issues. One by one, they hammered through them, with Tanya acting as referee.
Papa – who had been battered for days – began this particular round of accusations. We were gathered around the big table at Kochety, when Papa suddenly took it upon himself to say that celibacy and chastity were the two main goals of the Christian life.
‘Listen to him!’ Mama shrieked. ‘Leo Nikolayevich, you are eighty-two years old today and still a fool.’
Tanya said, ‘This is no way to speak to each other on a happy day. Let’s rejoice as a family and love one another, as the Gospels tell us.’ She offered everyone a second helping of venison, while Sukhotin passed around a white wine from the Moselle.
But Mama would not be silenced.
‘A man who fathers thirteen children insults us when he proclaims the holiness of celibacy. Especially if that man has lain beside God knows how many women – or men. It is disgraceful, Leo Nikolayevich. You shame yourself when you talk like this.’
After dinner, I removed Papa from her company. He gripped my arm tightly as we made our way into the long evening shadows, taking a short walk in the park. It was lovely, with barn swallows skimming the trees. The moon pressed its bootheel into the sky’s dark sand while, in the distance, a flock of geese could be heard honking as they flew southward.
‘They know exactly the way to go,’ Papa said. ‘And they don’t have to think about it. How I envy them.’
We stopped by a little pond full of ducks to sit on a stone bench overlooking the water.
‘The pity is,’ I said, ‘that Mama loves you.’
‘What your mother feels for me is not love,’ he said. ‘It has the possessiveness of love, but it’s something closer to hatred. She wants to destroy me.’
This could not be so. Much as I dislike her, I do not think Mama wants to destroy her husband, whom she worships in her twisted way.
‘Perhaps not. But her love is being transformed into hatred, day by day.’ He paused to think. ‘You see, she was saved for many years from her own egotism by the children. The children absorbed her. But that’s over, and nothing can save her now.’
Mama refused to stay at Kochety any longer, since everyone (so she claimed) treated her ‘like a Xanthippe.’ She continued to view her life as a drama – a tragedy – with herself on center stage. ‘She doesn’t want a family,’ Varvara told me. ‘She wants a Greek chorus.’
At Papa’s insistence, Varvara and I agreed to take Mama back to Yasnaya Polyana. He refused to go himself, thank God. He was enjoying himself at Kochety, playing chess with Sukhotin, walking in the park, reading Rousseau every morning and Pascal at night. He dictated letters and revised proofs sent to him by Chertkov. A brief while apart from Mama would be good for him.
I assumed the separation would benefit Mama, too, but as soon as we got home she became highly agitated. The day after we arrived, she walked into Papa’s study in a wild state. Realizing that a number of new photographs by Chertkov and me had been hung on the wall, she dashed them to the floor. Having replaced these by pictures of her own, she sent for a priest, who arrived with his liturgical paraphernalia to exorcise Chertkov’s diabolical presence from the room.
We sat in the hall, listening in near disbelief. Then Mama poked her head out, her eyes black as dirt. ‘I don’t care what your father does, Sasha. He can make everything over to Chertkov, if that’s what he wants. It won’t matter, because I shall break the will. Your brothers will stand behind me, and so will the tsar!’ She throbbed like a chicken’s disembodied heart.
Varvara assured Mama that Chertkov had no such evil plans.
‘The man will stop at nothing,’ Mama replied. ‘He wants to destroy me!’ She decided to return to Kochety at once.
The next few days were dreadful. Back at Kochety, Mama refused to eat any solid food. She would sit at meals, sulking, while Papa hovered meekly, imploring her to nibble. ‘Just a piece of black bread, my love,’ he would say. It was so pathetic that Sukhotin, who is normally pacific, lost his temper. Livid, he rose, leaning on clenched fists at the head of the table. ‘For God’s sake, Sofya Andreyevna!’ he said. ‘Do you know what you’re doing? Your only claim in life is as Leo Tolstoy’s wife, don’t you know that? If he leaves you, history will say it was your fault. And, I swear to you, they will be right!’
Papa’s head sagged. He realized that the situation was unbearable and put a hand on his wife’s shoulder and sighed.
I saw tears on Mama’s cheeks now, a look of unbearable sorrow pooling in her face.
She left that day for home – a merciful gesture on her part – asking her husband to follow in a few days. She wanted them together at Yasnaya Polyana, however, for their forty-eighth wedding anniversary, on the twenty-third of September. He could hardly not agree.
On the morning of the anniversary, Mama came down fro
m her bedroom dressed in a white silk dress, a childlike smile on her face, as if their marriage had been half a century of inexpressible bliss. I confess, she looked radiant. Varvara Mikhailovna and I both complimented her.
‘Tell your father to put on a clean shirt,’ she said. ‘I will ask Bulgakov to take our picture on the front lawn.’
With reluctance, Papa put on a white linen blouse and his best leather boots – ones that he had made himself a couple of years ago and reserves for what he calls ‘state occasions.’ He brushed his hair and beard carefully.
Husband and wife of nearly five decades had a cup of hot chocolate before going outside for the picture. It was a warm day for late September. Though it was not yet noon, the sun burned with an almost lurid brightness, and the heat stood, quivering, on the recently mowed fields – the last cut of the year. Bulgakov was assigned the role of photographer because he supposedly has a knack for it.
Mama thought that a grand, stately photograph of herself and Papa appearing in all the newspapers would put to rest what she called the ‘persistent rumor that there is marital strife between us.’ Papa could hardly refuse to be photographed beside her, since he lets Chertkov take his picture at the slightest whim. I doubt that any man in history has been more photographed than Leo Tolstoy.
I put a screen behind the anniversary couple, as Bulgakov directed. He was being ‘professional.’
‘The screen will concentrate the sun’s rays on the photographic subject,’ Bulgakov said. Varvara Mikhailovna and I giggled behind his back, while Dushan Makovitsky frowned.
Papa squinted into the sun, haggard and distracted.
‘Please try to smile, Leo Nikolayevich,’ Bulgakov said.
Papa forced a meager smile.
Bulgakov put his head under the camera’s black hood, holding the rubber pear to one side. ‘A little to the left, please … There! Now smile …’
Mama, of course, looked like heaven on a dish. She stealthily slipped her arm around her husband’s waist and cocked her head toward his shoulder. She wanted the world to see the Perfect Couple. But nothing would alter Papa’s mood.
The shutter clicked, but when Bulgakov attempted to develop the pictures, two featureless ghosts appeared on the strong-smelling paper. Varvara Mikhailovna said, ‘The camera knows what is really there.’
They tried again the next day, with better results. Afterward, I took Papa aside. ‘You should never have let her talk you into that photograph. It was dishonest.’
‘You are much like your mother,’ he said. ‘Full of anger.’
He should never have spoken to me like that. But I realized his situation made it impossible to behave rationally.
Before lunch, I went in to take his dictation. He was sitting on the couch and looked up like an old spaniel. ‘It’s not your shorthand I need, Sasha. It’s your love.’
Intense love, pity, and sadness rushed from my heels up my spine and broke in a full wave over my head. ‘I need you so, Papa,’ I said, falling to the floor. I wrapped my arms around his knees and wept.
‘What a dear girl,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘So dear, I love you. So dear …’
The next day Papa put the photographs taken by me and Chertkov back on his study walls. That afternoon, Mama lost her mind.
Varvara and I had been invited to visit a friend for a few nights, and we left after breakfast. That same afternoon, Papa went off into the woods on Delire. When he returned, he discovered that Mama had gone into his study with a cap pistol and fired shots at Chertkov’s pictures before tearing them up – the servants recounted the whole sordid tale in scrupulous detail, as always. When Mama saw Papa in his study, she rushed at him with the same pistol and fired several times at his head before racing back to her room.
Varvara and I were immediately sent for by one of the servants. When we returned, Mama pretended that nothing had happened. ‘You silly girls, what brings you back so quickly? I suppose your hostess was dull.’
I lost my temper. ‘You’re crazy and you’ll kill us all.’
‘Is that what you think?’ She began to enumerate her sufferings, but it was too much for Varvara Mikhailovna to endure.
‘Be still, for once!’ Varvara said.
Mama looked bitterly at my friend. ‘I have tolerated you for a long time, a very long time, Varvara Mikhailovna,’ she said. ‘But I am going to have to ask you to leave us for good. You and Sasha act like tiny children, milling about, pecking and cooing at each other. You disgust me, both of you. The presence of my own daughter I must accept. But you!’ She pointed a crooked finger at Varvara and shook it. ‘I will not have you in my house!’
I wanted to bash her to the floor. Instead, I slammed the door and went to Papa’s study and told him what had happened. He suggested that Varvara and I go to Telyatinki for a few days until Mama’s temper cooled.
Today, before breakfast, I rode off beside Varvara Mikhailovna with a few loosely packed bags and my parrot. Even Chertkov’s company seemed preferable to that of a woman whose entire life was now a sustained note of hatred streaked with self-pity.
30
L. N.
LETTER TO GANDHI
KOCHETY, 7 SEPTEMBER 1910
Your journal, Indian Opinion, arrived, and I was delighted to find out that so much has been written there by those who practice nonresistance. I would like to share with you my thoughts upon reading this material.
As I grow older, and now that I feel so vividly the approach of death, I want to tell others about things that move me in a special way. I want to talk about what seems to me of extreme importance, especially what is called nonresistance (but which is really nothing more than the teaching of love unsullied by false interpretations). The fact that love, which is the striving of human souls toward unity and the activity that follows from this striving, is the highest law of human life is sensed by most people in the depths of their souls (we see this most vividly with children) – sensed, that is, until the world snags them in its false teachings. All the great prophets – Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Greek, and Roman – have proclaimed this law. But I think it has been expressed most cogently by Christ, who stated explicitly that the Law and all true prophecies hang on this one supreme law. Having foreseen the possible distortions of this law, Christ pointed out the dangers threatening those who live according to more worldly interests; specifically, he mentioned the danger of letting oneself defend worldly interests by force (that is, returning a blow with a blow, reappropriating by force stolen objects, etcetera). Christ knew, as does any reasonable person, that the use of violence is incompatible with the basic law of love, and that once violence is tolerated, the inadequacy of the law of love reveals itself and repudiates it. Christian civilization, so brilliant on the surface, was founded on this obvious, strange, occasionally conscious but mostly unconscious misunderstanding and contradiction.
In essence, once resistance was allowed to exist side by side with love, love could no longer continue as a fundamental law. The only law that survived was the law of strength – the power of the stronger over the weaker. This is how, for nineteen centuries, Christians have lived. I grant that, at all times, people have mostly been guided by violence as they sought to organize their lives. The only difference between Christian civilization and the others is that Christianity has expressed this contradiction clearly. At the same time, while Christians accept this law, they disregard it in their private lives. Hence, Christians live a contradiction, basing their lives on violence while professing love. This contradiction continued to grow as the Christian world progressed, and it has reached new heights recently. The question now becomes this: either we recognize that we don’t follow any religious or moral teaching and are guided by the power of the strong, or we recognize that all our taxes have been collected by force, and that our institutions (our courts, our police, but – above all – our armies) must be abolished.
This past spring, during a Scripture examination in Moscow, the teacher, a bishop,
asked the girls being examined about the commandments, especially the sixth one. When the right answer was produced, the bishop routinely asked a further question: Is killing always forbidden by the Scriptures? The poor girls, corrupted by their mentors, had to answer ‘not always.’ Killing, they had been taught to say, is allowed in time of war and for the execution of criminals. Alas, when one of these poor girls (this is a true story, told to me recently by an eyewitness), after giving her answer, was asked the routine question about whether or not killing was always sinful she replied, blushing nervously, ‘Yes, it is always sinful.’ When questioned further, she pointed out that even in the Old Testament killing was forbidden; she added that Christ, in the New Testament, had even forbidden the perpetration of evil against one’s brother. In spite of his renowned eloquence, the bishop was silenced, and the girl walked away victorious.
Yes, we may talk in our journals about the successes of aviation, about complex diplomatic relations, about clubs, inventions, alliances of all kinds, or about so-called works of art, yet still ignore what the girl in Moscow said to the bishop. However, we must not do that. Everybody in the Christian world knows this – knows it more or less vaguely – yet knows it. Socialism, communism, anarchism, the Salvation Army, the growth of crime, unemployment, the continuing luxury of the wealthy classes and the destitution of the poor, even the rate of suicides – all register this internal contradiction, which must be solved, and, of course, solved in the sense of acknowledging the law of love. And so your work in the Transvaal, at what seems to us the other end of the world, is the most central and important of all tasks now being done in the world, and not only Christians but all people will inevitably take part in it. I think you will be glad to know that this work is also rapidly developing in Russia in the form of refusals to do military service, a movement that grows every year. However insignificant the number may be among your people or ours who practice nonresistance, they can all say boldly that God is with them. And God is more powerful than men.
