Tolstoy (58 page)

Everything which used to seem good and noble to me—ambition, fame, education, wealth, a complex and sophisticated lifestyle, environment, food, clothes, and formal manners—has become bad and sordid. Everything which seemed bad and sordid—the peasant lifestyle, obscurity, poverty, crudity, simple surroundings, food, clothes, manners—has become good and noble.
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It was not surprising that Nikolay Berdyaev later defined as one of Tolstoy's many paradoxes the fact that this man who was Russian to the core of his being started preaching 'Anglo-Saxon religiosity',
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for there were striking parallels with the reformist views that Matthew Arnold had been promoting in Victorian England in the 1870s.

Like Tolstoy, Arnold had increasingly turned to religious questions later in his career, although in his case he was impelled by a desire to navigate the crisis caused by the resistance of the Church of England's conservative theologians to the onslaught of scientific, rational thought (Darwin's
Origin of Species
had been published in 1859). Tolstoy, of course, had met Arnold briefly in London in 1861, and when in 1885 he read
Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible,
the controversial book Arnold published in 1873, he exclaimed excitedly in a letter to a friend that he had found half of his own ideas in it.
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Tolstoy ensured that Arnold was sent a copy of
What I Believe
as soon as it appeared in translation. It was, incidentally, Matthew Arnold who first awakened a serious interest in Tolstoy in England, where he was largely unknown until the middle of the 1880s. In the essay he published in 1887, a few months before he died, Arnold introduced British readers to Tolstoy's fiction. As well as presenting a strong case for the superiority of
Anna Karenina
to
Madame Bovary,
it is interesting to note that he also presented a summary of Tolstoy's religious philosophy to date. While sympathetic to its general thrust, Arnold had some judicious comments to make. Even without having the opportunity to read any of Tolstoy's later religious writings, Arnold's main exposure of the basic flaw in Tolstoy's thinking, based on a reading of
What I Believe,
is in many ways unsurpassed in its lucidity and concision:

Christianity cannot be packed into any set of commandments. As I have somewhere or other said, 'Christianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon of the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up.'
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Tolstoy was not a man to make concessions, however. In the spring of 1884, as he recovered from the exhaustion of completing the initial writing of
What I Believe
and then the various stages of proofreading (the number of changes he introduced at the first stage cost him about the same as the sum he was charged for the typesetting), he learned how to cobble shoes, and read Confucius and Lao Tzu.
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Family life in the Tolstoy home in Moscow was rather surreal in the early part of 1884. In one part of the house, Tolstoy, closely watched by the governor general, was paring his footprint on the earth down to a minimum and castigating such depraved activities as physical adornment and dancing at balls.
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In another part of the house, Sonya and Tanya were dressing up in tulle and velvet to go to society balls where they fraternised with the governor general, who went out of his way to be friendly and curry favour with them.
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Sonya was still breast-feeding their two-year old son Alyosha, and she was pregnant again, but she was determined to enjoy herself. Tolstoy deplored the money his wife was spending on Tanya's coming-out that season. Each dress alone cost up to 250 roubles, and he was well aware that twenty-five horses could have been bought with that money. He was also pained to think of the old coachmen shivering in the cold outside grand mansions while their employers partied, and so he absconded back to Yasnaya Polyana for a while to rest his frayed nerves. Sonya was also pained to think of her husband sitting in his dirty woollen socks at home, sewing misshapen boots for their old servant Agafya Mikhailovna, while their teenage sons Ilya and Lev were being delinquent and neglecting their schoolwork. She was fed up with him being a 'holy fool', she complained to her sister, reneging on his duties as a father, and no longer even interested in being part of family life.
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While Sonya wrote complaining letters to her sister Tanya, Tolstoy recorded in his diary, and in letters to Chertkov, the discord with his wife which prevented him from aligning their family's life with his convictions. He felt he was the only sane person living in a madhouse run by madmen. But it was Tolstoy who was the madman according to his brother Sergey, who had as little sympathy for his suffering as Sonya.
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Relations continued to be strained that summer when the family moved back to Yasnaya Polyana, and Tanya arrived as usual to take up her summer residence in the other house, along with her children (as a rule, her husband, Alexander Kuzminsky, did not join them). The summer days which Sonya spent with her sister were still the happiest time of year for her, but she was increasingly living apart from her husband. He had now started getting up even earlier, so he could do more physical work, and spent long days mowing with the peasants. He now also gave up eating meat, stopped drinking wine and tried to give up smoking.
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His personal self-discipline was not sufficient to maintain a cool head in his altercations with Sonya, however, and by early June he was longing to leave Yasnaya Polyana and move away from his family. There was a particularly bitter argument with Sonya about money on 17 June, just before she gave birth. Late that afternoon Tolstoy decided to leave, and he got halfway to Tula before feelings of guilt made him turn back. When the two bearded young men playing cards in the house (two of his sons) told him the rest of the family were outside playing croquet he retreated to his study, to be woken at three in the morning by Sonya, who had gone into labour.

The birth of Alexandra (Sasha) was not a happy occasion—Sonya had not wanted another child, she had dreaded giving birth, and she hired a wet-nurse this time in a fit of pique. Later she explained in her autobiography that Tolstoy was perennially so cold and unpleasant with her during this time, and so unhelpful around the house, that she felt no compunction about defying him in this matter.
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That July she was so unhappy that she could not refrain from unburdening herself in a letter to her husband's former confidante Alexandrine. 'Lyovochka has never been before in
such
an extreme frame of mind,' she wrote, describing how difficult it was to find any common ground between them where they could both make compromises. She also found it hard that Tolstoy was complaining about her in letters, and telling his correspondents how lonely he was.
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Alexandrine was no doubt sympathetic. Her irascible relative had barely been in touch since they had fallen out over their divergent views on Christianity, and then suddenly that spring she had been bombarded with four letters from him in quick succession. Tolstoy wanted her to intercede on behalf of Anna Armfeldt, the widow of a Moscow University professor. Her daughter Natalya was a revolutionary who had been sentenced to fourteen years' hard labour in Kara, a particularly harsh prison in eastern Siberia, just north of the border with China (where convicts worked the gold mines). Natalya had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and her mother wanted to be able to settle near her.
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Tolstoy's relations with Sonya improved somewhat when post-natal complications made her ill.
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Tanya reported to her absent husband in July that her sister was still weak, and that her brother-in-law was still preaching about the need to sell everything up and dismiss the servants, but he became more solicitous.
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One rare source of merriment during these tense years was the Yasnaya Polyana post box. Every member of the household was invited to drop unsigned stories, news items, poems and anecdotes into a locked box placed on the landing by the grandfather clock for Sunday evening readings around the samovar. On 22 August 1884, which was Sonya's birthday, Tolstoy compiled twenty-three medical histories for the mentally ill inmates at the Yasnaya Polyana hospital, who all suffered from a particular mania. He began with himself, describing his own mania as
Weltverbesserungswahn
(a desire to improve the world), and its symptoms as a dissatisfaction with the status quo, condemnation of everyone but himself, an annoying loquacity with no thought for his listeners, and frequent descents from anger and irritability to an unnatural lachrymose sensitivity. He prescribed complete indifference from everyone around him to anything he might say as his cure.

Tolstoy diagnosed his wife as suffering from
petulantia toropigis maxima
(unruly haste), a condition causing the patient to believe that everything depends on her, and a concomitant fear that she cannot manage to do everything.
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In her autobiography, Sonya records some of the 'Ideals of Yasnaya Polyana' that were posted:

• Lev Nikolayevich: Poverty, peace and harmony. To burn everything he used to have reverence for, and to have reverence for everything he has burned.
  
• Sofya Andreyevna: Seneca. To have 150 babies who will never grow up.
  
• Tatyana Andreyevna: Eternal youth, female emancipation.
  
• Ilya Lvovich: To carefully conceal from everyone that he has a heart, and to give the impression that he has killed 100 wolves.
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Sonya did not have much time to read, but she enjoyed leafing through a French edition of the Roman Stoic philosopher's complete works, which their friend Leonid Urusov had lent her, along with Marcus Aurelius, Plato and Epictetus.
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Tolstoy was on to the transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson by this time.

By the autumn of 1884 family relations were much improved, partly because Tolstoy had been able to stay behind for a few weeks after everyone left for Moscow, and live according to his ideals. He dismissed the cook and the caretaker, cooked his own simple dishes like baked turnip, lit the samovar himself, stopped using horses and walked every evening down to the railway station to post his letters to Sonya and pick up the post.
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He also took walks during the daytime to the highway to resume his conversations with pilgrims. He wrote to Sonya about meeting two old Stranniks from Siberia who had dedicated themselves to a life of permanent pilgrimage and were returning from Jerusalem and Mount Athos, a journey which they had undertaken without a single kopeck to their name. On another day he met two old gentlemen from the far north of Russia, whom he invited back to Yasnaya Polyana for tea—they completely drained the samovar. Tolstoy finally gave up hunting that autumn, having discovered, apart from a feeling of shame, that when he went out on horseback with his dogs he now hoped his quarry would get away. This meant a major change in his routine (his daughter Tanya had noted in her diary that he had killed fifty-five rabbits and ten foxes during the course of one autumn a few years earlier).
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Tolstoy also now decided to take over the running of all the farming at Yasnaya Polyana from his steward,
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and his spirits rose when Sonya decided she would not take their daughter Tanya into society for a second season, or attend any high-profile social events herself. But the dynamics within the family were also beginning to change, which raised Tolstoy's spirits. Although Tolstoy's relationship with his sons remained largely cool, his elder daughters, particularly Masha, were slowly coming round to his point of view.

In November 1884 Tolstoy published two of the draft openings to his abandoned novel about the Decembrists. It was the first fiction he had published for an educated audience since
Anna Karenina,
but his heart was now in a new project conceived by Vladimir Chertkov. Tolstoy had been engaged in a lively correspondence with Chertkov (whom he had already sent thirty-six letters since their meeting the previous year), and amongst their topics for discussion was a plan to produce quality literature for the masses. Chertkov wanted to emulate the pamphlets which had been put out under the auspices of the (now banned) Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading by Vasily Pashkov, who had just been sent into permanent exile by the government. He had met Pashkov in England that summer, and realised that inexpensive publications for the masses offered an excellent means to promote Tolstoy's new creed.
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Tolstoy was only too keen to collaborate, and they discussed these plans further when Chertkov came to Moscow in November. After a productive meeting with Ivan Sytin, an enterprising young publisher of popular woodcuts and pictures who had worked his way up from lowly beginnings as an apprentice in a bookshop, Chertkov was ready to sign a contract. The new publishing house they set up was given the name 'Posrednik' (The Intermediary), and they agreed they would publish superior but accessible Russian and foreign literature in translation with illustrations for a few kopecks a copy. That they were able to do so may well have been due to Chertkov's mother, who gave her son a 20,000-rouble annual allowance—more than the Tolstoy family's entire expenditure in a year.
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Chertkov's wealth proved to be a rare but lingering bone of contention between him and Tolstoy.
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