Tolstoy (60 page)

Frey was interesting, Tolstoy wrote teasingly to his sister-in-law Tanya, because of his absolute refusal to recognise 'Anke Cake', which was his ultimate symbol of bourgeois self-satisfaction and unearned privilege. Anke Cake was served on special occasions at Yasnaya Polyana, and was named after a friend and medical colleague of Sonya's father, also of German descent. In her recipe book, Sonya does not provide instructions, merely a list of ingredients:

Anke Cake

Filling

There was also a sour cream version, which involved mixing ten eggs with twenty dessert spoons of sour cream, a cup of sugar, and two dessert spoons of flour, lining a tin with jam, pouring the mixture onto it and baking it in the oven.
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The puritanical Frey would have considered it immoral to partake of something so rich and indulgent, and Tolstoy was now of the same opinion. Frey had a further meeting with Tolstoy in Moscow that December, but he was forced to leave Russia in March 1886 after failing to win over Tolstoy, or indeed anyone else, to his religion of mankind. He returned to London, where he died in extreme poverty of tuberculosis two years later at the age of forty-nine. Tolstoy recollected that he was one of the 'best' people he had ever known.
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Tolstoy had focused his energies in the first half of the 1880s on articulating and disseminating his new worldview. In 1886, after he finished setting out the practical proposals contained in
What Then Must We Do?,
he turned to the abstract realm of ideas. His new project was initially conceived as a treatise 'about life and death', in which he wanted to set out the philosophy underpinning his ideas. Even though he may have stopped feeling suicidal, thoughts of death had never left Tolstoy, as can be seen from all three of his major artistic works written in the 1880s
(The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Power of Darkness
and
The Kreutzer Sonata),
the last two of which deal with violent death by murder. Death was also never far away in Tolstoy's personal life, but he now had a new attitude to it. In the late summer of 1885 he had been saddened to hear of the death of his faithful friend and supporter Leonid Urusov, whom he had accompanied on a trip to the Crimea that spring (it was the first time he had been back to Sebastopol since the war).
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More testing, however, was the experience of death in the family: in January 1886 four-year-old Alyosha died. Tolstoy discovered that he was now able to approach the death of his youngest son with equanimity. He wrote to tell Chertkov that he had previously regarded the death of a child as cruel and incomprehensible, but now saw it in a positive light.
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Sonya's only response to Alyosha's death was grief, but despite feeling distraught, she shrank from paying the 250 roubles required for burial at the prestigious cemetery next to the Novodevichy Convent, which was close to their house. Instead, she and the family's nanny placed the small coffin in the sleigh they had only recently used to take Alyosha to the zoo, and travelled north of Moscow to bury him at Pokrovskoye, where the Bers family had rented a dacha when she was a young girl.
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In November 1886 Sonya had to cope with another death when her sixty-year-old mother fell gravely ill, and she too travelled to the Crimea. She was with her mother in Yalta during her last days.
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If Tolstoy barely seemed to register the demise of Lyubov Alexandrovna, his old friend from childhood,
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it was perhaps because he himself was seriously unwell that autumn. Death was an ever-present subject in his conversations, and in his correspondence.
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The thirty-five chapters of Tolstoy's voluminous treatise about life and death, which was later given the final title
On Life,
present the philosophical foundations underpinning his new worldview. He invested a great deal of mental energy in the exposition of his ideas, writing over 2,000 pages before the manuscript was complete in August 1887.
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Sonya agreed to copy it out, which helped to create a peaceful atmosphere between them during its composition. Although she still could not accept the fundamental proposition that one should reject the 'material, personal life' in favour of the life of the spirit and 'universal love', as she noted in her diary,
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she liked the fact that it was not tendentious like his earlier religious writings. Nevertheless, a work which replaced religious doctrine with reason and personal conscience never stood a chance of being approved by the censor. It had been planned that the 600 copies printed in 1888 would constitute a new thirteenth volume ofTolstoy's collected works, but the Holy Synod ordered their confiscation. All but three copies were burned, and the first publication of
On Life
was the French translation which appeared in 1889. The Archbishop of Kherson, who had examined the treatise, confided in a letter to one of Tolstoy's acquaintances that the Holy Synod was now seriously considering anathematising him.
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After
The Death of Ivan Ilych,
which had won many accolades from critics, Tolstoy wrote only two major artistic works in the late 1880s: the play
The Powers of Darkness,
and the novella
The Kreutzer Sonata.
He had first tackled the dramatic genre back in the 1860s, but had taken neither of his efforts back then very seriously. Now he was drawn towards popular drama. The books published by The Intermediary had already immeasurably improved the calibre of literature available to the peasantry, and Tolstoy wanted to transform the crude repertoire of drama on offer to the masses. He began in the spring of 1886 with a comedy on the evils of alcoholism called
The First Distiller.
It was published by The Intermediary and then staged in June at the open-air theatre attached to a porcelain factory outside St Petersburg. Despite the rain, 3,000 workers made up an enthusiastic audience. Two years later it was banned by the theatrical censor for featuring imps and devils, and an act set in hell.
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The Powers of Darkness,
which is also drawn from peasant life, is a much more serious work. Based on a recent criminal case involving murder and adultery heard in the Tula court, it was completed in the autumn of 1886. The theatrical censor immediately banned it. This was a setback, as the script had already been typeset at three different printers, and Tolstoy had agreed that the play could be performed for the actress Maria Savina's benefit night—he himself was very keen to see it staged. Sonya fired off a letter to the government's head of censorship, Evgeny Feoktistkov, who expressly forbade its performance, but did now consent to its publication. Over 100,000 copies were printed in the first months of 1887, including an edition with The Intermediary which sold for three kopecks.
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Meanwhile, Chertkov started a sophisticated public relations operation. As anticipated, the reading he organised at the home of Countess Shuvalov, using his formidable society connections, soon set people talking. Not only was it reported positively in the press, but soon the Tsar's curiosity was aroused. A special reading was arranged for him in the Winter Palace on 27 January, which was attended by the Empress, grand dukes and duchesses, and other members of the court. Alexander III declared that he liked the play very much, and ordered it to be staged by the Imperial Theatres. He was soon forced to back down, however, after being reprimanded by Pobedonostsev. The Chief Procurator had been horrified to learn of the Tsar's irresponsible attitude to the 'crude realism' and 'denigration of moral feeling' in this appalling play—he told the Tsar he had never seen anything like it.
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There was much worse to come.
The Kreutzer Sonata,
a worthy successor to
Anna Karenina
in terms of its association of carnal love with extreme violence, would be his most scandalous work yet. It owed its inspiration to several sources. First of all there was an anonymous female correspondent who wrote to complain to Tolstoy in February 1886 about the distressing situation of women in contemporary society, and their debasement by men.
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Then there was the acquaintance who told a story about once sitting in a train carriage opposite a man who confessed that he had been unfaithful to his wife. And there was a direct musical stimulus: on several occasions in 1887 Tolstoy's son Sergey, a fine pianist, accompanied Lev and Misha's violin teacher Yuly Lyasotta in performances of Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, the Kreutzer Sonata, both in Moscow and at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy certainly knew Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata very well, and it was one of relatively few opuses to feature on the list of his favourite musical works later compiled by Sergey.
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It is the first of the sonata's three movements which has the greatest parallel with the story. The frenzied dialogue between violin and piano in its central
presto
section performed by Pozdnyshev's wife and her male violinist partner suggests to Pozdnyshev a dialogue of a different kind, which provokes him to fits of jealousy he can eventually no longer control.

On one of the occasions when the sonata was performed at the Tolstoys' home, the painter Repin was present, and Tolstoy even toyed with the idea of his friend accompanying his story with a painting.
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Tolstoy would have certainly discussed his ideas for the story with Repin, for he found himself posing for another portrait in the summer of 1887 during the painter's stay at Yasnaya Polyana. They had been acquainted for seven years by this point, but Repin had bided his time, clearly wanting to get to know Tolstoy better before fixing him on canvas. The portrait, which depicts him sitting calmly in a chair with a book in his hand, dressed in black, seemed to many to be reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet.

Another oblique source for
The Kreutzer Sonata
were certain events in Tolstoy's own family life which touched a raw nerve. In the autumn of 1887 his second eldest son Ilya proposed to his sweetheart Sofya Filosofova. Tolstoy was a concerned father, as the couple did not have very good prospects and were both very young: Ilya was twenty-one, Sofya was twenty. Ilya had failed to graduate from his lycée, so was ineligible for university, and he had returned from spending two years in the army without any plans for earning his living. The Tolstoys were friends with his fiancée's family, but they were well aware she was no better off: her father worked at the Moscow art school where Tanya had trained. Tolstoy wrote Ilya several letters entreating him to consider carefully the step he was about to take, but his son's heart was set. There were further reasons why Tolstoy should have marital relations at the forefront of his mind at this time. In September 1887 he and Sonya celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and his wife was pregnant again. Their son Ivan (Vanechka) was born on 31 March 1888, a month after Ilya's marriage. On Christmas Eve of that year their first grandchild Anna was born.

Apart from the Tolstoys' eldest child Sergey (who had left Moscow University and was now working for the Tula peasant bank), only Ilya lived away from home at this time.
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In the spring of 1889 Tolstoy went to visit him and his family, and was appalled to find coachmen, carriages, horses and other trappings of a comfortable lifestyle which he felt they should abjure. Ilya was not the only one of his sons with whom Tolstoy seriously fell out during these years.
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His third eldest son Lev, then in his last year of school, constantly argued with him. Tolstoy also seriously risked falling out with his daughter Masha, whom his follower Pavel Biryukov proposed to at the end of 1888. Sonya was not prepared for her daughter to marry a 'Tolstoyan', even if he was of noble background, and she blocked it. Biryukov went away to lick his wounds but reappeared in Tolstoy's life in 1891 after sailing to Japan with the future Nicholas II on his nine-month 'grand tour'.
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Masha accepted her lot meekly. Since she was Tolstoy's favourite daughter, whom he relied upon for assistance and moral support, he was secretly glad, and he himself would later thwart Masha's romantic dreams on more than one occasion in a selfish attempt to keep her near him. Tolstoy had little to do with his youngest children Andrey, Misha and Alexandra, eleven, nine and four respectively, who barely saw their father, let alone baby Vanechka. Unlike the elder children, whom he had personally taught, the youngest came under the care of tutors and governesses, and were essentially brought up by Sonya.

Ilya's marriage, and the births of his son and granddaughter in quick succession, had a profound effect on Tolstoy, particularly the birth of Vanechka, which had been very difficult for Sonya. She was forty-three, he was fifty-nine, and he felt ashamed that while he had successfully been able to fight the temptation to drink wine and eat meat, he had been unable to master his physical desire for his wife, particularly knowing how reluctant she was to become pregnant again. He despised himself for his weakness, and ended up venting his self-loathing in his fiction, which Sonya perceived as barbs personally directed at her. Having exalted the sanctity of marriage in
What I Believe
a few years earlier, Tolstoy now regarded it as an institution to be roundly condemned. He had always taken violent exception to the idea of marriage without children, but now even procreation could not redeem its sinfulness. Not for the first time in his life the mercurial writer had changed his tune. Well might Sonya find her husband's sudden advocacy of chastity, even within marriage, hypocritical and hard to take. According to her first Russian biographer, she became pregnant yet again in 1890, and was relieved to miscarry.
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