Tolstoy (66 page)

Chertkov passed through Moscow that December. He was on his way to St Petersburg where he planned to campaign for Dmitry Khilkov's children to be returned to their parents, and he persuaded Tolstoy to have his photograph taken with him and the other Tolstoyans involved with The Intermediary. As well as Popov and Biryukov, there were two other young recruits: Ivan Tregubov, yet another priest's son who had graduated as an atheist from a seminary, and Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, the son of an engineer.
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Tolstoy's loyal daughters Tanya and Masha were put out by the covert way in which Chertkov had arranged this group portrait of five male Tolstoyans with their 'teacher', as they were used to being privy to their father's activities and were deeply involved in his work themselves. As for Sonya, it was one step too far, and as soon as she found out she marched off to the photographer's studio to collect the negatives and deface them. She then sat up until three in the morning trying to erase Tolstoy's face from the picture with one of her diamond earrings. It was fine for pupils at a school to have group photographs, she thought, but the idea of institutionalising Tolstoyanism was abhorrent to her. She felt it did not become her husband's status as a great writer to be pictured alongside such dubious people, and feared that thousands of people would want to buy copies of the photograph.
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Tolstoy acquiesced, but Chertkov later more than made up for the loss of this early group portrait by bringing an English professional photographer called Thomas Tapsell to Russia to help him take hundreds of images of the great man for posterity. Tolstoy was a vain man, and he acquiesced to that too.
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Tolstoy had been putting the finishing touches to a new story in the month that he met the Dukhobors. 'Master and Man' (the Russian title 'Kho-zyain i rabotnik' literally means 'The Master and the Worker') is about a rich landowner who redeems his selfish, avaricious ways in the middle of a snowstorm by sacrificing his life for that of his downtrodden peasant. The news that Tolstoy was going to publish this story, for nothing, in the expensive Petersburg journal
Northern Messenger
(its annual subscription was thirteen roubles) provoked another outburst from Sonya, who felt betrayed and jealous, not least because the editor was a young woman. She wanted the rights to new fiction by her husband, and in the first of many over-dramatic 'suicide attempts' she ran out into the snowy street late one January night in just her dressing gown and slippers.
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Peace was temporarily restored after Tolstoy brought her back into the house and agreed to her demands. Along with its appearance in
Northern Messenger,
his new story was published simultaneously as a supplement to the thirteenth volume of Sonya's edition of the collected works (10,000 copies sold for fifty kopecks in a matter of days), and also by The Intermediary (15,000 copies sold for less half that price in four days flat). A 'popular' edition which went on sale for three kopecks was then published and reprinted several times.
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Sonya's suicide attempts were really just desperate ploys to seek attention: she was exhausted by the stress of caring for six-year-old Vanechka, who was frequently sick, and by the struggle to keep her marriage going and raise their four youngest children on her own. In the event, petty concerns about money and personal loyalties were soon pushed to one side as the Tolstoys suffered a terrible bereavement just before the story appeared in print. Days before his seventh birthday their youngest son Vanechka died of scarlet fever. This time both parents were equally devastated, as the angelic, frail Vanechka had been universally adored by everyone in the family for his preternatural goodness and his supposed likeness to his father. Tolstoy, indeed, had already begun to nurture dreams of Vanechka carrying on his work after his death. His sister Masha, who had been visiting Moscow from her convent, prayed constantly over Vanechka in his last few hours, then helped comb his long, blond hair and dress him in a white shirt after he passed away. Numb with grief, Sonya wrote to tell her sister Tanya how she had placed a small icon on Vanechka's chest, and lit the traditional candle by his head. For the next three days the nursery filled with flowers, and then came another sleigh-ride north of the city to the graveyard of the Church of St Nicholas at Pokrovskoye, to bury Vanechka next to his brother Alyosha.
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'Mama is grief-stricken,' wrote Masha to a friend. 'Her whole life was in him, she gave him all her love. Papa is the only one who can help her, he's the only one who can do that. But he is suffering terribly himself, and keeps crying all the time.' For Tolstoy, indeed, this death was on a level with that of his brother Nikolay.
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The death of Vanechka was a major turning point for both his parents. Grieving for Vanechka brought them together, and Tolstoy thought about taking Sonya that summer to Germany for a rest (she had never been abroad, and had a longing to hear Wagner's
Ring
cycle at Bayreuth), but that plan had to be shelved when it became clear that they would probably not be allowed to return to Russia.
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Sonya stopped writing in her diary for over a year, and never really recovered. Tolstoy started making notes in his diary about how he wanted his own death to be handled, which would ideally lead to him being buried in the most humble cemetery possible, with no flowers, preferably no priest, and definitely no obituaries.
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He also employed a classic displacement technique to deal with his grief: he learned to ride a bicycle.

The British-made 'safety' bicycle, which was the first to replace the penny-farthing and become commercially successful, was a newfangled form of transport just coming into vogue in Russia. Tolstoy equipped himself with a 'Rover' (a popular model first developed in Coventry in 1885 by the inventor of the modern bicycle John Starley) and went off to have lessons. These were
held in the Moscow Manège, the long classical building in front of the Kremlin used for parades, where he had once learned to fence. Tolstoy acquired a reputation for riding alone, apart from the other trainee cyclists, with an intense look of concentration on his face. Once he had demonstrated his proficiency to the police and acquired a licence, he was free to pedal round the city. The high-minded Evgeny Popov disapproved of his mentor indulging in such a frivolous activity, but Tolstoy saw cycling as a kind of 'innocent holy foolishness', and did not care what people thought of a sixty-six-year-old man on wheels.
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That summer Tolstoy took his bicycle to Yasnaya Polyana and exhausted himself by going on rides all the way to Tula and back.
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As with all his enthusiasms, cycling became an obsessive passion for a while, and Tolstoy even managed to persuade the pianist and composer Sergey Taneyev to take it up. Taneyev, then thirty-nine, was a family acquaintance who sometimes went ice-skating with Tolstoy.
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Apart from being rather portly, he was extremely short-sighted and slightly cross-eyed, and did not like going out at night without a chaperone for fear of stumbling, but he was very game. Taneyev was also very game about playing the piano for Sonya. It was in music rather than sport that Sonya sought consolation from her grief.

10. Tolstoy skating in the back garden of his Moscow house in 1898. Photograph taken by Sonya Tolstaya.

Since her sister was not coming to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1895, Sonya offered the wing to Taneyev for a token rent, and in June he arrived to spend a month, accompanied by his wrinkled old nanny Pelageya Vasilievna and his seventeen-year-old composition pupil Yury Pomerantsev.
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Taneyev filled the house with exquisite piano music during his stay, and unwittingly became an emotional crutch for Sonya while she mourned the loss of Vanechka. Music acted as a kind of tranquilliser for her. Tolstoy had been affectionate and caring that spring, but he soon became preoccupied again with his missionary activities. It was Chertkov he wanted to spend time with. They had been exchanging frequent and sometimes very long letters, but had been able to meet only rarely during the first decade of their friendship, and usually only when Chertkov was passing through Moscow on the way from his estate to St Petersburg or vice versa. In 1894 all that had changed when Tolstoy found a dacha near Yasnaya Polyana for Chertkov, his frail wife and five-year-old son Vladimir (also known as Dima, like his father). It meant Tolstoy and Chertkov could spend finally long summer days in uninterrupted conversation. The Chertkovs returned to spend their summers in the house in 1895 and in 1896, so it is not surprising that Sonya found Tolstoy's emotional absence hard to bear. Taneyev was a placid, unobtrusive sort of person, completely wrapped up in his music, but he provided a sympathetic ear to Sonya, who was clearly very lonely.

To begin with, Tolstoy did not mind - he and Taneyev played a lot of chess together, and he certainly enjoyed the composer's peerless performances of the classical repertoire of which he was so fond. Taneyev had been a pupil of Tchaikovsky and Nikolay Rubinstein, and in 1875, at the age ofjust nineteen, had been the first Moscow Conservatoire student to graduate with the Gold Medal in composition and performance. That year he had been the soloist in the premiere of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, and in 1878 replaced him as teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire (his many pupils would include Scriabin and Rachmaninov). Tolstoy even shared an enthusiasm for Esperanto with Taneyev, who was unusual in being one of Russia's first speakers of the language - he wrote songs with lyrics in Esperanto, as well his frankly rather unexciting diary entries. Tolstoy had nothing but praise for Esperanto's inventor Lazar Zamenhof and the book he published in 1887:
Lingvo inter-nada. Antaüparolo kaj plena lernolibro
(International Language. Foreword and Complete Textbook).

A native Russian speaker from Bialystok in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, Zamenhof published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful), a name which expressed his dream that Esperanto would bring peace and understanding between peoples all over the world. Tolstoy expressed his support for the language in a letter he wrote to some Esperanto enthusiasts in early 1894. He told them he had received Zamenhof's book soon after it was published, and claimed to have learned to read the language fluently in two hours. This gave the resourceful Tolstoyans the idea of using the journal
Esperantisto
as an ideological platform. In May 1895
Esperantisto
published translations of both Tolstoy's 1894 letter and his article 'On Reason in Religion'. The Russian government reacted by promptly banning any further imports of the journal from its editorial base in Nuremberg. By August
Esperantisto
was forced to close, since three-quarters of its 600 subscribers lived in Russia. Amongst them must have been Taneyev.
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A shared love of Esperanto was unfortunately not sufficient to prevent Tolstoy developing absurd feelings of jealousy towards the hapless Taneyev, despite the fact that the composer was a confirmed bachelor. Taneyev was clearly extremely fond of his young pupil 'Yusha' Pomerantsev, who studied harmony and counterpoint with him for several years, and was frequently by his side, but the composer's lifelong companion was his old nanny. As one former student later commented, Taneyev simultaneously experienced fear, respect and contempt towards 'ladies', their appearance at his home invariably throwing him off kilter and making him less 'straightforward and natural'.
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Taneyev's ecstatic comments about bicycling, moreover ('I think that even the experiences of newly-weds on their wedding night cannot compare with the sensations experienced by a bicyclist'), ought to have been enough to put Tolstoy's mind at rest.
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Some might even argue that Tolstoy should have been indulgent of his wife simply for sitting through the premiere of Taneyev's interminably long opera
The Oresteia
at the Mariinsky Theatre in October 1895 (which rapidly disappeared from the repertoire after he refused to cut it).

Taneyev was hardly a surrogate husband, more someone for Sonya to talk to, particularly about the day-to-day matters concerning life at Yasnaya Polyana which Tolstoy had washed his hands of years before. Tolstoy might have been magnanimous, even if he did think his wife was making a fool of herself by fawning on a man much younger than herself. After all, he was doing the same now that Chertkov had replaced her as the chief object of his affections and confidences. Later on, Sonya would actually accuse her husband of having a homosexual relationship with Chertkov.
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It is a charge that cannot be substantiated, although the tone of many of Tolstoy's letters to his younger friend just after he was deported to England is sometimes that of an infatuated adolescent, and his affection was at least reciprocated with an obsessive devotion on Chertkov's part.
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