Leo Tolstoy

[Tolstoy] turned red and waved his hands saying: ‘Oh, let’s not talk about this! It is a horrible thing; it is so worthless that I am ashamed even to go out on the street.’ On that evening his face was thin, dark and severe. His seven-year-old son Vanya had died only a short time before; so after disavowing ‘Master and Man’ he began to talk about his son. ‘Yes, yes, he was a dear charming boy. But what does it mean that he is dead? There is no death. As long as we continue to love him, to live by him, he has not died.’

Sofia Tolstoy at the portrait of her late son Vanechka, 1895.

They went out into the snow. Tolstoy walked quickly, repeating abruptly, solemnly, harshly: ‘There is no death, there is no death.’⁸

Tolstoy hoped that the love that Vanechka had brought to the world and common grief over this loss would recreate peace and understanding within the family. He wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy about his astonishment at the ‘spiritual purity and particularly humility’ with which Sofia had accepted the greatest loss of her life:

She . . . only asks Him to teach her how to live without a being in which she had invested the whole power of her love; and so far she does not know how to do so . . . None of us has ever felt as close to each other as we do now, and I have never felt either in Sonya or in myself such a need for love and such an aversion towards all disunity and evil. I have never loved Sonya as much as I do now. And I feel good because of it. (Ls, II, p. 517)

His rigorous psychological analysis failed him here. The reconciliation achieved at the cost of a most terrible tragedy was short-lived. Leo was partially shielded by his philosophy, sense of mission and artistic genius. With none of these things to protect her, Sofia had to find refuges of her own. She had always passionately loved music and now found in it her only consolation. She would play the piano alone and with her husband and children, but her greatest joy came from performances by the famous pianist and composer Sergei Taneyev, Tchaikovsky’s favourite pupil. After Vanechka’s death, the Tolstoys invited Taneyev to spend the summer at Yasnaya Polyana. Like most Russian luminaries of the time, Taneyev admired Tolstoy and was happy to accept the invitation. Very soon members of the family could not fail to notice that Sofia’s love for music was gradually transferring itself to the musician.

None of the participants in this triangle envisaged even the remote possibility of adultery. Taneyev, who was twelve years younger than Sofia, lonely and, most importantly, gay, enjoyed the attention of the great writer and the tender care of his wife. Once he realized, belatedly, that he had involuntarily provoked a family rift, Taneyev gradually distanced himself from the Tolstoys. Sofia was certain of the innocence of her behaviour and believed it was impossible to control one’s inner feelings. Much later, she told her daughters that never in her life had she given so much as a handshake that she could not have given in the presence of her husband. Tolstoy was aware of this, but found Sofia’s ‘exclusive love’ for another man humiliating, especially as it began during the period of their shared grief. Once he confessed that he was close to killing himself because of jealousy. He could not stop trying to convince Sofia that in order to get rid of an evil feeling, one must first admit that it is evil. At some point he confessed that he was on the verge of suicide from jealousy, shame and humiliation, but even that could not convince Sofia to renounce what she considered to be the only and totally innocent source of joy in her life.

Portrait of Sergei Taneyev, 1890s.

In 1897, in the midst of this family crisis, Tolstoy finished his treatise What Is Art?, on which he had been working for the last ten years. Having addressed religion, philosophy, economy and politics, he now turned to a topic he knew intimately. Tolstoy challenged the identification of art with beauty prevalent in Romantic aesthetic thought. Instead, he claimed that art is a vehicle of human communication, a way of transmitting to others, and imbuing them with, the feelings of the author. While the artistic quality of a work depended on the sincerity and novelty of the emotions conveyed and clarity of their expression, its moral value was determined by the religious and ethical views of the author. Beethoven may have been a great musician, but the effect of his art on the souls of the Pozdnyshevs in The Kreutzer Sonata was detrimental and destructive.