Leo Tolstoy

He recovered, but the doctors advised against staying in the damp and cold climate of mainland Russia. In late August the Tolstoys left for the town of Gaspra in the Crimean peninsula. Tolstoy there met with both Chekhov, who was living nearby in Yalta because of his worsening tuberculosis, and Maxim Gorky, the young revolutionary writer who had been exiled to the outer regions of Russia. Tolstoy took an interest in Gorky, eager to see in him a genius who had emerged from the Russian soil. Tolstoy’s infatuation with his younger colleague proved to be short-lived and their ways parted irretrievably. In the autumn of 1901, however, the three most famous living Russian authors enjoyed their conversations and the chance to spend time together.

Chekhov and Tolstoy in Gaspra, c. 1901.

Gorky wrote in his memoirs that during their first meeting Tolstoy had called him the ‘real man from the people’. He used the word muzhik, literally meaning a peasant, which was technically wrong. Like Chekhov, Gorky came from a family of tradesmen, but in his past he had led the life of a vagabond and enjoyed presenting himself as a social pariah. At the same time both Chekhov and Gorky shared a reverence for high culture that allowed them to overcome the limitations of their origins. Gorky, whom Tolstoy accused of being ‘too bookish’,¹⁵ hated both his petit bourgeois background and the peasant culture to which his family was culturally close. He wrote later to Romain Rolland that he ‘owed the best in him to books’.¹⁶ Neither of the younger writers could sympathize with Tolstoy’s desire to throw away the shackles of his elitist upbringing and imbibe the culture of the uneducated masses.

This literary idyll was arguably the last respite in Tolstoy’s life. Shortly after the New Year he fell ill with pneumonia. On 27 January 1902 Chekhov wrote to his wife Olga Knipper-Chekhov, the famous actress of the Moscow Art Theatre, that news of Tolstoy’s death would most likely reach her earlier than the letter he was writing. The next day Tolstoy’s children and their spouses started arriving to bid farewell. Speaking to his sons, Leo said that he would die with the same faith with which he had lived for the last 25 years. He instructed them to ask him before his death, ‘whether this faith was just’,¹⁷ and that he would ‘nod in agreement’ to let them know that this was of help to him in his last moments.

Against all expectations, Tolstoy’s innate strength prevailed. A couple of months later he was again in bed on the verge of dying from typhus. Once again he recovered, but the illnesses had taken their toll, as Sofia recorded in her diary with a characteristic mixture of love and irritation: ‘Poor thing, I can’t look at him, this world celebrity, and in real life a thin, pathetic old man. And he keeps working writing his address to the workers’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 69). Even after thirteen births and three miscarriages, she was still a strong middle-aged woman. In the interval between her husband’s two illnesses she managed to travel to Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow, taking in a visit to the opera and a private concert where Taneyev was playing. It was clear, at any rate, that the Crimea was not benefiting Tolstoy’s health. In the summer of 1902 the couple headed home.

Tolstoy sick in Gaspra, with Sofia, c. 1902.

‘How difficult are these transitions from dying to recovering,’ Tolstoy said to Elizaveta Obolenskaya. ‘I prepared myself for death so well, it was so calm and now I have again to think how to live.’¹⁸ Tolstoy felt that he had lived his life to the end, but then was granted extra time. On his apparent deathbed in Gaspra he had prolonged conversations with his children and tried to gear his message to each of them. Likewise, he now set out to address his last words to different groups of the Russian population: the working people, the government, the clergy, the military and so on. He started this cycle with a letter to the emperor, whom he addressed as ‘Dear Brother’ and whom he urged to abolish private ownership of land.

The people who were close to him were departing. In 1903 Tolstoy wrote two farewell letters to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘the Granny’. They both knew they would never be able to see each other again. A devout Orthodox Christian, she regarded her cousin’s views as heretical. Their friendly relations continued, but both felt the barrier separating them. Leo made an effort to break it: