Leo Tolstoy

The difference of religious convictions not only cannot and should not prevent the loving unity of people, but cannot and should not arouse the desire to convert a person you love to your faith. I write about [this], because I only recently understood it, understood that any sincerely religious person . . . needs his own faith that corresponds to his mind, knowledge, experience, and mainly his heart, and he cannot leave this faith. For me to desire that you would believe like me or for you that I would believe like you is the same as desiring that I would say that it is hot, when I feel cold or that am cold when I am burning with heat . . . Since then, I stopped desiring to bring others to my faith and felt that I love people, whatever their faith is. (LNT & AAT, p. 520)

Alexandra could not accept this olive branch. She was sure that there can be no salvation outside of the Church and in her last letter wrote that she prayed that God would finally grant ‘the blessing of Holy Spirit’ (LNT & AAT, p. 523) to her wayward cousin. She died in March 1904 at the age of 86. In August 1904 Tolstoy visited his dying brother Sergei for the last time. A convinced atheist, Sergei suddenly expressed his desire to receive communion. To the relief of Sergei’s wife and their sister Maria, Leo fully supported this intention.

Both Alexandra and Sergei were his seniors and parting with them was to be expected. The most painful thing for Tolstoy was the loss of his daughter Maria (Masha), spiritually the closest to him among his children, the only one who refused to take her share when the estate was partitioned in 1892. ‘Masha greatly alarms me. I love her very, very much’ (Ds, p. 403), Tolstoy recorded in his diary on 23 November 1906. She died four days later with her father sitting at her deathbed. A month later, Tolstoy wrote:

I go on living and often recall Masha’s last minutes (I don’t like calling her Masha, that simple name is so unsuitable for the creature who left me). She sits here surrounded by pillows and I hold her dear, thin hand and feel life departing, feel her departing. These quarter hours are among the most important, significant time of my life. (Ds, p. 404)

Vanechka’s death eleven years earlier had brought the spouses together at least for a short while. This loss, however, only aggravated their growing alienation. Sofia did not want to conceal her belief that the hard physical work and vegetarianism imposed by her father had ruined Maria’s health and made her unable to have children.

The house was emptying out. The only one of Tolstoy’s offspring still living with her parents was their youngest daughter Alexandra. Highly intelligent and strong-willed, she was an ardent and rather rigid follower of Tolstoy’s ideas. She adored her father, but was well aware that she could never be as intimately close to him as the kind and understanding Maria. In his delirium when he lay dying, Tolstoy would ‘in a loud, joyous voice call out: “Masha, Masha!”’ (AT, II, p. 404).

The only way to cope with these losses was to keep writing. Tolstoy always tried to balance a moral message with artistic perfection. In The Forged Coupon, an unfinished story about the contagiousness of good and evil, the former clearly prevailed, but in Hadji Murat, his other literary preoccupation of 1904 and the last major piece of prose he managed to bring near to completion, the opposite seems to be the case. Tolstoy was ashamed of his attachment to this story, but could not rid himself of the urge to perfect the work. In 1903 he wrote in his diary that his other plans were ‘more important than the stupid Hadji Murat’ (Ds, p. 370), but later confessed to his biographer Pavel Biryukov that he was still editing it during a visit to his sister, who lived in a convent. As Biryukov recalls, ‘it was said in the manner of a schoolboy confessing to his friend that he had eaten a cake’ (CW, XXXV, p. 629).

Hadji Murat was one of the most powerful chieftains in the Northern Caucusus and fought against the Russians in the wars of the 1840s and ’50s. After quarrelling with Imam Shamil, the leader of the insurrection, he had deserted to the Russians but, finding out that they mistrusted him, tried to escape and was killed. The last part of this saga took place when Tolstoy was serving in the region. The character of Hadji Murat and his story had excited the young writer, who used to tell stories about him to his peasant pupils. Half a century later he brought his poetic imagination to bear on these old memories, supplementing them with new information from documents that had recently become available.