Leo Tolstoy

Maria Tolstoy was two years younger than Lev. Throughout their lives the two youngest children had been especially close. After a disastrous marriage and a stormy separation, Maria lived abroad for several years with a Swedish viscount, Hector de Kleen, and had a daughter with him. Afterwards she deeply repented her illicit love and became fervently religious. In 1891 she entered a convent at Shamordino, near the famous monastery of Optina Pustyn’, which Tolstoy had once frequently visited.

In spite of their diverging beliefs, the siblings loved each other. In April 1907, telling her about his grief over the loss of his daughter and her namesake Maria, Lev wrote to his sister:

I often think about you with great tenderness, and in the last days, it is as if some voice keeps telling me about you, how I would wish, how it would be nice to see you, to know about you, have contact with you . . . I am your brother both in blood and in spirit, do not reject me. (CW, LXXVII, p. 77)

‘Dear friend Levochka, my dear brother in blood and spirit,’ Maria answered. ‘How touched I was by your letter. I wept reading it and am now writing touched to the depths of my heart’ (CW, LXXVII, p. 78).

Tolstoy arrived at Optina late in the evening of 28 October and stayed the night at the monastery inn. The next morning Chertkov’s assistant, Alexei Sergeenko, to whom Tolstoy had sent a telegram about his whereabouts from the railway station, brought distressing news from Yasnaya Polyana. Having heard about Leo’s escape, Sofia had run to drown herself in the pond, slipped on the bridge and fallen into the shallows. Carried home by Alexandra and Tolstoy’s secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, she had oscillated between an intention to repeat her suicide attempt and the urge to bring her fugitive husband home. Sofia kept saying that if she were to get him back, she would sleep on the floor in the doorway of his bedroom so as not to allow him to escape again.

Tolstoy dictated his last article against the death penalty to Sergeenko and walked around the grounds of the monastery, thinking about the possibility of remaining there. He longed for an environment that would allow him to ‘pack for transition’, as he had put it several years before. He hoped that the walls of Optina Pustyn’ might protect him from tactless curiosity, alien intrusions and the struggle with himself, but he was not contemplating the possibility of rejoining the Church. Later he told his sister that he would gladly obey the rules that applied to novices, if only he were to be allowed not to attend services and not cross himself.

This solution was impracticable. The authorities at the monastery could hardly accept an unrepentant heretic, excommunicated by the Synod, who was, on top of everything else, legally married. Tolstoy could not fail to envisage the problems he would face and decided against visiting the monastery’s elder. In the afternoon he left Optina for Shamordino. ‘Is it bad at home?’, asked Maria, seeing the state in which her brother had arrived. ‘It is terrible,’ Leo answered and started crying.⁵

At Shamordino he spent the last enjoyable evening of his life with his sister and her daughter Elizaveta Obolenskaya, whom he had always loved:

Mashenka made a very comforting and joyful impression on me . . . and so did dear Lizanka. They both understand my situation and sympathize with it. On the journey I kept thinking as I was travelling about a way out of my situation and hers, and could not think of any, but there surely will be one, whether we want it or not, and it won’t be the one we foresee. Yes, I should only think about not sinning. And what will be, will be. (Ds, p. 471)

By then he had all but decided to settle in Shamordino near his sister. Also that evening Alexandra arrived with fresh news and letters from the family. Sofia pleaded with him to come back or at least to allow her to see him, promising to renounce luxury, follow his way of life and reconcile with Chertkov. In the morning Tolstoy went to rent a hut and made an arrangement with a peasant widow, but then changed his mind, scared that Sofia would catch up with him.

In the afternoon the whole group sat over a map choosing a place to go: Bulgaria, the Crimea and the Caucasus were suggested. Tolstoy was hesitant about the direction, but adamant that he was not going to a Tolstoyan commune because he wanted to live in an ordinary peasant hut. Leadership was one of the things he had renounced; he imagined for himself a kitchen garden, like the one where Father Sergius or Fyodor Kuzmich had found their last abode. He went to bed without making up his mind, but in the night he panicked and once again woke up Makovitsky and Alexandra.