Leo Tolstoy

Did Tolstoy understand or suspect that Sofia was close by as he was dying? Since his departure he had been thinking and inquiring about her, and expressing his love and pity for her. At the same time he wanted to avoid meeting her at all costs, at least during the first days of his illness when he was still hoping to recover and continue his journey. He had been on the brink of death many times and got used to it. Only on 4 November did he hesitantly say, ‘It seems I am dying. And, may be, not.’ Did he change his mind when the prospect of eternal separation became imminent? At one point in his last days, when he was already half-delirious, he said to his eldest daughter Tatiana: ‘So many things are falling on Sonya. We managed things badly.’ Not certain she had understood her father correctly, Tatiana asked him to repeat it and he distinctly said: ‘Sonya, on Sonya, so many things fall on her.’ ‘Do you want to see Sonya?’, she asked, ready to break the taboo against admitting her.⁷ He did not answer. There is also a recently publicized family legend that Tolstoy did once express the wish to see his wife, but there is no way to verify this.

We know that the decision not to tell Tolstoy about his wife’s arrival was taken by the people surrounding him, who wanted to protect the old man from excessive and possibly fatal emotions. They may have been right, but they did not give him a choice. Likewise, he was not told about the arrival of a monk from Optina Pustyn’ on a mission to try to convince him to reconcile with the Church. There is little doubt that Tolstoy’s answer would have been negative, but once again he was deprived of the possibility to decide for himself.

Sofia peeping in the window to see the dying Tolstoy, November 1910.

Tolstoy was subjected to intensive medical treatment. He had never believed in medicine, considering it, at best, useless for the sick and especially for the dying, but he believed it was helpful for those around the sick and dying because it afforded them an illusion of meaningful activity. Sometimes he objected to specific medicines and procedures, asking the doctors ‘not to jostle him’ and ‘not to bother him’ (Mak, IV, p. 426), but in general he was an obedient and obliging patient. There was one thing, though, that he resisted vehemently: morphine injections.

Apart from his aversion to all kinds of intoxication, Tolstoy had a more intimate and existential reason to object to any sedation with opiates. Throughout his life he had been thinking about death, preparing himself for this solemn moment and had often expressed his desire to experience this most important transition while fully conscious. He was denied that chance.

Dying proved to be difficult for him. His body was struggling against the inevitable. On the eve of his death he agreed to an injection only when he was convinced that he was going to be treated with camphor, not morphine. He called his son Sergei and, with growing difficulty, said: ‘Seriozha, Truth, love much, love all’ (Mak, IV, p. 430). Different memoirists recall this sentence in different ways, but its meaning was clear to everyone. At 11 p.m., when everyone except for the doctors on duty had gone to bed, Tolstoy said: ‘How hard it is to die, one should live a godly life.’ Half an hour later, believing his persistent hiccups were a danger to his heart, Dr Makovitsky suggested he take morphine. ‘I do not want parffin,’ Tolstoy replied, confusing the words ‘morphine’ and ‘parffin’ [paraffin]. Towards midnight, however, a dose of the drug was injected. Makovitsky observes that a quarter of an hour later a half-delirious Tolstoy muttered: ‘I am going somewhere, so that no one can bother (or find) [me], Leave me in peace . . . It is time to scarper. It is time to scarper’ (Mak, IV, pp. 430–31). These were his last words.

The meticulous Makovitsky put the words ‘or find’ in brackets to indicate that he might have misheard one word in the phrase ‘no one can bother me’. The Russian words nashol (‘find’) and meshal (‘bother’) do sound similar, but the significance of these alternatives is more or less irrelevant. Just as he had done eighty years before, when two caring grown-ups stood over his bed and watched while his arms were bound in swaddling, Tolstoy was protesting against suffocating control. But there was one difference this time. Now he had the chance to ‘scarper’. He used this chance the next morning, on 7 November, at 6.05 a.m.

Tolstoy on his deathbed.

References

1  An Ambitious Orphan

1 Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu, HI, 2009), p. 179.

2 P. V. Annenkov, Literaturnye Vospominania (Moscow, 1983), p. 522.

3 S. A. Tolstaya, ‘Tri biograficheskikh ocherka Tolstogo’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, LXIX (1961), p. 508.

4 L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v sta tomah (Moscow, 2002), II, pp. 393–4.