Tolstoy

21. Does your wife beat you or not? Do you beat her or not?

22. How much did you weigh when you were ten years old?

23. Do you consume hot drinks? yes or no?⁴

It is unlikely that Tolstoy ever read The Alarm Clock, where this irreverent skit appeared, but he would develop a great admiration for the short stories Chekhov wrote for literary journals later on in his career. If Chekhov paid scant attention to ‘About the Census in Moscow’ for his part, he nevertheless regarded Tolstoy as Russia’s greatest living artist, and would also succumb for a while to his hypnotic powers of rational argument.

Tolstoy failed in his mission to induce Muscovites to show brotherly love to the poor, as his appeal only resulted in him receiving requests for financial help, and misunderstanding on the part of the press, but his article nevertheless won him an early follower. Indeed, the article’s impact on the painter Nikolay Ge was so tumultuous that he left his remote farmhouse in the Ukraine and got on a train to Moscow so that he could come and embrace the ‘great man’ who had written it. Like Tolstoy, Ge (a descendant of a French émigré called Gay) had become preoccupied with religious and moral questions in the 1870s and had come to the same conclusions: art should not be practised for commercial gain, while engaging in physical labour was the path to saving one’s soul. In early March 1882 Ge turned up at Tolstoy’s front door in Moscow, and the discovery of their shared beliefs led to the blossoming of a close friendship.⁵

Ge was lucky to find Tolstoy at home. Several times that spring Sonya was left to fend on her own while her husband retreated to Yasnaya Polyana to recuperate from the trauma of living in Moscow, which he condemned as a ‘foul sewer’.⁶ For the first time, however, Sonya found herself almost wishing Tolstoy would stay at Yasnaya Polyana.⁷ She had her hands full with the family (two of their eight children were under five in 1882), but she was also beginning to take her first steps into Moscow society. As Countess Tolstoy she had an entrée into all the best drawing rooms, and as the wife of the famous novelist she was now also a celebrity in her own right, and she found it rather intoxicating being the centre of attention for once. She had missed out on going to balls and soirées in her youth, but now she prepared to live vicariously through their daughter Tanya, who was about to turn eighteen, and as keen to dress up and go out as she was. Sonya was only thirty-eight in 1882, and still very attractive. Tolstoy, by contrast, desired only to simplify his life now, and wanted nothing to do with the conventions of polite society. Instead he gravitated towards peasant sectarians like Vasily Syutayev and ascetics like the ‘Moscow Socrates’ Nikolay Fyodorov, the eccentric philosopher-librarian of the Rumyantsev Library who deplored all material possessions (even refusing a salary), and slept on bare planks covered only by his threadbare overcoat.

Vasily Syutayev came to visit Tolstoy after the census, and his arrival caused a great stir in Moscow. The tiny sect that he had established in Tver was the subject of a recently published article in the new journal Russian Thought, and such was Syutayev’s popularity that one art shop in Moscow even stocked copies of his photograph for purchase.⁸ Tolstoy also encouraged his new friend Ilya Repin to come and paint Syutayev’s portrait in his study. Family friends who came to visit Sonya were so curious about the peasant prophet that they abandoned the drawing room in order to go to Tolstoy’s study and hear what he had to say. His sister Masha was particularly piqued to have her conversation with Syutayev interrupted, and hoped he would be able to go and have a cup of tea with her one evening so they could continue their discussion.⁹ Syutayev’s visit to Moscow was cut short, however, when word of his presence in the city reached Prince Dolgorukov, the city’s governor general, who swiftly despatched one of his gendarmes to arrest him and send him back to Tver (where the local clergy had already taken him to court for refusing to christen his son). Tolstoy refused to speak to the young gendarme, and slammed the door in his face, prompting Dolgorukov to send round one of his officials, Vladimir Istomin, who was a family friend. Tolstoy’s brusque response to Istomin’s invitation to come and explain himself to Prince Dolgorukov was that the governor general could perfectly well come and see him himself if he wanted to talk to him. Syutayev and Tolstoy were henceforth prohibited from seeing each other.¹⁰