Tolstoy

Remarkably, Tolstoy found time to write fiction during the hectic last period of his life, when he was also sometimes extremely unwell. Apart from his novel Resurrection, completed in 1899, he worked on a handful of superlative stories, and also composed a substantial treatise on the meaning of art. These works were written alongside all the religious articles and diatribes against the immoral practices of the tsarist regime, which remained as reactionary as it had been under Alexander III. But Tolstoy’s main writing project at the end of his life was the compilation of several exhaustive volumes of daily sayings and maxims from his favourite writers and philosophers. He was in need of their solace, as he was unhappy for much of the last fifteen years of his life. He still felt obligations to his family, but found it endlessly painful having to put up with the trappings of his once seigneurial lifestyle when he was longing to take to the road as a penniless and penitent Strannik. And as his friend Vladimir Chertkov assumed ever more influence over his affairs, Tolstoy’s relationship with his wife steadily deteriorated.

Sonya had grown up in fairly humble surroundings despite her parents’ flat being located in the Kremlin, so when she married Tolstoy she had adapted quickly to Yasnaya Polyana, but its spartan furnishings invariably took foreign visitors by surprise. The intrepid American traveller George Kennan, for example, who came to Yasnaya Polyana in June 1886 after travelling across Siberia, was clearly expecting Tolstoy’s study to be a bit grander:

The floor was bare; the furniture was old-fashioned in form, with two or three plain chairs, a deep sofa, or settle, upholstered with worn green morocco, and a small cheap table without a cover. There was a marble bust [of Tolstoy’s brother Nikolay] in a niche behind the settle, and the only pictures which the room contained were a small engraved portrait of dickens and another of Schopenhauer. It would be impossible to imagine anything plainer or simpler than the room and its contents. More evidences of wealth and luxury might be found in many a peasant’s cabin in Eastern Siberia.⁹

Anna Armfeldt had asked Kennan to smuggle out a manuscript copy of Confession to her daughter Natalya in the convict mine at Kara, and he had been so shocked by what he had seen of the Russian penal system in Siberia that it turned him into a vociferous opponent of the tsarist regime. Tolstoy was consequently extremely interested to hear what he had to say. Kennan’s book Siberia and the Exile System was banned from Russia along with its author as soon as it was published in 1891.

Sonya did not need to live in luxury, and she even did not mind the additional burden of having to prepare special dishes at mealtimes for her husband and the growing number of vegetarians at Yasnaya Polyana. Tanya and Masha became vegetarians like their father, and all the Tolstoyans, beginning with Chertkov, refused to eat meat. Then there were other loyal friends of Tolstoy who were vegetarians, like the painter Repin, whose colourful companion Natalya Nordman at one point promoted a diet of grass and hay.¹⁰ All of that the conventional Sonya could just about tolerate, but she did not warm to her husband’s followers. ‘These people who are adherents of Lev Nikolayevich’s teaching are all so unlikeable! Not one normal person,’ she exclaimed in her diary in August 1890.¹¹ In general, she viewed the Tolstoyans as the opposite of the svetskie (polite society) people from her own milieu, and by playing on the word svet, which means ‘light’ as well as ‘society’ and ‘world’, Sonya took to calling them tyomnye (dark). She noticed tyomnye Tolstoyans coming out of the woodwork as soon as illegal copies of The Gospel in Brief and Confession started circulating. Sonya made an exception initially for the highborn Chertkov, who had exquisite manners, and also the artist Nikolay Ge, who became a friend of the whole family (he died in 1894). She also tolerated Pavel Biryukov (‘Posha’), who was meek and intelligent, but she found the sectarians and peasants hard to deal with, and positively recoiled from the social misfits who seemed to be drawn to her husband like magnets, and became fanatical followers, having failed to carve conventionally successful careers for themselves. Sonya recorded in her diary the knock on the door that woke them all up at four in the morning one icy January day in 1895, for example: the visitor turned out to be a ‘bedraggled, flea-bitten, tyomny’ who was desperate to marry their daughter Tanya.¹²