Tolstoy

The death of Vanechka was a major turning point for both his parents. Grieving for Vanechka brought them together, and Tolstoy thought about taking Sonya that summer to Germany for a rest (she had never been abroad, and had a longing to hear Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth), but that plan had to be shelved when it became clear that they would probably not be allowed to return to Russia.³⁸ Sonya stopped writing in her diary for over a year, and never really recovered. Tolstoy started making notes in his diary about how he wanted his own death to be handled, which would ideally lead to him being buried in the most humble cemetery possible, with no flowers, preferably no priest, and definitely no obituaries.³⁹ He also employed a classic displacement technique to deal with his grief: he learned to ride a bicycle.

The British-made ‘safety’ bicycle, which was the first to replace the penny-farthing and become commercially successful, was a newfangled form of transport just coming into vogue in Russia. Tolstoy equipped himself with a ‘Rover’ (a popular model first developed in Coventry in 1885 by the inventor of the modern bicycle John Starley) and went off to have lessons. These were held in the Moscow Manège, the long classical building in front of the Kremlin used for parades, where he had once learned to fence. Tolstoy acquired a reputation for riding alone, apart from the other trainee cyclists, with an intense look of concentration on his face. Once he had demonstrated his proficiency to the police and acquired a licence, he was free to pedal round the city. The high-minded Evgeny Popov disapproved of his mentor indulging in such a frivolous activity, but Tolstoy saw cycling as a kind of ‘innocent holy foolishness’, and did not care what people thought of a sixty-six-year-old man on wheels.⁴⁰ That summer Tolstoy took his bicycle to Yasnaya Polyana and exhausted himself by going on rides all the way to Tula and back.⁴¹ As with all his enthusiasms, cycling became an obsessive passion for a while, and Tolstoy even managed to persuade the pianist and composer Sergey Taneyev to take it up. Taneyev, then thirty-nine, was a family acquaintance who sometimes went ice-skating with Tolstoy.⁴² Apart from being rather portly, he was extremely short-sighted and slightly cross-eyed, and did not like going out at night without a chaperone for fear of stumbling, but he was very game. Taneyev was also very game about playing the piano for Sonya. It was in music rather than sport that Sonya sought consolation from her grief.

10. Tolstoy skating in the back garden of his Moscow house in 1898, photograph taken by Sonya Tolstaya

Since her sister was not coming to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1895, Sonya offered the wing to Taneyev for a peppercorn rent, and in June he arrived to spend a month, accompanied by his wrinkled old nanny Pelageya Vasilievna and his seventeen-year-old composition pupil Yury Pomerantsev.⁴³ Taneyev filled the house with exquisite piano music during his stay, and unwittingly became an emotional crutch for Sonya while she mourned the loss of Vanechka. Music acted as a kind of tranquilliser for her. Tolstoy had been affectionate and caring that spring, but he soon became preoccupied again with his missionary activities. It was Chertkov he wanted to spend time with. They had been exchanging frequent and sometimes very long letters, but had been able to meet only rarely during the first decade of their friendship, and usually only when Chertkov was passing through Moscow on the way from his estate to St Petersburg or vice versa. In 1894 all that had changed when Tolstoy found a dacha near Yasnaya Polyana for Chertkov, his frail wife and five-year-old son Vladimir (also known as dima, like his father). It meant Tolstoy and Chertkov could spend finally long summer days in uninterrupted conversation. The Chertkovs returned to spend their summers in the house in 1895 and in 1896, so it is not surprising that Sonya found Tolstoy’s emotional absence hard to bear. Taneyev was a placid, unobtrusive sort of person, completely wrapped up in his music, but he provided a sympathetic ear to Sonya, who was clearly very lonely.