Tolstoy

Altogether, 1904 was a fairly bleak year for Tolstoy. Although he had little tolerance for those who espoused the Orthodox faith, he was nonetheless greatly saddened to receive the news of the death of his old relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in March 1904. After their frosty meeting back in 1897 there had been little contact between them, but they were reconciled the year before she died at the age of eighty-seven. In his last letter, in which he addressed her as ‘dear, kind, old friend Alexandrine’, he thanked her for half a century’s friendship.¹⁵³ In July Chekhov lost his fight against tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, and in August, a couple of weeks after Tolstoy’s wayward son Andrey was posted to the front (it was already bad enough that he was serving in the army), his elder brother Sergey died of cancer. Sergey had led a secluded and quite unhappy life, disappointed by his four surviving children, and by his marriage to someone from such a different background, and he spent his last days in agony. Tolstoy went out to Pirogovo three times in the summer of 1904, and was instrumental in relaying his sister and sister-in-law’s wish that Sergey receive communion before he died. To their surprise he agreed, despite his well-known religious indifference.¹⁵⁴

13. Tolstoy photographed with his brother Sergey’s widow Maria Mikhailovna, the former gypsy singer in 1906

When Port Arthur finally fell to the Japanese in december 1904, Tolstoy became very despondent. Meanwhile, the 18,000-mile voyage halfway round the world of the imperial Baltic Fleet under Admiral Rozhdestvensky was dogged by incompetence. Soon after leaving St Petersburg in October, one inebriated captain opened fire on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea, mistaking them for Japanese torpedo boats, while another frigate in what came to be known as the ‘Russian mad-dog fleet’ was eventually discovered to be travelling up the Thames due to a navigation error. The day after the fleet finally arrived in the Pacific in May 1905, Japanese forces summarily destroyed it in the Battle of Tsushima. This was the final humiliating defeat which brought the war to a close.¹⁵⁵ Tolstoy followed all these events with horror from Yasnaya Polyana, and was aghast when there was further violence closer to home. The extent of Russia’s domestic problems meant that the war with Japan enjoyed no popular support, as expressed by the assassination in July 1904 of the Minister of Internal Affairs. Nicholas II’s halfhearted response to calls for reform led to the outbreak of revolution on the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 9 January 1905, when tsarist troops fired on an unarmed procession of workers bringing a petition to the Winter Palace. The public outcry was followed by mass strikes all over Russia and the assassination on 22 January of the governor general of Moscow, Grand duke Sergey Alexandrovich, who had received Sonya during the famine in 1892. Tolstoy was stunned, and confessed that the news had made him physically suffer.¹⁵⁶ Amongst the disturbances and uprisings which followed was a mutiny in June 1905 on the battleship Potemkin in Odessa. Perhaps regretting that he had not heeded Tolstoy’s brazen personal appeal back in 1902, Nicholas II was forced now to retreat from autocratic rule. In October he issued the historic manifesto which promised civil rights, the creation of a national legislative assembly (the ‘duma’), the abolition of censorship, religious tolerance and permission to found political parties. There was also a general amnesty.