Tolstoy

In december 1913 the dispute over the rights to Tolstoy’s pre-1881 manuscripts was finally decided in Sonya’s favour and she was at last free to proceed with publishing and selling her final edition of the collected works. She also sold to the Moscow publisher Ivan Sytin all remaining copies from previous editions for 100,000 roubles, which meant she could give another handout to her sons, as well as keep some money by for her beloved daughter Tanya. She was also, at last, getting on much better with her other daughter, Sasha, who, following a further deterioration in her relations with Chertkov, had sold her house at Telyatinki in order to buy a small farmhouse near Yasnaya Polyana (which she called New Polyana).¹⁵ Sasha proposed using the proceeds of a three-volume edition of Tolstoy’s works edited by Chertkov to buy from the family the most westerly part of the estate, closest to the Yasnaya Polyana village, which she would then immediately give to the peasants. Sonya and her sons readily agreed, and received 400,000 roubles. The peasants also agreed to Tolstoy’s behest, namely that they would not sell or rent out their newly acquired land. From the total of 2,230 acres, 1,620 acres now belonged to the peasants. Sonya next sold what remained of the land to Sasha, so that it too could be handed over to the peasants, and then she bought out her sons’ shares of the Yasnaya Polyana house.¹⁶ Sonya now began to pass control of her publishing operation to Sasha, and took pleasure in celebrating her daughter’s thirtieth birthday in June 1914. The peaceful co-existence did not last long, however, as on 1 August Russia entered World War I. Misha was drafted into the army, Lev went to work for the Red Cross, and Sasha went to the front as a nurse. Bulgakov and twenty-six other conscientious objectors were arrested and spent thirteen months in the Tula jail (they were eventually exonerated when their case was heard at the Moscow military court in 1916).¹⁷

Sonya spent her last years essentially copying out the past and endeavouring to provide for her descendants, as she always had. In preparation for publication, she made copies of Tolstoy’s old diaries, and his letters to her, as well as various of his artistic works. She also carried on writing the story of her life, and showed visitors round the house (one summer’s day, eleven bicyclists from St Petersburg had turned up), but there were few joys. When her sons pressed her again for money, she wrote a new letter to the Tsar about selling Yasnaya Polyana, but there were still many members of the Russian government who balked at the idea of the home of that notorious heretic Tolstoy becoming part of the national heritage. In the end, Nicholas II awarded Sonya a 10,000-rouble annual state pension, but held firm on his refusal to buy Yasnaya Polyana.¹⁸ There were personal losses for Sonya to endure during her last years: the deaths of her sister-in-law Maria Nikolayevna, her son-in-law Mikhail Sukhotin and, most painfully of all, her son Andrey from pleurisy in February 1916. Lev accompanied his mother to Petrograd (as Petersburg became when the war began) on a packed train, and they arrived just before Andrey died. After she returned home, Sonya steadily lost interest in life; she took to sitting for hours in the old Voltaire chair that Tolstoy had particularly liked because it had been in his family since before he was born.

Where Sonya’s life was now empty and static, Chertkov’s was congested with activity. He was a man with a mission, and had become even busier after Tolstoy’s death. It had been Chertkov who was in control of the situation during his friend’s last days, and it was to him that people turned afterwards. There were interviews and lectures to give, and a mass of manuscripts to put into order and prepare for publication. Chertkov published his first book on Tolstoy’s last days in 1911, and that was followed in 1912 by a volume of Tolstoy’s diaries. Next came the editing of the three volumes of posthumous fiction, whose proceeds enabled Sasha to buy the Yasnaya Polyana farmland from her family to give to the peasants.¹⁹ But Chertkov’s main task now was to produce a canonical edition of Tolstoy’s complete collected works, which he knew would be an enormous project. He had been entrusted with all of Tolstoy’s late manuscripts, and in 1913 he brought them from storage in England and took them to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg for temporary safe-keeping.²⁰