“No,” I said. “And you?”
“In Moscow, I have a marvelous cat.”
• • •
“There are no cats at the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana,” begins Amy Mandelker’s well-known study, Framing Anna Karenina:
Curled, or rather, coiled in the sunny patches in the Tolstoy house, protecting it from pestilential infestations, instead of the expected feline emblems of domesticity . . . [are] snakes . . . The ancestors of these ophibian house pets were adopted by Tolstoy’s ailurophobic wife, Sofia Andreyevna [Sonya], to rid the house of rodents.
I was contemplating these lines on the second morning of talks, when I counted a total of four cats actually inside the conference room. That said, in fairness to Amy Mandelker, you couldn’t accuse Yasnaya Polyana of a shortage of snakes. At breakfast, one historian had described his experience researching the marginalia in Tolstoy’s editions of Kant: he had seen a snake right there in the archive.
“Were there at least any good marginalia?” someone asked.
“No. He didn’t write anything in the margins at all,” the historian said. He paused, before adding triumphantly: “But the books fell open to certain pages!”
“Oh?”
“Yes! Clearly, those were Tolstoy’s favorite pages!”
The morning panel was devoted to comparisons of Tolstoy and Rousseau. I tried to pay attention, but I couldn’t stop thinking about snakes. Perhaps Tolstoy had been killed by some kind of venom?
“The French critic Roland Barthes has said that the least productive subject in literary criticism is the dialogue between authors,” began the second speaker. “Nonetheless, today I am going to talk about Tolstoy and Rousseau.”
I remembered a Sherlock Holmes story in which an heiress in Surrey is found in the throes of a fatal conniption, gasping, “It was the band! The speckled band!” Dr. Watson assumes that she was killed by a band of Gypsies who were camping on the property, and who wore polka-dotted kerchiefs. But Watson is wrong. The heiress’s words actually referred to the rare spotted Indian adder introduced into her bedroom through a ventilation shaft by her wicked stepfather.
The heiress’s dying words, “the speckled band,” represent one of the early instances of the “clue” in detective fiction. Often, a clue is a signifier with multiple significations: a band of Gypsies, a handkerchief, an adder. But if the “speckled band” is a clue, I wondered drowsily, what is the snake? There was a loud noise and I jerked upright. The Tolstoy scholars were applauding. The second speaker had finished her talk and was pushing the microphone along the conference table to her neighbor.
“The most important element of nature, for both Tolstoy and Rousseau, was—air.”
I walked along the birch-lined alleys of Yasnaya Polyana, looking for clues. Snakes were swimming in the pond, making a rippling pattern. Everything here was a museum. The snakes are the genetic snake museum. The flies buzz across generations; I know they know, but they won’t tell me. I walked along the winding path to Tolstoy’s grave: a grassy lump, resembling a Christmas log. I stared at it for three minutes. I thought I saw it move. Later, near Tolstoy’s apiary, I sat on a bench, not Tolstoy’s favorite, and looked in the garbage can. It was full of cigarette butts and cucumber peels.
On a tree stump in these very woods in 1909, Tolstoy signed a secret will. He left all his copyrights in the control of Chertkov and of his own youngest daughter, Sasha, a fervent Tolstoyan. This had long been Sonya’s worst fear—“You want to give all your rights to Chertkov and let your grandchildren starve to death!”—and she addressed it through a rigorous program of espionage and domestic sleuth-work. She once spent an entire afternoon lying in a ditch, watching the entrance to the estate with binoculars.
One afternoon in September 1910, Sonya marched into Tolstoy’s study with a child’s cap pistol and shot Chertkov’s picture, which she then tore into pieces and flushed down the toilet. When Tolstoy came into the room, she fired the pistol again, just to frighten him. Another day, Sonya shrieked, “I shall kill Chertkov! I’ll have him poisoned! It’s either him or me!”
On the afternoon of October 3, Tolstoy fell into a fit. His jaws moved spasmodically and he uttered mooing noises, interspersed with words from an article he was writing about socialism: “Faith . . . reason . . . religion . . . state.” He then flew into convulsions so violent that three grown men were unable to restrain him. After five convulsions, Tolstoy fell asleep. He woke up the next morning, seemingly recovered.
A few days later, Tolstoy received a letter from Chertkov and refused to let Sonya see it. Sonya flew into a rage and renewed her accusations about the secret will. “Not only does her behavior toward me fail to express her love,” Tolstoy wrote of Sonya, “but its evident object is to kill me.” Tolstoy fled to his study and tried to distract himself by reading The Brothers Karamazov: “Which of the two families, Karamazov or Tolstoy, was the more horrible?” he asked. In Tolstoy’s view, The Brothers Karamazov was “anti-artistic, superficial, attitudinizing, irrelevant to the great problems.”
At three in the morning on October 28, Tolstoy woke to the sound of Sonya rifling through his desk drawers. His heart began pounding wildly. It was the last straw. The sun had not yet risen when the great writer, gripping an electric flashlight, left Yasnaya Polyana for good. He was accompanied by his doctor, a Tolstoyan called Makovitsky. After a strenuous twenty-six-hour journey, the two arrived in Shamardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya was a nun. Tolstoy decided to spend the remainder of his life here, in a rented hut. But the very next day he was joined by Sasha who, together with Dr. Makovitsky, convinced the feverish writer that he really ought to run away to the Caucasus. The little party left on October 31, in a second-class train carriage, purchasing their tickets from station to station to avoid pursuit.
Tolstoy’s fever mounted. He shook with chills. By the time they reached Astapovo, he was too sick to travel. A sickroom was made up for him in the stationmaster’s house. Here Tolstoy suffered fever, delirium, convulsions, loss of consciousness, shooting head pains, ringing in the ears, delusions, difficulty breathing, hiccups, an irregular and elevated pulse, tormenting thirst, thickening of the tongue, disorientation, and memory loss.
During his last days, Tolstoy frequently announced that he had written something new, and wanted to give dictation. Then he would utter either nothing at all, or an inarticulate jumble of words. “Read to me what I have said,” he would order Sasha. “What did I write?” Once he became so angry that he began to wrestle with her, shouting, “Let me go; how dare you hold me! Let me go!”
Dr. Makovitsky’s diagnosis was catarrhic pneumonia.
Sonya arrived at Astapovo on November 2. She was not allowed to enter the stationmaster’s house and took up residence in a nearby train car. If Tolstoy recovered and tried to flee abroad, she decided, she would pay five thousand rubles to have him followed by a private detective.
Tolstoy’s condition worsened. He breathed with great difficulty, producing fearsome wheezing sounds. He forgot how to use his pocket watch. In a final period of lucidity on November 6, he said to his daughters, “I advise you to remember that there are many people in the world besides Lev Tolstoy.” He died of respiratory failure on November 7.
On the third day of the Tolstoy conference, a professor from Yale read a paper on tennis. In Anna Karenina, he began, Tolstoy represents lawn tennis in a very negative light. Anna and Vronsky swat futilely at the tiny ball, poised on the edge of a vast spiritual and moral abyss. When he wrote that scene, Tolstoy himself had never played tennis, which he only knew of as an English fad. At the age of sixty-eight, Tolstoy was given a tennis racket and taught the rules of the game. He became an instant tennis addict.