enormity of the evil is crushing me, driving me to despair, driving me to doubt everything. . . ."
How to get out of this dilemma? Fold his arms and whimper? Deceive himself playing cards or talking? No!
"I see one way: propaganda, spoken and written, but I am afraid this is nothing but vanity, conceit and possibly delusion. Another way would be to give help to people. But the infinite numbers of the destitute arc disheartening. It isn't like in the village where a little circle forms naturally. The only way I can see is to live honestly and always show one's good side to others."7
His own "good side" was shown increasingly seldom to his wife and children; he was keeping it for the poor, who alone could understand him. At home, he was a stranger. When she had recovered from her confinement, Sonya flung herself into the social season with a vengeance. Accompanied by Tanya, she went calling, shopping, to the theater and the concert. She even chose an "at-home" day, Thursday, to which all the smartest people came in droves. It was impossible for Tolstoy to avoid his wife's guests all the time, but he insisted upon appearing in his gray peasant's blouse, and categorically refused to dress up in city clothes. The very thought of putting on a jacket and stiff collar, knotting a tie, putting his feet into fine leather shoes, revolted him as a form of treason. He stood by his dress as he stood by his principles. "However," wrote his son Sergey, 'lie eventually accepted a compromise. He had a sort of black tunic, which he put on over a starched shirt and buttoned up to the throat. This black tunic was neither a blouse nor a jacket. lie wore it one winter, then went back to his usual blouse."8
Deep in his own social preoccupations, he was filled with eager anticipation by the announcement that the city administration was to make a census of the population, in January 1882. The project was being directed by civil servants, with the help of sociologists, students and other interested persons, and would last three days. Tolstoy decided to volunteer. He hoped to make use of this sally into the lower depths to devise a scheme for relieving the underprivileged. In all likelihood there was, mingled with his official and disinterested intentions, the artist's ever-present desire to document himself 011 a little-known fauna and put his sensitivity to the test. He would certainly get a closer look at human destitution during this survey than on his solitary walks in the Khitrovka district, where he could only go as far as people were willing to let him. lie obtained permission from Professor Yanzhul, the census director, to cover the district beyond Smolensky Market, which contained the grimmest slums, flophouses and dives in the entire city.
Tolstoy spent the days of January 23, 24 and 25 moving about in this skid row swarming with thieves, prostitutes, drunkards and starveling children. At the sight of the census-takers, they all tried to run away. The exits were blocked and the poor wretches were assured that no one was going to ask them for their papers.
"Terrified and frightening in their terror," wrote Tolstoy, "they clustered together by the reeking cesspool, listened to our explanations and did not believe a word we said. . . . Every dwelling was full, every bunk occupied. . . . All the women who were not dead drunk were lying with men. Many of those who had babies with them were wallowing on narrow bunks with total strangers. After this place a second, identical, then a third, tenth, twentieth and on forever, and everywhere the same suffocating stench, cramped quarters, mingling of the sexes. Men and women drunk to the point of idiocy, and on every face the same alarm, the same docility, the same guilt."
Swallowing his nausea, Tolstoy questioned this human debris, trying to find out what they lived on and how they had fallen so low. Their answers revealed a degree of stupidity, cowardice, bad luck, cunning and vice that left him speechless. No collection, no charitable bequest, no State relief would be enough to save these souls from the abyss. Such need could only be repaired by love, not money. Public opinion must be awakened, the eyes of the rich must be opened to the hell outside their doors, they must be forced to share their fortunes with those who had nothing. To gain support in the wealthier classes, Tolstoy published a poignant article entitled On the Moscow Census.
This appeal to Christian charity went unheeded. The voice of one writer, be he the author of War and Peace, could not shake the foundations of the established order. Tolstoy saw that he would have to content himself with a few disciples, rather than the hordes he had hoped to draw into the paths of righteousness. Quality would take the place of quantity. Welclass="underline" the worshipful Strakhov was still at his side, and this stammering sycophant had rcccntly been joined by Alexeyev, his sons' former tutor, who, after being arrested for his progressive ideas, had emigrated to Kansas with some other socialists to found an agricultural community and then returned to Russia disenchanted. He had abandoned Marxism in 1878 and had been seeking some religious foundation for his morality ever since. He was an excellent teacher, but after his quarrel with Sonya over Tolstoy's letter to Alexander III, he had left Yasnaya Polyana and settled with his family on the Samara estate. In his letters, Tolstoy poured out his heart to him as to a member of the same church.
He would have been pleased to number Ivanov, the scribe, among his followers; he had picked him up starving on the road to Kiev and employed him to copy his manuscripts for the last three years. But Ivanov, a mild little man with a pockmarkcd face and a goat's beard, had two obsessions—alcohol and vagabondage. One spring day he would get drunk and start off along the highroads, going nowhere in particular, "Russian-style," begging his food, writing a letter or giving a lesson in grammar to earn a few kopecks. lie returned with the autumn, repentant and tearful, and the Tolstoys took him in with open arms. In Moscow Tolstoy had found him a job as secretary of a district court judge, and arranged for his marriage to a seamstress. Within days, Ivanov abandoned the conjugal hearth. Some ragged urchins brought the count a note from the fugitive, beseeching him to settle his account with the owner of a Khitrovka flophouse, so that he could leave, lie had run through the money he had received from the judge and sold all his clothes. Tolstoy bailed him out of that predicament, but gave up any hope of elevating him to the ranks of the faithful.
He had better luck in his friendship with two remarkable meu he had met in Moscow: Fyodorov and Orlov. Old Fyodorov, librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum, was a learned, ascetic scholar, who lived in a bare cell, slept on a pile of newspapers, ate almost nothing and gave what little money he earned to the poor. Ilis extraordinary memory made him a "walking encyclopedia." He believed that scientists would soon be able to resurrect the dead in flesh and blood, and it was therefore the duty of the Christian community to preserve all that men left behind thcin after giving up the ghost. Whenever he saw Tolstoy he exhorted him, in a voice quivering with emotion, to spread the new- word of physical resurrection, and was offended when the author expressed doubts as to the future of his doctrine of "mystical and scientific immortality." Orlov was a professor at the Railways School, but there was no one like him for the interpretation of the Gospels. He worked himself into a state of collapse to support his nine children and, in spite of his poor health and slender resources, never complained of his lot.
These two fellow-thinkers paled, however, before a third, a certain Syutayev. Tolstoy had heard of him the previous July during his kumys treatment in Samara, from another patient named Prugavin, who wrote histories of Russian religious sects. According to Prugavin, Syutayev, a peasant, herdsman and stonecutter, raised in the faith of the Old Believers, was a man of supernatural goodness and wisdom. He was said to live in a village near Tver. Shortly after his arrival in Moscow in autumn 1881, Tolstoy had gone to sec an old friend of his, Bakunin, whose estate was five miles from the hamlet of Shevelino where Syuta-