Having signed his name at the bottom of the page, he called for a horse and galloped off at full speed to post his vindictive qjistle in person from the Yasenki station. But when he got back to the house, his fever began to abate. Fearing he had gone a little far, he sent a servant to recover the letter in the mailbag, with a word of apology to the mail clerk.
The next day he wrote what he hoped was a milder letter to Alexandra, although in fact it was hardly less violent:
"Do stop talking about Christ, in order to avoid the inanity that is SO prevalent among ladies of the court, with their sermonizing and preaching and converting. Is it not laughable that ladies of the court such as you, or the Bludovs or the Tyutchevs, should feel called upon to preach Orthodoxy? 1 can understand that any woman should desire salvation, but then, if she is a true Christian, the first thing she will do will be to leave the court and society; she will go to matins, and fast, and do the best she can to save her soul. Why has the position of courtier become tantamount to a degree in theology? Nothing could be more absurd!"
At this point he could not forgo the pleasure of imagining himself a martyr again, falling beneath the blows of the false prophets. Although no one was threatening his life, he repeated the terms of his first letter with evident relish:
"They will be silent as long as they can, and then they will kill me. And you, talking to me about your Christ, arc helping them in their work. You and I have as little in common as Christ and the Pharisees. My body can perish, but the teachings of Christ will not perish."
This was the first time he had compared himself with Christ, and consigned his enemies to the status of Pharisees. He so wanted to suffer for the faith! The pain, the spilling blood, the wondering crowds . . . Ah, but it was sweet to imagine his torture, sitting in his warm study at Yasnaya Polyana with a shawl over his shoulders and woolen slippers on his feet.
Having settled Alexandra's hash, he turned to his wife. As always, after an outburst, he was full of guilty affection for her. lie wrote to her that he needed the country "to thaw out morally" ancl "recovcr [his] self-possession," that he was planning "poetical works," that he was playing solitaire and dreaming of his beloved helpmeet, but that he was crushed by his consciousncss of the evil that dominated the world. Sonya answered:
"I begin to think that when a happy man suddenly notices that life is dreadful and closes his eyes to everything good in life, that man is sick. You should undergo treatment. 1 say this without any ulterior motive, I am simply noting a fact. I am very sorry for you, and if you were to think over what I say with an open mind you might find a remedy for your troubles. . . . Have you only just discovered that there are starving, sick, miserable, wicked people in the world? Look again; there are also cheerful, healthy, happy and good people. May God help you! As for me, what can I do? . . . You don't need my love any more now. What do you need, then? If only I knew!"
This appeal moved Tolstoy to tears.
"Don't worry on my account," he wrote, "and above all, don't accuse yourself. ... I have forgotten why I was so unhappy. Maybe it's age, or poor health. But I have nothing to complain about. I learned a
great deal from life in Moscow. It showed me the path to follow if I want to continue my work, and it has brought us closer together. . . .
"I cannot live apart from you. Your presence is absolutely necessary to me. . . . You say, 'I love you, but you don't need my love any more.' On the contrary, that is all I do need. And nothing can revive me like your letters. A liver ailment is one thing, the life of the soul another. I had a desperate need of solitude; it has refreshed me; and your love gives me the greatest joy in the world."
Sonya had to stay in the city because of the children's studies, so he made several quick trips to Moscow that spring to keep in touch with his family. Between trains, he visited picture galleries, chatted with writers and journalists and supervised the publication of Confession in Russian Thought. But by order of the censorship committee, the police confiscated the first issues of the review. However, handwritten and typed copies of the book circulated secretly, and it was later published in Geneva.
The violence with which the author denounced his own errors, criticized the Christian religion and proclaimed the need for a new rule of life provoked moral crises among his readers. Strangers wrote to insult him; others to congratulate him or ask him for advice. Gay, a well- known painter, was enthralled by the article On the Moscow Census, caught the first train to Moscow, rushed to Denezhny Street and found no one at home, paced back and forth outside the door for three hours, came back the next day and at last saw the master, fell into his arms and begged to be allowed to paint his portrait or that of his daughter. "Do my wife instead," said Tolstoy, and Gay, who was a gentleman, hid his disappointment and set to work forthwith. "I have been posing for a week now," Sonya wrote to her sister. "He is doing me with my mouth half-open, in a black velvet top with Alengon lace and my hair loose "
A few days were all that the painter needed to fall in love—not with the wife, but with the husband. He had admired Tolstoy as a writer before meeting him. Once admitted to his inner circle, he resolved to devote himself to the author for life. "I loved that man beyond words," he said to Stasov. "He revealed everything to me."12 Gay carried a New Testament in his pocket and was forever pulling it out to cite a passage; the fifty-year-old man with his gray beard, bald pate and blue eyes was transfigured. Tolstoy said he was "an elderly child, brimming over with affection for everything and everyone."13 Gay was a severe critic of his own work, however. He did not like his portrait of Sonya: "I painted a lady in a velvet dress who has forty thousand rubles in the bank," he said. Or, "I painted a woman of the world and Sofya Andreycvna is a
mother."14 He finally destroyed it. He made a second portrait of Sonya later, holding her youngest daughter in her arms, and another, very good one, of Tolstoy at his desk.
Early in the summer of 1882 the entire family returned to Yasnaya Polyana; as usual, the Kuzminskys moved into their special pavilion, other guests flocked in and the youngsters were hard at play around the swings, along the paths and on the croquet lawn. Sergey and Ilya were grown up now and had their own horses and guns and dogs and their own ideas, and talked with men's voices. Tolstoy, who had just given up hunting, looked on and gritted his teeth as his sons strode off to shoot snipe and hare. He found them heavy and rather oafish, as he himself had been at their age. There was no communion of thought between him and any of his family. His true sons were Syutayev, Alexeyev, Fyodorov, Strakhov. . . .
"The folly of the people I live with saddens me," he wrote to Alexeyev. "Often they fail to see how I can perceive their insanity so clearly when they are utterly lacking in the capacity to understand the error of their ways. And so there we stand, staring at each other and not understanding, astonished by each other and each holding the other to blame. Only, there arc untold hordes of them and I am alone. And they look happy and I look sad. . . ."15
His coldness toward his children could not fail to affect Sonya, espe cially as Ilya had just fallen ill. She was afraid he had typhus. The doctor prescribed frequent small doses of quinine. He lay in the drawing room shivering with fever. At her wit's end with won}', Sonya complained that Lyovochka was no help to her in nursing him and, in general, never lifted a finger in the house. He turned white with anger and shouted that his fondest desire was to run away from his family. "As long as I live I shall remember the sincerity of that cry which broke my heart," Sonya wrote on the evening of August 26, 1882. "I yearn for death with all my strength, for I cannot live without his love. I cannot prove to him how deeply I have loved him these twenty years, no less today than on the first day. My love weighs me down, but it only irritates him. He is filled with his Christian ideals of self-perfection. I am jealous of him."