Tolstoy had never felt more remote from Sonya. While she splashed about on the surface, he, or so he thought, was probing the lower depths. He listened to the jolly drawing-room gabble going on over his head, and wrote to an almost unknown correspondent, the young revolutionary Engelhardt:16 "You cannot imagine how alone I am, how my true self is scorned by everyone around me. ... I am guilt}', 1 live in sin, I deserve contempt because I do not practice what I preach, but I will say to you in reply, less to justify than to explain my weakness: look at my past life and look at my life now, and you will see that I am attempting to do what must be done; I have not achieved the thousandth part of it, true, not because 1 have not wanted to but because I did not know before. . . . Judge me if you like; I judge myself severely enough! But do not judge the path I have chosen. I know which is the
road that leads home and if T weave like a drunken man as I go down it that does not mean the road is the wrong one."
In order "to weave as little as possible" going down his road, he got up in mid-winter while it was still dark, to the cry of the whistles summoning their workers to the nearby factories, did a few calisthenics with his dumbl>ells, dressed himself in peasant clothes, went down to the courtyard to draw the water, drag the huge tub through the snow on a little sled and fill the water pitchers; he split wood for the stoves, cleaned his room and then, sitting in the entryway, pulled open a drawer under a bench, took out wax and brushes and waxed his boots, proudly reminding himself that he had twelve servants and was taking care of himself. Moreover, it was his opinion that such menial tasks put one in a proper frame of mind for lofty thought. Ilis mind bubbled and soared while his hands stayed earthbound, slaves to routine. He had become infatuated with Hebrew, which was to help him to a better understanding of the Gospels, and was taking lessons from Rabbi Minor. "Leo is learning the Hebraic language, to my intense regret," said Sonya. "He is wasting his energy on foolishness." And, "This is the end of his literary career and it is a shame, a great shame!"
She unconsciously knew that whenever he began to write a work of fiction, he drew closer to her. It was all this cloudy theology, this striving for a superhuman perfection, that separated tliein. She did not have what it took to be the wife of a saint. With objectivity and humility, she wrote to Tanya Kuzminskaya on January 30, 18S3:
"Leo is very calm. He's working, writing articles and only occasionally showing his aversion to town life, especially that of the aristocracy. It is painful for me, but I know he cannot do otherwise. lie is a man ahead of his time, he marchcs in front of the crowd and shows the way it must follow. And I am one of the crowd, I live with it and, with it, I sec the light in the men ahead of their time, like Leo, and I say yes, that is the light, but I cannot walk any faster than the crowd to which I am bound; I am held back by my environment, by my habits."
He, meanwhile, was writing in his diary:
"Again in Moscow, and again, for more than a month, enduring atrocious moral agonies, but not without progress. . . . What you have done will not be truly good until you are no longer there to spoil it. . . . One sows, the other reaps; you, Leo Nikolayevich, will not reap. . . . I used to think it unfair that I should not be allowed to see the fruit of my labor, now I realize that it is not unfair, it is good and reasonable. . . . Now it is clear: what you do out of love, without reaping any reward, is certainly the work of God."17
For the New Year, 1883:
"Property defended by force—a policeman armed with a pistol—is bad. Make yourself a spoon and cat with that spoon as long as no one else needs it. That is what is ccrtain. . . . We live, therefore we are dying. To live well means to die well. The New Year. I make a wish, for myself and for all, that we may die well."
Every minor illness, every death among his acquaintances, brought him back to the thought of his own end. The previous year he had been particularly distressed by the news that Ivan Turgenev was seriously ill in France. With his usual tact, he had hastened to inflict his compassion upon his unfortunate colleague: "The news of your illness has caused me much sorrow . . . especially when I was assured that it was serious. I realized how much I cared for you. I felt that I should be much grieved if you were to die before me."18
Touched by this letter, Turgenev immediately replied, saying that, according to his doctors, he was suffering from "angina pectoris with gout"—not, he believed, a dangerous disease. In fact, he had cancer of the bone marrow, which had momentarily subsided after the first warning signs. Between spoonfuls of medicine he still took an interest in literature. Much intrigued by Tolstoy's Confession, he asked him to send a lithographed copy; but after reading the book, so remote from his own convictions, he could not bring himself to enthuse to the author, and wrote to Grigorovich: "Confession is astonishing in its sincerity, truthfulness, persuasiveness; and yet it is built upon false premises and leads in the end to the most somber negation of all human life. ... It is a sort of nihilism. . . . This does not alter the fact that Tolstoy is, without doubt, the most remarkable man in Russia today."19
Turgenev's condition grew worse at the beginning of 1883. He was tortured by excruciating pains shooting through his back. Nothing helped—poultices, chloroform or morphine; he screamed in agony. He had become cadaverously thin, and entreated Mme. Viardot, who was nursing him devotedly, to heave him out the window. As soon as the warm weather came, he was carried—"the patriarch of the mollusks," as he said—to Bougival, to the villa "Lcs Frdnes." On June 27, summoning his last remaining strength, he penciled on a scrap of paper:
"My good and dear Leo Nikolayevich, I have not written to you for a long time because I was and still am, to tell the truth, on my deathbed. 1 cannot get well, it is useless even to think it. I write you chiefly in order to tell you how happy I am to have been your contemporary and to make one last, sincere appeal to you. My friend, return to literature! That gift came to you from the same source as all the rest. Oh, how happy I should be to think that this letter might have some influence upon you! I am clone for, the doctors don't even know what
name to give to my illness. Gouty stomach neuralgia! I can neither walk nor eat nor sleep. It bores me to talk about it. My friend, great writer of the Russian land, hear my prayer. Let me know you have received this scrap of paper, and allow me to embrace you once more, hard, very hard, you, your wife and all your family. I cannot go on, I am tired. . .
Tolstoy did not read this poignant letter until long afterward. When it reached Moscow he was in Samara for his kumys treatment. Before that, he had gone to Yasnaya Polyana where, finding the village half- destroyed by fire, he directed emergency relief operations. Decidedly, however, he had no desire to handle his affairs alone. On May 21, 1883 he signed a power of attorney authorizing Sonya to manage all his property. Then he set off, at peace. Three days later he was in the old wooden house among the Bashkirs. What a disappointment! The farm was being badly mismanaged, half the colts had died during the winter and the harvest would be worthless. Discouraged, Tolstoy decided to sell the stock and stud farm and farm out the land. But he could not bear to witness the "bargaining" between the steward and the prospective buyers.
On the other hand, he engaged in lengthy conversations with the Molokhan sectarians and his friends Alexeyev and Bibikov,! whom he liked less and less, and two militant socialists who had come to stay with them. These men had been involved in an important political trial; they bitterly defended the right to use violence and this infuriated Tolstoy, who did not agree. lie was relieved when they left. The treatment was prolonged, lie began to feel better. "Although I am ashamed and disgusted to think of my base body, I know the kumys will be good for me, principally because it will regulate the functioning of my stomach, the effect of which will be to improve my nerves and put me in a better frame of mind," he wrote to his wife.-0