Once again the benefits of the kumys evaporated in the superficial and agitated atmosphere of Yasnaya Polyana in the summer. Back with his family in July 1883, he began again to suffer from nothing and everything. He had refused to serve as marshal of the nobility for the Krapivna district, in order to avoid even the slightest temptation to collaborate with the authorities. One day, returning home after a visit to an old muzhik on his deathbed, he heard his son Sergey playing Brahms' "Hungarian Dances" 011 the piano. Startled, he hesitated for a moment, then flew into a red-hot rage: "It isn't that particular thing I hold against him," he said, "but how strange: by our side are wretched
t Alexis Alcxevcvich Bibikov; not to be confuscd with Alexander Nikolayevich Bibikov, Tolstoy's neighbor at Yasnaya Polyana.
souls lying ill and dying, and we don't even know they are there, we don't want to know it, we are playing joyful music!"1'1
Another day the guests suggested resuming the old game of "post- box," and he proposed this thorny question for their meditation: "Why must Ustyusha, Alyona, Peter, etc. [the servants} cook and prepare things, sweep, clear away and serve at table, and the gentlemen cat, gorge themselves, defecate and cat again?"
He made himself clearer in his next note, which also went into the "post-box":
"Today, July 7, thirteen chickens were killed in the two houses;* July 8, one sheep was delivered to one house, salt-meat to the other; July 10, 11 and 12, thirty pounds of roast beef were brought to the two houses, forty pounds of beef for soup, two hens, seven chickens and a seventy-pound lamb. . . ."
Another variation:
"Timetable of activities at Yasnaya Polyana: 10 to 11 a.m., coffee indoors; 11 to noon, tea on the croquet lawn; noon to 1 p.m., lunch; 1 to 2 p.m., tea on the croquct lawn; 2 to 3 p.m., study; 3 to 5 p.m., swimming; 5 to 7 p.m., dinner; 7 to 8 p.m., croquet and lxwting; 8 to 9 p.m., low tea; 9 to 10 p.m., high tea; 10 to 11 p.m., supper; and 11 p.m. to 10 a.m., sleep!"
The only work he could really enjoy was manual, so for several days he helped the peasants with the haying. His children brought him food in the fields, like a real muzhik. "He is so free and gay, he has come back to us again!" his daughter Tanya gratefully noted. But he told a guest, Rusanov, "I wish they would exile me or lock me up somewhere!" Once again, his eternal shame of his physical comfort, his yearning for some form of bodily suffering to crown and give substance to his mental anguish, his greedy envy of all who had the good fortune to be unfortunate.
On September 2, 1883 he learned that Ivan Turgenev, at the end of his strength, had died at Bougival on August 22. He was instantly sorry he had not answered his colleague's last letter, so mournful and so tender. To be sure, Turgenev's pretensions to lead him, Leo Tolstoy, back to the paths of literature were absurd, but his intentions had been good. I low death blots out all imperfections in the individual, and placcs him in a favorable light. Now that the author of Smoke was no more, Tolstoy was suddenly possessed of a consuming passion for him. He reread his complete works, sighing and weeping. "I think of Turgenev continually, I love him terribly, I pity him, I read him, I live with
* The main house at Yasnaya Polyana and the pavilion in which the KuzminsKn- family stayed.
him," he wrote to Sonya, who was in Moscow. "I have just finished his Enough! Read it! Magnificent!"
Could he recall that, some eighteen years before, he had abhorred the book for being "full of false suffering"?22
Turgcncv's body was brought back to Russia. Edmond About and Ernest Renan made speeches on the platform in the Paris railway station. In Moscow, the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature decided to organize an official ceremony in honor of the late, great author, and scheduled it for October 23, 1883. Tolstoy was approached to speak. What he had refused to do for Pushkin, he agreed to do for Turgenev. True, Dostoveysky had died in the meantime, so there was no rival speaker on the program. lie conscientiously prepared to inter under posthumous praise the man he had so often buried in sarcasm during his lifetime. He recalled their first meetings, their conversations, their disputes, and in his memory everything became noble, beautiful and serene. Sonya was very excited at the prospect of this glorious occasion: "All Moscow is already in an uproar," she wrote to Tanya. "They say there will be a huge crowd in the great hall of the University."28
The powers-that-bc thought so too, and took a very dim view of all this fuss and bother. Tolstoy had been under police surveillance for the past year. Spies reported that he had been to see the Molokhans in Samara, that he was inculcating false and dangerous notions about the equality of men into the muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana and had publicly proclaimed that the Orthodox Church had distorted the teachings of Christ. On September 28, 1883, having been called to jury duty at Krapivna, he refused to serve on the pretext that his religious beliefs would not allow him to take part in an act of punishment. Cost of this offense: two hundred rubles. A trifle, in comparison with the moral satisfaction he felt as he walked, head high, out of the courtroom. But on October 18 the minister of the interior, his homonym Count Dmitry Andrcyevich Tolstoy, submitted a paper to Alexander III on measures to be taken against the writer whose activities were in clanger of "undermining the people's confidence in justice and arousing the indignation of all true believers." The tsar had not replied when the head of the department of press affairs notified the minister of the interior that Tolstoy was to make a speech at the ccremony in honor of Turgenev. "Now," pursued this well-informed official, "Count Tolstoy is a madman; he is capable of anything; he may say all manner of outlandish tilings; and the scandal will not be a small one!" The minister of the interior immediately sent off a coded telegram to Prince Dolgorukov, governor general of Moscow, ordering all memorial speeches for Turgenev to be submitted for prior approval. Prince Dolgorukov sent for the president of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature and strongly "advised" him to postpone the ceremony, indefinitely. And so, because of Tolstoy, Turgenev was deprived of the homage his fellow citizens had wanted to pay him. 'iTie friendship of these two men had been decidedly star-crossed.
In Ivan Turgenev, Tolstoy had lost one steadfast and sincere admirer; but another, of a very different sort, was to emerge from the autumn mists that same year, 1883. The newcomer was named Vladimir Grigor- yevich Chertkov, and belonged to the St. Petersburg aristocracy. His father, a general and aide-de-camp to the tsar, had a huge fortune; his mother, nee Chcmishcv-Kuglikov, was an intimate friend of the empress. He himself, after graduating from the military acadcmy, had chosen to make his carcer in the army. Handsome, rich, elegant, impeccably educated, he could expect, thanks to his parents' connections, a brilliant future in uniform. Yet, as early as 1879, he contemplated resigning his commission to devote himself to social work. At his father's behest, he agreed to confine himself to applying for a year's leave of ab scnce and, after a long stay in England, he returned to his horse guards, albeit with heavy heart. Before, he had played cards, drunk and flirted with the girls, but he no longer derived the slightest pleasure from joining his comrades in their debauchery. His dream now was to retire to his family estate in order to live in closer union with the peasants. He had already read the works of Tolstoy. He felt there must be a communion of thought between them. He went to call on him in Moscow.