At first, Tolstoy was flattered to see that his philosophy had touched not only the "Dark Ones" of town and country—the ragged sectarians and disheveled nihilists—but also a man of the best society, a landowner and guards officcr. lie looked with friendly approval upon the tall thirty-year-old man with the receding hairline, aquiline nose and well- tailored uniform, who was telling him how he wished to leave the army. Master and disciple agreed that military servicc was incompatible with the doctrine of Christ. Then Tolstoy read his visitor passages from What I Believe, which he had just finished. "The realization that my period of moral isolation was over at last gave me such joy," Chertkov later said, "that, lost in my own thoughts, I paid no attention to the passages he was reading to me; I only came to my senses when, after reading the last lines of the work, he pronounced the author's name with peculiar emphasis: 'Leo Tolstoy."'
Then and there, with radiant vanity, Chertkov announced that he was his hosfs "co-thinker." He was certain that his fervor was as ncces-
sary to Tolstoy as Tolstoy's teachings were to him. The two men parted company affectionately.
A short time later, Chertkov resigned from the army. Tolstoy's first letter to him began with the words: "Very dear, very kind and very close to me Vladimir Grigoryevich ..." It was as though he were writing to his spiritual son. Sonya herself admitted that, for the first time, one of her husband's followers had some class and decent manners, and when he came back, she received him cordially. She soon observed, however, that this new type of disciple was more intransigent than his master on questions of doctrine. Chertkov had a narrow, systematizing mind, and was so attached to Tolstoy's ideas that he would not suffer him to depart one iota from them himself. On any and every matter, however trifling, he would respectfully call the master to order in the name of Tolstoyism. Instinctively, he sided with the thought against the thinker, with the work against the man. At first, the family was amused by his stern application of the rules. Then Sonya dirnly began to sense that a rival had crept under her roof and, uneasy and uncertain, she put up her guard.
On February 18, 1884 the police seized all the copies of What I Believe at the Kushncrcv printing-works. "I hope after this he will calm down and write nothing more in this vein!" Sonya wailed to her sister. Urged on by Chertkov, however, Tolstoy was working furiously away at his new essay, What Then Must We Do?
PART VI
This Loathsome Flesh...
1. The Temptation of Sainthood
On January 30, 1884 Countess Tolstoy and her eldest daughter, in full evening dress, attended the ball given by Prince Dolgorukov, governor general of Moscow—the man who, three months before, had decreed that the ceremonies in honor of Turgenev could not take place because Leo Tolstoy was to speak. "The governor general had a chair brought and sat next to me," the dazzled countess wrote to her husband, "and for one whole hour he talked to me as though he wished to show me a mark of special favor. . . .lie also paid thousands of compliments to Tanya." Sonya's letter, bubbling over with socialite vivacity, crossed one from Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, proudly announcing that he was making a pair of shoes for their old servant Agatha Mikhailovna, whose feast-day was on February 5.
Evcr>' evening he went to the isba of Arbuzov or Mitrofan, the village cobbler, and humbly drove pegs and punched holes with his awl under the half-amused, half-fearful eyes of the muzhiks. "How clean, how morally elegant everything is in their dirty, dark hole!" he said. And, "All it takes to give new life to the soul is to enter the dwelling of a workman!"1
Back in Moscow, he wanted to continue his apprenticeship and had a workshop set up next to his study. He bought tools and leather. A pensive, bashful cobbler with a thick black beard came to give him regular lessons. An oddly-shaped stove stood by the window against the bench, intended both to heat and ventilate the room. In spite of this device, a cloying odor of leather and tobacco assailed one in the doorway. The cobbler came at fixed hours and was admitted by a white- gloved, liveried lackey; walking on tiptoe, his head screwed down be tween his shoulders and his eyes darting off into the corners, he joined
the count in his gray blouse and sat down beside him on a stool. Work began: wax the thread, stitch, shape the quarters, nail on the sole, mount the heel. . . . Ilumpcd over his bench, Tolstoy grunted and cursed, trying to drive the wooden pegs into the soles.
"Let me do that, Leo Nikolayevich," the cobbler would say.
"No, no! You do your job and I'll do mine!" growled the pupil.2
Friends and admirers came to see the writer in action and were amazed at his perseverance in a trade at which, try as he like, he could never excel. He explained to the skeptics that no 011c had the right to profit from the labor of the poor without giving them as much in return. He made a pair of boots for his friend Sukhotin, who stood them up in his bookcase next to the first twelve volumes of Tolstoy's works, bearing the label "Volume XIII." And Fet, in exchange for a pair of shoes, gave the cobbler-author a certificate stating that they had been made "to order, by Count Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace."
The joys of bootmaking were soon augmented by the discovery of Chinese philosophy. He read Confucius and Lao-tzu and recognized his own ideas in oriental disguise. "One must make a circle of reading for oneself," he wrote, "Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Pascal, the Gospels. Everyone should do it." What would he have given to see his wife following him in this praiseworthy enterprise. But she refused to leave the flock. When he needed her, he had to look for her in the world of other people. Every time, he came back from the country with a renewed appetite for her. Even though, at forty, she was matronly and faded, she remained extremely desirable. After weeks of privation he could not contain himself, he took her, roughly, rapidly, to relieve himself and exorcise the evil spirit, and when it was over he went back to his philosophy, pacified.
Early in 1884 she found to her despair that she was pregnant for the twelfth time. This succession of pregnancies now humiliated her. She was no longer a woman, she thought, she was a brood marc, a vase, good only to receive the master's seed and germinate his progeny. "It's too bad," she wrote to her sister Tanya on February 5, 1884, "that I won't be confined before we go to Yasnaya Polyana. I should so like to get this ghastly thing over with in solitude." And on March 22, "This year I am going to Yasnaya Polyana to be tormented instead of happy. The best season—swimming, haying, long days, wonderful moonlit nights—I'll be spending in bed in the company of a squawling baby. I'll take a wetnurse." She complained to Tolstoy, and he was incensed at her for daring to disparage the holy state of motherhood. "Her nerves are badly strained," he noted. "Her pregnancy is an obsession with her. It is a great, a very great sin. A shame!"3
The truth is that he could not have approved her without condemning himself to continence, since for him conception was the sole justification of physical relations between couples. With a woman who rc fused to have children the act of love became a lewd farce. No concern for mere beauty could prevail against divine law. Nor any fatigue. So long as the male could procreate, the female must lend him her womb. And Tolstoy was full of sap, eager to spread and multiply. How admirable that religion and nature agreed on this point.