lie, at any rate, did not intend to be the victim of woman's wiles, the victim of a bed. lie might occasionally give in to sensuality, but he immediately caught himself up again. He spent the entire summer at Yasnaya Polyana, working in the fields and writing stories for the Intermediary,! revising his essay What Then Must We Do? and working 011 a long story, The Death of Ivan Ilich, which was moving ahead by fits and starts, depending on his mood. Chcrtkov and Biryukov came to see him, and it seemed to him that they had a most beneficial in-
t In particular, Three Old Men and Ivan the Fool.
fluence on his daughters. In October 1885, having stayed on alone, he received a letter from the eldest, Tanya, that was so reasonable he could hardly believe his eyes. In spite of Sonya, the girl was timidly beginning to turn toward her father's ideas.
"For the first time you acknowledge that your view of the world has changed," he replied on October 18. "My only hope, the only joy I dare look forward to, is to find brothers and sisters among my family instead of what I have seen in it thus far: remoteness, systematic disparagement and contempt, not for me but for the truth—unless it is a fear of something, I don't know what. And what a great shame it is! Death will come tomorrow. Must 1 take away with me this vague sense of misunderstanding between myself and mine, worse than between strangers? I am afraid for you, because of your weakness, your natural tendency to indifference, and I would like to help you."
In Moscow, however, the smiles of his two elder daughters were not enough to reconcile him to his family's way of life. He sus))ected Sonya of sabotaging his theories behind his back, in her relations with the children. With remarkable candor, she had written what she thought of him the previous year. He had kept the letter, and ever)' time he read it he received a chilling impression of narrow-mindedness and defeat. "Yes, you and I have been following different paths since childhood," she said. "You love the country, the people, the peasant children, you love the primitive life you abandoned when you married me. I am a city dweller, and no matter how I try to reason with myself and force myself to love the country and the common people, I shall never be able to devote myself to them body and soul. I do not understand and never shall understand the peasants. What I love is nature and nature alone, and with nature I could joyfully spend the rest of my days. Your description of the little muzhiks, the life of the people, etc., your tales and your conversations—it is all exactly the same as in the days of your school at Yasnaya Polyana. But it is too bad that you care so little for your own children. If they belonged to some peasant woman it would be a different story!"16
That woman certainly did not understand him. She nursed him, copied his manuscripts, published his works, ran to St. Petersburg to plead with the censorship committee, but she was not, really, an ally. What bothered him most was that she was making so much money from his books. She had just placed an advertisement in the newspapers, to bring in more subscribers. He was ashamed. And yet he could not deny that he, like the rest of his family, lived on the profits. Exasperated beyond endurance, he began to write to Chertkov:
"At the gymnasium (and the younger ones at home), the children
learn things—in particular a catechism—that they will need to know later at school. . . . Not one of them reads what I have written on these subjects; either they don't listen to what I say or they make some sharp retort; they don't sec what I am doing, or they refuse to see. . . . During the last few days, the subscription and sale of my books has begun, on terms that are very advantageous for us and very hard on the booksellers. I go out and see a buyer looking at me, the humbug, the man who writes against property and, through my wife's business, extorts every cent he can out of the people who read him. Ah, if only someone could trumpet the ignominy of it all in the newspapers, loud and clear and devastating! ... In the family, my daughters are my one, slender consolation. They love me as I should be loved and they love what I love."17
He did not have the heart to send this letter; it became irrelevant before he had finished writing it. After supper on December 18, 1885 a quarrel broke out between him and his wife, presumably on the subject of the "lie" of their life together. Frightened by the loud voices, the older children came running and froze at the foot of the stairs leading up to their parents' room. Sitting side by side in the hallway Tanya, Ilya, Leo and Masha18 (age twenty-one, nineteen, sixteen and fourteen, respectively) listened to the family tempest, the most violent their ears had recorded to date. Their father was announcing to their mother that he had had enough, he meant to leave her and, once again, set off for Paris or America! "When you overload the cart the horse just stops, he can't pull any more!" he shouted. And, with fearful violence: "You poison the very air around you!" The walls were shaking. No one dared interfere. "Neither of them," Tanya wrote later, "would give an inch. They were both defending something more important to them than life: for her it was her children's welfare, and she loved them to distraction; he, in defending his soul, w:as fighting for what he loved above all else: the truth."1" A little later the children saw a servant go by carrying an empty trunk. They realized that their mother was getting ready to leave home. They rushed up the stairs and flung themselves upon her, weeping, "Stay, Maman, stay!" Sonya, her eyes hot with tears, let herself be persuaded. But the moment she calmed down, it was Lyovochka's turn to become hysterical. "He was trembling and shaking all over with sobs," she wrote her sister on December 20. "I felt sorry for him."
The next day Tolstoy, too unnerved to resume his regular life with her, dccidcd to take his daughter Tanya to the estate of some friends of his, the Olsufyevs, forty miles outside Moscow. Tanya was delighted by this escapade and bursting with pride to take her mother's place
beside her father. On his desk he left a letter, no more nor less than an open indictment of his wife, who was stunned by it:
"For the last seven or eight years every conversation between us has ended, after painful conflict, with this: I tell you there can be no understanding or love between us until you have readied the same point as 1 have, whether out of love for me, or instinctively, or by personal conviction. ... If my conscience and reason command me to do something, I cannot disobey them and remain at peace; nor can I calmly look on while those I love, who know what conscience and reason command, disobey them too. ... By some tragic misunderstanding you failed to realize the depth of the crisis that has altered my entire life, and you responded to it with open hostility', or as though it were some abnormal, clinical phenomenon you had to deal with. . . . Everything that was important and precious to me became hateful to you; our quiet, modest, admirable life in the country, the people in it. . . . Then you began to treat me as though I were mentally unbalanced. You have always been bold and resolute, but from that moment on your determination became hard as rock, as happens with people who arc nursing patients whom everybody knows to 1)e deranged. . . . Our move to Moscow, the organization of our new life, our children's education, all of that was so alien to me that I was not even able to protest against what seemed to me to be evil. . . . And thus a year went by, two years, five years. The children have grown and their corruption with them, we have drifted steadily apart and my position has steadily become more false and painful. . . .