He returned to Moscow, determined to accept a compromise between the life according to society advocated by his wife and the life according to God which was becoming increasingly necessary to him. Three weeks later a sudden death deepened the household gloom. On January 18, 1886, little Alexis, age four and one-half, the youngest Tolstoy son, died of quinsy after thirty-six hours of gasping, rattling agony. "Dear Tanya," Sonya wrote to her sister, "can your heart imagine my sorrow? I buried Alyosha today." Tolstoy took a more lofty tone, as was his wont: "All I can say," he wrote to Chertkov, "is that the death of a child, which I once thought incomprehensible and unjust, now seems reasonable and good. Through this death we have been united in a closer and deeper affection than before."21 And to a distant cousin, Mrs. Young: "My wife has been much afflicted by this death and I, too, am sorry that the little boy I loved is no longer here, but despair is only for those who shut their eyes to the commandments by which we all are ruled."22
For a few months things went more smoothly between the two, each trying to make allowances for the other. Tolstoy finished his essay What Then Must We Do? and his long story, The Death of Ivan llich. and wrote more stories for the Intermediary, a virulent attack upon Nicholas I—Nicholas Stick—and a short play—'The First Distiller.
That summer at Yasnaya Polyana, he rejoiced to see his children rallying around him. Following their father's example, they all set to work to help the muzhiks in the fields. Even Sonya, in peasant costume, occasionally joined them with a rake over her shoulder. The men's team, which included Tolstoy and his two sons Ilya and Leo, began haying at four in the morning. "My father was good at scything," wrote Ilya, "but he perspired a great deal and one could sec it tired him." The other team were not such early risers: the girls, the French governess, Sergey. "The women," Tanya recounted, "lined up in a row, spread the swaths of hay out in the sun, raked them into heaps and carried them to the 'lord's court.' But we were not working for the lord; we worked for the peasants, who received half the harvest in return for cutting the hay in the 'master's' fields." After a noonday snack in the shade of the trees, the men took up their scythes again and went back into the tall grass under the blazing sun. At dusk, escorting a disheveled and dog-happy Tolstoy, the company made its way back to the house, singing. Sometimes Masha dropped her rake, beckoned to one of the peasant girls and broke into a wild dance. "Of course," Uya Tolstoy observed, "everybody did not share Father's ideas, and we did not all have our hearts in the work."
The "little lords" and "little ladies" also harvested the crops. For a time every member of the family was vying to sec who could do the most good deeds. Tanya went to visit sick peasants and wrote in her diary, "It was not at all difficult for me to dress and bandage Alyona's dirty foot." Ilya worked the plot of the mother of a large brood of children. Tolstoy repaired a widow's isba. He himself admitted, moreover, that this charity campaign was a form of play-acting. Children and guests dressed themselves up in colored kerchiefs and boots; they worked as though playing a sport, and showed each other the blisters on their hands with tender self-concern. But the main thing, thought Tolstoy, was to act right, and the right feeling would come later.
The peasants were only amused by these bucolic distractions; but they were perplexed when Tolstoy gave them a lecture on drunkenness and asked them to sign a pledge not to drink any more. He also exhorted them to give up smoking, since he had given it up himself. At his order, they threw their tobacco into a pit he had dug for the purpose. But behind his back, they continued to puff at their cigarettes and befuddle their brains on vodka. He knew this and it made him as miserable as a lie told by someone he loved. When he asked Chertkov to join the "Anti-Alcoholism League," of which he was proud to be a promoter in Russia, Chertkov replied that he could not take the oath because Christ had said, "Thou shalt not swear"; Tolstoy was unconvinced.
In the midsummer heat, he accompanied Ozmidov, his daughter and another disciple to the Tula station, from which they were setting out to the Caucasus to found a "Tolstoy colony."| Shortly afterward, while he was trying to set an example of the joys of physical labor, he had an accident: he was carting hay for a muzhik's widow, was thrown off balance by a false movement, fell from the telega and hurt his leg. He paid no attention to the wound and it became infected. Periostitis
$ This colony failed after five months.
developed. Bedridden, the patient reverted to his wife, who set rap turously to work nursing her bearded baby as he lay shaking with fever. She delighted in the most intimate and repugnant tasks, and in his weakened condition he found her touching and let her do as she pleased. For the first time, he was not afraid of death: "I am dying of a leg injury," he wrote to Ozmidov. "The river of life has dwindled to a tiny rivulet."23 And to Alexandra Tolstoy, "Feeling myself within the house of God is excellent. I should like to remain there always and, for the moment, have no desire to leave."24 He mockingly told his son, "I lie here and listen to the women and have become so completely possessed by their feminine world that I catch myself saying, 'I must have dropped off.'"
He did not really believe he was dying, but it was fascinating to imagine death, to smell it up close, to hazard a peek into the tomb, knowing he could pull back in time; lie compared his present thoughts with those he had attributed to Ivan Ilich. As soon as he was better, he drew away from his wife again.
"Now that he is almost well and can go outdoors, he has given me to understand that I am no longer necessary to him," Sonya lamented on October 25, 1886. "Here I am, rejected again, like some useless object." It annoyed her, when both the children and their father began coming to her, "wearing their masks of self-righteousness," "looking cold and stiff," to demand flour or clothing or money for the peasants. When Lyovochka asked her for a few rubles for "Ganka the Ibief," a revolting, foul-smelling woman who lived in the village, she refused, saying her moneybox was empty. Then, at a frosty stare from Tanya, who was siding increasingly often with her father, she yielded, grumbling and humiliated, and Ganka the Thief went off bearing her pittance.
Sonya had some compensation for these little blows to her pride; at least Lyovochka was no longer neglecting her only for his muzhiks and his philosophy. He had begun to write a play about the peasants. The first act was finished on October 26, 1886, the second three days later. Sonya rccopicd the manuscript in a flush of victory; but she was not blinded by love. "It is good, but flat; I told Lyovochka there were not enough dramatic effects," she wrote. He listened, revised, went on writing. All five acts were finished within a fortnight. Title: The Power of Darkness. Stakhovich, who happened to be staying at Yasnaya Polyana, had real talent as an actor, and Tolstoy asked him to read the play to the peasants. Since the action took place in the country, he thought it would be interesting to observe their reactions. Some forty muzhiks were assembled in the main room and the reading began. They listened silently, hanging their heads and looking blank. Only Andrey, who ran the Tula station buffet, occasionally broke into a loud guffaw. I lis bursts of merriment became even more inappropriate as the story of Nikita and Akulina unfolded, each scene more grisly than the one before. At the end, an exasperated Tolstoy asked his public what they thought of the play. The spectators looked at each other uncertainly. What could they tell the master, seeing they hadn't understood a word of it? At last, one of the ex-pupils of the Yasnaya Polyana school mumbled: