Power of Darkness that he was unable to "recover his spirits." According to him, the entire play was nothing but "negation of the ideal," "degradation of the moral sense" and "an offense to good taste."
"To my knowledge there is nothing like it in any literature," he went on. "Even Zola never reached this level of vulgar and brutal realism. ... It is a catastrophe, that at this minute enormous numl>crs of copies of Tolstoy's play have already been printed and are being sold for ten kopecks in cheap booklet form by peddlers on every street- corner."27
Unnerved by this furious outburst, Alexander III changed his mind and said, in his reply to Pobyedonostsev, that he had admired the play but had been "disgusted" by it at the same time. "My opinion," he added, "is that the play cannot be performed because it is too realistic and its subject too horrible." A few days later, in March, he sent a note to his minister of the interior saying, "This ignominious L. Tolstoy must be stopped. He is nothing but a nihilist and non-believer. It would be well to prohibit the publication of the play in book form, for the author has already sufficiently spread about and sold his rubbish among the people."
However, the Alexandra 'ITieater in St. Petersburg was going ahead with its plans to produce the play. Rehearsals were under way and enthusiasm among the actors was at fever pitch when, on the eve of the first night, the play was prohibited.* Shortly afterward the censor also prohibited its sale in printed form. Faithful to his principles, Tolstoy had already announced through the newspapers that anyone might reproduce his text without paying royalties to him.
• The Power of Darkness was not produced until 1895, in Petersburg, by the Alexandra Theater, and in Moscow the same year, by the company of the Skomorokli People's '1 heater. It was produced in France by the Th&Ure Antoine, however, in 1888.
2. Tiie Kreutzer Sonata
For Tolstoy and his wife, the winter of 1886-87 was relatively happy. After a few arguments that resounded like muffled echoes of the great scenes of 1885, each decided, willy-nilly, to put up with the peculiarities of the other. Tolstoy continued to philosophize as he chopped wood and stitched boots, while Sonya made the rounds of the drawing rooms, entertained and sold her husband's books at a stiff price. "He has changed a great deal and takes everything quietly and tolerantly," she wrote on March 6, 1887. "Sometimes he even plays vint with 11s, or sits down at the piano. City life no longer drives him to despair." Months later, "He seems contented and happy and often exclaims, 'How good it is to be alive!'"
In fact these moments of felicity were rare. Most of the time Tolstoy was "mild and spiritless." Especially when he returned to a vegetarian diet after more solid fare. Sometimes he ate nothing but vegetables, sometimes nothing but meat, and sometimes he drank only rum diluted with water, but his digestive troubles continued as before. One evening at table he complained that Sonya was "a woman of money." She retorted that she was selling the twelve volumes of his Complete Works for eight rubles, whereas he had sold War and Peace alone for twelve. He raged, but found nothing to say. Looking at him, a man nearing sixty, with a wrinkled face, whitening hair and sharp gray eyes lurking under bristling brows, Sonya yearned for her free, strong, happy companion of old, the writer and artist of 1865.
He had started to work again, but was producing nothing but moralizing articles, including one very big essay, On Life and Death, which he was try ing to write in a style that would be simple enough for a peasant to understand. "Continued association with professors leads to prolixity, love of long words and confusion," he wrote, "but with muzhiks, to conciseness, beauty of language and clarity."1 As usual, Sonya began to recopy the manuscript, but as soon as she had transcribed a few pages, Lyovochka would rewrite them completely. "What patience and what persevercnce!" she cricd, half annoyed and half admiring.
Now that her children were grown or growing up, she had to fight on several fronts at once to maintain her authority. In every one of the Tolstoys she discerned some trait inherited from Lyovochka. At the table she sat with a half-dozen facets of her husband grouped around her, behind masks ranging from infancy to young adulthood. In a conflict, some sided with their father, others with their mother. But since she had raised them all, it offended her to sec any of them on the other side.
Tolstoy, on the other hand, complained that he was a stranger in his own family. He was especially disappointed by his two older boys. "Among my children there will be no one to carry on my work," he said to Strakhov. "If I were a carpenter, my sons would be beside me at my bench. . . . Alas, it is exactly the opposite. One of my sons [Sergey] is finishing his studies at the University and wants to be a civil servant. The other [Ilya] will be a soldier, and his head is al ready turned by shoulder bars. The third—but what is the good of talking about them? . . . Neither the third nor the fourth nor my daughters will follow the same path as I. ... It would have been better for me to have had no children at all!"
Naturally, he held his wife responsible for Ilya and Sergey's failure to understand him. Wasn't she the one who had brought them up as aristocrats? He was forgetting that he had not chosen to interfere while there was still time. Moreover, it was inevitable, once the boys were removed from the family atmosphere and involved in Moscow university life, that they would be tempted to compare their father's strange ideas with the more commonly-hcld opinions of fellow students and professors. Tlicy unconsciously opposed the university world to the Tolstoyan world. Sergey, the eldest—rough, taciturn, music-minded— did not conceal his irritation, when he entered the house to find it teeming with obsequious disciples. He also thought it unfair of his father to hold his mother to blame for the luxury he himself enjoyed. "Leo Nikolaycvich," he wrote, "demanded that the family simplify its way of life, but failed to lay down any limits and seldom supplied concrete details. The questions of where and how the family was to live, how the property was to be disposed of, how the children were to be brought up, etc., were left unsettled."2 Although he venerated his father, he also regretted the extremes he was led to by his doctrine. "How were we to reconcile life according to God, the life of the pil
grims and the life of the peasants, with the intangible principles that had been instilled in us from the cradle?" he wrote. "We children often felt that it was not we who didn't understand our father, but he who did not understand us, because he was always busy with 'personal affairs.'"
After an erratic career at the University, Ilya had fallen in love with a poor girl, Sofya Philosofov, and made up his rnind to marry her. Tolstoy hesitated a long time before asking his twenty-two-year-old son the question that was burning his lips. Finally, one evening, he slipped into the young man's room and went behind a screen, then said in a low voice:
"Now nobody can hear us, and we will not be embarrassed because we can't sec each other. Tell me, have you ever had intercourse with a woman?"
"No," Ilya replied.
Then, behind his screen, Tolstoy sobbed with joy. "I began to weep with him," Ilya wrote. "With that screen between us, quite unashamedly, we cried heartily for a long time."
Later, Tolstoy wrote a pastoral letter to his son on marriage: