Among the spirits were individuals of all ages and conditions, earnest idealists and adventurers, the inquisitive and the insane, university students and illiterates, popes and muzhiks, officers who had left the army, passing foreigners. Their devotion to Tolstoy was equaled only by their lack of consideration for him. The more they admired the master, the less compunction they felt about importuning him. And he made no protest, believing that he did not have the right to withhold his word from the faithful. He was the lay equivalent of starets Ambrose, the sage of Optina-Pustyn. There was no pilgrims' inn at Yasnava Polyana, but this did not stop some of them from staying 011 for days, sleeping in a shed, isba or cupboard in the servants' rooms. Although most of these people were worthless, Tolstoy did not lose heart "One more, and another and another," he sighed. "And it al-
way-s seems to me that the next one will be someone new and rare who will know what the others do not and live better than the rest. But it is always the same, always the same weaknesses, always the same low level of thinking."7 When one of his visitors was manifestly a scoundrel he said to his wife, to excuse himself for having let him come, "If he really is a wicked man, I can be more useful to him than to those who are better than he."
Sonya was not satisfied with this edifying explanation: "How unattractive they all are, the followers of Leo Nikolayevich's doctrines," she wrote. "Not one normal man among them. As for the women, most of them arc hysterical."8 She citcd the example of Marya Schmidt, a former schoolteacher who was now devoting her time to copying Tolstoy's censored books; she followed him along the paths like a shadow and burst into tears whenever she parted from him. Then there was Feiner- mann, a Jew converted to Tolstoy, who had left his pregnant wife and child to receive the master's light and, even more, his hospitality; and Butkevich, son of a Tula landowner, who had been imprisoned twice for revolutionary activities and considered himself to be a spiritual brother of Tolstoy on that account. He ate at his table, but never uttered a word—he just sat, with sleepy facc and eyes hidden behind blue-tinted spectacles; and there was Ivanov the copyist, who had a nimble pen and aspirations to saintliness, but punctuated his periods of labor with long rambles on the highroads and vodka binges; and the peasant Osipov, who spent all his time reading in the orchard and did not even bother to look up at the master's approach; and the blind Old Believer who reproached Tolstoy for not living according to his doctrine and cried out "Liar! Hypocrite!" at the sound of his footstep; and the seventy-year-old Swede who went around barefoot preaching moral and vestimcntary "simplicity," and had to be turned out because he was beginning to be indecent; and the two ccccntric Americans who had set out around the world, one to the east and the other to the west, and had chosen the home of the author of What Then Must We Do? as their rallying point; and the morphine addict who provided mathematical proof of Christian dogma; ancl big, dumb Khokhlov, who followed Tanya around out of love of Tolstoyism; and all the rest, the talkers, the lazy, the ignorant, the failures, the servile. . . .
Maxim Gorky said later, after spending a clay at Yasnaya Polyana, "It is most curious to sec Leo Nikolayevich among his Tolstoyans. lie is like a great steeple whose bell is heard throughout the world, and all around him scurry contemptible, cringing little curs who try to bark in tune, casting anxious, jealous glances at each other to see who yapped the best, who has made the best impression on the master. To my mind
these people are polluting the atmosphere of Yasnaya Polyana in a miasma of cowardice, hypocrisy, sordid intrigue and speculation on his inheritance."
Tolstoy's voice did not, however, draw only the dregs of mankind. A few intelligent and sincere figures towered over the flea-bitten rank and file Tolstoyans: such were Chertkov and Biryukov, who were handling the Intermediary publications, or the delightful painter Gay, who was called "Granddad" by the children, or the faithful Strakhov, or Rayevsky the surgeon, or Kern, the forestry inspector, or Syutayev's son, a conscientious objector recently released from the Schliisselburg Prison, or Wilhelm Frey, who had gone to America as a communist, been naturalized there and come back spreading propaganda for the ideas of Auguste Comte, or young Prince Khilkov who, without ever meeting Tolstoy, had followed his precepts and distributed all his land to the peasants, keeping only eight acres for himself. . . . Here and there in Russia and in the provinces of Tver and Smolensk in the Caucasus, little Tolstoy communities were springing up to confront their precarious destinies.
Abroad, Tolstoy's word was also gaining a hearing among the intellectuals in quest of a new faith. In 1887 young Romain Rolland, a student at the Fcolc Normale, wrote to the sage of Yasnaya Polyana to convey his high regard and ask for particulars regarding the importance of manual labor in educating the spirit. Tolstoy replied on October 4, 1887, in a long letter in French:
"In our depraved society—the society of so-called civilized people- manual labor is essential solely because the chief defect of that society has been and still is that the people make every effort to avoid working themselves, and exploit the labor of the poor, ignorant and unhappy classes who are their slaves, just like the slaves in antiquity, giving them nothing in return. ... I shall never believe the sincerity of the Christian, philosophical or humanitarian pretensions of a person who sends a servant to empty his chamberpot. The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served by others as little as possible and to serve others as much as possible. . . . This is what involuntarily drives a moral and honest man to prefer manual labor to the sciences and the arts: the book I write, for which I need the work of the printer; the symphony I compose, for which I need the work of musicians; the experiments I perform, for which I need the labor of the people who manufacture laboratory instruments; the picture I paint, for which 1 need the work of those who manufacture pigments and canvas—all these things can be useful to men, but they can also be—and are, for the most part—utterly useless and even harmful. And while I am doing all these things whose usefulness is highly questionable and to produce which I must, in addition, make other people work, there are an endless number of things to do right in front of me, all of which are indubitably useful to others and for which I need no one but myself: a burden to carry for someone who is tired, a field to work for its owner who is ill, a wound to dress; not to mention those thousands of things within our immediate reach, for which we need no one's help, which give instantaneous pleasure to those for whom we do them: planting a tree, raising a calf, cleaning a well arc actions which are in- contestably useful to others and an honest man cannot fail to prefer them to the dubious occupations which are proclaimed by our society to be man's highest and most noble callings."
The year before, 1886, Paul DdrouRde had been in Russia to begin negotiating a Franco-Russian alliance, and had gone to Yasnaya Polyana out of curiosity. Paradoxically, the meeting between the apostle of non-violence and the author of Chants du soldat was most cordial. Tolstoy found that this "revengist" had his attractive side; but at table, when the guest said he hoped another war would soon return Alsace and Lorraine to France, nobody supported him. Then, at his request, Tolstoy took him out to the fields and questioned the muzhiks to see whether, in case there was a war, they would be willing to fight the Germans as allies of the Frcnch. "What for?" answered Prokopy, one of the peasants. "Let the Frenchman come work with us, and bring the German along with him. When we've finished we'll go for a walk. And we'll take the German with us. He's a man like all the rest." Tolstoy was jubilant, but DЈroulЈde took a disgruntled departure.