Other foreigners followed: scientists, authors, philosophers, travelers —Masaryk, professor of philosophy and future president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia; Loewcnfcld, director of the Schiller Theater; Stock- heim, specialist in tocology; the physiologist Charles Richet . . . Tolstoy saw them all. "It is the price of Lyovochka's greatness and the fame of his doctrine,commented Sonya.
This already numerous court of adulators and tourists swarming around Tolstoy did not lessen his preference for the iron-willed Chertkov. Even in his absence, the master's thoughts were filled by this man. He had just married Anna Konstantinovna Dietrich, a thin, pale student with unhealthily dilated eyes, who adored philosophy, worshiped her husband's ideas even more fervidly than he himself and dreamed only of becoming his collaborator. She helped Chertkov to transform their estate at Lizinovka into a ccntcr for nco-Christian propaganda. From his headquarters, the disciple sent missives to the master in which hymns of praise alternated with pious admonitions. Their intimacy was so complete that Tolstoy confided all his family troubles to him, in addition to his metaphysical torments. One day Chertkov wrote how fortunate he was to have married such a peerless spiritual companion and how he pitied Tolstoy for being deprived of this blessing. The letter fell into Sonya's hands and she flew into a rage: "That obtuse, scheming, false man, who has managed to ensnare Leo Nikolayc- vich, would like (no doubt in the name of Christian principles) to break the ties that have bound us so closely for twenty-five years," she wrote on March 9, 1887. "All relations with Chertkov must cease, he is nothing but deceitfulness and evil." Fortunately, Chertkov's visits were rare; he operated long distance, distilling his poison through the mail.
On July 3, 1887 the children arranged a little concert, featuring Lias- sotta, a pupil at the Moscow Conservatory of Music who had been engaged to give violin lessons to the third Tolstoy son. Liassotta ancl Sergey, playing the violin and piano respectively, gave a performance of the Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy, who was very fond of Beethoven, listened with tears in his eyes; then, during the presto, unable to control himself, he rose and went to the window where, gazing at the starry sky, he stifled a sob. Sonya received the benefits of his transports later that same evening, when they were alone: as she wrote immediately afterward in her diary, under the influence of the music he had become "the affectionate and tender Lyovochka of old." A few weeks later she discovered that she was pregnant. On September 23, 1887 it was a mother-to-be whom Tolstoy kissed on both cheeks in front of his entire family, assembled to celebrate the couple's silver wedding anniversary; but Sonya was too embarrassed to announce her condition yet. And Lyovochka, looking back over his long wedded life, commented laconically in his pocket notebook, "It could have been better!"
That summer a painter, Repin, came to stay at Yasnaya Polyana and painted two portraits and a large number of sketches of the master. Alexandra Tolstoy also came, and did her best to avoid arguments with Lyovochka over his anti-Orthodoxy. In spite of all the comings and goings in the house, and his worries about some of his peasants who had been ruined by a fire, Tolstoy worked steadily on a number of important articles, until he returned to Moscow with the family on Octobcr 26, 1887. While writing On Life and Death, he began planning a soul-staggering, "definitive" novel against sensuality. But perhaps his faithful flock would reproach him for cursing the evils of the flesh with his wife in an advanced stage of pregnancy; to parry their thrusts, he reminded them that procreation in the state of wedlock was lawful and even rccommcndable.
"It is not licentiousness," lie wrote to Chertkov 011 March 20, 1888, "but the will of God. ... If no more children were born, we could not go on hoping that the kingdom of God on earth will ultimately arrive. We are already corrupt, and it is a struggle for us to purify ourselves, whereas in the new generation pure souls arc coming to light in every family, and they may remain so. The river is cloudy and full of filth, but many springs flow into it and there is still hope that one day the water will all become dear."
Eleven days later, on March 31, in Moscow, after two hours of agonizing pain, Sonya gave birth to her thirteenth child, a boy, who was baptized Ivan (Vanichka). When the sixty-year-old father picked up the baby in his arms and bent his gray beard over it, the mother could not restrain her tears of gratitude. "It is a miracle from Lyovochka!" she wrote to her sister, on April 11. "lie is so glad it is a boy and is full of tenderness for it. I can't say whom he looks like. lie is long-limbed and has cloudy eyes and dark hair, but it seems to me it's always the same baby, just a continuation of the previous ones, not a new person."
Two weeks after his wife's confinement, the proud father decided that he needed to stretch his legs and set off to walk to Yasnaya Polyana with a pack on his back, accompanied by the young son of Gay, the painter. The hikers covered the hundred and thirty miles in five days, through rain, wind and sun. Arriving at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy felt twenty years old. When Sonya wrote, "Little Ivan is too thin, he is not developing well and I am terribly worried about him,"10 he replied with sublime confidence:
"Don't worry too much about Ivan, dear heart, God has given us a little one, and will provide nourishment for him too. ... I feel so good, so light and simple and affectionate toward you, as you toward me, I hope."11
Back in Moscow, he heard the Kreutzer Sonata again, played by Lias- sotta and Sergey at a gathering of friends in the family drawing room. Repin, the painter, and Andrcyev-Burlak, an actor, were among those present. Subjugated anew by Beethoven's music, Tolstoy proposed that they interpret the feeling the music inspired in them, each using the tools of his own art. He would write a story called The Kreutzer Sonata, and the actor would read it in public in front of a picture painted for the occasion by the artist. The previous summer, at Yasnaya Polyana, the painter had told him about a stranger he had met in a train one day, who had recited the tale of his conjugal woes with tears in his eyes. Tolstoy seized upon this, combined it with one of his own unfinished short stories—T/ze Man Who Murdered Ilis Wife—and felt he had hold of an awesome, profound, challenging subject, the kind he liked these days. Since the story was to be recited by Andreyev-Burlak, he thought it would heighten the tragic tone to write it in monologue form. But Andreyev-Burlak died in May of that year, Rcpin forgot his promise to paint a picture and Tolstoy alone carried out his project.
Between March and May 1888 he sketched out the novel in which, for the first time, the character of the musician appears. Then he put the manuscript aside, but continued to think about this strange fable in which sexuality and family life were the villains. As always, when he had found an idea that seemed right to him, he needed to carry it to the extreme. The further his deductions led him into absurdity, the more strongly he believed he must be inspired by God. He, who had once written to Chertkov in praise of procreation in wedlock, suddenly began preaching the necessity for conjugal abstinence to the same correspondent. According to St. Matthew (19:12), Christ had said, "For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." All this meant, affirmed Tolstoy, was that in order to live in accord ancc with God's word it was necessary, if not actually to mutilate one self, at least to forget that one had an instrument for sex. To this end, it was advisable for husband and wife to sleep in separate rooms. If they were unable to resist temptation and, by mishap, a child should be born of their commerce, they must refrain from all further inter course so long as the mother was nursing her offspring. "Otherwise, the woman may perhaps become a good mistress, but she will certainly become an overworked mother and a sick, irritable, hysterical person." wrote Tolstoy on November 6, 1888, to Chertkov. "Therefore let everyone try not to marry and, if he be married, to live with his wife as brother and sister. . . . You will object that this would mean the end of the human race? . . . What a great misfortune! The antedilu vian animals are gone from the earth, human animals will disappear too. . . . I have no more pity for these two-footed beasts than for the ichthyosaurus."