Late that night, after the guests had gone away, Lyovochka came to find his wife, took her in his arms and spoke to her tenderly. "I begged him to publish his statement and not to speak alxjut it any more," she wrote. "He told me he would not publish it until I understood that it had to be. I replied that I could not lie and would not lie and that it was impossible for me to understand that. Scenes like the one today are hastening the hour of my death. Let them strike, but let them finish me off quickly!"
The ensuing days brought more arguments followed by more reconciliations in bed. After these embraces, in which there was no real love, both repented in their respective diaries.
"Terribly displeased with myself," wrote Sonya on July 27. "Lyovochka woke me early in the morning with passionate caresses. . . . Then I took a French novel, Un coeur de femme by Paul Bourget, and read in bed until eleven-thirty, a thing I never do. This stupor that is creeping over me is unforgivable at my age. . . . What a strange man my husband is! The day after this quarrel began he made me a declaration of his passion and love, assured me that I had great influence over him and that he would never have believed so strong an attachment possible. But that is all purely physical. It is the secret of our division. I, too, am dominated by his passion, but in my heart of hearts that is not what 1 want or ever have wanted. I have always dreamed of a platonic relationship, a perfect spiritual communion."
And he was writing, in despair, "I live not purely but by my senses. Help me, my God. I have lost my way, I am suffering, I cannot go on."
Paradoxically, he began to be afraid of death again, just when he professed to be growing increasingly detached from material things. For some time he had begun every entry in his diary with the initials i.I.l. (if I live). He was wavering between heaven and earth. Nevertheless, this painful business of his royalties had to be settled. I11 order not to upset Sonya further, he resorted to the compromise he had adopted a few years before, whereby only the works subsequent to his "rebirth" would immediately become public property.
On September 16, 1891, he sent a letter to the most important Russian newspapers: "I hereby grant to all who wish it the right to publish, without payment, in Russia and abroad, in Russian or in translation, and to produce on the stage, all the works written by me since the year 1881 and published in Volumes XII (1886) and XIII (appearing this year, 1891), as well as those which have not yet been published in Russia or arc to appear in the future."
He would have liked Sonya to sign the letter abdicating Ills rights, to make it quite clear that the measure was not directed against her. But that was presumably asking too much of such a coarse-natured woman! She let him assume full responsibility for his action. What irked her most was that, as a bonus with his present to mankind, he was giving away The Death of Ivan Ilich, which she admired enormously and which he had offered to her 011 her birthday in 1886 for inclusion in Volume XII of the Complete Works. After reading the fateful announcement in the papers, she fumed: "Everything lie does comes from one source: vanity, thirst for fame, the need to be talked about as much
as possible. Nobody can change my mind about that."® She reproached him for his eternal talk about a Christian life, "when he does not have one drop of love, either for his children or for me or for anyone except himself."7 She claimed, not without reason, that the people to benefit from his absurd renunciation would not be the poor and needy—far from it—but the publishers, that is, the rich themselves!
'l'olstoy was too glad to be rid of his possessions to pay any attention to her nagging. Now, in theory, he was delivered from the evils of property, legally a pauper, hypothetically divested of all means of subsistence. Ah, the pleasures of utter destitution! But how was he to live? To be consistent, he should leave his handsome home, retire to some abandoned isba and earn a bit of bread by the sweat of his brow, or set off with the pilgrims on the highroad to Kiev, preaching the truth and begging his bread from door to door. But he could not bring himself to make such a radical change. As always, he contented himself with half-measures, and dug himself into an ambiguous position whose ludicrous side did not escape him. He affected semi-starvation and peasant dress, he drew the water from the well himself and clcancd his own room, but he did not give up his library or his saddle horses or his piano or the big drawing room in which his admirers congregated. Poor as Job on paper, he nevertheless continued to profit from his fortune, which had simply changed from his hands into those of his wife and children. Believing that he owed nothing to anyone, he was still living on them. Around him were the same chairs and tables, chandeliers, white-gloved lackeys as before; seated at the master's vast table and served by bowing attendants, he watched the disciples flocking in. The more there were, the greater his fame, and the more difficult it became for Sonva to feed them all.
In the village, Tolstoy often saw Timothy, the child he had had long before by his peasant mistress Axinya. A crude muzhik with steely eyes, a shapeless nose and heavy brows, he resembled him more closely than any of his legitimate children. He was a coachman 011 the estate. Tolstoy suffered occasional twinges of conscience at tin's reminder of his wayward youth. But, after all, it was the rule for a great noble to keep a few bastards on the premises, to prove his past virility. According to the custom of the time, the master's real children—those fortunate enough to bear his name—were not at all hostile toward Timothy and treated him as a brother who had lost out in his dealings with the law. Only Sonya still became indignant, now and then, at the thought of this left-handed descendant.
The spring and summer of 1891 brought an unusually large crop of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. Fet and his wife spent a few days in May.
The old poet was more charming than ever, with his plunging nose and graying beard in his long goat's face, and his small hands with their well- manicured nails. He was bubbling over with juvenile enthusiasm, but Lyovochka was too preoccupied with God to have any taste for such purely human lyricism.f "Fet read us some poems," wrote Sonya. "Love and more love . . . I lis feverish inspiration awakens poetical, ambiguous ideas and feelings in me, and I am too old for them."
The poet was succeeded by guests of lesser repute. As usual, the warm weather brought a new wave of admirers of every kind, professors, students, visionaries, opera singers, defrocked priests, repentant revolutionaries and government spies disguised as disciples. There were never fewer than fifteen at table. Stasov, a bearded giant with a leonine mane who was director of the St. Petersburg Public Library', set the tone of praise of the master of the house with his endless ranting about "Tolstoy the genius" whom he also called "Leo the Great." In the timcworn tradition, Sonya organized picnics and walks or rides, programs of charades, amateur concerts, readings. She bustled from drawing room to pantry, the overworked servants complained, the children's governesses quarreled, and still more people wrote announcing their arrival. . . .