Unfortunately, their period of unison did not outlast the food shortage. As soon as the harvest improved and Tolstoy, "demobilized," returned to his home and habits, the conflict between them flared up again. After the cold shower of privation from which he had just emerged, his reaction to the ease and comfort of his family's way of life was even gloomier than before. On December 22, 1893 he wrote, "I feel oppressed, sick at heart. I cannot contain myself. I desire to perform some great deed. I should like to devote the rest of my life to God. But He does not want me. Or else He does not want to encourage me in the direction I have choscn. And it makes me so irritable! Oh, this luxury! This commerce in my books! This ethical morass! This empty agitation! ... I want to suffer, I want to trumpet forth this truth that is consuming me!"
And a few days later, on January' 24, 1894: "Lord, help me! Teach me to bear my cross. I have unceasingly prepared myself to bear the cross I know: prison and the gallows; now I see before me a completely different cross, a new cross, one I do not know how to carry. What is new and different about it is this: I am placed against my will in the position of a spiritual weakling and by my way of life I am compelled to destroy the very things I live for. ... I am unable to tear myself free from these awful cobwebs in which I have become entangled. Not
•The letter was posted on January 2, 1894.
for want of strength, but because my conscience will not let me; I feel sorry for the spiders that have spun them."
The chief "spider" was Sonya, of course. However hard he labored to live the life of an ascetic, eating vegetables and porridge, drinking nothing but water, fleeing his wife's guests, chopping his own wood, drawing his own water, he still felt the pernicious warmth of the house around him. He was so happy to escape from horrid Moscow to spend a few days at Yasnaya Polyana, where at least there were some peasants in sight! In March 1894, with his daughter Masha, he also went to visit his disciple Chertkov, with whom he felt a communion of thought so intense that he could not refrain from writing to Sonya: "I am very glad I have comc. ... He and I arc so close spiritually, we have so many interests in common and we sec each other so seldom, that both of us arc very happy."13
Nothing could have hurt Sonya more than that declaration. She had long considered Chertkov as her real rival in Lyovochka's affections. By pretending to serve the great writer's philosophy, this cunning, puritanical man was really trying to ensnare him, detach him from his family, encourage his most subversive tendencies, and appropriate his works for himself. He was the ringleader of that abominable gang of "dark ones," the spoil-sport, the preventer of new novels! As long as Lyovochka was in his power, there would be no more War and Peace or Anna Karenina. He had even begun writing to Masha and Tanya. He would finish the job of weaning them away from their own mother. In August 1893 she learned that most of Tolstoy's manuscripts, which she had entrusted to the Rumyantsev Museum, had been removed by Chertkov and taken "for safekeeping" first to his home and then to that of one of his friends, Colonel Trepov, in St. Petersburg.! Lyovochka, when informed of this underhanded appropriation, had no comment to make. He was subjugated, bewitched. The following summer he even had the nerve to propose that Chertkov and his wife should be invited to Yasnaya Polyana. Sonya indignantly refused, whereupon Tolstoy wistfully wrote to his great friend:
"She is afraid of yon because you are the one who helps me to preserve all the things she hates in me. If you ask, 'Does she want me to come?' I would answer, 'No.' But if you asked whether it is ncccssary for you to come I would answer, 'Yes, it is necessary.' I repeat to you what I told her: if there is bad feeling between you, you must both use all your strength to destroy it so that true love may grow in its place."14 Only a few days l>cforc, on April 21, 1894, he had written in his diary, "I
f The same Trepov who later became an implacable governor general of St. Peters burg. At that time, he was relatively tolerant of liberals.
am happy with Sonya. . . . What a mother and, in a sense, what a wonderful wife! Fct may have had something when he said that every man married the wife he needed." Was she going to force him to change his mind by her stubborn hostility toward the man he loved most? Once again, he called upon all his self-control, mastered his anger and behaved like a Christian husband. "I have been feeling ill for a week," he noted in his diary on May 15, 1894. "It began, I think, when I was so upset by Sonya's shameful outburst over Chertkov. It is all very understandable, but depressing, especially as I had lost the habit of this kind of incident and was so happy to have recovered my profound affection and good-will for her. 1 was afraid she had destroyed everything, but no; it is over, and my affection has returned."
A fortnight later he was saddened by the death of his friend Gay, the painter: "He was a delightful, gifted, grown-up child," he said. Gay's last painting, a Crucifixion, had been removed the previous March from its room in St. Petersburg because the tsar, offended by the stark realism of the canvas, had said, "What carnage!" Whereupon Tolstoy had written to Gay, "What a triumph!"
The man who had considered Gay's work an insult to religion did not long outlive him: on October 20, 1894 Alexander III succumbed to nephritis and complications. His death gave rise, in Tolstoy as in all the enemies of autocracy, to renewed hopes of reform in Russian domestic policy. Nicholas II, the deceased emperor's eldest son, was only twenty-six; he was about to marry a German princcss, Alix of IIcssc, whose name after conversion became Alexandra Fyodorovna; he was said to be mild, conciliatory and sensitive; surely he would endorse the liberal ideas of the intelligentsia and give the country a constitution. But in fact, Nicholas II was a weakling filled with superstitious respect for his father and ruled by the reactionary minister to the Holy Synod, who had been his tutor. When he received the representatives of the zemstvos on January 17, 1895, he wanted to make a show of strength and declared, as a dutiful pupil of Pobycdonostsev, "I have heard that voices have recently been raised in zemstvo meetings, of men carried away by the mad dream of electing representatives to participate in the internal administration of the country. Let it be known to all that I, dedicating all my strength to further the happiness of my people, shall defend the principle of autocracy as unswervingly as did my late father."
Despair was all the blacker as hope had been so high. Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "Important event. Insolent speech by the tsar. . . . I'm afraid this may have consequences for me." But, faithful to his principle of denying the legality of all temporal authority, he refused to sign his colleagues' petition to abolish the censor. He said, "This Ls what you should say to the monarch: 'You can do nothing as long as you are emperor. The only thing you can do for the people and for yourself is to abdicate.'"
Already conccrncd for the future of his country, he was beginning to be concerned for the future of his marriage as well. After a few months' respite, Sonya's jealousy of Chertkov had flared up again; she saw him as the cause of all her troubles. She had just turned fifty, and her disposition was growing worse. It seemed to her that the whole world was conspiring to contradict and thwart her. Her children gave her nothing but trouble: Leo's nerves were very bad, he had to have "electrical treatments"; Vanichka, poor, sweet Vanichka, was so delicate that she feared the worst at every sniffle; Sergey was living in sin; Ilya had made a bad marriage and was spending too much money; Tanya and Masha were completely obfuscated by their father's ideas and spent all their time with the "Dark Ones"; they never even thought of starting a family. "They are utterly lacking in moderation or judgment and have no sense of duty," wrote Sonya. "They take after their father there. But he at least has struggled all his life to improve himself, whereas they simply let themselves go."15