Day after day, she poured out the same old grievances into her notebook. Everything about Lyovochka irritated her, beginning with his aspiration to a simple life, which simply complicated hers. "This vegetarian diet means that two menus have to be prepared, which adds to the cost and makes twice as much work. The result of his sermons on universal love is that lie has lost all feeling for his own family and shares his private life with anyone and everyone. His—purely verbal—renunciation of earthly goods has led him to criticize and condemn others."
And elsewhere.
"He pushes everything off onto me, everything, without exception: the children, the management of his property, relations with other people, business affairs, the house, the publishers. Then he despises me for soiling my hands with them all, retreats into his selfishness and complains about me incessantly. And what does he do? He goes for walks, rides his horse, writes a little, goes wherever he pleases, docs absolutely nothing for the family and takes advantage of everything: his daughters' help, the comfort and adulation that siuround him, my submissiveness and my sufferings. And fame; that unquenchable thirst for fame to which he has sacrificcd everything and is continuing to sacrifice everything . . .'Mfl
If she heard some pertinent criticism of him, she ran to note it down, to strengthen her case: "Today Chicherin said that there were two men in Leo Nikolayevicli, one writer of genius and one mediocre thinker who impressed people by talking in paradoxes and contradictions."17
Physically, she was increasingly repelled by him. She said he was slovenly. Was it in order to become one with the peasants that he went around unwashed like them? He used to be so particular, and now he smellcd like a goat. "It's like pulling teeth to get him to wash!" she wrote. "He told me his feet are caked with dirt and sores have formed underneath and arc beginning to cause him pain. . . . My aversion to my husband physically these days is making me very miserable, but I cannot, I simply cannot get used to it, I shall never get used to the dirt and the bad smell."18
Or sometimes, in a towering rage, her pen racing across the page, she would plead her cause, no longer to her family and contemporaries, but to posterity. With what passion she justified herself to the judges of generations to come! "His biographers will tell how he went to draw water for the porter, but no one will know how he never gave his wife one moment's rest or one drop of water to his sick child; how in thirty- five years he never sat for five minutes by a bedside to let me have a rest or sleep the night through or go for a walk or simply pause for a moment to recover my strength."19
It is true that she had added grounds for resentment at the time she consigned this grievance to paper. It was January 1895. Lyovochka had just completed a story, Master and Man, telling the adventures of two men of different social conditions who were caught in a blizzard and compelled by their impending death to discover the Christian truth within themselves, that is, their equality and dependence. Sonya greatly admired this straightforward, stern morality talc, in which human warmth and sympathy stood out in sharp contrast with the impersonal whiteness and cold of the snow. She was surprised to learn that instead of giving it to Chertkov's Intermediary or to her own Complete Works, Lyovochka had promised it to a review called Northern Herald. The editor of this publication, Lyubov Gurycvich, was "a scheming half- Jewess," who must surely have inveigled him by flattery. This time, he had offended both wife and publisher at once. She insisted that her husband break his promise and honor his double obligation to her. In the middle of the night the big house in Moscow resounded with her screams and sobs. Goaded beyond endurance, Tolstoy threatened to leave her for good if she did not stop. Then she began to suspect him of wanting to abandon her for the woman editor. Completely beside herself, she rushed out of the house in her bathrobe and bedroom slippers, with her hair flying about her face.
The snow lay deep on the ground. Not a living soul. Sonya wanted to die, never mind how, but quickly. Tolstoy, in vest and trousers, came running after her, caught up with her, seized her by one arm and dragged her back to the house. "I remember that I was sobbing and crying that I didn't care what happened, that they could take me to the police station or lock me up in an asylum," she wrote.
The next afternoon she tried to obtain by sweetness what she had failed to obtain by force: permission to copy the story and priority to publish it. Once again he balked, stubborn, bad-tempered and irrational, and once again she took to the street. But this time she put on a warm coat and hat and galoshes over her boots. As usual, her suicide attempt was inspired by her husband's books. Before, she had planned to throw herself under a train like Anna Karenina. After reading Master and Man, death by exposure now struck her fancy. "In the story, I had liked the death of Vasily Andrcyevich," she noted ingenuously, "and I wished to meet my end the same way." Thus, stumbling through the snow, she made her way toward the Sparrow Hills, where she was sure no one would come in search of her. But Masha had picked up her trace and finally brought her l)ack to the fold.
After two days of total prostration her obsession returned. She hailed a sledge in the street and asked to be driven to the Kursk station. Sergey and Masha took off in hot pursuit. She saw them coming just as she was paying the driver. No choice but to turn around and go back again, with one of them on either side. She had caught cold and the children forced her to go to bed. The doctors came running. One prescribed bromide, another Vichy water, and a third—who was a gynecologist—alluded to her changc-of-lifc "in cynical terms." Lyovochka, however, alarmed by this series of runaway attempts, had become more tractable. He came into the room where she was resting and knelt down to beg her pardon. On February 21, 1895 she was able to record, with pitiful pride, "The Intermediary and I have won Master and Man, but at what cost!"
By a diabolical coincidence, the very day she wrote those words in her diary, Vanichka, who had been sick once the previous month, fell ill again. Rash, sore throat, diarrhea; Dr. Filatov diagnosed scarlet fever. A premonitory silence settled down inside Sonya. She had always known that she would lose Vanichka before long. Not a week went by without some mention of him in her diary: "The bonds uniting me to him are so close! ... He is a weak child, delicate, and so sweet- tempered." "The spark of life is about to go out in my poor darling Vanichka." In the rare moments when she was not trembling for his health, she was explaining how he was destined for greatness, even
more, perhaps, than Tolstoy himself. She was not alone in thinking so. "The first time I set eyes on that child," said the Russian scientist Mechnikov, "I knew he must cither die a premature death or prove a greater genius even than his father." And Tolstoy marveled to hear the little boy of seven, so small, so gentle, with his skin the color of milk, saying to his mother when she told him that the house and trees and land at Yasnaya Polyana would one day belong to him, "You mustn't say that, Maman. Everything belongs to everyone."
Vanichka's fever had begun in the morning; toward evening he was burning and delirious; but as always, his thoughts were all for others: "It's nothing, Maman," he murmured. "It will soon be over. Don't cry, Nanny!" Thirty-six hours later he was dead. A sepulchral silence fell upon the house, suddenly shattered by a woman's sobs. Cowering in the children's room, little Sasha thought it was a wounded bitch screaming, with a voice like her mother's. On February 23, 189$ Sonya wrote in her notebook, "My darling little Vanichka died this night at eleven. My God! And I am still alive." She did not touch her diary again for two years. For once, Tolstoy was as stricken as she. "For the first time in my life, I feel caught in a situation there is no way out of," he stammered.