Looking at him on the day of the funeral, Sonya was alarmed: an old man. Bent, wrinkled, gray-bcardcd, the light gone from his eyes. With his sons' help he lifted the light coffin—open, in the Russian manner —onto a big sledge. Then he sat down with his wife among the flowers, near the dead child, and the horses moved off at a walk. The road to Nikolskoye cemetery where little Alyosha already lay buried was the same road he used to take thirty-three years before, when he went courting his fiancee at the Behrs' home outside Moscow. lie reminded Sonya of this, and she was terrified at the distance that separated the carefrcc girl of those days and this aged, disillusioned mother going to bury her child. Was that what they called a full life?
During the entire service she held Vanichka's icy head between her hands and tried to warm it with her kisses. rl"he real separation camc when the coffin lid was nailed down. No more Vanichka. She wrestled and fought against the hard fact. Back in the house Tolstoy murmured, "And I, who was hoping Vanichka would carry on God's work after me!"
The next day he tried to ease his pain by sublimating it: while Sonya wandered through the house like a demented soul, caressing the dead child's toys and clothes and looking for his ghost behind the doors, he wrote in his diary, "We have buried Vanichka. Terrible—no, not terrible: great spiritual event. I am grateful to you, Father, I am grateful
to you."20 Days later, "Vanichka's death has ban like the death of Nicholas for me;t no, not the same, but to a far greater degree the manifestation of God, of the force of attraction of God. Thus, not only can I deny that this event was sad or painful, but I can say without hesitation that it was, if not happy—that is not a fitting word—at least merciful, coming from God, revealing the lie of life, bringing us closer to Him. Sonya cannot see it that way. For her the almost physical pain of loss has hidden its spiritual value."21 He enlarged upon his idea to Aunt Alexandra: "I feel his loss cruelly, but by no means as cruelly as Sonya, because I had—because I have—another, spiritual life."
lie wanted to persuade himself that Vanichka had not died in vain, that God had sent him into the world with a message, that he was the "harbinger swallow," herald of the melting snows and opening-up of hearts. ... In obedience to the desires of this evanescent angel, he redoubled his demonstrations of affection for his wife. "Never have I felt such a need to love in Sonya and myself, and such a hatred of everything that separates and hurts," he wrote in the same letter to Alexandra. "Never have I loved Sonya as I love her now. It is doing me much good."22
But Sonya was still too deadened by sorrow to appreciate this new wave of warmth. She went to the church, questioned the priests, had strange dreams and saw absolutely no reason to go on living. Once she remained in the Arkhangelsky Cathedral praying, for nine hours, and came home through a driving rain. To jar her out of her apathy Tolstoy sent her to visit a prison, tried to interest her in the misfortunes of the political convicts. In vain. She responded to nothing but her own unhappiness. "The new feeling that has brought us together is strange," he told her. "It is like the setting sun. From time to time the little clouds of our quarrels, some coming from your side and some from mine, veil its rays. But I still hope that they will blow away before the night and the sunset will be radiant."23 Listening to him, Sonya would shed tears of joy; but the next minute she sank back into her morbid brooding. Then, gradually, he gave up. Was it his fault if he still had something to live for? His faith in God, first. Tlien, his writing. On March 12, 1895, two weeks after little Vanichka's burial, he wrote in his diary: "I feel like writing something literary." He listed a dozen ideas, including Koni's Story (later Resurrection) and concluded, "Enough there to last me for eight years!"
The enormous success of Master and Man surprised and annoyed him, but it also encouraged him to take up his pen again. The Inter-
t His brother, who had died at Hv6res thirty-five years earlier.
inediary sold fifteen thousand copies in four day's. And Volume XIV of the Complete Works, which contained the story, was in its tenth thousand! Praise rained down upon him. "What can I say to you?" wrote Strakhov. "The cold clutched at my skin. . . . The mystery of death, that is the inimitable thing about you. . . . llie precision and purity of every stroke arc prodigious!" And Tolstoy noted, "Since I hear no criticism, only compliments, alxmt Master and Man, I am reminded of the anecdote of the preacher who, surprised by a storm of applause at the end of one of his sentences, stopped short and asked, 'Have I said something wrong?' My story is no good. I should like to write an anonymous review of it." To the young writer Ivan Bunin, who came to see him about this time, he reiterated his aversion for his latest work:
"It's unspeakable! It's so bad that 1 am ashamed to show myself in the street."
Then, referring to the recent death of Vanichka, he exclaimed:
"Yes, he was a delightful, wonderful little boy. But what does it mean to say he is dead? 'I"here is no death; lie is not dead because we love him, because he is giving us life."
Bunin was deeply impressed; he noted that at that time the master's face was "gaunt, his complexion dark, his features severe, as though cast in bronze." After a brief conversation, the two men went out into the night together. A sharp wind stung their faccs and fluttered the flame in the lamps. They walked diagonally across the snow-covered Virgins' Field. Bunin could hardly keep pace with the old man, who had broken into a run and was leaping the ditches and repeating in a jerky, savage voice, "There is no death! There is no death!"-4
A few days later, reading that his colleague Leskov, who died in the same month as Vanichka, had left a literary testament, he decided he would also make a will. In this document, dated March 27, 1895, he began by stating that he wished to be buried in a cheap coffin, without flowers or wreaths and without speeches or announcements in the newspapers. lie left his unpublished papers to Sonya and Chertkov, both deeply devoted to his work, to sort and classify together. His daughters, Tanya and Masha, were not to have any part in this work. Still less his sons; although they loved him, their views were too far removed from his. The faithful Strakhov, on the contrary, was to be allowed to collaborate with Sonya and Chertkov if any help were required. Tolstoy also asked that the private diaries he had kept before his marriage be destroyed, except for the few pages that were "worthy of preservation," and that everything that might cause embarrassment in the later notebooks be deleted. "Besides," he added, "Chertkov has
promised to do this while I am alive. In view of his great and utterly undeserved affection for me and his unique moral intuition, I am certain he will acquit himself irreproachably of this task."
How could lie fail to understand, writing those lines, what an affront he was inflicting upon his wife by allowing an outsider to decide what should and should not be published among all the things he had written on the subject of his marriage? How could he fail to foresee the dreadful struggle that would ensue between wife and disciple, each bent on securing possession of the master's private manuscripts? With the boundless naivete of the man of letters, he must have imagined that the posthumous labor he was commissioning them to perform would lead them to a reconciliation rather than discord. However, upon reflection, he returned to his original idea: "No, let my private diaries stay as they are. That way, at least, it may be seen that in spite of the degradation and shamelessness of my youth, God had not forsaken me and that—late in life, it is true; on the very threshold of old age—I did begin to understand him a little, and to love him." He also urged his heirs to relinquish their rights to his early works, but without making this an absolute order. There followed some lofty considerations on man's relations with God: "Do not use the soul to preserve and cultivate the physical being, but use the physical being to preserve and cultivate the soul." "To live for God means to dedicate one's life to people's happiness." The entry concluded abruptly on a different note: "It is one o'clock, I am going to dinner."