In a postscript he entreated her to awaken from her "sleepwalking" state and resume "a normal life." It must have seemed to Sonya that by taking her friendship with Tanayev so seriously, her Lyovochka was displaying a state of mental derangement at least as acute as the one he alleged her to be suffering from. Recriminations, explanations and exhortations between the two continued by letter and—for a novelty! —by telephone.
Tanayev, however, was oblivious to the upheaval he had caused in the master's life. Vague, good-humored and naive, he thought of Sonya as an elderly, respectable lady whose affection flattered him. She invited him to spend a few days at Yasnaya Polyana again that summer, and he ingenuously accepted, certain that he would be welcomed by all. When Sonya, with an air of false detachment, announced this news
at table Tolstoy told her in no uncertain terms that if the musician set foot in the house again he, Tolstoy, would leave it forever. She took this for a passing fit of pique and tried to argue with him, but after five sleepless nights and five days of deadlock he went to his brother Sergey's home to find some peace, and from there, on May 18, 1897, he wrote a furious and desperate letter to Sonya:
"I am disgusted to sec you taking up with Tanayev again. I cannot go on living with you in these conditions; I am shortening and poisoning my existence. ... If you cannot put an end to this situation, let us separate."
During the night he went back to his pen, to state the four solutions he saw to their conjugal plight:
"1. The best is for you to break off all relations with him, not gradually but all at once, and never mind what he may think, in order to release us once and for all from the nightmare that has been tormenting us for a whole year. No meetings, no letters, no portraits, no mushroom- gatherings. 2. Another solution is for me to go abroad, after separating entirely from you, and each of us would live his own life. 3. The third solution is, in order to break with Tanayev, for us both to go abroad and remain there as long as necessary for you to be cured of the cause of your torment. 4. The fourth and most terrible, which I cannot envisage without a shudder, is for us to try to make ourselves believe that things will get better by themselves, that there is nothing irremediable in this, and go on living as we have done the past year."
The fourth solution was the one he ultimately adopted. On May 25, weary, sick at heart and red-eyed, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana. Betrayed and not betrayed, unable to break away and unable to accept, he, the giant, felt "bound to earth by the tiny fine hairs of Lilliputians." Sonya was touched by him, but more concerned about how he would receive Tanayev. "Am I guilty?" she wrote on June 2, 1897. "I do not know. When I first grew friendly with Tanayev I thought it would be pleasant for me to have a friend like him in my old age, calm, kind, gifted." And the next day, "The morbid jealousy displayed by Leo Nikolayevich when he heard that Tanayev was coming has hurt me deeply and filled me with dread."
At last Tanayev appeared, chubby and amiable, drummed a few songs with his little sausage-fingers, and was tactful enough to go away again forty-eight hours later, leaving a trail of music and gratitude behind him in Sonya's heart: "Sergey Ivanovich [Tanayev] left today, my husband is calm and cheerful again. I am calm, too, because I have seen Tanayev. If my husband insists that I have nothing more to do with Sergey Ivanovich, it is only because he is suffering. But it would be
torture for me. I feel so little guilt and such a peaceful joy in these pure and simple relations with someone else that I could no more give them up than I could prevent myself from seeing, breathing or thinking."
With increasingly morbid pleasure, she associated her little dead boy with the living musician. In her dreams she saw Vanichka sitting on Tanayev's knee. Or they would be standing side by side holding out their arms to her in questioning supplication. She often went off by herself under the grape arbor to talk to the dead child, tell him her troubles and ask his advice. "I asked Vanichka whether my feelings for Sergey Ivanovich [Tanayev] were impure," she wrote on June 5, 1897. "Today, Vanichka tried to draw me away from Sergey Ivanovich, probably out of compassion for his father. And yet, I know my child cannot blame me and does not want to dq^rivc ine of Sergey Ivanovich, because he sent him to me in the first place."
A month later, yielding to her obsession, she invited Tanayev back to Yasnaya Polyana without consulting anyone. Her dread at the thought of her family's scathing disapproval only added to the delight with which she anticipated the encounter: "Fearing my husband's anger, I have not told him yet. Could he be jealous again? If Sergey Ivanovich were to imagine such a thing, he would be so shockcd! As for me, I cannot hide my joy at the thought of playing music again and having someone pleasant and cheerful to converse with."18
The next day Michael (age seventeen), who knew of Tanayev's impending arrival, made a reference to it at the dinner table in front of his father. Tolstoy scovvlcd and snapped, "First I've heard of it!"
Tanayev remained at Yasnaya Polyana from July 5 to 13. Again there was a festival of music. Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert joined forces to send Sonya into a swoon: "His playing tears me asunder. I was inwardly shaken with sobs as I listened to the Polonaise." She photographed her idol from ever)' conceivable angle and developed the plates herself while Lyovochka, seething, climbed back onto his bicycle and pedaled grimly off across-country to work off his anger. It ended, however, without any major explosion, and Sonya concluded that her husband had resigned himself. But what she did not know was that on July 8 he had again decided to run away from home and had written her a farewell letter. He did not go, but neither did he tear up the letter. In it, he justified his decision by his desire to live in accordance with his principles, yet it could not have been plainer that it was his wife's behavior that had actually driven him to such a state:
"My dear Sonya, the inconsistency between my life and my beliefs has long been tonnenting me. And I have been unable to compel you
to change a way of life and habits for which I myself am responsible. Nor could I leave you before, fearing to deprive my children of what little influence I may have had upon them in their youth and not wanting to wound you. But now I am equally unable to go on as I have done these past sixteen years, cither struggling and irritating you all or succumbing in turn to the temptations that surround me and that I have ultimately grown used to. Therefore, I have now decided to do what I have been wanting to do for some time: leave. . . . The chief reason is this: just as the Hindus retire to the forest at the age of sixty, so any- elderly religious man hopes to devote the last years of his life to God and not to pleasantries, punning, gossip and tennis matches; and so I, on the eve of my seventieth year, aspire with all my heart and soul to peace and solitude and, if not a perfect harmony between my life and conscience, at least something other than this howling clash between them. ... I ask you all to forgive me, should you be hurt by my decision; but you, Sonya, you above all, accept my going, do not come looking for me, do not feel resentment toward me, do not condemn me. The fact that I am leaving you does not mean I am not satisfied with you. I know that you literally could not, and cannot, see and feel as I do, and that it is impossible for you to change your way of life and make sacrifices for a cause that means nothing to you. I accordingly do not blame you. On the contrary, I think back with gratitude over our thirty-five years together, especially during the first period when you performed what you considered to be your duty in life with the maternal self-denial and energy that abound in you. You have given us, the world and myself, everything you were able to give, a great deal of love and maternal devotion, and you are to be revered for that. But in the later phases of our life together, the past fifteen years, we have drawn apart from each other. I do not believe it is my fault, for I know that I did not change cither for my personal pleasure or for fame and glory, but because I could not do otherwise. Nor can I hold it against you that you did not follow me; I think of you; I remember and always shall remember what you gave me with love. Farewell, dear Sonya."