"will be far more enviable than that of Pobyedonostscv and company." She confided to her friend Mrs. Annenkov: "I wept a great deal, for I regard the men who have just been banished as our best and most devoted friends, and it is very hard for us to be separated from them." At this time she was still in the throes of her platonic infatuation with Tanayev; her husband, Chertkov, the children, the music, all swam together more or less harmoniously in her mind. But Tolstoy was grateful to her for siding with him on behalf of the Dukhobors.
Moreover, throughout his stay in the capital, he felt that public opinion was on his side. In the street, young people recognized him from his portraits, spoke to him, told him how they admired him; Koni's neighbors broke off in the middle of a party and came out to watch the great, taciturn writer go by in his muzhik dress; the day he left, he was acclaimed by a crowd at the station and had to come to the doorway of his compartment to bow, like a politician or an actor. The only person to give him a cold shoulder in Petersburg was his babushka Alexandra. lie could not resist telling her all the ill he thought of the tsar and his clique, any more than she could resist upbraiding him for his religious waywardness. They parted unreconciled. Tolstoy found her 'lifeless, utterly lacking in kindliness, pitiful" and "possessed of boundless pride."3 And she wrote, "It is sad to say, but he has no need of Him who is the onlv Savior. How is one to understand the merits and inconsistencies of this remarkable and mystifying character? On the one hand, love of truth, love of mankind, love of God and of the Master whose glory he will not or cannot admit; and on the other, pride, obscurity, lack of faith, the abyss."
After his Petersburg experiment, Tolstoy went through a period of discouragement and doubt. It had become clear to him that the government was cunningly contriving to exempt him from all punishment and prosecuting only his partisans. That was the best way to give him a guilty conscicncc and discredit him in the eyes of the public. They said—and it was probably true!—that when a minister suggested that Tolstoy should be exiled, the new tsar, Nicholas II, had taken the same line as his father: "I do not intend to add a martyr's crown to his glory." Frustrated, Tolstoy wrote to Gastcv, one of his followers, "You probably know that Chertkov and Biryukov have been sent into exile. That is all very well and good. The sad thing is that they won't lay a finger on me. They (the people in authority) are defeating their own purpose, however, for by leaving me free to speak the truth, they are compelling me to speak it. And I have the impression that much remains to be said."*
In his eagerness to compromise himself irretrievably, he seized every opportunity to defend his "dear brothers suffering for the doctrine of Christ." All the little religious sects being persecuted by Pobyedonos- tsev had no more loyal ally than he. When, on police order, the children of the Molokhans were removed from their parents' custody under pretext that they were not taught to respect the official Orthodoxy, he wrote to the tsar in protest:
"Majesty, for the love of God make an effort and, instead of avoiding the matter and referring it to commissions and committees, decide, without asking anyone's advice, you yourself, acting on your own initiative, that these religious persecutions, which arc causing the shame of Russia, must cease; the exiles must be sent back to their homes, the prisoners released, the children returned to their parents, and, above all, the whole body of administrative laws and regulations be abolished, as they are so complicated and obscure that they are just so many pretexts for illegality."
The Molokhans, who were supposed to send this letter to the emperor, were alarmed by its violence and destroyed it instead. But Tolstoy overrode their fears and rewrote it, and the second copy was handed to Nicholas II by Alexander Olsufyev,* a member of the emperor's military staff. Tolstoy never heard of it again. On September 19, 1897 he wrote another. To no avail. Four months later he instructed his daughter Tanya, who was not married at the time, to make another attempt. On January 27, 1898 she was granted an audience with Pobyc- donostsev and dutifully described the sufferings of the Molokhan parents who had been separated from their children. "Yes, yes, I know," muttered Pobyedonostsev. "The bishop of Samara has gone too far. I shall write to the governor right away." lie was as good as his word. The Molokhan children were returned to their families, and Tolstoy was so flabbergasted that he forgot to rejoice.
Besides, other injustices were already claiming his attention. Some of his friends were urging him to join a group of Russian liberals who were signing a manifesto soliciting a reprieve for the French officer Dreyfus, charged with high treason. Tolstoy became angry. Was Dreyfus a man of the people, a muzhik, a sectarian? No; he was an officer, that is, one of the worst possible sort. Guilty or not, he was unworthy of consideration. "It would be a strange thing that we Russians should take up the defense of Dreyfus, an utterly undistinguished man, when so many exceptional ones have been hanged, deported or imprisoned here at home,"0 he exclaimed.
lie was keenly interested, though, when he heard from a supposedly
•The brother of Adam Olsufycv, whom Tolstoy often visited in the country.
well-informed source that the recently founded Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden was considering him for the award. The grant was rumored to amount to one hundred thousand rubles.t Seizing the opportunity, Tolstoy sent a letter to the director of the Swedish newspaper Stockholm Dagbladet, suggesting that the sum be given to the Dukhobors, who had contributed far more than he to the cause of peace by refusing to bear arms. His advice was not followed, and indeed, the Swedish Academy seemed to be in no hurry to choose its first prizewinner. Then Tolstoy, with his old propagandists zeal, multiplied his appeals to public charity, launched a campaign in the foreign press, wrote personal letters to the highest officials in the Caucasus and Siberia exhorting them to give the sectarians more humane treatment, and sent his son Sergey to England to make contact with a relief committee there.
However much sympathy Sonya may have had for the Dukhobors, she was terrified by the enormous risks Lyovochka was taking by defending them. Would he not be deported too, along with his wife and children, to teach him a lesson for provoking the tsar? Unless the dreaded autocrats had some worse fate in store for him! He had recently been receiving anonymous threatening letters, "because he was offending Our Lord Jesus Christ and setting himself up as an adversary of the tsar and the fatherland." Some of them even mentioned a date: the beginning of 1898. If he had not mended his ways by then, he would be executed. "More letters threatening my life," he wrote on December 28, 1897. "I am sorry that there are people who hate mc, but I am scarcely interested and still less concerned."
There were no attempts upon his life, but his mail soon began to bring criticism from friends as well as enemies, llie purest Tolstoyans were complaining that he had betrayed his principles by begging money from the rich to save the poor. He had been faced with a similar conflict when he joined the relief work for the peasants during the great famine, and he had settled it the same way, with the same sense of guilt: "Adopting this solution [giving aid to the unfortunate] means acting contrary to one's ideas," he wrote to Gastev, one of his fiercest critics. "But not adopting it means withholding the word and the deed that might relieve present suffering." He accused himself of "spinclcssncss" because he had yielded to pity. One week he wrote twelve personal letters to people who were known to have vast fortunes, and six more another week.® All the "moneybags" answered his appeal, some with