After trying his hand at a few vague administrative jobs, Sergey had settled on his share of the estate in 1891. He was a gruff, tenderhearted, solitary man, and his marriage was not a success. Although a son had been born, he wras already contemplating divorce. Ilya wras also living a retired and idle existence on his land, and he, too, did not get along with his wife, by whom he had had several children. But while Sergey gave vent to his emotions at the piano, Ilya consolcd himself with the bottle. Looking at him, Tolstoy's pain became all the sharper because this "muzhik" with the gray eyes, shapeless nose and broad shoulders resembled him so closely. Riding side by side on their horses, they toured the most destitute villages of the district. On several occasions the police tried to prevent them from opening relief kitchens. They had to telegraph to the minister of the interior for permission to feed people who were starving.
One day Tolstoy wanted to revisit Spasskoye, Ivan Turgenev's home, which was only seven miles away from Ilya's. As he went through the abandoned grounds, he recalled the elegant old author with the white beard and woman's voice, with whom he had quarreled so bitterly and whose importance he now appreciated more fully. But he did not grieve long over this ghost at his heels: the forest was so beautiful and calm in the light of the setting sun that it positively beckoned one to eternal rest. He wrote to Sonya, "Cool grass underfoot, stars in the sky, the perfume of flowering laburnum and limp birch leaves, trills of the nightingales, buzzing of beetles, the cry of the cuckoo, the solitude, the easy movement of the horse beneath me and a sensation of physical and moral health. As always, I thought of death. It seemed clear to me that everything would be just as good—although in another way—on the other side, and I understood why the Jews imagine paradise in the form of a garden."20
On his return to Yasnaya Polyana, already bitterly disappointed by Sergey and Ilya, his two older sons, Tolstoy ran afoul of the third, Leo, the high-strung intellectual who suffered from being only the pale copy of a great father, and who also wanted to write. At every opportunity he openly opposed his father in the press, but thus far his undistinguished articles had attracted little attention.
Now, however, he had written a novel, entitled The Prelude of Chopin, no more nor less than an insolent retort to The Kreutzer Sonata. Was it Leo's recent marriage to Miss Wcstcrlund that had given him the impudence to defend marriage after his father had condemned it? Did he pretend to balance his insignificant personal experience of married life against that of the patriarch of Yasnaya Polyana? And he was proposing to publish this balderdash! At the risk of making the author of his days look ridiculous! It was one tiling to preach Christian meekness, indiffercncc to the gossip of the world and respect for the opinions of one's fellow man; but there were some forms of attack, com ing from a son, that were not to be tolerated. Stung in both his paternal dignity and his author's pride, Tolstoy fumed with rage. Some very strong words were exchanged between the two Leos. On the evening of June 22 the father wrote in his diary: "Leo spoke to me of his novel. I told him in no uncertain terms that what he had done was not only extremely ill-bred (his favorite expression) but also stupid and devoid of talent!" Disregarding threats and pleas, Leo decided to publish his prose, and two years later, he did so. But The Prelude of Chopin sank without a ripple.
At the end of the year, however, the much-maligned Sergey gave proof of unexpected devotion when he agreed to accompany the Dukhobors to Canada. On December 21,1898 lie embarked at Batum 011 the steamship Lake Superior, with two thousand sectarians. Two more shiploads had already left during the previous weeks, making a total of six thousand persons. The crossing took twenty-four days. Tolstoy could tell himself that this monumental migration had been made possible by him, through the collections he had organized and, above all, the money from Resurrection which he had contributed to the Dukhobors' fund. There was proof of the power of mind over matter: one little idea was enough to feed the masses and stoke the engines of steamships; he was touched. And he confessed in his diary, "Sergey is very close to me, becausc he is trying and because he has feeling."
If only his two younger sons would make an effort to imitate their brother. But Andrcy and Michael were strangers to their father's world. Besides, he had to admit that he neither understood nor loved them. Andrey even claimed that during one entire year his father had
spoken to him only once, and then to say, "Go home." Both, after halfhearted and fitful studies, had joined the army. Indolent and spendthrift amateurs of the gypsies, they turned up at Yasnaya Polyana only to demand money from their mother. To the astonishment of all, however, Andrcy suddenly decided to settle down and, on January 8, 1899, married Countess Olga Dietrich, Chcrtkov's sister-in-law. After serving as a volunteer in Sumsky's regiment, Michael married a Miss Glebov in 1901.
Unions and separations, flirtations and quarrels, presentations of fiancees and arrivals of daughters-in-law, births; Tolstoy took increasingly little interest in all this flurry. Since his double disappointment over Tanya's marriage to Sukhotin and Masha's marriage to Olwlensky, he expected nothing more from his daughters. The first was living the life of a provincial dame at Kochcty, her husband's estate; the second had moved to Pirogovo with her husband. Onetime priestesses of the Tolstoyan cult, they were now slaving to satisfy the whims of their imbecilic spouses. He was still glad to sec them, however; but they no longer belonged to him, there were impure smells clinging to them. After he visited Kochety, Tanya wrote in her diary, "I am ashamed to have let Papa down, yet I cannot feel guilty about it. We did not have much serious conversation; I was afraid he would tell me that my marriage was a disappointment to him."21 And he: "Tanya's frivolity disturbs me; she has embarked upon a purely selfish love. I hope she will come back."22
Wrapped up in his grief at the loss of his two older daughters, he paid little attention to the youngest, Alexandra, aged fifteen, who never took her eyes off him and drank his every word. Sensitive, willful and jealous, she had felt nothing but contempt for her mother ever since she had watched her sighing over Tanayev at the piano, and she wanted to become closer to her father. For her, he was an awesome and omniscient god, the master of all Russia, the only writer in the world. One day- just before Palm Sunday—Sonya came to her husband in his study and announced, her eyes sparkling with anger, that Sasha (Alexandra) refused to go to church. Tolstoy summoned his daughter. Alone with her, looking deep into her eyes, he asked why she had made such a decision.
"Because it's all lies!" cried Sasha between her sobs. "It is all false! I can't!"
A breath of fresh air wafted through the old warrior's heart. Just when he believed he had been abandoned by his entire family, here he was witnessing the birth of a new disciple, under his own roof. The least likely, the most delightful of disciples! A little girl with a stubborn forehead and braids, wearing a stiff skirt over her starched Sunday petticoats. "My father's face softened," Alexandra Tolstoy later wrote. "His eyes became gentle and loving."
"Go to church anyway, today," he said.
And he leaned over to kiss her. With pride and joy she bathed in the perfume of his harsh gray beard. From that day forward, she felt bound to her father by a loving conspiracy, and her sole desire was to take her mother's place at his side, her mother who— that she was sure of!—did not understand him.
2. Excommunication; the Crimea
After a year's residence under surveillance in the government of Kur- land, Biryukov was allowed to go to Switzerland. As soon as he reached Geneva he arranged with Chertkov, who was living in London, to found a Tolstoyan review, Free Thought. All the master's works that were forbidden by the ccnsor in Russia were brought across the frontier, where his two disciples saw to their translation and publication. He had virtually ccascd to write for anyone else. Orchestrated by them, his fame was assuming ecumenical proportions. The figure of the noble old man with the white beard, suffering, thoughtful countenance and knotted limbs, dressed in a linen blouse and Turkish trousers stuffed into soft leather boots, spread throughout the world in cheap picture-books. And in the opening days of the century he began, for the first time, to feel the weight of his years. lie still rode his horse, hiked for miles cross-country and did the work of ten in his study, but he seldom touched his bicycle any more, played hardly any tennis and often complained of pains in the stomach. He had even been forced, reluctantly, to give up gymnastics. And yet it seemed to him that as his strength waned, his soul only rose higher. "The moral progress of mankind is due to the aged," he wrote in his diary. 'The old grow better and wiser." And, "I am moved to tears by nature: the meadows, woods, wheat fields, the plowed earth, the hay. I tell myself: 'Am I living through my last summer?' If I am, so much the better."