Tolstoy

This soft-spoken retort made no impression upon the addressee. "Everything he says is true, but cold," wrote Sonya in her diary. "My letter was written from the heart, it has gone around the world and moved people by its sincerity."¹⁰

Tolstoy was both touched and embarrassed by his wife's generous impulse. He thanked her for the ardor with which she defended him, but he would have preferred her to keep still and do nothing. For him, a woman lost her best quality the moment she left the sidelines: the incorrigible misogynist confided to his diary on March 19: "When religious feeling wanes in a society', it means that woman's power is waxing." And: "Women have only two emotions: love of their husband and love of their children, and, as consequences of these two, love of dress on account of the husband and love of money on account of the children. All the rest is artifice, imitation of men, tools for seduction, coquetry, fashion." He wrote to his daughter Masha, "Maman's letter to the metropolitan has had a very good effect upon her. Nothing is predictable in a woman. In man, thought precedes and determines action; but in woman (especially very feminine women), action determines thought."

His own reaction to the excommunication had been a feeling of deep content. This measure gave him an inexpensive martyrdom, and he deprecatingly told the callers who came to congratulate him that he took no interest in these absurd ecclesiastical rantings. However, after thinking it over for more than a month, he determined to reply to his judges, in order to silence the materialists and atheists who were over-

joyed at his falling-out with the Church and were already trying to claim him as their own. In a letter of April 4, 1901, he condemned the decree of the Iloly Synod as unlawful and slanderous, reaffirmed that the dogma of the Holy Trinity and Irninaculatc Conception were incomprehensible to him, disposed of the sacraments as "base, crude magic" and taxed the ecclesiastical hierarchy with deforming the word of Christ. Then he stated his own crcdo:

"I believe in God, whom I conceive of as the Spirit, Love and Principle of all things.

"I believe He is in me as I am in Him.

"I believe that the will of God was never more clearly expressed than in the doctrine of the Christ-Man; but to regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege . . .

"I believe that the intention of our individual lives is to augment the sum of love for Him.

"I believe that this added measure of love will secure daily increasing happiness for us in this life, and in the other, a felicity all the more perfect for our having better learned to love before.

"I believe that there is only one means of progressing in love: prayer. Not public prayer in temples, which was explicitly condemned by Christ (Matthew, 6:5-13), but prayer as he himself has taught us, solitary prayer, which consists in restoring and strengthening, within oneself, an awareness of the meaning of our life and a lielief that we must be ruled by the will of God."

As soon as it readied the public, this noble affirmation released a new- wave of fervor. A flood of typed and handwritten copics poured into the big cities. Even young Sasha, aided by a cousin, was secretly hcctograph- ing her father's credo. Alexis Suvorin, director of the New Times, noted: "We have two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which is the stronger? Nicholas II is powerless against Tolstoy and cannot make him tremble on his throne, whereas Tolstoy is incontcstably shaking the throne of Nicholas II and his whole dynasty. He is anathematized, the Synod publishes a decree against him. Tolstoy replies, and his reply circulates in handwritten copies and is published in the foreign press. Let anyone lift a finger against Tolstoy and the whole world will be up in arms and our administration will turn tail and run!"¹¹

At the beginning of summer, Tolstoy's enemies hoped he would soon relieve them of his unwclcomc presence without necessitating any police action: for some time he had been losing weight, suffering from rheumatism ancl pains in the stomach, complaining of hot flushes in his head. In June 1901 he suffered an acute attack of malaria. The family came running. The doctors were so alarmed that the minister of the

interior began flashing coded telegrams to ever)' provincial governor and chief of police instructing them to forbid all demonstrations in the event of the author's death.

He realized his situation, however, and contemplated the ordeal ahead with equanimity. "I am at a crossroads," he murmured to Sonya. "I would be just as glad to go forward [to death] as backward [to life]. . . . And yet, I still have so much to tell them!" Then, moved to tears by the devotion of his wife, who was nursing him like a baby: "Thank you, Sonya. Don't believe I am not grateful to you, or that I don't love you." She kissed his hands, told him it was a joy for her to take care of him, and rcproachcd herself for having inadvertently caused him so much pain. . . . Ten days later, on July 16 he began to feel better, smiled to see the glad faces around him, asked for his diary and ruthlessly penned: "Woman's chief talent is to guess the role that pleases every person and then to play that role." Now that he was out of danger, he regretted, for the future of his doctrine, that his martyrdom had not been more spectacular. "If one wants to be heard," he wrote the same day, "one must speak out from the top of Golgotha, affirm the truth by suffering and, better yet, by death." His daughter Masha also showed a sudden and intense concern for the future of Tolstoyism—the will her father had written in his diary in 1895, giving all his copyrights to the public, had never been made legal. There were three copies, kept by herself, Sergey and Chertkov. In order that his will might not be contested after his death she asked Tolstoy, without telling her mother, to sign her copy of the document. As was to be expectcd, Sonya soon discovered her daughter's action and, on August 28, a scene of unprecedented violence broke out between the two women. Disfigured by fury, Sonya screamed that Masha was nothing but a hypocrite and a Pharisee, that she had been quite capable, when the time came, of demanding her share of the estate in order to support her "sponger of a husband" and that she had no right to come playing the disinterested onlooker now. And she entreated Lyovochka to destroy the paper he had so rashly signed. His wife's screaming and sobbing upset him so that he began to have palpitations. Fearing to aggravate his condition, the two rivals calmed down. Masha gave the will to her mother, but warned her that if her father's provisions were not respected, she would send the exact text to the newspapers.

A week later, urged by his doctors, Tolstoy agreed to go to the Crimea to convalesce in the sun. The immensely wealthy Countess Panin, a friend of the family, offered the patient her magnificent villa at Gaspra. Sonya would accompany Lyovochka, as would his daughter Sasha, the Obolenskys, P. A. Boulanger—the "nice Tolstoyan"—Dr.

Bertenson, a court physician, and the pianist Coldenweiser. A half- dozen servants completed the retinue of the apostle of poverty. I It- was so feeble that he had to be lifted into the carriage.

The Tula station was eleven miles away. They started out at night, in driving rain, over muddy roads. The groom lighted the way with a kerosene lamp. Tolstoy, exhausted by the bumps and jolts, nearly lost consciousness at Tula. Sonya wondered whether it would not be better to turn back. But Boulanger, who worked for the railroad company, reassured everyone by showing them the magnificent private car he had reserved for the party. Each person had his own room and toilet; there was a kitchen, a dining room and a drawing room with a piano. Tolstoy was too weary to protest against such lordly splendor, and resigned himself.