lie slept well and felt strong enough next day to look out at the countryside. When they came into Kharkov he was surprised to see an excited crowd thronging the platform, composed almost exclusively of students. IIow had they heard of his departure for the Crimea? Feverish acclamations rose up to him as he cowered in the car, alarmed and unhappy, and muttered, "Oh, my God! . . . Why? That is all superfluous!" Nevertheless, he was forced to receive one delegation after another, and reply to the compliments of the overexcited young people. Then the crowd demanded that he show himself at the window.
"He can't. He's ill," said Sonya.
"Just for one minute, for heaven's sake! Let him only show himself!"
As the train was about to pull away, Tolstoy came to the window. Every head was bared.
"Hurrah, Tolstoy! Leo Nikolaycvich! Good health! Bon voyage!"12
The train moved away and the students came running after it. Their ranks soon thinned, and the last of them disappeared, waving their arms, in clouds of smoke. Tolstoy, worn out, blew his nose, lay down and had another attack of fever.
At Sevastopol, fortunately, the public had not been told the day of his arrival, so there were only a few wild-eyed ladies at the station, who had been relaying each other for forty-eight hours, to welcome him with shrill wails and fluttering handkerchiefs. He rested there for a day, toured the city in a coach, dragged himself, groaning and wheezing, to the 4th Bastion where, as a l>oy, he had fired on the enemy, and went back to the hotel, his head burning with memories.
The next day two heavy coaches, each drawn by four horses, carried Tolstoy and the rest of the party toward Gaspra. The narrow road zigzagged along the rockface. At every turn the changing landscape drew cries of admiration from Sasha. Tatar villages with smoking chim-
neys, exuding a strong smell of kizyak and tallow, men in round sheepskin caps, veiled women with lacquered nails, forests, rushing streams, promontories and, suddenly, through a gap in the foliage, the sea.
Toward evening the coaches entered a dream garden and rolled along a flower-bordered drive. A huge castle in the Scottish manner, flanked by twin towers, stood waist-deep in wistaria. Behind, the rocky walls of Mount Ai-Petri, and before, an esplanade of roses, statues, copses, marble benches and a fountain splashing into a pool full of fish.
Countess Panin's servants were lined up before the door, and the German steward held out the traditional bread and salt of hospitality to the travelers. Tolstoy looked long and disapprovingly at the marble staircase, the carved doors, high frescoed ceilings, precious furniture and dark paintings with crazed varnish surfaces. His daughters were dismayed by so much luxury. But all was forgiven and forgotten when they reached the floor above and stood on a terrace looking out to sea. Beyond the lawns planted with cypress, walnut and rose laurel, sparkling waves reflected the transparent blue of the sky. Trellises loaded with ripe grapes stretched out beneath the veranda. The air was warm, fragrant, sweet. Unfamiliar birds called back and forth to each other, before going to sleep in the trees.
Stimulated by the change of air, Tolstoy promptly recovered. At the end of two weeks, he hired horses and went out a few times with his daughter Sasha into the surrounding countryside. He also resumed work on an essay he had started, entitled What Is Religion?, began writing his diary again, turned out dozens of letters to catch up with his correspondence, and began to receive callers, some with joy and others with annoyed reluctance. In the first category were a group of Russian authors of the younger generation: Balmont, Korolenko, Chekhov, Gorky; in the second, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, uncle of the tsar.
The grand duke's estate lay not far from Gaspra; it was guarded by sentinels. He came to pay a neighborly call, strolled through the garden with the sworn enemy of the monarchy, disarmed him by his simplicity and even told him to come to him if he had any trouble with the local authorities. "I am like the measles, I'm an outcast," Tolstoy told him. "I may make trouble for you; they'll be suspicious of you and criticize you for being seen with a man who is politically compromising."13 Tn spite of this warning the grand duke—who, although a traditionalist, bemoaned the fact that the tsar was so badly counseled—remained friendly with Tolstoy. And the author took advantage of this to ask him, as early as January 1902, to give a letter to the emperor which could, he believed, help to save Russia. The grand duke passed on the letter
and informed Tolstoy that Nicholas II had promised to read it himself and not show it to any of his ministers. "You see," he concluded, "how good our sovereign is, how sensitive to the sufferings of others; all the harm is done by his associates."
In his letter to the tsar, Tolstoy exhorted him to give the nation its freedom, in order to avert a civil war. "Autocracy," lie wrote with breathtaking audacity, "is a superannuated form of government that may suit the needs of a Central African tribe, remote from the rest of the world, but not those of the Russian people, who are increasingly assimilating the culture of the rest of the world. That is why it is impossible to maintain this form of government, and the orthodoxy that is attached to it, except by violence, or, in other words, by the methods being used today—by doubling the size of the Guards, by administrative expulsions, executions, religious persecutions, prohibitions of books and periodicals and all bad and brutal measures in general." llien, after summarizing the errors of the latest government, from "the exactions in Finland" to the "vodka monopoly," not forgetting "the restriction of provincial autonomy," lie observed: "You could not have perfomied these acts had you not been pursuing, on the ill-considered advice of your counselors, an impossible goaclass="underline" not merely to halt the progress of the Russian people, but to drive it back to a completely retrograde, even more primitive condition."
There was, of coursc, no reply to this letter. But additional spies appeared around the house. Whenever Tolstoy set foot outside the grounds a shadow fell into step behind him. The comings and goings of his family were also under observation. Setting off for a walk, young Sasha often amused herself by "shaking" the spy assigned to follow her.
Police surveillance did not prevent the master's friends from calling upon him often. One of those he was most glad to sec was Anton Chekhov. After a long bachelorhood, Chekhov had just married a young and charming actress, Olga Knipper. But his health was too poor to permit him to take part in the busy whirl of his wife's life, so he had withdrawn to the Crimea to conserve his failing strength in the sun. Consumed by tuberculosis, he looked upon men and things with the equanimity of one who knows he must soon part from them.f He had seen Tolstoy several times before, at Yasnaya Polyana and in Moscow, and had never swerved from his skepticism of the Tolstoyan philosophy. Everything he had learned of life had convinced him that it was not by "putting on bark shoes" and "going to sleep on the stove next to the laborer" that one would save the people from their moral and physi-
t He died three years later, on July 2, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany.
cal indigence, but by building more schools, hospitals, means of communication, by raising their educational level and giving them important work to do in the State. But although he opposed the doctrines of his illustrious colleague, he respected the nobility of his purpose and his talent. At Gaspra his fondness for Tolstoy increased enormously, when he saw how the old man had aged. "His worst disease is age, which has now infected him completely,"14 he wrote to Maxim Gorky. And to his wife, "If—God forbid!—what I fear should happen, I'll notify you by telegram. But I would call him 'grandfather' in the text, otherwise I don't think it would reach you."15 The year before, he had expressed his filial affection for the great man in a letter to Menshikov: "I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. It would leave a great void in my life. In the first place, I have loved no man as I have him. ... In the second place, when there is a Tolstoy in the world of literature, it bccomcs a fine and easy thing to be a man of letters. And even if one knows one has done nothing and is still doing nothing, it is not too terrible because Tolstoy is creating for us all, and his work justifies all the hope and faith we put in literature. In the third place, Tolstoy's position is solid, his authority is immense, and as long as he is alive literary bad taste—pretentious and sentimental vulgarity, and all the frustrated little egos—will remain out of sight, hidden in the shadows. His domination alone can raise the different literary currents and trends to any height. Without him, there would be only a flock without a shepherd."16