One evening, Gorky was taken aback by an abrupt question:
"Why don't you believe in God?"
"I have no faith."
"That's not true; by nature you are a believer, you cannot live without God. Soon you will feel it. If you don't believe, it's out of stul> bornness and spite, because the world isn't the way you would like it to be. Also, sometimes people do not believe because they don't dare. That happens to the young: they worship some woman but they don't want to let her see it, afraid she won't understand; they have no courage. Faith, like love, demands courage, boldness. You must tell yourself, 'I believe,' and everything will be all right."
This conversation took place in Tolstoy's study. Seated on the sofa with his legs folded under him, he smiled all-knowingly, blinked, ancl added after a short pause, one finger raised in the air: "You can't avoid that question by saying nothing."
"And I," wrote Gorky, "who do not believe in God, I looked at him, 1 don't know why, with a great deal of circumspection and a little fear, too; I looked at him ancl I thought, This man is like God.'"
He also wrote:
'This little man's limbs had grown knotted together with I don't know what deep, powerful roots of the earth. . . .He made one think of some very ancient personage, the owner of everything around him— owner and creator—returning after a hundred years' absence to the domain he had built. He strides along the roads and paths with the quick
step of a connoisseur of the earth; not one pebble, not one pansy escapes his penetrating eyes that look everywhere, measure, weigh, compare."
The "old wizard" was unable to convert Gorky to Christianity, just as Gorky was unable to convert him to Marxism. As early as 1900 Gorky wrote to Chekhov: "Leo Tolstoy docs not love men; no, he does not love them. The truth is that he judges them, cruelly and too severely. I do not like his idea of God. Is that a God? It is a part of Count Leo Tolstoy and not God, this God without whom men cannot live. lie says he is an anarchist. To some extent, yes. But although he destroys some regulations, he dictates others in their place, no less harsh and burdensome for men. That is not anarchism, it is the authoritarianism of a provincial governor."
Later, he employed more vehement terms in a letter to Korolenko:
"No man deserves more to be called a genius, no man is more complex, more contradictory, more admirable than he in all tilings, yes, in all tilings, in some broad and undcfinable way. ... He is a man who envelops all men, a man-mankind. But I have always been repelled by his obstinate, despotic drive to transform the life of Count Leo Nikola- yevich Tolstoy into the life of Our Father the Blessed Boyar Leo. You know, he spent a long time preparing to 'suffer.' ... He wanted to suffer, not only in order to measure his willpower, but with the manifest, despotic—I repeat the word—intention of increasing the authority of his doctrine, rendering it irresistible, dazzling the world with his pain, forcing—can you imagine, forcing!—people to share his ideas. . . . All his life he has hated death, all his life the 'horror of Arzamas' has been quivering inside him. Living, trembling antennae reach out to him from China, India, America, everywhere. His soul belongs to all, forever! Why should not nature make an exception to the rule, by giving him, him alone, physical immortality, yes, why not?"
Gorky returned to this impassioned portrait later, and elaborated upon it even further in a letter to Vengerov:21
"Count Leo Tolstoy is an artist of genius, perhaps our Shakespeare. But although I admire him, I do not like him. He is not a sincere person; he is exaggeratedly sclf-preoccupied, he sees nothing and knows nothing outside himself. His humility is hypocritical and his desire to suffer repellent! Usually, such a desire is a symptom of a sick and perverted mind but in his ease it is a great pride, wanting to be imprisoned solely in order to increase his authority. He lowers himself in my eyes, by his fear of death and his pitiful flirtation with it; as a rabid individualist, it gives him a sort of illusion of immortality to consolidate his authority. . . . What comic greed! Exactly, comic! For more than
twenty years this bell has been tolling a paean from the stecpletop that is contrary to my beliefs in every respect; for more than twenty years this old man has been talking of nothing but transforming young and lovely Russia into a province of China and young and gifted Russians into slaves. No, that man is a stranger to me, in spite of his very great beauty."
However, at the first sign of faltering in the dreadful old wizard, Gorky was panic-stricken. Even his detractors could not do without him. His health suddenly took a turn for the worse in January 1902; pneumonia set in; his temperature soared; his heart was reacting badly; doctors came running from St. Petersburg and Moscow to assist the local practitioners; the entire family was alerted and closed its ranks around his bed.
Reinstated in her role as chief nurse, Sonya spent every night by her husband's side until four, when she was relieved by Tanya and Sasha. Masha was on duty during the day. As soon as one center of infection died out, another would flare up. For weeks, gaunt, livid and gasping, Tolstoy wrestled with death. Every breath tore his lungs. He could not remain prone without suffocating, and cushions were placed behind his neck and shoulders to raise the upper half of his body. Sasha performed his toilette. She wrapped cotton around the comb before drawing it through her patient's hair—white hair, very fine, curling at his neck "like a baby's." Then she brushed out his beard, which was long, curling and tangled; at the smallest tug, he moaned in pain. But a wan smile flitted across his lips when the girl soaped his hands and washed his face and neck with a sponge and dried him with a towel soaked in cologne water.
In moments of respite, he summoned all his strength and dictated his thoughts and letters to Masha in a voice that was scarcely audible. lie was completely unmoved when he learned that the Nobel Prize, for which his name had been proposed, had gone to Sully Prudhomme. After all, in What Is Art? he himself had ranked Sully Prudhomme among the foremost poets of France. Swedish authors wrote to express their regret at this unjust decision. Between two bouts of fever, he replied, on January 22, 1902, in French:
"I was very pleased to learn that the Nobel Prize was not given to me. First, becausc it spared me the great problem of disposing of the money, which, like all money, can lead only to evil, in my view; and second, bccause it has given me the honor and great pleasure of receiving such expressions of sympathy from so many highly esteemed although unknown persons."
Once again the government busied itself with preparations for Tol-
stoy's death. Should obituary notices 1x5 allowed or forbidden? Ilow- was the body to be convey ed to Yasnaya Polyana without any danger of public demonstration? Should booksellers be allowed to display photographs of the dead author? 'l'he Holy Synod, anxious to announce that the outcast had recanted, dispatched a priest to Gaspra, who solicited permission to speak to the dying man. Informed of this initiative by his son Sergey, Tolstoy murmured: