Sonya sent for a priest, confessed and took communion. Pointless mimicry, of course, all that, and Tolstoy would have preferred her to die in the pure Tolstoyan faith, but one must not demand too much of a poor weak woman, whose religious upbringing was reasserting itself at the last moment. He generously noted in his diary: "Not only did I consent to this request, I helped her to carry it out. There are beings who cannot raise themselves to an abstract, purely spiritual communion with the principle of life. They need a cruder form."
But the surgeon was still hesitating: peritonitis had set in. After explaining the clanger, Professor Snegirev asked Tolstoy whether he gave his permission to operate notwithstanding. In a fresh burst of hatred for the medical profession, the old man refused. "But if we don't operate, she will diel" cried the surgeon. Tolstoy glared at him and growled: "Do as you please."12
Sincc Sonya's soul appeared to be saved, it little mattered to him whether her body was or not. If these fools were to heal her, with their scalpels and drugs, she might never regain her present exemplary spiritual attitude. Perhaps this was the ideal moment for her to leave the world. . . . His indignant sons stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then he seized his cherry stick and walked to the door, announcing that he was going to pray in the forest, and told them to ring the bell twice if the operation were a success and once if not. Then he changed his mind: "No; don't ring at all. I'll come back when I'm ready to!"ia 'Hie vigil began. Now and then, Sasha stole over to the bedroom door and, peering through a crack, saw the scoured floor, white-coated figures and cotton wadding in a basin, heard the clink of metal instru-
ments, inhaled the smell of ether, and went away, full of dread. Suddenly the door was thrown open and the surgeon appeared, sweating and red-faced; the nurse threw a blanket over his shoulders; he called for champagne, swallowed a few gulps, straightened himself and announced that all was well.
Sasha sped away to the forest. She found her father sitting in a clearing in the oaks, and called out:
"Papa! It's a success!"
"What a blessing! What a blessing!" he said.
"But," wrote Sasha, "what showed on his face was not joy, but great pain."
He did not follow his daughter back to the house, but stayed on alone in the clearing. Alive, his wife no longer interested him. He was in no hurry to see her again. For the moment, his only dealings were with God. He prayed and dreamed 011, to the munnur of the leaves. At last he went to see Sonya, who was regaining consciousness ancl whimpering with pain. He took one glance at her and hurried out of the room, horror-stricken:
"My God! What a dreadful thing!" he said. "Why can't they let people die in peace! A poor woman lashed to her bed with her stomach cut open and no pillow! It's torture!"14
That very evening, hiding in his study, he recorded his disappointment at the reprieve the doctors had granted to Sonya, who had been so beautifully prepared to meet her maker. "Sonya was operated on today," he wrote. 'They say it was a success. It grieves me to think of it. This morning she was spiritually very beautiful. What composure in the face of death!" Further 011: "In dving, Sonya reveals herself to us."15
The operation was indeed a success; the tumor was not malignant and Sonya quickly recovered. But it seemed to Tolstoy that her spiritual strength failed as her physical strength increased. Soon every trace of the gentle, happy woman on her deathbed had disappeared. The robust matron of sixty-two, round-cheeked, bright-eyed, eating with hearty appetite, once again bustled about the house scolding the servants and keeping accounts, playing the piano and sewing shirts. A few weeks after the operation, on October 10, 1906, a disheartened Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "Our life here is too tawdry to be borne; they amuse themselves, they pamper themselves, they go off here and there, they study this and that, they quarrel, they worry about things that arc no business of theirs; but they do not live bccause they have no duties. It is abominable! I!!"
The autumn rains and mud cut Yasnaya Polyana off from the world.
That year the Obolenskys were staying in the pavilion. One evening, coming in from a walk, Masha, who had a delicate constitution, complained of chills and headache. She had caught cold, and went to bed shivering with fever. The doctors diagnosed double pneumonia. In a few days, racked by fits of coughing, she had become unrecognizable. Her eyes were fixed and glittering, her cheeks on fire, her mouth dry and discolored, she could hardly lift her hand. Her pulse weakened. But she remained perfectly conscious.
When the doctors announced that they could not save her, Tolstoy seemed surprisingly resigned. As on the occasion of his wife's operation, lie stifled any impulse to sorrow, thinking of the joy in store for the dying woman. "Even though she is my best friend, the one I love best of all those around me," he wrote to Chertkov, "selfishly, I am not frightened or saddened by her death. . . . Only, forgetting rational reactions aside, I suffer and I am sorry for her because, at her age, she would undoubtedly have preferred to live. . . . Death has become so close to me lately that I 110 longer fear it, and it seems natural and necessary. It is not opposed to life but related to it, a continuation of it. And therefore although it is natural to fight death with one's instinct, one must not fight it with one's reason. Any reasoned, intelligent battle against death—such as that waged by medicine—is unfortunate and evil in itself."10
On November 26 it was clear that Masha would not live through the night. Her husband, father, mother and Sasha were gathered by her bedside. The room was dimly lighted, by a single shaded lamp. In the deep silence the young woman's breathing became more and more irregular. Conscious to the end, she opened her eyes, took Tolstoy's hand, held it to her chest and whispered, "I am dying." A little later her breath stopped and her features stiffened. It was over. She was thirty-five years old. Tolstoy left the room, shut himself into his study and opened his diary.
"November 27. It is one o'clock in the morning," he wrote. "Masha just died. Strangely enough, I felt no horror, fear or sense of anything out of the ordinary occurring, or even pity or affliction. That is, I thought I was required to produce some special feelings of tenderness and grief in myself, and I succccded; but in my heart of hearts, I was more at peace than if I had been witnessing some evil or unjust deed committed by someone else, or even more by myself. Yes, it is a physical event and therefore unimportant. My eyes never left her, all the time she was dying: amazingly calm. She was a human being reaching the highest point of her fulfillment, before it is my turn to do so. I watched this high point and rejoiced in it. But then it moved beyond
the area that is accessible to me (life); that is, it ceased to be visible to me. But I know it was still going on. Where? When? These are questions that torment our understanding here on earth, and yet they have no bearing on real life, which is outside spacc and time."
On the day of the funeral he followed the coffin all the way to the little Kochaky cemetery in which his ancestors, and two of the children who had died in infancy—Nikolenka, Petya—were already buried. When the procession passed through the village, the peasants came out of their isbas and pressed coins into the priest's hand for a requiem in memory of the woman who had eared for them and loved them so well. The professional mourners were sobbing. The road was long and muddy. At the cemetery gate the procession came to a halt. Tolstoy would not go any further; he took his leave of the coffin and returned to the house. "I watched him go," wrote his son Ilya. "He walked through the melting snow with his old man's gait, taking short quick steps, with his toes turned out. He did not look back once." As soon as he readied the house Tolstoy opened his diary again and wrote, "November 29, 1906. They have just taken her away, carried her off to be buried. Thank Cod, I am not depressed."