Sonya displayed more grief than he, although she had never really cared for Masha-thc-Tolstoyan; but she was made of simpler stuff, and was incapable of rejoicing in the loss of a child. She admired her husband for being able to return to his regular occupations so quickly: writing, going for walks, riding his horse . . . And yet, while lie made an outward show of perfect serenity, sometimes, at nightfall, sorrow got the best of him, and he felt the absence of his favorite daughter like a craving. She had been the only one who had found the way to his heart, the only one in whom, now and then, he had seen a reflection of himself. "I live on, and I often recall Masha's last minutes," he wrote a month later. "She is sitting up, her pillows all around her, I am holding her dear hand, so thin, and I feel the life going, going. . . . Those fifteen minutes were among the most important and mast serious of my whole life."17
PART VIII
The Solution
I. Days Pass, and a Birthday
After Sonya's recovery and Masha's death, there was a long lull in Tolstoy's life. Even politics seemed to have calmed down, as though to spare the old patriarch's nerves. To continue meditating, writing, even living, at his age, he needed an absolutely rigid schedule: he felt that this routine was what kept him in good health. Up early in the morning, he washed with cold water, emptied his basin, straightened his bed and covered it with a crocheted blanket embroidered with a Greek key motif, swept the floor and, in the winter, carricd logs and lighted a fire in the stove. Then he went for a short walk in the woods, sat on a bench to jot down some philosophical thought or literary' project, and was back in his room at nine. He ate his breakfast alone (coffee and dry bread) and read the newspapers: two Russian dailies and the London Times.
In the meantime Philichka, a red-headed, grimy muzhik who wore an immense black cap and was nicknamed "Tolstoy's mail clerk," had climbed onto his horse and gone to fetch the mail at the railway station. He returned with a sackful and poured out the contents on the master's desk. Tolstoy drank the last of his coffee as he opened envelopes—thirty or forty missives a day, from the four corners of the earth. Waves of writing, washing up at his feet, showing him the extent of his popularity and his powerlessness. How to help all these strangers who needed him? True: for every moving appeal there were dozens more from visionaries, autograph hounds, hysterics, unsuccessful authors, inventors of perpetual-motion machines and blinkered Tolstoy- ans asking whether it was right to kill microbes, eat honey produced by the labor of the bees or use glue manufactured from the bones of animals. Tolstoy initialed the envelopes "NA" (110 answer), "S" (silly) or "A" (appeal for help). Sometimes he wrote out a reply him-
self, but as his writing had become ver}' poor he usually scribbled a few lines for his daughter Sasha to copy in legible form.
In the early days, Tolstoy's secretariat had been a rudimentary affair: Sonya, the two elder daughters, Ivanov the scribe and various guests all shared in the copying. Tanya, however, had bought a typewriter and begun to type some of her father's letters. Sasha also learned to type, and the Remington became the standard means of dealing with correspondence and manuscripts. All incoming letters and copies of replies were recorded and filed.
The only exception to this rule was made for Chertkov. Everything Tolstoy wrote was sent to him for publication in England, where, as guardian of the master's thought and defender of his fame, he saw that every new work came out simultaneously in the various languages; and if Tolstoy were rash enough to send an article directly to some foreign periodical, he received such an avalanche of reproof that he humbly begged pardon of the tyrannical servant of his glory. One day he said to Sasha with a sad smile:
"By the way, Chertkov asks that no one be allowed to read his letters and that they be returned to him immediately."
When his daughter bristled at these high-handed ways, he entreated her, with a weary and embarrassed air, not to poison his relations with the exile.
After finishing his letters, he worked 011 his own projects until two in the afternoon. He still refused to wear glasses, so he sat on a chair that had been Tanya's when she was a child in order not to have to bend over so far to bring his eyes close to the paper. He gripped the pen in his fist, the forefinger bunched up with the rest instead of extended along the penholder. With a rubber pad under his seat, his head lowered and his elbows spread apart, he looked like some old bearded schoolboy laboring over his homework. "When he wrote," Sasha noted, "he pushed his lips out as though he were blowing. Then he would put a full stop and raise his thick, beetling eyebrows." No one was allowed to disturb him during his hours of crcation. He demanded absolute silence, for the slightest noise, he said, prevented him from concentrating. If he needed anything, he rang a turtle-shaped bell or knockcd on the wall with his big walking stick. Most of the time he rang to tell them to drive away the dogs barking on the lawn or the hens cackling beneath his windows, and a servant was sent around the house waving a branch to scatter the animals. When silence was restored, Tolstoy went back to blackening of sheets of paper with his flowing hand. He usually filled only a quarter of the page, and often preferred to use scraps of paper torn from letters he had received.
Sometimes, rather than change the order of the sentences in a difficult passage, he cut the whole manuscript into strips, marked them with tall, angular numbers, and gave them to Sasha with a sheepish growclass="underline" "Careful! Don't lose any of the bits! I made a lot of noodles today." "He did not finish his words," she said later, "and wrote without punctuation; any he did put in was always in the wrong place. Sometimes he made grammatical errors."
One imagines the pride with which Sasha, just turned twenty-three, bore off the precious scraps of paper to the "Remington room," reserved for secretarial work. Behind the library and drawing-room doors, guests were laughing and exchanging trivial remarks; she, meanwhile, sitting bolt upright behind her typewriter, was the first to learn the new word of Leo Tolstoy. In addition to this routine work she also copied her father's diary, and thus she learned what he thought of his intimates and himself. Before, he had been more willing to share his secrets with everyone around him, but now it occasionally troubled him to think that a mere girl, his own child, should be following every twist and turn of his most private thoughts. But Chertkov had demanded that the diary be typed and a copy sent to him, and it was impossible to oppose that man's will. Pitifully trying to maintain the illusion that he was writing for himself, Tolstoy told his daughter:
"Take the diary without telling me, don't let me know it's being typed; otherwise, I wouldn't be able to write it!"1
At two o'clock a bell rang for lunch. With a brisk step, "hopping a little," Tolstoy went into the big dining room where the table was set. White cloth, silver, servants in livery and white gloves. When the master came in everyone stood and all talk ceased. Tolstoy made a pleasant remark to everyone present, and sat down to the right of his wife. In addition to the family, there were his secretary, his private physician Dushan Makovitsky, his grandchildren's tutors and governesses, friends, passing foreigners, neighbors. Some thirty persons in all. Two menus: one for ordinary people and one for the master, usually consisting of a soft-boiled egg, raw tomatoes, and macaroni and cheese. He ate rapidly, paying no attention to what was on his plate. His guests never heard him express any opinion of his food. As he had lost all his teeth, his cheeks wrinkled into deep folds as he chewed. On his bad days, he was aggrieved by the material comforts around him, cast murderous glances at the servants and the crystal, did not join in the conversation and hurried away from the table. When he was in a good mood, on the other hand, he charmed his guests with the vivacity of his conversation. Leaping from one subject to another, he stated his views on everything in simple, colorful language, flew into a rage at