Tea was drunk, once again, around ten in the evening. At eleven, after wishing everyone a good night, Tolstoy withdrew. "His handshake was very special," noted Gusev. "He held the other person's hand a long time and gave him a friendly look, straight into his eyes." Alone in his study, he lighted his candle, sat down in his child's chair in front of the writing table and took out his notebook. Everything he had jotted down in it he now expanded in his diary, adding thoughts and impressions that had come to him in the meantime. Then he drew a line beneath his report and wrote the date of the following day, with the customary "i.I.l."
Having thus examined his conscience, he went into the next room and took off his clothes, meditated, prayed, lay down on his little iron
• She had brought her own harpsichord.
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[i9j Tolstoy playing chess at Yasnaya Polyana, 1908. In the center, his wife, Sofya
[20] Birthday picture: Tolstoy in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, 1908
[2i] Tolstoy and Dr. Makovitsky at Yasnaya Polyana, 1909
Count TolMov as a Pilgrim
AVES HIS E.
[22] Tolstoy as a pilgrim, from an English newspaper story 011 his flight and death
[23] The room in which Tolstoy died at the Astapovo railway station, 1910
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[24* Tolstoy's grave at Yasnaya Polyana
bed and calmly surveyed his surroundings. On the night table stood a little bell, a clock under a glass dome, a candle, matches. Above his head, a portrait of his daughter Tanya. A washstand in one corner. More portraits: his father in uniform, Masha, who had died the previous year, Sonya . . . Everything was in order. He lay his cheek against the pillow, pulled up the blanket decorated with the Greek key design, closed his eyes and waited for sleep to come.
This uneventful life was being recorded on all sides. The most zealous chroniclers were the new secretary, Nicholas Nikolayevich Gusev, whom Chertkov had recommended to Tolstoy; Goldenweiser; and Dr. Dushan Makovitsky, who had recently been hired as the master's personal physician. All three kept their diaries with scrupulous punctuality. Gusev, at twenty-five, was an impassioned Tolstoyan who wrote so fluently that Tolstoy allowed him to answer some letters and acknowledge consignments of books in his own name. Instead of restricting himself to a conventional expression of thanks, Gusev composed four-page epistles enthusiastically expounding the master's doctrine. In his capacity as disciple, he also received and conversed with callers. And yet, despite his admiration for Tolstoy, he had not read War and Peace. "Tolstoy, as an artist, does not exist for me," he said. "Tolstoy himself repudiates his past works." His major drawback was a resistance to hygiene. Sasha, who worked with him in the "Remington room," said she could not stand the smell in hot weather.
At thirty', the pianist Goldenweiser, who lived nearby and came to the house nearly every day, was a very different type. "He was sad, as Tolstoyans nearly always were, and tall, and something dogged and ineradicably tedious emanated from him," wrote Maurice Kues, the Swiss tutor of Tolstoy's grandson. The author liked to play chess, converse and go for walks in the woods with the pianist. Goldenweiser, a carcful biographer, noted the most minute details of these occasions. He did not fail to record that Tolstoy had a faint lisp, that his toes pointed out and his heels touched the ground first when he walked, that he was miserly in small things (paper, candles) and had a very characteristic smell, "reminiscent of cypress."
A still more impressive observer was Dr. Makovitsky. Although Tolstoy claimed to have nothing but contempt for medicine, he had been attended by a private physician since 1898. Dr. Bertenson, who had accompanied hiin to the Crimea, was followed by Drs. Nikitin and Berkenheim, and now by Dr. Makovitsky, a Hungarian Slovak who had left his native land and come to live at Yasnaya Polyana out of love for the apostle of non-violence, whose entire opus he knew by heart. He was a puny little man, anemic and bald, with a waxen face ending in a short little pepper-and-salt beard. But this unprepossessing envelope enclosed a soul of fire. He would willingly have laid down his life for his idol. Tolstoy said of him, "Dushan is a saint. But since there are no true saints, God gave him one fault: hatred of Jews."
True enough, the mild and pacific Dushan Makovitsky was so rabid an anti-Semite that his state sometimes bordered on insanity. He was endowed with a colossal memory and, on the slightest pretext, could rattle off statistics demonstrating the superiority of Slavs over Israelites. He scolded Sasha if he heard that she had shopped in a Jewish store.
"Oh, Alexandra Lvovna, aren't you ashamed of yourself? Why buy from the Jews, why? Why not support your own? Don't you see how the Jews hate you, how they lord it over you?"3
It pained him that Goldenweiser, who was a Jew, should be treated as a friend of the family.
lie was amazingly active for a man of such puny appearance. Every morning he held consultations in the village at Yasnaya Polyana in an isba fitted out as an infirmary, after which he set off on his rounds in a telaga to see patients scorcs of miles away who could not come to him. Whenever he had a free moment he ran to Tolstoy's side and hearkened to catch the Word as it fell. No founder of a religion ever had a more fervent hagiographer by his side. The very idea of wanting to consider the doctrine objectively was sacrilcgc to him. His mission on earth was to record and witness, and in order to escape the notice of the master, who did not like people to write down every word he said, the doctor had devised an ingenious form of notation. He wrote on stiff cardboard squares inside his pockct, feeling his way along with a minute pencil sharpened to a very fine point. With practice, he had become a past master at this form of blind-writing. Often, at teatimc, Sasha saw Makovitsky's left hand on top of the table, while his right was scratching away out of sight. "Dushan," she would say in a low voice, "I'll tell Papa!" "Oh, no, Alexandra Lvovna, don't do that," he stammered, blushing and pulling his right hand out of his pocket.
A few seconds later he resumed his watchdog pose. His right hand disappeared, his eyes unfocused. His mind a-quivcr, he was recording, recording for posterity.
"Thus we were deprived of the great joy of having a private life," wrote Sasha, "of talking nonsense, joking, singing, not having to be careful of everything. Instead, we knew that every word we spoke and every gesture we made would be recorded on the spot.""
Dushan Makovitsky and Gusev helped Tolstoy to compile the texts of famous authors he wanted to use in his next book, The Circle of
Reading. It was probably his work on this anthology that reawakened his taste for pedagogy. He wrote a brochure, The Teachings of Jestis Explained to Children, prepared a Circle of Reading for Children and suddenly started evening classes for the little muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana. At first, fifteen of them came to the library, where, this time, Tolstoy sought to teach, not science or history or grammar, but religious and moral principles, using the simplest methods possible. They listened, they appeared to understand. The old man was jubilant. "Lately," he wrote in his diary on March 17, 1907, "I have been completely occupied giving lessons to the children. The farther I go the more clearly I see the difficulties of the task, and at the same time the greater the success I look forward to."