Sonya shrugged. "Leo Nikolayevich has a new hobby," she said. "He is droning away, teaching Christian truths to the children; they repeat after him like parrots. But they will turn into drunkards and thieves all the same!" Although he was offended by his wife's skepticism, Tolstoy had to admit that his pupils were not angels, despite their sweet faces and high piping voices. He would have liked to find a sort of fundamental innocence in them, the purity of souls preserved from civilization; but instead, he ran headlong into all the wicked impulses he had learned to recognize in the adult. One afternoon he returned from his walk in a very agitated state and said to his daughter, "It's dreadful! Dreadful! I am walking along, it is a gorgeous morning, the birds are singing, the smell of clover is spreading through the air . . . and suddenly, I hear the most terrible swearing. I come closer; there were some children behind an acacia tending the horses, and they were hurling the crudest insults at each other. It brought tears to my eyes."7
The number of pupils dwindled steadily. Tolstoy did not know whether to attribute this loss of interest to the children themselves or to their parents, who did not like to see them being indoctrinated by the master. Although the revolution had been smothered, the villagers still harbored deep resentments against the landowners. Strikes and insurrections had given way to isolated acts of violence. Sonya's own brother Vyacheslav Behrs, chief works engineer on a project near St. Petersburg, was murdered by unemployed workers. The peasants on Tolstoy's son Michael's farm had set fire to the barns containing the farm machinery. Another fire was started by muzhiks on the Sukhotin property. On the land of a neighbor, Mrs. Zvegintsev, prowlers shot and killed two house-servants sent to ask them for their passports. At Yasnaya Polyana itself, marauders often robbed the vegetable garden, and the night watchman complained of being shot at while trying to catch them in the act; and one hundred and twenty-nine of Tolstoy's
beloved trees were cut down by the peasants, who appropriated the wood. On the advice of her son Andrey, Sonya requested official assistance from the governor of the province, D. D. Kobeko. The police raided the village and arrested a few peasants for possessing firearms. Only too happy to blow up the case, the governor placed sentinels on the property and even inside Tolstoy's house. Thus the apostle of nonviolence found himself under uniformed protection. The situation was made all the more paradoxical by the fact that Yasnaya Polyana was the only estate in the district to receive such official help. Now the enemies of Tolstoyism could chortle to their heart's content, to see what a fool the prophet had made of himself. He fumed at his wife:
"Why can't you understand that the presence of police who arrest and imprison peasants is intolerable to me?" "Then do you want them to shoot us here?" she retorted. "This is hell. Pure hell. This is the worst possible atmosphere to create. To think that there are seven armed men on this property!"8 The wives and parents of the incarcerated peasants came to plead with the master to intercede on their behalf. No matter how often he told them that it had all been decided without consulting him, that in obedience to his ideal of poverty he had given all his rights to his wife and children and was no longer the owner of Yasnaya Polyana and therefore could do nothing to help, they did not believe him. "They cannot accept the fact that I am not the master here—since I live here —and they hold me responsible for everything that happens," he wrote in his diary on September 7, 1907. "It is very hard." In his notebook: "The governor has just comc, with all his suite. Revolting and pitiful." Now two tall, heavy, coarsc guards stood preening themselves in the entryway, revolver on hip. In their vicinity, Sasha detected an unpleasant odor of "bad tobacco and male perspiration." She begged her mother to send them away, to pardon the muzhiks and have mercy on her father. But Sonya was adamant. Then Tolstoy dispatched his daughter to Tula, to see Governor Kobeko and give him a letter. She was received by Deputy Governor Lopukin. After glancing over Tolstoy's appeal, he turned to Sasha and concluded with a smile:
"The countess, your mother, has asked us to protect your family at Yasnaya Polyana, and we are only obeying her orders."
And he showed her a letter from Sonya asking that the guards be kept on the premises at all costs. When Sasha returned to the house, she ran to her mother and sobbed out:
"Even if we lose everything, everything, not just a few old oak trees but Yasnaya Polyana itself, we can't put Papa in such a position!" "I can expect nothing but trouble from you!" Sonya replied curtly.
"1 know you don't care a rap whether Yasnaya Polyana is torn to rack and ruin. But I don't have the right to talk like that: I have children!"
The police remained at Yasnaya Polyana for two years, and Tolstoy suffered leaden remorse all the time they were there. "If someone were to speak to me about myself as a stranger, living in the lap of luxury, surrounded by armed guards, despoiling peasants and having them thrown into prison while he preaches and practices Christianity and hands out fortunes in money and performs all these ugly deeds hiding behind his beloved wife, I should not hesitate to call that man a criminal," he wrote.t Once again, he wanted to run away. But when the moment came to take the plunge, he hung back and invented excuses: "However powerfully I desire to obey the call of my ideal, I do not feci capable of it; it is not that I so love fine food or a soft bed or the pleasure of riding horseback, but there are other reasons: I cannot be the cause of a woman's unhappiness, provoke the anger of a person who is convinced she is doing her duty. . . ."9
On October 22, 1907, Gusev was arrested as a revolutionary propagandist and Tolstoy wrote to Governor Kobeko and Count Olsufyev to obtain his release. When he was freed, at the end of December 1907, the old man embraced him and said, "How I envy you! How I should like to be put into prison, a real prison, good and stinking! ... I see that I don't deserve such honor!"10
Badly shaken by these emotions, he had several slight strokes, accompanied by temporary loss of memory, during the winter of 1907- 8. But his ardor for battle was undiminished. He anxiously followed the policy of Stolypin's new government, which had opted for strong- arm tactics. Before the 1905 revolution, the death penalty had hardly ever been applied in Russia, and ordinary criminal offenses were punished by prison sentences or hard labor. But punitive action was intensified after the terrorist crimes began. Most of those charged with political murder were executed. Tolstoy looked in the papers every day for the notices on the executions. In this violent settling of accounts between the tsarist society and its adversaries, his compassion went equally to victims and executioners. He would have liked to write something on the subject. "I should like to show in this book that 110 one is guilty," he said. "I should like to explain that the judge of the court who signed the order and the hangman who put the condemned man to death were both led to do so perfectly naturally—as naturally as we drink tea here together, while so many others are shivering with cold and soaked by rain."11 But a novel would not have enough impact on
t July 1908.
the public. The question was too serious to be argued by fictional characters. Professor Davydov, the lawyer Muravyev, the young Tol- stoyan Biryukov were sending Tolstoy secret documents, photographs of the hanged men. ... So many mistakes! So much arbitrary action! So much violencel To abolish violence, one had to begin by abolishing private property. On July 26, 1907, Tolstoy had written to the prime minister, P. A. Stolypin, to warn him: