"Two courses are open to you. Either you will continue in the way you have begun, condoning and even directing the policy of exile, hard labor and capital punishment, and, without accomplishing your aims, leave a hated name behind you and, which is more serious, lose your soul; or, taking the lead among all the countries of Europe, you will strive to abolish the oldest and greatest injustice of all, which is common to all peoples: the individual ownership of land."
At Tolstoy's request, Stolypin's brother, a reporter on the New Times, conveyed this letter to its destination, and also undertook to reply to the writer on behalf of the overworked minister:
"As regards the idea of abolishing private property, my brother said it would be utterly impossible to make such a transformation—particularly as he is now completely committed to the idea that he can put Russia on the road to prosperity by establishing and consolidating small holdings; that is, by following a course exactly opposite to yours. You know how children love property, what joy they derive from their first horse, their first dog. The only way the common people can experience this same thrill of joy is if they have their own land, around their own house, fenced in by their own stockade. . . ."12
Tolstoy wrote to the minister again in January 1908, but with 110 hope of being understood. In May of that year, opening the newspaper Russia, he read the following announcement: "Today, May 9, on the Stryelbitsky Esplanade in Kherson, twenty peasants were hanged for armed trespassing upon a property in the district of Elizavctgrad." lie crumpled the paper and groaned: "It's impossible! We can't go on living this way! No! No!" That same day he decided to launch a fresh appeal to the government: I Cannot Be Silent. Early that year Thomas Edison had sent him a dictating machine from America, in token of his esteem. Until now he had not been able to use the machine: when the moment came to speak, he became nervous and rattled and could not find his words. This time, he determined to get the best of his stage fright and, standing in front of the machine, his voice blurred by tears, slowly began to dictate. The speech went well. Sasha typed it out on her
Remington. On May 31 the revised and corrected text was ready for the press:
"People now talk and write of executions, hangings, murders and bombs, as they used to talk and write about the weather. Schoolboys, hardly more than children, go out to expropriate and kill as they used to go hunting. ... It is impossible to live this way, for me at any rate, and I shall not do it. . . ."
Further along, he called upon the government to stop the growing carnage and begged, as a special favor, to be persecuted for his opinions.
"Let mc be put in prison," he wrote, "or better yet (so good that I dare not hope for such happiness), let mc be dressed in a shroud like those twelve or twenty peasants, and pushed off a bench so that the weight of my body will tighten the well-soaped slipknot around my old neck."
This manifesto was prohibited by the censor, but extracts appeared in the Russian press; the newspapers publishing them had to pay large fines. Innumerable printed, hectographed and handwritten copies were already circulating. Abroad, the full text was published simultaneously in several languages. All Europe was soon talking of the great Tolstoy's protest against the tsar's method of expediting justice. The mail at Yasnaya Polyana multiplied tenfold overnight. Most of the letters congratulated the author for his courage, some insulted him and called him destructive. A package arrived; when he unwrapped it Tolstoy found a little box containing a piece of rope as thick as his finger. There was a note with the packagc: "Count, here is the reply to your message; you can do it yourself, no need to bother the government about it, it isn't so difficult! And you will be doing a favor to our nation and our young. —A Russian Mother."
Tolstoy's admirers did not want to let the year 1908 go by without a full-scale celebration of his eightieth birthday. For some it would be a tribute to the greatest Russian author, for others a means of making money by publishing articles and photographs, and for still others a political maneuver calculatcd to discredit the government. An organizing committee was set up in St. Petersburg in January. Response to its appeal was enthusiastic, in Russia and abroad; subscription lists went as far as England for contributions to a "Tolstoy Fund." All this fuss displeased the old man. "All my life I have hated anniversaries of every sort," he said. "It's a ridiculous habit. At this advanced age, when there is nothing left to think alxnit but death, they want to bother me with that!"13
The government was equally unhappy, for whenever Tolstoy's name
appeared in the press, it could expect the worst. As usual, alarm in official circles took the fonn of an exchange of coded telegrams between the capital and the larger provincial cities. Old Princess Dondukov- Korsakov warned Sonya that Orthodox churchgoers would be outraged if religion's public enemy No. 1 were to be publicly honored. There were grumblers in the opposite camp as well, for to a true Tolstoyan this form of manifestation could be nothing but trickery. Bodyansky wrote to Gusev that Leo Nikolayevich "ought to be imprisoned for his birthday, which would have given him deep moral satisfaction." Tolstoy replied to Princess Dondukov-Korsakov that he quite approved of her protest and that the festivities being arranged were "more than painful" to him, and to Bodyansky he wrote, "Indeed, nothing could have satisfied me as fully or given me as much happiness as to be put in prison: a good, proper prison that stinks, where people suffer from cold and hunger."
Thus enlightened from both sides as to where his duty lay, he announced his refusal to Stakhovich, who was a member of the organizing committee: "I have an urgent request to make of you; do everything you can to stop this jubilee and release me from it. I shall be eternally grateful to you."14
The committee deferred to his request, but it was too late to silence the public, which was in a fine frenzy of anticipation over the celebration. So, even though the newspapers confirmed the announcement that all demonstrations were being cancclcd at the request of Tolstoy himself, government and Church redoubled their precautions. The bishop of Saratov even issued an order forbidding his faithful to honor "the anathematized infidel and revolutionary anarchist Leo Tolstoy," "the Russian Judas, reviled and accursed," "morally rotten to the core," "intellectual murderer and corrupter of the young . . ."
Just then, as it happened, the Russian Judas was in rather poor health. He had had more strokes, which had so muddled his wits that when he regained consciousness lie could not remember what he had been doing when the attack came. Then he developed phlebitis, in July. The doctors forced him to stay in bed with his leg encased in ice and raised on wooden trestles. The date of his birthday was drawing near but he was thinking more and more of death. Too weak to write his diary, he dictated it:
"Difficult situation. Pain. The last few days continual fever and pain, it is hard for me to bear. I must be beginning to die. It is hard enough to live in the absurd and luxurious state in which I have been compelled to spend my life, but it is even harder to die in it: the fuss and bother, the medicine, the deceitful reassurance and rallying, when
it is all impossible and useless, for the only result is a worsening of the state of the soul."15
Just in case, he specified his last wishes: all his books to become public property, 110 requiem mass, a plain wooden casket and, for his last resting place, that spot in the Zakaz forest near the ravine, "where the green stick was buried."
Four days after making his arrangements to die, his temperature dropped. Me realized that he had been spared once again. Was he happy? He said not—life was a burden, he had lost all desire to work. But on August 17, he noted seven fresh themes for novels in his notebook, one of which concerned a young priest who, "having read Tolstoy," has a sudden revelation of the great problems of mankind.t