Then Strakhov explained that if he did not conform to the legal regulations governing inheritance, and if he did not provide otherwise, all his copyrights would be inherited by his family. What a storm that would arouse among the Tolstoyans, to hear that after condemning all property, their master had not had the courage to deprive his wife and children of the incomc from a work which, by its very csscnce, was destined to become public property. Shaken by this argument, Tolstoy withdrew to think it over. After a few hours, he announced to Strakhov that he had reached his decision. Trusting the integrity of his daughter Sasha, he would bequeath his copyrights to her, on condition that she turn them over at once "to the people." This decision would apply- not only to works written after 1881, but also to those published prior to that date.
When these arrangements were explained to Sasha, she protested that she was unworthy, and that her mother, sister and brother would hate her for depriving them of the inheritance. But she yielded to her father's urging. At heart, she was proud to be the one chosen to carry out this great mission. The prospect of seeing her mother choking with jealousy was compensation enough for all the storms ahead. Tolstoy- made her promise that after his death she would use the money from the sale of his posthumous works to repurchase the land at Yasnaya Polyana from Sonya and give it to the muzhiks. Strakhov left, satisfied.
On November 1 he came back with Goldenwciser and the new text, whereby Alexandra Lvovna Tolstoy (Sasha) became the sole heiress to her father's copyrights. The two men arrived during the night. Everyone in the house was asleep except Tolstoy. He received Chertkov's emissaries in his bedroom, read the document over and copied it out in their presence. But he kept starting up at every moment, listening. Sonya was a light sleeper. Wasn't she suddenly going to burst through the door in her nightgown with a lamp in her hand and unmask the conspirators? Several times he went to make sure no one was hiding behind the door. In spite of the reassurances of Goldenvveiser and Strakhov, he felt he was doing something wrong. After he signed the paper, the two men witnessed it and Strakhov put it in his portfolio to take back to Moscow.
The next day, Sonya, suspecting nothing, behaved very cordially to the two guests. Strakhov had pangs of remorse; but he consoled himself with the thought that the night before he had, in his own words, successfully completed an undertaking destined to have historic consequences.
In January 1910, young Dorik Sukhotin—Tanya's step-son, who was staying at Yasnaya Polyana—came down with measles, and Sasha, who often went to see him in his bedroom next to the "Remington room," caught them from him. But her case was complicated by double pneumonia. She began to cough blood. Tolstoy spent anguished hours by her side. When she asked for a drink, he held out the glass in his trembling old hand. "The water spilled out and ran down my chin," she wrote. "I covered his dear hand with kisses. He sobbed and took hold of my long hand that had grown so thin. I felt the touch of his beard and my hand was moist."
In March she was able to get out of bed. But the doctors, fearing consumption, advised her to convalesce in the Crimea. Two months, they said, should bring back her strength. She was terrified at tbe thought of being away from her father for so long: "What if I were never to see him again?" They insisted. It was decided that her friend Varvara Fcokritova would go with her. On April 13, the day of departure, Tolstoy wept. "I am sad, I don't know what to do with myself," he wrote in his diary the next day. "Sasha has gone. I love her, I miss her, not for the work she does but because of her soul. . . . The tears came to my eyes, out of weakness. In the night, a physical oppression that affected my mind, too. ... I must not write any more. I think I have done all I can in that field. And yet, I want to write, I want terribly to write. ... It is midnight. Going to bed. Still in a bad frame of mind. Look out! Leo Nikolayevich, hang on!"
He soon found that with his daughter gone, the atmosphere of Yasnaya Polyana became more bearable. Sasha's absence and Chertkov's enforced removal restored Sonya to a semblance of balance. She still complained of her health (migraine, nervous fatigue, fear of losing her sight), kept producing shirts and hats which no one needed, wailed that her sons were spending too much of her money, wore herself out preparing an edition of her husband's Complete Works in twenty-eight volumes, wrote a story of her life and predicted that the entire family would end in the poorhouse; but as long as her agitation and lamentations remained within these familiar limits, Tolstoy did not suffer from them. Perhaps he would even have felt lost in more peaceful surroundings. He corresponded regularly with Sasha, told her everything he did and assured her of his affection.
"You arc so near to my heart, dear Sasha, that I cannot help writing to you every day." (April 24, 1910.) "No letter from you today, my dear friend Sasha, but I want to write to you anyway." (April 25.)
"How are you spending your time? I would like to think that you are striving for spiritual improvement there, too. That is more important than anything else. Even though you're young, you can do it, and you must!" (End of April.)
As in every other year, the advent of the warm weather brought a flood of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy wore himself out seeing them. Sometimes his old sense of social injustice welled up and he rushed to his study, seized his diary and wrote: "No dinner. Aching pain caused by a sense of the shameful life I live surrounded by people who work and slave and only just manage to avoid dying of cold and hunger, they and their families. Yesterday, fifteen people gorging themselves on pancakes, and five or six fathers and mothers slaving away, breaking their necks to get all that swill ready and on the table. . . . Also yesterday, riding past some stonecutters, I suffered the tonnents of a soldier running the gauntlet."14 Almost every day he found some pretext for being upset or miserable. One time it was a young guest in schoolboy uniform who confessed that he was a spy paid by the police to denounce terrorists; another time it was a real revolutionary, come to reproach him for not "fighting with bombs"; another time it was a Tolstoyan accusing him of living on his family like a parasitic Croesus; another time it was two Japanese who, thinking it would make him happy, told him how much they admired the Christian civilization. One evening the Japanese accompanied him to the village, where he and his friends were going to show the peasants one of the wonders of the modern world, a phonograph. Men, women and children came out of their isbas and assembled on the green. From the box the joyful sounds of a balalaika orchestra issued forth. The muzhiks looked at each other in amazement. Then, urged on by the master, they began to dance a hopak. The Japanese were in ecstasy. Soon after they left, Chertkov's son and the writer Sergeycnko arrived. Rejoicing to see these two emissaries, reminders of his best friend, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, "I felt a breath of Chertkov pass. It is very pleasant. Going to bed."15