He left on June 12, with Sasha, Dr. Makovitsky and Bulgakov. Varvara Fcokritova stayed on at Yasnaya Polyana, ostensibly to keep Sonya company, but actually to guard her and see that she remained calm. Once again, on meeting Chertkov, Tolstoy felt ten years younger. The Meshcherskoye house was dirty and run-down and, to his satisfaction, full of Tolstoyans. With Chertkov and Sasha, he visited a nearby
insane asylum, talked to the inmates, questioned the doctors and attended film projections for the patients. "They were showing stupid melodramas on the screen," wrote Sasha. "In the darkness I could make out my father's white shirt and beard; I felt the hall around me full of crazy people and I wanted to run away as fast as I could. But my father was talking away to Chertkov, as calm as could be, and he did not even seem to sense the danger. I remember him saying on several occasions that madness is only an extreme form of egoism—the egoism of a person who concentrates all his thoughts and interest upon himself." Perhaps he had Sonya in mind when he formulated that definition. But just then he felt so much at peace that the thought of his private life evoked nothing but forbearance and understanding. "I must try to fight Sonya consciously, with kindness and love," he wrote in his diary on June 20. "At a distance, it seems possible. I must try to succeed at closc quarters." And to her he wrote: "IIow time flics! Only five days before we leave. We have decided to start out on the twenty-fifth. It is nice to be away visiting, but it is also nice to be at home. Farewell, dear Sonya, I embrace you!" Diplomatically, he served up the honey ljcfore the gall; in a postscript, he told his wife the "good news" that the government was allowing Chertkov to return to Telyatinki—almost next-door to Yasnaya Polyana—to visit his mother for a few days.
Back at Yasnaya Polyana, meanwhile, Sonya was finding her solitude oppressive. Offended because Chertkov had invited her to Mcshchers- koye in the vaguest of terms and had not even offered her a room of her own, she brooded over her grievances and orchestrated her ire. When she heard that "the monster" would be in the neighborhood again, she suddenly lost control. Her head on fire, she ordered Varvara Fcokritova to cable her husband: "Sofya Andreyevna's nerves in very bad state. Insomnia, weeping, pulse: one hundred. Please telegraph. Varvara." Another telegram followed a few hours later, signed by Sonya herself, on the night of June 22-23: "Entreat you hurry back—on twenty-third." Sasha, who guessed that her mother was not seriously ill, begged her father not to set their departure ahead, especially since they were expecting the cellist Erdcnko that day. Tolstoy obeyed, and wired back: "More convenient return tomorrow. But if indispensable will comc tonight." The "more convenient" revolted Sonya. "I recognize Chertkov's cold hand there," she cried, and ordered Varvara Fcokritova to reply immediately, with the command: "Indispensable. Varvara."
Then, in her nightgown, with hair undone and breast heaving with sobs, she flung herself upon her diary and poured out her despair.
"What is the matter with me? Hysteria, attack of nerves, cramps in the chcst, is it the beginning of madness? I don't know. . . . This de-
pression came over me as a result of Leo Nikolaycvich's long absence, lie has developed a revolting, senile crush on Chertkov (falling for men was more in his line as a boy!) and now he is absolutely at that man's beck and call. Chertkov is what is keeping us apart. He is an ingenious, despotic, heartless man, who has reached a far more advantageous and distinguished position in life as Tolstoy's intimate friend than he could have had as an insignificant, silly officer of the guards. I am wildly jealous of Chertkov where Tolstoy is concerned. I feel he has stripped mc of the one tiling that has kept me alive for forty-eight years. . . . Even form of suicide has crossed my mind. ... I am thinking of going to Stolbova and lying down under the train on which it would be convenient for Leo Nikolayevich to come home. ... I have consulted Florin- sky's book on medicine to see what the effects of opium poisoning would be. First excitement, then lethargy. No antidote. I must write to my husband who has just been to an insane asylum and ask him to find out all the details about the place, since Chertkov will undoubtedly find it convenient to have me committed to it."
But whether she killed herself or was institutionalized, all she really- cared about was seeing that Chertkov was punished for his devilry. One of her sons would make sure that vcngcance was done. "You, Andry- ushka," she went on in her diary, "avenge your mother's death; you loved her, you saw through her enemy!"
When he reached home at ten o'clock that evening, Tolstoy found his wife in bed in a state of feverish agitation. He spent part of the night with her, and then went to write in his notebook, "It's worse than I expected. Nervous breakdown and ovcrcxcitement. Indescribable. I did not behave particularly badly, but not very well cither, I was not kind."
Despite Tolstoy's efforts to avoid further disputes, Sonya attacked him at every turn with his "love" for Chertkov, and wept continually. One moming she was found on her knees behind a cupboard in the library with a vial of opium in her hand. She sobbed:
"Just one little swallow!"
"However," wrote Sasha with pitiless objectivity, "she waved the vial of opium around her mouth but did not drink any. At first I tried to take it away from her, then I suddenly felt disgusted."
After being given a no-nonsense treatment by her daughter and admonished by Dr. Makovitsky, she dried her tears and promised to control herself in future. The next day, June 26, she asked her husband to show her what he had written about her in his last diary. He reluctantly consented. Opening the notebook, she came across the entry for
June 20: "I must try to fight Sonya consciously, with kindness and love." She immediately flew into a rage:
"Why do you say you want to fight me? What have I done wrong?"
Refusing to listen to Tolstoy's explanations, she demanded to know where the diaries of the previous ten years had gone. He was eventually forced to admit that Chertkov had them. She ordered him to tell her where Chertkov had put them and he answered that he had no idea. Then she rushed out into the garden, wandered about under driving rain and came back soaked to the skin. When her husband urged her to change her clothes, she cried:
"No, I shall stay like this, I'll catch cold and diel . . . That's all they want! . . . I'm going to have an attack this very minute! . . ."
Tolstoy did not sleep at all that night, and the next day he consulted Dr. Korsakov's treatise on psychiatry. On every page lie seemed to recognize some trait of Sonya's. "The insane are always better at achieving their purposes than the sane," he noted on June 27, "because they have no morality to hold them back, neither shame nor truth nor conscience, nor even fear." He dreaded the effect upon Sonya of the news that Chertkov would be in the neighborhood for any length of time—even temporarily. He was expected at any moment. Returning from Telyatinki in the evening of the twenty-seventh, Bulgakov announced that the disciple and his mother had arrived. Sonya was terrified by the thought that the "devil" had returned to his lair, and she determined to take Lyovochka away—anywhere, so long as he was removed from the sphere of evil radiation. In a few hours she persuaded him to go with her to Nikolskoye to visit their son Sergey, whose birthday it was. At the same time, she asked him to alter the description of the hero's wife in By Mistake, one of his stories, becausc she bore a physical resemblance to the author's wife. Tolstoy obediently changcd a few words and the "forceful black-eyed brunette" became a "blue- eyed blonde."