To offset Leo's pernicious influence on his mother, Chertkov sent an urgent appeal to the calm and equable Tanya, who arrived with her husband on July 12, and was horrified to see how far relations between her parents had deteriorated within a few weeks. Sonya, looking old and haggard, stared about her like a madwoman; Tolstoy was bent and shriveled, and whenever he wasn't paying attention, his face assumed an expression of childish bewilderment. Tanya, who was twenty years older than Sasha, urged her to be more tolerant, but could not alter the girl's inflexible determination to treat their mother as a fake. And indeed, oncc the crisis was past, Sonya quickly bccamc her old self again. The very day of the Sukhotins' arrival, she was trying to win the secretary, Bulgakov, to her side. After offering to drive the young man over to the Chertkov home in her trap, she suddenly turned a tear- stained face to him and begged him to make them give her back the diaries.
"Let them copy them all," she said, "every word. But at least, let them give back Leo Nikolayevich's original manuscripts to me. I used to be the person who kept the diaries. Tell Chertkov that if he gives them back to me, I shall grow calm again. I will like him again, and he can come to see us as he used to do and we will work together to serve Leo Nikolayevich. Will you tell him? For the love of Cod, will you tell him? . . ."
Although a staunch Tolstoyan, the boy was shaken. "There was absolutely nothing fake about her tears or her emotion," he wrote. "I confess I was deeply moved. At any price, even if it meant returning the manuscripts to Sonya Andreyevna, or by any other means, I wanted peace to be restored to Yasnaya Polyana."
When they reached Telyatinki, Sonya was ceremoniously received by the great disciple's mother, while Bulgakov retired with Chertkov and his advisor Sergeyenko and explained that, in all fairness, they must conscnt to the countess's request.
"What?" cried Chertkov, rolling his eyes. "Ilave you told her where the diaries are?"
He stuck out his tongue in fury. His handsome, regular features were distorted into a gargoyle's mask. Bulgakov protested that he was unable to tell anything because he didn't know anything. Reassured, Chertkov told him, "Go, now. Go have tea next door. You must be hungry." He pushed him out and closed the door behind him. After consultation, he and Sergeyenko decided to hold their ground. But Tolstoy was beginning to weaken. "She is suffering, poor thing," he wrote on July 12, "and it is no effort for me to feel sorry for her and love her at the same time."
Was he merely battle-weary, or was this an attempt to conform to his doctrine of non-resistance? In all probability, his philosophical principles were conveniently summoned to cover up his wavering will. He wanted peace and quiet so badly! Two days later it was decided: he would take the diaries back from Chertkov; but, instead of giving them to Sonya, he would deposit them in a bank in Tula, where they would remain until his death. To make sure his intentions were clear, he wrote a long letter to his wife:
"1. I shall give no one the diary I am now writing, and shall keep it with me.
"2. I shall take back my earlier diaries from Chertkov and shall keep them myself, probably in a bank.
"3. If you are worried lest future biographers who may be unfriendly to you should make use of the pages in my diary which were written in the heat of the moment and record all our conflicts and quan-cls, I
would remind you, first of all, that such expressions of fleeting emotion, in my diary as in yours, cannot pretend to give a true picture of our relations; but if you arc still afraid, I shall be happy to take this opportunity to say, in my diary or in this letter, what my true relations with you are, and my view of your life.
"My relations with you and my view of your life arc as follows: as I loved you when I was young, so I never stopped loving you in spite of the many causes of estrangement between us, and so I love you now. Leaving aside the cessation of our conjugal relations (a fact that could but add to the sincerity of our expressions of true love), those causes were as follows: first, my increasing withdrawal from society', whereas you neither would nor could forgo it, bccausc the principles which led me to adopt my convictions were fundamentally opposed to yours: this is perfectly natural and I cannot hold it against you. ... In recent years, you have grown more and more irritable, despotic and uncontrollable. This could not fail to inhibit any display of feeling on my part, if not the feelings themselves. That is the second point. And in the third place, the principal, fatal cause, was that of which we arc both equally innocent: our totally opposite ideas of the meaning and purpose of existence. For me property is a sin, for you an essential condition of life. I forced myself to accept the painful circumstances of our life in order not to leave you, but you saw my acceptance as a concession to your views, and this only deepened the misunderstanding between us. . . . As for my view of your life, it is this:
"I, a debauchcd man, profoundly depraved sexually, and no longer in his first youth, married you, a girl of eighteen, pure, good and intelligent, and in spite of my wicked past you lived with me for almost fifty years, loving me, living a life full of care and pain, giving birth to children, bringing them up, caring for them and nursing me, without succumbing to any of the temptations to which a woman like you, beautiful, solid and healthy, is always exposed; and your life has been such that I can have absolutely nothing to reproach you with. As for the fact that you did not follow me in my moral development, which is a unique one, I cannot hold that against you, cither, for the inner life of any human is a secret between himself and God, and no one else can call him to account in any way; I have been intolerant with you, I was mistaken and I confess my error. . . .
"4. If my relations with Chertkov arc too trying for you now, I am ready to give him up, although I must tell you that it would be more unpleasant and painful for him than for 111c; but if you ask it of me I shall do it.
"5. If you do not acccpt these terms for a peaceful and good life, I
shall take back my promise not to leave you; I shall go away. And not to Chertkov, you may be sure! In fact, I would even lay down as an absolute condition that he must not come and settle near me. But go I certainly shall, for I cannot continue living like this. I might have gone on with this life had I been able to look at all your sufferings unmoved, but I am not capable of that. . . . Stop, my dove, tormenting not only others but yourself, for you are suffering a hundred times more than they. That is all. July 14, in the morning. Leo Tolstoy."
He immediately showed this letter to Sonya, who was both delighted and disturbed by it. She feared some maneuver designed to fetter her still more tightly. To reassure her, Tolstoy sent Sasha to Chertkov with instructions to bring back the diaries in exchange for a note signed by him. The girl set out, furious with her father for yielding on this capital point, and soon came back empty-handed, for in his troubled state he had forgotten to mention the return of the diaries in the note he had given her for Chertkov. He at once drafted another: "I was so upset when I wrote to you this morning that I mistakenly supposed I had told you the most important thing, which is that you are to give the diaries to Sasha immediately. I ask you to do it. Sasha will take them to the bank. I am loath to do it, but so much the better. Be brave and steadfast for the good, you also, dear friend."
Sasha set out again, with an ugly smile on her face, while her father wrote, "I am not sure this is right, and I may have been too weak and conciliating, but I could not do anything else."
When the girl reached Telyatinki, the Tolstoyan general staff was already assembled around a table, with Chertkov presiding: in addition to the master of the house, there were the two Goldcnwcisers, Scrgey- enko, and Olga Dietrich, Andrey Tolstoy's ex-wife and Chertkov's sister-in-law. Hypnotized, Sasha took her place in their midst. They distributed the seven notebooks and went through them looking for any passages that were derogatory to Sonya, who would be sure to destroy them if she ever got her hands on the diaries. Every time they spied a criticism, confession of depression or disgust, or description of a quarrel, they avidly copied out the paragraph. When this anthology of hatred had been compiled, the editors lay down their pens and looked at one another with the satisfaction of men who have done their duty. Then the diaries were tied up, wrapped in heavy paper and, as Sasha was getting back into the coach, Chertkov derisively made the sign of the cross over her head three times with the package.6 He also gave her a letter for her father in which lie deplored that the master's true friends were prevented from coming to his assistance, as were the disciplcs of Christ on Golgotha on an earlier occasion: "The thought