Sonya was exasperated by this steady stream of emissaries between Yasnaya Polyana and Telyatinki. She called Bulgakov and Golden- weiser "walking post officcs." One day, stung by jealousy, she said to her husband: "You and Chertkov are writing secret love letters to each other." When he rebuked her, she triumphantly brandished a copy of a passage from one of his early diaries, dated November 29, 1851: "I have never been in love with a woman . . . but I have quite often fallen in love with a man. . . . For mc the chief symptom of love is the fear of offending the loved one or of not pleasing him, or simply fear itself. . . . I fell in love with a man before I knew what pederasty was; but even after I found out, the possibility never crosscd my mind. Beauty has always been a powerful factor in my attractions; there is D . . . [Dyakov], for example. I shall never forget the night we left P . . . [Pirogovo] together, when, wrapped up in my blanket, I wanted to devour him with kisses and weep. Sexual desire was not totally absent, but it was impos-
sible to say what role it played, for my imagination never tempted me with lewd pictures. On the contrary, I was utterly disgusted by all that."
After reading the paper, Tolstoy turned pale and shouted, "Go away! Get out of here!" Sonya did not budge, so he rushed into his own room and locked the door behind him. "I stood there petrified," Sonya wrote in her diary. "Where is love, then? Where non-resistance? Where Christ? ... Is it possible that old age can so harden the heart of man?" When Dr. Makovitsky, alerted by Sasha, came to examine the old man, lie found him prostrated, his heartbeat irregular, his pulse over a hundred.
"Tell her that if she's trying to kill me, she'll soon succeed," murmured Tolstoy.
Far from subsiding, Sonya continued to repeat her wild accusations of homosexuality, to Dr. Makovitsky, Sasha or anyone else within earshot. She found out that Tolstoy occasionally met Chertkov in the pine woods during his walks, and began to follow him, spying on him from behind the trees and questioning the village children to discover whether the count had been alone or with another man. At home, she waited until he left his study to search through his papers. She was looking for evidence of his betrayal, his wickcdness and his immorality. Sometimes she realized that she was going mad and thought with horror of her brother Stcpan, who had died in an asylum the year before. Then, needing a moment of respite, she wrote, "I wondered whether I might not make peace with Chertkov. . . . Perhaps I will end by no longing hating him. But when I think of actually seeing his face again, and when I think of the joy that would be written on Leo Nikolaye- vich's face to see him again, then my heart fills with agony, I feel like weeping, and a desperate protest cries out within me. The spirit of evil is in Chertkov, that is whv he frightens me and makes me suffer so."11
Andrey and Leo were seriously contemplating having their father declared feeble-minded, in order to invalidate the will they suspected him of having made despite his protestations to the contrary. Hated by some, ill-treated by others and spied on by all, Tolstoy looked upon his divided tribe in horror. No matter what he did now, he infuriated either his family or his disciples. He preached universal love, and had become the apple of discord in his own family. What a failure his life was, in spite of the great principles he professed to follow. He made one last attempt to deceive himself: unable to reach any decision, he wrapped his cowardice in a cloak of religion.
"In my position," he told Bulgakov, "inertia is the lesser evil. Do nothing, undertake nothing. Answer every provocation with silence.
Silence is so powerful! . . . One must reach the point, as it says in the Gospels, of being able to love one's enemies, to love those who hate one."
Thinking of Chertkov and Sasha, he added:
"But they go too far, they go too far."
"No doubt you regard this as a challenge, useful to your spiritual progress?" asked Bulgakov.
"Yes, yes, of course! I have thought a good deal lately. But I am still a long way from being able to act, in my position, like Francis of Assisi."12
lie wrote in his Diary for Myself Alone, on August 6, "I think I would like to go away, leaving a letter, but I'm afraid for Sonya, al- thought I think it would be best for her too." A few days later, "Help me, Father, universal Spirit, source and principle of life, help me, at least in these last days and hours of my life on earth, help me to live before Thee, serving Thee alone."
Tanya returned to Yasnaya Polyana in the midst of this nightmare, and in an unguarded moment Tolstoy told his eldest daughter about his will. She was not surprised, and even approved of it; but a little while later, she said she was sorry he had felt it necessary to give up the rights to the books written before 1881. In any event, one glance was enough to tell her that if he remained at Yasnaya Polyana much longer in that atmosphere of spying and hysteria, he would die of a heart attack. She invited him to come, alone, for a rest at her home at Koehety. He accepted enthusiastically, but Sonya insisted upon coming with him. She preferred to make him miserable by her company, rather than know he was happy somewhere else. On August 15 he left, with his wife, Sasha, Tanya and Dr. Makovitsky.
Their first days at Koehety were so enjoyable that Sonya forgot all about her grievances. She began to relax, basking in the solicitude of her son-in-law and spoiled by her grandchildren. But on August 18, she read an item in the newspapers which her family had been hiding from her for the past four days: the minister of the interior had just given Chertkov permission to settle permanently in the government of Tula. "It's my death warrant!" she cried. "I shall'kill Chertkov! I'll have him poisoned! It's either him or me!" And she took her pulse: "One hundred and forty! . . . My chest hurts, my head hurts!"
To quiet her, Lyovochka had to promise that he would not see Chertkov any more, or let himself be photographed by him "like an old coquette ... in the woods and ravines." While she was proudly recording this victory in her diary, he was writing in his: "I have had a con-
versation with Sofya Audreycvna and, although it was an error, have consented not to allow any more pictures to be taken of me. One should not make such concessions." But lie told her the same day that he would continue writing to his disciple, and she immediately sccntcd another danger: "I could not sleep all night for thinking that henceforth it is not his diary that will be filled with nasty remarks about me and evil schemes against me (under cover, of course, of Christian humility), but his correspondence with Mr. Chertkov (Leo Nikolayevich has cast himself in the role of Christ and given the part of his favorite disciple to Chertkov)."
Driven by her obsession, she hunted through every word Tolstoy had ever written in search of passages revealing his penchant for men. Perhaps the most significant was that paragraph in Childhood where the author goes into raptures over the beauty of Sergey. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," she wrote in her diary. "Falling for a little boy in childhood and having a crush on Chertkov-the-fair-inamorato in old age are one and the same thing." When she looked in the mirror she could not understand how Lyovochka was able to prefer that obese balding bearded man to herself. Gone were the days when her amorous, impetuous husband came to take her by surprise, as she stood undressed for her bath on the edge of the stream.18 "My birthday," she wrote on August 22, 1910. "I am sixty-six years old and have as much vitality, intensity of emotion and, so people tell me, youthfulness as ever."