Tolstoy's birthday followed six days later. Eighty-two years old. lie hoped that this day, at least, would bring a lull in the storm. But a quarrel broke out between them because he maintained in her presence that celibacy and chastity were the Christian ideals. She remarked that he had no business talking that way after fathering thirteen children. One thing led to another, and the venerable couple, quivering with rage, were soon digging up all their old resentments: the division of the estate, the copyrights, Chertkov; they didn't overlook a single one. The ensuing reconciliation was sincere 011 her side, but inspired on his by a profound sense of pity. "My relations with Sonya arc becoming more and more difficult," he wrote that day. "What she feels for me is not love, but the possessiveness of love, something that is not far from hatred and is lDeing transformed into hatred. The children saved her before. An animal love, but full of self-denial. When that was over, there remained only immense egoism. And egoism is the most abnormal state of all, it is insanity. . . . Dushan Makovitsky and Sasha refuse to admit that she is ill. They are wrong."
Two days later Sonya, furious at being treated "like a Xantippe" by everyone, determined to leave Kochety and return to Yasnaya Polyana.
At her father's request, Sasha went with her. The moment Sonya entered the house, she took down the photographs by Chertkov and Sasha and replaced them with her own. Then she sent for a priest, to exorcise the disciple's diabolical spirit from Lyovoehka's study. The pope appeared at four in the afternoon of September 2, wearing his sacerdotal garb and accompanied by a sacristan who carried a little chest. He sprinkled the room with holy water, swung his censer toward the four corners and intoned a series of purgative prayers in a cavernous voice, including one rather strange one celebrating I lis Majesty the emperor's victories on the battlefield, which shocked Sonya's Tolstoyan pacifism. Sasha left again the following day, and reported these aberrant goings-on in the house to her father. He was much saddened to hear of them and his sorrow increased at the news that Sonya was already restless and threatening to return to Kochety.
On September 5 she was back, and their quarrel flared up again. Reproaches, curses, imprecations, nocturnal flights into the garden. The old man lumbered after her as she howled, "He's a monster! A murderer! I never want to sec him again!" Between rounds in their match, he tried to read and write a little. He was disappointed by the new novels. Charles Salomon had brought him Gide's Retour de Venfant prodigue, which he found "empty and bombastic."14 Nor did he care for Gorky's Mother ("Worthless!"). On the whole, he remained faithful to the literary preferences of his youth and adulthood. Among foreign authors, he continued to revere his beloved Rousseau, for the unqualified, agonizing sincerity of his confessions; Pascal, whose mystical writings reminded him of his own; Moli&re, because his theater was accessible to all; Stendhal, who had taught him to see and portray war; Hugo, the giant, who, like himself, proclaimed that art must be useful; the bantering Anatole France; Zola, the champion of social rights; Dickens, friend of the weak and poor, whose genius was tinged with humor and melancholy; and Maupassant, "the only one to have understood and expressed the negative side of relations between men and women."15 Gorky and his friend Posse once asked Tolstoy how he could have any esteem for that "virtually pornographic" author, to which the old man replied: "True talent always has two shoulders: one is ethical, the other aesthetic. If the ethical shoulder hitches itself up too high, then the aesthetic shoulder dips down to the same degree, and the talent Incomes misshapen."18 Curious statement from a man who maintained elsewhere that the artist should be a professor of morality before all else.
On September 6, 1910, lie sent a poignant letter to Gandhi, then a lawyer in Johannesburg in the Transvaal, explaining that there was a
monstrous inconsistency between the law of love professed by Christian nations and the violence they practiccd, in the guise of government, army, courts and all administrative institutions. With one foot in the grave, he continued to exhort his Asian brethren not to resist evil with evil. Perhaps they would succeed where the Christians had failed. Sometimes lie wondered what his far-off correspondent, who took him for a seer, would have thought had he been able to observe the master's struggles with a half-demented wife and children wallowing in materialism. Chertkov had just sent him an extract from the diary of Varvara Feokritova, who had made a note of one of Sonya's rash threats uttered in her presence: "Even if my husband made everything over to Chertkov I would not give up my rights to his unpublished works, because they arc not dated. Everybody will believe me if I say they were written before 1881. Besides, I don't care what he does, because my sons and I will surely try to break the will (if there is one); our case is very strong; we shall prove that he [Tolstoy] had become feeble-minded toward the end and had a series of strokes, which is no more than the truth and the whole world knows it, and we will prove that he was forccd into writing that will in a moment of mental incapacity and that he himself would never have wanted to disinherit his children."
While thus plunging Tolstoy into a state of anguish, Chertkov was also writing to Sonya, in an attempt to return to her good graccs: "I am convinced that so unexpected and sudden a change in your attitude could not have comc about through your own volition. It seems to me that it must be due in part to a few most regrettable misunderstandings which we have been unable to clear up, and in part to the calumny of third persons who have transmitted to you their feelings of hostility toward me."17 She haughtily replied that she could not forgive him for appropriating her husband's diary: "His diary is the most intimate reflection of his life and therefore of my life with him; it is the minor of his soul, which I had grown accustomed to feel and to love, and it should not fall into the hands of an outsider. And the notebooks were removed by stealth, unknown to me, by persons whom you sent to take them, and they remained with you in a wooden house exposed to all the dangers of fire or confiscation, long enough to be copied ten times. . . . How many times have I asked you what arrangements you have made with regard to Leo Nikolayevich's papers and manuscripts in the event of his death? You have always maliciously refused to answer. You love neither truth nor light. . . . You published the works of Leo Nikolaye- vich, that is your claim to merit. But why do you always insist upon having all his manuscripts in your possession? I sec it as a proof of your cupidity, not minel You will tell me that he gives them to you himself.
But it is by that action and many others that I recognize your growing ascendancy over a man whose will is steadily weakening, an old mail who has already ceased to care for most of the tilings of this world. Your despotic personality has subjugated him (in a conversation I had with your mother, she shared my opinion regarding your tyranny). Your pernicious and insidious influence and my husband's excessive regard for you have estranged him from me. . . . You arc the one who has given him the idea that one should cither run away from a wife like me or kill oneself. . . ,"18
On September 12, after refusing to eat for two days in order to punish Lyovochka for treating her so harshly, Sonya left, alone, for Yasnaya Polyana. During her short stay at Koehety she liad managed to antagonize even placid Michael Sukhotin, who had shouted at her, "Your only claim to fame, which is to be Tolstoy's wife, will be destroyed if he leaves you! Tolstoy has run away from his wife, they'll say, because she was making his life hell!" Now that she was gone, her adversaries, led by Sasha, tried to consolidate their authority over the old man. "What I want is for my father not to give in to my mother," Sasha wrote to Bulgakov. Chertkov, tearing his hair because he could not talk to his master in person at such a critical moment, wrote letter after letter exhorting him to be firm. "Received a letter from Chertkov who joins in the chorus of advice telling me I must not give in, but I don't know whether I shall be able to hold out," wrote Tolstoy on September 19. "I plan to return to Yasnaya on the twcnty-second." September 23 was their forty-eighth wedding anniversary and he had promised to be with her 011 the great day: "Twenty-second, morning. Leaving for Yasnaya, in terror at the thought of what awaits me there. Do what you must . . . And above all, say nothing, do not forget there is a soul-God in her."