Sasha and Dr. Makovitsky returned to Yasnaya Polyana with him. The meeting was ominous and awkward. But the next day Sonya appeared in a white silk dress with a part)' smile on her face, ordered hot chocolate for breakfast and asked Bulgakov to photograph her with her husband. Lyovochka could not refuse this one favor, she said, after posing for Chertkov so often. The picture, appearing in the newspapers, would put an end to the rumors of conflict between the author and his wife. Tolstoy unwillingly consented to pose for the camcra. A screen was put up to concentrate the sun's pale rays on the couple. With his head under the black hood and the rubber pear in his hand, Bulgakov timidly suggested that his models move right and left, face each other, look happy. But Tolstoy, exasperated by this farce, paid no attention. The photographs were no good, and had to be taken over again
the next day, in the same clothes and pose. It was cold, a sharp wind was blowing. Bulgakov took forever to arrange his camcra. At last, he counted: "One . . . two . . . three." Standing before him, with ravaged features, staring fiercely into space, one hand in the pocket of his blouse, Tolstoy seemed unaware of his wife, who was clutching his arm in her white dress, supplicating and imperious, devouring him with her eyes. The shutter's click fixed for all time the tragic image of these two disunited beings, one trying to restrain the other.0
Sasha, of coursc, was furious at her father for consenting to have his picture taken with her mother, as though they formed some sort of model couple; and even more because he had not replaced the photographs by his daughter and Chertkov that had formerly adorned his study. In the angry amazon with the blazing eyes, Tolstoy sorrowfully recognized the bellicose Spirit of his wife.
"IIow you resemble her," he sighed.
In his Diary for Myself Alone: "They are tearing me apart. Sometimes I feel like leaving the lot of them."
Later, when a repentant Sasha came to him with pencil and paper in hand, he murmured:
"It isn't your shorthand I need, but your love."
Whereupon father and daughter wept and made up. The next day- Tolstoy returned the portraits by Sasha and Chertkov to their former places. And it was Sonya's turn to perform. As it happened, Sasha had just left with Varvara Fcokritova to visit Olga Dietrich, Audrey's ex- wife, at Taptikovo, and Lyovochka had gone for a walk in the forest. Brandishing a child's cap pistol, Sonya stormed into the study and fired at Chertkov's picture, then tore it up and threw the pieces clown the toilet. When her husband came back from his walk she fired a second time into the air, to frighten him. Then, as he showed no sign of alarm, she ran sobbing into the garden. In turn, Dr. Makovitsky, Bulgakov and old Marya Schmidt went out to admonish her. She eventually consented to go back to the house ancl Marya Schmidt, who was worried by her state, sent a servant on horseback to inform Sasha that her mother had gone raving mad. Sasha returned from Taptikovo in the night of September 26-27 to find her father dropping with exhaustion ancl her mother astonished at all the fuss being made over such a trifle.
"You crazy girls, why have you come back so soon?" she said.
Sasha retorted sharply. Sonya resented their impertinent insinuations. In the heat of the argument, she banished Varvara Feokritova like a thieving servant and screamed at her daughter:
• This is the last portrait taken of Tolstoy alive.
"I'll throw you out of here as I did Chertkov!"
Sasha, about to leap upon her mother like a wildcat, managed to control herself and went into her father's study to announce that she was going to spend a few days with Varvara Feokritova at Telyatinki, where she had a little house not far from Chertkov's, in order to restore peace and quiet in the family. She was certain her father would come with her. But he only said, wearily:
"Yes, do go."
She and her friend left the next morning. With relief, Sonya watched the "two pests," as she called them, retreating into the distance with their "horses, dogs and parrot." Tolstoy wrote: "I am in a comical and contradictory position. Without false modesty I may say that I formulate and express the most important and significant ideas, and at the same time, I spend the best part of my life yielding to or resisting the whims of women. As far as moral perfection is concerned I feel like a youngster, a schoolboy, and a not very assiduous schoolboy as yet."
Chertkov was sending a complete correspondence course to the schoolboy: "You have allowed yourself, on my account, to l>e forced into an ambiguous and to a certain extent false position, unconsciously, no doubt, and trying all the while to do right." On the other side, Sonya was deafening him with a stream of words in which the same vindictive allusions and the same protestations of love recurred again and again. "We have been left alone, the two old folks," she noted with satisfaction. "He is flabby, and his intestines are out of order." And: "When the others aren't there he becomes the way he used to be, kind and coaxing with me and, I think, mine." But he was irritated beyond words by these attentions that were mingled with so much mistrust. After reading Maupassant's story En famille, he conceived a desire to write a novel "demonstrating the triviality of existence," the central figure of which would be "a man who is spiritually alive." He waxed enthusiastic: "Oh, it will be fine!" But he drooped at the thought of such a tremendous undertaking. "Impossible to work because of her [Sonya], because of the feeling that obsesses mc about her, because of my inner struggle. And of coursc that struggle and the possibility of victory arc more important than any work of literature could be."
On October 3, he was much agitated by the arrival of his son Sergey and daughter Tanya, who had decided to convince their mother to separate from him. They accused her of torturing their father and threatened to have her put under surveillance by a board of guardians if she would not consent cither to leave or to mend her ways.
To escape from their screaming and shouting, Tolstoy went out for a ride with Dr. Makovitsky. When he returned, after a seven-mile canter,
he lay down fully dressed on his bed, without pulling off his boots. At seven in the evening, when he had not appeared for supper, the countess served the soup and then, apprehensive, went to his room. He was lying unconscious on the bed, his jaws jerking and emitting a muffled mooing noise at intervals. Sonya's cries brought the whole household on the run; the Sukhotins, Sergey, Biryukov, Bulgakov, Dr. Makovitsky. They undressed him. He was mumbling, "Society . . . society . . . reason," and slowly waggling his sluggish fingers across the blanket as though trying to write. With remarkable presence of mind Sonya, following Dr. Makovitsky's instructions, put hot-water bottles on her husband's feet and a compress on his forehead, made him drink coffee and rum and waved smelling salts under his nose. Suddenly he went into convulsions. His legs thrashed so violently that three men— Biryukov, Bulgakov and the doctor—could not hold him down. His head slid off the pillow, his features contracted, his eyes were glassy and his throat filled with a gurgling rattle. Kneeling before him, Sonya clasped his feet in her arms and prayed aloud, "Not this time, my God, not this time! Spare him!"