code-name, Nikolayev. He also wrote a letter to Saslia, telling her about the trip and asking her to send him the books he had been reading (Montaigne's Essays, the second volume of The Brothers Karamazov, Une Vie by Maupassant), a pair of small scissors, some pencils and his dressing gown. As for the scene she must inevitably have with her mother, he gave her a piece of advice: "I beg you, my darling: few words, but be gentle and firm."
The travelers hired a carriage to the Optina monastery. The roads were full of potholes, the wind glacial, the sky black, the moon glim mering intermittently through the clouds; they had to ferry across a river. Dr. Makovitsky watched Tolstoy apprehensively. At the convent hostelry they were received by the head monk, an affable man with a flamboyant beard and a mane of red hair. A vast room with two beds, clean and well heated, was made ready for them. Tolstoy drank tea with honey but ate nothing, asked for a glass to hold his fountain pen during the night, wrote a long entry in his diary and, around ten in the evening, undressed for bed, worn out and happy. When Dr. Makovitsky moved to help him take off his boots, he growled:
"I wish to take care of myself!"
But he had difficulty pulling them off. As he struggled and puffed, bending double, he added:
"I want to live with the utmost simplicity, spend money parsimoniously . . ."8
'Ihen he stretched out and closed his eyes, thinking of those he had left behind in the old white house at the end of the birch drive.
At Yasnaya Polyana on that October 28, Sonya rose at eleven and, as soon as she was dressed, went to her husband's bedroom. Empty! Alarmed, she ran into the Remington room and asked Sasha:
"Where is Papa?"
"Gone," answered the girl drily.
"Where?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know? Has he gone for good?"
"He left a letter for you. Here."
Sonya jerked upright, snatched the letter out of her daughter's hand, tore open the envelope and read the first few lines, moaned, "My God, what is he doing to me?" and ran out into the garden. Sasha, Bulgakov, who had just arrived from Chertkov's, and a few servants rushed off in pursuit. In the distance they caught glimpses of her gray dress weaving between the trees. She was running toward the pond as hard as her old legs would carry her. When she reached the planks of the laundry-raft
she slipped and fell, dragged herself to the edge and rolled off into the water. She was already going under, her arms beating weakly, when Bulgakov and Sasha splashed in after her, seized her and pulled her onto the bank. She was brought back, soaked and shivering, to her room.
"Wire your father that 1 drowned myself," she begged.
Sasha had just finished changing her clothes when she saw her mother comc out of the house in a bathrobe and turn back toward the pond. Once again Bulgakov and the servant stopped her. She was delirious with grief all day long; she could not be left alone, she cried and beat at her breast with a paperweight or a hammer, jabbed herself with scissors, a knife, pins, threatened to throw herself out of the window or down the well. Seriously alarmed, Sasha called a doctor from Tula, who merely diagnosed a fit of hysterics, "without the least trace of mental derangement." Sasha telegraphed an urgent summons to her brothers and sister. Andrey arrived that evening and immediately lay the blame on his father. Bulgakov and old Marya Schmidt took turns sitting up with Sonya, who wandered about the house all night talking to herself, sobbing and threatening: 'Til find him, I'll get out of here, I'll jump out the window, I'll go to the station! . . . Just let me find out where he is and I'll never let him go again! . . . I'll lie down in his doorway! . . ."
While she was wailing on, Sergeyenko was on his way to Optina- Pustyn bearing instructions from Chertkov. lie reached the monastery at seven in the morning of October 29. After a bad night (there were caterwauling cats galloping down the halls, a woman was weeping in the next room), Tolstoy welcomed the emissary apprehensively. What was happening at Yasnaya Polyana? When he learned that Sonya had tried to kill herself he was horror-stricken, yet everything he knew about his wife should have prepared him for just such an eventuality'. He was also upset when Sergeyenko told him that Sonya and his sons might be tempted to put the police on his trail. Fortunately, the traveler brought good letters, one from Sasha counseling her father not to lose heart and one from Chertkov, rejoicing as though on the morn of a personal victory.
"I can find 110 words," the disciple wrote, "to express my joy at your departure. I feel with my whole being that this is what you should have done and that it would have been wrong for you to continue living at Yasnaya Polyana with things as they were. I only think you waited too long, fearing to act out of self-interest; but now there was no selfishness in the forcc that impelled you to take your decision. To be sure, at times you will inevitably find your new life more peaceful and pleas-
ant, and simpler, but you must not let that trouble you. I am convinced that your action will be a source of relief to all, and to Sofya An- dreyevna first of all, however she may react outwardly."4 Tolstoy immediately answered both letters. Sasha first: "It is difficult. I cannot help feeling a great burden upon me. ... I am relying on the good influence of Tanya and Sergey. 'l"he main thing is for them to understand and to try to show her that this spying, these eternal reproaches, this way of treating me as an object, this perpetual chccking-up 011 me, this hatred of the man who is closest and most useful to me (Chertkov), this obvious hatred and simulated love for me—that this entire life is worse than disagreeable to me, it is utterly impossible, and if someone has to drown himself it is I and not she, and that 1 desire only one thing: to free myself from her, from the lying and hypocrisy and malice that fills her whole being. Naturally, they can not make her understand that, but they can tell her that not only does her behavior toward me fail to express her love, but its evident object is to kill me, and that she will succeed, for I hope that the third attack that is now threatening me will release us both from the dreadful atmosphere in which we have been living and to which I will not return "s
To Chertkov he wrote more briefly, but with no less determination: "A return to my former life has become difficult if not impossible, for now I would incur yet more reproaches and less goodwill. As for acccpting some form of compromise, I cannot and will not. Come what may; so long as I do not commit too many sins."*
Relieved by his double confession, he dictated some reflections 011 the death penalty to Sergeycnko and went for a walk in the monastery gardens where he, the renegade, banished from the Church, felt the peace of the place as a blessing from God. He chatted with a few simple-minded brothers in tattered frocks, and went up to the hermitage wall, intending to have a conversation with the starets, but changed his mind just as he was about to cross the threshold. Returning to Dr. Makovitsky, he said:
"I shall not go to see the startsy of my own accord. But if they were to send for me, I would go."
It was certainly not a desire to become rcconcilcd with the official Church that attracted him to the solitary monks; it was a need to discuss his thoughts on God, the soul and death, with men whose high degree of morality he esteemed, while continuing to deplore their beliefs. Also, he would have liked to learn more about the ascetic lives the\
' 4
led, find out to what extent tlicy really had given up the world, compare their experience with his own. After all, was not he, too, a truth
seeker? Ah, if only he could have gone to live in one of those white cells, far from his wife and sons and disciples, to meditate on the great problems at his leisure, while still repudiating the dogma of the Church!