On Sergey's orders, the coffin was placed on a table between the doors of the study, one of which led to the entryway and the other onto a terrace. The lid was raised, revealing the dead man. His family stayed alone with him a few minutes. At eleven the crowd began to file past, and went on until a quarter to three. Occasionally, a voice grumbled somewhere:
"Move along, move along, don't hold up the line."
Ilie floor groaned as though it would give way beneath the weight of so many people. The visitors' dark clothes made the face of the man lying there between the bare sides of his varnished wooden shell seem even whiter by contrast. Bending over him in the crush, people leaned into the table, sometimes jarring the dead man's head, which shifted imperceptibly to one side or the other. He had grown even thinner in the past two days, his nose was longer, his skin diaphanous. Lying there with his hands crossed, at rest after all their labors, he was nothing more than a bit of wax, with tufts of white silk on the brow and under the chin, a construction of mist and snow, a phantom that would dissolve at a puff of wind, someone out of a book, the Platon Karatayev of War and Peace.
At two forty-five, the funeral began. A host of people had assembled outside on the steps. The cameras began to roll while other photographers stood on tiptoe to shoot the scene. The dead man's sons and friends took turns carrying the coffin. The crowd, larger now, followed them, singing "Eternal Memory." They stumbled along the path full of deep, frost-hardened ruts. A chilling wind streamed through the bare branches. The grave had been dug at the edge of the wood in accordant with Tolstoy's wish. Peasants lowered the coffin on ropes. Swelling out of a thousand throats, the hymn of farewell rose and swept through the forest. Between the tree trunks, as far as the eye could see, men and women kneeled in prayer. In such a large gathering of people, the eyes involuntarily sought the embroider}' of some ecclesiastical vestment or the glitter of a cross; this was the first public burial in Russia that was not attended by any priest. But the fervor of the people could not have been greater if the metropolitan of St. Petersburg had come in person to bless the author's remains.
The family requested that no speeches be made at the grave. 'Ihere was only some unknown old man, who said a few words about "the great Leo"; and Sulerzhitsky, a Tolstoyan of long standing, explained why the dead man had wished to be buried in that spot. Suddenly a few policemen appeared to see what was going on. Someone shouted:
"On your knees! Take off your hats!"
After a moment's hesitation, they kneeled down too, and removed their caps. The sky was beginning to darken when the first clods of frozen earth thudded dully onto the coffin. Dazed by grief, Sonya was no longer even crying now. When it was all over, the crowd dispersed in silence. The police climljed onto their horses and trotted away, their mission accomplished. The family turned back to the house.
At the end of the drive the old white house rose up, surrounded by the shivering trees. A few close friends stayed 011 after the burial. So many people in the big room. And yet, it was so empty. All that was left of Leo Tolstoy was a name on the cover of a long row of lwoks.
Post Mortem
The day after the funeral Sonya, who had caught cold, fell ilclass="underline" temperature 104. She was bedridden for two weeks. As soon as she was strong enough to walk, she went back to her husband's grave. She was shattered by her sudden solitude and her guilt over Lyovochka's flight and death. On November 29, 1910 she wrote in her diary: "Unbearable depression, remorse, weakness, aching regret for my husband. How he suffered, these last months! I cannot go on living." And on December 13, "I did not close my eyes all night. Oh, these awful nights of insomnia, with my thoughts, the tormenting of my conscience. Darkness of the winter night and darkness of my heart." To sleep, she took massive doses of veronal that left her drugged during the day. Even religion, 011 which she had been relying, could not pull her out of her depression. What was to become of Yasnaya Polyana? The government had been approached as a possible buyer, but had declined, not wishing to honor the memory of a writer who had been an enemy of State and Church. However, two years later Sasha, the sole heir, received one hundred and twenty thousand rubles for the publication of her father's posthumous works and was able to buy back the estate from her mother and brothers. Then, according to Tolstoy's wishes, she gave the land to the peasants. Sonya kept the house and orchard. The Moscow house was bought by the city, but did not bccomc a museum until long afterward.0
As for the manuscripts, the struggle for their possession and use continued, with Sonya and her sons on one side and Sasha and Chertkov on the other. Not one line of Leo Tolstoy's writing appeared without the approval of his youngest daughter and favorite disciple.
0 In 1920.
They regarded themselves as the continuators of his work. In their pious aim of remaining loyal to his memory, they refused all collal>ora- tion from the other members of the family, who were judged to be impure. Some even suspected the Chertkov-Sasha tandem of "correcting" the texts before delivering them to the printer. Sergeycnko, a confirmed Tolstoyan, accused Chertkov of deleting all the passages in Tolstoy's letters that were favorable to his wife. Tanya herself, who had succeeded in preserving a judicious neutrality in the fight between her parents, now became incensed at the lengths to which Chertkov was going. "If my father could put a stop to the activities of Sasha and Chertkov, lie would surely do so,"1 she wrote. And she added, speaking of a Tolstoyan society founded by her sister, "Nothing good can come of it. . . . Everything said and done there is far removed from the spirit of my father's ideas."2
Sonya undertook to write an autobiography, to counter the malevolent insinuations of the Tolstoyans. It took her back to a time of agitation and violence which she had formerly cursed and now regretted. It made her happy to write about her life as the wife of an exceptional man, whose fame was growing steadily after his death. But now her role was limited to poring over her memories. She lived on a pension, paid by Tsar Nicholas II. Every day she went to pray at Lyovochka's grave. Many pilgrims came, some reverent, others indifferent or derisive. Greasy papers littered the mound, stupid inscriptions were carved 011 tree trunks. ... "I see clearlv that Yasnaya Polvana will never be our home again/' Tanya wrote. "Our house lias become public property of its own accord/'
In 1914 Sonya was dismayed to see her husband's pacifist dreams shattered by the first cannonball. She said to her daughter Sasha, who wanted to enlist as a nurse on the Turkish front, "Why arc you going to the war? Your father would not have approved." She was even more distressed by the revolution of 1917. She remembered Lyovochka preaching "non-violence" to the revolutionaries, and was glad he had died before this fratricidal fury was unleashed.
From one end of the country to the other, peasants were pillaging and setting fire to the estates of the nobility. Warned that the men from the neighboring villages were marching 011 the house behind the red flag, Sonya, her daughter Tanya and granddaughter Tanichka made preparations for flight; but at the entrance to the estate the "expropriators" were met and repelled by the muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana. armed with axes, pitchforks and scythes, and so Yasnaya Polyana was one of the few homes to be spared. Transformed into a State farm, it
was placed under the administration of Sonya's son-in-law Obolensky,8 and this enabled the great man's widow to stay on in the family home, in which a few rooms were set aside for her use.
In 1918 Sasha went to Yasnaya Polyana and found, in the place of her enemy, a bent little old woman with a quavering chin, lifeless eyes and a broken voice. Falling into each other's arms, mother and daughter were reconciled. It was the beginning of the great famine. A decrepit servant officiated, in patched white gloves. As before, silver and crystal glasses gleamed on the damask tablecloth. But in the center of the platter were nothing but boiled beets and chunks of black bread mixed with chopped straw.4 The following year the situation l>ccame so acute that in order to support her mother, aunt5 and daughter, all of whom were living at Yasnaya Polyana, Tanya was reduced to knitting scarves and selling them at the Tula market. The civil war was approaching. Bolshevik soldiers were quartered in the house. At the beginning of October 1919, a red flag was hoisted on the rooftop. As guardian of the premises, Tanya protested: "To what extent can the presence of soldiers be tolerated in the home of Tolstoy?"'5 The red flag came down again.