Rare clear-sightedness: he knew that after confessiong his sins to his babushkd Alexandra he would receive a scolding, that the scolding would thrill him as a proof of her love, that he would not mend his ways, and that the next time it would give him a double thrill to proclaim himself doubly guilty.
With the first harbinger of spring his gloom vanished, and he became an impetuous child again, tipsy with completely unmotivated high spirits. Turning his back on drawing rooms, young maidens and writers alike, he could think of nothing but Yasnaya Polyana: he left on April 9, 1858, and less than a week later his confidante received this blast of victory full in the face:
"Babushka! It's spring! It is so good to be alive on this earth, for all good people and even for such as I. Nature, the air, everything is drenched in hope, future, a wonderful future. . . . When I think about it more soberly, I know perfectly well I am nothing but an old frozen potato, rotten, cooked and served up with a tasteless sauce full of lumps, but the springtime has such a powerful effect on me that I sometimes catch myself imagining I am a plant that has just opened and spread its leaves among all the other plants and is going to grow up simply, peacefully and joyfully on the good Lord's earth. When this happens, such a fennentation, purification and orchestration goes on inside me that anyone who has not experienced it himself could not imagine the sensation. Away with all the old worn-out things, all the conventions, the laziness and selfishness and vice and all the vague and mixed-up relationships and regrets and remorse, to the devil with them all! Make way for the wonderful plant that is filling out its buds and growing in the spring."
At Yasnaya Polyana it seemed to him, as it did every time he returned to the scenes of his childhood, that he laid his finger on the truth. The weather was chilly and damp, the sun feebly stroked at the patches of snow that cracked and melted between tufts of new grass. At the end of the avenue of lime trees there was a hole where the old house had been; but the larch saplings planted in the rubble the previous year were taking hold and flourishing. The furniture and family portraits had been removed to the stone pavilion which was now the master's dwelling. There, Prince Nicholas Scrgeyevich Volkonsky— black eyebrows, powdered wig, lace jabot and red caftan; Count Peter Andreyevich Tolstoy—full-checked and bright-eyed beneath a mop of curly hair; Count Ilya Andreyevich, who was so extravagant and so plaintive; blind Prince Nicholas Ivanovich Gorchakov, with lowered eyelids; and all the others welcomed Leo Tolstoy from their tarnished gilt frames. In the study, the scion of this great family cast a sentimental glance around at the book-laden shelves, the plain table, old armchair, hunting trophies and pictures of friends and writers hanging on the walls. A pious hand had slipped a branch of silvery pussy-willow behind the icon on Palm Sunday. The recent holiday was still in evidence everywhere, along with the promise of fine weather to come. Even the muzhiks looked clean and happy, standing outside their thatched isbas. Tolstoy embraced a few of them on the day after his return, and observed that "in the springtime their beards have a surprisingly sweet smell." He drank birch sap, played with his sister's children, galloped over the countryside, ogled the girls and was tongue- tied afterward, inspected the sprouting buds, watched the snowdrops pushing through the ground and heard, with a solemn thrill, the first nightingale. The air warmed, a vegetal mist shrouded the rough carpentry of the trees, the ground was dotted with pink and yellow blossoms. In the evening Tolstoy lingered on the terrace listening to the noises of the country, or played chords on the piano to attract the nightingales. "I stop playing, they stop singing, T start again, they start again. I spent nearly three hours at this pastime; the terrace is open to the warm night, the frogs arc busy at their work and the night watchman at his. What a wonder!"13
One night this communion with nature suddenly brought him to his knees. Coming out of his ecstasy, he wrote in his diary: "I prayed to God in my bedroom, in front of the Greek icon of the Virgin. The vigil lamp was burning. I went out onto the balcony. Black night, swarming with stars. Faint stars, bright stars, a maze of stars. Sparkle, dark shadows, silhouettes of dead trees. He is there. Kneel to Ilim, and be silent."14
These surges of vague and intense piety recurred frequently, and he never tired of analyzing his reactions to the divine enigma. He increasingly felt that the Church degraded and dishonored God by trying to make him comprehensible to human minds. How could God be conceived of as a kind of general administrator, always ready to lend an ear to supplications from below? "What sort of God is it that can be seen clearly enough to be prayed to, entered into relations with?" he wrote. "If I even try to imagine him like that, he loses all his grandeur in my eyes. A God who can be prayed to and served is a proof of our spiritual weakness. lie is God exactly because I cannot conceive his whole being. Besides, he is not a being; God is Law and Power."15
Since God was beyond the reach of reason, he must be grasped with the heart. It was not the mind that led to him, but the senses, 'l he best way of approaching the Creator was to become one with nature. All atrcmblc with this discovery, Tolstoy wrote impassioned letters to his babushka Alexandra, telling her about it. Extremely devout, she replied that she was very unhappy to sec him turn away from the Orthodox faith. He was deeply hurt, and wrote back: "Do not despair, babushka, I am filled with Christian sentiment to the highest degree; I have a true concept of Christianity, and I cherish it: it is in my feeling for truth and beauty."10 Or, "I have looked in the Gospels and found neither God, nor the Redeemer, nor the sacraments, nor anything. . . . To be sure, I love and rcspcct religion and I think that men cannot be cither good or happy without it. . . . But I have no religion myself and I do not believe in it. For mc, religion comes from life, not life from religion. You scoff at my nature and nightingales. But in my religion, nature is the intermediary."17 Yes, now he was certain: it was by uniting with the animals and plants that he would penetrate the great mystery, by descending the stages of creation that he would mount toward heaven, by giving up intelligence that he would receive the light. Admiration was already a form of prayer. The Beautiful led to the Good. The Good led to God. Alexandra's faith ended in the same truth as that of her nephew; but Alexandra relied upon Scripture for support, and he upon his love of the earth. And wasn't that the very thing that was so wonderful, this diversity of routes and identity of goals? There were as many ways to the Lord as there were beings. "Every individual," he wrote, "has his own unconscious way, felt only in the depths of his soul." He was not even disconcerted by the contradictions that filled him: "How can they all live together inside me? I do not know and could not explain it; but it is ccrtain that dog and cat sleep together in the same hovel."18 As a matter of fact, this particular dog and cat were singularly fond of a good spat. With these two animals warring in his breast, how could Tolstoy be otherwise than eternally preoccupied with his internal upheavals? Pagan in every fiber of his body, he wanted to be Christian by thought. A sybarite with pretensions to apostlehood. A billy-goat pining for purity.
His short story Three Deaths was intended to illustrate this pantheistic Christian faith. The "worldly lady" in the story was "contemptible and pitiful" because although she believed in life after death she was afraid to die, and just when her Christian faith should have stood her in good stead, she received no comfort from it. The muzhik, on the contrary, died contented precisely because he was not a Christian in the eyes of the Church, because nature was his religion and it seemed natural to him, having lived out his time, to return to the earth which had nourished him. "A brute, you say?" wrote Tolstoy to Alexandra. "Where is the harm in that? A brute implies happiness and beauty, harmony with the whole universe, whereas in the life of the lady there was nothing but discord." And lastly, the third death, that of the tree: it expired with dignity, in silence and beauty. "In beauty because it did not prevaricate or protest, it felt neither fear nor regret."19 After explaining the story to his babushka, Tolstoy added: "There is my idea; you assuredly do not agree with it, but it cannot be contested." How he missed having her by his side, so that he could talk to her for hours, of religion, literature, friendship, perhaps of love. He filled his letters with protestations of affection which must have thrown the old maid of honor into palpitations, at the Marya Palace in St. Petersburg, in her stiff ceremonial gown with a diamond monogram on the shoulder. He told her she was his "Madonna," he begged her to come to the country (knowing she would not), he urged her to write to him in French if that was more comfortable for her: "A woman's thoughts are more easily comprehensible to me expressed in French."20