The long train and coach trip had worn Nicholas out. He smiled up at the blue sky and sun and felt his strength ebbing away. When lie had a coughing fit, which was usually in the morning when he awoke, he was ashamed to be seen spitting blood into the basin and refused to have anyone in the room. Although the slightest effort exhausted him, he dressed and undressed himself out of discipline, and to keep up his dignity. But one day, in his toilet, he had to call his brother because lie was too weak to straighten his clothes by himself. "Help mc," he murmured. And afterward said, "Thanks, friend." These words moved Tolstoy far more than a searing lament or an avowal of love. "Friend. ... Do you realize what that meant, between us?"fl he wrote to Sergey.
Nicholas no longer doubted that his end was at hand, and accepted defeat with equanimity. Seated by his bed, Tolstoy looked at the bloodless face, listened to the shallow breathing and thought back to their children's games at Yasnaya Polyana, the drinking bouts with the officers, the hunts with Uncle Epishka in the Caucasian forest and the green stick bearing the secret of happiness that Nicholas said was buried in the forest of Zakaz. Was it possible that this cherished vessel of memory, this lively intelligence, this warmth of thought were about to dissolve forever? What was the point of living, what was the point of work, if evcr> thing must end in this horrible slithering toward an abyss?
On September 20 (October 2), 1S60 Tolstoy saw that his brother would not live through the day. Marya had just gone back to her villa outside Hydres. Nicholas sank into unconsciousness. Then his eyes opened wide, his face winced in terror, he blurted out, "What is it?" and died.
Eight years earlier Tolstoy had written to Aunt Toinette from the Caucasus: "As God is my witness, the two greatest misfortunes that could befall me would be your death or that of Nicholas, the two people I love more than myself."7
For once he had not been wrong in his predictions. He was literally astonished by an event he refused to understand. Death as he had seen it on the battlefield was brutal, heroic, awful, but the very strangeness of the sight distorted its meaning. Besides, one was quaking so hard with fear for one's own skin that one had no time to ponder over metaphysical problems. But here in Mine. S^ndquier's pleasant family pension, death was not a sudden blow, but a long, slow wearing- down, an ineluctable advance of l>cing toward nothingness, the most abominable destruction in the most intimate and commonplace setting, between basin and bedpan. "Terrible though it is," Leo wrote to his brother Sergey, "1 am glad it all happened before my eyes and affected me as it should have done. It is not like the death of Mitenka [Dmitry], which I learned of 3t a time when my mind was completely taken up with other things. ... I was bound to Mitenka by childhood memories and a feeling of kinship, but that was all. But he [Nicholas] was, for you and for me, the man we loved and respected more than anything in the world. You know the selfish thought that was in our minds toward the end: the sooner the better—now, it is terrible to write that and remember that one could think it. ... lie died without suffering, visibly at least. The next day I went down to his room. I was afraid to uncover his face. I thought it must be even more anguished and frightening than during his illness, but you cannot imagine how attractive it was, how good, cheerful and calm."8
During the burial at the cemetery at Hy&res, Tolstoy thought of writing "a practical Gospel, a materialist life of Christ."9 But it was not, he was convinced, literary vanity that inspired this project. He was no longer interested in art. After the ordeal he had just been through, his sole aim was to tear off the absurd masks that religions had plastered onto the face of God, one on top of the other, down through the centuries: "When one really comes to think that death is the end of everything, then there is nothing worse than being alive. Why care, why work, since there is nothing left of what was Nicholas Nikolayevich? Strange idea of a joke! Be useful, virtuous, happy, people tell cach other; but we and our usefulness, our virtue, our happiness, it all boils down to this simple truth which I have understood after thirty- two years of life: the situation in which we are placed is atrocious. . . . No doubt, so long as one has the desire to discover the truth and say it, one goes on trying to discover it and say it. That is all that remains of my idea of morality. That is the only thing I shall do, only not in your form of art. Art is a lie, and already I am no longer able to love a beautiful lie."10 And he wrote in his diary, on October 13 (25): "It is almost a month since Nikolenka [Nicholas] died. This event has detached me terribly from life. Again the same question: why? I am no longer very far myself from the crossing-over. Over where? Nowhere. I try to write, I force myself, and I can't do it, for the simple reason that I cannot attach enough importance to work to muster up the strength and patience it demands. . . . Nikolenka's death has hit mc harder than anything I have ever experienced."
But man is so made that the consciousness of the nothingness lying in wait for him paradoxically spurs him on to build. With his prodigious powers of recuperation, Tolstoy drew a strength from his grief that happiness could not have given him. "Read my fortune in the cards," he wrote on October 16 (28), i860. "Shilly-shallying, idleness, depression, thoughts of death. Must get out of this. Only one way: make myself work. It is already one o'clock in the afternoon and I have not yet done a thing. Finish the first chapter before dinner, then write letters." And a little later, "For the last three days I have been invaded by a host of images and ideas, such as I have not had for ten years."11
After casting away art ("Art is a lie, and already I am no longer able to love a beautiful lie"), he turned and clung to it as though it were the most precious thing in the world. He even began a new novel, The Decembrists, the opening pages of which described the homecoming of one of the heroes of Russian liberalism after being exiled by Nicholas I for his part in the uprising of December 14, 1825.* In his portrait of Russian society as seen through the eyes of this ghost from the Siberian prison camps, he abandoned himself, in spite of his mourning, to a mordant irony and grim gaiety in which the joy of crcation could be detected. He might have left Hyeres and broken away from the sad memories there, but lie preferred to stay until the end of the year, and moved into the villa "Touche" with his sister. The little provincial town was full of tuberculosis patients. "Wherever one goes," wrote Marya Tolstoy, "there are the sick, and what sick! A congrcss of dying consumptives! Every minute one goes by in a chair, or held up by the
• Tolstoy abandoned this novel after a few chapters.
arms by someone on cither side, or dragging along alone with a cane; all their faces arc livid, exhausted and dismal. In a word, this is an outdoor hospital. Hardly anyone has only a mild case; only those for whom all hope has been abandoned come here!"'2 And Tolstoy himself confessed to his babushka Alexandra that since his brother's death he could not look at the Hyeres invalids without feeling that they were all "part of the family," that they all "had some power over him."13 When he was too downhearted, his nephews helped him to combat his despair. Their candid eyes, laughter and questions revived his taste for life. With them and a little nine-year-old neighbor, Sergey Plaxin, who "had a weak chest," he went for long walks up the Montagne Sainte, or over to the castle of the Trou des Fees (Fairies' Hole) or to Porquerol- les to watch the men working in the salt flats. He told them fairy talcs as they went; the story of the golden horse, the story of the giant tree from the top of which one could see all the cities and seas of the world. When Sergey Plaxin was tired, he lifted him onto his shoulders, and the little boy might pretend he was at the top of the magic oak. Back at the house, Tolstoy organized games: lie hung a rig between the doors and did gymnastics with the children, or gathered them around him and asked them to write a composition on the theme, "What distinguishes Russia from all other countries?" For one, the most striking thing about Russia was the blinis they ate during Lent and the painted eggs at Easter; for another, it was all the snow that fell there; for another, it was troikas.14 Tolstoy was delighted with their replies. He felt his professorial calling stirring again.