8. Pencil drawing by Repin of Tolstoy reading in his grandfather’s chair at Yasnaya Polyana, 1887
Tolstoy agreed with ‘everything’ in the treatise, and entered into an enthusiastic correspondence with Bondarev, telling him that he frequently read out his manuscript to his acquaintances, though adding rather tactlessly that most of them usually got up and walked out. He also confided to Bondarev that this had given him the idea of narrating his manuscript whenever he had boring visitors: it was a successful ploy in getting rid of them.85 Tolstoy went out of his way to get Bondarev’s manuscript published. After its inclusion in the journal Russian Wealth was censored at the last moment in 1886, he persevered, only to see it being physically cut from Russian Antiquity in 1888. Eventually an edited version of Bondarev’s manuscript, accompanied by an article by Tolstoy, appeared later in the year in The Russian Cause, its editor receiving a caution from the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a result.86 Much later it was published by The Intermediary, prefaced by Tolstoy’s introduction.87 Both Bondarev and Syutayev were pivotal figures for Tolstoy in his quest to persuade people to live in harmony with the land, as he made clear in a footnote to What Then Must We Do?, which he finally finished revising in 1886:
In the course of my lifetime, there have been two Russian thinking people who have had a deep moral influence on me, enriched my thinking, and clarified my worldview. These people were not Russian poets, scholars or preachers, but are two remarkable men who are alive today, and have both spent their whole lives working on the land – the peasants Syutayev and Bondarev.88
Another crucial person in Tolstoy’s campaign to promote a life of non-violence in harmony with the land was William Frey, the gifted son of an army general from the Baltic nobility who had abruptly turned his back on a brilliant military career in St Petersburg in the 1860s in order to seek the truth. In 1868, at the age of twenty-nine, after dabbling with radical left-wing politics, Frey emigrated with his bride to America and changed his name from Vladimir Geins to the symbolic Frey (‘free’). In the mid-1870s he had been part of the disastrous kansas commune along with Vasily Alexeyev and Alexander Malikov, but in 1884 he moved with his family to London, by this time a fervent positivist, and a devotee of Comte and Spencer. The following summer he set off to preach the ‘religion of mankind’ in Russia, where he very quickly came across samizdat copies of Confession and What I Believe, which made a deep impression on him. After sending Tolstoy a sixty-page letter outlining the superiority of the ‘religion of mankind’, he received an invitation to visit Yasnaya Polyana, and he arrived in October 1885.89 Tolstoy was enchanted by Frey, whom he described as a serious, clever and sincere person with a pure heart. He was not persuaded by Frey’s arguments about religion, but he was encouraged by his example to persevere with his efforts to give up meat, alcohol and tobacco. And he was captivated by Frey’s stories of life in the Wild West, and his experiences of living in communes where there was no private property, and where everyone worked with their hands rather than with their heads.
Frey was interesting, Tolstoy wrote teasingly to his sister-in-law Tanya, because of his absolute refusal to recognise ‘Anke Cake’, which was his ultimate symbol of bourgeois self-satisfaction and unearned privilege. Anke Cake was served on special occasions at Yasnaya Polyana, and was named after a friend and medical colleague of Sonya’s father, also of German descent. In her recipe book, Sonya does not provide instructions, merely a list of ingredients:
Anke Cake
1 pound of flour
½ pound of butter
¼ pound of caster sugar
3 egg yolks
1 glass of water
The butter should come straight from the cellar, it needs to be on the cold side.
Filling
Melt a quarter of a pound of butter, then mix in two eggs, half a pound of caster sugar, the grated rind of two lemons and the juice of three lemons. Heat until it is as thick as honey.90
There was also a sour cream version, which involved mixing ten eggs with twenty dessert spoons of sour cream, a cup of sugar, and two dessert spoons of flour, lining a tin with jam, pouring the mixture onto it and baking it in the oven.91 The puritanical Frey would have considered it immoral to partake of something so rich and indulgent, and Tolstoy was now of the same opinion. Frey had a further meeting with Tolstoy in Moscow that December, but he was forced to leave Russia in March 1886 after failing to win over Tolstoy, or indeed anyone else, to his religion of mankind. He returned to London, where he died in extreme poverty of tuberculosis two years later at the age of forty-nine. Tolstoy recollected that he was one of the ‘best’ people he had ever known.92
Tolstoy had focused his energies in the first half of the 1880s on articulating and disseminating his new worldview. In 1886, after he finished setting out the practical proposals contained in What Then Must We Do?, he turned to the abstract realm of ideas. His new project was initially conceived as a treatise ‘about life and death’, in which he wanted to set out the philosophy underpinning his ideas. Even though he may have stopped feeling suicidal, thoughts of death had never left Tolstoy, as can be seen from all three of his major artistic works written in the 1880s (The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Power of Darkness and The Kreutzer Sonata), the last two of which deal with violent death by murder. Death was also never far away in Tolstoy’s personal life, but he now had a new attitude to it. In the late summer of 1885 he had been saddened to hear of the death of his faithful friend and supporter Leonid Urusov, whom he had accompanied him on a trip to the Crimea that spring (it was the first time he had been back to Sebastopol since the war).93 More testing, however, was the experience of death in the family: in January 1886 four-year-old Alyosha died. Tolstoy discovered that he was now able to approach the death of his youngest son with equanimity. He wrote to tell Chertkov that he had previously regarded the death of a child as cruel and incomprehensible, but now saw it in a positive light.94
Sonya’s only response to Alyosha’s death was grief, but despite feeling distraught, she shrank from paying the 250 roubles required for burial at the prestigious cemetery next to the Novodevichy Convent, which was close to their house. Instead, she and the family’s nanny placed the small coffin in the sleigh they had only recently used to take Alyosha to the zoo, and travelled north of Moscow to bury him at Pokrovskoye, where the Bers family had rented a dacha when she was a young girl.95 In November 1886 Sonya had to cope with another death when her sixty-year-old mother fell gravely ill, and she too travelled to the Crimea. She was with her mother in Yalta during her last days.96 If Tolstoy barely seemed to register the demise of Lyubov Alex-androvna, his old friend from childhood,97 it was perhaps because he himself was seriously unwell that autumn. Death was an ever-present subject in his conversations, and in his correspondence.98