Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  These events lay in the future, and were quite simply unimaginable when Chertkov and his followers sat in the garden at Tuckton House and spoke of their hopes for the setting up of the Kingdom of Heaven on Russian soil. Sometimes even Chertkov allowed his mind to dwell on something more trivial. He followed the fortunes of the local football team, and presented the Bournemouth Football League with a cup. Sad to say, the cup has gone missing.36

  Meanwhile, one of the most immediate results of Chertkov’s exile in England was that the first stage of the rescue of the Dukhobors got under way. Chertkov dispatched his old friend Arthur St. John, a former captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, to see what he could do for the Spirit Wrestlers. The Captain arrived in the Caucasus with money from the Quakers and greetings of good will from Tolstoy and Chertkov. Perhaps, in a military career, he had witnessed odder scenes than those presented by these pathetic encampments of fanatics, some of whom practised nudism. But one may doubt it. He was greeted by emotional crowds, and not only because he brought with him several thousand roubles. There was a great amount of bowing, for the Dukhobors believe that the Deity resides in His fullness in every human being, and reverence their fellow men as the Orthodox would an altar or a wonder-working icon. There was weeping and sighing. Captain St. John promised that he would do what he could, but not long after his arrival, he was arrested by the police and sent over the border to Turkey. From there he made his way to Cyprus and determined that the Dukhobors should find there ‘a kind of pied-à-terre where we could bring them over without further delay as many as our means will at present allow’. The British High Commissioner was consulted, but there was anxiety in Whitehall. The establishment of a Russian colony on Cyprus would have provided a perfect seedbed for spies or political agitators. It was a full two years from the time of Chertkov’s exile before a solution – a well-nigh miraculous one – to the Dukhobor problem was found.

  Not that the Dukhobors were the only persecuted minority with claims upon Tolstoy’s sympathy. No less persecuted were his old friends the Molokans, the milk drinkers of Samara. According to new edicts brought in by the Government, heretic parents could be forcibly separated from their children if they refused to bring them up in the Orthodox faith. There was a particularly sad series of cases in Samara, in which the police rounded up Molokan children and took them off to monasteries. The parents were not told where their children were. There was a policy of deliberately tormenting parents, who would be told that they could see their children if they turned up to church at such and such an hour on such and such a day. When they kept the appointment, the worried parents would find in the church, not their own children, but other Molokan adults who were being forcibly instructed in the Orthodox faith. ‘You are filled with sadness because your children have forsaken you,’ they were told by some quisling monk, ‘but so also is your holy Mother the Church because you have forsaken her.’37

  Tolstoy was appalled by the story. ‘Such things were done only at the time of the Inquisition. Nowhere, not even in Turkey, is such a thing possible, and no one could believe that such a thing could happen in a Christian country in 1897.’38 Marooned at Yasnaya Polyana, he wired to his daughter Tanya in St. Petersburg to get in touch with their friend the distinguished lawyer Koni (a liberal who had been largely responsible for setting up the jury system in Russia) and to await the arrival of aggrieved Molokans at the railroad station. Until this alarming request arrived, Tanya had been enjoying a metropolitan interlude, compiling an album of French and German pictures, visiting exhibitions, and calling upon the great painter Repin whose pupil she became. Tolstoy had urged Repin to attempt a canvas of the Decembrists being led to execution, but in the atmosphere of the late 1890s, Repin felt that such a theme would be ‘dangerous’.

  With the arrival of her father’s telegram, however, Tanya’s practical, bossy nature asserted itself. Koni had already attempted to speak in the senate of the Molokan plight; their friends the Olsufyevs had done their best to get a letter from Tolstoy taken to the Emperor. Tanya asked Count Dmitry Olsufyev what was to stop her interviewing the Procurator of the Holy Synod himself, Pobedonostsev. Olsufyev thought it was worth a try, though Koni was more dubious. Tanya immediately went to the telephone and arranged to see ‘Pob’ (as her diary calls him) between eleven and twelve the following day.

  The interview reflects some credit both upon Tanya and on the usually much maligned Procurator himself. In the hall of Church Government House, she was asked if she was Countess Tatyana Lvovna Tolstaya, and she admitted that she was. When she was actually shown into Pob’s presence, however, he pretended to vagueness about her identity. What was the nature of her request? She told him the Molokans’ plight, which he knew perfectly well already. They were suffering because of laws brought in by himself.

  Pobedonostsev was taller, sturdier, more handsome than she had expected. His reaction to the sad story was one of genial reasonableness. ‘It’s all through the Bishop of Samara getting over-zealous. Children have been taken away from sixteen parents. There is no such statute in Russia.’ Tanya, who had studied the whole matter with Koni and reread the wording of the statute that very morning, protested. ‘Excuse me. I think that there is such a statute, though fortunately it has never hitherto been applied.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Pob. ‘You send me the names of your Molokans, and I shall write to Samara.’

  When she took her leave, Pobedonostsev showed her out, all charm, and watched her descend his great staircase. When she was half-way down, he called over the banisters, ‘What is your name?’ ‘Tatyana,’ she said. ‘And your patronymic?’ ‘Lvovna,’ she replied. ‘So! You are the daughter of Lev Tolstoy?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The famous Tatyana!’ She laughed, and she said she had never known that before.39

  Afterwards, Koni explained to her how it suited Pob’s purpose to receive a petition on behalf of the Molokans, but not to know until after the interview was over the identity of his suppliant. He could not acknowledge that he had received Tolstoy’s appeal to the Emperor; he could not be seen to negotiate with anarchists and enemies of the Imperial system. Equally clearly, though, the persecution of the Molokans had been a blunder which served no good purpose. In this way, he could squash the matter unofficially and, as he hoped, easily.

  But, as it happened, the Molokan children themselves added a complication which neither Pobedonostsev nor Tolstoy would have foreseen. When the cruel statute was revoked, and word reached the Samaran monasteries that the Molokan parents could come and reclaim their children, there were embarrassing scenes. The children, who, perhaps for the first time in their lives had eaten regular meals and slept in beds, announced that they preferred life in the monastery and refused to come home.40

  A couple of days after her surprisingly cordial encounter with Pobedonostsev, Tanya rejoined the family circle in Moscow, where another tragi-farce was being enacted by her mother. On February 5, What Is Art? had been published in a separate book (the first edition) by the Posrednik House. Five thousand copies were sold within the week. It is a book in which Tolstoy allowed his knockabout, ‘bronchitis is a metal’ persona full rein. (‘ “What! the Ninth Symphony not a great work of art!” I hear exclaimed by indignant voices. And I reply: “Most certainly it is not.”’41) The denunciatory tone is never more hoarsely vociferous than in his assaults on ‘counterfeit’ or ‘upper-class’ musical performances.

  The day after publication, there was a musical evening in the Tolstoy household. Tanya remembered that ‘Taneyev and Goldenweiser played a four-handed arrangement of Taneyev’s overture to the Orestes. It is an incomprehensibly uninspired thing with one miserable little theme at the end, which is a trifle of consolation for hearing through a lengthy piece in which their hands seemed to fall just about anywhere on the keys.’42

  The two musicians who excited these satirical opinions were in fact both successful concert pianists. Alexander Borisovich Goldenweiser was a young Jew who was deeply attached to Tolstoy’s writings and way of li
fe. Because, like Boswell, he only partially understood his great hero but was, at the same time, wonderfully literal-minded, Goldenweiser has provided us with some of the best snatches of Tolstoy’s conversation – prose snapshots of his domestic life.

  Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev’s part in the story is rather different. Born in 1856, he was older than Goldenweiser, and had been a longstanding friend of the family. Tolstoy never greatly cared for him. As long ago as 1889, Tolstoy had dismissed Taneyev as a ‘completely ignorant man who has adopted an aesthetic outlook that was new thirty years ago and imagines he is in possession of the last word in human wisdom. For example: sensuality is good; Christianity is Catholic dogma and ritual and therefore stupid; the Greek outlook on the world is the most elevated, and so on. . . . Taneyev gets on my nerves.’ Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s profound love of music covered a multitude of Taneyev’s follies. As Tchaikovsky’s favourite pupil, Taneyev deserved to be taken seriously. He was the teacher of, among others, Rachmaninov and Scriabin. Like many of his contemporaries, he took an interest in folk music, but less in the emotional fashion of the Mighty Five and more for its melodic structures. There is something abstract and intellectually impressive about this most technically adept of Russian composers. But he was never as popular as Moussorgsky, Cui, Borodin or Glazunov, perhaps because he lacked some primary emotional quality. This coldness was to play its part in his distinctive relationship with the Tolstoy household.

  Tolstoy might complain about Taneyev, but in the initial stages of their friendship, there were two things for which he valued his companionship. They would often play duets together – in particular Bach, Chopin and Beethoven. Taneyev also provided Tolstoy with something for which he was always (like most Russian men) on the look-out: a good game of chess.

  Things started to go wrong after the death of Vanichka. As Sofya Andreyevna emerged from the first prostrations of grief she began to lose herself in music and decided (something which she and Tolstoy were forever in the process of doing) to perfect her keyboard performances. Taneyev, who presumably found Moscow summers disturbingly quiet, would retreat to the noisier atmosphere of the country, where he could compose and practise with just the right level of distraction. He spent the summer at Yasnaya Polyana, taking rooms as a paying guest in one of the wings, and in 1896 Sofya asked him back, free of charge, if he would consent to become her tutor. She was by now fifty-two years old: that is to say, twelve years Taneyev’s senior. Tolstoy was on his way to seventy. Deeply to Taneyev’s embarrassment (when the truth of things slowly dawned on him) Sofya Andreyevna fell in love with the musician.

  She put no check on her infatuation, and started to pursue Taneyev everywhere. She attended all his Moscow concerts that autumn and winter. In the spring of 1897, she chucked over the Lenten fast and set off to attend Taneyev’s concerts in St. Petersburg.

  Tolstoy, always preternaturally jealous by temperament, tried to view these goings-on rationally, but he couldn’t. Rather than witness his wife making a fool of herself, he retreated more and more to the Olsufyevs at Nikolskoye-Obolyanovo – always, for some reason, a place where he could write. There he wrote Sofya a pathetic, but from her point of view intolerable letter, telling her that her obsession with the pianist was nothing but a game and that she would never succeed in making the man love her. It particularly grieved Tolstoy that all this should have blown up after the rapprochement between himself and his wife following upon the death of Vanichka:

  It is terribly painful and humiliatingly shaming that a total outsider, an unnecessary and quite uninteresting man rules our life and poisons the last years of our life: it is humiliating that one has to ask when and where he is going, and when he is playing at what rehearsals.

  This is terrible, terrible, painful and disgusting. And it is happening just at the end of our life – a life spent purely and well, just at the time when we have been drawing closer together in spite of all that could divide us.43

  With a painful irony, the Tolstoys were inhabiting much of the same territory as the fantasy which had given rise to The Kreutzer Sonata: a musician and a jealous husband. Unlike the mad narrator of that tale, Tolstoy did not imagine that his wife was actually having an affair with her musician; nor did he want to murder her. But he did find the association completely intolerable. He tried to be kind about it, but he was unable to react with the good humour which the situation required. Throughout the summer of 1897 while he suffered the exile and absence of Chertkov, Tolstoy penned enormous letters to his wife proposing solutions to the Taneyev problem. Both his daughters, Masha and Tanya, had indulged in unsuitable liaisons. Tanya was still entangled with some married man. Sofya Andreyevna’s infatuation filled Tolstoy with similar feelings of shame. The one obvious and sensible solution – ‘to persuade oneself that this will pass and that it is not important at all’ – was one which Tolstoy could not contemplate without ‘horror and despair’.

  In all seriousness, he proposed that she must choose between her infatuation and her marriage. Either she stopped seeing her pianist or Tolstoy would leave her, go abroad, go into exile. Later in the summer of 1897, when she had had Taneyev to stay at Yasnaya without Tolstoy’s permission, he issued another ultimatum. This time, however, he stuffed the letter into the leather upholstery of the armchair in his study where it was discovered, four years later, by his daughter Masha. He had decided once and for all that he would leave his wife. Their beliefs and life styles were incompatible. He longed for solitude. He was going. By the time Masha read these words, the situation had changed. The Taneyev problem had faded in the way such things do. The great escape still lay in the future. Illness had changed the complexion of family life once more, and they were all living with the consequences of publishing Resurrection.

  *

  Resurrection is a novel which has earned the disapprobation of scholars and critics, but in Russia it has always been one of Tolstoy’s most popular novels. The story of the young serving maid who, after a single amorous fling with the nephew of an aristocratic house, becomes pregnant and slithers into a life of moral degradation, might just about be allowed by the highbrows. But they cannot easily admire the melodramatic plot in which Maslova, by now a prostitute on trial for murder, comes up before her first seducer, Prince Nekhlyudov (of Russian Landlord fame) who is a member of the jury, sitting in judgement upon her. Nekhlyudov is so outraged by the injustice of the bungled verdict that he pursues her through all the labyrinthine bureaucracy surrounding Russian prisons, accompanies her on her journey to Siberia and attempts to marry her in reparation for the great wrong which he did her in the distant past. Of all the born-again Tolstoyan heroes, Nekhlyudov is the most reborn. It is not only on the last page that new life springs up in the hero’s heart to justify the title of the novel. All this, the sober critics tell us, is crude stuff, written by the old moraliser who penned The Kingdom of God is Within You and What Is Art?

  Certainly, if one gives a mere outline of the plot, Resurrection sounds insufferable. This is not, however, the impression given off by successive rereadings! Enthusiasts for the book see it as a resurrection in a different sense, a vehicle by which he very nearly managed to escape the strictures which the Tolstoyans, and his family and the official censor had, all in their different ways, been so long imposing upon him. Here was a book where he was free to speak with that authentic voice which had been speaking in him or through him ever since Childhood. In terms of his own art, as well as in its religious significance, the title of the book is wholly appropriate.

  The plot, which some readers find so fantastical, is – like most improbable stories – something which actually happened. Tolstoy’s lawyer friend Koni had been told the story as long ago as 1887 and in the family thereafter it came to be known as Konevsky – Koni’s Story. A real prostitute, Koni told them, was on trial for murder. She was disease-ridden, wretched and abject. A young man on the jury recognised a girl he had formerly seduced. He obtained permission to interview her in prison and
offered to marry her; but she died in gaol.

  Readers from countries where there is a more advanced legal system than obtained in nineteenth-century Russia may conceivably be puzzled by the fact that the young man had not either declared his former association or silently absented himself from the jury, having made his reasons clear in private session with the judge or the clerk of the court. But as Koni himself found when he got to work on jury reform (and there had only been trial by jury at all in Russia since 1864)44 the problem was to find anyone even remotely suitable to sit as a juror. A long trial in the provinces, for example, would ruin a peasant farmer who had to be away from his land for several weeks. After 1889, only members of the Orthodox Church were allowed to serve on juries and, although there were plenty of those about, the preponderance of those who sat on juries were those who, like the farcical jury in Tolstoy’s story, lived lives which were fairly remote from Maslova and her kind.