The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year

by Jay Parini

  That afternoon, he seemed much livelier. Goldenweiser, the pianist, arrived with his frowsy wife, cheering the company with his broad jokes and genial manner. Dushan Makovitsky withdrew from the house immediately. His anti-Semitism is quite spectacular in its vehemence, though totally irrational; Leo Nikolayevich has told him so.

  Sofya Andreyevna begged Goldenweiser to play, though this was a mere formality. He would have been crushed had she not. The man adores attention, and he does play well – better than Sofya Andreyevna, to be sure.

  I hoped that it might be possible to slip away before the little concert began, but Leo Nikolayevich ushered me into the drawing room with a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come and listen,’ he said. ‘You like music, don’t you?’

  Indeed. Back in Moscow, I had been tremendously interested in opera. I took lessons in singing throughout my boyhood and youth, and at one point went so far as to consider a musical career. The only thing I lacked, it seemed, was talent.

  Goldenweiser swayed over the keyboard in a kind of trance, his chin to the ceiling. I was stirred by the performance and watched Leo Nikolayevich as the notes played over his ragged face and his brow loosened; his cheeks were sucked and blown; the white, bushy eyebrows twitched. His eyes blackened, like holes pricked in the visible surface of the world, deepening into eternity. Tears stained his cheeks.

  When Goldenweiser had completed Chopin’s Étude in E major, opus 10, Leo Nikolayevich sighed. ‘When a lovely piece of music pleases you, you imagine that you wrote it yourself,’ he said.

  ‘Chopin considered that étude among his finest compositions,’ said Goldenweiser. ‘I am so glad you like it, Leo Nikolayevich.’

  ‘If a man came down from Mars and said this étude was worthless, I would dispute him. But there is one thing that worries me. This music would be incomprehensible to the common people.’ He went on to say that he loved music above all the arts, however, even if it has no social value or intellectual content.

  As I rode home through the sharp afternoon light, the stubble fields were yellow and damp, the willows flush with new leaves. I found myself thinking about Leo Nikolayevich. I love him, and I can hardly bear it that he is eighty-two and must soon die. But he would hate knowing that such a thing upsets me. And, of course, I have no reason to be so upset. I am not his son, not even a nephew or, for that matter, a friend of long standing. yet I feel that God has connected us in some mysterious way, has brought us together for reasons unknown, perhaps, to either of us.

  Masha was not at Telyatinki when I arrived, and I felt uneasy about her absence. The prospect of spending the afternoon with Sergeyenko and his merry band did not excite me. I went straight to my room, hoping to get some work done. But I found it difficult to concentrate, thinking first of Masha, then of Leo Nikolayevich in his exhaustion. Life seemed terribly fragile to me, like a shimmering mirage.

  I turned my mind once again to the Inner Chapters of Chuang Tsu, which Leo Nikolayevich had given me to search. I lit upon this passage:

  The great ones of ancient times slept a dreamless sleep. They woke without fear. They ate simple food, and they breathed deeply. The breath of the great ones rose from their heels, in contrast to the mediocre people of today, whose breath rises from their throats like vomit. When they are filled with lust and desire, their heavenly nature grows shallow.

  The great ones of ancient times knew nothing of loving life or death. They felt no elation at birth. They felt no sorrow when they entered death. Carefree they went and came. That was all. They delighted in what was given, but they gave it no further thought.

  I am not among the great ones, but I understand what must be done – or not done – to become more like them. I have to give up desire and loathing. I have to delight in what happens, whatever is given. I should not struggle or exert my own petty will.

  I knelt beside the bed and prayed to become nothing, to accept life and death, loving neither overmuch, giving myself to the currents of eternal being that moved through me. When I stood, I felt cleansed and whole. A new spirit burned in my heart, as if God had touched me invisibly. The room was bathed in dusky light, with a red – almost peach – glow on the bare walls; I sat on my cane chair and watched it, the simple color of sunset as it flickered against the whitewashed plaster.

  The image of Masha’s face floated into my head; since it was nearly time for dinner, I decided to look for her.

  The door to her room was ajar, and I knocked lightly. She didn’t answer, so I pushed it open.

  ‘Masha!’ I whispered.

  She was not there. I should have turned back, but I noticed a diary on her bed table. It was no more than a few feet away. My heart thudding against my neck muscles, I shut the door. The red ball sun was caught in the window and flared on the little notebook’s roughcut pages. The diary opened to my name.

  Valentin Fedorovich. His soft beard, the smell of his shirt at night: woodsmoke, oil. He is a simple creature, I think, with a decent heart. He does not know himself. He is probably not a true Tolstoyan, though be imagines that he is. As I do. One lives in hope.

  I could scarcely hold the notebook now, turning the pages with trembling fingers. Sweat fell along my sleeves from under my arms, chilling me, as a particular line flashed from the page: ‘I may indeed love him. He does not love me.’

  I do, Masha! I do! This declaration rang in my ears, in the bone of my brow. How can I make her understand that I love her?

  I put the diary back where I had found it. One is driven to the edge of immorality by passion, which is why Chuang Tsu recommended against it.

  So much for detachment. ‘Valya!’ It was Masha. I had just put her diary in place, yet I blushed as if she had caught me with the notebook open on my knees.

  ‘I was waiting for you. Your room was … open.’

  Fortunately, she seemed unconcerned about my presence. She reached up and touched my beard as she passed me, flinging a package on the bed.

  ‘I’ll make you a new shirt, Valya,’ she said. ‘I bought some lovely blue muslin in town.’ She unwrapped the material, and I sat beside her on the bed. We fingered the rough cloth as though it was silk.

  She was in supremely high spirits, talking of things she had seen in town, her reading, her afternoon conversation with Sergeyenko about Henry George, the American socialist, and the single-tax scheme he has proposed – a favorite subject of Sergeyenko ever since he discovered that Leo Nikolayevich admires George and corresponds with him.

  ‘I’ve never read Henry George,’ I said.

  ‘Then you’re really a virgin,’ she said.

  Once again, I blushed. Masha always manages to tease me about my virginity. I have never made an issue of it. I have committed the act of copulation in my heart many times. My hope, now, rests on purity of heart, of mind, of conscience.

  That night, during dinner and throughout our usual discussion in the parlor afterward, I could hardly focus.

  ‘Are you well, Valentin Fedorovich?’ Sergeyenko asked, putting a hand on my forearm as I was about to go to bed.

  ‘I have a mild headache, Leo Patrovich. Nothing serious.’

  ‘Keep well, my boy. You are doing excellent work with Leo Nikolayevich. He has communicated this to Chertkov, who asked me to pass the word along.’

  ‘Tell Vladimir Grigorevich that I am honored.’

  ‘I shall. But he also urged me to say that your diaries have not been as detailed as he should have liked. You must remember that it is difficult for him, being cut off. He is hungry for details.’

  ‘I will try harder,’ I said, though I felt disingenuous. Spying on Tolstoy and his family is a disagreeable activity, and I had quickly taken to making things up or filling Chertkov’s notebooks with long, boring passages in which I meditate on aspects of Tolstoyan thought.

  I took a cup of fragrant linden tea to my bed and, for several hours, sat up in my nightdress, the oil lamp burning on the bed table. I continued to study the Inner Chapters of Chuang Tsu, marking pas
sages with a red pencil. At some point I must have fallen asleep. It was past midnight when I realized that I was not alone. Was I dreaming?

  ‘Masha!’

  She put a finger to her lips. I had not turned off the oil lamp, and her brow flickered in the yellow light. Her short hair was parted in the middle and fell straight along either side of her head. It was light as corn silk. Her face was a lovely oval, her eyes steady as she knelt above me on the bed. I could hardly breathe.

  ‘Masha.’

  She sat across my thighs, putting her knees on either side of my legs. They sunk into the mat. She leaned forward slowly. She seemed almost in a trance. As if sleepwalking. Dreaming.

  I was afraid of her. What was happening? I put my hands on her narrow shoulders, cupped them in my palms. A flame seemed to burn them as I held her there, almost pushing her away, yet not wanting to. I could not wish for more than was happening to me now. It was a dream, but a dream from which I wanted never to waken.

  She was so deliberate, moving over me with a strange, convulsive certainty. A shadow, but palpable. Suddenly her face was close to mine, her lips touching my lips. Our mouths opened into each other, tongues loose and searching. Our teeth touched and clattered like bits of ice.

  I breathed her into me, the smell I had come to savor. I drew circles on her back, her neck and shoulders, with moist fingertips. She seemed so terribly slight now, a fantasy, a succuba.

  It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise but it did when, casually, she sat upright again and lifted her nightdress, exposing her bare stomach, her thighs. She lifted my nightdress, too, curling her hand around me tightly. I turned my head to the side, the pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.

  ‘Is this all right, Valya?’

  She looked at me with a peculiar frankness, suspended before me, motionless and beautiful as any piece of statuary from the ancient world. It broke my heart to look at her.

  I nodded, and she moved forward slowly but firmly, gathering me into her with ease.

  She was so warm, so wet, taking me between her soft, white thighs. With astonishing sureness, she rocked forward, then back. A slow, steady rhythm of attraction and repulsion. When I came, too quickly, I felt that my entire body had been sucked into a holy space, that a lively, understandable spirit had filled me, as I had filled it. Valya and Masha had become, if briefly, more than the sum of their parts. I had obtained union, something like the fabled state of bliss spoken of by Plotinus and Porphyry.

  Masha lay heavily on me now, breathing slowly, deeply. Then she curled beside me. The bed is small, but we did not require more room.

  When I woke, she was still sleeping, her blond hair against the white pillow, the sunlight blowing through the curtains. I could hear birds in the elm by the window, recent arrivals from the Crimea, perhaps. Or from Africa or Siam. They cackled in the tree, and I began to laugh.

  ‘What are you laughing about, Valya?’

  ‘The birds,’ I said.

  ‘Do birds always make you laugh?’

  ‘Only when you are beside me, Masha. And we have just made love.’

  I dug myself as close to her as I could, my bare thighs against hers, our stomachs touching, and I understood that my life could never be the same again.

  17

  L. N.

  LETTER TO

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  YASNAYA POLYANA, 9 MAY 1910

  My dear Mr Bernard Shaw,

  I have received your play The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and witty letter. I have read it with pleasure. I am in full sympathy with its subject.

  Your remark that the preaching of righteousness has generally little influence on people and that young men regard as laudable that which is contrary to righteousness is quite correct. It does not, however, follow that such preaching is unnecessary. The reason of the failure is that those who preach do not fulfill what they preach, that is, hypocrisy.

  I also cannot agree with what you call your theology. You enter into controversy with that which no thinking person of our time believes or can believe: with a God-creator. And yet you seem to recognize a God who has got definite aims comprehensible to you. ‘To my mind,’ you write, ‘unless we conceive God engaged in a continual struggle to surpass himself as striving at every birth to make a better man than before, we are conceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob.’

  Concerning the rest of what you say about God and about evil, I will repeat the words I said, as you write, about your Man and Superman, namely that the problem about God and evil is too important to be spoken of in jest. And therefore I tell you frankly that I received a very painful impression from the concluding words of your letter: ‘Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?’

  18

  Dr Makovitsky

  Yesterday the new century arrived in Tula.

  I refer to the Moscow-Orel automobile race, which destroyed the peacefulness that one has come to expect from provincial life. The horrid machines – black, ugly things that cough and spit, spewing a pitch of smoke out their backs – came streaking past us as we walked on the Kiev road in the bright morning sunlight.

  The drivers recognized Tolstoy, who was unmistakable as he leaned on his stick, with his cloud white beard and bristly eyebrows. This is the problem one must deal with should Fame attach itself like a parasite, feeding, draining one’s vital fluids – a frightful prospect that I, happily, shall never have to confront.

  The young, Italian-looking men with narrow, cheerful faces and dark mustaches shouted at him, waving their caps, and one of the machines clattered to a halt beside us, frightening Leo Nikolayevich, who shook his head to register disapproval. To make amends, the driver invited us to peer into the mechanism. Leo Nikolayevich is curious about everything. Too much so, I thought, as he peered into the mechanism and flicked a lever with his big finger. The dark machine shook and sputtered, a mess of black, tubular intestines, shiny pistons, whirring belts and fans.

  ‘I wish you good luck in the race,’ Leo Nikolayevich said, bowing to the driver, who grinned stupidly and bowed even lower.

  ‘It is our honor, sir, to meet Your Excellency,’ he said. ‘I have read about you in the papers.’

  Leo Nikolayevich sighed.

  Bulgakov was with us, awestruck as usual. Leo Nikolayevich seems to like him, so I do not interfere. For myself, I avoid the young man whenever possible, though Sofya Andreyevna courts him like a prince, which cannot be a good sign.

  Thank goodness I was never young, except in years. Even as a boy, I understood that eternal things are all that count. And I have never wavered in my commitment.

  ‘The machine age is upon us,’ Leo Nikolayevich said.

  ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it?’ I responded.

  ‘I suppose I shall not live to see airplanes,’ he said, pointing to a small group of children who had gathered about us. ‘But they certainly shall. I would rather see them till the soil.’

  That night, he looked me in the eyes. ‘Automobiles, in Russia! There are people who have no shoes, and here are automobiles costing twelve thousand rubles! It’s filthy.’

  I agreed, saying it would lead to revolution, and Leo Nikolayevich nodded. He believes that violent revolutions can only result in chaos, hence in worse conditions for the poor than now exist. This opinion, though correct, does not sit well with the revolutionary types who clog the entrance to his house each morning. No wonder the police lurk about the estate.

  The situation at Yasnaya Polyana is desperate. Thank goodness we shall leave tomorrow to visit the Sukhotins at Kochety. Leo Nikolayevich loves his daughter Tanya, even though she has married that fractious bore and abandoned her father’s precepts. He is eager to get away quickly, before Sofya Andreyevna returns from Moscow, where she has been indulging herself for several weeks. Delightful weeks for us, I should say. Everyone is much happier when she is away from Tula. Alas, she suspects as much, and is rar
ely gone. A pity.

  We were taken to the station today at half past seven in a troika. I have rarely felt so cheerful, and Leo Nikolayevich seemed alert and well. I checked his pulse several times, and it was normal.

  Bulgakov met us at the Zasyeka Station with a small group of Tolstoyans – young Masha, Boulanger, Sergeyenko, and several others. A photographer hovered near us, clicking his contraption. Leo Nikolayevich seemed not to notice. Fortunately, we had to wait only a quarter of an hour before the train wheezed into the dock, steaming from all sides like an overworked horse.

  A group of schoolboys emerged from a third-class carriage, shouting, ‘Count Tolstoy! Count Tolstoy!’ We pushed through them with difficulty. Leo Nikolayevich always insists on riding in third class, but today it was full. The conductor led us to a second-class carriage, a situation that clearly upset Leo Nikolayevich, who cannot tolerate a change in plans. We settled on pleasant benches covered with soft, blue cushions, but Leo Nikolayevich insisted that we or the conductor had conspired to seat him in a better carriage. This was simply not true.

  At the fourth stop third-class space became available, and everyone was relieved. There are no seats in third class, so we moved a wicker basket near the window for Leo Nikolayevich to sit on and look out. He was so happy that he hummed to himself for much of the journey.

  We had brought several newspapers with us, and one of them, New Russia, had excerpted a passage from For Every Day. This thrilled young Bulgakov, who insisted on reading it aloud. ‘Suffering and torment,’ he thundered above the clattering rails, ‘are experienced only by those who have separated themselves from the life of the world and, not seeing their own sins which have brought suffering into the world, consider themselves guiltless; consequently they rebel against the suffering they bear for the sins of the world and for their own spiritual well-being.’