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

by Jay Parini

  He was in love with a Cossack girl, ‘a dark-eyed beauty,’ he’d called her. ‘She was as slender hipped as a boy, with short black hair – a sign that she was independent. The others wore their hair long, like gypsies.’

  He and a young infantry officer, named Ilya, had become close friends through many months. They spent their days gambling and riding. They occupied their nights with whoring among the gypsies. But Leo Nikolayevich was drawn to the Cossack girl, as was Ilya. They played cards and, jokingly, bet on the girl. The man who lost would have to sleep alone that night or with another woman.

  Each afternoon, the carts would arrive from the battlefield, bringing the corpses. By chance, one day Leo Nikolayevich was nearby when they arrived. ‘It was the most brilliant day of autumn,’ he said, with his usual recall of detail. ‘A cloudless sky. The plane trees tossed in the wind.’ A senior officer motioned to Leo Nikolayevich. ‘Here, give a hand!’ He rushed to the cart, where several officers lay mutilated among the ordinary infantrymen. One of them, to his amazement, was Ilya.

  Ilya’s neck was raw where a bullet had got him at the base of the throat, but his face was untouched – ‘even lovely,’ as Leo Nikolayevich remembered. Scarcely able to control himself, he lifted Ilya from the cart and carried him to the morgue in his arms. The sleeves of his jacket were stained so badly that he threw it in the fire.

  Why had this happened to Ilya and not to Leo Nikolayevich? Was life fundamentally irrational? He could not answer these questions.

  That night, he went to the house of the Cossack girl. He did not tell her what had happened to Ilya. ‘I was overcome by a powerful feeling of what was probably lust, but it felt like … love.’ He lay with her till dawn, he said, swearing to himself that this would be their last night together. He was sinning against God, that he knew. But – as Martin Luther put it – he was sinning boldly.

  ‘You know, I still think of her quite often,’ Leo Nikolayevich told me. There was a strange look in his eyes as he said that, a mingling of nostalgia, regret, and genuine sorrow.

  I don’t know why, but I was thinking of that Cossack girl as I sat beside Masha, who had come down from St Petersburg to attend the funeral the next morning. She arrived on the late train at Tula. I met her in a droshky, which I drove myself.

  We turned abruptly into the long gravel driveway. Telyatinki was lit up like a skull, with candles burning in the windows. The oak trees, which still retained their leaves, chittered in the cold wind. ‘Welcome home,’ I said to Masha, who smiled ruefully.

  The household was in mourning, of course, and the place had a ghostly feel to it. Chertkov and Sergeyenko had been with Leo Nikolayevich throughout his ordeal, and reports were just filtering back. The funeral would attract large crowds. Indeed, the trains from Moscow and elsewhere had been crammed all day, with hundreds of people – most of whom had never met Tolstoy – already camped on the grounds at Yasnaya Polyana.

  ‘I can hardly believe you’re here,’ I said. ‘I guess I won’t have to put today’s letter in the mail. You can have it.’ She grinned as I handed her the envelope and stuffed it into her coat pocket.

  I reached for her hand and held it, briefly. She looked at me with an intensity that almost hurt.

  We had a glass of tea in the kitchen.

  ‘I think I know you a lot better now,’ I said to her, softly. ‘I’m almost afraid that, face to face, we won’t speak directly to one another. It’s much easier in letters. I’m a more honest person in print.’

  ‘You keep too much to yourself – even in your letters.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘There’s no reason that we can’t speak openly,’ she said.

  I saw that she shivered.

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  I took off my coat and put it around Masha’s narrow shoulders, inhaling the lovely odor of her hair, which had a slightly waxy sheen that I did not mind. It smelled of water and mud.

  ‘You’ve been traveling all day. You must be exhausted.’

  ‘It’s so good to see you, I don’t care.’

  When we had drunk our tea, I carried her leather case to her room, which I had prepared with fresh sheets.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said timidly.

  Closing the door behind us, I reached my hand to her face and let my fingers graze the skin lightly, lightly. She closed her eyes.

  ‘May I kiss you, Masha?’

  She said nothing. She just opened her eyes. They were deep and wet, blue-green in the candlelight, large as a calf’s.

  I could feel the shyness slipping away from me, sloughing off like a snake’s skin. Emboldened, I pressed my lips to hers. I put my hands firmly on her hips.

  When she reached her arms around my shoulders, I knew that all would be well.

  ‘I love you, Valya,’ she said.

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  That night we made love – not the frenzied lovemaking I had expected, but a gentle, almost ceremonious mingling. I knew I would never be the same again.

  For several hours we nestled against each other like children. She seemed to sleep hard, but I lay solidly awake, astounded by everything that was happening. I did not even want to sleep. I wanted to feel everything, the swollen sheets, the full length of her body beside mine, her thighs and back and arms and shoulders. I was floating now, permeable, fully human – a creature of skin and hair and bones.

  Near dawn, I saw that Masha was awake and kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘I wish I understood what love is,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have to understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s not something that needs analysis.’

  People were talking at the end of the corridor now, and I realized it was time to get up if we were to meet the train at Zasyeka Station, the train that was bringing the body of Leo Nikolayevich home to rest.

  ‘It’s here!’ a muzhik shouted.

  The train, an hour late, wheezed into the station. It was a briskly cold morning, with a cover of dry snow in the railway yard; milkweed and mullein – the surviving bones of summer – poked through the white crust. In a few places, bare ground showed through, the black Russian dirt I have always loved. I heard eight bells ring in the chapel tower.

  The air sparkled, our breath forming a white cloud in front of us. Policemen were everywhere. The tsar, I was told, feared an uprising. Everywhere in Russia the police and the militia had doubled their ranks, and censorship was in effect for all the papers.

  But the feelings of the Russian people could not be stifled. People wept openly in the streets. Theaters in Moscow and St Petersburg had closed, and university professors refused to lecture. Masha and I stood behind a delegation of students from Moscow.

  I knew, intellectually, that Leo Tolstoy meant a great deal to the Russian people. But I had somehow not understood, not fully, the significance of his life. Of his example.

  Sofya Andreyevna stepped from the train, looking dignified and at peace. She, like her husband, had been longing for closure. When people saw her, they began to sing ‘Eternal Memory,’ an old hymn that Leo Nikolayevich was known to admire. The entire station lifted in song. Even the railway conductors sang from their cars.

  The coffin appeared, at last. A plain coffin made of dark yellow pine, long and narrow; Leo Nikolayevich’s four strong sons carried it on their shoulders from the railway car to a waiting cart. Muzhiks tossed flowers in their path, singing loudly and weeping. One group of peasants carried a poster that read: ‘Dear Leo Nikolayevich: We remember your goodness. It will never die.’ It was signed, ‘The orphaned muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana.’

  We formed a slow procession to the Tolstoy estate, feet scraping along the frozen road, scuffling through snow, a vast train of two or three thousand people who filed through the majestic white pillars at the entrance to Yasnaya Polyana with heads bent low. By ten-thirty, the coffin had made its way to the entrance of the study where Leo Nikolayevich wrote the words that have burned their
way into the collective memory of the race.

  Sergey, who had taken charge of the day, opened the coffin, revealing what remained of Leo Tolstoy. And the long, sad procession began.

  Leo Nikolayevich did not look like himself. He was shockingly thin, his nose bulbous at the tip but shrunken along the sides. His cheeks were hollow. Someone had combed his hair to the wrong side, and his beard was fluffed out like cotton wool. His lips had been sewn shut to prevent his jaw from dropping open. The skin of his face was splintered like an old plate in a million pieces, holding together by force of habit more than physical substance.

  When my turn came to stand beside the coffin, I touched his cold fingers. I prayed, ‘God, accept your son, Leo Nikolayevich, into your eternal arms.’ And I wept openly for the first time that day.

  Masha held my hand.

  Leo Nikolayevich had asked to be buried near the edge of a ravine in Zasyeka Wood. It was a place where his brother Nikolenka once said that the secret of eternal love was buried, engraved on a green stick. Sasha pointed out the exact spot, and the funeral was held there in the midafternoon – the time of day when Leo Nikolayevich would usually be riding in these woods on Delire. Had I not, in fact, been riding by that very spot with him less than a month before? It seemed impossible …

  Wherever one looked, mourners knelt or stood with their heads bent, singing ‘Eternal Memory.’ The solid tree trunks rang aloud with the hymn, which gathered now like a great wave and poured through the woods. Photographers snapped pictures from a thousand angles, and cinematographers cranked their strange, modern machines. A sharp wind made everyone huddle as close together as possible.

  Sofya Andreyevna insisted that nobody should speak at the grave. No priest would utter the usual words. There would be no ceremony. Even in his death, Leo Nikolayevich was pointing the way to a new world – a world without false praise, empty ceremonies, foolish disguises. He did not require the blessings of authority.

  But an old man, a muzhik, took it upon himself to stand on a stump and deliver a brief sermon about the ‘dear man who had changed their lives.’ Everyone listened in awe. Though his speech was that of an ‘uneducated’ man, it was eloquent and simple. That a peasant – one of the Russian muzhiks so honored by Leo Tolstoy in his writing – should deliver the final words on his behalf seemed wholly just.

  At one point several policemen rode through the crowds on black horses. It was a horrible intrusion, but they were immediately surrounded by muzhiks and forced to get off their animals and kneel. To my relief, they obliged.

  Suddenly it was snowing. Just a fluff, at first, but soon it thickened, and the gravediggers became anxious. With a signal from Sergey, they began to pour dirt on the coffin, and the crowds – singing ‘Eternal Memory’ even more loudly – began to leave.

  ‘I feel so empty,’ I said to Masha.

  She put her arm through mine. ‘Let’s go inside, Valya. There will be tea and food. I’m freezing!’

  ‘I’m going with you, Masha,’ I said, holding my ground. ‘Is that all right?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To Petersburg?’

  She turned to me with a strange, bright sweetness. ‘I would like that,’ she said. ‘But come along now.’

  Walking back to Yasnaya Polyana in the midst of the crowd, we said nothing more about where we were going or why or when. We were carried along, buoyed up, by a thousand singing voices, men and women who loved Tolstoy as much as we did, who understood, as he did, that death was simply one of life’s many noble transformations, and that nothing mattered in the world but love.

  42

  J. P.

  ELEGY

  Cover him over, clover.

  Grass, you long-baired, wheezy cover,

  hold him down.

  That dust was man that plucks your roots,

  that signals from the dark,

  again, again.

  That man was both of us,

  my gentle reader.

  He was fine, they say. No worse

  than you are when you leave your bed

  unmade, unfilled.

  No worse than I am when I eat fresh bread

  while elsewhere in the world

  the bread is stale.

  No worse, no better,

  though he tried to heal.

  Speak, Russian wind.

  Blow harshly from the steppes

  and clear the rubble.

  Rip tall trees to whistling timber,

  stripped of leaves.

  The old world’s bare in winter as we leave.

  Afterword

  The Last Station is fiction, though it bears some of the trappings and affects of literary scholarship. It began half a decade ago when, browsing in a used bookstore in Naples, I stumbled upon Valentin Bulgakov’s diary of his last year with Leo Tolstoy. Soon I discovered that similar diaries were kept by numerous other members of Tolstoy’s inner circle, which had grown remarkably wide by 1910. I read and reread the memoirs and diaries of Vladimir Chertkov, Sofya Andreyevna Tolstoy, Ilya and Leo, Sergey, Tanya, and Alexandra (Sasha) Tolstoy, Dushan Makovitsky, and others. Reading them in succession was like looking at a constant image through a kaleidoscope. I soon fell in love with the continually changing symmetrical forms of life that came into view.

  A novel is a voyage by sea, a setting out into strange waters, but I have sailed as close as I could to the shoreline of literal events that made up the last year of Tolstoy’s life. Whenever Tolstoy speaks in this novel, I quote his actual words or, less often, I create dialogue based on conversations reported indirectly. Elsewhere, I have freely imagined what might have, could have, or should have been said.

  In addition to the diaries mentioned, I have relied for chronology and circumstantial details on well-known biographies of Leo Tolstoy by Aylmer Maude, Edward A. Steiner, Ernest J. Simmons, Henri Troyat, and A. N. Wilson. Anne Edwards’s life of Sofya Andreyevna Tolstoy was also useful. I would refer the interested reader to the book I depended on for bibliographical information: Leo Tolstoy: An Annotated Bibliography of English-language Sources to 1978 by David R. Egan and Melinda A. Egan (Metuchen, N.J., and London, 1979).

  All quotations from Tolstoy’s writings – including those from his letters and diaries – have been ‘Englished’ by me, based on previous translations. In this way, I was able to make his voice conform – in cadence and diction – with the Tolstoy of my invention.

  I owe a considerable debt to Professor R. F. Christian of the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is among the great Tolstoy scholars of this century, and he was kind enough to read my novel in manuscript and provide detailed suggestions and corrections. I am also grateful to Gore Vidal, who offered encouragement, friendship, and practical advice throughout its composition. As always, Devon Jersild, my wife, was my closest reader.

  The Last Station

  Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College, Vermont. His six novels also include Benjamin’s Crossing and The Apprentice Lover. His volumes of poetry include The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems. In addition to biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost and William Faulkner, he has written a volume of essays on literature and politics, as well as The Art of Teaching. He edited the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and writes regularly for the Guardian and other publications.

  By the same author

  SINGING IN TIME (poetry)

  THEODORE ROETHKE: AN AMERICAN ROMANTIC (criticism)

  THE LOVE RUN (novel)

  ANTHRACITE COUNTRY (poetry)

  THE PATCH BOYS (novel)

  AN INVITATION TO POETRY (textbook)

  TOWN LIFE (poetry)

  JOHN STEINBECK (biography)

  First published in Great Britain in 2007

  by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  First published in Great Britain

  by HarperCollins Publishers in 1992

  This digital edition first publishe
d in 2008

  by Canongate Books Ltd

  Copyright © Jay Parini, 1990

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 394 7

  www.meetatthegate.com