Tolstoy

The nine Tolstoys left Yasnaya Polyana on 15 September, and took up residence in a rented apartment in a house in the best residential area of Moscow. Sergey became a student in natural sciences at Moscow University and Ilya and Lev became pupils at the very popular private boys’ school founded in 1868 by Lev Polivanov, who had masterminded the Pushkin celebrations the year before. Later that autumn, Tanya became a student at the main art school in Moscow. Despite Tolstoy’s pledge to help Sonya in Moscow, he soon forgot it. It was sheer misery for him to move to the city, and Sonya told her sister by letter that he was neither sleeping nor eating and had sunk into apathy, while she had spent the first two weeks constantly in tears. After he had arrived in Moscow, Tolstoy had gone to visit the city’s slums, and had then returned home, walked up carpeted stairs to their new home and sat down to dinner, waited upon by two servants in white tie and tails.¹¹⁶ The close proximity of luxury and poverty sickened him.

Relief came when Tolstoy escaped Moscow at the end of the month to go north to Tver province and meet Vasily Syutayev, the peasant sectarian Prugavin had told him about. Apart from their difference in social backgrounds, Syutayev was almost Tolstoy’s mirror image in terms of their religious beliefs, which astonished him. Syutayev’s doctrine of brotherly love was derived exclusively from the modern Russian translation of the New Testament, which he knew by heart, and like Tolstoy, he had dedicated his life to pursuing the ideal of self-perfection. Syutayev, who later came to visit Tolstoy in Moscow, was to become a source of deep inspiration for him.¹¹⁷ Another source of spiritual support for Tolstoy at this time would come from his correspondence with his family’s former tutor Vasily Alexeyev, and from his friendship with the librarian of the Rumyantsev Public Library, Nikolay Fyodorov, whose asceticism made Tolstoy’s simple tastes seem positively sybaritic.

By the beginning of October Tolstoy was back in Moscow and trying to work. The walls in the flat proved to be paper-thin, however, so there was constant noise and he could not concentrate, for which he squarely blamed Sonya. He was also unhappy about her spending money needlessly. How could she have wasted twenty-two roubles on an armchair when that money could have bought a peasant a horse or a cow? Things improved a little after he rented two small rooms in another wing of the house for six roubles a month. Finally, he had some peace of mind, and to salve his conscience he crossed the Moscow river to go and chop wood every afternoon with the peasants on the Sparrow Hills. But relations with Sonya were no better. Two weeks before she gave birth, Sonya wrote again to Tanya to tell her that her husband had reduced her to complete despair. Tolstoy told his diary it had been the most painful month in all his life.¹¹⁸ Alexey was born on 31 October. A few weeks later Tolstoy published a story about an angel in the new children’s journal edited by Sonya’s brother Petya. It was his first publication in four years.

Tolstoy had been working sporadically on the short story ‘What Men Live By’ throughout 1881. Utterly different from Anna Karenina, his last published work, which was a sophisticated novel aimed at an educated audience, this new work was a story from peasant life, and a parable which put forward his new Christian views about love. A reworking of a well-known legend about an angel sent to earth by God to learn ‘what men live by’, the story had been told to him by Vasily Shchegolenok, one of the last living peasant ‘reciters’ of oral folk epics from the Russian north. He had come to stay at Yasnaya Polyana in 1879 when he was already an old man (and still illiterate), and Tolstoy had listened to him with rapt attention. He took particular care to write ‘What Men Live By’ in a simple and lucid language, and incorporated several of the folk expressions he had heard during his conversations with Shchegolenok, and also with the pilgrims and wanderers on the road to kiev near Yasnaya Polyana. Despite its simplicity, Tolstoy’s work on the story was characteristically meticulous. He produced thirty-two manuscripts and nine different beginnings before being satisfied with the draft he submitted for publication. The eight epigraphs about love which preface the story are taken from his own version of St John’s Gospel. Writing morally engaged fiction in a clear and simple style was one way Tolstoy planned to propagate his Christian ideals. He also now felt a need to protest in public about the evil he saw around him, and this was something he would do in an increasingly loud voice for the remaining three decades of his life.

11

SECTARIAN, ANARCHIST, HOLY FOOL