Tolstoy

Sonya did not have much time to read, but she enjoyed leafing through a French edition of the Roman Stoic philosopher’s complete works, which their friend Leonid Urusov had lent her, along with Marcus Aurelius, Plato and Epictetus.⁶⁶ Tolstoy was on to the transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson by this time.

By the autumn of 1884 family relations were much improved, partly because Tolstoy had been able to stay behind for a few weeks after everyone left for Moscow, and live according to his ideals. He dismissed the cook and the caretaker, cooked his own simple dishes like baked turnip, lit the samovar himself, stopped using horses and walked every evening down to the railway station to post his letters to Sonya and pick up the post.⁶⁷ He also took walks during the daytime to the highway to resume his conversations with pilgrims. He wrote to Sonya about meeting two old Stranniks from Siberia who had dedicated themselves to a life of permanent pilgrimage and were returning from Jerusalem and Mount Athos, a journey which they had undertaken without a single kopeck to their name. On another day he met two old gentlemen from the far north of Russia, whom he invited back to Yasnaya Polyana for tea – they completely drained the samovar. Tolstoy finally gave up hunting that autumn, having discovered, apart from a feeling of shame, that when he went out on horseback with his dogs he now hoped his quarry would get away. This meant a major change in his routine (his daughter Tanya had noted in her diary that he had killed fifty-five rabbits and ten foxes during the course of one autumn a few years earlier).⁶⁸ Tolstoy also now decided to take over the running of all the farming at Yasnaya Polyana from his steward,⁶⁹ and his spirits rose when Sonya decided she would not take their daughter Tanya into society for a second season, or attend any high-profile social events herself. But the dynamics within the family were also beginning to change, which raised Tolstoy’s spirits. Although Tolstoy’s relationship with his sons remained largely cool, his elder daughters, particularly Masha, were slowly coming round to his point of view.

In November 1884 Tolstoy published two of the draft openings to his abandoned novel about the Decembrists. It was the first fiction he had published for an educated audience since Anna Karenina, but his heart was now in a new project conceived by Vladimir Chertkov. Tolstoy had been engaged in a lively correspondence with Chertkov (whom he had already sent thirty-six letters since their meeting the previous year), and amongst their topics for discussion was a plan to produce quality literature for the masses. Chertkov wanted to emulate the pamphlets which had been put out under the auspices of the (now banned) Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading by Vasily Pashkov, who had just been sent into permanent exile by the government. He had met Pashkov in England that summer, and realised that inexpensive publications for the masses offered an excellent means to promote Tolstoy’s new creed.⁷⁰ Tolstoy was only too keen to collaborate, and they discussed these plans further when Chertkov came to Moscow in November. After a productive meeting with Ivan Sytin, an enterprising young publisher of popular woodcuts and pictures who had worked his way up from lowly beginnings as an apprentice in a bookshop, Chertkov was ready to sign a contract. The new publishing house they set up was given the name ‘Posrednik’ (The Intermediary), and they agreed they would publish superior but accessible Russian and foreign literature in translation with illustrations for a few kopecks a copy. That they were able to do so may well have been due to Chertkov’s mother, who gave her son a 20,000-rouble annual allowance – more than the Tolstoy family’s entire expenditure in a year.⁷¹ Chertkov’s wealth proved to be a rare but lingering bone of contention between him and Tolstoy.⁷²

In April 1885 Chertkov opened a bookshop in Moscow, set up a warehouse in St Petersburg and hired a young female assistant, whom he would later marry, and a co-editor, Pavel Biryukov, who was to become another of Tolstoy’s devoted friends and disciples (in time he would write a voluminous and reverential biography). Biryukov was a graduate of the Naval Academy, and had been working as a physicist in the main observatory in St Petersburg. He came from the nobility, but occupied a far lower place in the pecking order than either Chertkov or Tolstoy, which became a stumbling block when he tried to marry Tolstoy’s daughter Masha a few years later.⁷³