Tolstoy

There was also a sour cream version, which involved mixing ten eggs with twenty dessert spoons of sour cream, a cup of sugar, and two dessert spoons of flour, lining a tin with jam, pouring the mixture onto it and baking it in the oven.⁹¹ The puritanical Frey would have considered it immoral to partake of something so rich and indulgent, and Tolstoy was now of the same opinion. Frey had a further meeting with Tolstoy in Moscow that December, but he was forced to leave Russia in March 1886 after failing to win over Tolstoy, or indeed anyone else, to his religion of mankind. He returned to London, where he died in extreme poverty of tuberculosis two years later at the age of forty-nine. Tolstoy recollected that he was one of the ‘best’ people he had ever known.⁹²

Tolstoy had focused his energies in the first half of the 1880s on articulating and disseminating his new worldview. In 1886, after he finished setting out the practical proposals contained in What Then Must We Do?, he turned to the abstract realm of ideas. His new project was initially conceived as a treatise ‘about life and death’, in which he wanted to set out the philosophy underpinning his ideas. Even though he may have stopped feeling suicidal, thoughts of death had never left Tolstoy, as can be seen from all three of his major artistic works written in the 1880s (The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Power of Darkness and The Kreutzer Sonata), the last two of which deal with violent death by murder. Death was also never far away in Tolstoy’s personal life, but he now had a new attitude to it. In the late summer of 1885 he had been saddened to hear of the death of his faithful friend and supporter Leonid Urusov, whom he had accompanied him on a trip to the Crimea that spring (it was the first time he had been back to Sebastopol since the war).⁹³ More testing, however, was the experience of death in the family: in January 1886 four-year-old Alyosha died. Tolstoy discovered that he was now able to approach the death of his youngest son with equanimity. He wrote to tell Chertkov that he had previously regarded the death of a child as cruel and incomprehensible, but now saw it in a positive light.⁹⁴

Sonya’s only response to Alyosha’s death was grief, but despite feeling distraught, she shrank from paying the 250 roubles required for burial at the prestigious cemetery next to the Novodevichy Convent, which was close to their house. Instead, she and the family’s nanny placed the small coffin in the sleigh they had only recently used to take Alyosha to the zoo, and travelled north of Moscow to bury him at Pokrovskoye, where the Bers family had rented a dacha when she was a young girl.⁹⁵ In November 1886 Sonya had to cope with another death when her sixty-year-old mother fell gravely ill, and she too travelled to the Crimea. She was with her mother in Yalta during her last days.⁹⁶ If Tolstoy barely seemed to register the demise of Lyubov Alex-androvna, his old friend from childhood,⁹⁷ it was perhaps because he himself was seriously unwell that autumn. Death was an ever-present subject in his conversations, and in his correspondence.⁹⁸

The thirty-five chapters of Tolstoy’s voluminous treatise about life and death, which was later given the final title On Life, present the philosophical foundations underpinning his new worldview. He invested a great deal of mental energy in the exposition of his ideas, writing over 2,000 pages before the manuscript was complete in August 1887.⁹⁹ Sonya agreed to copy it out, which helped to create a peaceful atmosphere between them during its composition. Although she still could not accept the fundamental proposition that one should reject the ‘material, personal life’ in favour of the life of the spirit and ‘universal love’, as she noted in her diary,¹⁰⁰ she liked the fact that it was not tendentious like his earlier religious writings. Nevertheless, a work which replaced religious doctrine with reason and personal conscience never stood a chance of being approved by the censor. It had been planned that the 600 copies printed in 1888 would constitute a new thirteenth volume of Tolstoy’s collected works, but the Holy Synod ordered their confiscation. All but three copies were burned, and the first publication of On Life was the French translation which appeared in 1889. The Archbishop of kherson, who had examined the treatise, confided in a letter to one of Tolstoy’s acquaintances that the Holy Synod was now seriously considering anathematising him.¹⁰¹