There were also problems over at Pirogovo. To the horror of Tolstoy’s brother Sergey, whose way of life was very ancien régime, despite his unconventional marriage, both his daughters had become fervent Tolstoyans. In 1897 Varya became the common-law wife of Vladimir Vasiliev, who was one of Sergey’s peasants, and she left home. Her elder sister Vera was also a free spirit who shocked her father by having a child out of wedlock a couple of years later with Abdurashid Sarafov, a Bashkir who had come to Pirogovo to provide them with koumiss.71 Tolstoy felt very guilty. In 1897 Sonya’s strange obsession with Taneyev and his playing showed no sign of abating, and Tolstoy yearned again to leave home. At one point he got as far as writing a farewell letter to Sonya, but ended up stuffing it down the back of a chair after they made up.72 Sonya agreed not to invite Taneyev to Yasnaya Polyana again, and Tolstoy channelled his feelings about music, and what he regarded as its dangerous powers, on to the page. The product was his iconoclastic treatise
all novels and poems which transmit ecclesiastical or patriotic feelings, and also exclusive feelings pertaining only to the class of the idle rich, such as aristocratic honour, satiety, spleen, pessimism, and refined and vicious feelings flowing from sex-love – quite incomprehensible to the great majority of mankind.
In painting we must similarly place in the class of bad art all the Church, patriotic, and exclusive pictures; all the pictures representing the amusements and allurements of a rich and idle life; all the so-called symbolic pictures, in which the very meaning of the symbol is comprehensible only to the people of a certain circle; and, above all, pictures with voluptuous subjects – all that odious female nudity which fills all the exhibitions and galleries. And to this class belongs almost all the chamber and opera music of our times, beginning especially with Beethoven (Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner) – by its subject-matter devoted to the expression of feelings accessible only to people who have developed in themselves an unhealthy, nervous irritation evoked by this exclusive, artificial, and complex music …73
Into the category of ‘counterfeit art’ falls most of modern Western culture, deplored by Tolstoy as degenerate and elitist, not to mention all the fiction he himself wrote before he became an overtly Christian artist (such as the novels
Looking back over the trajectory of Tolstoy’s career, it is possible to see that he took pains to transform himself into a different kind of artist long before his religious ‘conversion’ at the end of the 1870s. The love and care he invested in his