Tolstoy

Tolstoy remained a problem for the Church hierarchy even after he was excommunicated, as in June 1901 he fell seriously ill with malaria, necessitating the drawing up of a new strategy: governors and police chiefs were ordered not to allow any speeches or demonstrations in the event of his death.¹³⁷ Sergey was mortified to find out his brother was in a critical condition from the newspapers, whose editors regarded Tolstoy’s state of health as a matter of public interest. Sergey now wrote his brother a heartfelt letter in which he told him how much he meant to him, and how there was no other person in the world to whom he could talk in the same way. Underneath his signature he added sadly: ‘Apart from our closeness from childhood, I just need you, but you don’t need me. You have a legion apart from me.’¹³⁸ Not for the first time, Tolstoy’s strong constitution helped him recover, and Alexandrine’s friend Countess Panina kindly offered her dacha outside Yalta for his convalescence. In September 1901, the family decamped to the Crimea. Contrary to his usual habit of travelling fourth class with fleas and cockroaches, as Sergey put it, this time the family was allotted a private compartment, which had been arranged with the help of a Tolstoyan who worked for the railways. despite the ban on press coverage of his movements, there was a huge crowd of 3,000 supporters waiting at Kharkov station to cheer him. The Tolstoys would remain in the Crimea for the best part of ten months, during which time Sonya tended to her husband with her usual devotion.

Countess Panina’s ‘dacha’ was in fact a gothic palace – a fairy-tale castle with two towers. Tolstoy had never lived in such luxury in all his life, and wrote to tell Sergey about the profusion of exotic flowers, the marble fountain in a pond with fish swimming in it, the manicured lawns, the luxuriant view of the sea past the cypress trees, and even the lavatories, a convenience he was not used to. Back in 1887 Tolstoy had written a long letter to the future pacifist writer Romain Rolland in which he declared that the first test of the sincerity of those who professed to live by Christian principles was to put an end to living parasitically off the manual work done by the poor and take care of one’s own needs, which included emptying one’s own chamber pot.¹³⁹ Tolstoy told his brother that the grand dukes and millionaires who lived nearby were surrounded by even greater luxury.¹⁴⁰

As usual Tolstoy was thronged with visitors, but there were also pleasant meetings with Chekhov, who was a local telephone call away in Yalta, and with the young writer Gorky. Tolstoy also developed a friendship with the urbane and scholarly Grand duke Nikolay Mikhailovich, an old friend of Chertkov who sought him out. Not only was he unflustered by Tolstoy’s pariah-status in official circles, it turned out he was an avid reader of his virulently anti-government writings. His lofty position as a member of the Romanov family enabled him to receive uncensored all the editions Chertkov published in England.¹⁴¹ Fearing this might be his last chance, Tolstoy seized the opportunity of this serendipitous acquaintance to write another lengthy letter to Nicholas II, which the Grand duke gamely offered to deliver. Addressing the Tsar as ‘dear brother’, Tolstoy dispensed with the niceties of protocol. After admonishing Nicholas II for increasing police surveillance, censorship and religious persecution to unacceptable levels, Tolstoy disputed the notion that Orthodoxy and autocracy were inherently Russian. First of all he pointed to the ever increasing numbers of those ‘defecting’ to other faiths, despite the dangers of persecution entailed. Next he declared that autocracy was outmoded and bankrupt as a form of government. Tsarist power might still have had prestige under Nicholas I, he admitted, but in the nearly fifty years since his death, it had completely disintegrated, to the point that people from all classes of society now openly criticised and ridiculed the Tsar himself (that is, Nicholas II, the person he was addressing):

The fact that crowds of people run after you with shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ in Moscow and other cities has probably misled you about the people’s love for autocracy and its representative, the Tsar. don’t believe that this is an expression of devotion to you – they are just a crowd of curious people who will go after any unusual spectacle.¹⁴²

Only someone with the authority of a tsar would have the temerity to speak in such terms to a crowned head of state. The fact that Nicholas II pledged not to show this letter to anyone (as attested by Grand duke Nikolay Mikhailovich’s mistress, Princess Elena Baryatinskaya, who happened to be Chertkov’s cousin) lends credence to the view that Tolstoy and Chertkov still enjoyed a certain amount of favour and protection at court.¹⁴³