Tolstoy

The precarious harmony established after the Tolstoys returned home from the Crimea had disappeared by the end of 1906. A wonderful snapshot of life at Yasnaya Polyana just before everything began to disintegrate is provided by the Japanese writer Tokutomi Roka, who spent five days at the estate in June, and duly wrote an account of his visit. He arrived just before Sergey (now forty-three) married for the second time. Tokutomi had been Meiji Japan’s most fervent Tolstoy devotee since the age of twenty-three, and having been brought up as a Protestant, was drawn as much to his religious philosophy as he was to his fiction. He took life just as seriously as Tolstoy, with whom he conversed in English. Apart from his hero, who was just as he expected, but ‘looked all of his seventy-eight years’, Tokutomi met most of the family: Sonya (‘the look in her eyes was a little lacking in charm’), Masha (‘sickly and thin’), her husband Nikolay (‘gentle of voice and manner and typifies the effeminate Slavic male’), the ‘fun-loving student’ Sasha (‘and her weight would be about 170 pounds’), as well as Lev and his Swedish wife dora, plus Andrey, now estranged from his first wife, and Misha. Amongst the Tolstoy children, it was Sasha whom Tokutomi got to know best, and whom he obviously found a little overwhelming. He once encountered her ‘zooming up on her bicycle, travelling like a cyclone’ (‘and with her physique I was sure she was certain to smash the machine’). Tokutomi also took care to describe the family’s four dogs who were a presence at the outside dining table under the maple tree: a white Siberian, a brown pointer, a black setter and a black and white spaniel.

Tokutomi was accompanied on swims and walks by Tolstoy, and he noticed that he never forgot to attach the chain of his silver watch to his belt, and take with him a notebook with pencil thrust in it. during one walk in the woods, Tolstoy shared his thoughts on Russian writers such as Turgenev, whose works he described as ‘remarkably beautiful, but not very deep’. Gorky, on the other hand, he declared had ‘genius but no learning’, while Merezhkovsky had ‘learning and no genius, and Chekhov has a great genius, a great genius’. Towards the end of a sometimes rather awestruck account of his pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana, Tokutomi describes being taken to Tolstoy’s study, and watching him breathe heavily as he wrote letters of reference for him with his goose-quill pen, his thick brows arched together: ‘He is a prophet in his final years, his frame weakening day by day, but within him a raging fire burns ever brighter. Just to see him inspires you with a feeling of awe and makes you weep bitterly.’ Tokutomi touches here on Tolstoy’s extraordinary charisma, which affected even those immune to his religious message. Many were the sceptical Anglo-Saxon visitors to Yasnaya Polyana who found themselves in awe of Tolstoy’s physical presence, and surprised by his deep sincerity. After replacing the quill in the rack, Tolstoy picked up a lamp to show Tokutomi the pictures on the wall of Henry George, his brother Sergey, William Lloyd Garrison, Syutayev, and a reproduction of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, divided into five panels, which had been given to him by his sister Maria.¹⁶⁴ Before they parted, Tolstoy showed Tokutomi his beloved Circle of Reading – an immense compendium of the thoughts of wise people he had compiled for every day of the year taken from an equally huge array of sources, including his own works.

The problems at Yasnaya Polyana began shortly after Tokutomi’s departure. First Andrey and Lev told their father in no uncertain terms that they approved of capital punishment, which led to a dreadful row, with much slamming of doors. Tolstoy was upset for two days, and then became worked up again a few weeks later when Sonya insisted on taking to court the peasants who had chopped down some oak trees in their forest. Once again, Tolstoy threatened to leave home.¹⁶⁵ Then in August, having just turned sixty-two, Sonya fell seriously ill and almost died. On 2 September, attended by at least four doctors, she underwent an operation to remove the fibroid which had caused her to contract peritonitis. Remarkably, her constitution was as strong as that of her husband, and she recovered, but thirty-five-year-old Masha was not so fortunate. After catching a chill that November, she died in her father’s arms.¹⁶⁶ Of all his children, it had been Masha who had been closest to him, and her death was a terrible loss.

14. Tolstoy and Chertkov in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, 1907