Tolstoy

In September, Tolstoy went to visit Chertkov, stopping off on the way in Moscow, where he had not been for eight years. Before he left Krekshino towards the end of the month, he drew up a will handing over all his works written after 1881 into the public domain, and the manuscripts to Chertkov. A huge crowd gave him an ovation at the Kursk station as he set off back home to Yasnaya Polyana. He would never see Moscow again. In January Valentin Bulgakov, a young philosophy student originally from Siberia, arrived to become Tolstoy’s new secretary. Like Gusev, he was instructed by Chertkov to take copious notes on Tolstoy’s day-to-day life. He thus became witness to the worst few months in the Tolstoys’ marriage, and after her husband’s death it was to Bulgakov that Sonya confirmed what the root cause of all the problems had been. In a letter of June 1911 she told him that she could not tolerate being supplanted in her husband’s affections by Chertkov. She had spent forty-eight years being married to Tolstoy, as the most important person in his life, and now to have her husband tell her that Chertkov was the closest person to him was unbearable.¹⁸⁶ Sonya did not behave well in the last few months of Tolstoy’s life, and numerous doctors correctly diagnosed paranoia and hysteria, but she was not mentally ill. She was just felt out of control, usurped and desperate. She feared poverty, and she feared her name being blackened.

In June 1910, Tolstoy made another trip to visit Chertkov, and at the end of the month Chertkov was allowed to return to Telyatinki. Sonya now tried to stop her husband from seeing him, and when she discovered that Chertkov had his diaries from the last ten years, she demanded they be given to her, fearing they would expose her in a bad light. She felt she should have them, as her husband’s rightful executor, but Tolstoy refused to accede to her demands. Finally, after bitter conflict, Tolstoy agreed to take back his latest diaries from Chertkov, in order to hand them to their daughter Tanya, who would deposit them in the Tula bank. Sonya and her husband had always read each other’s diaries, but now Tolstoy began to keep a secret private journal. And in June he wrote another secret will, bequeathing the rights to his works to Sasha or, in the event of her death, to Tanya. Sonya was not made privy to its contents, but Tolstoy came to regret not having been open about it all.

Tolstoy was compelled to conduct his friendship with Chertkov by letter again, to avoid further hostilities with Sonya. In September she invited a priest to Yasnaya Polyana to conduct an exorcism to expel Chertkov’s evil spirit. In late October, after discovering her rifling through his study, Tolstoy decided finally to leave. He had long yearned to leave home and set off on foot with nothing but the clothes on his back as a wanderer. In 1910 he finally did, leaving superstitiously at the age of 82 on 28 October in the middle of the night with dr Makovický, so he would not be pursued by Sonya. despite his antagonistic relations with the Orthodox Church, it is entirely in keeping with Tolstoy’s contradictory character that his first destination was the Optina Pustyn Monastery. Finding he was unable to receive spiritual guidance from the elders at Optina Pustyn, he visited his sister at her convent, then boarded a train heading south towards the Caucasus. As soon as she found out her husband had left, Sonya tried to drown herself in the pond.