Tolstoy

In May 1911 Sonya went to Moscow to sort out what could be included in her latest edition of Tolstoy’s collected works, since most of his later writings were still censored. She also began negotiations to sell the family’s empty house to the City of Moscow for 125,000 roubles, planning to use the money to help her sons. She then travelled on to Petersburg for meetings at court and with Prime Minister Stolypin, in the hope of interesting the Tsar in purchasing Yasnaya Polyana for the nation. Initially the situation looked promising, and newspapers reported on 28 May that the government would buy Yasnaya Polyana for 500,000 roubles.⁷ Sonya put together detailed inventories of each of the rooms when she returned home, in preparation for receiving government officials and surveyors, but everything was still very raw for her. The meeting that summer with her sister-in-law, who came on a visit from her convent, was a particularly emotional one, since it was to Masha that Tolstoy had first gone after leaving Yasnaya Polyana for the last time. Maria Nikolayena would die the following April of pneumonia aged eighty-two, the same age as her brother.

Fortunately Sonya was kept busy that first summer by the huge numbers of visitors who wanted to make the pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana. Biryukov brought 200 village schoolteachers on 6 June to inspect the Tolstoy memorial rooms, for example, and on one day in July Sonya noted in her diary that there had been 140 visitors. On Tolstoy’s birthday on 28 August, as many as 300 people gathered at his grave.⁸ Nevertheless, for Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev, who returned after his two-year Siberian exile in the summer of 1911, Yasnaya Polyana felt deserted and empty.⁹ In October, soon after Stolypin was assassinated, Sonya learned that the government had now decided against buying Yasnaya Polyana. In debates at the duma there had been some Church figures who objected very strongly to the state honouring the memory of an apostate who had been excommunicated.¹⁰ On 18 November, shortly after the first anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, Sonya wrote to Nicholas II to warn him that her sons might soon have to sell Yasnaya Polyana, and she expressed the hope that he would not want to see ‘the heart of the Russian nation’ fall into private hands, but on 20 december Nicholas noted in a memo to his ministers that he regarded the purchase of Yasnaya Polyana by the government to be ‘inadmissible’.¹¹

The estate gradually started coming back to life in 1912. When Valentin Bulgakov came back that summer he sensed an air of liberation about the place – there were games of croquet and tennis again, and no longer any need to be preoccupied with questions of death and immortality, serving the people, and moral self-improvement. Bulgakov wound up the gramophone and played a record of Strauss waltzes which Tolstoy had particularly loved.¹² Tolstoy’s birthday that August was almost an occasion for celebration, with nineteen sitting at table, but there were mixed feelings on 23 September, when Sonya marked her fiftieth wedding anniversary by dressing all in white. It was a festive occasion, she told Bulgakov when he came to visit that day, but her face was tear-stained. Bulgakov was living at Telyatinki with the Chertkovs at this time, and he was appalled by their continuing hostility towards Sonya. Bulgakov had not really noticed anyone else while Tolstoy was alive as his huge, magnetic personality had involuntarily commanded his full attention. Now, however, as he started the mammoth task of compiling a detailed inventory of the Yasnaya Polyana library, for use as a scholarly resource, he got to know Sonya better. He enjoyed listening to her tell stories about the happy days of her marriage, but found her continuing anger and bitterness over the last years hard-going. Faced with the choice of either criticising her husband severely or concluding she had never understood him, she told Bulgakov she preferred to opt for the latter.¹³ A young priest brought Sonya a degree of peace in November 1912 when he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana soon after the second anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, requesting permission to say prayers at Tolstoy’s grave and perform a requiem in his room.¹⁴ The following month the first Tolstoy Museum opened in Moscow under the aegis of the Tolstoy Society. With the support of Sonya and her children, Biryukov and Bulgakov had put together a permanent exhibition in a flat rented on Povarskaya Street on the proceeds of ticket sales and member subscriptions.