Autobiography of Countess Tolstoy Part 4

In 1904 I had to endure the pain of my son, Andrey, leaving to fight in the war against j.a.pan. In my heart I was opposed to war as to any other kind of murder, and it was with a peculiar pain in my heart that I saw my son off at Tambov and with other mothers looked at the carriages full of soldiers--our sons doomed to death.

A happy event for our family in 1905 was the birth of an only child to our daughter, Tatyana Lvovna Sukhotin. This granddaughter, as she grew up, was a favourite of Leo Nikolaevich and of the whole family.

In 1906 I underwent a serious operation, performed by Professor V. F.

Snegirev in Yasnaya Polyana. How quietly I prepared myself for death, how happy I felt, when the servants, saying good-bye to me, cried bitterly! I felt a strange sensation, when I fell asleep under the anaesthetic which was given to me: it was new and significant. All external life in its complicated setting, especially of towns, flashed before my inner vision like a quickly changing panorama. And how insignificant human vanity appeared to me! I seemed to be asking myself: what, then, is important? One thing: if G.o.d has sent us on to the earth and we are to live, then the most important thing is to help one another in whatever way possible. To help one another to live. I think the same now.

The operation was quite successful, but it seemed as though the will of fate, having aimed at taking my life, wavered and then removed its hand to our daughter Masha. I recovered, and that lovely, unselfish, spiritual creature, Masha, died of pneumonia in our house two and a half months after my operation. This sorrow was a heavy weight on our life and aging hearts. The previous rift, the reproaches and unpleasantness ceased for a while and we humbled ourselves before fate. The time pa.s.sed in our usual occupations, and Leo Nikolaevich, as a distraction, played cards with his children and friends; he was very fond of whist. In the mornings he wrote, and every afternoon he rode; he lived the most quiet and regular life. He was, however, often worried by visitors who tired him, by applicants, and by letters in which people disagreed with his teaching and reproached him with his way of life, or asked him for money or to get them jobs.

These reproaches and the interference of outsiders in our peaceful family life ruined it. Even before this the influence of outside people was creeping in and towards the end of Leo Nikolaevich's life it a.s.sumed terrifying dimensions. For instance, these outsiders frightened Leo Nikolaevich with the prediction that the Russian Government would send the police and seize all his papers. On that pretext they were removed from Yasnaya Polyana, and, therefore, Leo Nikolaevich could no longer work at them, as he had not the _whole_ material. Eventually with difficulty I succeeded in getting back seven thick note-books containing my husband's diaries which are now in the possession of our daughter Alexandra; but the affair led to strained relations with the man who had them in his keeping and he ceased his daily visits.{61}

XI

In 1895 Leo Nikolaevich wrote a letter in which, as a request to his heirs, he expressed the desire that the copyright in his works should be made public property, and in which he entrusted the examination of his MSS. after his death to Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov, to Chertkov, and to me.{62} The letter was in the keeping of my daughter Masha and was destroyed,{63} and in its place in September, 1909, a will was made at Chertkov's house in Kreks.h.i.+no not far from Moscow, where Leo Nikolaevich and several other persons were staying at the time. The will turned out to have been drawn incorrectly and to be invalid, a fact which the "friends" soon found out.{64}

Our journey home from Kreks.h.i.+no through Moscow was terrible. One of the intimates had informed the press that on such and such a day at a certain hour Tolstoy would be at the Kursk Station. Several thousands of people came there to see us off. At moments it seemed to me, as I walked arm in arm with my husband and limped on my bad leg, that I should be choked, fall down, and die. In spite of the fresh, autumnal air, we were enveloped in a hot, thick atmosphere.

This had a very serious effect upon Leo Nikolaevich's health. Just after the train had pa.s.sed Schekino station, he began to talk deliriously and lost all consciousness of his surroundings. A few minutes after our arrival at home he had a prolonged fainting fit and this was followed by a second. Luckily there was a doctor in the house. After this I suffered more and more from a painful, nervous excitement: day and night I watched my husband to see when he would go for a ride or a walk by himself, and I awaited his return anxiously, for I was afraid that he might have another fainting fit or simply fall down somewhere where it would be difficult to find him.

Owing to these agitations and to the difficult and responsible work connected with L. N. Tolstoy's publications, I continually grew more nervous and worried, and my health broke down completely.{65} I lost my mental balance, and, owing to this, I had a bad effect upon my husband.

At the same time Leo Nikolaevich began continually to threaten to leave the house and his "intimate" friend[M] carefully prepared, together, with the lawyer M., a new and correct will[N] which was copied by Leo Nikolaevich himself on the stump of a tree in the forest on 23 July, 1910.{66}

This was the will which was proved after his death.

In his diary he wrote at the time, among other things: "I very clearly see my mistake; I ought to have called together all my heirs and told them my intention; I ought not to have kept it secret. I wrote this to----, but he was very annoyed--"

On 5 August he writes of me:

"It is painful the constant secrecy and fear for her...."

On 10 August he writes:

"It is good to feel oneself guilty, as I do...." And again: "My relations with all of them are difficult; I cannot help desiring death...."

Clearly the pressure brought to bear upon him tormented him. One of his friends, P. I. B..V,{67} was of opinion that no secret should be made of the will, and he told Leo Nikolaevich so. At first he agreed with the opinion of this true friend, but he went away and Leo Nikolaevich submitted to another influence though at times he was obviously oppressed by it. I was powerless to save him from that influence, and for Leo Nikolaevich and myself there began a terrible period of painful struggle which made me still more ill. The sufferings of my hot and hara.s.sed heart clouded my reasoning powers, while Leo Nikolaevich's friends worked continually, deliberately, subtly upon the mind of an old man whose memory and powers were growing feeble.{68} They created around him who was dear to me an atmosphere of conspiracy, of letters received secretly, letters and articles sent back after they had been read, mysterious meetings in forests for the performance of acts essentially disgusting to Leo Nikolaevich; after their performance he could no longer look me or my sons straight in the face, for he had never before concealed anything from us; it was the first secret in our life and it was intolerable to him. When I guessed it and asked whether a will was not being made, and why it was concealed from me, I was answered by a "no" or by silence. I believed that it was not a will. It meant, therefore, that there was some other secret of which I knew nothing, and I was in despair with the perpetual feeling that my husband was being carefully set against me and that a terrible and fatal ending was in front of us.{69} Leo Nikolaevich's threats to leave the house became more and more frequent, and this threat added to my torment and increased my nervousness and ill-health.

I shall not describe in detail Leo Nikolaevich's going away. So much has been and will be written about it, but no one will know the real cause.

Let _his_ biographers try to find out.

When I read in the letter which Leo Nikolaevich sent me through our daughter Alexandra that he had gone away finally and for ever, I felt and clearly understood that without him--and especially after all that had happened--life would be utterly impossible, and instantly I made up my mind to put an end to all my sufferings by throwing myself into the pond in which some time before a girl and her little brother had been drowned. But I was rescued, and, when Leo Nikolaevich was told of it, he wept bitterly, as his sister, Marie Nikolaevna, wrote to me, but he could not get himself to return.{70}

After Leo Nikolaevich's going away an article appeared in the newspapers expressing the joy of one of his most "intimate" friends at the event.{71}

XII

All my children came to Yasnaya Polyana and called in a specialist on nervous diseases and had a nurse to be with me. For five days I ate nothing and did not take a drop of water.

I felt no hunger, but my thirst was acute. In the evening of the fifth day my daughter Tanya persuaded me to drink a cup of coffee, by saying that, if father summoned me, I would be so weak that I should be unable to go.

Next morning we received a telegram from the newspaper _Russkoye Slovo_ that Leo Nikolaevich had fallen ill at Astapovo and that his temperature was 104. The "intimate" friend had received a telegram before this and had already left, carefully concealing from his family the place where the patient was lying. We took a special train at Tula and went to Astapovo. Our son Serge on his way to his estate had been overtaken by a telegram from his wife who had sent it at our daughter Alexandra's request, and he was already with his father.

This was the beginning of new and cruel sufferings for me. Round my husband was a crowd of strangers and outsiders, and I, his wife who had lived with him for forty-eight years, was not admitted to see him. The door of the room was locked, and, when I wanted to get a glimpse of my husband through the window, a curtain was drawn across it. Two nurses who were told off to look after me held me firmly by the arms and did not allow me to move. Meanwhile Leo Nikolaevich called our daughter Tanya to him and began asking all about me, believing me to be in Yasnaya Polyana. At every question he cried, and our daughter said to him: "Don't let us talk about mama, it agitates you too much." "Ah, no,"

he said, "that is more important to me than anything." He also said to her, but already indistinctly: "A great deal of trouble is falling upon Sonya; we have managed it badly."

No one ever told him that I had come, though I implored every one to do so. It is difficult to say who was responsible for this cruelty. Every one was afraid of accelerating his death by agitating him; that was also the doctors' opinion.{72} Who can tell? Perhaps our meeting and my ways of looking after him to which he was accustomed, might have revived him.

In one of his letters to me, which I have recently published, Leo Nikolaevich writes that he dreads falling ill without me.

The doctors allowed me to see my husband when he was now hardly breathing, lying motionless on his back, with his eyes already closed. I whispered softly some tender words in his ear, hoping that he might still hear how I had been all the time there in Astapovo and how I loved him to the end. I don't remember what more I said to him, but two deep sighs, as though the result of a terrible effort, came as an answer to my words, and then all was still....

All the days and nights that followed, until his body was removed, I spent by the dead, and in me too life became cold. The body was taken to Yasnaya Polyana; a mult.i.tude of people came there, but I saw and recognized no one, and the day after the funeral I collapsed with the same illness, pneumonia, though in a less dangerous form, and I was in bed for eighteen days.

A great comfort to me at the time was the presence of my sister Tatyana Andreevna Kuzminskii, and of Leo Nikolaevich's cousin, Varvara Valeryanovna Nagornaya. My children, tired out, returned to their families.

XIII

And then there began my lonely life in Yasnaya Polyana, and the energy which I used to spend on life was and is directed only to this, that I may endure my sorrowful existence worthily and with submission to the will of G.o.d. I try to occupy myself only with what in some way or another concerns the memory of Leo Nikolaevich.

I live in Yasnaya Polyana keeping the house and its surroundings as they were when Leo Nikolaevich was alive, and looking after his grave. I have kept for myself two hundred desyatins of land with the apple orchard and the plantations, the making of which had given us such pleasure. The greater part of the land (475 desyatins), with the fine, carefully preserved woods, I sold to my daughter Alexandra to be transferred to the peasants.{73}

I also sold my Moscow house to the munic.i.p.ality,{74} and I sold the last edition of the works of Leo Tolstoy, and gave all the proceeds to my children. But they, and particularly the grandchildren, are so numerous!

Including the daughters-in-law and myself, we are now a family of thirty-eight, and my help was, therefore, far from satisfactory.

I always feel in my heart profound grat.i.tude to the Sovereign Emperor for granting me a pension, which allows me to live in security and to keep the manor of Yasnaya Polyana.

Three years have now pa.s.sed. I look sadly on the havoc in Yasnaya Polyana, how the trees which we planted are being cut down, how the beauty of the place is gradually being spoiled, now that everything has been handed over to the timber-merchants and peasants who frequently have painful quarrels, now about the land and now about the woods. And what is going to happen to the manor and the house after my death?

Almost daily I visit the grave; I thank G.o.d for the happiness granted to me in early life, and as to the last troubles between us, I look upon them as a trial and a redemption of sin before death. Thy will be done.{75}

COUNTESS SOPHIE TOLSTOY.

OCTOBER 28, 1913.

YASNAVA POLYANA.