Sofia Tolstoy at the portrait of her late son Vanechka, 1895.
They went out into the snow. Tolstoy walked quickly, repeating abruptly, solemnly, harshly: ‘There is no death, there is no death.’8
Tolstoy hoped that the love that Vanechka had brought to the world and common grief over this loss would recreate peace and understanding within the family. He wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy about his astonishment at the ‘spiritual purity and particularly humility’ with which Sofia had accepted the greatest loss of her life:
She . . . only asks Him to teach her how to live without a being in which she had invested the whole power of her love; and so far she does not know how to do so . . . None of us has ever felt as close to each other as we do now, and I have never felt either in Sonya or in myself such a need for love and such an aversion towards all disunity and evil. I have never loved Sonya as much as I do now. And I feel good because of it. (Ls, II, p. 517)
His rigorous psychological analysis failed him here. The reconciliation achieved at the cost of a most terrible tragedy was short-lived. Leo was partially shielded by his philosophy, sense of mission and artistic genius. With none of these things to protect her, Sofia had to find refuges of her own. She had always passionately loved music and now found in it her only consolation. She would play the piano alone and with her husband and children, but her greatest joy came from performances by the famous pianist and composer Sergei Taneyev, Tchaikovsky’s favourite pupil. After Vanechka’s death, the Tolstoys invited Taneyev to spend the summer at Yasnaya Polyana. Like most Russian luminaries of the time, Taneyev admired Tolstoy and was happy to accept the invitation. Very soon members of the family could not fail to notice that Sofia’s love for music was gradually transferring itself to the musician.
None of the participants in this triangle envisaged even the remote possibility of adultery. Taneyev, who was twelve years younger than Sofia, lonely and, most importantly, gay, enjoyed the attention of the great writer and the tender care of his wife. Once he realized, belatedly, that he had involuntarily provoked a family rift, Taneyev gradually distanced himself from the Tolstoys. Sofia was certain of the innocence of her behaviour and believed it was impossible to control one’s inner feelings. Much later, she told her daughters that never in her life had she given so much as a handshake that she could not have given in the presence of her husband. Tolstoy was aware of this, but found Sofia’s ‘exclusive love’ for another man humiliating, especially as it began during the period of their shared grief. Once he confessed that he was close to killing himself because of jealousy. He could not stop trying to convince Sofia that in order to get rid of an evil feeling, one must first admit that it is evil. At some point he confessed that he was on the verge of suicide from jealousy, shame and humiliation, but even that could not convince Sofia to renounce what she considered to be the only and totally innocent source of joy in her life.
Portrait of Sergei Taneyev, 1890s.
In 1897, in the midst of this family crisis, Tolstoy finished his treatise What Is Art?, on which he had been working for the last ten years. Having addressed religion, philosophy, economy and politics, he now turned to a topic he knew intimately. Tolstoy challenged the identification of art with beauty prevalent in Romantic aesthetic thought. Instead, he claimed that art is a vehicle of human communication, a way of transmitting to others, and imbuing them with, the feelings of the author. While the artistic quality of a work depended on the sincerity and novelty of the emotions conveyed and clarity of their expression, its moral value was determined by the religious and ethical views of the author. Beethoven may have been a great musician, but the effect of his art on the souls of the Pozdnyshevs in The Kreutzer Sonata was detrimental and destructive.
Tolstoy attacked modern art not only on moral, but on artistic grounds. He quoted poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine or Maeterlinck that were, in his view, utterly incomprehensible. He understood that in the absence of universal criteria, this objection was relative – the same accusations could be made against the artists he himself admired. However, the notion of looking for a middle ground was not in his nature. Tolstoy had often denigrated his own work and did not hesitate to proclaim that, in order to be considered great, art should be understandable to everyone, including illiterate working people. He allowed for happy exceptions, but as a rule only folklore and religious parables could pass this threshold.
Did he fully believe what he was writing? In real life Tolstoy could not live without music. Taneyev was gradually replaced as his performer of choice by the young pianist Alexander Goldenveizer. In his memoirs Goldenveizer recalled a conversation in 1899 about a poem by Fedor Tyutchev, whom Tolstoy valued more highly than Pushkin and Fet:
L. N. told me: ‘I always say that a work of art is either so good that there is no gauge to measure its value – this is true art. Otherwise, it is just all wrong. Look, I am happy that I found a true work of art. One I cannot read without tears. I learned it by heart. Wait, I’ll recite it to you.’ L. N. began with an unsteady voice: ‘Blue-grey shadows mingled.’ Even on my deathbed, I shall not forget the impression L. N. made on me then. He was lying on his back convulsively gripping in his fingers the edge of the blanket, trying in vain to contain his suffocating tears. Several times, he stopped and started again, but finally, when he reached the end of the first stanza, ‘Everything is in me. I am in everything’, his voice broke.9
Tyutchev’s lyrical verse was a long way from being folk poetry, but came close to encapsulating Tolstoy’s long-cherished idyll of a peaceful dissolution in universal love. Tears prevented him from reciting to Goldenveizer the final stanza of Tyutchev’s poem: ‘By the haze of self-oblivion/ Fill my feelings to overflowing/ Let me taste annihilation/ Mix me with the slumbering world.’10 In spite of his denunciation of all modern artistic forms, at the time of his conversation with Goldenveizer Tolstoy was completing his third and the last major noveclass="underline" Resurrection.
As usual, Tolstoy’s work on the novel was long and tortuous. In 1887 he had been impressed by a story told to him by the lawyer Anatoly Koni about a man who, sitting as a member of a jury, suddenly recognized in the prostitute accused of theft a woman he had seduced many years earlier. Distraught and repentant, he decided to marry her, but the woman died from typhus acquired in prison before they could wed. At first Tolstoy insisted that Koni, himself a man of letters, should write about this case. Then, changing his mind, Tolstoy asked Koni if he could borrow the plot. Permission was readily granted.
It is not difficult to see why this story fascinated Tolstoy. Feeling perennial disgust towards himself and his former sexual exploits, Tolstoy was thinking about the psychological mechanics of repentance and the possibility of redemption. He believed that those who, like him, were unfit for abstinence should regard their first sexual encounter as a lifetime commitment. The hero of ‘the Koni story’, as Tolstoy always called it in his manuscripts, was not only ashamed of his role as seducer, but belatedly acknowledged that this seduction actually amounted to a marriage that needed only to be sealed.
Tolstoy strongly identified himself with the protagonist of the story. In 1903 he told Pavel Biryukov, who was writing his biography, that he had once seduced his aunt’s maid, Gasha, who had subsequently perished after being driven out of the house. Five years earlier, however, writing in her diary about Resurrection, Sofia recalled that her husband had pointed out to her the same Gasha, now in her seventies and living in the house of Tolstoy’s brother. Most likely we will never know whether Tolstoy’s self-denunciation was caused by an erroneous memory or a deliberate desire to magnify his own guilt.