He recovered, but the doctors advised against staying in the damp and cold climate of mainland Russia. In late August the Tolstoys left for the town of Gaspra in the Crimean peninsula. Tolstoy there met with both Chekhov, who was living nearby in Yalta because of his worsening tuberculosis, and Maxim Gorky, the young revolutionary writer who had been exiled to the outer regions of Russia. Tolstoy took an interest in Gorky, eager to see in him a genius who had emerged from the Russian soil. Tolstoy’s infatuation with his younger colleague proved to be short-lived and their ways parted irretrievably. In the autumn of 1901, however, the three most famous living Russian authors enjoyed their conversations and the chance to spend time together.
Chekhov and Tolstoy in Gaspra, c. 1901.
Gorky wrote in his memoirs that during their first meeting Tolstoy had called him the ‘real man from the people’. He used the word muzhik, literally meaning a peasant, which was technically wrong. Like Chekhov, Gorky came from a family of tradesmen, but in his past he had led the life of a vagabond and enjoyed presenting himself as a social pariah. At the same time both Chekhov and Gorky shared a reverence for high culture that allowed them to overcome the limitations of their origins. Gorky, whom Tolstoy accused of being ‘too bookish’,15 hated both his petit bourgeois background and the peasant culture to which his family was culturally close. He wrote later to Romain Rolland that he ‘owed the best in him to books’.16 Neither of the younger writers could sympathize with Tolstoy’s desire to throw away the shackles of his elitist upbringing and imbibe the culture of the uneducated masses.
This literary idyll was arguably the last respite in Tolstoy’s life. Shortly after the New Year he fell ill with pneumonia. On 27 January 1902 Chekhov wrote to his wife Olga Knipper-Chekhov, the famous actress of the Moscow Art Theatre, that news of Tolstoy’s death would most likely reach her earlier than the letter he was writing. The next day Tolstoy’s children and their spouses started arriving to bid farewell. Speaking to his sons, Leo said that he would die with the same faith with which he had lived for the last 25 years. He instructed them to ask him before his death, ‘whether this faith was just’,17 and that he would ‘nod in agreement’ to let them know that this was of help to him in his last moments.
Against all expectations, Tolstoy’s innate strength prevailed. A couple of months later he was again in bed on the verge of dying from typhus. Once again he recovered, but the illnesses had taken their toll, as Sofia recorded in her diary with a characteristic mixture of love and irritation: ‘Poor thing, I can’t look at him, this world celebrity, and in real life a thin, pathetic old man. And he keeps working writing his address to the workers’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 69). Even after thirteen births and three miscarriages, she was still a strong middle-aged woman. In the interval between her husband’s two illnesses she managed to travel to Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow, taking in a visit to the opera and a private concert where Taneyev was playing. It was clear, at any rate, that the Crimea was not benefiting Tolstoy’s health. In the summer of 1902 the couple headed home.
Tolstoy sick in Gaspra, with Sofia, c. 1902.
‘How difficult are these transitions from dying to recovering,’ Tolstoy said to Elizaveta Obolenskaya. ‘I prepared myself for death so well, it was so calm and now I have again to think how to live.’18 Tolstoy felt that he had lived his life to the end, but then was granted extra time. On his apparent deathbed in Gaspra he had prolonged conversations with his children and tried to gear his message to each of them. Likewise, he now set out to address his last words to different groups of the Russian population: the working people, the government, the clergy, the military and so on. He started this cycle with a letter to the emperor, whom he addressed as ‘Dear Brother’ and whom he urged to abolish private ownership of land.
The people who were close to him were departing. In 1903 Tolstoy wrote two farewell letters to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘the Granny’. They both knew they would never be able to see each other again. A devout Orthodox Christian, she regarded her cousin’s views as heretical. Their friendly relations continued, but both felt the barrier separating them. Leo made an effort to break it:
The difference of religious convictions not only cannot and should not prevent the loving unity of people, but cannot and should not arouse the desire to convert a person you love to your faith. I write about [this], because I only recently understood it, understood that any sincerely religious person . . . needs his own faith that corresponds to his mind, knowledge, experience, and mainly his heart, and he cannot leave this faith. For me to desire that you would believe like me or for you that I would believe like you is the same as desiring that I would say that it is hot, when I feel cold or that am cold when I am burning with heat . . . Since then, I stopped desiring to bring others to my faith and felt that I love people, whatever their faith is. (LNT & AAT, p. 520)
Alexandra could not accept this olive branch. She was sure that there can be no salvation outside of the Church and in her last letter wrote that she prayed that God would finally grant ‘the blessing of Holy Spirit’ (LNT & AAT, p. 523) to her wayward cousin. She died in March 1904 at the age of 86. In August 1904 Tolstoy visited his dying brother Sergei for the last time. A convinced atheist, Sergei suddenly expressed his desire to receive communion. To the relief of Sergei’s wife and their sister Maria, Leo fully supported this intention.
Both Alexandra and Sergei were his seniors and parting with them was to be expected. The most painful thing for Tolstoy was the loss of his daughter Maria (Masha), spiritually the closest to him among his children, the only one who refused to take her share when the estate was partitioned in 1892. ‘Masha greatly alarms me. I love her very, very much’ (Ds, p. 403), Tolstoy recorded in his diary on 23 November 1906. She died four days later with her father sitting at her deathbed. A month later, Tolstoy wrote:
I go on living and often recall Masha’s last minutes (I don’t like calling her Masha, that simple name is so unsuitable for the creature who left me). She sits here surrounded by pillows and I hold her dear, thin hand and feel life departing, feel her departing. These quarter hours are among the most important, significant time of my life. (Ds, p. 404)
Vanechka’s death eleven years earlier had brought the spouses together at least for a short while. This loss, however, only aggravated their growing alienation. Sofia did not want to conceal her belief that the hard physical work and vegetarianism imposed by her father had ruined Maria’s health and made her unable to have children.
The house was emptying out. The only one of Tolstoy’s offspring still living with her parents was their youngest daughter Alexandra. Highly intelligent and strong-willed, she was an ardent and rather rigid follower of Tolstoy’s ideas. She adored her father, but was well aware that she could never be as intimately close to him as the kind and understanding Maria. In his delirium when he lay dying, Tolstoy would ‘in a loud, joyous voice call out: “Masha, Masha!”’ (AT, II, p. 404).