Before his first meetings with the dukhobors, Tolstoy knew very little about their beliefs, since their existence was officially frowned upon and barely documented. Tolstoy could not meet Verigin himself, who was imprisoned like a convicted criminal while awaiting his departure for Siberia, but on 9 december 1894 Popov and Biryukov accompanied him to a meeting with the three dukhobors who had come to see Verigin off, one of whom was his brother Vasily. To his delight, Tolstoy discovered that the dukhobor views on private property, organised religion, secular authority and non-resistance to violence were remarkably similar to his own. Verigin had already made this discovery. Even before he had started reading Tolstoy’s banned religious writings (procured via contacts with political exiles in the far north) he had begun inciting dukhobors to renounce tobacco, alchohol and the eating of meat. Now he realised that a concerted application of the principles contained in Tolstoy’s writings offered an effective means for the dukhobors to stand up against the government. He started plotting various strategies for mass resistance.30
Chertkov passed through Moscow that december. He was on his way to St Petersburg where he planned to campaign for dmitry Khilkov’s children to be returned to their parents, and he persuaded Tolstoy to have his photograph taken with him and the other Tolstoyans involved with The Intermediary. As well as Popov and Biryukov, there were two other young recruits: Ivan Tregubov, yet another priest’s son who had graduated as an atheist from a seminary, and Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, the son of an engineer.31 Tolstoy’s loyal daughters Tanya and Masha were put out by the covert way in which Chertkov had arranged this group portrait of five male Tolstoyans with their ‘teacher’, as they were used to being privy to their father’s activities and were deeply involved in his work themselves. As for Sonya, it was one step too far, and as soon as she found out she marched off to the photographer’s studio to collect the negatives and deface them. She then sat up until three in the morning trying to erase Tolstoy’s face from the picture with one of her diamond earrings. It was fine for pupils at a school to have group photographs, she thought, but the idea of institutionalising Tolstoyanism was abhorrent to her. She felt it did not become her husband’s status as a great writer to be pictured alongside such dubious people, and feared that thousands of people would want to buy copies of the photograph.32 Tolstoy acquiesced, but Chertkov later more than made up for the loss of this early group portrait by bringing an English professional photographer called Thomas Tapsell to Russia to help him take hundreds of images of the great man for posterity. Tolstoy was a vain man, and he acquiesced to that too.33
Tolstoy had been putting the finishing touches to a new story in the month that he met the dukhobors. ‘Master and Man’ (the Russian title ‘Khozyain i rabotnik’ literally means ‘The Master and the Worker’) is about a rich landowner who redeems his selfish, avaricious ways in the middle of a snowstorm by sacrificing his life for that of his downtrodden peasant. The news that Tolstoy was going to publish this story, for nothing, in the expensive Petersburg journal Northern Messenger (its annual subscription was thirteen roubles) provoked another outburst from Sonya, who felt betrayed and jealous, not least because the editor was a young woman. She wanted the rights to new fiction by her husband, and in the first of many over-dramatic ‘suicide attempts’ she ran out into the snowy street late one January night in just her dressing gown and slippers.34 Peace was temporarily restored after Tolstoy brought her back into the house and agreed to her demands. Along with its appearance in Northern Messenger, his new story was published simultaneously as a supplement to the thirteenth volume of Sonya’s edition of the collected works (10,000 copies sold for fifty kopecks in a matter of days), and also by The Intermediary (15,000 copies sold for less half that price in four days flat). A ‘popular’ edition which went on sale for three kopecks was then published and reprinted several times.35
Sonya’s suicide attempts were really just desperate ploys to seek attention: she was exhausted by the stress of caring for six-year-old Vanechka, who was frequently sick, and by the struggle to keep her marriage going and raise their four youngest children on her own. In the event, petty concerns about money and personal loyalties were soon pushed to one side as the Tolstoys suffered a terrible bereavement just before the story appeared in print. days before his seventh birthday their youngest son Vanechka died of scarlet fever. This time both parents were equally devastated, as the angelic, frail Vanechka had been universally adored by everyone in the family for his preternatural goodness and his supposed likeness to his father. Tolstoy, indeed, had already begun to nurture dreams of Vanechka carrying on his work after his death. His sister Masha, who had been visiting Moscow from her convent, prayed constantly over Vanechka in his last few hours, then helped comb his long, blond hair and dress him in a white shirt after he passed away. Numb with grief, Sonya wrote to tell her sister Tanya how she had placed a small icon on Vanechka’s chest, and lit the traditional candle by his head. For the next three days the nursery filled with flowers, and then came another sleigh-ride north of the city to the graveyard of the Church of St Nicholas at Pokrovskoye, to bury Vanechka next to his brother Alyosha.36 ‘Mama is grief-stricken,’ wrote Masha to a friend. ‘Her whole life was in him, she gave him all her love. Papa is the only one who can help her, he’s the only one who can do that. But he is suffering terribly himself, and keeps crying all the time.’ For Tolstoy, indeed, this death was on a level with that of his brother Nikolay.37
The death of Vanechka was a major turning point for both his parents. Grieving for Vanechka brought them together, and Tolstoy thought about taking Sonya that summer to Germany for a rest (she had never been abroad, and had a longing to hear Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth), but that plan had to be shelved when it became clear that they would probably not be allowed to return to Russia.38 Sonya stopped writing in her diary for over a year, and never really recovered. Tolstoy started making notes in his diary about how he wanted his own death to be handled, which would ideally lead to him being buried in the most humble cemetery possible, with no flowers, preferably no priest, and definitely no obituaries.39 He also employed a classic displacement technique to deal with his grief: he learned to ride a bicycle.
The British-made ‘safety’ bicycle, which was the first to replace the penny-farthing and become commercially successful, was a newfangled form of transport just coming into vogue in Russia. Tolstoy equipped himself with a ‘Rover’ (a popular model first developed in Coventry in 1885 by the inventor of the modern bicycle John Starley) and went off to have lessons. These were held in the Moscow Manège, the long classical building in front of the Kremlin used for parades, where he had once learned to fence. Tolstoy acquired a reputation for riding alone, apart from the other trainee cyclists, with an intense look of concentration on his face. Once he had demonstrated his proficiency to the police and acquired a licence, he was free to pedal round the city. The high-minded Evgeny Popov disapproved of his mentor indulging in such a frivolous activity, but Tolstoy saw cycling as a kind of ‘innocent holy foolishness’, and did not care what people thought of a sixty-six-year-old man on wheels.40 That summer Tolstoy took his bicycle to Yasnaya Polyana and exhausted himself by going on rides all the way to Tula and back.41 As with all his enthusiasms, cycling became an obsessive passion for a while, and Tolstoy even managed to persuade the pianist and composer Sergey Taneyev to take it up. Taneyev, then thirty-nine, was a family acquaintance who sometimes went ice-skating with Tolstoy.42 Apart from being rather portly, he was extremely short-sighted and slightly cross-eyed, and did not like going out at night without a chaperone for fear of stumbling, but he was very game. Taneyev was also very game about playing the piano for Sonya. It was in music rather than sport that Sonya sought consolation from her grief.