10. Tolstoy skating in the back garden of his Moscow house in 1898, photograph taken by Sonya Tolstaya
Since her sister was not coming to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1895, Sonya offered the wing to Taneyev for a peppercorn rent, and in June he arrived to spend a month, accompanied by his wrinkled old nanny Pelageya Vasilievna and his seventeen-year-old composition pupil Yury Pomerantsev.43 Taneyev filled the house with exquisite piano music during his stay, and unwittingly became an emotional crutch for Sonya while she mourned the loss of Vanechka. Music acted as a kind of tranquilliser for her. Tolstoy had been affectionate and caring that spring, but he soon became preoccupied again with his missionary activities. It was Chertkov he wanted to spend time with. They had been exchanging frequent and sometimes very long letters, but had been able to meet only rarely during the first decade of their friendship, and usually only when Chertkov was passing through Moscow on the way from his estate to St Petersburg or vice versa. In 1894 all that had changed when Tolstoy found a dacha near Yasnaya Polyana for Chertkov, his frail wife and five-year-old son Vladimir (also known as dima, like his father). It meant Tolstoy and Chertkov could spend finally long summer days in uninterrupted conversation. The Chertkovs returned to spend their summers in the house in 1895 and in 1896, so it is not surprising that Sonya found Tolstoy’s emotional absence hard to bear. Taneyev was a placid, unobtrusive sort of person, completely wrapped up in his music, but he provided a sympathetic ear to Sonya, who was clearly very lonely.
To begin with, Tolstoy did not mind – he and Taneyev played a lot of chess together, and he certainly enjoyed the composer’s peerless performances of the classical repertoire of which he was so fond. Taneyev had been a pupil of Tchaikovsky and Nikolay Rubinstein, and in 1875, at the age of just nineteen, had been the first Moscow Conservatoire student to graduate with the Gold Medal in composition and performance. That year he had been the soloist in the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and in 1878 replaced him as teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire (his many pupils would include Scriabin and Rachmaninov). Tolstoy even shared an enthusiasm for Esperanto with Taneyev, who was unusual in being one of Russia’s first speakers of the language – he wrote songs with lyrics in Esperanto, as well his frankly rather unexciting diary entries. Tolstoy had nothing but praise for Esperanto’s inventor Lazar Zamenhof and the book he published in 1887: Lingvo inter-nacia. Antaŭparolo kaj plena lernolibro (International Language. Foreword and Complete Textbook).
A native Russian speaker from Białystok in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, Zamenhof published under the pseudonym doktoro Esperanto (doctor Hopeful), a name which expressed his dream that Esperanto would bring peace and understanding between peoples all over the world. Tolstoy expressed his support for the language in a letter he wrote to some Esperanto enthusiasts in early 1894. He told them he had received Zamenhof’s book soon after it was published, and claimed to have learned to read the language fluently in two hours. This gave the resourceful Tolstoyans the idea of using the journal Esperantisto as an ideological platform. In May 1895 Esperantisto published translations of both Tolstoy’s 1894 letter and his article ‘On Reason in Religion’. The Russian government reacted by promptly banning any further imports of the journal from its editorial base in Nuremberg. By August Esperantisto was forced to close, since three-quarters of its 600 subscribers lived in Russia. Amongst them must have been Taneyev.44
A shared love of Esperanto was unfortunately not sufficient to prevent Tolstoy developing absurd feelings of jealousy towards the hapless Taneyev, despite the fact that the composer was a confirmed bachelor. Taneyev was clearly extremely fond of his young pupil ‘Yusha’ Pomerantsev, who studied harmony and counterpoint with him for several years, and was frequently by his side, but the composer’s lifelong companion was his old nanny. As one former student later commented, Taneyev simultaneously experienced fear, respect and contempt towards ‘ladies’, their appearance at his home invariably throwing him off kilter and making him less ‘straightforward and natural’.45
Taneyev’s ecstatic comments about bicycling, moreover (‘I think that even the experiences of newly-weds on their wedding night cannot compare with the sensations experienced by a bicyclist’), ought to have been enough to put Tolstoy’s mind at rest.46 Some might even argue that Tolstoy should have been indulgent of his wife simply for sitting through the premiere of Taneyev’s interminably long opera The Oresteia at the Mariinsky Theatre in October 1895 (which rapidly disappeared from the repertoire after he refused to cut it).
Taneyev was hardly a surrogate husband, more someone for Sonya to talk to, particularly about the day-to-day matters concerning life at Yasnaya Polyana which Tolstoy had washed his hands of years before. Tolstoy might have been magnanimous, even if he did think his wife was making a fool of herself by fawning on a man much younger than herself. After all, he was doing the same now that Chertkov had replaced her as the chief object of his affections and confidences. Later on, Sonya would actually accuse her husband of having a homosexual relationship with Chertkov.47 It is a charge that cannot be substantiated, although the tone of many of Tolstoy’s letters to his younger friend just after he was deported to England is sometimes that of an infatuated adolescent, and his affection was at least reciprocated with an obsessive devotion on Chertkov’s part.48
Sonya’s dependency on music after Vanechka’s death stimulated Tolstoy to reflect further on questions of aesthetics which would be fully articulated a few years later in his treatise What is Art?, but his central mission in the 1890s was as a non-violent Christian soldier fighting for truth and justice. It was extremely gratifying to him that his ideas were now beginning to bear fruit abroad. When a British businessman called John Kenworthy had stumbled across Tolstoy’s writings in America in 1890, for example, they had completely changed his life. He abandoned all desire to settle in America and make money, and returned home to England to live and work amongst the poor in the East End of London. In 1893 he published a book entitled Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics. To the vegetarian pacifist Ernest Crosby, a reforming American lawyer and Tolstoyan, Kenworthy described the day in March 1894 when he received his first letter from Tolstoy as the happiest in his life.49 For his part, Tolstoy told Kenworthy that it was a ‘joy’ to be in communication with him, and that he had not only read his book, but had commissioned a Russian translation.50