Accompanied by Sonya, Tolstoy came to St Petersburg to see his friends off – he had not been in the city since 1880, and it would be his last ever visit to the capital. The secret police had a field day, filing detailed reports on his every movement, including to the barber on Panteleimon Street where he had his beard trimmed. They even embellished their despatches with loving details about Tolstoy’s couture (a short coat tied with a grey belt, dark trousers and a dark grey knitted hat one day, and a heavy coat with a lambswool collar, dark grey trousers and a grey felt hat the next).60 Tolstoy was mobbed everywhere he went, and given a huge ovation at the railway station when he left to go back to Moscow. There were only two people he did not enjoy seeing. One was Chertkov’s indomitable mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna, who loathed him for leading her only son astray (she also thought he was imbued with the spirit of the Antichrist for not acknowledging Christ’s resurrection).61 The other was his implacably devout old relative Alexandra Andreyevna, no longer his dear friend and confidante Alexandrine.62
Tolstoy was abandoned by another of his devoted followers in 1897: six months after Chertkov’s departure, his daughter Masha suddenly announced that she was to be married. She was twenty-six, and had finally decided to insist on some independence after several potential engagements had been thwarted by her father.63 Tolstoy was no happier about Masha marrying Nikolay Obolensky, the son of his niece Liza, who was a feckless youth without an income. He noted in his diary that seeing Masha get married to someone like Obolensky was like watching a thoroughbred horse being ruined by being made to carry water. He was also not happy about the fact that Masha now reneged on her earlier principles and demanded her share of the family property. But most importantly, Masha had been his faithful helpmeet – meek, quiet and always willing to help, so her departure from Yasnaya Polyana, even though she did not go far, left a huge hole in her father’s life. It was Masha he loved best of all amongst his children.
Soon after Chertkov’s departure, Masha’s elder sister Tanya also began to loosen her ties to her father by beginning an affair with a man fourteen years older than her who had six children. She felt very guilty, feeling she had sullied herself. Mikhail Sukhotin was unhappily married to a woman who was gravely ill, and who in fact died later that year, but that did not make it easier. Tanya’s previous romantic life had also been quite unhappy. It was difficult living in a house where all the attention was directed at her father. Everything revolved around him, and Tanya felt aggrieved that he gave his time to just about anyone who turned up to see him, but not to his own daughter.64 She had been devastated in October 1886 when Chertkov, at the age of thirty-two, had married Anna diterikhs, a general’s daughter from St Petersburg. Anna Konstantinovna, or Galya, as she was universally known, was twenty-seven (Tanya was then twenty-two), and not only was she educated, having been one of the first graduates of the university courses that had finally been opened to women in 1878, but also beautiful – Yaroshenko had painted her portrait in his famous 1883 painting The Student. Galya was also earnest and principled, and completely committed to Tolstoyan ideals. It was not that Tanya was in love with Chertkov, but she admired him, and she felt dejected to be always on the sidelines, never quite beautiful, clever or noble enough to take centre stage.65 Tanya had also been very drawn to the handsome Evgeny Popov while he was living at Yasnaya Polyana in 1894. He was exactly her age, but he was still technically married, and even less eligible in her parents’ eyes than Pavel Biryukov, the Tolstoyan who had courted Masha.66 Following the lead of her parents, who still read each other’s diaries manically, Tanya showed Popov her diaries, and received his to read. Tolstoy also got to see his daughter’s diary, and then he put a stop to the relationship.67 He and Sonya were no happier about Tanya’s liaison with Misha Sukhotin, but it led to a happy marriage.
Tanya had been a peacemaker for her parents, and she was keenly missed. In the summer of 1897 Masha lamented in a letter to Galya Chertkova that there was a sadness at Yasnaya Polyana, with each person dealing with their own issues, and feeling very lonely.68 There certainly seemed to be many problems in both generations of the Tolstoy family that year. Sergey’s marriage had gone wrong soon after he married in 1895, and in 1897 his wife divorced him after their son was born.69 Ilya now had three children (a fourth had died before his second birthday), his wife Sonya was expecting another, and he was always short of money. Lev junior had recovered from the nervous breakdown he had suffered after the famine-relief work out in Samara, and had married the daughter of the Swedish doctor who had cured him in Stockholm, but, like most of his brothers, he was fanatically opposed to his father’s views. After he and his wife moved into the wing at Yasnaya Polyana, there had been many bitter rows with Lev senior. The situation with the three youngest children was not much better. Andrey, who turned twenty in 1897, had been expelled from school for tearing up a picture of Nicholas II, and was leading a dissipated life. He was already a notorious womaniser, first angering his father by wanting to marry a peasant girl from Yasnaya Polyana whom he had become involved with at the age of fifteen, then absconding to the Caucasus where he fell in love with a Georgian princess, who in due course was also unceremoniously dropped.70 Andrey constantly ran up large debts, and expected his mother to bail him out. Eighteen-year-old Misha, still at school in Moscow, was suffering teenage angst, and Alexandra (Sasha), who turned thirteen in 1897, had turned into a tomboy with an unwavering hostility towards her mother. This was hardly surprising as Sonya had neglected her youngest daughter from the moment she was born.
There were also problems over at Pirogovo. To the horror of Tolstoy’s brother Sergey, whose way of life was very ancien régime, despite his unconventional marriage, both his daughters had become fervent Tolstoyans. In 1897 Varya became the common-law wife of Vladimir Vasiliev, who was one of Sergey’s peasants, and she left home. Her elder sister Vera was also a free spirit who shocked her father by having a child out of wedlock a couple of years later with Abdurashid Sarafov, a Bashkir who had come to Pirogovo to provide them with koumiss.71 Tolstoy felt very guilty. In 1897 Sonya’s strange obsession with Taneyev and his playing showed no sign of abating, and Tolstoy yearned again to leave home. At one point he got as far as writing a farewell letter to Sonya, but ended up stuffing it down the back of a chair after they made up.72 Sonya agreed not to invite Taneyev to Yasnaya Polyana again, and Tolstoy channelled his feelings about music, and what he regarded as its dangerous powers, on to the page. The product was his iconoclastic treatise What is Art?, which he had been thinking about writing ever since his daughter Tanya had become a student at the Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1881.
What is Art? is of a piece with Tolstoy’s religious writings, in that it promotes the sort of Christian art to which he himself aspired. Art for Tolstoy was to the ability to communicate universal feelings of brotherly love to the widest possible audience. Everything else is made the subject of condemnation as ‘counterfeit art’, namely:
all novels and poems which transmit ecclesiastical or patriotic feelings, and also exclusive feelings pertaining only to the class of the idle rich, such as aristocratic honour, satiety, spleen, pessimism, and refined and vicious feelings flowing from sex-love – quite incomprehensible to the great majority of mankind.