Tolstoy never reached his destination. On 31 October he boarded a train heading south to Rostov-on-don with dr Makovický and Sasha (who had joined them by this time), but had to get off at Astapovo when he fell ill. Tolstoy was put to bed in the station master’s house. Sasha summoned Chertkov, who arrived with his secretary on 2 November, followed by Sergey, and then Sonya who had chartered a train with Tanya, Andrey and Misha. The next day Ilya arrived, as well as Gorbunov-Posadov and Goldenweiser, and on 5 November sixty army officers swelled the ranks of the secret police officers already stationed there. Once the news reached the press, the story made front page headlines. Soon the whole world knew what was happening at the remote railway station in Ryazan province. On 7 November 1910, amidst of a frenzy of international publicity, which included regular headlines in The Times, and the whirr of Pathé cameras, Tolstoy finally passed away. Sonya was allowed to see her husband only after he had lost consciousness. There was no reconciliation with the Church. By this time it was only too aware of the public relations disaster it had brought upon itself through the excommunication, but its increasingly frantic attempts to effect a deathbed recantation were an abject failure. Father Varsonofy came down from Optina Pustyn, but Sasha refused him access to her father, which she later felt bitter remorse about when she herself later came back to the Church. Tolstoy was not given Extreme Unction, and was buried very quickly, on 9 November.
There was only one place Tolstoy could be buried, and that was in the grounds of his ancestral home Yasnaya Polyana, where he had spent some seventy of his eighty years. He was interred where exactly as he had wished, at the spot in the woods a short walk from his house where the little green stick was buried – the little green stick on which his brother Nikolay had told him the secret to human happiness was written. Aware that mourners from all over Russia would want to attend the funeral, and that the quicker the burial, the fewer would have time to make the journey, the Russian government hastened with the arrangements. There were so many students attending the meetings organised at Moscow University the day following Tolstoy’s death that even the corridors were full, and the 800 reserved seats on the train that their representatives managed to negotiate with the management of the Kursk station could have been filled many times over. Thousands besieged the station, but the government forbade the running of any extra trains. Nevertheless, thousands did manage to pay their last respects, having sat all night on a freezing train which brought them to Zaseka station (as Yasenki had been renamed) in the early hours of the morning. It was a clear November night, bonfires were burning, and students had to struggle to restrain the enormous crowd awaiting the arrival of the special train bearing Tolstoy’s coffin. But as soon as the train’s yellow lights emerged out of the fog on that cold morning, the crowd fell completely silent.
When it was removed from the carriage, which prompted the immediate removal of hats, the wooden coffin containing Tolstoy’s body seemed somehow small and too short. The writer’s sons passed the coffin over to peasants from Yasnaya Polyana, who would carry it on its final journey. With the exception of the police in attendance, the entire crowd started softly singing ‘Eternal Memory’, the sombre song which concludes every Orthodox funeral. Still singing, the crowd set off behind Sofya Andreyevna and her sons, to walk for three hours to reach Tolstoy’s ancestral home – first down the slope and across the little wooden bridge over the stream, then through the birch and alder forest underneath frosted branches, and then along bare, frozen fields, lightly covered in snow, which were the same pale-white colour as the sky.
Ahead of the coffin village carts carried wreaths and fir-twigs, which were strewn along the path by students and old women. As many noted with amazement, the whole of Russian society had come together on that day to pay their last respects – peasants, aristocrats, intellectuals and factory workers, old and young, male and female – and this was something quite unprecedented. Two local peasants carried a banner as they walked on which they had painted ‘Lev Nikolayevich! The Memory of Your Goodness Will not die Amongst the Orphaned Peasants of Yasnaya Polyana’. No one in the village surrounding Tolstoy’s estate had been to bed, and their houses remained lit throughout the night. One local peasant was heard to remark that it was just like at Easter, when everyone stayed up for the midnight service, before going home to break the long fast in the early hours and start celebrating.
When the procession arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s coffin was brought into the house, so that the 5,000 mourners could file past and pay their last respects. Many people were shocked by the discrepancy between the Tolstoy they knew from all the portraits and photographs and the wax-like, wizened face of his corpse, and some fainted or had hysterics. Three and a half hours later the coffin was lifted up again and taken on its final journey into the wood, a short walk from the main house. At ten minutes to three in the afternoon, it was quietly lowered into the simple unmarked grave that had been prepared. Speeches had been banned, but everyone fell to their knees (even the policeman who had been despatched to monitor the proceedings). ‘Eternal Memory’ was sung softly again, but there was nothing Orthodox about this funeral rite, which was the first civil burial to take place in Russia. There were no priests, no icons, and no prayers, and no cross was erected at the head of the grave. Mourners continued to flock to Tolstoy’s bare burial mound in the days and weeks following his funeral. Only the following spring did grass begin to grow over it. As the attention finally receded from Astapovo, where over 1,000 telegrams had been sent and received during the last week of Tolstoy’s life, Yasnaya Polyana became once again a place of pilgrimage.
‘Eternal Memory’ was sung at memorial services held throughout Russia after the funeral, and also at demonstrations that had nothing ostensibly to do with Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s death, in fact, acted as a catalyst for political action: there were widespread strikes in Moscow on the day of the funeral, as well as student demonstrations, marches and processions, and vociferous calls were made for the death penalty to be abolished. The Russian government was caught on the back foot. Unable to join in the eulogies flooding the media, having demonised Tolstoy for so long, and equally unable to denounce him now that his great significance as a writer and thinker was being celebrated around the world, it found itself in an intractable position, for it could not remain silent. Ministers debated how they should honour the memory of a writer who had condemned governments, monarchs and state authority, but they had already become irrelevant and impotent, and their efforts to contain public manifestations were ineffectual. The Russian population at large had seized the initiative and was now beginning to write the script: it was a defining moment. Schools and universities closed, and factories, offices and theatres shut their doors while Russians from all backgrounds united in grieving publicly for a great writer and mighty hero who had defiantly spoken up on behalf of a nation that had been maimed and muzzled for so long. The import of these unprecedented events was not lost on one exiled revolutionary in Switzerland – Vladimir Lenin, who wrote three new articles on Tolstoy in November 1910. Tolstoy was still just a mirror of diverse and contradictory impulses in Russia in his view, but the nation had moved on since 1905. Tolstoy had taken giant steps during his lifetime, and his death was one last giant step – on the road to Revolution.187