Epilogue
PATRIARCH OF THE BOLSHEVIKS
I believe their example and their lives give an answer to the question which I have asked myself and my readers in my previous books: is it possible to withstand, and to preserve one’s integrity intact while living in a Totalitarian regime? The Tolstoyans answered this question with their lives, both tragically and heroically.
Mark Popovsky, 1983 1
THE NATION’S ATTENTION was focused on Yasnaya Polyana at the time of Tolstoy’s burial, and initially his widow was kept busy. On 17 december, forty days after her husband’s death, Sonya walked to his grave in order to commemorate his memory according to Orthodox custom, and was joined by the entire population of the village – men, women and children. The grave was tidied up, fresh fir branches laid on it, and those present took off their hats and sank to their knees three times to sing ‘Eternal Memory’.2 There were frequent visitors in the first weeks after Tolstoy’s death. In her now brief diary entries Sonya recorded the arrival of various journalists, a group of fifty-two female students from St Petersburg, a Muslim visitor from the Caucasus bearing a wreath, and her sister Tanya, who stayed on for a month. But as family and friends departed, Sonya was left alone to mourn. Yasnaya Polyana suddenly felt very empty.
Sonya had to get used to the idea of being a widow at the age of sixty-six, and she was inevitably racked by grief and guilt: her last years were ones of loneliness and self-recrimination. She feared with some justification what people would write – and were indeed already writing – about her, and at the same time she felt completely superfluous, as the curtain had now fallen on the drama in which she had starred. To some it seemed that she had at last become meek and acquiescent, as if she had undergone the spiritual transformation her husband had wished; to others it seemed she was the only one to have emerged from the trauma as a better person.3 One of the few consolations for Sonya in the days following her husband’s funeral was the beautiful wintry weather which at last descended after those bleak November days, bringing sub-zero temperatures, clear blue skies and lots of snow. Just before Christmas in 1910 she walked out with her camera to take photographs of Tolstoy’s grave to send to her daughter Tanya, who was then in Rome, although, she confided to her diary, the beauty of the frost and the blue sky made her feel even more sad. Another consolation was the moral support of her sons, who had remained loyal to her throughout. She was still estranged from her daughter Sasha, and relations with her eldest daughter Tanya also remained quite tense.
In January 1911 the kind-hearted dr Makovický left for good, and Sonya felt another precious link to her husband had been lost. It was difficult for Sonya not to feel embattled. Sasha was still on the side of the ‘hateful’ Chertkov, despite a growing discord between them, while the profligate ways of three of her sons prompted them to bring up, with indecent haste, the uncomfortable question of their father’s legacy and the future of Yasnaya Polyana. Since Vanechka Tolstoy’s death, the estate had belonged to Sonya, Ilya, Misha, Andrey and Lev (Sergey having relinquished his share). They all wanted to be able to preserve Yasnaya Polyana as a cultural monument, but they did not have the necessary funds – indeed they seemed always to be short of cash, and dependent on handouts from their mother. despite Sonya’s unease, Ilya, Misha and Andrey hatched a plan to sell some of the land to a wealthy American (Lev was in Sweden at this point). This was not such a new idea, as Chertkov had been on the look-out for an American philanthropist to purchase Yasnaya Polyana back in 1908. The plan then had been for the land to be given to the local peasants, as Chertkov felt this would constitute the best possible eightieth birthday present for Lev Nikolayevich, but nothing had materialised. Alexander Kuzminsky, Sonya’s nephew, was now deputised to move this project forward and he duly arrived in New York on 1 January 1911 armed with a list of American millionaires who had shown an interest in literature and the arts. Unfortunately, as he soon learned, Jews were still prohibited from buying land outside the Pale of Settlement in Russia, so most of the names on his list were ineligible. Tolstoy had made good copy during his lifetime, and American newspapers now pounced on the story of the disputes over this ill-conceived new proposal. Sonya persuaded her sons to give an interview to a Russian newspaper in order to explain that they had wanted to sell only the land, not the house.4
That was not the only scandaclass="underline" journalists also had a field-day with the battle over Tolstoy’s manuscripts, which were split between the two warring camps of Chertkov and Sasha on the one side, and Sonya on the other.5 When the provisions of Tolstoy’s will had come into effect a lawyer had promptly appeared at the Historical Museum, where Sonya had kept those Tolstoy’s manuscripts in her possession, and ordered the archive to be sealed. Sonya was aghast, as she believed the manuscripts still belonged to her, and she used her connections at the Museum to refuse access to Chertkov and Sasha. Another edition of the Tolstoy collected works was underway, and she had invested large amounts of money already to have each of the twenty volumes typeset: she was not going to give up her rights easily. It was now open warfare. In January 1911 Chertkov published a very biased account of Tolstoy’s last days, and he and Sasha published a joint letter shortly afterwards stating their grievances regarding the copyright issue. Tolstoy’s name thus continued to appear frequently in the Russian press, and Tanya pleaded with her mother to give way and so restrain Sasha from engaging in an undignified and shameful public battle with her. The matter would not be resolved for another three years.6
In May 1911 Sonya went to Moscow to sort out what could be included in her latest edition of Tolstoy’s collected works, since most of his later writings were still censored. She also began negotiations to sell the family’s empty house to the City of Moscow for 125,000 roubles, planning to use the money to help her sons. She then travelled on to Petersburg for meetings at court and with Prime Minister Stolypin, in the hope of interesting the Tsar in purchasing Yasnaya Polyana for the nation. Initially the situation looked promising, and newspapers reported on 28 May that the government would buy Yasnaya Polyana for 500,000 roubles.7 Sonya put together detailed inventories of each of the rooms when she returned home, in preparation for receiving government officials and surveyors, but everything was still very raw for her. The meeting that summer with her sister-in-law, who came on a visit from her convent, was a particularly emotional one, since it was to Masha that Tolstoy had first gone after leaving Yasnaya Polyana for the last time. Maria Nikolayena would die the following April of pneumonia aged eighty-two, the same age as her brother.
Fortunately Sonya was kept busy that first summer by the huge numbers of visitors who wanted to make the pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana. Biryukov brought 200 village schoolteachers on 6 June to inspect the Tolstoy memorial rooms, for example, and on one day in July Sonya noted in her diary that there had been 140 visitors. On Tolstoy’s birthday on 28 August, as many as 300 people gathered at his grave.8 Nevertheless, for Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev, who returned after his two-year Siberian exile in the summer of 1911, Yasnaya Polyana felt deserted and empty.9 In October, soon after Stolypin was assassinated, Sonya learned that the government had now decided against buying Yasnaya Polyana. In debates at the duma there had been some Church figures who objected very strongly to the state honouring the memory of an apostate who had been excommunicated.10 On 18 November, shortly after the first anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, Sonya wrote to Nicholas II to warn him that her sons might soon have to sell Yasnaya Polyana, and she expressed the hope that he would not want to see ‘the heart of the Russian nation’ fall into private hands, but on 20 december Nicholas noted in a memo to his ministers that he regarded the purchase of Yasnaya Polyana by the government to be ‘inadmissible’.11