The estate gradually started coming back to life in 1912. When Valentin Bulgakov came back that summer he sensed an air of liberation about the place – there were games of croquet and tennis again, and no longer any need to be preoccupied with questions of death and immortality, serving the people, and moral self-improvement. Bulgakov wound up the gramophone and played a record of Strauss waltzes which Tolstoy had particularly loved.12 Tolstoy’s birthday that August was almost an occasion for celebration, with nineteen sitting at table, but there were mixed feelings on 23 September, when Sonya marked her fiftieth wedding anniversary by dressing all in white. It was a festive occasion, she told Bulgakov when he came to visit that day, but her face was tear-stained. Bulgakov was living at Telyatinki with the Chertkovs at this time, and he was appalled by their continuing hostility towards Sonya. Bulgakov had not really noticed anyone else while Tolstoy was alive as his huge, magnetic personality had involuntarily commanded his full attention. Now, however, as he started the mammoth task of compiling a detailed inventory of the Yasnaya Polyana library, for use as a scholarly resource, he got to know Sonya better. He enjoyed listening to her tell stories about the happy days of her marriage, but found her continuing anger and bitterness over the last years hard-going. Faced with the choice of either criticising her husband severely or concluding she had never understood him, she told Bulgakov she preferred to opt for the latter.13 A young priest brought Sonya a degree of peace in November 1912 when he arrived at Yasnaya Polyana soon after the second anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, requesting permission to say prayers at Tolstoy’s grave and perform a requiem in his room.14 The following month the first Tolstoy Museum opened in Moscow under the aegis of the Tolstoy Society. With the support of Sonya and her children, Biryukov and Bulgakov had put together a permanent exhibition in a flat rented on Povarskaya Street on the proceeds of ticket sales and member subscriptions.
In december 1913 the dispute over the rights to Tolstoy’s pre-1881 manuscripts was finally decided in Sonya’s favour and she was at last free to proceed with publishing and selling her final edition of the collected works. She also sold to the Moscow publisher Ivan Sytin all remaining copies from previous editions for 100,000 roubles, which meant she could give another handout to her sons, as well as keep some money by for her beloved daughter Tanya. She was also, at last, getting on much better with her other daughter, Sasha, who, following a further deterioration in her relations with Chertkov, had sold her house at Telyatinki in order to buy a small farmhouse near Yasnaya Polyana (which she called New Polyana).15 Sasha proposed using the proceeds of a three-volume edition of Tolstoy’s works edited by Chertkov to buy from the family the most westerly part of the estate, closest to the Yasnaya Polyana village, which she would then immediately give to the peasants. Sonya and her sons readily agreed, and received 400,000 roubles. The peasants also agreed to Tolstoy’s behest, namely that they would not sell or rent out their newly acquired land. From the total of 2,230 acres, 1,620 acres now belonged to the peasants. Sonya next sold what remained of the land to Sasha, so that it too could be handed over to the peasants, and then she bought out her sons’ shares of the Yasnaya Polyana house.16 Sonya now began to pass control of her publishing operation to Sasha, and took pleasure in celebrating her daughter’s thirtieth birthday in June 1914. The peaceful co-existence did not last long, however, as on 1 August Russia entered World War I. Misha was drafted into the army, Lev went to work for the Red Cross, and Sasha went to the front as a nurse. Bulgakov and twenty-six other conscientious objectors were arrested and spent thirteen months in the Tula jail (they were eventually exonerated when their case was heard at the Moscow military court in 1916).17
Sonya spent her last years essentially copying out the past and endeavouring to provide for her descendants, as she always had. In preparation for publication, she made copies of Tolstoy’s old diaries, and his letters to her, as well as various of his artistic works. She also carried on writing the story of her life, and showed visitors round the house (one summer’s day, eleven bicyclists from St Petersburg had turned up), but there were few joys. When her sons pressed her again for money, she wrote a new letter to the Tsar about selling Yasnaya Polyana, but there were still many members of the Russian government who balked at the idea of the home of that notorious heretic Tolstoy becoming part of the national heritage. In the end, Nicholas II awarded Sonya a 10,000-rouble annual state pension, but held firm on his refusal to buy Yasnaya Polyana.18 There were personal losses for Sonya to endure during her last years: the deaths of her sister-in-law Maria Nikolayevna, her son-in-law Mikhail Sukhotin and, most painfully of all, her son Andrey from pleurisy in February 1916. Lev accompanied his mother to Petrograd (as Petersburg became when the war began) on a packed train, and they arrived just before Andrey died. After she returned home, Sonya steadily lost interest in life; she took to sitting for hours in the old Voltaire chair that Tolstoy had particularly liked because it had been in his family since before he was born.
Where Sonya’s life was now empty and static, Chertkov’s was congested with activity. He was a man with a mission, and had become even busier after Tolstoy’s death. It had been Chertkov who was in control of the situation during his friend’s last days, and it was to him that people turned afterwards. There were interviews and lectures to give, and a mass of manuscripts to put into order and prepare for publication. Chertkov published his first book on Tolstoy’s last days in 1911, and that was followed in 1912 by a volume of Tolstoy’s diaries. Next came the editing of the three volumes of posthumous fiction, whose proceeds enabled Sasha to buy the Yasnaya Polyana farmland from her family to give to the peasants.19 But Chertkov’s main task now was to produce a canonical edition of Tolstoy’s complete collected works, which he knew would be an enormous project. He had been entrusted with all of Tolstoy’s late manuscripts, and in 1913 he brought them from storage in England and took them to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg for temporary safe-keeping.20
When Russia was drawn into World War I, the Tolstoyans were placed in a difficult position. despite Tolstoy’s baleful predictions about large-scale bloodshed and violence, and his warnings about the false allure of patriotism, Chertkov supported the war effort. He arranged for his 1909 article about pacifism to be republished in 1914 and 1917, but in this extreme situation, his pacifism could ultimately not stand up against his patriotism (he had, after all, once been an officer in the Imperial Guard). He also felt a deep allegiance to England, which he declared was his ‘second fatherland’, not least because he had spent about eleven years of his life there.21 Biryukov was now in Switzerland, so it was left to Bulgakov to become the chief spokesman for the Tolstoyans. Bulgakov typed up and distributed copies of an article he wrote about the war in September 1914, after being released from jail, and the following month he started gathering signatures for a collective anti-war petition which was entitled ‘Come to Your Senses, Brothers!’ Russian soldiers at the front were exhorted to love all of their fellow human beings in uniform regardless of their nationality. The tsarist government moved swiftly to arrest those who signed the petition, three of whom were rounded up at Chertkov’s house in Moscow at six in the morning one cold January day in 1915. Fortunately, Sasha and Tanya were able to step in to post bail for Bulgakov and Makovický, and Chertkov called on his influential British contacts to dissuade the Russian government from sending them to prison or to do hard labour along with other conscientious objectors. Most of the Tolstoyans were later acquitted.22