Tolstoy (76 page)

When it was removed from the carriage, which prompted the immediate doffing 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 faced a dilemma. 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.
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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
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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'.
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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 for; to others it seemed she was the only one to have emerged from the trauma as a better person.
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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 Makovicky 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.
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That was not the only scandal: 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.
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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 of 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.
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In May 1911 Sonya went to Moscow to sort out what could be included in her latest edition ofTolstoy'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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On 18 November, shortly after the first anniversary ofTolstoy'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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.