Tolstoy (77 page)

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 endeavour-ing 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 Makovicky, 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

The atrocities of World War I served to make Tolstoy's ideas even more relevant and topical, and then suddenly, in 1917, it finally became possible to publish all of his banned writings in Russia. The collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the February Revolution brought the end of censorship, and Tolstoy's followers lost no time. The board of the Tolstoy Society in Moscow could at last seriously discuss publishing a truly complete edition of the collected works, and in April 1917 Sergey and Sasha, as representatives of the Tolstoy family, became members of a new committee charged with overseeing editorial matters and raising the necessary funds for publication.
²³
They were joined by Valentin Bulgakov and Nikolay Gusev. Between 1917 and 1918 the old Intermediary publishing house produced sixty-three editions of Tolstoy's writings, but a new publishing house called Zadruga was also set up now, to publish all those Tolstoy essays that had previously been banned. In the heady days of June 1917 a new Tolstoyan organisation was also formed. The Society of True Freedom quickly launched a journal,
Voice of Truth and Unity,
which had a print run of 10,000 and established a network of affiliated branches in cities across Russia.
²⁴
It was estimated there were between 5,000 and 6,000 Tolstoyans active in Russia at this time.
²⁵

The situation was less optimistic in 1917 at Yasnaya Polyana. The February Revolution unleashed widespread looting, and in particular the indiscriminate destruction of former gentry estates. Chertkov later likened the situation to the bursting of a dam. After centuries in which the Russian people had existed 'under the heel of autocratic oppression', the pent-up water was now bearing down 'in a wild, irresistible torrent, relentlessly flooding and ruining all that it encounters'.
²⁶
Blinded by the propaganda of class hatred unleashed by the Bolsheviks, the peasants and demobbed soldiers who went on the rampage did not see why Count Tolstoy's estate was deserving of exemption. And the aggressors were not all male. In September 1917 Sasha received a postcard from her sister Tanya informing her that hundreds of local women and children had broken into the extensive orchards at Yasnaya Polyana and stolen all the apples - around 16,500 kilograms' worth by her reckoning.
²⁷
When Bulgakov read newspaper reports that autumn about marauding peasants breaking into Yasnaya Polyana and wreaking havoc not just in its orchards, but also in its apiaries and its fields of crops, he came down from Moscow straight away to meet with villagers to arrange the provision of some kind of security. Sonya meanwhile also appealed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for help, and the writer Pyotr Sergeyenko, who had known Tolstoy and was also known to the local peasants, was appointed to help protect Yasnaya Polyana from future raids. When it became known that a group of young peasants and demobbed soldiers were inciting the locals to wreck Yasnaya Polyana at the end of 1917, a Red Army unit was eventually assigned to the estate to provide security. Bulgakov was soon able to report that a telephone had been installed for the first time at Yasnaya Polyana, so that there could be regular communication with local political organisations in Tula, who were aware this landed estate was not like the others, and needed special safeguarding.
²⁸

The Tolstoyans had welcomed the February Revolution, and they continued to feel a certain camaraderie with the Bolsheviks. This was not only because the Bolsheviks had attempted to sabotage the war effort by persuading rank-and-file soldiers that their real enemy was their own military hierarchy, but also because both groups rejoiced to see both Church and landowners being divested of their lands (albeit for completely different reasons).
²⁹
The events of October 1917 and the violence of the ensuing weeks and months filled the Tolstoyans with horror, however. 'Stop the Fratricide!' was the title of the leaflet distributed on the streets in Moscow by the Tolstoyans three days after the Bolsheviks seized power. The desire to get their message across outweighed their fears of exposing themselves to mortal danger while doing so.
³⁰
The Peace concluded with Germany in March 1918 was followed by yet more bloodshed. Despite his initial support of the imperial army, Chertkov was proud that Russian soldiers had eventually left the ranks in great numbers and returned home in 1917, 'disgusted and physically exhausted by the international carnage' and no longer willing to be treated as 'cannon fodder'. A similar idea was argued by émigré intellectuals in Paris, who saw the situation in a far less favourable light. In a 1918 article Nikolay Berdyaev argued that the Russian Revolution was in its way a victory for Tolstoyanism, while Dmitry Merezhkovsky declared that Bolshevism was the 'suicide' of Europe: 'Tolstoy began it, and Lenin finished it off.'
³¹
Berdyaev argued that spiritual regeneration would entail overcoming Tolstoyanism.
³²

It was not only Russians who associated Tolstoy directly with the Bolshevik Revolution immediately after it took place. Tolstoy's English translator and biographer Aylmer Maude was also under no doubt that Tolstoy's 'courage and intellectual force', his outspokenness and deep love of the people, had played a cardinal role in bringing about the fall of the Romanovs. An American article published in 1919 quoted Maude extensively:

Tolstoy's condemnation of the very foundations of civilized life and of all established government must be effectively met, or a growing spirit of anarchy, challenging, indicting and disparaging every effort to secure any definiteness in human relations or to establish any fixed law, will undermine the bases of all our social efforts, and sooner or later the whole structure will crash down as it has done in Russia. Merely to deny or deride Tolstoy's opinions will not do. His themes are too important, his statement of them is too masterly, and his sincerity is too apparent.

The article described Tolstoy as the 'Great Patriarch of the Bolsheviki Family'.
³³

Sasha came back from World War I with the rank of colonel, and two St George medals awarded for bravery (the decoration which had once eluded her father). She had served on the Western Front, and also in the Caucasus, where she set up orphanages and ran a field hospital, but the situation became dangerous after the February Revolution and she returned home.
³⁴
It was Sasha, or Alexandra, as we should call her, since she was now stepping out of the role of daughter, who took over the running of Yasnaya Polyana from her ailing mother at the end of 1917. She took up residence in the old family home again along with her aunt Tanya, her sister Tanya (both now widowed) and her niece Tanya, and now began to turn her attention back to her father's legacy. It was now that Sonya finally handed over the keys to the twelve chests of Tolstoy's manuscripts under her jurisdiction to Alexandra, removing the last bone of contention between them. Sonya's eldest and youngest children (Sergey was now fifty-five, Alexandra was thirty-four) were thus at last able to start serious work on preparing their father's manuscripts for the projected complete scholarly edition.

It was thanks to Lenin's personal initiative that the gargantuan project of Tolstoy's collected works was moved to the top of the agenda in the cultural sphere and viewed as a matter of state importance. An article to this effect appeared in the Bolshevik newspaper
Sovetskaya pravda
at the end of January 1918, when the figure of sixty volumes was mentioned.
³⁵
(It was also at Lenin's personal behest that Sonya's state pension was reinstated in March 1918, having been reduced in 1917.
³⁶
) The archives in the Rumyantsev Museum, which had once again become the repository of Tolstoy's early manuscripts, became a hive of activity in the winter of 1918. Pashkov House, the elegant mansion that housed the Rumyantsev Museum, located a short walk from the Kremlin, was still the home of Moscow's most important library, and would later become the nucleus of the Lenin Library. In the harsh post-revolutionary conditions of 1918, however, no one cared much for well-appointed surroundings, particularly in winter when there was no heating. Alexandra, Sergey and their colleagues were forced to work in their overcoats and hats, with regular bursts of gymnastics in order to survive the freezing temperatures. They had formed a Society for the Study and Dissemination of the Works of L. N. Tolstoy, chaired by Alexandra, but it soon became clear to them that Chertkov and other key followers of their father would be instrumental in the preparation of any authoritative edition. Chertkov was not a member of their society, as he was preparing a rival edition. Having appointed himself as chief editor of the
Complete Collected Works,
he started negotiations with Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the new Commissar of People's Enlightenment, for the publication of an edition which he now projected would comprise ninety volumes. By December 1918 he had won assurances that 10 million roubles would be allocated by the Bolshevik government to fund the entire enterprise, but until the money became a reality, he paid the thirty-strong editorial team he assembled out of his own pocket.
³⁷
Bulgakov had been effective in setting up and running the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, but the situation remained bleak at Yasnaya Polyana, which the family still owned and ran as an unofficial museum. Sovnarkom, the administrative arm of the new Soviet government, formally took over the estate in May 1918, and stipulated that Tolstoy's widow should be able to reside there for the rest of her life, but provided no money at this point for its upkeep. Pride disinclined the Tolstoys from asking the Bolsheviks for money, but the estate had begun to go into such decline that in February 1919 Tanya proposed handing it over to the local society which had been formed to provide security. In a letter to her brother Sergey in Moscow that April, Tanya described the desperate conditions she and the other thirteen members of the family had to endure at Yasnaya Polyana. They had so little to eat they were unable to provide for their staff, let alone the animals. For the staff the situation was even worse: some of them had to endure effluent from the next-door pigsty seeping into their accommodation and rotting the floorboards. Roofs leaked, the belt from the threshing machine had been stolen, books were disappearing from Tolstoy's library, and the furnishings in the house were becoming very worn. Tanya had to resort to knitting scarves, to sell along with Yasnaya Polyana honey in Tula. We have the KGB to thank for preserving Tanya's letter to her brother - it was confiscated and copied when their sister Alexandra was arrested the following year - and we have the stubborn efforts of the Moscow writer Vitaly Shentalinsky to thank for gaining access to its previously impregnable archive in the 1980s.
³⁸