Sample translation by Catherine Porter

‘We all put on a brave face with each other, and forget that without love we’re the most wretched of the wretched. But we grow used to acting this way and become spiteful and proud, and mistake sick chickens for fierce lions.’

Letter from Tolstoy to his friend Vladimir Chertkov

DEPARTURE OR ESCAPE?

On October 28th 1910, in the Krapivo district of Tula province, an extraordinary event occurred, even for such an extraordinary place as Yasnaya Polyana, the estate of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy: the 82-year-old writer left home in the early hours of the morning for an unknown destination, accompanied by his personal physician, Doctor Dushan Makovitsky.

What the newspapers said

The news spread quickly across Russia and the world, and by October 29th the St Petersburg Telegraph Agency was buzzing with telegrams from Tula, published the following day in the newspapers. “Shocking news of L.N. Tolstoy’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana with Doctor Makovitsky. On leaving, he wrote a letter explaining that he had left for good.”

Even Tolstoy’s friend Makovitsky knew nothing of this letter he had written for his sleeping wife, given to her the next morning by their youngest daughter Sasha, and he learnt of it only from the newspapers.

The most detailed of these was Moscow’s “Russian Word”, with a report on October 30th from its special Tula correspondent:

“Tula, 29.10. Urgent. Having returned from Yasnaya Polyana, I can now confirm that Lev Nikolaevich left yesterday at five in the morning, when it was still dark. He went to the stables, having packed some essential things in the night, and ordered the horses to be harnessed. The coachman Andrian obeyed, and when the horses were ready Lev Nikolaevich drove off with Doctor Makovitsky to the station at Shchokina. Filka the groom rode ahead, lighting their way with a torch. At Shchokina, Lev Nikolaevich bought a ticket to one of the stations on the Moscow-Kursk line, and boarded the first train that arrived.

“When his departure was discovered at Yasnaya Polyana in the morning, the house was in turmoil. The despair of his wife, Sofia Andreevna, cannot be described.”

This report, which the whole world was discussing the following day, was published on the third page. The front page was taken up as usual with advertisements for various products: “Saint Raphael Wine, the stomach’s best friend.” “Medium-sized sturgeon, 20 kopecks a pound.”

On receiving the news from Tula, the paper immediately sent its correspondent to the Tolstoys’ house in Moscow on Khamovniki Street, now the Tolstoy Museum, thinking he might have gone there. But according to the paper, “the Tolstoys’ ancient residence was quiet, with nothing to indicate that Lev Nikolaevich was at home. The gates were locked; everyone was asleep.”

A young journalist and theatre critic on the paper, Konstantin Orlov, was sent to track the runaway down. The son of one of Tolstoy’s followers and a former revolutionary, depicted in his stories “The Dream” and “There Are No Guilty Men in The World,” Orlov caught up with him at the station of Kozelsk, and quietly accompanied him to the remote country station of Astapovo, from where he sent Sofia Andreevna and her children a telegram informing them that he was lying gravely ill in the house of the stationmaster, I.I. Ozolin.

If it wasn’t for Orlov, his family would only have learnt where he was and that he was fatally ill from the newspapers, which would have added cruelly to their distress. This was why, unlike Makovitsky, who regarded “Russian Word” as “spying”, the Tolstoys’ eldest daughter Tatyana described in her memoirs her “eternal gratitude” to Orlov: “Father is dying somewhere not far from here, but I don’t know where, and I can’t look after him. Perhaps I shall never see him again. Will they at least let me see him on his deathbed? A sleepless night. Torture,” she wrote of her mental state after his “escape” (her word). “But this man we didn’t know took pity on his family, and telegraphed us: ‘Lev Nikolaevich in stationmaster’s house in Astapovo. Temperature 40 deg’”. The press was generally more tactful and restrained with his family, particularly Sofia Andreevna, than it was with Tolstoy himself, whose every step was relentlessly pursued, despite the fact that in his farewell letter to his wife he had begged people not to look for him: “Please do not follow me, even if you learn where I am.”

“At Belyovo station Lev Nikolaevich got out and ate a fried egg at the cafe,” a journalist wrote, relishing the vegetarian Tolstoy’s modest meal. The coachman and Filka were questioned, and the servants and peasants at Yasnaya Polyana, the buffet attendants and ticket clerks, the driver who drove him from Kozelsk to the Optina Pustyn Monastery, the monks who ran the guest-house there, and anyone who might have information about the journey of this old man, whose only wish had been to escape and hide from the world.

“Don’t look for him! He’s not yours, he belongs to all of us!” “Odessa News” cynically exhorted his family.

“Naturally his location will soon be discovered,” coldly announced the “St Petersburg Paper”.

Although he read the newspapers, Tolstoy had never disguised his dislike of them. Sofia Andreevna was another matter. She knew that like it or not his reputation and her own were formed by them, and she was happy to talk to journalists and give interviews, in which she explained this or that oddity of her husband’s behaviour, never missing the chance (for this was her weakness) to emphasise her own role in the great writer’s life. For this reason the media’s attitude to her then was mainly sympathetic. The general tone is exemplified by the vignette “Sofia Andreevna”, published on October 31 in “Russian Word”, by the journalist Vlas Doroshevich. “The old lion has left to die in solitude,” he wrote, and compared Sofia to Yasodhara, the wife of the Buddha. This was clearly meant as a compliment, since no one has ever blamed Yasodhara for her husband’s decision to leave. More spiteful tongues however would compare Sofia to Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, who had tormented her husband with her shrewish behaviour and hostility to his ideas.

Doroshevich correctly pointed out that Tolstoy wouldn’t have lived for so long or written his late works without her (although it’s not clear what this has to do with Yasodhara), but the article’s conclusion was that the writer was “superhuman”, and couldn’t be judged by normal human rules. As a simple earthly woman, Sofia Andreevna did everything she could for her husband as a man, but the “superhuman” aspects of his life were inaccessible to her, and this was her tragedy. Sofia read the piece and liked it. She was grateful for Doroshevich’s article, and for Orlov’s telegram, and she turned a blind eye to details such as Orlov’s unflattering depiction of her: “Sofia Andreevna’s head was shaking, and her eyes wandered, expressing her inner torment. She was shabbily dressed in an old housecoat.” She could even forgive the journalists who stalked the house in Moscow, and tasteless references to the sum she later paid for a special train to take the family from Tula to Astapovo (492 roubles 27 kopecks), and the literary critic Vasily Rozanov’s transparent reference to Tolstoy escaping from his family (“the prisoner breaking free of his jail.”)

The headlines at the time spoke not of his “departure”, but of “SUDDEN FLIGHT”, “DISAPPEARANCE”, and in English, “TOLSTOY QUITS HOME.” This wasn’t from any desire to sensationalise the affair, it was sensational enough as it was, but because the circumstances of his leaving were more reminiscent of escape than a triumphant departure.

The nightmare

He left at night, while the Countess was asleep, and had taken such pains to keep it secret from her that the first she knew of his whereabouts was on November 2nd, from Orlov’s telegram. Yet what neither she nor the journalists knew was that he himself had no clear idea of his itinerary when he left, still less his final destination.

In the first hours of his departure, only his daughter Sasha and her companion Varvara Feokritova knew that he planned to visit his sister Maria the nun in her convent at Shamordino. But even on the night itself he was having second thoughts about this, as Sasha recalled in her memoirs: “’You stay here, Sasha,’ he said. ‘I’ll send for you in a couple of days when I’ve decided definitely where I’m going. I’ll probably go to Mashenka’s in Shamordino.’”

He told Doctor Makovitsky nothing of this when he woke him in the night. More importantly, he didn’t tell the doctor he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana for good, as he had told Sasha, and for the first few hours Makovitsky assumed they were going to Kochety, the estate of his daughter Tatyana and her husband Mikhail Sukhotin, on the border between Tula and Orlov provinces. Tolstoy had paid several visits there in the past two years, on his own and with his wife, to escape the flood of visitors at Yasnaya, and there he could take a “holiday”, as he put it. Unlike Sasha, Tatyana didn’t approve of his desire to leave her mother, even though she took his side in the conflicts between them. But he knew he couldn’t hide from Sofia Andreevna in Kochety. His plan to visit Shamordino was less calculated. The excommunicated Tolstoy’s appearance in an Orthodox convent would be an event no less scandalous than his flight, but he knew he could count on his sister and her support and discretion.

Poor Makovitsky, thinking they had left to stay in Kochety for a month, had taken almost no money with him, and didn’t know that Tolstoy’s only funds were 50 rouble notes in a notebook and some loose change in his wallet. It was only as Tolstoy was saying goodbye to Sasha that he heard Shamordino mentioned, and he noted later in his diary that as they set off in the carriage he had asked his advice, and his words “How far can we go?” He had chosen his travelling companion well, and needed Makovitsky’s devotion and unflappable temperament if he was to keep his head. Makovitsky responded by suggesting they travel south to Bessarabia to stay with Tolstoy’s worker friend Gusarev, who lived with his family on his own land. “L.N. did not reply,” he wrote. When they arrived at the station of Shchokina, a train to Tula was expected in twenty minutes, and one to Gorbachevo in half-an-hour. Although it was only a short distance to Shamordino from Gorbachevo, Tolstoy was afraid Sofia would wake and come after them, and wanted to travel via Tula to throw her off their tracks. But Makovitsky persuaded him he would be instantly recognised in Tula, so they took the Gorbachevo train instead.

It must be said that none of this resembles a heroic departure. Yet to this day the heart-warming image persists of Tolstoy walking off at night, with a knapsack on his back and a stick, even though there would have been nothing heart-warming about this old man of 82 “walking off”, who for all his phenomenal vitality suffered from blackouts and episodes of forgetfulness, heart palpitations and varicose veins. The writer Ivan Bunin, in his book “Tolstoy’s Liberation”, ecstatically quoted his words in his farewell letter to his wife: “I am doing what is natural for old men of my age to do: leaving this worldly life to live out their last days in peace and solitude.”

Sofia also took note of these words. After recovering from her initial shock, and after two suicide attempts, she began writing letters to him begging him to return, relying on third parties to deliver them. In her second letter, which he never received, she protested: “You write about old men leaving the world. Where have you seen that? Old peasants live out their last days on the stove, surrounded by their children and grandchildren. It’s the same for everyone, rich and poor. Is it really natural for an old man in poor health to leave the love, care and attention of his family?” She was wrong. It was quite common among the peasants for old men, and even women, to wander off as vagrants, or simply to live in separate huts. They left to die, when they were no longer able to do domestic tasks or work in the fields, so as not to be a burden on the young people and an extra mouth to feed. They left when “the house was ruled by sin”: drunkenness, brawls and sexual scandals. But they didn’t leave their old wives in the night, with the support and encouragement of their daughters.

Let us return to the fateful night of October 27th however, and follow step by step the path of his journey.

“At 3 am L.N. woke me in his dressing-gown and slippers, holding a candle,” Makovitsky wrote in his diary. “His face was distraught but resolute. ‘I have decided to leave,’ he said. ‘You must come with me. I’m going upstairs now and you’ll follow me, just don’t wake Sofia Andreevna. We won’t take much, just a few essentials. Sasha will follow us in a few days and bring whatever we need.’”

His “resolute” expression spoke not of composure but the resignation of a man about to jump off a cliff. The doctor noted: “Agitated. I took his pulse: 100.” One wonders what “essentials” an old man in his eighties could possibly need for such a journey. But this was the last thing on his mind then; his main concern was that Sasha should hide the manuscripts of his diaries from Sofia Andreevna. He had his notebooks and fountain pen with him, and Makovitsky, Sasha and Varvara Feokritova packed his luggage and some provisions. Unfortunately there turned out to be rather a lot of “essentials”, and they needed another bigger suitcase, which would be hard to collect without making a noise and waking Sofia. Between the couple’s bedrooms were three doors that she kept open at night, so she would wake at the slightest sound from his room. She explained that she needed to be able to hear him in case he needed help, but the true reason was quite different: she was afraid he would escape in the night. For several months now this had been a real threat. One can even pinpoint the date when this threat hung in the air at Yasnaya Polyana, after a stormy argument with her husband on July 15th.

The following morning she wrote him this letter: “Dearest Levochka, I am writing this instead of talking to you, because after a sleepless night I find it difficult to talk. I am too anxious and may upset everyone again, and I want desperately to be calm and reasonable. I was thinking everything through all night, and it became painfully obvious to me that while you caress me with one hand, with the other you threaten me with a knife, and yesterday I felt as if this knife had stabbed my heart. The knife is the threat that you will break your promise to me and slip away if I remain as I am. So now I shall spend every night as I did last night, listening and worrying that you have left. Every time you go out and are slightly late back I shall be in agony. Just think, dearest Levochka, your threat to leave me is the same as the threat of murder.”

While Sasha, Makovitksy and Varvara were packing (“like conspirators”, Varvara recalled, blowing out candles and listening for any sound from Sofia), Tolstoy firmly closed the three doors leading to her room and managed to collect the suitcase without waking her. But even this turned out not to be big enough, and his overcoat and a rug had to be bundled up separately with a basket of food. Impatient for everything to be ready, he hurried out to the coach-house to wake the coachman Andrian and help him harness the horses. “Went to the stables while they finished packing,” he writes in his diary. “It was so dark I lost my way and missed the path to the wing of the house, stumbled into a thicket, pricked myself, bumped into a tree, fell, lost my cap and couldn’t find it, and managed with difficulty to make my way out arid return to the house. I found another cap, and headed back to the stable with a flashlight. Sasha, Dushan and Varvara arrived. I was trembling with fear that I would be discovered.”(What he described twenty-four hours later as a “thicket”, from which he “managed with difficulty to make his way out”, was in fact his own apple orchard, which he knew like the back of his hand.)

“It took us half-an-hour to pack,” Sasha wrote. “Father was flustered and kept hurrying, us up, but our hands were shaking so much we couldn’t tie the straps and the cases wouldn’t close. I had been waiting for this every day, every hour, but when he said ‘I’m going,’ it shocked me as if I was hearing it for the first time. I shall never forget him standing in the doorway of the house in his peasant shirt with a candle in his hand, and his bright, determined face.” Varvara too was struck by his “bright, determined expression”.

It was a bleak October dawn, and the houses in the village, masters’ and peasants’ alike, were in total darkness, and this old man in his peasant clothes standing at the door with a candle under his face would have startled anyone. But we shouldn’t be deceived about his state of mind then. Of course his fearlessness and stamina were legendary. The pianist Alexander Goldenweiser, a friend of the Tolstoys’ and a frequent visitor to Yasnaya Polyana, left a vivid description of a sledge ride in the snow with him two years earlier, to help a needy peasant family in a village four miles away: “We had reached the station of Zaseka when a snowstorm blew up. It grew fiercer, and before long we had lost the road and had no idea where we were. After stumbling around for a while we saw a forest lodge in the distance, and headed for it to ask the forester for directions. As we approached, three or four enormous dogs bounded out and surrounded the horses and the sledge, barking savagely. I confess I was terrified. But L.N. firmly handed me the reins and said ‘Hold them’, then climbed out, whooping loudly at the terrible dogs, and walked empty-handed past them. And in an instant they stopped barking and made way for him, submitting to him as their master. Walking calmly between them to the lodge with his flowing grey beard, he reminded me of the hero from a fairy tale rather than a frail old man of eighty.”

Yet on the night of October 28th his self-possession abandoned him. His helpers left the house with the luggage and he met them with the flashlight Sasha had made him take after his ordeal in the orchard. “Our feet kept slipping in the mud, and it was so dark we could hardly see the road,” she recalled. “A little blue light flickered past the wing of the house as Father came out to meet us. ‘Ah, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I managed it this time. We’re already harnessing up. Let me go ahead and light your way. But why have you given Sasha the heaviest things?’ he asked Varvara reproachfully, taking the basket from her so she could help me with the suitcase. He went ahead, pressing the button of the flashlight every so often to switch it off so it became even darker; he always economised; and didn’t like wasting energy.” Nonetheless, as he helped the coachman with the horses “his hands were shaking and he couldn’t buckle the harness.” Then “he sat on a suitcase in a corner of the coach-house and lapsed into despair.” These sharp mood swings would follow him throughout his journey to Astapovo, where he died on the night of November 7th; his conviction that he was doing the only thing possible would alternate with apathy and painful feelings of guilt. However much he had imagined this and longed for it over the past twenty-five years, it was clear he was now in no way prepared for it, physically or mentally, and even its first stages, such as when he got lost in the orchard, presented challenges neither he nor his companions could have anticipated.

But why did his decisiveness in the house suddenly turn to despair in the coach-house?

Everything had been packed astonishingly quickly, in just two hours, the horses were almost ready, only a few minutes were left before his “freedom.” Yet his spirits flagged. Quite apart from his physical exhaustion after barely sleeping, getting lost, and helping carry the luggage in the dark, there are other factors that may explain his mood then. Waking Sofia Andreevna as they packed would have resulted in a mighty row, but one within the walls of the house, known only to his inner circle. He had grown used to them, they had been a constant feature of the house recently. But already his departure was drawing more and more people in, like a snowball gathering pace with every moment that passed, and what happened soon would be the exact opposite of what he had wanted. He couldn’t leave without Andrian Bolkhin the coachman, or 33-year-old Filipp Borisov, Filka, the postman and groom, who was to ride ahead of the carriage with a torch. While he was in the coach-house waiting to leave, the snowball was already growing. All the journalists, police chiefs, priests and provincial governors were still asleep, but even Tolstoy himself couldn’t have foreseen how many people willingly or unwillingly would be swept up in his escape, including government ministers, the senior clergy, Prime Minister Stolypin and Tsar Nicholas II himself. Naturally he knew it was impossible for him simply to leave Yasnaya and vanish. Even Fedya Protasov in his play “The Living Corpse”, who faked his suicide, was eventually caught. But he also wrote “Father Sergius”, and “The Posthumous Notes of Old Fyodor Kuzmich”, about famous men who retreated from the world, and it was this idea that sustained him as he prepared to cast off into the unknown, that a man’s fame could exist independently of him and he could live in obscurity. It didn’t matter who he had been in the past - the Russian Tsar, a famous miracle-worker, a great writer - what mattered was that here and now he could be the most simple and ordinary of men, and could dissolve into the human space, unnoticed by anyone.

As he sat on his suitcase in the coach-house in his knitted cap and peasant overcoat, it seemed his dream was finally about to be realised. Yet it was that hour, five am, “between the wolf and the dog,” that anguished moment of waiting when the house was behind him and there was no going back, when the horses were almost ready and he was about to leave Yasnaya and his wife; his wife, with whom he had lived for forty-eight years, who had borne him thirteen children, seven of them still alive, who themselves had produced twenty-three grandchildren; his wife, on whose shoulders he had loaded all the responsibilities for running the estate and publishing his greatest works, parts of which she had copied out for him several times, and many other works too; his wife, who nine years earlier in the Crimea, when he was thought to be dying, had spent sleepless weeks looking after him, for only she could carry out the intimate tasks involved in his care; his wife, who might wake at any moment and discover the closed doors and disorder in his room, and find out her worst fears had been realised.

We can imagine the scene, as she burst into the coach-house and found him wrestling with the horses’ harness. It wasn’t so much Tolstoy as Gogol. It’s revealing that Tolstoy had mixed feelings about Gogol’s story “The Carriage”, whose hero, the provincial aristocrat Pifagorh Pifagorovich Chertokutsky, hid from his guests in his new carriage, and was discovered in the most humiliating way. He considered the story excellently written, but a silly joke. Yet “The Carriage” isn’t a joke. The arrival of the General, who discovers Chertokutsky in the coach-house cowering under the leather apron of his carriage, is the arrival of Fate itself, catching up with a man at the moment when he is least prepared for it, exposing him in all his helplessness and vulnerability. According to Sasha: “At first Father kept hurrying up the coachman, then he sat on the suitcase and said ‘I’m terrified we’ll be caught and all will be lost. We can’t leave without a scene.’”

Tolstoy’s weakness

His emotions then can be understood partly in terms of his fastidiousness and breeding. Writer, philosopher, “this colossus of a man,” in Lenin’s words, his temperament was that of an old-fashioned Russian aristocrat, in the finest sense of the word. This complex and alas long-lost code of behaviour involves notions of moral and physical decency, the inability to lie or speak ill of people behind their backs, the fear of hurting their feelings with a thoughtless word, and of simply being disagreeable”. In his youth, his ungovernable character meant he often failed to live up to these standards, which were partly hereditary and partly instilled in him by his upbringing, and he suffered from this. But in his old age, as well as cultivating the virtues of love and compassion, he developed an even greater distaste for anything sordid, scandalous and indelicate. Throughout the whole of his conflict with Sofia he was almost entirely blameless. He pitied her, and reproached people who spoke ill of her, even when he acknowledged the justice of their criticisms. He submitted to her demands, however foolish and impossible, and patiently endured her provocations, including her attempts to blackmail him by threatening to commit suicide. But fundamentally, to the surprise and even dismay of many of his followers, at the core of his character weren’t abstract principles but the nature of an old-fashioned aristocrat and a fine old man, who painfully resigned himself to his wife’s insults and humiliations.

And so he secretly planned his escape, which would be more terrible than anything she could have imagined: it wasn’t a knife, it was an axe. This was why his most powerful emotion in the coach-house that night was fear. Fear that she would wake, run out of the house and find him sitting on his suitcase, waiting for the carriage to be ready. There would be no way then to avoid a scene, a dreadful, heart-wrenching scene that would bethe culmination of all the bitter arguments at Yasnaya recently. He had never run from his difficulties. On the contrary, he had thanked God over the years for sending him these experiences, accepting the “unpleasantnesses” with a humble heart, and rejoicing when people judged him. But now he no longer had the strength to endure them, and he longed for the cup to pass from him. Clearly his decision to leave was evidence as much of weakness as of strength, and he spoke openly of this to his old friend and confidante Maria Schmidt. A former schoolmistress, the most committed and sincere of the “Tolstoyans”, who believed in Tolstoy as in a new Christ, she lived in a hut in the village of Ovsyannikovo four miles from Yasnaya. He visited her often when he was out riding, knowing that his visits didn’t merely give her pleasure but were the main reason for her life, and he asked her spiritual advice on October 26th, two days before he left. When he told her of his still undecided plan, she clapped her hands.

“Lev Nikolaevich dear, it’s weakness! It will pass!” she said.

Tatyana Tolstaya in her memoirs quoted this exchange between them verbatim from Maria Schmidt. However in Makovitsky’s diary there is no reference to the conversation, and Maria Schmidt herself, when interviewed by “Russian Word”, insisted that Tolstoy had said “not a word” to her about leaving when they met.

This was clearly not true, and is explained by her reluctance to air the family’s problems in public. But on October 26th, in Tolstoy’s secret “Diary For Myself Alone”, he had written: “More and more burdened by this life. Maria Alexandrovna doesn’t tell me to leave, but nor does she blame me.” Makovitsky noted in his diary on that day that “L.N. seemed distracted and in low spirits.” When riding over to Maria. Schmidt’s he had done a “bad thing”, he told him, and had ridden over some winter crops; it was especially bad to do this when it was muddy, and the horse had left deep tracks as it trampled on the delicate green shoots. So he cared more about the new crops than his old wife? This is how the man in the street sees him: strong Tolstoy, Lenin’s colossus”, leaving his weak wife because she couldn’t follow him

on his spiritual path; he had to leave her because he was a genius, and it’s always dangerous to marry a genius. It’s a view that chimes with one popular in intellectual circles, elegantly formulated by Ivan Bunin, that he left home to die. It was an act of liberation, a spiritual titan escaping from the material prison that had confined him. There are pagan and animal metaphors of his dash from Yasnaya too, expressed in the first days of his flight by the poet Alexander Kuprin, who compared him to some mighty beast sensing the approach of death and wandering off from the herd. But his escape wasn’t that of a titan resolved on a last magnificent act, still less of an old but still powerful animal. He was a sick old man, who had dreamed of leaving for twenty-five years but hadn’t done so, regarding it as cruel to his wife. And now that his family crisis had finally reached boiling point, he no longer had the strength, but saw no alternative for himself or those close to him. He left when physically he was longer capable of it, in autumn, with nothing prepared, when even the plan’s most enthusiastic supporters, including Sasha, had no idea what awaited the old man in the outside world. It was precisely then, when his departure meant his almost inevitable death that he no longer felt able to stay at Yasnaya.