Mark W. Tiedemann
From: Karyn Alexander, assistant archivist, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
To: Pavel Pobodonostsev, deputy archivist, Tolstoy Institute, St. Petersburg University, Tula.
Pav: Here it is, the Document that has everyone all bothered and excited. Before you ask, yes, it is authentic, yes, it was in Chertkov’s possession at one time, and no, it was not in the Tuckton Vault with the rest of Chertkov’s archive of Tolstoyan writings. It was found among some old papers of John Kenworthy, the founder of the Croyden Brotherhood. Let me know what you think. Maybe we can work on a presentation together. The Conference on Global Synergism is coming up.
* * *
My Dear Vladimir Grigoryevich,
There is no way for me to know with certainty that you will ever read this, but, as has been my impulse all my adult life, I must write. Perhaps England has suffered the same fate as Moscow and Smolensk, and, as I have heard, as St. Petersburg itself. There is, however, much to do, so I will be brief.
My last night in Moscow Strakhov visited us at our house on Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street and asked whether we had heard of the falling star that had crashed outside Smolensk. “Stars do not fall,” I said and waved my cane confidently skyward. “One has to believe that the pale blue sky up there is a solid vault. Otherwise one would believe in revolution.”
“Perhaps,” said Strakhov, “but nevertheless the reports are that it made an enormous crater and that it is as large as the Tsar’s yacht.”
After supper he took his leave. As he was about to climb into his carriage, a bright light flared in the sky. A long streak of green fire, behind a bloated head like a ghostly comet, came down on Moscow. After a long silence, Strakhov shook himself and said perhaps the night sky was not so solid as the day, then bade us good night.
I should have stayed, but I do not like Moscow, especially in the summer. The new novel—yes, I had finished it, and Sofya had brought it at once to Moscow—was with the publisher and there were details. Details consume us, Vladimir Grigoryevich, like ants consume a crumb carelessly dropped. At least Strakhov was there to help. I suffered it all impatiently and after that night I left, joyously, to return to the country, to my home, Yasnaya Polyana. Sasha and Masha remained in Moscow with their mother.
The coach took me by the river, past the Kremlin. On the levee soldiers gathered along with workmen and sightseers. The road was puddled and I saw shrouds over corpses. I stopped the coach and asked a subaltern what had happened. The green comet, he told me, had fallen into the Moskva last night and had caused the river to swamp its banks. People had been carried away, drowned or smashed to death against the wall of the Kremlin fortress, and considerable property had been damaged. I looked past him to the river. Warehouses and docks lined the far bank. A barge was capsized.
“It fell in here?” I asked.
The subaltern turned to point when the river bubbled. In the center huge domes of air burst through the surface, churning the water violently for several seconds. I thought I saw steam rise. As abruptly as it began, the water stilled. I waited awhile longer, but nothing more happened. I thanked the subaltern and continued on to Kursk Station.
On the train I shared a compartment with a Cossack major on leave, one Yepishka Sekhim, on his way from St. Petersburg to the Caucasus. We talked about his home and I warmed to the remembrance of my time spent there as a young officer, newly commissioned. That, of course, was before the Crimea and Sebastopol and all that my life became afterward. The conversation drifted from the army to war and we spoke about the Boer War then ongoing. I made a comparison between Britain’s actions against the Boers and our own lamentable annexation of Manchuria so recently completed, which annoyed him considerably. He defended Russia’s move as necessary to our territorial integrity. “What of Manchuria’s territorial integrity?” I countered. “Besides, territoriality is an artifice of governments. There is no natural basis for it.”
“Oh? You can think of no instance where the natural condition of a people might be one of separateness from others and therefore innately territorial?”
I was delighted. An educated Cossack! But I said, “No, we are all human, and any separateness is the creation of a lie.”
“Then,” he said with a wide grin, “it is only natural that we annex Manchuria, if only to dissolve such barriers to our common humanity.”
And so it went all the way to Tula. It was, in retrospect, the last pleasant time I had for many weeks. I invited the major to Yasnaya Polyana. He accepted, and we continued through Tula and detrained at Shchyokino Station, where my son Ilya waited with a carriage.
On the road, by the old turret that marks the entrance to Yasnaya Polyana, we encountered three large wagons filled with people. They were shabby, mostly peasants, but a few townspeople were mixed among them. Ilya stopped and I stood in the carriage and asked them where they were from and what they wanted.
They all began speaking at once until I insisted they pick a spokesman. One man jumped down from the lead wagon. He was short, wide-shouldered, with a thick mustache and several days’ growth of beard. His eyes were set wide apart and, though narrow, were very clear.
“We’ve been on the road for over three days,” he said. “Some are from Orol, but most are from Begichevkaest.”
“That is Ivan Ivanovich Rayevsky’s estate,” I said. “What are you all doing here?”
“Running. As, perhaps, you should, too, old man.”
“Muzhik!” the major shouted, stepping down to the road. “He is dvoryanstvol Count Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy!”
“Da? Nui chto zh?”
So what indeed, I thought. But Major Sekhim was not amused. “Major, enough,” I said. “They are all obviously hungry. Come, eat. You can tell me afterward what you’re running from.”
We all continued in silence to my home. I told Ilya to take them the last mile to the village and see to food and shelter for the night. Among these prodigal muzhikii I heard whispers, words spoken in terror laced with hope. Shtativii, teplovoy potok, zakhvatchik . . . .
“They speak of invasion,” Major Sekhim said. “Tomorrow, with your permission, Lev Nikolayevitch, I’ll go back to the station and telegraph Orol and find out what this is all about. When I left St. Petersburg there was no talk of any trouble. How could an invader strike so deep into Russia without warning? We would have been alerted. This is probably just some mischief concocted by anarchists and democrats.”
I showed him to his room. I promised the use of a good horse, but I did not believe there was mischief by democrats. I wondered if another pogrom were under way farther south. Perhaps these people had come a greater distance than they claimed. Mikhail came to the house from the fields and I asked him to take a few men in the morning to visit Ivan Ivanovich.
“He won’t get through.” I turned to find the spokesman standing nearby, eating bread and watching intently.
“Why not? What’s to stop him?”
“Vtorzhenie,” he said.
“An invasion by whom?” I asked.
“Who? Whom? You wouldn’t believe me.”
“What is your name?”
“Iosef Vissarionovich.”
“Are you their leader?”
“The refugees? No. They think I am.”
I could never, I decided, like this man, but he impressed me. I asked him to stay in the house. He consented, but it was almost as if he were doing me the favor.
The rest of the day passed in seeing to the refugees’ needs and telling Tanya, Ilya, and Mikhail the news of their mother and sisters. At dinner I told them about the green comet and what I saw in the Moskva by the Kremlin. The major seemed unimpressed, but Iosef Vissarionovich asked many questions. Major Sekhim grew irritated again and began questioning him. Where was he from? Tiflis, but he was born in Gori. Why was he so far north? He was on his way somewhere. Where? Pskov. Why was he not still on his way? How does the major know he is not? The major probed and baited, sometimes clumsily, and Iosef toyed with him, like a cat with an impudent rat.
I was very tired, but I did not sleep well. In the morning Major Sekhim rode out one direction and Mikhail the opposite way. An hour later four more wagons of weary, frightened muzhikii arrived. Ilya, Tanya, and I, and then Iosef, worked most of the day organizing an encampment outside the village. I enjoyed working among my peasants; I had missed the harvest by being in Moscow. The work distracted me, put me back in good spirits. Iosef demonstrated a fine head for organization. I commented that we could have used him back in ’92 for the famine relief in Samara. He seemed uninterested, though, as if he did this only because he had nothing else to do.
By midday more wagons and people on foot with carts arrived. It looked like the beginnings of a steady exodus. As I walked among them, talking to them, I heard stories of fire and destruction. From what? I asked, and the same two words repeated again and again: shtativ and zakhvatchik—tripod and invader. What? cannons on tripods? Machine guns? No, no, only shtativ, veliki shtativii, great tripods. They stuttered over their own fear. They were hungry and exhausted, so we fed them, gave them a place to sleep. The imagination of a frightened man is not a reliable source of information, but the consistency from story to story troubled me.
Toward evening Major Sekhim returned with a squadron of soldiers. His face was drawn. “We must speak, Lev Nikolayevitch,” he said, and I led him toward the grove of chepyzh near the house, my place of privacy. “Moscow is invaded,” he said. “The garrison at Tula is on alert. There is word that St. Petersburg is also under siege. I telegraphed Orel, but the line no longer goes through. I began sending messages to other places—Bryansk, Gomel, Mogilev—from Mogilev I received word that Smolensk has been burned.”
I took this news calmly, but it was a false calm. Shock? Perhaps, though I have never been easily shocked. Sofya Andreyevitch and two of our daughters were in Moscow. My son Sergey was in St. Petersburg, attached to the Ministry of Interior. They appeared in my mind, nebulous and unreal. They seemed somehow safe from danger because, at that moment, they were only ideas. Of all the things I might have asked Major Sekhim at that moment, what I did ask was, “What of the Tsar?”
“Escaped on his yacht, Standart, into the Gulf of Finland.”
“Who is the aggressor?”
He shook his head, his eyes wide, disbelieving. “Great machines rose up out of the Moskva River, near the Kremlin. They possess a weapon that brings fire and instant death, one message called it teplovoy potok. I have never heard of such a thing, have you?”
A heat-ray? Perhaps the Germans might invent something like that. They have an intense love of things mechanical. But that seemed unlikely. I said, “More refugees are coming. This will soon be a very crowded camp.”
“Why are they coming here?”
“They remember Samara, the famine, what we did then. They come to someone who will feed them. But that won’t be enough. Can you return to Tula and bring supplies? Tents, blankets, whatever food?”
“I can try. But they will be preparing for an attack.”
“Do what you can, or this alone will become terrible.”
I watched him walk away, back straight, stride firm. He was shaken, but still he would do his best. At that moment I still thought all this news an exaggeration. But it did not matter. There were refugees here and on the way, and the telegraph lines to several cities were down. I thought of the green comet and the bubbling in the Moskva and I shuddered. My son Lev, at least, was away, in Paris, and so, I thought, safe.
I returned to the house to find Major Sekhim and Iosef arguing. The major looked to me for support. “He intends to take men and steal food from other estates!”
“If things are as you say,” Iosef said, “that may be our only source of food.”
“It is theft!”
“We must do what is necessary,” I said. “I’ll draft a letter he can take with him, asking the other landlords for help.”
This did not improve Major Sekhim’s mood, but he relented for the time being.
That night I shall never forget. Major Sekhim had left for Tula again. I sat with Iosef and a few others on the veranda. Tanya had brought us tea and we spoke companionably. Iosef had read me and had questions about my work. He said he admired my radicalism, but did not think much of my solutions. He had attended the seminary in Tiflis, but it had not suited him. I fell into reminiscing again about the Caucasus, about the army, about Chechnya, about the Cossacks. Iosef listened politely.
Tanya saw it first and gasped. To the west, just above the horizon, a greenish ball appeared in the sky. We stared at it, transfixed by this spectral intruder. It grew and came lower and lower. I found myself standing, my heart beating faster. We hurried to the road that led out into the fields, toward the village and the refugee encampment. The comet dipped below the horizon.
Suddenly it reappeared, bursting through the trees lining the hill crest that ran north to south nearly a mile away. The trees exploded in flame and the object sparked with burnt debris and came down, down, and I shouted, my hand reaching out as if to stop it by force of will. It struck the ground and tore into the southern end of the village, trailing fire as it set the gorse aflame behind it. It skipped once, twice, then burrowed heavily into the earth. It sounded like the rush of a waterfall or the constant thunder of a thousand cannon. And then, still moving swiftly, it struck something. There was a deep shock and a sharp rending, a sound I have heard when a cannon ruptures and the metal peels apart. My nerves danced from the hideous screech. The thing bounded upward once more, arced a short distance, and struck the ground.
The fields caught fire. Part of the tree line on the distant crest blazed. My village burned. In the dark, order escaped us, but still we managed to assemble work parties to fight the fire— Iosef proved himself once more very capable in this regard— and to help the injured. So much to do!
And from the crashed comet itself, bringer of revolution, so I now thought for in that panicked night I could believe anything, came a keening sound none of us had ever heard before. All through the night it underscored our labors. It was dawn before we could take the time from the dead and dying to go look at it.
Iosef, Ilya, Tanya, some soldiers and peasants bearing water buckets, and I approached the crater in which it lay. It was a great twisted thing, like a whale with its belly slit. Later we found that it had struck a buried outcrop of granite, though I wonder if it did not already have a flaw which this chance encounter merely exposed. No matter. It had struck the rock with great force and had been torn open even as it hurtled once more into the air. Within the crater, around the wreck, lay bits and parts of machinery, huge pistons, ball bearings, other devices twisted out of shape or broken and unrecognizable.
Blood glistened everywhere and I looked closely for the injured and dead. At first we did not see them. Then there was movement and I pointed to a brown limb. It twitched convulsively for a few moments, then lay still. It seemed unconnected to a body. Another movement, more fluid, caught my attention and this time I made out the shape. The jointless limb attached to a base from which several such limbs extended, which joined a bloated sack that was crisscrossed by wounds that oozed thick red blood. Not until a large, dark eye opened sluggishly in the sack did I realize that this was the body of a passenger from the ruined comet. Once recognized, it was easy to see the others, torn and mangled though they were. Most were dead. The few survivors would not live long. The machine still gave off heat. Several of the corpses appeared burnt.
As I looked down at these things I felt that an unbridgeable abyss lay between us. Not physically; they were but yards away. The abyss of Difference. We feel it when we encounter an animal in nature that we have never before seen and we must find a way to recognize it so that it makes sense as part of our world. With these creatures that was not possible. They were not of the world, they could not be made to fit into it. Never before had I felt such profound separateness, and never had I felt any degree of separateness to be natural. Until now. And in that moment the world I instinctively vowed to defend from these invaders passed away and was lost to me. Revolution had come.
The day brightened and there was work to do. Our own dead to find and bury, the injured to comfort, the rest to reassure and care for. I busied myself, not wanting to think of Moscow and that such creatures might be there now, only alive and active. Then, too, Mikhail had been gone over a day, going south, into danger.
Midmorning I stopped, exhausted, and walked out to sit not far from the wreck and stare at it and its now dead passengers. Presently someone sat down beside me. Iosef.
“Where could they have come from?” I asked, not expecting an answer.
“Mars,” he said. I looked at him but he did not smile. He nodded. “Truth. After I left the seminary I took a post in the observatory in Tiflis. I worked there until last month. I was a clerk. Just before I left, the astronomers became excited about a new observation. They wouldn’t tell me, but I kept the records, it wasn’t difficult to find out. Besides, I carried the dispatches to the telegrapher to be sent to other observatories for confirmation. I didn’t believe what I read, though, so one night I looked for myself. Giant plumes of gas were being thrown off the surface of Mars, one each night. None of them knew what to make of it, but I know the trace of a cannon when I see one.” He smiled wryly. “I left shortly after. I was near Orol when I saw one come down.”
“You said you were on your way to Pskov. Why did you come here?”
He narrowed his eyes at the crashed machine. “My reasons for going changed.”
We buried the creatures the next day, far from the graves of their victims. More refugees arrived. Major Sekhim returned with wagons of blankets, more soldiers, and more news from other places. All word had stopped from Moscow, nor had anything been heard from St. Petersburg for three days. A fragmentary report from Orekhovo-Zuyevo told of shtativii advancing on emplacements of artillery. Then one phrase— chewy dym, black smoke—and silence.
For two more days refugees found their way to us, and then, but for a few singly or in pairs, no more. There were perhaps three thousand in the camp by then. Major Sekhim went once more to Tula, but returned soon from Shchyokino to tell us that the telegraph had been cut to Tula.
By the end of that first week a red fungus spread from the wreck. It moved swiftly and nearly covered the bare fields within a few days. The peasants attacked it, beat it back, ripped up the soil in a line from the edge of the village to the manor house. Within another week it was dying of its own unsuitability to this world.
Major Sekhim prowled the house, the estate, toured the village and the camp, drilled his men daily, inspected them, maintained discipline, but I did not think he did this out of any rational impulse. Habit and the need to feel useful in his profession drove him to enact these rituals even when we clearly had no use for them. But perhaps that isn’t fair. The muzhikii derived a sense of security from it all, though even they could see that Major Sekhim was defending his own well-being more than theirs. In this we shared motive, because for days all I had done was for my own peace of mind.
If not for Iosef’s foraging expeditions the camp would have crumbled into chaos and disaster. Major Sekhim, however, did not approve. Theft is theft, he insisted, and even in time of war certain laws must be obeyed. My letter forgave nothing in his eyes—the property owners never saw it. Iosef did not care what he said, and told him so, pointing out that Major Sekhim and his men were eating from the same stolen stocks as all the rest. But Major Sekhim was preparing for a confrontation. If he could not fight the invader, he would find another target. Iosef provided him the only alternative. Each time Iosef left, the major lectured him on law, and when he returned Sekhim met him at the edge of the encampment and berated him from horseback. Through it all Iosef ignored him. I considered Major Sekhim’s position ridiculous, almost criminal. People needed to be fed, needed to be protected. Iosef managed to accomplish the first and Major Sekhim promised the second. It ought to have been a perfectly acceptable arrangement. However, if there had been a jail on Yasnaya Polyana, Major Sekhim would have attempted to lock Iosef in it.
In any case, Iosef left for longer and longer periods, ranging farther afield. It seemed clear that soon the available forage would become dangerously scarce. He had hesitated to go south—Mikhail had not returned—but his options were decreasing. One night at dinner he announced that he would go south in the morning.
“More stealing?” Major Sekhim said.
Iosef remained quiet for a time, then said, “You know, to insist on legal niceties when there are courts and police makes some sense. But now?”
“Civilization—”
“Is wrecked, Major.”
Major Sekhim did not reply. He wandered off, his shoulders slightly bowed. I felt sad for him.
“You are a revolutionary,” I said to Iosef.
He continued to watch Major Sekhim and shook his head. “Not anymore.” His eyes shifted to me. “And neither are you, dvoryantsvo. We are all overthrown.”
In the morning Major Sekhim did not lecture him when he left. Instead he only watched the wagons head off in the sharp after-dawn light. The fields were covered in thick patches by the pale, dead detritus of the red plant. When the foragers were out of sight Major Sekhim ordered sentries a mile or more out to keep watch for their return.
Late in the afternoon two of Sekhim’s horsemen came at a gallop. Iosef’s wagons were returning already. Major Sekhim mounted a squadron and rode off to give escort. By dusk they appeared and rode back into the encampment. The wagons were empty. Iosef jumped to the ground.
“Shtativii,” he said. “I don’t think they saw us, but they are coming this way. We saw two of them, wandering the countryside.”
“We will meet them if they come,” Major Sekhim said grimly.
“And do what?” Iosef asked. “They are giants, they’ll step right over you.”
Major Sekhim glared. “We will meet them!”
Iosef shrugged. “Nui chto zh. Do what you want.”
“I will do my duty!”
“And I will do what is necessary.”
They parted that way and never spoke again. By morning Iosef had gone, along with a few others, fellow foragers. But then our attention focused on something more immediate.
The night turned unusually chill and the sun rose on mist. Faintly at first, but growing louder and clearer, came a sound of a train whistle echoed through mountains. At least, so it seemed at first. The louder it became, though, the stranger it was, a shrill warble that scoured our nerves and tightened our hearts with fear. To the south the morning light glinted pale yellow off a tall metal cupola. It moved, left to right, then back.
During the night Major Sekhim had his men polish their steel, buff their boots, shine their saddles and buttons, and now they rode out to meet the invader, glittering and gallant, almost forty of them on horseback, sabers drawn and gleaming. I remembered such charges in my youth, remembered the stammer in the heart, the surge of blood, the pride, and anticipation. I had thought myself well past such feelings, but I watched them anxiously, the nostalgia of struggle and victory turning in my mind. It was senseless. The shtativ advanced across the field, its three legs just as Iosef had said, holding its head high above its enemies, sounding its awful wail.
At two hundred yards Major Sekhim ordered the charge. The horsemen, stretched in a single line abreast, spurred forward, screaming.
The shtativ staggered awkwardly a few more steps, then stopped. Beneath the cupola hung mechanical arms. One set raised a thing that could only be a weapon. It seemed to aim at the cavalry charge and I waited for the inevitable death. But the blow never came. The machine stopped, the arms dangled, its terrible wailing ceased, and all we heard was the pounding of the horses, the battle cries of the Cossacks, and nothing else.
Major Sekhim reached it first, rode under the legs, and swung his saber. The blow rang sharply and Major Sekhim’s cry became a shout of triumph. The horsemen rode around the shtativ, striking at it, their swords ringing off the metal legs.
When the giant did not react, they stopped the attack, circling it warily. Tanya held my left arm while I walked out into the field. Others quickly followed. I stopped beneath it and peered up. Toward the rear of the cupola a hatch was partially open. Tentacles hung limply, similar in appearance to those dead creatures from the comet. I reached out and struck the leg with my cane. It sang with a crystalline delicacy. The machine did not move. I laughed. “Hah! Bronchitis!” Major Sekhim still sat his horse, staring up at it, puzzled. “Perhaps, Major, you frightened it to death. But obviously they are dying. Let them die. There’s work to do.”
In the weeks since we have had word from all over Russia that the zakhvatchik is dying. Yasnaya Polyana has become a place of focus for the survivors. Everyone seems to be mingled here. Peasant, bureaucrat, noble—they all need to eat, need shelter, need to feel safe. With each group we learn how much has been lost. It feels as though Russia has died. But it can be revived.
Yesterday I found my copy of the new novel, the one Sofya remained in Moscow to oversee. Moscow, we learned, has indeed been burned down. It is worse than Napoleon; even the Kremlin is gone. With this in mind I read what I had written. It was a silly book. It spoke of things that are now gone, along with so much else. The things that were so important for me to address with it have changed. This is no longer the same world, it cannot be. Russia—the world—does not need another novel about humankind’s barbarity to itself, at least not from me. Early this morning I burned it. I wonder what Iosef would say to that. Have I done a necessary thing? Perhaps, like me, like Major Sekhim, he could not say. His world is gone, too.
I must close now, Vladimir Grigoryevich. I will write to you again when I have heard from you and know that you have survived. For now, there is work to do.
Your friend
Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy
* * *
From: Pavel Pobodonostsev, dep. arch., Tolstoy Institute, Univ. St. Petersburg, Tula
To: Karyn Alexander, asst, arch., Oxford Univ., Dept. Cultural Studies
Karyn: Thank you! My God, what a find! We have always known Count Tolstoy experienced the war—the refugee camp at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, was at one point the largest community in Russia—but this is the first account of it in his own hand. The book he mentions is the “lost” Tolstoy. We only know the tide—“Resurrection”—he never tried to recover it, and since he wrote no more fiction after the war we don’t even have tantalizing hints. He threw all his efforts into the Global Cooperative Movement. He was seventy-two at the time and this was the effort that killed him three years later.
Of course, the people mentioned are all familiar—Major Sekhim, later governor of the region, then first Georgian Cossack elected to the bicameral duma; Sergey Lvonovitch Tolstoy, who became the first president of the Russia Monarchic Republic; Lev, who became the writer in the family; Tolstoy’s wife and daughters and Strakhov, the family lawyer, all of whom died in Moscow.
However, one name mentioned has us puzzled. The man from Tiflis—present day Tblisi—Iosef Vissarionovich. We were able to trace the employment records of the Observatory— they became part of the university archives—so we’re sure that this was one Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Up till then he’d been a seminary student, then a clerk at the Observatory. He became involved with a prodemocracy group called the Mesame Dasi, then disappeared. What became of him after he left Yasnaya Polyana we have no idea.
This is a treasure. Of course I would like to work with you on a presentation. I am looking forward to seeing you at the next conference anyway. It will be in Constantinople, which ought to be much better than last year’s in Dresden. Keep in touch.
Yours, Pavel
Tula, 1943 A.D.