Revolutionaries form clandestine Marxist discussion groups and take their propaganda into the factories. Autumn—Marxists in the capital unite in the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, led by Lenin. November—Lenin and other revolutionaries arrested, imprisoned and exiled. The Dukhobors in the Caucasus refuse to bear arms and continue to be arrested and persecuted.
January—Tolstoy attends a meeting organized by landowners. February—Lyova Tolstoy has electrical treatment for his nervous illness. 23rd February—Vanechka dies. March—Tolstoy makes his first will, leaving his unpublished papers to his wife and Chertkov. He resumes work on Resurrection. Summer—Anton Chekhov visits Yasnaya Polyana; the composer Sergei Taneev spends the summer there; Chertkov moves to a nearby estate. July—Sergei Tolstoy marries Maria Rachinskaya. September—Nicholas II authorizes production of The Power of Darkness, at St Petersburg’s Alexandra Theatre (opening shortly afterwards in Moscow’s Skomorokh People’s Theatre).
1st and 2nd of January (Moscow). I was woken at 4 this morning by a ring at the door. I waited, terrified, and then there was another ring. The servant went to open the door, and who should it be but Khokhlov, one of Lyovochka’s followers, who has gone mad and keeps pursuing Tanya and proposing marriage to her! Poor Tanya can’t go out into the street now, for this dark one, dressed in rags and covered in lice, follows her everywhere. These are the people Lev Nikolaevich has brought into our family circle—and it’s I who have to send them packing.
How strange that it should be these weak foolish people, who for whatever morbid reason have strayed from the path of normal life and thrown themselves into Lev Nikolaevich’s teachings, then follow the road to certain ruin.
I am afraid I cannot resist complaining about Lev Nikolaevich whenever I write my diary. But I must complain, for all the things he preaches for the happiness of humanity only complicate life to the point where it becomes harder and harder for me to live.
His vegetarian diet means preparing two dinners, which means twice the expense and twice the work. His sermons on love and goodness have made him indifferent to his family, and mean the intrusion of all kinds of riff-raff into our family life. And his (purely verbal) renunciation of worldly goods has made him endlessly critical and disapproving of others.
When it all gets too difficult I fly into a rage and say harsh things which I then regret; but by then it is too late, and that makes me even more miserable.
I have very tender feelings for my daughter Masha. She is a sweet, gentle good creature and I should so love to help her! I don’t love Tanya quite so much as I used to, as I feel she has been contaminated by the love of the “dark ones”, Popov and Khokhlov. I pity her, she has grown old and withered. I am sorry that her youth is behind her—so full of beauty, happiness and promise. I am sorry she never married. How little my lovely big family has given me. I mean, how little happiness they have had. That is the most painful thing for a mother.
This morning I read Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to Sasha and Vanya. “It’s difficult, you won’t understand it,” I said to them. But Vanya said, “It doesn’t matter, Maman. Read it, and you’ll see how clever we get after that and In Search of the Castaways.”*
3rd January. I got up late. I went to see Masha and Lyova, and scolded Misha for not practising his violin and not getting up until midday. Then Lyova went off to the clinic for his electrical treatment. The streets, the courtyards, the garden and the balcony are all covered in snow. 4° below freezing.
5th January. I didn’t write yesterday as I was reading Fonvizin’s story to Lyova. We found it interesting but rather coarse.
Then I did the accounts till 3 in the morning and got in a great muddle. I can’t get it right. I spent a lot of the day sitting with Vanya and reading to him. He has been ill all day. Everything terrifies me nowadays, but especially Vanechka’s fragile health. My life is inextricably bound up with his—there is almost something wrong and dangerous about it. He is such a weak, delicate little boy—and so good!
8th January. Vanechka has been ill for three days with a fever and a bad stomach. It breaks my heart to see him grown so thin and pale. Andryusha, Misha and Sasha went to a children’s party at the Glebovs’ yesterday, while Vanechka sat on my knee all evening, weak and feverish. I hated to make him miss the party. Before this he was ill in bed with influenza, and it’s three weeks since he had any fresh air. I have given up trying to teach the older boys a sense of their responsibilities; the struggle to do so has quite set my heart against them. Oh how painful it is, how painful to see Ilya ruining himself in this stupid vulgar way, and Seryozha with his immoral life, and Lyova ill, and my daughters unmarried, and poor darling Vanechka with hardly a flicker of life in him.
Busy all day. I paid the laundresses and the others and gave the labourers in the workshop their orders. The servants asked for leave to attend a wedding; some documents arrived from the police station about the theft at Yasnaya Polyana;* then wages, overdue passports, and so on and so on. Then Lyova, Vanechka and I sat together and looked at the pictures in the history books; I told him everything I could remember about the Egyptians, then read him some of Grimms’ fairy stories.
The episode with the photograph still hasn’t died down.* Posha came and blamed me, and I blamed all the others. They had persuaded Lev Nikolaevich on the sly, without telling us, to have his photograph taken with a group of “dark ones”. The girls were highly indignant, all his friends were horrified, Lyova was grieved and I was furious. Group photographs are taken of schools, picnics, institutions, etc., so I suppose that means that the Tolstoyans are an “institution”! The public would seize on it, and all want to buy pictures of “Tolstoy with his pupils”—that would make them laugh! But I wasn’t going to let them drag Lev Nikolaevich from his pedestal into the mud. So the following morning I went to the photographer and got all the negatives from him before a single print had been made. The photographer, an intelligent, sensitive German called Mey, was very sympathetic and gladly handed over the negatives.
I have no idea what Lev Nikolaevich thought of this. He has been very affectionate to me, but he’ll blame me “on principle” in his diary, where he never has a sincere or kind word to say nowadays.
The English governess Miss Spiers is not nice. She is dry and unfriendly and keeps her distance from the children, and is concerned only with learning Russian and having a good time.
10th January. This evening I went to the bathhouse and took a bath. Then Masha and I drank tea together and talked about the Olsufievs and Tanya. It is pouring with rain, 3° above freezing, and very muddy.
This evening I smashed the negatives of the photographs of the dark ones. I tried to scratch Lev Nikolaevich’s face out of it with my diamond earring but couldn’t. I went to bed at 3 a.m.
11th January. Vanya has a rasping cough. I have been sitting with him and reading him Grimms’ fairy stories. I then tried to draw our garden, but was out of practice. I went out and swept the snow from the skating rink, for the exercise. Through the window I could see that Vanya had jumped out of bed and was running about without any clothes on. I went in and shouted at the nurse, and she screamed back at me and Vanya started crying. We all dined at home. It is Misha’s name day; I gave him 10 rubles. This evening they took Ilya’s peasant coachman Abramka to the circus, and were enchanted by his naive enjoyment of it.
12th January. I got up early and gave Vanya some apomorphine for his cough, which is worse. I opened the ventilation pane in the window—it was 10° below freezing—and had a wash in cold water, but didn’t feel any livelier. I was in very low spirits. I sat with Vanya and read to him, then received guests. Chicherin came, and Lopatin, with whom I had an interesting talk about death. He said among other things that life wouldn’t be so interesting if we were not faced with the eternal mystery of death at the end. Then Petrovskaya and Tsurikova came. Tsurikova dined and spent the night here. She is one of those aristocratic old-fashioned unmarried ladies who tells fortunes with cards, has a huge circle of acquaintances and falls in love at the age of 40.
This evening Vanechka again had a temperature of 38.3, and I was dreadfully worried. Something has broken in me—I ache inside and cannot control myself. Chicherin was talking about Lyovochka today; there are two men in him, he said, a writer of genius and a mediocre philosopher who impresses people by talking in paradoxes and contradictions. He cited several instances of this. Chicherin loves Lev Nikolaevich, but that is because he has known him for so long. He sees in him the Lev Nikolaevich he knew as a young man, who wrote him a vast number of letters which he treasures.*
15th January. I spent the whole day frantically trying to entertain Vanechka. Doctor Filatov came this afternoon and didn’t find any complications in his lungs or his throat, and said his spleen wasn’t enlarged. It’s influenza, nothing more. I drove to the Glebovs’ to collect Sasha, who had just had her first dancing lesson there. My brother came this evening with his sad, thin wife. Afterwards I told Masha’s fortune with cards. I told Misha Olsufiev’s too, and it showed death. I was very upset, and afraid for Tanya and Lev Nikolaevich.
16th and 17th of January. Vanya is just the same. He becomes feverish at noon and this lasts until night. His cough is better, but his cold is the same. I sewed, and spent the whole day sitting with him. My life is empty and cheerless.
18th January. Today is the anniversary of my little Alyosha’s death. He died nine years ago.
I got up at 6 a.m., gave Vanya 4 g of quinine, then went back to bed. I got up again at 8.30 and took his temperature—which was 36.7. Then I lay down again and dozed off. I got up late, and my temple was aching. I went out shopping and bought cloth, stockings, bobbins and various other essentials. I also bought the children more pieces for the ariston.* After dinner I accompanied Misha, who played first a Mozart violin sonata then one by Schubert. It’s a pity I sight-read so badly. He was enjoying it enormously and I was sorry to have to tear him away and make him revise his lessons with his tutor. Andryusha has a stomach ache, and his illness makes him lazy and disagreeable.
Lev Nikolaevich and Tanya have returned from the Olsufievs’. It wasn’t a very joyful reunion after 18 days apart—not as it was in the old days. Tanya had a sharp, censorious manner, and Lyovochka is indifferent to everything. I had a talk with Miss Spiers this morning about her general inadequacy. She is very disagreeable and doesn’t like children. I shall have to get rid of her. There are no good governesses to be had these days. It’s all very depressing.
19th January. I got up early and sat with Vanya. He did a still-life drawing of some baskets, without any help, and I tried my hand at a watercolour sketch of our garden—with disastrous results.
Goltsev is with Lyovochka, reading him the Tver address and the petition presented to the new Tsar.* Dunaev is also here. Vanya is still ill. His temperature shoots up at 3.30 every afternoon. It’s fine, 6° below freezing, a moonlit night. So beautiful! But I am depressed and my soul is asleep.
20th January. Vanya is very ill, with a high temperature. I went to see Doctor Filatov this evening, and he prescribed large doses of quinine. Lyovochka is annoyed that I consulted him, although he evidently has no idea either what to do. He is healthy, draws his own water from the well and writes. This afternoon he read, and has just gone off to see Sergei Nikolaevich. 17° below freezing, with a mist and hoar frost; a fine day and a bright night. My heart is heavy, it’s unbearable!
26th January. Vanechka has had a high temperature for the past week. It tortures me body and soul to look at him. He is a little better today, and we have been giving him 4 g of quinine twice a day. I left the house for the first time in many days and bought some sheet music, toys, cheese, fresh eggs and so on. I sat with Vanya for a little while, played duets with Lev Nikolaevich after dinner, and chose a piece for Sasha and Nadya Martynova to play at the forthcoming children’s musical evening. Then everyone left but Lyova, who told me about the house he wants to build in the courtyard, and curtly asked me for the money to do so. When I refused, he soon changed his tune and became more friendly. Then Masha and I corrected and transcribed the proofs for Lyovochka’s story ‘Master and Man’. I am angry that he gave it to the Northern Herald to publish. What is one to make of him? If he had published it for nothing in the Intermediary, I would have understood, for then anyone could have bought it and read a story by Tolstoy for just 20 kopecks. But now the public will have to pay 13 rubles to read it. This is why I cannot share my husband’s “ideas”—because they are dishonest and insincere. His whole philosophy is so strained, artificial and unnatural, based as it is on vanity, the insatiable thirst for fame, and the compulsive desire for popularity. No one ever believes me when I say this, and it’s painful for me to recognize it—especially when others don’t see it. But then what does it matter to them!
It’s now 2 in the morning. Lyovochka has gone off to some meeting, I don’t know what about, called by Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoi.* The lamps are still burning, the servant is waiting up. I have boiled his porridge and pasted up the proofs. Meanwhile they just sit there talking. Tomorrow I shall get up at 8, take Vanechka’s temperature and give him his quinine, while he sleeps on. Then he’ll go and draw his water from the well, without even asking whether his child is better or his wife is exhausted. How little kindness he shows his family! With us he is never anything but severe and indifferent. His biographers will tell how he helped the porter by drawing his own water, but no one will know that he never once thought to give his wife a moment’s rest, or his sick child a drink of water. How in 32 years he never once sat for five minutes by his sick child’s bedside to let me have a rest, or a good night’s sleep, or go for a walk, or simply sit down for a while and recover from my labours.
11° below freezing. Hoar frost, silence, moonlight.
1st February. Vanya hasn’t had a temperature for 3 days, and for 4 days I have been giving him 5 or 6 drops of arsenic twice a day after dinner. I feel much happier about him now. I am still concerned about Lyova. Relations with Lyovochka are good.
I measured him the other day, by the way. He is 6 foot 3 inches.
5th February. Either I have a bad character or I am being perfectly reasonable. Lev Nikolaevich wrote a marvellous story called ‘Master and Man’. Now that scheming half-Jewish Gurevich woman is always buttering him up, trying to inveigle him into sending her things for her magazine, and it makes me furious.
Once on my name day Lev Nikolaevich brought me a file containing ‘The Death of Ivan Ilich’, for the new edition. Then he took it away again and published an announcement saying he was making it public property. That made me angry and I wept bitterly. Why does he give so little thought to my feelings? How sad it all is!
Yesterday Masha visited Professor Kozhevnikov, who was not at all reassuring about Lyova’s health. This morning I told Andryusha off for deceiving his father and me the other day and going off with Kleinmikhel and Severtsev to see the gypsies, rather than coming straight home as he had promised. Andryusha flared up and said the reason he deceived his father was that for the past year the only two words he had heard from him were “Come home!” His father never took any interest in them, he said, and never had anything to do with them or gave them any help. It made me sad to hear this—but there’s much truth in it.
I started thinking about Turgenev, and that spring when he stayed with us in Yasnaya Polyana and we went out shooting snipe. Lyovochka was standing behind one tree and he and I were behind another, and I asked him why he didn’t write any more. And he stooped down, looked around in a rather comical way and said, “Nobody can hear us but the trees I think, my dear.” (He called everyone “my dear” as he got older.) “So I shall tell you. You see, before I write something new I need to be inflamed by love—and that’s all over now!”
“What a shame!” I said, adding as a joke: “You can fall in love with me if you like, then you could write something!”
“No, it’s too late!” he said.
He was such good company. That evening he danced a Paris cancan with my daughters and the Kuzminsky girls, and argued good-naturedly with Lev Nikolaevich and the late Prince Urusov. I remember he asked me if we could have chicken soup with semolina, and beef and onion pie, saying that was something only Russian chefs knew how to make. He was gentle and affectionate with everyone and to Lev Nikolaevich he said: “What a good thing you did when you married your wife.” He was always urging him to write more fiction, and spoke passionately about his supreme talent as a writer. It’s painful to recall all this now.
21st February. I am passing through yet another painful period, and another dreadful episode between us. It’s all my fault of course, yet how did I get dragged into it in the first place?
As I said earlier, I was upset about his story ‘Master and Man’. But I tried to keep this to myself, and worked hard on the proofs with him. Then just as they were about to be sent off I asked him if I could take a copy for myself, so I could publish them in Volume 13 of the Complete Collected Works.
I couldn’t bear the idea of the Northern Herald having the sole rights; I recalled the words of Storozhenko, who said that Gurevich (the editor) must have bewitched the Count, since she had got two articles out of him in one year, and I was quite determined that, come what may, I would see that my own edition was published simultaneously. We were both furious and upset. Lyovochka got so angry that he rushed upstairs, put his clothes on and said he was leaving home for ever and wouldn’t be returning.
Since I felt my only crime was wanting to take a copy, it suddenly flashed across my mind that there must be some more serious reason why he should want to leave me, and I immediately thought of the Gurevich woman. I ran out of the house and tore off down the road in my dressing gown. He came chasing after me in his long underpants and waistcoat, without a shirt. He pleaded with me to go back, but at that point my only wish was to die, never mind how. I was sobbing and shouting: “I don’t care, let them take me away and put me in prison or the mental hospital!” Lyovochka dragged me back to the house, I kept falling in the snow and got soaked to the skin. I had only a nightdress on under my dressing gown, and nothing on my feet but a pair of slippers, and I am now ill, demented and choked, and cannot think clearly.
Somehow we smoothed things over. Next morning I again helped him to correct the proofs for the Northern Herald. He finished them after lunch and was about to take a nap. “Well, I’ll take a copy now if I may,” I said. He was lying on the sofa, but when I said that, he leapt up, glared at me and again refused to let me do it, without giving any reason. (I still don’t know what it might be.) But I didn’t lose my temper, and merely begged him to let me copy it; I had tears in my eyes and could hardly speak. I promised I wouldn’t release the story without his permission; I was only asking him to let me copy it. He didn’t refuse in so many words, but his anger stunned me. I couldn’t understand anything. Why were Gurevich and her journal so precious to him that he wouldn’t let his story be published simultaneously in Volume 13?
Feelings of jealousy and rage, the mortifying thought that he never did anything for me, the old grief of having loved him so much when he had never loved me—all this reduced me to a state of despair. I flung the proofs on the table, threw on a light overcoat, put on my galoshes and hat and slipped out of the house. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—Masha had noticed my distraught face and followed me, although I didn’t realize this at the time. I stumbled towards the Convent of the Virgin, intending to freeze to death in the woods on Sparrow Hills. I remember I liked the idea that Vasily Andreich froze to death in the story, and that I too would meet the same end. I didn’t regret what I was doing. I had staked my whole life on one card—my love for my husband—and now the game was lost and I had nothing to live for. I wasn’t sorry about the children either. I always feel that however much we may love them, they never love us, and I was sure they would survive quite well without me. Masha, as it turned out, hadn’t let me out of her sight and eventually managed to take me home. But my despair didn’t subside, and for two days I kept trying to leave. The following day I hailed a cab in the street and set off for the Kursk station. How my children guessed I had gone there I shall never know. But Seryozha and Masha caught up with me and once again took me home. Each time I get back I feel so foolish and ashamed of myself.
After I had been sobbing for a long time he came in, kneeled before me on the floor and begged me to forgive him. If he could keep just a fragment of that compassion for me alive, I might still be happy with him.
Having tortured my soul, he then called in the doctors to examine me. It was comical the way each prescribed medicine according to his own speciality. So the neurologist prescribed bromide, and the specialist in internal diseases prescribed Vichy water and drops. Then the gynaecologist Snegiryov was called in, referred cynically to my “critical time of life” and prescribed his particular medicine. I haven’t taken any of it. I don’t feel any better either. I’ve been running around the streets for three days and nights with barely a stitch on, in 16° of frost, frozen to the marrow and at my wits’ end—naturally I’m ill. The girls were timid with me, Misha sobbed and Andryusha went off to share his grief with Ilya. Sasha and Vanya were childishly puzzled, Lyovochka was alarmed. The nicest of all was Seryozha—gentle, affectionate and completely uncensorious. Lyovochka, Christian that you are, I saw in you more judgement than love or compassion. This whole episode was due only to my limitless love for him. He is always seeking evil in me; if only he would realize this isn’t one of my vices, although there are plenty of others to be sure. Is it my fault that God has given me such a restless, passionate temperament?
His sister Maria Nikolaevna was also very sweet and kind and told me what I said in my frenzy was quite true, but that I’d gone too far. Yes, this frenzy is an unforgivable, incorrigible vice!*
We have made peace again. Lyova has left for Ogranovich’s sanatorium.* He is morbidly resentful of his family and wants nothing to do with us, which may be for the best while he is in this nervous condition. A doctor arrived from there yesterday and spoke reassuringly about him. God grant that I don’t live to see any of my children die, and that I may be the first to join Him in the place where all is love and an end to suffering.
The story has been given to both me and the Intermediary. But at what a price.
22nd February, morning. Vanya has been ill ever since yesterday evening. He has now developed scarlet fever, a sore throat and diarrhoea.
23rd February. My darling little Vanechka died this evening at 11 o’clock. My God and I am still alive!