IN the autumn of 1901 my father was attacked by persistent feverishness,
and the doctors advised him to spend the winter in the Crimea. Countess
Panina kindly lent him her Villa Gaspra, near Koreiz, and he spent the
winter there.
Soon after his arrival, he caught cold and had two illnesses one after
the other, enteric fever and inflammation of the lungs. At one time his
condition was so bad that the doctors had hardly any hope that he would
ever rise from his bed again. Despite the fact that his temperature
went up very high, he was conscious all the time; he dictated some
reflections every day, and deliberately prepared for death.
The whole family was with him, and we all took turns in helping to nurse
him. I look back with pleasure on the nights when it fell to me to be on
duty by him, and I sat in the balcony by the open window, listening
to his breathing and every sound in his room. My chief duty, as the
strongest of the family, was to lift him up while the sheets were being
changed. When they were making the bed, I had to hold him in my arms
like a child.
I remember how my muscles quivered one day with the exertion. He looked
at me with astonishment and said:
"You surely don't find me heavy? What nonsense!"
I thought of the day when he had given me a bad time at riding in the
woods as a boy, and kept asking, "You're not tired?"
Another time during the same illness he wanted me to carry him
down-stairs in my arms by the winding stone staircase.
"Pick me up as they do a baby and carry me."
He had not a grain of fear that I might stumble and kill him. It was all
I could do to insist on his being carried down in an arm-chair by three
of us.
Was my father afraid of death?
It is impossible to answer the question in one word. With his tough
constitution and physical strength, he always instinctively fought not
only against death, but against old age. Till the last year of his life
he never gave in, but always did everything for himself and even rode on
horseback.
To suppose, therefore, that he had no instinctive fear of death is out
of the question. He had that fear, and in a very high degree, but he was
constantly fighting to overcome it.
Did he succeed?
I can answer definitely yes. During his illness he talked a great deal
of death and prepared himself for it firmly and deliberately. When he
felt that he was getting weaker, he wished to say good-by to everybody,
and he called us all separately to his bedside, one after the other, and
gave his last words of advice to each. He was so weak that he spoke in a
half-whisper, and when he had said good-by to one, he had to rest for a
while and collect his strength for the rest.
When my turn came, he said as nearly as I can remember:
"You are still young and strong and tossed by storms of passion. You
have not therefore yet been able to think over the chief questions of
life. But this stage will pass. I am sure of it. When the time comes,
believe me, you will find the truth in the teachings of the Gospel. I
am dying peacefully simply because I have come to know that teaching and
believe in it. May God grant you this knowledge soon! Good-by."
I kissed his hand and left the room quietly. When I got to the front
door, I rushed to a lonely stone tower, and there sobbed my heart out
in the darkness like a child. Looking round at last, I saw that some one
else was sitting on the staircase near me, also crying.
So I said farewell to my father years before his death, and the memory
of it is dear to me, for I know that if I had seen him before his death
at Astapova he would have said just the same to me.
To return to the question of death, I will say that so far from
being afraid of it, in his last days he often desired it; he was
more interested in it than afraid of it. This "greatest of mysteries"
interested him to such a degree that his interest came near to love. How
eagerly he listened to accounts of the death of his friends, Turgenieff,
Gay, Leskof, [23] Zhemtchuzhnikof [24]; and others! He inquired after
the smallest matters; no detail, however trifling in appearance, was
without its interest and importance to him.
His "Circle of Reading," November 7, the day he died, is devoted
entirely to thoughts on death.
"Life is a dream, death is an awakening," he wrote, while in expectation
of that awakening.
Apropos of the "Circle of Reading," I cannot refrain from relating a
characteristic incident which I was told by one of my sisters.
When my father had made up his mind to compile that collection of the
sayings of the wise, to which he gave the name of "Circle of Reading,"
he told one of his friends about it.
A few days afterward this friend came to see him again, and at once told
him that he and his wife had been thinking over his scheme for the new
book and had come to the conclusion that he ought to call it "For Every
Day," instead of "Circle of Reading."
To this my father replied that he preferred the title "Circle of
Reading" because the word "circle" suggested the idea of continuous
reading, which was what he meant to express by the title.
Half an hour later the friend came across the room to him and repeated
exactly the same remark again. This time my father made no reply. In
the evening, when the friend was preparing to go home, as he was saying
good-by to my father, he held his hand in his and began once more:
"Still, I must tell you, Lyoff Nikolaievich, that I and my wife have
been thinking it over, and we have come to the conclusion," and so on,
word for word the same.
"No, no, I want to die--to die as soon as possible," groaned my father
when he had seen the friend off.
"Isn't it all the same whether it's 'Circle of Reading' or 'For Every
Day'? No, it's time for me to die: I cannot live like this any longer."
And, after all, in the end, one of the editions of the sayings of the
wise was called "For Every Day" instead of "Circle of Reading."
"Ah, my dear, ever since this Mr. ---- turned up, I really don't know
which of Lyoff Nikolaievich's writings are by Lyoff Nikolaievich and
which are by Mr. ----!" murmured our old friend, the pure-hearted and
far from malicious Marya Alexandrovna Schmidt.
This sort of intrusion into my father's work as an author bore, in the
"friend's" language, the modest title of "corrections beforehand," and
there is no doubt that Marya Alexandrovna was right, for no one will
ever know where what my father wrote ends and where his concessions to
Mr. ----'s persistent "corrections beforehand" begin, all the more as
this careful adviser had the forethought to arrange that when my father
answered his letters he was always to return him the letters they were
answers to.[25]
Besides the desire for death that my father displayed, in the last years
of his life he cherished another dream, which he made no secret of
his hope of realizing, and that was the desire to suffer for his
convictions. The first impulse in this direction was given him by
the persecution on the part of the authorities to which, during his
lifetime, many of his friends and fellow-thinkers were subjected.
When he heard of any one being put in jail or deported for disseminating
his writings, he was so disturbed about it that one was really sorry
for him. I remember my arrival at Yasnaya some days after Gusef's
arrest.[26] I stayed two days with my father, and heard of nothing but
Gusef. As if there were nobody in the world but Gusef! I must confess
that, sorry as I was for Gusef, who was shut up at the time in the local
prison at Krapivna, I harbored a most wicked feeling of resentment at
my father's paying so little attention to me and the rest of those about
him and being so absorbed in the thought of Gusef.
I willingly acknowledge that I was wrong in entertaining this
narrow-minded feeling. If I had entered fully into what my father was
feeling, I should have seen this at the time.
As far back as 1896, in consequence of the arrest of a doctor, Miss
N----, in Tula, my father wrote a long letter to Muravyof, the Minister
of Justice, in which he spoke of the "unreasonableness, uselessness,
and cruelty of the measures taken by the Government against those who
disseminate these forbidden writings," and begged him to "direct the
measures taken to punish or intimidate the perpetrators of the evil,
or to put an end to it, against the man whom you regard as the real
instigator of it... all the more, as I assure you beforehand, that I
shall continue without ceasing till my death to do what the Government
considers evil and what I consider my sacred duty before God."
As every one knows, neither this challenge nor the others that followed
it led to any result, and the arrests and deportations of those
associated with him still went on.
My father felt himself morally responsible toward all those who suffered
on his account, and every year new burdens were laid on his conscience.