CHANGE FOR THE WORSE IN HIS WIFE'S ATTITUDE TO HIM
And so in the last few months before Leo Nikolaevitch left Yasnaya
Polyana he was subjected in an intensified form to all the agonising
conditions which had for many years made him long to get away from
his family. What went on around him in Yasnaya Polyana, particularly
in the management of the estate, seemed to be purposely calculated
to wound, insult and revolt him more and more in his most sacred
feelings. In her relations with the peasants Sofya Andreyevna, far
from restraining herself through consideration for her husband,
behaved with peculiar injustice and harshness as though to spite
him.[11]
At one time she would try to impress on the peasants that she was
acting with the consent and approval of Leo Nikolaevitch himself; at
another she would boast before him that his championship had no
influence on her arrangements. It is easy to imagine how unutterably
painful all this was for him. It is sufficient to recall how he
sobbed when he chanced to come across a policeman on horseback
dragging along a Yasnaya Polyana peasant caught in the Tolstoys'
forest, an old man whom Leo Nikolaevitch knew well and respected.
Fully realising that he would not in the least improve the position
of the peasants by going away, Leo Nikolaevitch went on regarding
such spectacles as a bitter trial laid upon him, and confining
himself to protesting warmly on every possible occasion. In the same
way, that is as a trial laid upon him, he continued to look upon the
false position in which he was placed in the eyes of the public by
his apparent acceptance of what was done in Yasnaya Polyana. On this
subject he not only continually received abusive letters which he
accepted as a useful exercise in humility, but also from time to time
persons wishing him well addressed him with censure and exhortation.
A letter written by Leo Nikolaevitch at the beginning of 1910 in
answer to an unknown student who had written to persuade him to leave
his privileged surroundings, is characteristic:
"Your letter touched me," wrote Leo Nikolaevitch; "what you advise me
to do is my cherished dream! That I should be living at home with my
wife and daughter in horrible, shameful conditions of luxury in the
midst of the poverty around us tortures me unceasingly and ever more
and more; and not a day passes on which I do not think of carrying
out your advice."
At the same time a third and most painful trial, consisting in his
wife's immediate attitude to him, was intensely accentuated. The
mournful recital of those spiritual agonies which shattered his
health, and which she systematically inflicted on him in the last
months of his life, will be set forth in its time and place. No one
can imagine what he had to endure and to suffer at that time. On one
occasion, calling in D. P. Makovitsky,[12] Leo Nikolaevitch said to
him: "Dushan Petrovitch, go to her" (Sofya Andreyevna) "and tell her
that if she desires my death she is going the right way to bring
it about."[13] In a touching letter of July 14, 1910, to Sofya
Andreyevna, Leo Nikolaevitch, after making her every concession he
considered possible, adds in conclusion: "If you will not accept
these conditions of a good and peaceful life, then I will go away....
I will certainly go away, because it is impossible to go on living
like this."
It will be readily understood that with such a position of affairs
Leo Nikolaevitch began to foresee more and more definitely the
possibility that in the end he would have to leave Yasnaya Polyana.
In a moment of openness he said to his friend, the peasant Novikov:
"Yes, yes, believe me, I tell you frankly I shall not die in this
house. I have made up my mind to go to a strange place where I shall
not be known. And perhaps I may come straight to die in your hut....
I want to prepare for death in peace, and here they think of me as
worth so many roubles. I shall go away, I shall certainly go away."
Only a final decisive shock was needed. In his same letter to the
student he says about going away: "This can and ought only to be done
when it is essential, not for the supposed external objects, but for
the satisfaction of the inner need of the soul,--when to remain in
the old position becomes as morally impossible as it is physically
impossible not to cough when one cannot breathe.... And I am near to
that position, and every day I get nearer and nearer to it."
But Leo Nikolaevitch still did not go away, and remaining continued
to be subjected on an increased scale to the tortures to which he had
been subjected since the 'eighties. And he remained still for the
same reasons as had restrained him for thirty years. He knew that he
would not alleviate the position of the peasants of the district by
going. From his painful position in the eyes of men he drew a
profitable lesson in humility. His wife's attitude to him assisted in
him the development of true love for those who hated his soul. And
therefore the more intense these trials became with the passage of
time, the more painfully they were reflected in his soul, the more
difficult it became for him to deal with them--the more insistent
from the spiritual point of view became the moral duty not to forsake
his post, but to endure to the end.
FOOTNOTES
[11] At the beginning of the eighties of the last century, Leo
Nikolaevitch's feeling against property in general, and the
ownership of land in particular, began to take shape, though it was
only somewhat later that it was fully fixed and confirmed. He
renounced all property for himself personally in 1894, acting as
though in that respect he were dead, that is, leaving the possession
of his former property to those whom he regarded as his heirs, that
is, his family. After this Sofya Andreyevna began to manage the
estate of Yasnaya Polyana, while his children divided the land and
property between them. Later on Leo Nikolaevitch felt, he said, that
he had made a mistake in giving up the land to his "heirs" instead of
to the local peasants, and at the desire of his family confirming the
transfer by legal act.
[12] An intimate friend who shared the views of Leo Nikolaevitch,
a doctor who lived in the Tolstoys' house from the year 1904. He
was of Slovak nationality, and in 1920 left Russia and returned to
Czechoslovakia, where he died in 1921.
[13] From one of the diaries and letters of Tolstoy's friends and
household of the times.