LEO TOLSTOY

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 2, 3 January 1936, Page 9

LEO TOLSTOY

HIS TRAGIC DEATH

SON'S INTIMATE STORY

EXTItAOKDINAEY

MGUEE

Twenty-five years have passed since the Press announced that Tolstoy was dead. The writings of my father had been translated into sixty languages, his name was everyv/here a household word, jnd his death was a world-wide sensatjon, writes Leo Tolstoy, jun., in the' "New York Times." ' He had completed his eighty-second year, yet it was hard to believe that the end had come. 1 was living with my family in Paris, where i was studying sculpture. But every summer I paid a visit to my parents at their home, Jasnaja Poliana, and in that year—l9lo—l had seen very clearly that all was not going wejl between them. Yet I was at a loss to understand from the Paris newspapers what it was that had actually happened td my father. I It was first reported that he had suddenly left his home and undertaken a journey—that he had fallen ill at a little-known railway station called Astapovo. I had a very strong feeling—l could not be deceived—that if my father had really left his wife and' home he must have been in an abnormal state of mind. Otherwise he would never have done this. I feared that, this time, his illness would be fatal. Knowing only, the reports of my father's illness, I left Paris by the first fast train for Moscow. At Borodino I obtained Russian newspapers and read the announcement of his death. 1 remember it as .if it were yesterday—the strong impression made upon me by the grief of all who, with newspapers in their hands, were reading the short, significant telegram. THE FUNERAL. In due course I arrived at Jasnaja Poliana. It was the day of the funeral. There were thousands of young men and women from Moscow. There were neighbours from the near-by town of Toula. All of our relatives were there, and peasants from the surrounding villages. The district police on their horses were in full force. Such was the strange and straggling procession that followed the coffin from the little station in the Moscow-Kursk railroad through the woods of Zasieeka to our family estate of Jasnaja. At the head of the informal cortege a group of peasants carried a long strip of white linen inscribed with the words "Your memory will never die among the peasants of Jasnaja Poliana." We reached the house. There was Tolstoy's room —the temple of genius wherein he had endured his spiritual crisis. There stood the table at which he had~written most of his books. And he was back again—for the last time. On the table they had laid all that was left of him. The doors were thrown open and a crowd formed into a long queue to see him for a last time. At Astapovo a death mask had been taken of my father and I was startled by his appearance as I looked on him. How short and how ragged the beard! It did not seem to be Leo Tolstoyproud master of thought—but a strange and pitiful little old man. What did impress me by contrast was the enorr mous size of his hands, ?When-air who desired had passed through the room we bore him to the wood near by, .where he had .wished to be laid to rest. This was where my uncle, Nicolas Tolstoy—my father's eldest brother—used, to play as a child, and there he buried a little stick on which was written a secret talisman that would make all people happy. It was the one word —Love. No clergy of the Orthodox Church were present at that , funeral. My father had been excommunicated. But the people themselves provided a liturgy. As the grave was filled they knelt and chanted the "Eternal Memory." He had a book of readings for the day and on the day of his death the reading was "Life is a slumberdeath is the awakening." It had been what I have called a terrible drama, those final months of my father's life. What were the determining motives, due to environment and psychology, that influenced ■ my father on October 28, immediately before his death, to take the decisive step of leaving his wife and his home?

It is well known that, many years before, he had an idea, of going away somewhere, far from his worldly surroundings, and living in the forest like an Indian fakir who has decided at the age of 60 to live a purely spiritual life. For a long time the contradictions and disharmony between his position as a wealthy Bussian land owner and his social and revolutionary ideals had tormented him. He had worried himself by thinking how he could reconcile his circumstances with his beliefs.

But year after year the routine of life continued. My father was ever occupied intensely by his mental activities. Nor could he find a suitable moment in which to summon up the courage to realise in practice his desires, which were never very definite. Many times he would reiterate to me and to others that even if his ideas and his actions did not always correspond, if he was made to suffer by a situation from which he could not easily escape, it was the cross that he had to carry. He alone knew how hard it was for him to bear it. Yet bear- it he must, to the end. How could he grieve his family—especially his wife, who would not long survive a separation from him?

In these thoughts he was entirely sincere. His spiritual , anxiety was genuine. Yet he overlooked the fact that, all the, time, he was still leading the life of a rich Russian gentleman for whom others had to toil —a landlord who was himself free from all material troubles and discomforts. UNDER INFLUENCE OF FRIEND. This way of feeling and thinking was completely changed during the year immediately preceding my father's death. To the purely moral sufferings of the Tolstoy who had been there were suddenly added material troubles which filled the cup of his sorrows to overflowing. I am unable to avoid the conclusion that these troubles arose out of the fact that my, father had fallen under the strong—l would even say the absolute —influence of his friend and first disciple, Tchertkoff, who, as it seemed to me during that last • summer, used what I can only describe as dishonest and underhand means to control my father as if he had been in a second childhood—an infant of two years.

This was the psychological drama that poisoned the closing period of my parents' lives. The nervous, behaviour of my mother was due to the success with which she was alienated from my father. TchertkofE wrote long letters to Tolstoy in which he said every bad thing he could think of against Countess Tolstoy and her children. He managed to secure the return of these letters, which he was thus able to destroy.

The object of all this was to persuade Tolstoy to make a will in which he would leave all his writings to the public. After the death of the master. Tchhertkoff would thus be empowered freely to dispose of these writings for

publication. My father made this will. It was concealed from his wife. It was kept secret from her sons. This was the prelude to my father's pathetic death. He was ill with fever. He was infinitely unhappy. On a dull November morning he set forth. He did not know what he was doing. He did not know where hs was going. As if he were a criminal, he left the house before the sun was up—stealthily, lest his wife hear him. Literally, he ran away from home, losing his hat in the bushes on his way from the house to the stables. A few days later he was dead.

Deeply engraved on my memory are these deplorable events—my mother's anguish as she sought for some news of her vanished husband; her crushing humiliation as she stood at Astapovo, poorly dressed, profoundly miserable, and completely distracted, awaiting the end.

Yet out of these shadows there emerges the extraordinary figure of my father—illuminated by the glory of his genius as artist, moralist, preacher, thinker, and revolutionist — the first of Russian Puritans whose great and beneficent influence drew the nation to a cleaner and more sober life. One of the world's great novelists, he would have been among the immortals if he had only written "War and Peace." To "Anna Karenina" and "The Resurrection" he owes a popularity that is independent of frontiers. PREACHER OF CHRISTIANITY. My father was a pi-eacher of Christianity. He was an apostle of universal religious ideas. To him, faith was the basis of life. He stood for the principle of non-resistance to evil by violence, and to him such non-resist-ance was the zenith of altruism. Omit this principle and what rule, he asked, is there left for one to follow?

As a thinker and social reformer, Tolstoy believed in Christian anarchism. Like Rousseau, he started from the affirmation that man is good by Nature and from this axiom, as he held it to be, all his conclusions were deduced by reaspn. Inevitably, he had to face contradictions with his own experience and with the laws of life as a whole. The religious and social works of Tolstoy are thus the outpouring of his rich imagination. They are not a philosophy of realism. They are spiritual poems in prose fiction. As a young officer Tolstoy served during the siege of Sebastopol. He was overwhelmed ,by the horrors of war that he saw around him. This was his spiritual crisis, and in his diary wrote: I came to perceive a great idea. It is theI'necessity of creating a new re-| ligion, the religion of Christ, yet purified of its mysteries and dogmas. I feel myself capable of sacrificing my whole life to the accomplishment of this purpose. To create such a religion—that was his object. He worked. He strove. But he did not succeed. Others were less influenced than he had hoped. Tolstoy did not desire a revolution. But he became the most terrible and powerful revolutionary that the world has ever known. Why? Because his desire to destroy the old institutions of Russia was so transparently sincere. For the welfare of the world I will allow myself to add a word in conclusion. I believe that Tolstoy was endowed with the most influential intellect of his generation. If he had used but a small part of that influence for a rational and peaceful regeneration of the religion, society, and government of Russia, that country, vyould be today in a different situation—millions of lives would have been saved. There is an opinion that Russia needed such a bleeding—that she will emerge the cleaner and better. I do not think so. I look at other countries and see that,. by peaceful means, miracles can be wrought by which nations rise to culture and prosperity. It is hardly a criticism of Tolstoy to say this. It was not his fault that his people did not understand him. Let us hope that future generations of Russians will understand him better. For this was his own deep hope.