Tolstoy's Complaint

...Henri Troyat, in his biography of Tolstoy, tells how even Tolstoy's personal physician contrived to record the master's dicta for posterity right under his unsuspecting nose, by making minute notes, sight unseen, on pieces of cardboard in his pocket...

...on the contrary, as George Steiner says in an eloquent introduction, "his whole book is a record of a profound spiritual infatuation...

...Bulgakov loved and venerated the impossible old man, with his cantankerous self-importance, his ethical tantrums, and his special smell: "a kind of very strong church smell compounded of cypress, the sacristy, and communion bread...

...To his wife's hysterical outbursts he responded with silence, withdrawal, a harsh rectitude: ". . . that is her affair...

...Not that posterity's fifth columnist set out to chronicle the Great Man's failings...

...Never a man to wrestle with himself in private, he involved a large cast of characters in his pilgrim's progress...

...But that wasn't really the point...

...There were unedifying scenes...

...It was the struggle for the disposition of these diaries, and Tolstoy's literary estate in general, that precipitated the final showdown...

...Now he was drafting a secret will designed to make the whole of his estate public property...

...landowner and paterfamilias groaning under the multiple burdens of a family that in general regarded his precepts as an exercise in vainglorious perversity and at times thought him quite mad...

...This narrow, humorless man ("Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle...

...One cannot quarrel with Tolstoy's perception that it was criminal to live in luxury while peasants starved, or feel anything but admiration for his intermittent bursts of practical philanthropy...

...He had already, over Sonya's protests, signed away the copyright to the bulk of his work after his conversion...

...As can be seen from his scurvy treatment of those close to him, it was not compassion for suffering humanity that dictated Tolstoy's self-denial: It was the seductions of asceticism...

...so—in the Indian summer of his world celebrity—did secretaries, tutors, poor relations, and almost everyone else who came within range...

...To Sonya this was mere self-righteous posturing, whose only visible result was more work for mother...

...Not long afterward, hearing Sonya search among his papers at night, Tolstoy finally snapped: Not waiting for the dawn, he carried out his long-pondered plan to leave Yasnaya Polyana forever...

...He had not only gained control of all Tolstoy's work since 1881 but he was also in physical possession of the diaries which, as Sonya well knew, contained passages highly derogatory of herself...

...As Chekhov put it, "There is more love in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and refusal to eat meat...

...When they became engaged—he being 34, she 18—Tolstoy set the tone of their future relations by making her read the private record of his bachelor years: a document of narcissistic self-absorption in which misogynist tirades alternate with robustly factual accounts of his affairs with gypsies, peasant girls, and just plain whores...

...love meant a huge philistine family that regarded his efforts to live the simple life as "playing at Robinson Crusoe...

...not Tolstoy the "great writer of the Russian land" (the phrase is Turgenev's...

...His true kin, Tolstoy thought, were to be found among the artless peasantry...

...At the end, as the old man passed visibly into history, he knew that everything he had ever written— especially the diaries—would be the evidence by which society would judge him, the source material of potential biographers no less real in his mind for existing only in the shadowy world of the future...

...The soul was encumbered in its striving heavenward by the taints of the gross flesh...

...Tolstoy was at his wits' end...

...The most enthusiastic proponent of encounter-group candor could scarcely devise a more telling coup...

...Not Tolstoy, but Lev Nikolaevich, or Lyov-ochka as Sonya usually called him...

...Bulgakov's account of the scandalous proceedings at Yasnaya Polyana, The Last Year of Leo Tolstoy (Dial, 235 pp., $7.95), affords a long look at what were surely among the most formidable feet of clay in intellectual history...

...Bulgakov actually began his diary in a notebook provided by Chertkov, sending him carbon copies of each day's entry...

...Further, "the life of the body causes suffering...

...Is this not inconsistent with his Christian ideals...

...One of the diarists was Valentin F. Bulgakov, a young disciple of Tolstoy who entered his service as a private secretary in January 1910, just 11 months before Tolstoy's death, and involuntarily witnessed the denouement of his domestic drama...

...Love meant Sonya, who provoked him to lust, pestered him with possessions, hamstrung his would-be altruism with mercenary calculation...

...For 30 years the family, and more particularly his wife, had thwarted him at every turn, systematically sabotaging his aspirations to sainthood...

...Three days later he was dead...

...Not only Tolstoy and his immediate family kept diaries...

...Leo the lion at bay in his den, dim of eye and mangy of coat, he was less a patriarch than prisoner in his own house, impotently ruminating plans for escape...

...Chertkov and Sonya were of course mortal enemies, and by the time Bulgakov arrived on the scene he was obviously winning...

...The Jatter is either in conspiracy with him or, with typical female antagonism towards the mother, devotes herself to the struggle as to a kind of sport...

...Later, when he perceived the true nature of the situation, he kept his comments to himself...

...My heart is wrung for this great and dear old man," wrote Bulgakov...

...The diaries had been returned—Chertkov having carefully copied out the passages he was afraid Sonya might delete— and sent to a bank for safe-keeping...

...They sent someone out with a horse and she was brought back...

...If there is someone directing the course of our lives," he wrote on his wife's delivering a 12th child, "I feel like complaining to him...

...At one end of the tug-o'-war for Tolstoy's soul were his daughter Sasha, the only one of his children to take him seriously, and V. G. Chertkov, a doctrinaire Tolstoyan who for years had acted as the keeper of Tolstoy's conscience...

...The diary habit was strong in the country houses of the gentry in those far-off years that seem to us almost geologically remote...

...Scene followed scene, each more grotesque than the last...

...Not Tolstoy in his public image: the preacher of chastity, nonresistance to evil, holy poverty, and the rest of the "Christian anarchism" for which he was excommunicated by an outraged Establishment...

...Sonya: ". . . when a happy man suddenly notices that life is dreadful and closes his eyes to everything good in life, that man is sick...

...But what began as a lover's conceit, a device to extend and complicate the private relations between husband and wife, eventually escalated into a fight for control of larger realities...

...The most Tolstoy could manage was a labored compassion: "It's impossible not to feel pity for her, and I rejoice when I succeed in feeling it...

...Cold comfort, when she rightly suspected Tolstoy of planning to disinherit his family materially as well as morally...

...Creativity is spiritual," he assured Bulgakov, "and sexual love is animal...

...He did this, he said, so that she might know, while there was yet time to draw back, what a wicked man he was...

...Whatever one thinks of Tolstoy's views in the abstract, their practical application to his own family was clearly disastrous...

...Did he urge vegetarianism on a bloodthirsty world...

...not the Tolstoy of whom Gorky said that as long as he lived no one in the world need feel wholly an orphan...

...What he saw would surely have dismayed the staunchest believer...

...She tried desperately to arouse his concern: On May 29, Bulgakov notes, "she walked out into a field and lay down in a ditch...

...The editors preface Bulgakov's book with a list of dramatis personae: some 20 members of the Tolstoy family, with the inevitable panoply of overlapping patronymics, plus a good number of "Associates and Frequent Visitors to Yas-naya Polyana...

...BULGAKOV owed his appointment as Tolstoy's secretary to this same Chertkov, who recommended him for the job with the intention of using him as a spy...

...Sonya, who had somehow managed to survive nearly half a century with Tolstoy, was finally going to pieces under the hammer blows of Chertkov's triumphant machinations and her husband's silent withdrawal from her...

...For 30 years—since his "conversion" of 1881— he had struggled, manfully but ineffectually, to reconcile theory and practice...

...Partisan though he was...

...Yet Bulgakov shows him calmly continuing to play the sage amid domestic turbulence, indefatigably churning out tracts on the good life, answering letters, dispensing advice...

...Tolstoy saw his life in terms of the classic struggle between high brow and low loins...

...not Tolstoy the national conscience, intuitively expressing what was best in "the people...

...His analysis was flattering to neither Chertkov nor Tolstoy's daughter: "The former aims at the moral destruction of Tolstoy's wife in order to get control of his manuscripts...

...Did he bemoan the futility of life lived under the shadow of certain death...

...Sonya's discovery that the secret will had been signed, after finding a diary Tolstoy called "For myself alone," virtually unhinged her...

...The diary as declaration of moral bankruptcy, as caveat emptor...

...Sonya: "Everything he does comes from one source: vanity, thirst for fame, the need to be talked about as much as possible...

...For a man of such ready emotion—Bulgakov has him bursting into tears at least once a week—Tolstoy was appallingly callous toward his wife...

...Tolstoy was riven by the old sick split between body and soul...

...Did he preach love of the downtrodden and oppressed...

...who met Tolstoy soon after his "conversion" and subsequently became his closest associate and most energetic disciple, incessantly urged Tolstoy to keep the faith, to live up to his principles and renounce his worldly ways...

...If there is a spiritual life, then love is a degradation...

...Recovering quickly, Sonya entered into the spirit of the thing—if they were to read each other's most intimate confessions, so be it—and from that time forth the two of them kept their voluminous journals in the sure knowledge that each would sooner or later read all the other had set down...

...I try only to act as I should, because what I do is between me and God, and what she does is between her and God...

...Did he fancy himself a prophet, a voice crying in the wilderness...

...With Tolstoy's burgeoning fame the stakes grew steadily bigger...

...he tried hard not to take sides in the free-for-all that raged around Tolstoy in the last months of his life...

...Did he publicly advocate chastity, even between man and wife...

...Sonya's comment: "We don't try to justify our lack of any profound love by pretending to love the whole universe...

...Sonya calmly continued to bear him children —to the princely total of 13—just as if nothing had been said...

...In the hands of Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sonya, the diary served other purposes too...

...No telephone, no tv to fill the long summer afternoons, the longer winter nights: instead, a structure of manners for the slow accretion of daily event...

...You should undergo treatment...