No one ever told him that I had come, though I implored every one to do so. It is difficult to say who was responsible for this cruelty. Every one was afraid of accelerating his death by agitating him; that was also the doctors’ opinion. Who can tell? Perhaps our meeting and my ways of looking after him to which he was accustomed, might have revived him. In one of his letters to me, which I have recently published, Leo Nikolaevich writes that he dreads falling ill without me.
The doctors allowed me to see my husband when he was now hardly breathing, lying motionless on his back, with his eyes already closed. I whispered softly some tender words in his ear, hoping that he might still hear how I had been all the time there in Astapovo and how I loved him to the end. I don’t remember what more I said to him, but two deep sighs, as though the result of a terrible effort, came as an answer to my words, and then all was still….
All the days and nights that followed, until his body was removed, I spent by the dead, and in me too life became cold. The body was taken to Yasnaya Polyana; a multitude of people came there, but I saw and recognized no one, and the day after the funeral I collapsed with the same illness, pneumonia, though in a less dangerous form, and I was in bed for eighteen days.
A great comfort to me at the time was the presence of my sister Tatyana Andreevna Kuzminskii, and of Leo Nikolaevich’s cousin, Varvara Valeryanovna Nagornaya. My children, tired out, returned to their families.
XIII
AND THEN THERE began my lonely life in Yasnaya Polyana, and the energy which I used to spend on life was and is directed only to this, that I may endure my sorrowful existence worthily and with submission to the will of God. I try to occupy myself only with what in some way or another concerns the memory of Leo Nikolaevich.
I live in Yasnaya Polyana keeping the house and its surroundings as they were when Leo Nikolaevich was alive, and looking after his grave. I have kept for myself two hundred desyatins of land with the apple orchard and the plantations, the making of which had given us such pleasure. The greater part of the land (475 desyatins), with the fine, carefully preserved woods, I sold to my daughter Alexandra to be transferred to the peasants.
I also sold my Moscow house to the municipality, and I sold the last edition of the works of Leo Tolstoy, and gave all the proceeds to my children. But they, and particularly the grandchildren, are so numerous! Including the daughters-in-law and myself, we are now a family of thirty-eight, and my help was, therefore, far from satisfactory.
I always feel in my heart profound gratitude to the Sovereign Emperor for granting me a pension, which allows me to live in security and to keep the manor of Yasnaya Polyana.
Three years have now passed. I look sadly on the havoc in Yasnaya Polyana, how the trees which we planted are being cut down, how the beauty of the place is gradually being spoiled, now that everything has been handed over to the timber-merchants and peasants who frequently have painful quarrels, now about the land and now about the woods. And what is going to happen to the manor and the house after my death?
Almost daily I visit the grave; I thank God for the happiness granted to me in early life, and as to the last troubles between us, I look upon them as a trial and a redemption of sin before death. Thy will be done.
Countess Sophie Tolstoy.
October 28, 1913.
Yasnava Polyana.
NOTES
. IN THE Book of Genealogies of the Nobility of the Moscow Government, Vol. I, page 122, it is said of S. A. T.’s father: “Andrey Evstafevich, son of a chemist, born 9 April, 1808, a physician on the staff of the Moscow Palace Control, collegiate assessor 1842, State Councillor 1864.”
. This was the former name of the Commandant’s Board.
. Alexander Alexandrovich Bers, first cousin of S. A. T.
. Born 3 December, 1789, died 25 March, 1855. Buried in Petersburg in the Volkov Lutheran Cemetery. Peterburgskii Necropol, Petersburg, 1912, Vol. I, page 204.
. In The Book of Genealogies of the Nobility of the Moscow Government, Vol. I, page 122, the Bers are included under Section III, i. e. among those families which were promoted to the title of nobility through the civil service. The year of their promotion was 1843. The right to the coat-of-arms was granted by Supreme Order to the father of S. A. T. in 1847. See V. Lukomskii and S. Troinizkii, List of persons to whom has been granted by H. I. M. the right to coats-of-arms and the title of nobility of the All-Russian Empire and of the Kingdom of Poland, Petersburg, 1911, page 14.
. Alexander Evstafevich Bers, born 18 February, 1807, died 6 September, 1871. See Peterburgskii Necropol, Vol. I, page 204; also V. Lukomskii and S. Troinizkii, page 14.
. In the Tula Province, twenty-five versts from Yasnaya Polyana.
. A. M. Islenev, born 16 July, 1794, died 23 April, 1882. Leo Tolstoy, who knew him well, described him as the father in Childhood Boyhood and Youth. See P. Sergeenko, From the Life of L. N. Tolstoy and How Count L. N. Tolstoy Lives and Works, Moscow, 1898, page 40.
. The well-known Vladimir Alexandrovich Islavin, State Councillor, born 29 November, 1818, died 27 May, 1895, author of the The Samoyeds, their Domestic and Social Life, Petersburg, 1847, which at the time was much discussed in newspapers and magazines. See V. I. Maezkov’s Systematic Catalogue of Russian Books, A. F. Basunov, Petersburg, 1869, page 404.
. There were five sons and three daughters, The Book of Genealogies, Vol. I, pages 122 and 123. The best known of these, besides Sophie Andreevna, were: Tatyana Andreevna (by marriage Kuzminskii) born 24 October 1846, the author of My Reminiscences of Countess Marie Nikolaevna Tolstoy, Petersburg, 1914; Stepan Andreevich Bers, born 21 July 1855, author of Reminiscences of L. N. Tolstoy, Smolensk, 1894; Peter Andreevich Bers, born 26 August 1849, died 19 May 1910, the editor of Detskyii Otdikh (1881-1882), and co-editor with L. D. Obolenskii of the collection of Stories for Children by I. S. Turgenev and L. N. Tolstoy, 1883 and 1886; Vacheslav Andreevich Bers, born 3 May 1861, died 19 May, 1907, an engineer who was killed for no obvious reason by workmen during the revolutionary days in Petersburg. Leo N. Tolstoy was very fond of him. See P. Biryukov, How L. N. T. Composed the Popular Calendar, 1911.
. A. Y. Davidov, 1823-1885, professor of mathematics in the University of Moscow, author of popular text-books on algebra and geometry.
. N. A. Sergievskii, 1827-1892, a writer on theology, author of many scholarly theological books, founder and editor of The Orthodox Review, professor of theology in the University of Moscow.
. In the Natasha of War and Peace there are many characteristics of S. A. T. and of her sister, Tatyana Andreevna Kuzminskii. According to S. A. T., Leo Nikolaevich made the following remark about his heroine: “I took Tanya, ground her up with Sonya, and there came out Natasha.” See P. Biryukov, Biography of L. N. T., Vol. II, page 32.
. In S. A. T.’s story Natasha L. N. T. recognized himself in the hero, Dublitskii, and he wrote to her in September, 1862: “I am Dublitskii, but to marry merely because I needed a wife — that I could not do. I demand something tremendous, impossible from marriage; I demand that I should be loved as much as I am able to love.” L. N. T. doubted whether a woman could fall in love with him deeply and completely, as he was not good-looking. On 28 August, 1862, he put down in his diary: “I got up in the usual despondency. I thought out a society for apprentices. A sweet, placid night. Ugly face, don’t think of marriage, your vocation is different and much has been given you instead.” L. N. T.’s Letters to his Wife, edited by A. E. Gruzinskii, 1913. P. Biryukov, Biography of L. N. T., Vol. I, page 471.
. M. N. Tolstoi, 7 March, 1830 — 6 April, 1912, sister of L. N. T. In the ‘sixties she went abroad with her brother Nikolai and lived with him at Hyères in the South of France. After her brother’s death, M. N. T., overcome with grief, did not wish to return to Russia and settled for a short time in Algiers. She returned from there in 1862 and visited Yasnaya Polyana for a short time and met S. A. T. and her mother there. See T. A. Kuzminskii, My Reminiscences of Marie N. Tolstoy, Petersburg, 1914. P. Biryukov, Countess Marie N. Tolstoy, in “Russkaya Vedomostii,” 1912, Moscow. A. Khiryakov, L. N. Tolstoy’s Sister, in “Solitse Rossii,” 1912. S. Tolstoy, To the Portrait of Countess Marie N. Tolstoy in Tolstovskii Ezhegodnik, 1912. L. N. Tolstoy’s Letters to Marie N. Tolstoy in New Collection
