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Pavel Basinsky
Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise

We all take courage in front of each other and forget that all of us, unless we love, are pitiful, pitiful. But we are so brave and pretend to be angry and self-confident that we ourselves fall for this and mistake sick chickens for terrible lions ...

From a letter from Leo Tolstoy to V.G. Chertkov

Chapter first
Departure or flight?

On the night of October 27-28, 1910 1
All dates are given according to the old style. - Note here and below. ed.

An incredible event took place in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province, out of the ordinary, even for such an unusual place as Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate of the world-famous writer and thinker - Count Leo Tolstoy. The eighty-two-year-old count at night secretly fled from his house in an unknown direction, accompanied by his personal doctor Makovitsky.

Newspaper eyes

The information space of that time did not differ much from the present. The news of the scandalous event instantly spread throughout Russia and around the world. On October 29, urgent telegrams began to arrive from Tula to the Petersburg Telegraph Agency (PTA), which were reprinted by newspapers the next day. “The shocking news was received that L.N. Tolstoy, accompanied by Dr. Makovitsky, unexpectedly left Yasnaya Polyana and left. Having left, L.N. Tolstoy left a letter saying that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever.

About this letter written by L.N. for his sleeping wife and handed over to her in the morning by their youngest daughter Sasha, even Tolstoy's companion Makovitsky did not know. He himself read about it in the papers.

The most efficient of all was the Moscow newspaper " Russian word". On October 30, it published a report by its own Tula correspondent with detailed information about what happened in Yasnaya Polyana.

"Tula, 29, X ( urgent). Having returned from Yasnaya Polyana, I present the details of Lev Nikolayevich's departure.

Lev Nikolaevich left yesterday at 5 o'clock in the morning, when it was still dark.

Lev Nikolaevich came to the coachman's room and ordered the horses to be laid down.

The coachman Adrian carried out the order.

When the horses were ready, Lev Nikolaevich, together with Dr. Makovitsky, took the necessary things packed the night before, and went to the Shchekino station.

The postman Filka rode ahead, lighting the way with a torch.

At st. Shchekino Lev Nikolayevich took a ticket to one of the stations of the Moscow-Kursk railway and left with the first passing train.

When in the morning the news of Lev Nikolayevich's sudden departure became known in Yasnaya Polyana, a terrible commotion arose there. The despair of the wife of Lev Nikolaevich, Sofya Andreevna, defies description.

This message, which the whole world was talking about the next day, was not printed on the front page, but on the third. The front page, as was customary at the time, was given over to advertisements for all sorts of goods.

"The best friend of the stomach wine Saint-Raphael."

“Small sturgeons are fish. 20 kopecks a pound.

Having received a nightly telegram from Tula, Russkoye Slovo immediately sent its correspondent to the Khamovniki Tolstoy House (today it is the Leo Tolstoy House-Museum between the Park Kultury and Frunzenskaya metro stations). The newspaper hoped that perhaps the count had fled from Yasnaya Polyana to the Moscow estate. But, the newspaper writes, “in the old manor house of the Tolstoys it was quiet and calm. Nothing said that Lev Nikolaevich could come to the old ashes. Locked gate. Everyone in the house is asleep."

A young journalist Konstantin Orlov, a theater reviewer, the son of a follower of Tolstoy, a teacher and a member of the People's Will, Vladimir Fedorovich Orlov, depicted in the stories "Dream" and "There is no one to blame in the world," was sent after Tolstoy's alleged escape route. He overtook the fugitive already in Kozelsk and secretly accompanied him to Astapovo, from where he informed Sofya Andreevna and Tolstoy's children by telegram that their husband and father were seriously ill and were at the junction railway station in the house of her boss I.I. Ozolin.

If not for Orlov's initiative, the relatives would have learned about the whereabouts of the terminally ill L.N. not before all the newspapers reported it. Do I need to say how painful it would be for the family? Therefore, unlike Makovitsky, who regarded the activities of the Russian Word as "detective", Tolstoy's eldest daughter Tatyana Lvovna Sukhotina, according to her memoirs, was "to death" grateful to the journalist Orlov.

“My father is dying somewhere nearby, but I don’t know where he is. And I can't take care of him. Maybe I won't see him again. Will they even let me see him on his deathbed? A sleepless night. Real torture, - later Tatyana Lvovna recalled her and the whole family's state of mind after Tolstoy's "escape" (her expression). – But there was a person unknown to us who understood and took pity on the Tolstoy family. He telegraphed us: “Lev Nikolayevich is in Astapovo with the head of the station. Temperature 40°“”.

In general, it must be admitted that in relation to the family and, above all, to Sofya Andreevna, the newspapers behaved more restrained and delicately than in relation to the Yasnaya Polyana fugitive, whose every step was mercilessly monitored, although all the newspapermen knew that in a farewell note Tolstoy asked: don't look for it! “Please ... do not follow me if you find out where I am,” he wrote to his wife.

“In Belev, Lev Nikolayevich went out to the buffet and ate scrambled eggs,” the newspapermen savored the modest act of the vegetarian Tolstoy. They interrogated his coachman and Filka, the lackeys and peasants of Yasnaya Polyana, cashiers and barmaids at the stations, the cab driver who drove L.N. from Kozelsk to the Optina Monastery, hotel monks and anyone who could tell anything about the path of the eighty-two-year old man, whose only desire was to run away, hide, become invisible to the world.

"Don't look for him! - Odessa News cynically exclaimed, referring to the family. “He is not yours – he is everyone!”

"Of course, his new location will be opened very soon," the Peterburgskaya Gazeta said coolly.

L.N. did not like newspapers (although he followed them) and did not hide it. Another thing is S.A. The writer's wife was well aware that her husband's reputation and her own reputation, willy-nilly, are made up of newspaper publications. Therefore, she willingly communicated with newspapermen and gave interviews, explaining certain oddities in Tolstoy's behavior or his statements and not forgetting (this was her weakness) to indicate her role with the great man.

Therefore, the attitude of newspapermen to S.A. it was rather warm. The general tone was set by the "Russian Word" by Vlas Doroshevich's feuilleton "Sofya Andreevna", placed in the issue of October 31. “The old lion went to die alone,” Doroshevich wrote. “The eagle has flown away from us so high that where can we follow its flight?!”

(Followed, and how they followed!)

S.A. he compared it to Yasodara, the young wife of the Buddha. It was a definite compliment, because Yasodara was innocent of her husband's departure. Meanwhile, evil tongues compared Tolstoy's wife not with Yasodara, but with Xanthippe, the wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who allegedly tormented her husband with quarrelsomeness and misunderstanding of his worldview.

Doroshevich rightly pointed out that without his wife Tolstoy would not have lived such a long life and would not have written his later works. (Although what does Yasodara have to do with it?)

The feuilleton's conclusion was as follows. Tolstoy is a "superman", and his act cannot be judged by ordinary norms. S.A. - a simple earthly woman who did everything she could for her husband while he was just a man. But in the "superhuman" realm, he is inaccessible to her, and this is her tragedy.

“Sofya Andreevna is alone. She does not have her child, her elder child, her titan child, who must be thought about, taken care of every minute: is he warm, is he full, is he healthy? There is no one else to give a drop of your whole life to.

S.A. read a feuilleton. She liked him. She was grateful to the Russkoye Slovo newspaper for both Doroshevich's article and Orlov's telegram. Because of this, it was possible to ignore small things, such as an unpleasant description appearance wife of Tolstoy, which was given by the same Orlov: “The wandering eyes of Sofya Andreevna expressed inner torment. Her head was shaking. She was dressed in a carelessly thrown hood. One could forgive the night surveillance of the Moscow house, and a very indecent indication of the amount that the family spent to hire a separate train from Tula to Astapovo - 492 rubles 27 kopecks, and Vasily Rozanov's transparent hint that L.N. nevertheless, he ran away from his family: “The prisoner left the delicate dungeon.”

If we run through the headlines of the newspapers that covered Tolstoy's departure, we find that the word "departure" was rarely used in them. "SUDDEN DEPARTURE ...", "DISAPPEARANCE ...", "FLIGHT ...", "TOLSTOY QUITS HOME" ("TOLSTOY LEAVES THE HOUSE").

And the point here is by no means the desire of newspapermen to "warm up" readers. The event itself was scandalous. The fact is that the circumstances of Tolstoy's disappearance from Yasnaya, indeed, were much more reminiscent of flight than a majestic departure.

Nightmare

First, the event happened at night, when the Countess was fast asleep.

Secondly, Tolstoy's route was so carefully classified that for the first time she learned about his whereabouts only on November 2 from Orlov's telegram.

Thirdly (which neither the newspapermen nor S.A. knew about), this route, in any case, its ultimate goal, was unknown to the fugitive himself. Tolstoy clearly imagined where and from what he was fleeing, but where he was heading and where his last refuge would be, he not only did not know, but tried not to think about it.

In the first hours of departure, only Tolstoy's daughter Sasha and her friend Feokritova knew that L.N. intended to visit his sister, nun Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya in the Shamorda Monastery. But even that, on the night of the flight, was in doubt.

“You will stay, Sasha,” he told me. “I'll call you in a few days, when I've finally decided where I'm going. And I will go, in all likelihood, to Mashenka in Shamordino, ”recalled A.L. Thick.

Having awakened Dr. Makovitsky first at night, Tolstoy did not even tell him this information. But the main thing is that he did not tell the doctor that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever, which he told Sasha about. Makovitsky in the first hours thought that they were going to Kochety, the estate of M.S. Tolstoy's son-in-law. Sukhotin on the border of the Tula and Oryol provinces. Tolstoy has traveled there more than once over the past two years, alone and with his wife, to escape the influx of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. There he took, as he put it, "vacation". His eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, lived in Kochety. She, unlike Sasha, did not approve of her father's desire to leave her mother, although she stood on the side of her father in their conflict. In any case, in Kochety from S.A. there was no hiding. The appearance in Shamordin was less calculable. The arrival of the excommunicated Tolstoy to an Orthodox monastery was an act no less scandalous than the departure itself. And finally, there Tolstoy could well count on the support and silence of his sister.

Poor Makovitsky did not immediately realize that Tolstoy had decided to leave home forever. Thinking that they were going to Kochety for a month, Makovitsky did not take all his money with him. He also did not know that Tolstoy's fortune at the time of his flight was estimated at fifty rubles in his notebook and change in his purse. It was only during Tolstoy's farewell to Sasha that Makovitsky heard about Shamordin. And only when they were sitting in the carriage, Tolstoy began to consult with him: where to go further away?

He knew whom to take with him as companions. It was necessary to have an unflappable nature and devotion to Makovitsky, so as not to be confused in this situation. Makovitsky immediately offered to go to Bessarabia, to the worker Gusarov, who lived with his family on his own land. “L.N. didn't answer anything."

Let's go to Shchekino station. A train to Tula was expected in twenty minutes, and a train to Gorbachevo in an hour and a half. Through Gorbachevo to Shamordino, the path is shorter, but Tolstoy, wanting to confuse the tracks and fearing that S.A. wakes up and overtakes him, offered to go through Tula. Makovitsky dissuaded them: they would definitely recognize them in Tula! Let's go to Gorbachevo ...

Agree, this is a little like leaving. Even if you understand this not literally (he left on foot), but in a figurative sense. But it is precisely the literal idea of ​​​​the departure of Tolstoy that warms the souls of the townsfolk to this day. By all means - on foot, on a dark night, with a knapsack over his shoulders and a stick in his hand. And this is an eighty-two-year-old man, although strong, but very sick, suffering from fainting, memory lapses, heart failure and varicose veins in his legs. What would be great about such a "care"? But for some reason, it is pleasant for the layman to imagine that the great Tolstoy just picked up and left like that.

Ivan Bunin's book The Liberation of Tolstoy quotes with admiration the words written by Tolstoy in his farewell letter: “I do what old people of my age usually do. They leave worldly life to live in solitude and in silence the last days of their lives.

Do old people usually do it?

S.A. also drew attention to these words. Having barely recovered from the first shock caused by her husband's night flight, she began to write letters to him with entreaties to return, counting on third parties to mediate in their transfer. And in the second letter, which Tolstoy did not have time to read, she objected to him: “You write that the old people are leaving the world. Yes, where did you get it? Old peasants live out on the stove, in the circle of their families and grandchildren, their last days, the same is true in the lordly and every way of life. Is it natural for a weak old man to leave the care, cares and love of the children and grandchildren around him?

She was wrong. The departure of old men and even old women was a common thing in peasant houses. They went on pilgrimage and simply - to separate huts. They left to live out their lives so as not to interfere with the young, not to be reproached with an extra piece, when the participation of an old person in field and domestic work was no longer possible. They left when sin "settled" in the house: drunkenness, strife, unnatural sexual relations. Yes, they left. But they did not run away from their old wife at night with the consent and support of their daughter.

Makovitsky's notes:

“In the morning, at 3 o’clock, L.N. in a dressing gown, in shoes on bare feet, with a candle, woke me up; a face of pain, agitation and determination.

- I decided to leave. You will come with me. I'll go upstairs and you come, just don't wake Sofya Andreyevna. We will not take a lot of things - the most necessary. Sasha will come for us in three days and bring what we need.

A "decisive" face did not mean composure. This is the determination before jumping off a cliff. As a doctor, Makovitsky notes: “Nerven. I felt his pulse - 100. What are the "necessary things" for the care of an 82-year-old man? Tolstoy thought about this least of all. He was concerned about Sasha hiding from S.A. manuscripts of his diaries. He took with him a self-writing pen, notebooks. Things and provisions were packed by Makovitsky, Sasha and her friend Varvara Feokritova. It turned out that there were still a lot of “most necessary” things, a large travel suitcase was required, which cannot be obtained without noise, without waking S.A.

There were three doors between the bedrooms of Tolstoy and his wife. S.A. kept them open at night to wake up to any alarm from her husband's room. She explained this by saying that if he needed help at night, she would not hear through closed doors. But the main reason was different. She was afraid of his night flight. For some time now, this threat has become real. You can even accurately name the date when it hung in the air of the Yasnaya Polyana house. It happened on July 15, 1910. After a stormy explanation with her husband, S.A. spent a sleepless night and wrote him a letter in the morning:

“Levochka, dear, I write, but I don’t speak, because after a sleepless night it’s hard for me to talk, I’m too worried and can again upset everyone, but I want, I want terribly to be quiet and prudent. At night, I thought about everything, and this is what became painfully clear to me: with one hand you caressed me, with the other you showed a knife. Yesterday I vaguely felt that this knife had already wounded my heart. This knife is a threat, and a very decisive one, to take the word of the promise back and quietly leave me if I am the same as now ... So, every night, like last, I will listen, have you gone where? Any absence of yours, however slightly longer, I will be tormented that you have left forever. Think, dear Lyovochka, because your departure and your threat are equal to the threat of murder.

When Sasha, Varvara and Makovitsky were packing their things (they acted “like conspirators,” Feokritova recalled, extinguished the candles, hearing any noise from S.A.’s room), Tolstoy tightly closed all three doors leading to his wife’s bedroom, and yet without noise he took out the suitcase. But it turned out to be not enough, it turned out to be a bundle with a plaid and a coat, a basket with provisions. However, Tolstoy did not wait for the end of the training camp. He hurried to the coachman's room to wake the coachman Andrian and help him harness the horses.

Care? Or escape...

From Tolstoy's diary:

“... I’m going to the stable to order to lay; Dushan, Sasha, Varya finish styling. Night - I gouge out my eye, I go off the path to the outbuilding, I get into the thicket, piercing myself, knocking on trees, I fall, I lose my hat, I can’t find it, I get out by force, I go home, I take my hat and with a flashlight I get to the stable, I order it to be mortgaged. Sasha, Dushan, Varya come ... I'm trembling, waiting for the chase.

What a day later, when these lines were written, seemed to him a "thicket", from which he "forced" got out, was his apple orchard, well-trodden by Tolstoy up and down.

What do old people usually do?

“They packed things for about half an hour,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. “Father had already begun to worry, he was in a hurry, but our hands were trembling, the belts would not tighten, the suitcases would not close.”

Alexandra Lvovna also noticed determination in her father's face. “I was waiting for his departure, I was waiting every day, every hour, but nevertheless, when he said:“ I’m leaving completely, ”it struck me as something new, unexpected. I will never forget his figure at the door, in a blouse, with a candle, and his bright, beautiful, determined face.

“A resolute and bright face,” Feokritova wrote. But let's not delude ourselves. Deep October night, when in rural houses, it doesn’t matter, peasant or lordly, you can’t see own hand when you bring it up to your eyes. An old man in light clothes, with a candle to his face, suddenly appeared on the threshold. It will amaze anyone!

Of course, Tolstoy's fortitude was phenomenal. But it says more about his ability not to get lost under any circumstances. A friend of the Yasnaya Polyana house, musician Alexander Goldenweiser, recalled one incident. One winter, they rode in a sledge to a village nine miles from Yasnaya to deliver help to a needy peasant family.

“When we were approaching the Zasek station, a small snowstorm began, which became stronger, so that in the end we lost our way and drove without a road. Having strayed a little, we noticed a forest gatehouse not far away and went to it in order to ask the forester how to get on the road. When we arrived at the gatehouse, three or four huge sheep dogs jumped out at us and surrounded the horse and sledge with frantic barking. To be honest, I felt terrified… L.N. with a resolute movement he handed me the reins and said: “Hold it,” and he himself got up, got out of the sleigh, hooted loudly and, empty-handed, boldly walked straight at the dogs. And suddenly the terrible dogs immediately calmed down, parted and gave him the way, as if he were in power. L.N. calmly passed between them and entered the gatehouse. At that moment, with his flowing gray beard, he looked more like a fairy-tale hero than a weak eighty-year old man ... "

So on the night of October 28, 1910, self-control did not leave him. He met the assistants walking with things halfway. “It was dirty, our feet slipped, and we hardly moved in the dark,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. - A blue light flickered near the outbuilding. Father walked towards us.

“Ah, it's you,” he said, “well, this time I got there safely. We are already tied up. Well, I'll go ahead and shine for you. Oh, why did you give Sasha the heaviest things? he turned reproachfully to Varvara Mikhailovna. He took the basket from her hands and carried it, while Varvara Mikhailovna helped me to carry the suitcase. My father walked in front, occasionally pressing the button of the electric torch and immediately releasing it, which made it seem even darker. Father always saved money and here, as always, he regretted wasting electrical energy.

Sasha persuaded him to take this flashlight after his father wandered in the garden.

Yet when Tolstoy helped the coachman to harness the horse, "his hands trembled, did not obey, and he could not fasten the buckle in any way." Then he "sat in a corner of the carriage house on a suitcase and immediately lost heart."

Sharp mood swings will accompany Tolstoy all the way from Yasnaya to Astapov, where he died on the night of November 7, 1910. Decisiveness and awareness that he acted in the only right way will be replaced by lack of will and an acute sense of guilt. No matter how he prepared for this departure, and he had been preparing for it for twenty-five (!) years, it is clear that neither mentally nor physically he was ready for it. You could imagine this departure in your head as much as you like, but the very first real steps, like wandering in your own garden, presented surprises for which Tolstoy and his companions were not ready.

But why did his resolute mood in the house suddenly change to discouragement in the carriage house? It would seem that things are collected (in two hours - just amazing!), the horses are almost ready, and there are several minutes left before the "liberation". And he loses heart.

In addition to physiological reasons (did not get enough sleep, worried, got lost, helped carry things along a slippery path in the dark), there is another circumstance that can only be understood by clearly imagining the situation as a whole. Wake up S.A. when they were packing, it would be a deafening scandal. But still a scandal inside the home walls. Scene among the "initiates". It was no stranger to such scenes, recently they constantly took place in the Yasnaya Polyana house. But as Tolstoy moved away from the hearth, more and more new faces were involved in his departure. It was exactly what he didn't want to happen. Tolstoy turned out to be a lump of snow, around which a grandiose snowball was wrapping up, and this happened with every minute of its movement in space.

It is impossible to leave without waking up the coachman Andrian Bolkhin. And they also need a groom, thirty-three-year-old Filka (Philip Borisov), who, sitting on horseback, will light the road with a torch in front of the carriage. When L.N. was in the carriage house, the snowball had already begun to grow, grow, and it was becoming more and more impossible to stop it every minute. The gendarmes, newsmen, governors, priests were still sleeping peacefully... Even Tolstoy himself could not imagine how many people would become willing and involuntary accomplices in his flight, up to ministers, chief bishops, Stolypin and Nicholas II.

Of course, he could not fail to understand that he would not succeed in disappearing from Yasnaya Polyana unnoticed. Even Fedya Protasov in The Living Corpse, who imitated suicide, could not disappear unnoticed, but, in the end, was exposed. But let's not forget that in addition to The Living Corpse, he wrote Father Sergius and Posthumous Notes of Elder Fyodor Kuzmich. And if at the moment of leaving he was warmed by some thought, then this one: famous person, disappearing, dissolves in human space, becomes one of these small ones, invisible to everyone. The legend about him exists separately, and he - separately. And it doesn't matter who you were in the past: the Russian Tsar, the famous miracle worker or the great writer. It is important that here and now you are the simplest and most ordinary person.

When Tolstoy was sitting on a suitcase in the carriage house, in an old Armenian coat, put on a wadded undershirt, in an old knitted cap, he seemed to be fully equipped for the realization of his cherished dream. But... This time, 5 o'clock in the morning, "between the wolf and the dog." This dank end of October is the most disgusting Russian off-season. This is an unbearable languor of waiting, when the beginning of departure is laid, the native walls are abandoned and there is no way back, but ... The horses are not yet ready, Yasnaya Polyana has not yet been abandoned ... And the wife with whom he lived for forty-eight years, who gave birth to him thirteen children, of whom seven are alive, from whom twenty-three grandchildren were born, on whose shoulders he shouldered the entire Yasnaya Polyana economy, all his publishing business on fiction, who several times rewrote parts of his two main novels and many other works, who did not sleep at night in the Crimea, where he died nine years ago, because no one but her could take care of him in the most intimate way - this dear person can wake up at any second, find closed doors, a mess in his room and understand that something, what she feared most in the world had come true!

But has it happened? It doesn't take a wild imagination to imagine the appearance of S.A. in the carriage house, while her husband fastened the horse's buckle with trembling hands. This is no longer a Tolstoyan, but a purely Gogolian situation. No wonder Tolstoy both loved and disliked Gogol's story "The Carriage", in which the district aristocrat Pythagor Pythagorovich Chertokutsky hid from the guests in the carriage house, but was exposed in the most embarrassing way. He considered this thing to be an excellently written, but ridiculous joke. Meanwhile, "Carriage" is not a funny thing at all. The general's visit to the carriage house, where little Chertokutsky huddled on a seat under a leather canopy, is, after all, a visit from Fate itself, which overtakes a person precisely at the moment when he is least ready for it. How pathetic and helpless before her!

Memories of Sasha:

“At first, my father hurried the coachman, and then sat down in the corner of the carriage house on a suitcase and immediately lost heart:

“I feel that they are about to overtake us, and then everything is gone. You can’t leave without a scandal.”

We all take courage in front of each other and forget that all of us, unless we love, are pitiful, pitiful. But we are so brave and pretend to be angry and self-confident that we ourselves fall for this and mistake sick chickens for terrible lions ...

From a letter from Leo Tolstoy to V.G. Chertkov

Chapter first
Departure or flight?

On the night of October 27-28, 1910 1
All dates are given according to the old style. - Note here and below. ed.

An incredible event took place in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province, out of the ordinary, even for such an unusual place as Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate of the world-famous writer and thinker - Count Leo Tolstoy. The eighty-two-year-old count at night secretly fled from his house in an unknown direction, accompanied by his personal doctor Makovitsky.

Newspaper eyes

The information space of that time did not differ much from the present. The news of the scandalous event instantly spread throughout Russia and around the world. On October 29, urgent telegrams began to arrive from Tula to the Petersburg Telegraph Agency (PTA), which were reprinted by newspapers the next day. “The shocking news was received that L.N. Tolstoy, accompanied by Dr. Makovitsky, unexpectedly left Yasnaya Polyana and left. Having left, L.N. Tolstoy left a letter saying that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever.

About this letter written by L.N. for his sleeping wife and handed over to her in the morning by their youngest daughter Sasha, even Tolstoy's companion Makovitsky did not know. He himself read about it in the papers.

The most efficient of all was the Moscow newspaper Russkoye Slovo. On October 30, it published a report by its own Tula correspondent with detailed information about what happened in Yasnaya Polyana.

"Tula, 29, X ( urgent). Having returned from Yasnaya Polyana, I present the details of Lev Nikolayevich's departure.

Lev Nikolaevich left yesterday at 5 o'clock in the morning, when it was still dark.

Lev Nikolaevich came to the coachman's room and ordered the horses to be laid down.

The coachman Adrian carried out the order.

When the horses were ready, Lev Nikolaevich, together with Dr. Makovitsky, took the necessary things packed the night before, and went to the Shchekino station.

The postman Filka rode ahead, lighting the way with a torch.

At st. Shchekino Lev Nikolayevich took a ticket to one of the stations of the Moscow-Kursk railway and left with the first passing train.

When in the morning the news of Lev Nikolayevich's sudden departure became known in Yasnaya Polyana, a terrible commotion arose there.

The despair of the wife of Lev Nikolaevich, Sofya Andreevna, defies description.

This message, which the whole world was talking about the next day, was not printed on the front page, but on the third. The front page, as was customary at the time, was given over to advertisements for all sorts of goods.

"The best friend of the stomach wine Saint-Raphael."

“Small sturgeons are fish. 20 kopecks a pound.

Having received a nightly telegram from Tula, Russkoye Slovo immediately sent its correspondent to the Khamovniki Tolstoy House (today it is the Leo Tolstoy House-Museum between the Park Kultury and Frunzenskaya metro stations). The newspaper hoped that perhaps the count had fled from Yasnaya Polyana to the Moscow estate. But, the newspaper writes, “in the old manor house of the Tolstoys it was quiet and calm. Nothing said that Lev Nikolaevich could come to the old ashes. Locked gate. Everyone in the house is asleep."

A young journalist Konstantin Orlov, a theater reviewer, the son of a follower of Tolstoy, a teacher and a member of the People's Will, Vladimir Fedorovich Orlov, depicted in the stories "Dream" and "There is no one to blame in the world," was sent after Tolstoy's alleged escape route. He overtook the fugitive already in Kozelsk and secretly accompanied him to Astapovo, from where he informed Sofya Andreevna and Tolstoy's children by telegram that their husband and father were seriously ill and were at the junction railway station in the house of her boss I.I. Ozolin.

If not for Orlov's initiative, the relatives would have learned about the whereabouts of the terminally ill L.N. not before all the newspapers reported it. Do I need to say how painful it would be for the family? Therefore, unlike Makovitsky, who regarded the activities of the Russian Word as "detective", Tolstoy's eldest daughter Tatyana Lvovna Sukhotina, according to her memoirs, was "to death" grateful to the journalist Orlov.

“My father is dying somewhere nearby, but I don’t know where he is. And I can't take care of him. Maybe I won't see him again. Will they even let me see him on his deathbed? A sleepless night. Real torture, - later Tatyana Lvovna recalled her and the whole family's state of mind after Tolstoy's "escape" (her expression). – But there was a person unknown to us who understood and took pity on the Tolstoy family. He telegraphed us: “Lev Nikolayevich is in Astapovo with the head of the station. Temperature 40°“”.

In general, it must be admitted that in relation to the family and, above all, to Sofya Andreevna, the newspapers behaved more restrained and delicately than in relation to the Yasnaya Polyana fugitive, whose every step was mercilessly monitored, although all the newspapermen knew that in a farewell note Tolstoy asked: don't look for it! “Please ... do not follow me if you find out where I am,” he wrote to his wife.

“In Belev, Lev Nikolayevich went out to the buffet and ate scrambled eggs,” the newspapermen savored the modest act of the vegetarian Tolstoy. They interrogated his coachman and Filka, the lackeys and peasants of Yasnaya Polyana, cashiers and barmaids at the stations, the cab driver who drove L.N. from Kozelsk to the Optina Monastery, hotel monks and anyone who could tell anything about the path of the eighty-two-year old man, whose only desire was to run away, hide, become invisible to the world.

"Don't look for him! - Odessa News cynically exclaimed, referring to the family. “He is not yours – he is everyone!”

"Of course, his new location will be opened very soon," the Peterburgskaya Gazeta said coolly.

L.N. did not like newspapers (although he followed them) and did not hide it. Another thing is S.A. The writer's wife was well aware that her husband's reputation and her own reputation, willy-nilly, are made up of newspaper publications. Therefore, she willingly communicated with newspapermen and gave interviews, explaining certain oddities in Tolstoy's behavior or his statements and not forgetting (this was her weakness) to indicate her role with the great man.

Therefore, the attitude of newspapermen to S.A. it was rather warm. The general tone was set by the "Russian Word" by Vlas Doroshevich's feuilleton "Sofya Andreevna", placed in the issue of October 31. “The old lion went to die alone,” Doroshevich wrote. “The eagle has flown away from us so high that where can we follow its flight?!”

(Followed, and how they followed!)

S.A. he compared it to Yasodara, the young wife of the Buddha. It was a definite compliment, because Yasodara was innocent of her husband's departure. Meanwhile, evil tongues compared Tolstoy's wife not with Yasodara, but with Xanthippe, the wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who allegedly tormented her husband with quarrelsomeness and misunderstanding of his worldview.

Doroshevich rightly pointed out that without his wife Tolstoy would not have lived such a long life and would not have written his later works. (Although what does Yasodara have to do with it?)

The feuilleton's conclusion was as follows. Tolstoy is a "superman", and his act cannot be judged by ordinary norms. S.A. - a simple earthly woman who did everything she could for her husband while he was just a man. But in the "superhuman" realm, he is inaccessible to her, and this is her tragedy.

“Sofya Andreevna is alone. She does not have her child, her elder child, her titan child, who must be thought about, taken care of every minute: is he warm, is he full, is he healthy? There is no one else to give a drop of your whole life to.

S.A. read a feuilleton. She liked him. She was grateful to the Russkoye Slovo newspaper for both Doroshevich's article and Orlov's telegram. Because of this, it was possible not to pay attention to trifles, such as the unpleasant description of the appearance of Tolstoy's wife, which Orlov gave: “The wandering eyes of Sofya Andreevna expressed inner torment. Her head was shaking. She was dressed in a carelessly thrown hood. One could forgive the night surveillance of the Moscow house, and a very indecent indication of the amount that the family spent to hire a separate train from Tula to Astapovo - 492 rubles 27 kopecks, and Vasily Rozanov's transparent hint that L.N. nevertheless, he ran away from his family: “The prisoner left the delicate dungeon.”

If we run through the headlines of the newspapers that covered Tolstoy's departure, we find that the word "departure" was rarely used in them. "SUDDEN DEPARTURE ...", "DISAPPEARANCE ...", "FLIGHT ...", "TOLSTOY QUITS HOME" ("TOLSTOY LEAVES THE HOUSE").

And the point here is by no means the desire of newspapermen to "warm up" readers. The event itself was scandalous. The fact is that the circumstances of Tolstoy's disappearance from Yasnaya, indeed, were much more reminiscent of flight than a majestic departure.

Nightmare

First, the event happened at night, when the Countess was fast asleep.

Secondly, Tolstoy's route was so carefully classified that for the first time she learned about his whereabouts only on November 2 from Orlov's telegram.

Thirdly (which neither the newspapermen nor S.A. knew about), this route, in any case, its ultimate goal, was unknown to the fugitive himself. Tolstoy clearly imagined where and from what he was fleeing, but where he was heading and where his last refuge would be, he not only did not know, but tried not to think about it.

In the first hours of departure, only Tolstoy's daughter Sasha and her friend Feokritova knew that L.N. intended to visit his sister, nun Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya in the Shamorda Monastery. But even that, on the night of the flight, was in doubt.

“You will stay, Sasha,” he told me. “I'll call you in a few days, when I've finally decided where I'm going. And I will go, in all likelihood, to Mashenka in Shamordino, ”recalled A.L. Thick.

Having awakened Dr. Makovitsky first at night, Tolstoy did not even tell him this information. But the main thing is that he did not tell the doctor that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever, which he told Sasha about. Makovitsky in the first hours thought that they were going to Kochety, the estate of M.S. Tolstoy's son-in-law. Sukhotin on the border of the Tula and Oryol provinces. Tolstoy has traveled there more than once over the past two years, alone and with his wife, to escape the influx of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. There he took, as he put it, "vacation". His eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, lived in Kochety. She, unlike Sasha, did not approve of her father's desire to leave her mother, although she stood on the side of her father in their conflict. In any case, in Kochety from S.A. there was no hiding. The appearance in Shamordin was less calculable. The arrival of the excommunicated Tolstoy to an Orthodox monastery was an act no less scandalous than the departure itself. And finally, there Tolstoy could well count on the support and silence of his sister.

Poor Makovitsky did not immediately realize that Tolstoy had decided to leave home forever. Thinking that they were going to Kochety for a month, Makovitsky did not take all his money with him. He also did not know that Tolstoy's fortune at the time of his flight was estimated at fifty rubles in his notebook and change in his purse. It was only during Tolstoy's farewell to Sasha that Makovitsky heard about Shamordin. And only when they were sitting in the carriage, Tolstoy began to consult with him: where to go further away?

He knew whom to take with him as companions. It was necessary to have an unflappable nature and devotion to Makovitsky, so as not to be confused in this situation. Makovitsky immediately offered to go to Bessarabia, to the worker Gusarov, who lived with his family on his own land. “L.N. didn't answer anything."

Let's go to Shchekino station. A train to Tula was expected in twenty minutes, and a train to Gorbachevo in an hour and a half. Through Gorbachevo to Shamordino, the path is shorter, but Tolstoy, wanting to confuse the tracks and fearing that S.A. wakes up and overtakes him, offered to go through Tula. Makovitsky dissuaded them: they would definitely recognize them in Tula! Let's go to Gorbachevo ...

Agree, this is a little like leaving. Even if you understand this not literally (he left on foot), but in a figurative sense. But it is precisely the literal idea of ​​​​the departure of Tolstoy that warms the souls of the townsfolk to this day. By all means - on foot, on a dark night, with a knapsack over his shoulders and a stick in his hand. And this is an eighty-two-year-old man, although strong, but very sick, suffering from fainting, memory lapses, heart failure and varicose veins in his legs. What would be great about such a "care"? But for some reason, it is pleasant for the layman to imagine that the great Tolstoy just picked up and left like that.

Ivan Bunin's book The Liberation of Tolstoy quotes with admiration the words written by Tolstoy in his farewell letter: “I do what old people of my age usually do. They leave worldly life to live in solitude and in silence the last days of their lives.

Do old people usually do it?

S.A. also drew attention to these words. Having barely recovered from the first shock caused by her husband's night flight, she began to write letters to him with entreaties to return, counting on third parties to mediate in their transfer. And in the second letter, which Tolstoy did not have time to read, she objected to him: “You write that the old people are leaving the world. Yes, where did you get it? Old peasants live out on the stove, in the circle of their families and grandchildren, their last days, the same is true in the lordly and every way of life. Is it natural for a weak old man to leave the care, cares and love of the children and grandchildren around him?

She was wrong. The departure of old men and even old women was a common thing in peasant houses. They went on pilgrimage and simply - to separate huts. They left to live out their lives so as not to interfere with the young, not to be reproached with an extra piece, when the participation of an old person in field and domestic work was no longer possible. They left when sin "settled" in the house: drunkenness, strife, unnatural sexual relations. Yes, they left. But they did not run away from their old wife at night with the consent and support of their daughter.

Makovitsky's notes:

“In the morning, at 3 o’clock, L.N. in a dressing gown, in shoes on bare feet, with a candle, woke me up; a face of pain, agitation and determination.

- I decided to leave. You will come with me. I'll go upstairs and you come, just don't wake Sofya Andreyevna. We will not take a lot of things - the most necessary. Sasha will come for us in three days and bring what we need.

A "decisive" face did not mean composure. This is the determination before jumping off a cliff. As a doctor, Makovitsky notes: “Nerven. I felt his pulse - 100. What are the "necessary things" for the care of an 82-year-old man? Tolstoy thought about this least of all. He was concerned about Sasha hiding from S.A. manuscripts of his diaries. He took with him a self-writing pen, notebooks. Things and provisions were packed by Makovitsky, Sasha and her friend Varvara Feokritova. It turned out that there were still a lot of “most necessary” things, a large travel suitcase was required, which cannot be obtained without noise, without waking S.A.

There were three doors between the bedrooms of Tolstoy and his wife. S.A. kept them open at night to wake up to any alarm from her husband's room. She explained this by saying that if he needed help at night, she would not hear through closed doors. But the main reason was different. She was afraid of his night flight. For some time now, this threat has become real. You can even accurately name the date when it hung in the air of the Yasnaya Polyana house. It happened on July 15, 1910. After a stormy explanation with her husband, S.A. spent a sleepless night and wrote him a letter in the morning:

“Levochka, dear, I write, but I don’t speak, because after a sleepless night it’s hard for me to talk, I’m too worried and can again upset everyone, but I want, I want terribly to be quiet and prudent. At night, I thought about everything, and this is what became painfully clear to me: with one hand you caressed me, with the other you showed a knife. Yesterday I vaguely felt that this knife had already wounded my heart. This knife is a threat, and a very decisive one, to take the word of the promise back and quietly leave me if I am the same as now ... So, every night, like last, I will listen, have you gone where? Any absence of yours, however slightly longer, I will be tormented that you have left forever. Think, dear Lyovochka, because your departure and your threat are equal to the threat of murder.

When Sasha, Varvara and Makovitsky were packing their things (they acted “like conspirators,” Feokritova recalled, extinguished the candles, hearing any noise from S.A.’s room), Tolstoy tightly closed all three doors leading to his wife’s bedroom, and yet without noise he took out the suitcase. But it turned out to be not enough, it turned out to be a bundle with a plaid and a coat, a basket with provisions. However, Tolstoy did not wait for the end of the training camp. He hurried to the coachman's room to wake the coachman Andrian and help him harness the horses.

Care? Or escape...

From Tolstoy's diary:

“... I’m going to the stable to order to lay; Dushan, Sasha, Varya finish styling. Night - I gouge out my eye, I go off the path to the outbuilding, I get into the thicket, piercing myself, knocking on trees, I fall, I lose my hat, I can’t find it, I get out by force, I go home, I take my hat and with a flashlight I get to the stable, I order it to be mortgaged. Sasha, Dushan, Varya come ... I'm trembling, waiting for the chase.

What a day later, when these lines were written, seemed to him a "thicket", from which he "forced" got out, was his apple orchard, well-trodden by Tolstoy up and down.

What do old people usually do?

“They packed things for about half an hour,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. “Father had already begun to worry, he was in a hurry, but our hands were trembling, the belts would not tighten, the suitcases would not close.”

Alexandra Lvovna also noticed determination in her father's face. “I was waiting for his departure, I was waiting every day, every hour, but nevertheless, when he said:“ I’m leaving completely, ”it struck me as something new, unexpected. I will never forget his figure at the door, in a blouse, with a candle, and his bright, beautiful, determined face.

“A resolute and bright face,” Feokritova wrote. But let's not delude ourselves. Deep October night, when in rural houses, whether peasant or lordly, you can not see your own hand, if you bring it to your eyes. An old man in light clothes, with a candle to his face, suddenly appeared on the threshold. It will amaze anyone!

Of course, Tolstoy's fortitude was phenomenal. But it says more about his ability not to get lost under any circumstances. A friend of the Yasnaya Polyana house, musician Alexander Goldenweiser, recalled one incident. One winter, they rode in a sledge to a village nine miles from Yasnaya to deliver help to a needy peasant family.

“When we were approaching the Zasek station, a small snowstorm began, which became stronger, so that in the end we lost our way and drove without a road. Having strayed a little, we noticed a forest gatehouse not far away and went to it in order to ask the forester how to get on the road. When we arrived at the gatehouse, three or four huge sheep dogs jumped out at us and surrounded the horse and sledge with frantic barking. To be honest, I felt terrified… L.N. with a resolute movement he handed me the reins and said: “Hold it,” and he himself got up, got out of the sleigh, hooted loudly and, empty-handed, boldly walked straight at the dogs. And suddenly the terrible dogs immediately calmed down, parted and gave him the way, as if he were in power. L.N. calmly passed between them and entered the gatehouse. At that moment, with his flowing gray beard, he looked more like a fairy-tale hero than a weak eighty-year old man ... "

So on the night of October 28, 1910, self-control did not leave him. He met the assistants walking with things halfway. “It was dirty, our feet slipped, and we hardly moved in the dark,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. - A blue light flickered near the outbuilding. Father walked towards us.

“Ah, it's you,” he said, “well, this time I got there safely. We are already tied up. Well, I'll go ahead and shine for you. Oh, why did you give Sasha the heaviest things? he turned reproachfully to Varvara Mikhailovna. He took the basket from her hands and carried it, while Varvara Mikhailovna helped me to carry the suitcase. My father walked in front, occasionally pressing the button of the electric torch and immediately releasing it, which made it seem even darker. Father always saved money and here, as always, he regretted wasting electrical energy.

Sasha persuaded him to take this flashlight after his father wandered in the garden.

Yet when Tolstoy helped the coachman to harness the horse, "his hands trembled, did not obey, and he could not fasten the buckle in any way." Then he "sat in a corner of the carriage house on a suitcase and immediately lost heart."

Sharp mood swings will accompany Tolstoy all the way from Yasnaya to Astapov, where he died on the night of November 7, 1910. Decisiveness and awareness that he acted in the only right way will be replaced by lack of will and an acute sense of guilt. No matter how he prepared for this departure, and he had been preparing for it for twenty-five (!) years, it is clear that neither mentally nor physically he was ready for it. You could imagine this departure in your head as much as you like, but the very first real steps, like wandering in your own garden, presented surprises for which Tolstoy and his companions were not ready.

But why did his resolute mood in the house suddenly change to discouragement in the carriage house? It would seem that things are collected (in two hours - just amazing!), the horses are almost ready, and there are several minutes left before the "liberation". And he loses heart.

In addition to physiological reasons (did not get enough sleep, worried, got lost, helped carry things along a slippery path in the dark), there is another circumstance that can only be understood by clearly imagining the situation as a whole. Wake up S.A. when they were packing, it would be a deafening scandal. But still a scandal inside the home walls. Scene among the "initiates". It was no stranger to such scenes, recently they constantly took place in the Yasnaya Polyana house. But as Tolstoy moved away from the hearth, more and more new faces were involved in his departure. It was exactly what he didn't want to happen. Tolstoy turned out to be a lump of snow, around which a grandiose snowball was wrapping up, and this happened with every minute of its movement in space.

Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise Basinsky Pavel Valerievich

CHAPTER ONE LEAVING OR FLIGHT?

Chapter first

LEAVING OR FLIGHT?

On the night of October 27-28, 1910, an incredible event took place in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province, out of the ordinary, even for such an unusual place as Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate of the world-famous writer and thinker - Count Leo Tolstoy. The eighty-two-year-old count at night secretly fled from his house in an unknown direction, accompanied by his personal doctor Makovitsky.

Newspaper eyes

The information space of that time did not differ much from the present. The news of the scandalous event instantly spread throughout Russia and around the world. On October 29, urgent telegrams began to arrive from Tula to the Petersburg Telegraph Agency (PTA), which were reprinted by newspapers the next day. “The shocking news was received that L.N. Tolstoy, accompanied by Dr. Makovitsky, unexpectedly left Yasnaya Polyana and left. Leaving, Leo Tolstoy left a letter informing him that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever.”

About this letter written by L.N. for his sleeping wife and handed over to her in the morning by their youngest daughter Sasha, even Tolstoy's companion Makovitsky did not know. He himself read about it in the papers.

The most efficient of all was the Moscow newspaper Russkoye Slovo. On October 30, it published a report by its own Tula correspondent with detailed information about what happened in Yasnaya Polyana.

"Tula, 29, X (urgent). Having returned from Yasnaya Polyana, I present the details of Lev Nikolayevich's departure.

Lev Nikolaevich left yesterday at 5 o'clock in the morning, when it was still dark.

Lev Nikolaevich came to the coachman's room and ordered the horses to be laid down.

The coachman Adrian carried out the order.

When the horses were ready, Lev Nikolaevich, together with Dr. Makovitsky, took the necessary things packed the night before, and went to the Shchekino station.

The postman Filka rode ahead, lighting the way with a torch.

At st. Shchekino Lev Nikolayevich took a ticket to one of the stations of the Moscow-Kursk railway and left with the first passing train.

When in the morning the news of Lev Nikolayevich's sudden departure became known in Yasnaya Polyana, a terrible commotion arose there. The despair of the wife of Lev Nikolaevich, Sofya Andreevna, defies description.

This message, which the whole world was talking about the next day, was not printed on the front page, but on the third. The front page, as was customary at the time, was given over to advertisements for all sorts of goods.

"The best friend of the stomach wine Saint-Raphael."

“Small sturgeons are fish. 20 kopecks a pound.

Having received a nightly telegram from Tula, Russkoye Slovo immediately sent its correspondent to the Khamovniki Tolstoy House (today it is the Leo Tolstoy House-Museum between the Park Kultury and Frunzenskaya metro stations). The newspaper hoped that, to be maybe the count fled from Yasnaya Polyana to the Moscow estate. But, the newspaper writes, “in the old manor house of the Tolstoys it was quiet and calm. Nothing said that Lev Nikolaevich could come to the old ashes. Locked gate. Everyone in the house is asleep."

A young journalist Konstantin Orlov, a theater reviewer, the son of a follower of Tolstoy, a teacher and a member of the People's Will, Vladimir Fedorovich Orlov, depicted in the stories "Dream" and "There is no one to blame in the world," was sent after Tolstoy's alleged escape route. He overtook the fugitive already in Kozelsk and secretly accompanied him to Astapov, from where he informed Sofya Andreevna and Tolstoy's children by telegram that their husband and father were seriously ill and were at the junction railway station in the house of her boss I.I. Ozolin.

If not for Orlov's initiative, the relatives would have learned about the whereabouts of the terminally ill L.N. not before all the newspapers reported it. Do I need to say how painful it would be for the family? Therefore, unlike Makovitsky, who regarded the activities of the Russian Word as "detective", Tolstoy's eldest daughter Tatyana Lvovna Sukhotina, according to her memoirs, was "to death" grateful to the journalist Orlov.

“My father is dying somewhere nearby, but I don’t know where he is. And I can't take care of him. Maybe I won't see him again. Will they even let me see him on his deathbed? A sleepless night. Real torture, - later Tatyana Lvovna recalled her and the whole family's state of mind after Tolstoy's "escape" (her expression). But there was a man unknown to us who understood and took pity on Tolstoy's family. He telegraphed us: “Lev Nikolayevich is in Astapovo with the head of the station. Temperature 40°“”.

In general, it must be admitted that in relation to the family and, above all, to Sofya Andreevna, the newspapers behaved more restrained and delicately than in relation to the Yasnaya Polyana fugitive, whose every step was mercilessly monitored, although all the newspapermen knew that in a farewell note Tolstoy asked: don't look for it! "Please ... don't follow me if you find out where I am," he wrote to his wife.

“In Belev, Lev Nikolaevich went out to the buffet and ate scrambled eggs,” the newspapermen savored the modest act of the vegetarian Tolstoy. They interrogated his coachman and Filka, the lackeys and peasants of Yasnaya Polyana, cashiers and barmaids at the stations, the cab driver who drove L.N. from Kozelsk to the Optina Monastery, hotel monks and anyone who could tell anything about the path of the eighty-two-year old man, whose only desire was to run away, hide, become invisible to the world.

"Don't look for him! - Odessa News cynically exclaimed, referring to the family. - He is not yours - he is everyone!

“Of course, his new location will be opened very soon,” Petersburgskaya Gazeta stated coolly.

L.N. did not like newspapers (although he followed them) and did not hide it. Another thing - S.A. The writer's wife was well aware that her husband's reputation and her own reputation, willy-nilly, are made up of newspaper publications. Therefore, she willingly communicated with newspapermen and gave interviews, explaining certain oddities in Tolstoy's behavior or his statements and not forgetting (this was her weakness) to indicate her role with the great man.

Therefore, the attitude of newspapermen to S.A. it was rather warm. The general tone was set by the "Russian Word" by Vlas Doroshevich's feuilleton "Sofya Andreevna", placed in the issue of October 31. “The old lion went to die alone,” Doroshevich wrote. “The eagle has flown away from us so high that where can we follow its flight?!”

(Followed, and how they followed!)

S.A. he compared it to Yasodara, the young wife of the Buddha. It was a definite compliment, because Yasodara was innocent of her husband's departure. Meanwhile, evil tongues compared Tolstoy's wife not with Yasodara, but with Xanthippe, the wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who allegedly tormented her husband with quarrelsomeness and misunderstanding of his worldview.

Doroshevich rightly pointed out that without his wife Tolstoy would not have lived such a long life and would not have written his later works. (Although what does Yasodara have to do with it?)

The feuilleton's conclusion was as follows. Tolstoy is a "superman", and his act cannot be judged by ordinary norms. S.A. - a simple earthly woman who did everything she could for her husband while he was just a man. But in the "superhuman" realm, he is inaccessible to her, and this is her tragedy.

“Sofya Andreevna is alone. She does not have her child, her elder child, her titan child, who must be thought about, taken care of every minute: is he warm, is he full, is he healthy? There is no one else to give a drop of your whole life to.

S.A. read a feuilleton. She liked him. She was grateful to the Russkoye Slovo newspaper for both Doroshevich's article and Orlov's telegram. Because of this, it was possible not to pay attention to trifles, such as the unpleasant description of the appearance of Tolstoy's wife, which Orlov gave: “The wandering eyes of Sofya Andreevna expressed inner torment. Her head was shaking. She was dressed in a carelessly thrown hood. One could forgive the night surveillance of the Moscow house, and a very indecent indication of the amount that the family spent to hire a separate train from Tula to Astapov - 492 rubles 27 kopecks, and Vasily Rozanov's transparent hint that L.N. nevertheless, he ran away from his family: “The prisoner left the delicate dungeon.”

If we run through the headlines of the newspapers that covered Tolstoy's departure, we find that the word "departure" was rarely used in them. "SUDDEN DEPARTURE ...", "DISAPPEARANCE ...", "FLIGHT ...", "TOLSTOY QUITS HOME" ("TOLSTOY LEAVES THE HOUSE"),

And the point here is by no means the desire of newspapermen to "warm up" readers. The event itself was scandalous. The fact is that the circumstances of Tolstoy's disappearance from Yasnaya, indeed, were much more reminiscent of flight than a majestic departure.

Nightmare

First, the event happened at night, when the Countess was fast asleep.

Secondly, Tolstoy's route was so carefully classified that for the first time she learned about his whereabouts only on November 2 from Orlov's telegram.

Thirdly (which neither the newspapermen nor S.A. knew about), this route, in any case, its ultimate goal, was unknown to the fugitive himself. Tolstoy clearly imagined where and from what he was fleeing, but where he was heading and where his last refuge would be, he not only did not know, but tried not to think about it.

In the first hours of departure, only Tolstoy's daughter Sasha and her friend Feokritova knew that L.N. intended to visit his sister, nun Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya in the Shamorda Monastery. But even that, on the night of the flight, was in doubt.

“You will stay, Sasha,” he told me. - I'll call you in a few days, when I finally decide where I'm going. And I will go, in all likelihood, to Mashenka in Shamordino, ”recalled A.L. Tolstaya.

Having awakened Dr. Makovitsky first at night, Tolstoy did not even tell him this information. But the main thing is that he did not tell the doctor that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever, which he told Sasha about. Makovitsky in the first hours thought that they were going to Kochety, the estate of Tolstoy's son-in-law M.S. Sukhotin on the border of the Tula and Oryol provinces. Tolstoy has traveled there more than once over the past two years, alone and with his wife, to escape the influx of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. There he took, as he put it, "vacation". His eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, lived in Kochety. She, unlike Sasha, did not approve of her father's desire to leave her mother, although she stood on the side of her father in their conflict. In any case, in Kochety from S.A. there was no hiding. The appearance in Shamordin was less calculable. The arrival of the excommunicated Tolstoy to an Orthodox monastery was an act no less scandalous than the departure itself. And finally, there Tolstoy could well count on the support and silence of his sister.

Poor Makovitsky did not immediately realize that Tolstoy had decided to leave home forever. Thinking that they were going to Kochety for a month, Makovitsky did not take all his money with him. He also did not know that Tolstoy's fortune at the time of his flight was estimated at fifty rubles in his notebook and change in his purse. It was only during Tolstoy's farewell to Sasha that Makovitsky heard about Shamordin. And only when they were sitting in the carriage, Tolstoy began to consult with him: where to go further away?

He knew whom to take with him as companions. It was necessary to have an unflappable nature and devotion to Makovitsky, so as not to be confused in this situation. Makovitsky immediately offered to go to Bessarabia, to the worker Gusarov, who lived with his family on his own land. “L.N. didn't answer anything."

Let's go to Shchekino station. In twenty minutes the train to Tula was expected, in an hour and a half - to Gorbachevo. Through Gorbachevo to Shamordino, the path is shorter, but Tolstoy, wanting to confuse the tracks and fearing that S.A. wakes up and overtakes him, offered to go through Tula. Makovitsky dissuaded them: they would definitely recognize them in Tula! Let's go to Gorbachevo ...

Agree, this is a little like leaving. Even if you understand this not literally (he left on foot), but in a figurative sense. But it is precisely the literal idea of ​​​​the departure of Tolstoy that warms the souls of the townsfolk to this day. Certainly - on foot, on a dark night, with a knapsack over his shoulders and a stick in his hand. And this is an eighty-two-year-old man, although strong, but very sick, suffering from fainting, memory lapses, heart failure and varicose veins in his legs. What would be great about such a "care"? But for some reason, it is pleasant for the layman to imagine that the great Tolstoy just picked up and left like that.

Ivan Bunin's book The Liberation of Tolstoy quotes with admiration the words written by Tolstoy in his farewell letter: “I do what old people of my age usually do. They leave worldly life to live in solitude and in silence the last days of their lives.

Do old people usually do it?

S.A. also drew attention to these words. Having barely recovered from the first shock caused by her husband's night flight, she began to write letters to him with entreaties to return, counting on third parties to mediate in their transfer. And in the second letter, which Tolstoy did not have time to read, she objected to him: “You write that the old people are leaving the world. Yes, where did you get it? Old peasants live out on the stove, in the circle of their families and grandchildren, their last days, the same is true in the lordly and every way of life. Is it natural for a weak old man to leave the care, cares and love of the children and grandchildren around him?

She was wrong. The departure of old men and even old women was a common thing in peasant houses. They went on a pilgrimage and simply - to separate huts. They left to live out their lives so as not to interfere with the young, not to be reproached with an extra piece, when the participation of an old person in field and domestic work was no longer possible. They left when sin "settled" in the house: drunkenness, strife, unnatural sexual relations. Yes, they left. But they did not run away from their old wife at night with the consent and support of their daughter.

Makovitsky's notes:

“In the morning, at 3 o'clock, L.H. in a dressing gown, in shoes on bare feet, with a candle, woke me up; a face of pain, agitation and determination.

I decided to leave. You will come with me. I'll go upstairs and you come, just don't wake Sofya Andreyevna. We will not take a lot of things - the most necessary. Sasha will come for us in three days and bring what we need.

A "decisive" face did not mean composure. This is the determination before jumping off a cliff. As a doctor, Makovitsky notes: “Nerven. I felt his pulse - 100. What are the "necessary things" for the care of an 82-year-old man? Tolstoy thought about this least of all. He was concerned about Sasha hiding from S.A. manuscripts of his diaries. He took with him a self-writing pen, notebooks. Things and provisions were packed by Makovitsky, Sasha and her friend Varvara Feokritova. It turned out that there were still a lot of “most necessary” things, a large travel suitcase was required, which cannot be obtained without noise, without waking S.A.

There were three doors between the bedrooms of Tolstoy and his wife. S.A. kept them open at night to wake up to any alarm from her husband's room. She explained this by saying that if he needed help at night, she would not hear through closed doors. But the main reason was different. She was afraid of his night flight. For some time now, this threat has become real. You can even accurately name the date when it hung in the air of the Yasnaya Polyana house. It happened on July 15, 1910. After a stormy explanation with her husband, S.A. spent a sleepless night and wrote him a letter in the morning:

“Levochka, dear, I write, but I don’t speak, because after a sleepless night it’s hard for me to talk, I’m too worried and can again upset everyone, but I want, I want terribly to be quiet and prudent. At night I thought about everything, and this is what became painfully clear to me: with one hand you caressed me, with the other you showed me a knife. Only yesterday I vaguely felt that this knife had already wounded my heart. This knife is a threat, and a very decisive one, to take the word of the promise back and quietly leave me if I am the same as now ... So, every night, like last, I will listen, have you gone where? Any absence of yours, however slightly longer, I will be tormented that you have left forever. Think, dear Lyovochka, because your departure and your threat are equal to the threat of murder.

When Sasha, Varvara and Makovitsky were packing their things (they acted “like conspirators,” Feokritova recalled, extinguished the candles, hearing any noise from S.A.’s room), Tolstoy tightly closed all three doors leading to his wife’s bedroom, and yet without noise he took out the suitcase. But it turned out to be not enough, it turned out to be a bundle with a plaid and a coat, a basket with provisions. However, Tolstoy did not wait for the end of the training camp. He hurried to the coachman's room to wake the coachman Andrian and help him harness the horses.

Care? Or escape...

From Tolstoy's diary:

“... I’m going to the stable to order to lay; Dushan, Sasha, Varya finish styling. Night - I gouge out my eye, I go off the path to the outbuilding, I fall into the bowl, piercing myself, knocking on the trees, I fall, I lose my hat, I don’t find it, I get out by force, I go home, I take my hat and with a flashlight I get to the stable, I order it to be laid. Sasha, Dushan, Varya come ... I'm trembling, waiting for the chase.

What a day later, when these lines were written, seemed to him a "thicket", from which he "forced" got out, was his apple orchard, well-trodden by Tolstoy up and down.

What do old people usually do?

“They packed things for about half an hour,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. “Father was already getting worried, he was in a hurry, but our hands were trembling, the belts would not tighten, the suitcases would not close.”

Alexandra Lvovna also noticed determination in her father's face. “I was waiting for his departure, I was waiting every day, every hour, but nevertheless, when he said:“ I’m leaving completely, ”it struck me as something new, unexpected. I will never forget his figure at the door, in a blouse, with a candle, and his bright, beautiful, determined face.

“A resolute and bright face,” Feokritova wrote. But let's not delude ourselves. Deep October night, when in rural houses, whether peasant or lordly, you can not see your own hand, if you bring it to your eyes. An old man in light clothes, with a candle to his face, suddenly appeared on the threshold. It will amaze anyone!

Of course, Tolstoy's fortitude was phenomenal. But it says more about his ability not to get lost under any circumstances. A friend of the Yasnaya Polyana house, musician Alexander Goldenweiser, recalled one incident. One winter, they rode in a sledge to a village nine miles from Yasnaya to deliver help to a needy peasant family.

“When we were approaching the Zasek station, a small snowstorm began, which became stronger, so that in the end we lost our way and drove without a road. Having strayed a little, we noticed a forest gatehouse not far away and went to it in order to ask the forester how to get on the road. When we arrived at the gatehouse, three or four huge sheep dogs jumped out at us and surrounded the horse and sledge with frantic barking. To be honest, I felt terrified… L.N. With a decisive movement, he handed me the reins and said: "Hold it," - and he himself got up, got out of the sleigh, hooted loudly and, empty-handed, boldly went straight to the dogs. And suddenly the terrible dogs immediately calmed down, parted and gave him the way, as if he were in power. L.N. calmly passed between them and entered the gatehouse. At that moment, with his flowing gray beard, he looked more like a fairy-tale hero than a weak eighty-year old man ... "

So on the night of October 28, 1910, self-control did not leave him. He met the assistants walking with things halfway. “It was dirty, our feet slipped, and we hardly moved in the dark,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. - A blue light flickered near the wing. Father walked towards us.

Oh, it's you, - he said, - well, this time I arrived safely. We are already tied up. Well, I'll go ahead and shine for you. Oh, why did you give Sasha the heaviest things? he turned reproachfully to Varvara Mikhailovna. He took the basket from her hands and carried it, while Varvara Mikhailovna helped me to carry the suitcase. My father walked in front, occasionally pressing the button of the electric torch and immediately releasing it, which made it seem even darker. Father always saved money and here, as always, he regretted wasting electrical energy.

Sasha persuaded him to take this flashlight after his father wandered in the garden.

Yet when Tolstoy helped the coachman to harness the horse, "his hands trembled, did not obey, and he could not fasten the buckle in any way." Then he "sat in a corner of the carriage house on a suitcase and immediately lost heart."

Sharp mood swings will accompany Tolstoy all the way from Yasnaya to Astapov, where he died on the night of November 7, 1910. Decisiveness and awareness that he acted in the only right way will be replaced by lack of will and an acute sense of guilt. No matter how he prepared for this departure, and he had been preparing for it for twenty-five (!) years, it is clear that neither mentally nor physically he was ready for it. You could imagine this departure in your head as much as you like, but the very first real steps, like wandering in your own garden, presented surprises for which Tolstoy and his companions were not ready.

But why did his resolute mood in the house suddenly change to discouragement in the carriage house? It would seem that things are collected (in two hours - just amazing!), the horses are almost ready, and there are several minutes left before the "liberation". And he loses heart.

In addition to physiological reasons (did not get enough sleep, worried, got lost, helped carry things along a slippery path in the dark), there is another circumstance that can only be understood by clearly imagining the situation as a whole. Wake up S.A. when they were packing, it would be a deafening scandal. But still a scandal inside the home walls. Scene among the "initiates". It was no stranger to such scenes, recently they constantly took place in the Yasnaya Polyana house. But as Tolstoy moved away from the hearth, more and more new faces were involved in his departure. It was exactly what he didn't want to happen. Tolstoy turned out to be a lump of snow, around which a grandiose snowball was wrapping up, and this happened with every minute of its movement in space.

It is impossible to leave without waking up the coachman Andrian Bolkhin. And they also need a groom, thirty-three-year-old Filka (Philip Borisov), who, sitting on horseback, will light the road with a torch in front of the carriage. When L.N. was in the carriage house, the snowball had already begun to grow, grow, and it was becoming more and more impossible to stop it every minute. The gendarmes, newsmen, governors, priests were still sleeping peacefully... Even Tolstoy himself could not imagine how many people would become willing and involuntary accomplices in his flight, up to ministers, chief bishops, Stolypin and Nicholas II.

Of course, he could not fail to understand that he would not succeed in disappearing from Yasnaya Polyana unnoticed. Even Fedya Protasov in The Living Corpse, who imitated suicide, could not disappear unnoticed, but, in the end, was exposed. But let's not forget that in addition to The Living Corpse, he wrote Father Sergius and Posthumous Notes of Elder Fyodor Kuzmich. And if at the moment of leaving he was warmed by some thought, then this one: the famous person, disappearing, dissolves in human space, becomes one of these little ones, invisible to everyone. The legend about him exists separately, and he - separately. And it doesn't matter who you were in the past: the Russian Tsar, the famous miracle worker or the great writer. It is important that here and now you are the simplest and most ordinary person.

When Tolstoy was sitting on a suitcase in the carriage house, in an old Armenian coat, put on a wadded undershirt, in an old knitted hat, he seemed to be fully equipped for the realization of his cherished dream. But... This time, 5 o'clock in the morning, "between the wolf and the dog." This dank end of October is the most disgusting Russian off-season. This is an unbearable languor of waiting, when the beginning of departure is laid, the native walls are abandoned and there is no way back, but ... The horses are not yet ready, Yasnaya Polyana has not yet been abandoned ... And the wife with whom he lived for forty-eight years, who gave birth to him thirteen children, of whom seven are alive, from whom twenty-three grandchildren were born, on whose shoulders he shouldered the entire Yasnaya Polyana economy, all his publishing business on fiction, who several times rewrote parts of his two main novels and many other works, who did not sleep at night in the Crimea, where he died nine years ago, because no one, except for her, could take care of him the most intimate care - this dear person can wake up at any second, find closed doors, a mess in his room and understand that something, what she feared most in the world had come true!

But has it happened? It doesn't take a wild imagination to imagine the appearance of S.A. in the carriage house, while her husband fastened the horse's buckle with trembling hands. This is no longer a Tolstoyan, but a purely Gogolian situation. No wonder Tolstoy both loved and disliked Gogol's story "The Carriage", in which the district aristocrat Pythagor Pythagorovich Chertokutsky hid from the guests in the carriage house, but was exposed in the most embarrassing way. He considered this thing to be an excellently written, but ridiculous joke. Meanwhile, "Carriage" is not a funny thing at all. The general's visit to the carriage house, where little Chertokutsky huddled on a seat under a leather canopy, is, after all, a visit from Fate itself, which overtakes a person precisely at the moment when he is least ready for it. How pathetic and helpless before her!

Memories of Sasha:

“At first, my father hurried the coachman, and then sat down in the corner of the carriage house on a suitcase and immediately lost heart:

I feel that they are about to overtake us, and then everything is gone. You can’t leave without a scandal.”

Tolstoy's weakness

Much in Tolstoy's mood both at the moment of flight, and before him, and afterwards, is also explained by such a simple thing as delicacy. Creator, philosopher, "mature human being", Tolstoy by nature remained an old Russian gentleman, in the most beautiful sense of the word. This polysyllabic and, alas, long-lost spiritual complex included such concepts as moral and physical cleanliness, the inability to lie to the eye, slander about a person in his absence, the fear of hurting someone’s feelings with a careless word and just being something unpleasant for people. . In his youth, due to the unbridled mind and character, Tolstoy sinned a lot against these spiritual qualities that were innate and brought up in the family, and he himself suffered from this. But by old age, in addition to the acquired principles of love and compassion for people, the rejection of the nasty, dirty, scandalous was increasingly manifested in him.

Throughout the conflict with his wife, Tolstoy was almost flawless. He felt sorry for her, stopped any attempts to slander her, even when he knew the validity of these words. He obeyed, as far as possible and even impossible, her demands, sometimes the most ridiculous, patiently endured all her antics, sometimes monstrous, like blackmail by suicide. But at the core of this behavior, which surprised and even annoyed his supporters, there were not abstract principles, but the nature of an old gentleman, but simply a beautiful old man who painfully experiences any quarrel, discord, scandal.

And this old man secretly commits an act at night, which cannot be worse for his wife. It's not even the knife S.A. wrote about. It's an ax!

Therefore, the strongest feeling that Tolstoy experienced in the carriage house was fear. The fear that his wife will wake up, run out of the house and catch him on a suitcase, near the still unready carriage ... And - you can’t avoid a scandal, a painful, heartbreaking scene that will become the crescendo of what has been happening in Yasnaya Polyana lately.

He never ran away from difficulties ... In last years On the contrary, he thanked God when He sent him trials. With a humble heart, he accepted any "troubles". He rejoiced when he was condemned. But now he passionately wanted to "pass away this cup."

It was beyond his strength.

Yes, Tolstoy's departure was a manifestation not only of strength, but also of weakness. He frankly admitted this to his old friend and confidante Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt, a former classy lady who believed in Tolstoy as in the new Christ, the most sincere and consistent “hoodie”, who lived in a hut in Ovsyanniki, six miles away. Tolstoy often visited her during horse rides, knowing that these visits not only bring her joy, but are the meaning of life for her. He consulted with her on spiritual matters and on October 26, two days before his departure, spoke of his still inconclusive decision to leave. Maria Alexandrovna threw up her hands:

Darling, Lev Nikolaevich! - she said. - It's a weakness, it will pass.

Yes, he replied, it is a weakness.

This conversation, according to Maria Alexandrovna, is cited in her memoirs by Tatyana Lvovna Sukhotina. In the diary of Makovitsky, who accompanied L.N. on a walk on October 26, this dialogue is not. Yes, and Maria Alexandrovna herself, in an interview with the correspondent of Russkoye Slovo, claimed that on that day L.N. didn't say a word to her. This was an obvious lie, explained by her unwillingness to wash dirty linen in public (and not even her own hut) and open the Tolstoy family conflict to the whole world. In Tolstoy's secret Diary for Myself alone, there is an entry dated October 26: “More and more I am weary of this life. Marya Alexandrovna does not order me to leave, and my conscience does not let me either.

Makovitsky also noted on October 26 that “L.N. weak" and distracted. On the way to Schmidt, Tolstoy commits a “bad”, in his own words, act: he rode a horse through the “greens” (winter crops), but this cannot be done in the mud, because the horse leaves deep traces and destroys the delicate greenery.

I would like to exclaim: I regretted the “greenery”, but not my old wife ?! Unfortunately, this is a typical way of condemning Tolstoy. This is how people think, who see in Tolstoy's flight the act of a “mothered human being” and correlate it with their “human, too human” ideas about the family. The strong Tolstoy left a weak wife who did not coincide with him in spiritual development. It's understandable, that's why he is a genius, but S.A., of course, it's a pity! How dangerous it is to marry geniuses.

This common point of view, oddly enough, almost coincides with that which is cultivated in the intellectual environment and, with light hand Ivan Bunin, became fashionable.

Tolstoy left to die. It was an act of liberation of the spiritual titan from the material captivity that tormented him. "The Liberation of Tolstoy". How beautiful! Reduced version: like a strong animal, sensing the approach of death, leaves the pack, so Tolstoy, sensing the approach of an inevitable end, rushed from Yasnaya Polyana. Also a beautiful pagan version, which Alexander Kuprin voiced in the newspapers in the first days of his departure.

But Tolstoy's act was not the actions of a titan who decided on a grandiose symbolic gesture. And even more so, it was not a jerk of an old, but strong beast. It was an act of a weak, sick old man who dreamed of leaving for 25 years, but, as long as he had the strength, he did not allow himself this, because he considered it cruel towards his wife. But when there was no more strength left, and family contradictions reached the highest boiling point, he saw no other way out either for himself or for those around him. He left at a time when he was not physically ready for it at all. When the yard stood deaf end of October. When nothing was prepared and even the most ardent supporters of leaving, like Sasha, could not imagine what it was like to be in an “open field” for an old man. Just when his departure almost inevitably meant certain death, Tolstoy no longer had the strength to be in Yasnaya Polyana.

Gone to die? This explanation was put forward by Professor V.F. Snegirev, the famous obstetrician who treated S.A. and performed an emergency operation on her right in the Yasnaya Polyana house. He was not only an excellent physician, but an unusually intelligent and delicate person. Wishing to encourage and console his patient, who, after the death of her husband, was accused of being the one who brought him to flight and the grave, on April 10, 1911, on Bright Sunday, he wrote her a lengthy letter, where he tried to name the objective and extra-family reasons for Tolstoy's departure. He saw two reasons for this.

First. Leaving Tolstoy was a complex form of suicide. In any case, the subconscious acceleration of the process of death.

“In the course of almost his entire life, he equally cultivated, educated his spirit and body, and with his insatiable energy and talents, educated them equally strongly, tightly bound them and merged: where the body ended and where the spirit began, it is impossible to say. Anyone who peered into his gait, turn of the head, landing, he clearly saw Always consciousness of movements: that is, each movement was developed, developed, comprehended and expressed an idea ... At the death of such a fused combination of spirit and body, separation, departure of the spirit from the body could not and cannot take place quietly, calmly, as happens with people, in whom the rupture of soul and body took place long ago ... In order to make such a separation, one must make exorbitant force over the body ... "

Snegirev's other explanation was purely medical. Tolstoy died of pneumonia. “This infection is sometimes accompanied even by manic seizures,” Snegirev wrote. - Whether the night flight was made in one of these attacks, because the infection sometimes manifests itself only a few days before the illness, that is, the body has already been poisoned before the local process. Haste and wandering while traveling are quite consistent with this ... "

In other words, Tolstoy was already ill on the night of his departure, and the infectious poisoning was affecting his brain.

Let's not guess how much Snegirev wrote as a doctor and how much he simply wanted to console poor S.A. One thing is clear: on the eve and on the night of the flight, Tolstoy was mentally and physically weak. This is confirmed by the notes of Makovitsky and the diary of L.N. He had “bad”, confused dreams ... In one of them there was some kind of “struggle with his wife”, in the other - the characters of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, which he was reading at that time, were intertwined, and real, but already deceased people, like N.N.Strakhov.

Less than a month before he left, he almost died. What happened on October 3 was very similar to the real end, right down to death convulsions and stripping(characteristic hand movements before death). Here is how the last secretary of Tolstoy, Valentin Bulgakov, describes this episode:

“Lev Nikolaevich fell asleep, and, after waiting for him until seven o’clock, they sat down to dine without him. After pouring the soup, Sofya Andreevna got up and once more went to see if Lev Nikolayevich was getting up. When she returned, she reported that as she approached the bedroom door, she heard the strike of a lighted matchbox on the box. I went to Lev Nikolaevich. He sat on the bed. He asked what time it was and if they were having lunch. But Sofya Andreyevna felt something unkind: Lev Nikolayevich's eyes seemed strange to her:

Eyes meaningless ... This is before a seizure. He falls into oblivion ... I already know. He always has such eyes before a seizure.

Soon, Tolstoy's son Sergei Lvovich, servant Ilya Vasilievich, Makovitsky, Bulgakov and Tolstoy's first biographer P.I. Biryukov gathered in Tolstoy's room.

“Lying on his back, clenching the fingers of his right hand as if he were holding a pen with them, Lev Nikolayevich weakly began to run his hand over the blanket. His eyes were closed, his brows were furrowed, his lips were moving, as if he was experiencing something... Then... then strange fits of convulsions began one after another, from which the whole body of the man lying helplessly in bed beat and trembled. He threw it out with the force of his legs. It was hard to keep them. Dushan (Makovitsky. - P.B.) hugged Lev Nikolaevich by the shoulders, Biryukov and I rubbed our legs. All seizures were five. The fourth one was especially strong, when Lev Nikolayevich's body was thrown almost completely across the bed, his head rolled off the pillow, his legs hung down on the other side.

Sofya Andreyevna threw herself on her knees, hugged those legs, leaned her head against them, and remained in that position for a long time until we laid Lev Nikolayevich properly on the bed again.

In general, Sofya Andreevna made a terribly miserable impression. She raised her eyes, hurriedly crossed herself with small crosses and whispered: “Lord! If only not this time, if only not this time! .. "And she did not do this in front of others: accidentally entering the Remington room, I found her praying."

After convulsions L.N. began to rave, just as he would rave in Astapov before his death, pronouncing a meaningless set of numbers:

Four, sixty, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine...

“The behavior of S.A. during this seizure it was touching, - recalled Biryukov. She was pathetic in her fear and humiliation. While we men were holding L. N-cha so that the convulsions would not throw him off the bed, she threw herself on her knees by the bed and prayed a passionate prayer, approximately of the following content: “Lord, save me, forgive me, Lord, don’t let him die, it was I who brought him to this, if only not this time, don’t take him, Lord, from me.

That S.A. felt guilty during L.N.'s seizure, she herself admitted in her diary:

“When, embracing my husband’s twitching legs, I felt that extreme despair at the thought of losing him, remorse, remorse, crazy love and prayer with terrible power captured my whole being. Everything, everything for him - if only he would remain alive at least this time and get better, so that in my soul there would be no remorse for all the anxieties and excitements that I gave him with my nervousness and my painful anxieties.

Shortly before that, she had a terrible fight with Sasha and Feokritova and actually kicked her daughter out of the house. Sasha moved to Telyatniki, near Yasnaya Polyana, in own house. Tolstoy was very upset by the separation from Sasha, whom he loved and trusted more than all his relatives. She was his invaluable assistant and secretary along with Bulgakov. The breakup between mother and daughter was one of the causes of the seizure. They understood this and reconciled the next day.

Memories of Sasha:

“Going down to the hall, I found out that my mother was looking for me.

Where is she?

On the porch.

I go out, there is a mother in one dress.

Did you want to talk to me?

Yes, I wanted to take another step towards reconciliation. I'm sorry!

And she began to kiss me, repeating: sorry, sorry! I also kissed her and asked her to calm down ...

We talked standing outside. Some passer-by looked at us in surprise. I asked my mother to come into the house.”

Let's think about it: isn't the version that Tolstoy left to die not only an unfounded, but also a very cruel myth? Why not turn the pupil, put it in a normal position and look at this question the way L.N. Gone to Not die. And if you die, then not as a result of another seizure.

Fear that S.A. overtake him, was not only a moral experience, but simply fear. This fear passed as Tolstoy moved away from Yasnaya, although the voice of conscience did not stop in him.

When he and Makovitsky finally left the estate and the village on the highway, L.N., as the doctor writes, “still silent, sad, excited, interrupted voice said, as if complaining and apologizing that he could not stand it, that he was leaving secretly from Sofya Andreevna. And then he asked the question:

When they got into a separate compartment of the 2nd class car “and the train started moving, he probably felt confident that Sofya Andreevna would not overtake him; happily said that he was fine. But after warming up and drinking coffee, he suddenly said:

What is Sofya Andreevna now? Pity her.

This question will torment him until the last conscious moments of his life. And those who imagine the moral image of the late Tolstoy are well aware that there was no moral justification for leaving for him; All the talk about Tolstoy leaving to die, to merge with the people, to free his immortal soul, is true for his twenty-five-year dream, but not for concrete moral practice. This practice ruled out the selfish pursuit of a dream to the detriment of living people.

This tormented him all the way from Yasnaya to Shamordin, when it was still possible to change his mind and return. But he not only did not change his mind and did not return, but ran farther and farther, urging his companions on. And this is his behavior - the main mystery.

We will find some answer to it in Tolstoy's three letters to his wife, written during his departure. In the first, “farewell” letter, he focuses on moral and spiritual reasons: “... I can no longer live in those conditions of luxury in which I lived, and I do what they usually do (in the original, a typo: “does”. - P.B.) old people of my age: they leave worldly life to live in solitude and quiet the last days of their lives.

This is a wife-friendly explanation. In the same letter, he writes: “I thank you for your honest forty-eight-year life with me and ask you to forgive me for everything that I was guilty of before you, just as I wholeheartedly forgive you for everything that you could be guilty before me.

Besides the fact that this letter is touching on a personal level, every word in it is weighed in case of its possible publication. It is no coincidence that before leaving the letter, Tolstoy wrote two draft versions of it the day before. This letter was, as it were, a "protection letter" for his wife. She could boldly show it to correspondents (and showed it). Its meaning, roughly speaking, was this: Tolstoy leaves not from his wife, but from Yasnaya Polyana. He can no longer live in lordly conditions that do not coincide with his worldview.

Perhaps Tolstoy believed that S.A. will be satisfied with this explanation, will not pursue him and do crazy things. But when he learned that she tried to drown herself in the pond of the Yasnaya Polyana park, and received her response letter with the words: “Lyovochka, my dear, come back home, save me from secondary suicide,” he realized that threats from her continued. And then he decided to explain himself to her directly and express what he had kept silent about in his farewell letter.

He did not send the first version of the second letter written in Shamordin. It was too harsh. “Our meeting can only, as I wrote to you, only worsen our situation: yours is, as everyone says and as I think, as far as I am concerned, for me such a meeting, not to mention, a return to Yasnaya, is directly impossible and would be suicidal.

In the sent letter, a more relaxed tone: “Your letter - I know that it is written sincerely, but you are not in the power to do what you would like to do. And the point is not in the fulfillment of any of my desires and requirements, but only in your poise, calm, reasonable attitude about life. In the meantime, this is not, for me, life with you is unthinkable. To return to you when you are in such a state would mean for me to give up life. And I don't think I have the right to do it. Farewell, dear Sonya, God help you. Life is not a joke, and we have no right to abandon it of our own free will, and it is also unreasonable to measure it by the length of time. Maybe those months that we have left to live are more important than all the years we have lived, and we must live them well.

Gone to die? Yes, if by this we mean the fear of an absurd, unconscious death, agreeing to which, in his understanding, was the same as committing suicide.

Tolstoy fled from such a death. He wanted to die with a clear mind. And it was more important for him to abandon the lordly living conditions and merge with the people.

When Sasha asked him in Shamordin whether he regretted that he had done this to his mother, he answered her question with a question: “How can a person regret if he could not do otherwise?”

He gave a more accurate explanation of his act in a conversation with his sister, a nun of the Shamorda desert, which was heard by her daughter, niece and, oddly enough, Tolstoy's mother-in-law Elizaveta Valeryanovna Obolenskaya (the daughter of L.N. Masha was married to the son of E.V. Obolenskaya Nikolai Leonidovich Obolensky). E.V. Obolenskaya left the most interesting memories of her mother, and one of the most important places in them is the meeting of L.N. with Maria Nikolaevna in her monastery cell on October 29, 1910.

“It was enough to look at him to see how exhausted this man was both physically and mentally ... Speaking to us about his last seizure, he said:

One more such - and the end; death is pleasant, because it is a complete unconsciousness. But I would like to die in memory.

And he began to cry... The mother expressed the idea that Sofya Andreevna was ill; After thinking for a while, he said:

Yes, yes, of course, but what was I to do? It was necessary to use violence, but I could not, so I left; and I want to use it now to start a new life.”

The words of Tolstoy, transmitted in the memoirs and diaries of other people, must be treated very carefully and critically. And even especially critical when they are close, interested persons. Only by comparing different documents, one can find the “intersection point” and admit that there is truth here. But at the same time, it must be remembered that Tolstoy himself did not know this truth. Here is an entry in his diary dated October 29, made after a conversation with Maria Nikolaevna:

“... I kept thinking about getting out of mine and her (Sofya Andreevna. - P.B.) position and could not think of any, but he, like it or not, but he will be, and not the one you foresee.

Merging with the people

From the very first days of Tolstoy's departure, newspapers began to put forward their own versions of this event, among which was this: Tolstoy left to merge with the people. In a word, it sounded like this simplification.

This version dominated Soviet time. It was taught to schoolchildren. Tolstoy rebelled against the social conditions in which he and the entire nobility lived. However, not possessing a Marxist worldview, he acted like an anarchist populist, literally went to the people.

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Pavel Valerievich Basinsky
Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise

We all take courage in front of each other and forget that all of us, unless we love, are pitiful, pitiful. But we are so brave and pretend to be angry and self-confident that we ourselves fall for this and mistake sick chickens for terrible lions ...

From a letter from Leo Tolstoy to V.G. Chertkov

Chapter first
LEAVING OR FLIGHT?

On the night of October 27-28, 1910 1
All dates are given according to the old style. - Note here and below. ed.

An incredible event took place in the Krapivensky district of the Tula province, out of the ordinary, even for such an unusual place as Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate of the world-famous writer and thinker - Count Leo Tolstoy. The eighty-two-year-old count at night secretly fled from his house in an unknown direction, accompanied by his personal doctor Makovitsky.

Newspaper eyes

The information space of that time did not differ much from the present. The news of the scandalous event instantly spread throughout Russia and around the world. On October 29, urgent telegrams began to arrive from Tula to the Petersburg Telegraph Agency (PTA), which were reprinted by newspapers the next day. “The shocking news was received that L.N. Tolstoy, accompanied by Dr. Makovitsky, unexpectedly left Yasnaya Polyana and left. Leaving, Leo Tolstoy left a letter informing him that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever.”

About this letter written by L.N. for his sleeping wife and handed over to her in the morning by their youngest daughter Sasha, even Tolstoy's companion Makovitsky did not know. He himself read about it in the papers.

The most efficient of all was the Moscow newspaper Russkoye Slovo. On October 30, it published a report by its own Tula correspondent with detailed information about what happened in Yasnaya Polyana.

"Tula, 29, X (urgent). Having returned from Yasnaya Polyana, I present the details of Lev Nikolayevich's departure.

Lev Nikolaevich left yesterday at 5 o'clock in the morning, when it was still dark.

Lev Nikolaevich came to the coachman's room and ordered the horses to be laid down.

The coachman Adrian carried out the order.

When the horses were ready, Lev Nikolaevich, together with Dr. Makovitsky, took the necessary things packed the night before, and went to the Shchekino station.

The postman Filka rode ahead, lighting the way with a torch.

At st. Shchekino Lev Nikolayevich took a ticket to one of the stations of the Moscow-Kursk railway and left with the first passing train.

When in the morning the news of Lev Nikolayevich's sudden departure became known in Yasnaya Polyana, a terrible commotion arose there. The despair of the wife of Lev Nikolaevich, Sofya Andreevna, defies description.

This message, which the whole world was talking about the next day, was not printed on the front page, but on the third. The front page, as was customary at the time, was given over to advertisements for all sorts of goods.

"The best friend of the stomach wine Saint-Raphael."

“Small sturgeons are fish. 20 kopecks a pound.

Having received a nightly telegram from Tula, Russkoe Slovo immediately sent its correspondent to the Khamovniki Tolstoy House (today it is the Leo Tolstoy House-Museum between the Park Kultury and Frunzenskaya metro stations). The newspaper hoped that, to be maybe the count fled from Yasnaya Polyana to the Moscow estate. But, the newspaper writes, “in the old manor house of the Tolstoys it was quiet and calm. Nothing said that Lev Nikolaevich could come to the old ashes. Locked gate. Everyone in the house is asleep."

A young journalist Konstantin Orlov, a theater reviewer, the son of a follower of Tolstoy, a teacher and a member of the People's Will, Vladimir Fedorovich Orlov, depicted in the stories "Dream" and "There is no one to blame in the world," was sent after Tolstoy's alleged escape route. He overtook the fugitive already in Kozelsk and secretly accompanied him to Astapov, from where he informed Sofya Andreevna and Tolstoy's children by telegram that their husband and father were seriously ill and were at the junction railway station in the house of her boss I.I. Ozolin.

If not for Orlov's initiative, the relatives would have learned about the whereabouts of the terminally ill L.N. not before all the newspapers reported it. Do I need to say how painful it would be for the family? Therefore, unlike Makovitsky, who regarded the activities of the Russian Word as "detective", Tolstoy's eldest daughter Tatyana Lvovna Sukhotina, according to her memoirs, was "to death" grateful to the journalist Orlov.

“My father is dying somewhere nearby, but I don’t know where he is. And I can't take care of him. Maybe I won't see him again. Will they even let me see him on his deathbed? A sleepless night. Real torture, - later Tatyana Lvovna recalled her and the whole family's state of mind after Tolstoy's "escape" (her expression). But there was a man unknown to us who understood and took pity on Tolstoy's family. He telegraphed us: “Lev Nikolayevich is in Astapovo with the head of the station. Temperature 40°“”.

In general, it must be admitted that in relation to the family and, above all, to Sofya Andreevna, the newspapers behaved more restrained and delicately than in relation to the Yasnaya Polyana fugitive, whose every step was mercilessly monitored, although all the newspapermen knew that in a farewell note Tolstoy asked: don't look for it! “Please ... do not follow me if you find out where I am,” he wrote to his wife.

“In Belev, Lev Nikolayevich went out to the buffet and ate scrambled eggs,” the newspapermen savored the modest act of the vegetarian Tolstoy. They interrogated his coachman and Filka, the lackeys and peasants of Yasnaya Polyana, cashiers and barmaids at the stations, the cab driver who drove L.N. from Kozelsk to the Optina Monastery, hotel monks and anyone who could tell anything about the path of the eighty-two-year old man, whose only desire was to run away, hide, become invisible to the world.

"Don't look for him! - Odessa News cynically exclaimed, referring to the family. “He is not yours – he is everyone!”

"Of course, his new location will be opened very soon," the Peterburgskaya Gazeta said coolly.

L.N. did not like newspapers (although he followed them) and did not hide it. Another thing is S.A. The writer's wife was well aware that her husband's reputation and her own reputation, willy-nilly, are made up of newspaper publications. Therefore, she willingly communicated with newspapermen and gave interviews, explaining certain oddities in Tolstoy's behavior or his statements and not forgetting (this was her weakness) to indicate her role with the great man.

Therefore, the attitude of newspapermen to S.A. it was rather warm. The general tone was set by the "Russian Word" by Vlas Doroshevich's feuilleton "Sofya Andreevna", placed in the issue of October 31. “The old lion went to die alone,” Doroshevich wrote. “The eagle has flown away from us so high that where can we follow its flight?!”

(Followed, and how they followed!)

S.A. he compared it to Yasodara, the young wife of the Buddha. It was a definite compliment, because Yasodara was innocent of her husband's departure. Meanwhile, evil tongues compared Tolstoy's wife not with Yasodara, but with Xanthippe, the wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates, who allegedly tormented her husband with quarrelsomeness and misunderstanding of his worldview.

Doroshevich rightly pointed out that without his wife Tolstoy would not have lived such a long life and would not have written his later works. (Although what does Yasodara have to do with it?)

The feuilleton's conclusion was as follows. Tolstoy is a "superman", and his act cannot be judged by ordinary norms. S.A. - a simple earthly woman who did everything she could for her husband while he was just a man. But in the "superhuman" realm, he is inaccessible to her, and this is her tragedy.

“Sofya Andreevna is alone. She does not have her child, her elder child, her titan child, who must be thought about, taken care of every minute: is he warm, is he full, is he healthy? There is no one else to give a drop of your whole life to.

S.A. read a feuilleton. She liked him. She was grateful to the Russkoye Slovo newspaper for both Doroshevich's article and Orlov's telegram. Because of this, it was possible not to pay attention to trifles, such as the unpleasant description of the appearance of Tolstoy's wife, which Orlov gave: “The wandering eyes of Sofya Andreevna expressed inner torment. Her head was shaking. She was dressed in a carelessly thrown hood. One could forgive the night surveillance of the Moscow house, and a very indecent indication of the amount that the family spent to hire a separate train from Tula to Astapovo - 492 rubles 27 kopecks, and Vasily Rozanov's transparent hint that L.N. nevertheless, he ran away from his family: “The prisoner left the delicate dungeon.”

If we run through the headlines of the newspapers that covered Tolstoy's departure, we find that the word "departure" was rarely used in them. "SUDDEN DEPARTURE ...", "DISAPPEARANCE ...", "FLIGHT ...", "TOLSTOY QUITS HOME" ("TOLSTOY LEAVES THE HOUSE"),

And the point here is by no means the desire of newspapermen to "warm up" readers. The event itself was scandalous. The fact is that the circumstances of Tolstoy's disappearance from Yasnaya, indeed, were much more reminiscent of flight than a majestic departure.

Nightmare

First, the event happened at night, when the Countess was fast asleep.

Secondly, Tolstoy's route was so carefully classified that for the first time she learned about his whereabouts only on November 2 from Orlov's telegram.

Thirdly (which neither the newspapermen nor S.A. knew about), this route, in any case, its ultimate goal, was unknown to the fugitive himself. Tolstoy clearly imagined where and from what he was fleeing, but where he was heading and where his last refuge would be, he not only did not know, but tried not to think about it.

In the first hours of departure, only Tolstoy's daughter Sasha and her friend Feokritova knew that L.N. intended to visit his sister, nun Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya in the Shamorda Monastery. But even that, on the night of the flight, was in doubt.

“You will stay, Sasha,” he told me. “I'll call you in a few days, when I've finally decided where I'm going. And I will go, in all likelihood, to Mashenka in Shamordino, ”recalled A.L. Tolstaya.

Having awakened Dr. Makovitsky first at night, Tolstoy did not even tell him this information. But the main thing is that he did not tell the doctor that he was leaving Yasnaya Polyana forever, which he told Sasha about. Makovitsky in the first hours thought that they were going to Kochety, the estate of Tolstoy's son-in-law M.S. Sukhotin on the border of the Tula and Oryol provinces. Tolstoy has traveled there more than once over the past two years, alone and with his wife, to escape the influx of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana. There he took, as he put it, "vacation". His eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, lived in Kochety. She, unlike Sasha, did not approve of her father's desire to leave her mother, although she stood on the side of her father in their conflict. In any case, in Kochety from S.A. there was no hiding. The appearance in Shamordin was less calculable. The arrival of the excommunicated Tolstoy to an Orthodox monastery was an act no less scandalous than the departure itself. And finally, there Tolstoy could well count on the support and silence of his sister.

Poor Makovitsky did not immediately realize that Tolstoy had decided to leave home forever. Thinking that they were going to Kochety for a month, Makovitsky did not take all his money with him. He also did not know that Tolstoy's fortune at the time of his flight was estimated at fifty rubles in his notebook and change in his purse. It was only during Tolstoy's farewell to Sasha that Makovitsky heard about Shamordin. And only when they were sitting in the carriage, Tolstoy began to consult with him: where to go further away?

He knew whom to take with him as companions. It was necessary to have an unflappable nature and devotion to Makovitsky, so as not to be confused in this situation. Makovitsky immediately offered to go to Bessarabia, to the worker Gusarov, who lived with his family on his own land. “L.N. didn't answer anything."

Let's go to Shchekino station. A train to Tula was expected in twenty minutes, and a train to Gorbachevo in an hour and a half. Through Gorbachevo to Shamordino, the path is shorter, but Tolstoy, wanting to confuse the tracks and fearing that S.A. wakes up and overtakes him, offered to go through Tula. Makovitsky dissuaded them: they would definitely recognize them in Tula! Let's go to Gorbachevo ...

Agree, this is a little like leaving. Even if you understand this not literally (he left on foot), but in a figurative sense. But it is precisely the literal idea of ​​​​the departure of Tolstoy that warms the souls of the townsfolk to this day. By all means - on foot, on a dark night, with a knapsack over his shoulders and a stick in his hand. And this is an eighty-two-year-old man, although strong, but very sick, suffering from fainting, memory lapses, heart failure and varicose veins in his legs. What would be great about such a "care"? But for some reason, it is pleasant for the layman to imagine that the great Tolstoy just picked up and left like that.

Ivan Bunin's book The Liberation of Tolstoy quotes with admiration the words written by Tolstoy in his farewell letter: “I do what old people of my age usually do. They leave worldly life to live in solitude and in silence the last days of their lives.

Do old people usually do it?

S.A. also drew attention to these words. Having barely recovered from the first shock caused by her husband's night flight, she began to write letters to him with entreaties to return, counting on third parties to mediate in their transfer. And in the second letter, which Tolstoy did not have time to read, she objected to him: “You write that the old people are leaving the world. Yes, where did you get it? Old peasants live out on the stove, in the circle of their families and grandchildren, their last days, the same is true in the lordly and every way of life. Is it natural for a weak old man to leave the care, cares and love of the children and grandchildren around him?

She was wrong. The departure of old men and even old women was a common thing in peasant houses. They went on pilgrimage and simply - to separate huts. They left to live out their lives so as not to interfere with the young, not to be reproached with an extra piece, when the participation of an old person in field and domestic work was no longer possible. They left when sin "settled" in the house: drunkenness, strife, unnatural sexual relations. Yes, they left. But they did not run away from their old wife at night with the consent and support of their daughter.

Makovitsky's notes:

“In the morning, at 3 o'clock, L.H. in a dressing gown, in shoes on bare feet, with a candle, woke me up; a face of pain, agitation and determination.

- I decided to leave. You will come with me. I'll go upstairs and you come, just don't wake Sofya Andreyevna. We will not take a lot of things - the most necessary. Sasha will come for us in three days and bring what we need.

A "decisive" face did not mean composure. This is the determination before jumping off a cliff. As a doctor, Makovitsky notes: “Nerven. I felt his pulse - 100. What are the "necessary things" for the care of an 82-year-old man? Tolstoy thought about this least of all. He was concerned about Sasha hiding from S.A. manuscripts of his diaries. He took with him a self-writing pen, notebooks. Things and provisions were packed by Makovitsky, Sasha and her friend Varvara Feokritova. It turned out that there were still a lot of “most necessary” things, a large travel suitcase was required, which cannot be obtained without noise, without waking S.A.

There were three doors between the bedrooms of Tolstoy and his wife. S.A. kept them open at night to wake up to any alarm from her husband's room. She explained this by saying that if he needed help at night, she would not hear through closed doors. But the main reason was different. She was afraid of his night flight. For some time now, this threat has become real. You can even accurately name the date when it hung in the air of the Yasnaya Polyana house. It happened on July 15, 1910. After a stormy explanation with her husband, S.A. spent a sleepless night and wrote him a letter in the morning:

“Levochka, dear, I write, but I don’t speak, because after a sleepless night it’s hard for me to talk, I’m too worried and can again upset everyone, but I want, I want terribly to be quiet and prudent. At night I thought about everything, and this is what became painfully clear to me: with one hand you caressed me, with the other you showed me a knife. Only yesterday I vaguely felt that this knife had already wounded my heart. This knife is a threat, and a very decisive one, to take the word of the promise back and quietly leave me if I am the same as now ... So, every night, like last, I will listen, have you gone where? Any absence of yours, however slightly longer, I will be tormented that you have left forever. Think, dear Lyovochka, because your departure and your threat are equal to the threat of murder.

When Sasha, Varvara and Makovitsky were packing their things (they acted “like conspirators,” Feokritova recalled, extinguished the candles, hearing any noise from S.A.’s room), Tolstoy tightly closed all three doors leading to his wife’s bedroom, and yet without noise he took out the suitcase. But it turned out to be not enough, it turned out to be a bundle with a plaid and a coat, a basket with provisions. However, Tolstoy did not wait for the end of the training camp. He hurried to the coachman's room to wake the coachman Andrian and help him harness the horses.

Care? Or escape...

From Tolstoy's diary:

“... I’m going to the stable to order to lay; Dushan, Sasha, Varya finish styling. Night - gouge out my eye, stray from the path to the outbuilding, fall into the bowl, prick myself, knock on trees, fall, lose my hat, I can’t find it, I get out by force, I go home, take my hat and with a flashlight I get to the stable, I order it to be mortgaged. Sasha, Dushan, Varya come ... I'm trembling, waiting for the chase.

What a day later, when these lines were written, seemed to him a "thicket", from which he "forced" got out, was his apple orchard, well-trodden by Tolstoy up and down.

What do old people usually do?

“They packed things for about half an hour,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. “Father had already begun to worry, he was in a hurry, but our hands were trembling, the belts would not tighten, the suitcases would not close.”

Alexandra Lvovna also noticed determination in her father's face. “I was waiting for his departure, I was waiting every day, every hour, but nevertheless, when he said:“ I’m leaving completely, ”it struck me as something new, unexpected. I will never forget his figure at the door, in a blouse, with a candle, and his bright, beautiful, determined face.

“A resolute and bright face,” Feokritova wrote. But let's not delude ourselves. Deep October night, when in rural houses, whether peasant or lordly, you can not see your own hand, if you bring it to your eyes. An old man in light clothes, with a candle to his face, suddenly appeared on the threshold. It will amaze anyone!

Of course, Tolstoy's fortitude was phenomenal. But it says more about his ability not to get lost under any circumstances. A friend of the Yasnaya Polyana house, musician Alexander Goldenweiser, recalled one incident. One winter, they rode in a sledge to a village nine miles from Yasnaya to deliver help to a needy peasant family.

“When we were approaching the Zasek station, a small snowstorm began, which became stronger, so that in the end we lost our way and drove without a road. Having strayed a little, we noticed a forest gatehouse not far away and went to it in order to ask the forester how to get on the road. When we arrived at the gatehouse, three or four huge sheep dogs jumped out at us and surrounded the horse and sledge with frantic barking. To be honest, I felt terrified… L.N. with a resolute movement he handed me the reins and said: “Hold it,” and he himself got up, got out of the sleigh, hooted loudly and, empty-handed, boldly walked straight at the dogs. And suddenly the terrible dogs immediately calmed down, parted and gave him the way, as if he were in power. L.N. calmly passed between them and entered the gatehouse. At that moment, with his flowing gray beard, he looked more like a fairy-tale hero than a weak eighty-year old man ... "

So on the night of October 28, 1910, self-control did not leave him. He met the assistants walking with things halfway. “It was dirty, our feet slipped, and we hardly moved in the dark,” Alexandra Lvovna recalled. - A blue light flickered near the outbuilding. Father walked towards us.

“Ah, it's you,” he said, “well, this time I got there safely. We are already tied up. Well, I'll go ahead and shine for you. Oh, why did you give Sasha the heaviest things? he turned reproachfully to Varvara Mikhailovna. He took the basket from her hands and carried it, while Varvara Mikhailovna helped me to carry the suitcase. My father walked in front, occasionally pressing the button of the electric torch and immediately releasing it, which made it seem even darker. Father always saved money and here, as always, he regretted wasting electrical energy.

Sasha persuaded him to take this flashlight after his father wandered in the garden.

Yet when Tolstoy helped the coachman to harness the horse, "his hands trembled, did not obey, and he could not fasten the buckle in any way." Then he "sat in a corner of the carriage house on a suitcase and immediately lost heart."

Sharp mood swings will accompany Tolstoy all the way from Yasnaya to Astapov, where he died on the night of November 7, 1910. Decisiveness and awareness that he acted in the only right way will be replaced by lack of will and an acute sense of guilt. No matter how he prepared for this departure, and he had been preparing for it for twenty-five (!) years, it is clear that neither mentally nor physically he was ready for it. You could imagine this departure in your head as much as you like, but the very first real steps, like wandering in your own garden, presented surprises for which Tolstoy and his companions were not ready.

But why did his resolute mood in the house suddenly change to discouragement in the carriage house? It would seem that things are collected (in two hours - just amazing!), the horses are almost ready, and there are several minutes left before the "liberation". And he loses heart.

In addition to physiological reasons (did not get enough sleep, worried, got lost, helped carry things along a slippery path in the dark), there is another circumstance that can only be understood by clearly imagining the situation as a whole. Wake up S.A. when they were packing, it would be a deafening scandal. But still a scandal inside the home walls. Scene among the "initiates". It was no stranger to such scenes, recently they constantly took place in the Yasnaya Polyana house. But as Tolstoy moved away from the hearth, more and more new faces were involved in his departure. It was exactly what he didn't want to happen. Tolstoy turned out to be a lump of snow, around which a grandiose snowball was wrapping up, and this happened with every minute of its movement in space.

It is impossible to leave without waking up the coachman Andrian Bolkhin. And they also need a groom, thirty-three-year-old Filka (Philip Borisov), who, sitting on horseback, will light the road with a torch in front of the carriage. When L.N. was in the carriage house, the snowball had already begun to grow, grow, and it was becoming more and more impossible to stop it every minute. The gendarmes, newsmen, governors, priests were still sleeping peacefully... Even Tolstoy himself could not imagine how many people would become willing and involuntary accomplices in his flight, up to ministers, chief bishops, Stolypin and Nicholas II.

Of course, he could not fail to understand that he would not succeed in disappearing from Yasnaya Polyana unnoticed. Even Fedya Protasov in The Living Corpse, who imitated suicide, could not disappear unnoticed, but, in the end, was exposed. But let's not forget that in addition to The Living Corpse, he wrote Father Sergius and Posthumous Notes of Elder Fyodor Kuzmich. And if at the moment of leaving he was warmed by some thought, then this one: the famous person, disappearing, dissolves in human space, becomes one of these little ones, invisible to everyone. The legend about him exists separately, and he - separately. And it doesn't matter who you were in the past: the Russian Tsar, the famous miracle worker or the great writer. It is important that here and now you are the simplest and most ordinary person.

When Tolstoy was sitting on a suitcase in the carriage house, in an old Armenian coat, put on a wadded undershirt, in an old knitted cap, he seemed to be fully equipped for the realization of his cherished dream. But... This time, 5 o'clock in the morning, "between the wolf and the dog." This dank end of October is the most disgusting Russian off-season. This is an unbearable languor of waiting, when the beginning of departure is laid, the native walls are abandoned and there is no way back, but ... The horses are not yet ready, Yasnaya Polyana has not yet been abandoned ... And the wife with whom he lived for forty-eight years, who gave birth to him thirteen children, of whom seven are alive, from whom twenty-three grandchildren were born, on whose shoulders he shouldered the entire Yasnaya Polyana economy, all his publishing business on fiction, who several times rewrote parts of his two main novels and many other works, who did not sleep at night in the Crimea, where he died nine years ago, because no one but her could take care of him in the most intimate way - this dear person can wake up at any second, find closed doors, a mess in his room and understand that something, what she feared most in the world had come true!

But has it happened? It doesn't take a wild imagination to imagine the appearance of S.A. in the carriage house, while her husband fastened the horse's buckle with trembling hands. This is no longer a Tolstoyan, but a purely Gogolian situation. No wonder Tolstoy both loved and disliked Gogol's story "The Carriage", in which the district aristocrat Pythagor Pythagorovich Chertokutsky hid from the guests in the carriage house, but was exposed in the most embarrassing way. He considered this thing to be an excellently written, but ridiculous joke. Meanwhile, "Carriage" is not a funny thing at all. The general's visit to the carriage house, where little Chertokutsky huddled on a seat under a leather canopy, is, after all, a visit from Fate itself, which overtakes a person precisely at the moment when he is least ready for it. How pathetic and helpless before her!

Memories of Sasha:

“At first, my father hurried the coachman, and then sat down in the corner of the carriage house on a suitcase and immediately lost heart:

“I feel that they are about to overtake us, and then everything is gone. You can’t leave without a scandal.”

Tolstoy's weakness

Much in Tolstoy's mood both at the moment of flight, and before him, and afterwards, is also explained by such a simple thing as delicacy. Creator, philosopher, "mature human being", Tolstoy by nature remained an old Russian gentleman, in the most beautiful sense of the word. This polysyllabic and, alas, long-lost spiritual complex included such concepts as moral and physical cleanliness, the inability to lie to the eye, slander about a person in his absence, the fear of hurting someone’s feelings with a careless word and just being something unpleasant for people. . In his youth, due to the unbridled mind and character, Tolstoy sinned a lot against these spiritual qualities that were innate and brought up in the family, and he himself suffered from this. But by old age, in addition to the acquired principles of love and compassion for people, the rejection of the nasty, dirty, scandalous was increasingly manifested in him.

Throughout the conflict with his wife, Tolstoy was almost flawless. He felt sorry for her, stopped any attempts to slander her, even when he knew the validity of these words. He obeyed, as far as possible and even impossible, her demands, sometimes the most ridiculous, patiently endured all her antics, sometimes monstrous, like blackmail by suicide. But at the core of this behavior, which surprised and even annoyed his supporters, there were not abstract principles, but the nature of an old gentleman, but simply a beautiful old man who painfully experiences any quarrel, discord, scandal.

And this old man secretly commits an act at night, which cannot be worse for his wife. It's not even the knife S.A. wrote about. It's an ax!

Therefore, the strongest feeling that Tolstoy experienced in the carriage house was fear. The fear that his wife will wake up, run out of the house and catch him on a suitcase, next to the still unready carriage ... And - you can’t avoid a scandal, a painful, heartbreaking scene that will become the crescendo of what has been happening in Yasnaya Polyana lately.

He never ran away from difficulties... In recent years, on the contrary, he thanked God when He sent him trials. With a humble heart, he accepted any "troubles". He rejoiced when he was condemned. But now he passionately wanted to "pass away this cup."

It was beyond his strength.

Yes, Tolstoy's departure was a manifestation not only of strength, but also of weakness. He frankly admitted this to his old friend and confidante Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt, a former classy lady who believed in Tolstoy as in the new Christ, the most sincere and consistent “hoodie”, who lived in a hut in Ovsyanniki, six miles away. Tolstoy often visited her during horse rides, knowing that these visits not only bring her joy, but are the meaning of life for her. He consulted with her on spiritual matters and on October 26, two days before his departure, spoke of his still inconclusive decision to leave. Maria Alexandrovna threw up her hands:

- Darling, Lev Nikolaevich! - she said. It's a weakness, it will pass.

“Yes,” he replied, “that is a weakness.

This conversation, according to Maria Alexandrovna, is cited in her memoirs by Tatyana Lvovna Sukhotina. In the diary of Makovitsky, who accompanied L.N. on a walk on October 26, this dialogue is not. Yes, and Maria Alexandrovna herself, in an interview with the correspondent of Russkoye Slovo, claimed that on that day L.N. didn't say a word to her. This was an obvious lie, explained by her unwillingness to wash dirty linen in public (and not even her own hut) and open the Tolstoy family conflict to the whole world. In Tolstoy's secret Diary for Myself alone, there is an entry dated October 26: “More and more I am weary of this life. Marya Alexandrovna does not order me to leave, and my conscience does not let me either.

Makovitsky also noted on October 26 that “L.N. weak" and distracted. On the way to Schmidt, Tolstoy commits a “bad”, in his own words, act: he rode a horse through the “greens” (winter crops), but this cannot be done in the mud, because the horse leaves deep traces and destroys the delicate greenery.

I would like to exclaim: I regretted the “green”, but not my old wife ?! Unfortunately, this is a typical way of condemning Tolstoy. This is how people think, who see in Tolstoy's flight the act of a “mothered human being” and correlate it with their “human, too human” ideas about the family. The strong Tolstoy left a weak wife who did not coincide with him in spiritual development. It's understandable, that's why he is a genius, but S.A., of course, it's a pity! How dangerous it is to marry geniuses.

This common point of view, oddly enough, almost coincides with the one that is cultivated in the intellectual environment and, with the light hand of Ivan Bunin, has become fashionable.

Tolstoy left to die. It was an act of liberation of the spiritual titan from the material captivity that tormented him. "The Liberation of Tolstoy". How beautiful! Reduced version: like a strong animal, sensing the approach of death, leaves the pack, so Tolstoy, sensing the approach of an inevitable end, rushed from Yasnaya Polyana. Also a beautiful pagan version, which Alexander Kuprin voiced in the newspapers in the first days of his departure.

"Escape from Paradise" is a detailed reconstruction last days life of Leo Tolstoy, which is interspersed with an exposition of his biography. This well-founded compositional technique serves a dual purpose: firstly, according to the author, the writer’s flight from Yasnaya Polyana was prepared for his entire forty-eight years of family life, and this kind of conflict, which was gradually brewing, is best reflected by such a structure. Secondly, the feeling of the denouement inexorably approaching and at the same time being delayed, like in a movie, by constant flashbacks, gives tension to the narrative. Basinsky is an experienced journalist, and his book is not an academic biography, namely that a journalistic - not to say yellowish - investigation, designed, as they say, for a wide audience. Hence the escalation of suspense by bizarre versions of various events from Tolstoy's life, which the biographer puts forward and immediately refutes himself; rhetorical questions; controversy with unnamed opponents; the amazing ability of the author to read in the hearts, as in an open book, great attention to minor, but spectacular details. Here, for example, the author meticulously studies the Brühl railway sign used by Tolstoy and consistently rejects various possible escape routes in order to come to the conclusion: “It is precisely the inexorable laws of Russian railways, and not at all a romantic love for the Caucasus, turned out to be the main, decisive reason that Tolstoy rushed to run not to the west and not to the south, but to the southeast, through the endless Don steppes. Therefore, it is so funny and bitter to read that Tolstoy died "at a godforsaken station." Astapovo just wasn't a “god-forgotten station”. It was a large, junction station between Dankov and Ranenburg. - Oh, well, then it's a completely different matter. It is interesting how many still believed that the writer was guided in his last journey by a romantic love for the Caucasus. Basinsky also draws vocabulary from the same modern Russian journalism: either Sofya Andreevna “does not try to slow down” the family conflict, then Chertkov, as Tolstoy’s correspondent, is awarded “exclusive”, then the Tolstoy family is “buggy”, then Chertkov, taking possession of the writer’s diaries, “received compromising information on Tolstoy's wife."

There is more than enough compromising evidence on Tolstoy's wife in Escape from Paradise - as, indeed, on all the inhabitants of Yasnaya Polyana. The book is made as a dense compilation of a huge number of documents: diaries, memoirs, letters, between which the author's conclusions are skillfully woven. Basinsky did a great job, including archival work - and it should be noted that he had something to work with. Leo Tolstoy was the most media figure of his time. According to the testimony of the writer's daughter Alexandra Lvovna, “The Tolstoys were deprived of what every family cherishes so much - personal life. They lived in full view of everyone, under a glass jar.” The beginning of this life was laid open by Tolstoy himself, who kept a diary from a young age and gave it to his wife to read; then the life of Yasnaya Polyana was carefully documented by almost all its inhabitants in diaries and memoirs, on the basis of which more than one biographical study was subsequently created. I therefore think that anyone who is in any way interested in this question will not find anything new for himself in Basinsky's book. But this is not necessary, since Escape from Paradise has the energy and fascination of a tabloid - well, a novel is not a novel - let's say, an investigation. To common, as it seems to him, intellectual prejudices (“Strong Tolstoy left a weak wife who did not coincide with him in spiritual development”; “Tolstoy left to die”; “Tolstoy left to merge with the people”) Basinsky contrasts a kind of warm psychological picture in the best traditions of the "Caravan of stories", that is, the story of a brilliant, but weak man, hunted down by loved ones. In general, as the song says: “His wife, Sofya Tolstaya, / Back, loved to eat. / She did not go barefoot, / Saving noble honor. / From this in their family / There was an eternal and grave discord: / He was reproached for villainy - / He was not to blame for anything. This is a common problem: the biography of the writer, which is not centered on an analysis of his work, but on family troubles, as a rule, sins with yellowness. But the biographer Leo Tolstoy is especially let down by the material.

Read full text I think that every reader of Tolstoy experienced at one time an internal conflict, trying to reconcile in his view of Tolstoy the prose writer and Tolstoy the God-seeker. If only because we, simple souls, usually love Tolstoy for "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", and Tolstoy, after his spiritual turn, rejected the value of literary work - well, and because we do not forgive the prophets for weakness and inconsistency in confession what they preach. Tolstoy, in his extremely confessional diaries, is the first to give the reader food for such a condemnation. And Basinsky, throwing a lot of eloquent facts into the furnace of rumor, is not able to oppose them with anything but superlatives and enthusiastic epithets: we are invited to take Tolstoy's spiritual feat on faith.

Here even the special efforts of the biographer are not needed - this is in the nature of the material itself: the mentioned internal conflict results in the fact that with all our recognition of the value of the spiritual search and moral suffering of Leo Tolstoy and respect for such, many of his notes are read today like vaudeville. We randomly open Tolstoy's diary - an entry dated March 28, 1884: "... Fet came to order boots ...". The note says that these boots with Fet’s own “testimony” are now stored in the L.N. Tolstoy in Moscow. I didn’t have to go there, to my shame, but I’m curious to know if the boots were worn. Basinsky quotes a lot from the same year, here is an entry ten days earlier cited by me: “Houses are people. Embarrassing and seductive. Music, singing, talking. Right after the orgy." If such orgies were described by Tolstoy in his youthful diary, which he gave the eighteen-year-old bride to read before the wedding, which inflicted mental trauma on Sofya Andreevna for life, one will actually have to agree with Basinsky, to whom her jealousy seems inexplicable "otherwise than by the original features her feminine character.

In his analysis of the spiritual movements of the inhabitants of Yasnaya Polyana, Basinsky does not stand on ceremony at all: Sofya Andreevna was unable to make a "reasonable decision" in him, Chertkov "causes disgust." Tolstoy himself is no exception - he’s just, so to speak, both small and vile otherwise: “Tolstoy’s Krekshinsky diary (from September 5 to September 18, 1909) evokes amazing feelings. He is wise, but somehow too childishly wise. For an unprepared person, he really can give the impression of some kind of infantile babble. At this point, I would like an explanation - what is wise infantile babble and what is the preparation of the researcher necessary for understanding, in addition to the notorious conviction that everything that came out of Tolstoy's pen cannot but be wise and brilliant.

““ Tanya is the charm of the naivety of egoism and instinct ... - Tolstoy wrote in his diary of 1863, brilliantly expressing inner world sister-in-law. “I love you and I’m not afraid.” It sounds as if Pavel Basinsky studied the inner world of Tatyana Kuzminskaya inside and out and probably found out whether Leo Tolstoy expressed it brilliantly or not. But suppose, nevertheless, that the author simply praised the successful mot his hero (he really had an abyss of such; here is another, for example: “I love drunks terribly. Such good nature and sincerity!”), but this excerpt from the diary of 1963 is not just given. It is intended to illustrate the idea that "[Kuzminskaya's] habits and attitude to life did not coincide with Tolstoy's new convictions" - the very convictions that were out of the question in the sixty-third year, then Tolstoy had just married and was passionate about literature, hunting , household - in particular, as the same Kuzminskaya recalls, he built a distillery, causing moral condemnation of his wife and father-in-law, while his sister-in-law went with him to the construction site in complete peace and harmony. But this is not important - Basinsky has every bast in a line.

Against the background of this mastery of the art of compilation - watch your hands! - non-obvious author's connections, unconvincing psychological guesses and sometimes comical generalizations slip unnoticed. Here Basinsky writes about Maria Nikolaevna, the writer’s sister, describing her “heavy and capricious character”, inability to get along anywhere, waywardness and wit, and ending the story like this: “In the end, only in the monastery could her proud and independent nature find peace and harmony.” If you read it, it’s an absolutely meaningless phrase: you can’t think of a less suitable place for a proud and independent nature than a monastery where Maria Nikolaevna, as Basinsky writes further, could not even give her famous brother her stroller without asking the abbess. Or here: "According to the tradition laid down by the father, Tolstoy's children did not marry and did not marry for money." It is, of course, Alexander the Macedonian hero, but why break the chairs? In the year 1888 being described, you really didn't have to be the son of a God-seeker or the son of Count Tolstoy in order to marry whomever you wanted. Or here's another thing about Sofya Andreevna: “She could conclude any contracts and sign any legal documents without the consent of her husband. It is interesting that at the same time she could not freely move around Russia without the consent of her husband. And when in 1886 the need arose for a trip by S.A. to Yalta to see his mother dying there, Tolstoy had to sign another certificate for his wife that he allows her “During this 1886, living in all cities and localities Russian Empire"". The author cites this fact simply as a curiosity - it is no longer needed for anything. We appreciated the archival zeal of the researcher, but for mercy, what's interesting here? A married lady in the Russian Empire was inscribed in her husband's passport and could not get her own without his consent, this is well known. But past, past, my reader: following the biographer, “let’s not be hypocrites and ask the question: weren’t family conflicts connected with the physical cooling of an already aging man to his<...>not a young friend?”

I will quote, following Pavel Basinsky, a letter that seems to me the key to understanding the main flaw in the writer's new biography. Tolstoy writes to Sofya Andreevna in an unsent letter (1885. December 15-18. Moscow): “... All my works, which were nothing more than my life, interested you so little and interest you, which is so out of curiosity, as you will read a literary work when it comes to you; and children, they are not even interested in reading. It seems to you that I am on my own, and my writing is on its own. My writing is all of me. In life I could not fully express my views, in life I make a concession to the necessity of cohabitation in the family; I live and deny in my soul all this life, and it is not my life that you consider my life, but my life, expressed in writing, you consider words that have no reality.

Basinsky is interested in Tolstoy's writings only as material for an almost detective investigation of the writer's relationship with his relatives and the internal motives of his family (-tsr-) conflicts. The combination of enticing tricks from the yellowish press with the intonations of an excited, intelligent young lady, against the will of the author, exposes Tolstoy in a comic light: if in this way Basinsky wanted to refute “an anecdote that has set the teeth on edge: “Your Excellency, the plow is filed to the front door. Would you like to plow?” - then, undertaking to paint a portrait of Tolstoy “by himself”, he achieved the exact opposite goal. To the general reader, the one whose supposed antipathy to Tolstoyism has hitherto been based on the above-mentioned anecdote, and perhaps on the epilogue of War and Peace, the author does a disservice to this reader.

Pavel Basinsky. Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise. M.: AST: Astrel, 2010.