The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 2/Chapter 3
From a historical figure to a contemporary figure. From the simplicity of a mediæval choice such as Seraphim's to the difficulty of the choice that confronts a modern.
Nothing in Tolstoy's life is so interesting to me as the circumstances of his death, his flight from home to the monastery, his perishing on a wayside station like some aged pilgrim broken down on the way to Jerusalem. The story is such a beautiful, pathetic, touching one that the station of Astapovo may well be an object of pilgrimage for people who can feel in themselves the poignancies of life, and who are interested in the destinies of mankind.
Not a place for sightseers, however! A dreary journey at the rate of eighteen miles an hour and at the end of it all this little station on a by-line. In the waiting-room are peasants in rags, in sheepskins, in old blouses, peasants sleeping on forms; bundles on the floor, heaps of bundles, tied-up sacks, ancient green trunks. On one side of the room is a grandfather's clock, on the other is a little wooden chapel with ikons and votive candles. From the clock to the chapel runs a long linoleum-covered bar, and on the ikon side of it are scores of fresh loaves, while on the clock side are vodka and wine. On the top of the clock burns a paraffin lamp. There is praying and disputing and tea-drinking, children crying, bundles, boxes, pointsmen with dim lanterns, a mouldy-looking gendarme, and it is five o'clock in the morning.
Out of the lingering train they brought Tolstoy into just such a room and to such a scene. "They brought him through here," says the heavy bearded man behind the bar, "and they put him first in the woman's room and then took him to a room in the stationmaster's house."
The man behind the bar has trained his whiskers to look like those of Tolstoy, and is vain enough to ask me: "Did you not take me for Tolstoy's double? Some are frightened when they see me and think I am Tolstoy's ghost. Am I not like him?"
"Did you look as like him then? What did Tolstoy's friends think of your appearance?"
"They laughed."
"Did you have many people here?"
"Not many strangers, fifteen of the family, twenty correspondents, a general from Petrograd, two doctors. . . . I put them all up and fed them."
A gruff, astonishing old fellow, this double of Tolstoy. A strange coincidence that Tolstoy should die at his station. He is heavy, awkward, unpleasant-looking, like a Guy Fawkes effigy of Tolstoy; and as you watch him cross the waiting-room it seems as if his hair might fall off and prove to be a wig, and as if one might pull his beard and whiskers away.
But he is quite obliging to me, and shows me the marble tablet in the stationmaster's wooden wall, and directs me to the room in which everything stands just as it did then, which is being preserved so for all time—if Time spares Tolstoy's memory.
The first I ever heard of Tolstoy was the discrediting whisper, "His wife banks his money; everything is in his wife's name." And later on, when I came to Russia, coupled with national pride in Leo Nikolaevitch was always the rumour: "When he wants to go to Moscow he travels first-class; he does not go on foot as he advises others to do. He counsels us to live simply while he himself lives in style at Yasnaya Polyana. He disbelieves in doctors, but when the least thing is the matter with him doctors are in attendance." I suppose no one really put these things in the balance against Tolstoy's sincerity—unless, perhaps, it was Tolstoy himself.
Tolstoy was evidently heavily oppressed by the worldly life in which he seemed to share and which he seemed to countenance. It was mirrored in his soul as the everyday reflection of life, the luxury, feasting, drinking, trivial conversation, and vulgar pride of his home.
Some time in his life, perhaps several times, Tolstoy must have been on the point of running away. In order to make his personal life correspond to his teaching, it would have been necessary to give up his wife and family and the life they insisted on living. He ought to have gone out into the wilderness and become a hermit or a pilgrim. So he would have made his personality and doctrine into one great snow-crowned mountain and holy landmark in the national life of Russia.
Tolstoy failed to do this, not through weakness, but because he felt he would lift a heavier cross and would be truer to his own ideal if he continued to lead his life in "the world," in the midst of the frivolities and luxuries which did not pertain to him. He would live his personal life against the background of this stupidity, his flesh nailed to that cross.
His life will not stand out in relief till some one writes the evangel of his life. As yet Tolstoy is merely a great man, the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Few know the real significance of his life. But certainly it may be said of him, despite calumnies and appearances, "He had no possessions on earth; he always confessed to being a stranger and a pilgrim here. He did not believe that machinery or medicine or law were of any value to the soul of man. And though he lived in the midst of wealth he lived very simply."
A very brilliant old man at Yasnaya Polyana. You went away impressed with his brilliance, and even if you were inclined to scoff you still acknowledged he was great. But greatness was not much to Tolstoy; it was surely nothing to him that he remained great to the end. The chief fact about him was that for many years he was really old and confused in spirit, troubled. In his heart of hearts he was not sure that he was living the true life. He felt a doubt that the emptiness and vanity around him were his own emptiness and vanity. The world was too much with him; the vision forsook him.
In the blaze up of the candle before death he saw his way and sought sanctuary from the world, fled. . . .
And he perished on the road, with his back to Yasnaya Polyana and the "world." In the room where he died are the poor two-foot-six by five-foot-six iron bedstead, the table with medicine bottles, a chair, the enamel basin they washed him in. It is all to remain as it was on the day that he died. Pleasant symbolism! The world will also remain the same: it will remove his body to Yasnaya Polyana, and quarrel over the prayer to be said over the grave; it will quarrel over the rights in his autograph manuscripts; it will publish the old man's love-letters; it will rig up in Moscow a facsimile of Astapovo Station and the room where he died; it will arrange ten-year jubilees, fifty-year jubilees, centenaries; build statues . . . ; but those who seek to know the true Tolstoy, the real man who had this strange life-journey, will hear the whisper, "Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."