The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (16 page)

On the third day of the Tolstoy conference, a professor from Yale read a paper on tennis. In
Anna Karenina
, he began, Tolstoy represents lawn tennis in a very negative light. Anna and Vronsky swat futilely at the tiny ball, poised on the edge of a vast spiritual and moral abyss. When he wrote that scene, Tolstoy himself had never played tennis, which he only knew of as an English fad. At the age of sixty-eight, Tolstoy was given a tennis racket and taught the rules of the game. He became an instant tennis addict.

“No other writer was as prone to great contradictions,” explained the professor, whose mustache and mobile eyebrows gave him the air of a nineteenth-century philanderer. All summer long, Tolstoy played tennis for three hours every day. No opponent could rival Tolstoy’s indefatigable thirst for the game of tennis; his guests and children would take turns playing against him.

The International Tolstoy Scholars wondered at Tolstoy’s athleticism. He should have lived to see eighty-five—ninety—one hundred!

Tolstoy had also been in his sixties when he learned how to ride a bicycle. He took his first lesson exactly one month after the death of his and Sonya’s beloved youngest son. Both the bicycle and an introductory lesson were a gift from the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers. One can only guess how Sonya felt, in her mourning, to see her husband teetering along the garden paths. “Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle,” Chertkov noted at that time. “Is this not inconsistent with Christian ideals?”

On the last day of talks, wearing my Tolstoyan costume and flip-flops, I took my place at the long table and read my paper about the double plot in
Anna Karenina
. It ended with a brief comparison of Tolstoy’s novel to
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, which turned out to be somewhat controversial, since I was unable to prove that Tolstoy had read
Alice
by the time he wrote
Anna Karenina
.

“Well,
Alice in Wonderland
was published in 1865,” I said, trying to ignore a romance that was being enacted, just outside the window, by two of the descendants of Tolstoy’s horses. “It’s well known that Tolstoy liked to receive all the latest English books by mail.”

“Tolstoy had a copy of
Alice in Wonderland
in his personal library,” said one of the archivists.

“But it’s an 1893 edition,” objected the conference organizer. “It’s inscribed to his daughter Sasha, and Sasha wasn’t born until 1884.”

“So Tolstoy
hadn’t
read
Alice
in 1873!” an old man called from the back of the room.

“Well, you never know,” said the archivist. “He might have read it earlier, and then bought a new copy to give to Sasha.”

“And there might be mushrooms growing in my mouth—but then it wouldn’t be a mouth, but a whole garden!” retorted the old man.

One of the Rousseau experts raised her hand. “If Anna represents Alice, and Levin represents the White Rabbit,” she said, “then who is Vronsky?”

I tried to explain that I wasn’t suggesting a one-to-one correspondence between every character in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Anna Karenina
. The Rousseau expert stared at me. “Anyway,” I concluded, “it’s Oblonsky whom I was comparing to the White Rabbit—not Levin.”

She frowned. “So Vronsky is the White Rabbit?”

“Vronsky is the Mad Hatter!” someone shouted.

The conference organizer rose to her feet. “I think we can continue this interesting discussion over tea.”

In the crush at the tea table, I was approached by the archivist, who patted my shoulder. “I’m sure Tolstoy read
Alice in Wonderland
before 1873,” she said. “Also, we received a police report today. A certain suitcase has been received and is being held in security.”

She directed me to the security holding area, which was inside one of the historic white gate-towers of Yasnaya Polyana—one of the very towers depicted on the mug that I had used to solicit shampoo. The mug had been a clue. As the Keebler Elf factory is hidden inside a hollow tree, so was an entire security office concealed within a gatepost. Next to one of the officers’ steel desks, under a framed portrait of Tolstoy, sat my suitcase. It had arrived two days ago, but the officers hadn’t known whose it was. I signed a form and dragged my suitcase over moss and tree roots, back toward the conference hall. It was a good opportunity to look at the ground.
I was looking for
Hyoscyamus niger
, a toxic plant known as henbane or stinking nightshade that is native to Eurasia.

Henbane contains the toxin atropine, which is associated with nearly all of Tolstoy’s symptoms, including fever, intense thirst, delirium, delusions, disorientation, rapid pulse, convulsions, difficulty breathing, combativeness, incoherence, inability to speak, memory loss, disturbances of vision, respiratory failure, and cardiopulmonary arrest. A particularly distinctive feature of atropine poisoning is that it dilates the pupils and causes sensitivity to light. I had no information about Tolstoy’s pupils, but Chertkov’s diary does contain one suggestive observation: “Tolstoy—to the amazement of his doctors—continued to show signs of consciousness to the very end . . . by turning away from the light that was shining into his eyes.”

Nearly anyone might have slipped henbane into Tolstoy’s tea (of which he drank large quantities). Chertkov, for example, in concert with Dr. Makovitsky. They, the fervent Tolstoyans, had motive enough: What if Tolstoy repented and changed his will again? What if, in his dotage, by some new weakness, he contradicted the principles of Tolstoyanism?

Sonya had, in addition to motive, a known interest in poisons. “I have consulted Florinsky’s book on medicine to see what the effects of opium poisoning would be,” wrote Sonya in her diary in 1910. “First excitement, then lethargy.
No antidote
.” Then there were the Tolstoys’ sons: though the daughters tended to side with Tolstoy, the sons, who were usually short on money, sided with their mother. In 1910, Sonya boasted that, even if Tolstoy
had
written a secret will, she and their sons would have it thrown out: “We shall prove that he had become feeble-minded toward the end and had a series of strokes . . . We will prove that he was forced into writing that will in a moment of mental incapacity.”

Perhaps Sonya had used atropine to simulate the effects of a stroke. She might not have intended to kill her husband—just to provide grounds to invalidate his will. But, in his atropine-induced delirium, Tolstoy had embarked on his bizarre and fatal flight.

After Tolstoy’s death, Sonya, supported by a pension from the tsar, tried to fight Sasha and Chertkov for the copyrights. History opposed her in the form of the Great War, followed by the 1917 revolution. Sonya and Sasha were finally reconciled during the famine of 1918–19. Of her mother at this time Sasha recalled: “She seemed strangely indifferent to money, luxury, things she liked so much before.” On her deathbed, Sonya made a strange confession: “ ‘I want to tell you,’ she said, breathing heavily and interrupted by spasms of coughing, ‘I know that I was the cause of your father’s death.’ ”

Of all the papers at the conference, the most mysterious was about Tolstoy’s little-read play
The Living Corpse
. This paper was delivered by a Czech septuagenarian with large, watery gray eyes, well liked both for his bombastic sociability and for his generosity with the bottle of single-malt scotch he carried in his suitcase. Everyone called him Vanya, though I believe that wasn’t his real name.

The hero of
The Living Corpse
is a man called Fyodor. Fyodor is married, but he keeps running off with the Gypsies. He is chastely in love with a Gypsy singer. Meanwhile, his wife, Liza, is chastely in love with his best friend, whose name is, oddly, Karenin. (Karenin’s mother’s name is actually Anna Karenina.) Although Karenin returns Liza’s love, the two are unable to act on their feelings unless Fyodor grants Liza a divorce. Fyodor, for his part, cannot file for
divorce without besmirching the honor of the Gypsy singer. In despair, Fyodor resolves to kill himself and even writes a suicide note, but is persuaded by the Gypsy girl to adopt a different course: he simply leaves his own clothes on a riverbank, with the note in one pocket. Everyone believes he has drowned, including Liza and Karenin, who get married. But just at the point when a new life should begin for Fyodor as well—nothing happens. Somehow Fyodor doesn’t change his name. He and the Gypsy girl don’t get married. They quarrel and drift apart. Fyodor spends all his time in the tavern. “I am a corpse!” he shouts, slamming his glass on the table. Eventually, Fyodor’s identity comes to light, and Liza is arrested for bigamy. In despair, Fyodor shoots himself. The living corpse becomes just an ordinary corpse.

The Living Corpse
was based on the true story of an alcoholic called Gimer who had faked his own suicide and been sentenced to Siberia. The Moscow Art Theater very much wanted to stage it, but Tolstoy kept demurring. “It has seventeen acts,” he said. “It needs a revolving stage.” The real reason for Tolstoy’s refusal came to light only much later. Gimer, it seems, had somehow learned that there was a play written about him and, upon his return from Siberia, presented himself at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy took the unhappy man in hand, persuaded him to give up drink, and even found him a job in the very court that had convicted him. In light of Gimer’s real-life “resurrection,” Tolstoy abandoned the staging of
The Living Corpse
.

The strange story has an even stranger epilogue. As Tolstoy lay in a fever, in 1908, a visitor brought him news of this Gimer’s death. “The corpse is now really dead,” quipped the visitor—but Tolstoy had completely forgotten not only his former protégé but also the existence of the play. Even when the plot was recounted, Tolstoy had no recollection of
having written such a thing: “And I am very, very glad that it escaped my mind to give place to something else.” The central question of Vanya’s talk was “Who is the living corpse?”

The argument twisted and coiled, glinting in the sun. At one moment it seemed that Tolstoy’s Fyodor was actually Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had lived through the firing squad and survived the House of the Dead. Then it turned out that Fyodor was really Fyodorov, the philosopher-librarian who believed that the universal task of mankind was to harness the forces of science in order to abolish death and resurrect all dead people. Still later, it seemed the living corpse was actually Anna Karenina, who had died an adulteress in
Anna Karenina
and returned a mother-in-law in
The Living Corpse
. Then there was Jesus Christ, whose tomb was found empty after three days and nights: what was Tolstoy’s God, if not a living corpse? And what was Tolstoy?

The banquet that night lasted until ten or eleven. Entertainment was provided by students from the Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy: boys aged six to fifteen, already able to play the accordion with all the mannerisms of genial, nostalgic old men.
*
Even the tiniest of the boys, playing on a doll-size accordion, smiled knowingly, nodded, and even winked at the audience.

I had stopped at the dormitory first, where I took a shower and put on a linen dress. Many of the International Tolstoy Scholars congratulated me on my change of costume. Some of them had really thought that I didn’t own any other clothes. A White Russian from Paris shook my hand. “You
should change three times this evening,” he said, “to make up for lost time.”

At dinner, many toasts were proposed. An unknown man in a sports jacket recited a particularly long, pointless toast; later, I learned that he was Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson.

We had to get up early the next morning for the last event of the International Tolstoy Conference, a field trip to Anton Chekhov’s former estate. Melikhovo lay directly along the three-hour route from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow. In this respect, the field trip made a certain amount of logistical sense. Nonetheless, after five days of total devotion to Tolstoy, master of the Russian novel, it felt strange to drop in so breezily on Chekhov—master of the Russian short story and an altogether different writer—simply because one happened to be passing through the neighborhood.

And so, after the banquet, when the participants went to their rooms to pack their suitcases—mine, of course, had never been unpacked to begin with—I went onto the balcony to think about Chekhov. The air smelled like plants and cigar smoke, bringing to mind the marvelous story that begins with a young man’s arrival, late one spring night, at the country estate of his former tutor, a famous horticulturalist. There is the nip of frost in the air, and the horticulturalist and his daughter are in a panic that the orchards might freeze. The daughter has resolved to stay up all night, supervising the bonfires. All night long, the young man and the daughter pace, coughing and weeping, through the rows of trees, watching the workers who stoke the smoldering bonfires with manure and damp straw. I tried to remember how the story ends. It doesn’t end well.

Chekhov was nine years old when
War and Peace
was
published. He admired Tolstoy tremendously and longed to meet him; at the same time, the prospect of this meeting filled him with such alarm that he once ran out of a bathhouse in Moscow when he learned that Tolstoy was also there. Chekhov did not want to meet Tolstoy in the bath, but this apparently was his inescapable destiny. When at last he worked up the nerve to go to Yasnaya Polyana, Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chindeep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.