Читать книгу The Last Days of Tolstoy - V. G. Chertkov - Страница 4

[1] Sofya Andreyevna Tolstoy, who died in November, 1919. In Appendix II, at the end of the present volume, I explain what attitude towards Sofya Andreyevna I adopt in the present narrative.

[2] Isabella Fyvie Mayo.

[3] In this connection I venture to quote here a small extract from my article entitled "Should the truth about Tolstoy's going away be told?" (published in the magazine Tolstoy's Voice and Unity, N 3 (15)).

"The conditions under which Leo Nikolaevitch Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana and died on the journey at a railway station were, as everyone knows, quite exceptional. And yet, though it happened ten years ago, mankind does not to this day know the true causes of this event. Both in Russia and abroad the actual reasons that drove a man like Leo Tolstoy to leave his family are unknown, and so everyone invented his own reasons and published all sorts of fictions. Some have maintained that Tolstoy longed to be received once more into the Orthodox Church and wanted to save his soul in a monastery. Some insisted that as he grew old his intellect grew so weak that he did not know what he was doing, and, instinctively feeling the approach of death, went off without any definite purpose. Others observed with satisfaction that at the end of his life, at any rate, Tolstoy succeeded in overcoming his attachment to his family and his bondage to wealthy surroundings, and in doing what in accordance with his convictions he ought to have done long ago. Others, on the contrary, regretted that he had not the strength to endure the trials of his home life to the end, and that, revolted at the behaviour of his family, he lost his spiritual balance and failed in his duty to his relatives. There is no enumerating all the guesses and suppositions that were spread by people who attempted during the last ten years to solve the riddle of Tolstoy's 'going away,' or who intentionally perverted the truth. Quite recently in his book on Tolstoy (which has already been translated into foreign languages), Maxim Gorky, with his usual amazing rashness in dealing with subjects which he does not know or fails to understand, thought it fit, by the side of other absurdities about Tolstoy, to inform the world that Leo Nikolaevitch left Yasnaya Polyana 'with the despotic intention of increasing the oppressive influence of his religious ideas' and 'compelling people to accept them,' and that he, Maxim Gorky, does not approve of such behaviour.

"I owe it to my friend's memory to show how ill-grounded are the accusations and the slanders with which men, misinformed as to the circumstances of his life, or opposed to his theories, tried to besmirch his name. I naturally want to do my utmost to reinstate in all its beauty and purity the spiritual image of him to whom I am indebted so much for his love and moral assistance."

[4] In connection with the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow (Pretchistenka 11) a circle has been formed with the object, partly, of collecting and preserving such communications. Some of them may, with the author's consent, be published in the Viestnik.