seemed that the public, forgetting its personal cares, lived only for the literature of Count Tolstoy … The most important political events rarely captured everyone with such force.”
The “Tolstoyans” (followers of Tolstoy who lived in quasi-socialist communes, working the land, practicing nonviolent resistance to evil and moral self-perfection) discussed
Tolstoy’s wife was deeply wounded by the popularity of
So Sophia had a brilliant idea: she would go to St. Petersburg to get permission for publication of
Her plan worked. Alexander received her in the palace and after a friendly chat gave his consent to the publication of the novella in the next volume of Tolstoy’s collected works. Sophia was triumphant: “I, a woman, got what no one else could achieve.”
She was especially pleased that Alexander found her “young and beautiful” at forty-seven. Naturally, that provoked displeasure in Tolstoy, who was pathologically jealous. Hearing his wife’s joyous account of her meeting with the emperor, Tolstoy grumbled angrily that “before he and Sovereign had ignored each other and now this new turn of events could create problems.”
Tolstoy’s jealousy finally brought his family to the brink of disaster, in a classic example of life imitating art. Like the protagonist in his novella, Tolstoy grew jealous of a musician, the composer and pianist Sergei Taneyev.
The Neoclassicist Taneyev was often called the Russian Brahms (even though he abhorred Brahms’s music), and after the death in 1893 of his teacher and idol Tchaikovsky, Taneyev became the guru of musical Moscow. As a composer, Taneyev always stood apart: he had a special knowledge of the polyphonic technique of the old masters (Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso), and he used it in his own work.
Short, heavyset, bearded, nearsighted, and dumpy, Taneyev was a freethinker. During the census of 1897 he intended to fill in the religion question with “heretic not believing in God.” He also openly despised the Romanovs. He liked to tell the story of how in 1881, during the celebrations of the coronation of Alexander III, he was asked to conduct a concert in Moscow in the presence of the emperor, and he “intentionally put on a boot with a hole specially for the tsar.” “Alexander III gave me a gold ruble,” Taneyev recalled with a laugh, “and I immediately gave it to the doorman as a tip.”24
One of his favorite writers was Tolstoy, whom he had met in the early 1890s. Tolstoy was a fair amateur pianist and even composed a sweet little waltz, written down by Taneyev, who was a guest at Yasnaya Polyana in the summers of 1895 and 1896.
Neither man liked the late Beethoven, Wagner, or the “modernists” Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy. But Tolstoy found Palestrina, adored by Taneyev, boring, and he was rather skeptical about Taneyev’s music, unabashed at telling him so to his face.
. . .
Soon, Taneyev became “disgusting” to Tolstoy, and in his diary Tolstoy compared the clumsy, shy, and kindly composer to a rooster: his wife had invented an “affair” for herself with Taneyev, and Tolstoy could not stand it.
Tolstoy ignored the fact that Taneyev was a completely asexual virgin. Sophia’s tenderness toward the eccentric composer was more maternal than anything else. Taneyev had a calming effect on Sophia, and lofty music, which he embodied, gave her the illusion of an emotional harbor, a respite from the stormy atmosphere created by her tyrannical husband.
A controlling person, Tolstoy found the situation intolerable: he could not sleep, he wept, he kept arguing with Sophia, trying to separate her from that “fat musician.” Sophia fought back aggressively, “I will love people who are good and kind, and not you. You’re a beast.” It went on for years, while the unsuspecting Taneyev calmly continued visiting the Tolstoy house and Sophia attended his concerts in Moscow.
What must have infuriated Tolstoy most was that Taneyev was a silent rebuke, the ideal Tolstoyan, a follower of his moral teachings: he lived simply, did not care about money, and did not chase after fame and glory; nor did he smoke or drink, and he was a vegetarian, like Tolstoy.
But while Tolstoy proclaimed in
Looking at Taneyev, the world-famed prophet and stern judge of tsars saw himself as pathetic and ridiculous. His bedroom was his gallows: although only he and his wife knew it, he feared that everyone knew (or guessed). His dilemma was an irresolvable contradiction between his writing and his lifestyle, a fundamental problem that eventually drove Tolstoy to flee his house in 1910 and contributed to his death that same year at the age of eighty- two.
CHAPTER 11
Tchaikovsky and Homosexuality
in Imperial Russia
A paradox mentioned frequently by contemporaries of Leo Tolstoy: that stern brute would burst into tears at the least provocation. He was particularly moved by sophisticated classical music, whose right to exist he always stubbornly denied: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin.
The sole contemporary composer who could wring tears from the great writer was Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky. In December 1876 a private performance of Tchaikovsky’s music was arranged for Tolstoy at the Moscow Conservatory. The writer, listening to the soulful Andante from the First String Quartet, “began sobbing”1 (according to Tchaikovsky), thereby pleasing the composer enormously.
Fired up by the idea of “gabbing” about music with Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy visited him several times, which made the composer (who considered Tolstoy a “semigod”) “terribly flattered and proud.”2 But Tchaikovsky was a nervous and fragile person, and these contacts with Tolstoy ultimately brought “nothing but difficulty and torment, like any acquaintance,”3 as he confessed in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck.
Tolstoy’s drive and Tchaikovsky’s neurotic reticence clashed. Right off the bat, Tolstoy ranted about Beethoven,
