proximoception

[July 1883]

Dearest Leo Nikolaevich,

It is a long time since I wrote to you, for I have been and am, to tell the truth, at death's door. I cannot recover--it's hopeless to think of it. I write to you particularly that I may tell you how glad I am to have been your contemporary--and that I may express to you my last and heartfelt plea. My friend, go back to literary work! For this gift came to you whence come all other things. Oh how happy I should be if I could think that my asking would have its effect on you. As a man I am finished--the doctors don't even know the name of my disease, nevralgie stomacale goutteuse. I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep--and there you are! My friend, great writer of the Russian land--heed what I ask! Let me know if you have had this letter, and allow me once more to embrace very closely yourself, your wife, all your family--I must stop, I am exhausted.

[tr. Henry Gifford]

*

[from Tolstoy, My Father: Reminiscences, by Ilya Tolstoy, 1933]

[p. 147] In 1883, papa received his last letter from Ivan Sergeyevich, written in pencil when he was on his deathbed, and I remember with what emotion he read it. And when the news of his death came, papa could talk of nothing else for days, and sought from every possible source the details of his illness and last days...

[148] "I am always thinking about Turgenev," he wrote to my mother at this time. "I am terribly fond of him, feel sorry, and do nothing but read him. I live with him constantly. I shall certainly give a lecture on him, or write one and have it read; tell Yuryev..."

...This lecture was never delivered, unfortunately. The Government, in the person of the Minister Count D. A. Tolstoy, prohibited my father from paying this last tribute to the dead friend he had quarrelled with all his life only because he could not be indifferent to him.

[tr. Anne Dunnigan]

*

[from Talks with Tolstoy, by A. B. Goldenweizer, 1922]

[p. 64] [1900] Then A. M. Sukhotin, a man over seventy, read aloud Turgenev's Old Portraits superbly. Tolstoi did not remember the story, and was in great delight over it. He said:

"It is only after reading all these moderns that one really appreciates Turgenev."

Tolstoi remembered Turgenev with great love. He said, in passing:

"When Turgenev died I wanted to read a paper about him. I wanted especially, in view of the misunderstandings that there had been between us, to remember and relate all the good that was so abundant in him, and to tell what I loved in him. The lecture was not given. Dolgorukov did not allow it."

[tr. S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf]

*

Tolstoy wrote no fiction between finishing Anna Karenina in 1877, and c. 1884. He had had a spiritual crisis, resulting in the formulation of a sort of personal Protestant Christianity, explained in the books A Critique of Dogmatic Theology (1880), Translation and Harmony of the Gospels (1880), What I Believe (1883), and (most famously) A Confession (1883, begun 1879). His fictions of the mid-80s on are fiercely moralistic, generally folk-inspired fables or tragedies in novella form (commencing with The Death of Ivan Ilych in 1886), with the single exception of his final great work, Hadji Murad (posthumous), a return to the scene and in some respects the manner of his early novel The Cossacks (published 1863), to Turgenev the masterpiece of Russian fiction.