I am publishing my answers to questions about my book, “Tolstoy’s False Disciple,” that I have received through social media and during the book’s launch at McNally Robinson Bookstore in Saskatoon.

Q. How intimate were Tolstoy and Chertkov?

A. Tolstoy’s contemporary biographer and translator, Aylmer Maude, describes the relationship as intimate and non-transparent. Chertkov was at the center of events that generated lasting controversy––Tolstoy’s signing of the secret will, his flight from home at eighty-two, and his pathetic death at Astapovo. This is when Chertkov was first brought into the public eye. But it remains little known that he was Tolstoy’s companion and confidante for three decades.

Tolstoy’s personal doctor, Makovitsky, describes Chertkov’s influence over the writer as “tremendous and despotic.” Sophia alleged that her husband’s relationship with Chertkov was homosexual in nature. She implied this in her diary (not all her entries are published to this day) and spoke her mind with Makovitsky and the writer’s secretary, Bulgakov. Because of Tolstoy’s moral authority, her allegations were dismissed. But this doesn’t mean that Sophia’s suspicion was unfounded.

In fact, it’s hard to explain Tolstoy’s attachment otherwise. The only thing they shared was Tolstoy’s religion. But this doesn’t justify the exclusive relationship: Tolstoy had other followers and a dogmatic Chertkov could not contribute any ideas to him.
Tolstoy referred to Chertkov as the man he “most needed,” the “person closest” to him, and frequently wrote him about his love. The two had secrets, and some of their early exchange was destroyed by mutual consent. The writer’s son-in-law, Mikhail Sukhotin (his full diary also remains unpublished) has remarked that Tolstoy loved Chertkov “with exceptional tenderness, partially and blindly” and this love drove him “to become completely subordinated to Chertkov’s will.”

Tolstoy did have homosexual leanings, having admitted in his youthful diary, that he had been in love with men.

Q. What do you think about Paul Giamatti’s portrayal of Chertkov in The Last Station?

A. Giamatti portrays Chertkov as a conniving adviser to Tolstoy, and I think he got it right.

Actually, the most surprising thing about Chertkov was his banality. He did not value Tolstoy’s talent and time and was manipulative and rude with him.

Q. Did Chertkov ever marry?

A. Chertkov had homosexual relationships, and married through Tolstoy’s insistence. His wife was a semi-invalid, who spent much of her life in a wheelchair.

Q. Was Chertkov an agent of the secret police? And if so, did he spy on Tolstoy from the very beginning?

A. Tolstoy lived under surveillance for fifty years. Chertkov met him in the fall of 1883, soon after the police watch was intensified. This was because Tolstoy in his new writings began to challenge the Orthodox Church and the authoritarian state. The secret police collected information about Tolstoy’s causes, writing, and private life. During his last decades Tolstoy lived under double surveillance: in addition to the police scrutiny Chertkov arranged to keep a copy of his entire correspondence and diaries. The disciple insisted on this privilege despite Tolstoy’s objections. Over the years, Chertkov employed secretaries who aside from helping Tolstoy copied for Chertkov. He was obsessed with Tolstoy, but his method of collecting intelligence resembles that of the secret police.

Chertkov’s family was close to the tsars and to the interior ministry, and he maintained close ties to the establishment. His lifelong friend, Dmitry Trepov, was the chief of the gendarmes, and later an assistant minister of the interior. Trepov is infamous for organizing Jewish pogroms and shooting student demonstrators. Chertkov called him “a decent man.” Chertkov’s other friend was a member of the secret police. While it is unknown what role Chertkov played in surveillance over Tolstoy, his handwriting was identified on one of the reports to the Petersburg Police Department.

Chertkov was a chronic manipulator and schemer with a knack for conspiracy. These traits would make him ideally suited for clandestine activity.

Q. Was Chertkov a psychopath?

A. Chertkov’s intricate plots and a secret will he imposed on Tolstoy suggest he had a psychopathic mind. His exaggerated sense of self-worth, emotional shallowness, superficial charm, and persuasiveness would make him a case study. He was also quarrelsome and despotic and, as Maude writes, had an unmatched ability to impose his will on other people: “Everybody connected with him became his instrument, quarreled with him, or had to escape.” Tolstoy admitted that Chertkov was “a difficult man.”

Q. Why did Tolstoy maintain a lasting relationship with such a man?

A. This question drives my book. Tolstoy’s contemporaries, including Bulgakov, were unable to fathom the relationship. In his marginally published memoir Bulgakov asks, rhetorically, how could such a man as Tolstoy love such a man as Chertkov? There is no rational answer to this.
I think that Tolstoy maintained the relationship because he loved Chertkov and also because he was afraid that Chertkov would not spare him if they broke up. So, he tried to appease his companion by satisfying all his demands for privileges and promotions. But this only inspired Chertkov to demand more. His ultimate goal was to become the executor of Tolstoy’s literary estate, and to possess the writer’s manuscripts. This is why Chertkov imposed a secret will on the writer. When, after signing it, Tolstoy attempted to change his mind, Chertkov threatened him with a scandal. Later, Chertkov composed a persuasive, but entirely false account of Tolstoy’s final year, misleading biographers and the public for a century.

Q. How does your book affect what we know about Tolstoy?

A. The book tells about Tolstoy’s behind-the-scenes relationship, which impacted his private and public lives. Chertkov was responsible for Tolstoy’s marital conflicts and eventual alienation from his wife. He also aspired to the role of Tolstoy’s editor and censor. As such, he meddled in Tolstoy’s work, took his energy and time, and nipped many of his ideas in the bud.

Chertkov introduced secrecy into Tolstoy’s life. It’s disappointing that Tolstoy preached high morals, despite his involvement with a cad. Tolstoy used his authority to promote Chertkov and to silence his scandals, all of which was against his beliefs. This shows that Tolstoy was inconsistent and weak in private life, unable to defend his own privacy and peace, let alone such benefits for his family.
Tags: Tolstoy, Chertkov, homosexuality, Paul Giamatti, psychopaths, Russian secret police, The Last Station

This spring, while in Moscow, I visited a central bookstore on Tverskaya Street. Shop windows displayed the familiar red and yellow jackets of J.K. Rowling’s Casual Vacancy in Russian translation. But upon coming in, I found myself face to face with Stalin’s flamboyant photographs gazing at me from the red covers of Soviet-style editions, prominently placed by the entrance. For a few seconds, I was baffled and lost in time. Stacks of Rowling’s book were further back in the store, and I recalled an advertisement on a Russian website saying that her book was read by the entire world.

Promoting Casual Vacancy alongside Stalin biographies is ironic. This March marked sixty years since Stalin died, and one hopes his death left no casual vacancies. But in the past decade, Stalin’s popularity in Russia has visibly grown. When it comes to popular novels, Russians read what the rest of the world is reading. But when it comes to Soviet history, they are encouraged to read books that tell a different version than what the rest of the world knows.

While Stalin biographers in the West have produced factual accounts, the tendency in Russia is to bring back the myth. This is why the comprehensive Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield is hard to find; as far as I know the book was published only marginally in Russia. This also applies to Anne Applebaum’s famous book Gulag: A History, which was translated into scores of foreign languages, but is barely accessible in Russian. Yet, one can easily find trashy editions that attempt to resurrect the myth of Stalin’s greatness.

Although millions died in Stalin’s mass purges, understanding the history of the gulag is still not believed to be essential. The dictator is celebrated with a new biography in the series of “Lives of Remarkable People” and such titles as Stalin Won the War, Stalin. The Military Genius, and a memoir How I.V. Stalin Lived, Worked, and Raised Children. Over a recent decade, scores of obscure authors have created his sympathetic portrait and even suggested his martyrdom in Krushchev Killed Stalin Twice and What Stalin Was Killed For?

Articles emphasizing Stalin’s achievements abound on Russian websites. In 2010, a website, “Truth About Stalin,” was launched. The most amazing thing about it is that it provides entirely false information. Unlike with the Holocaust, which now cannot be openly denied in most countries, deniers of Stalin’s mass murders are functioning in the open. In the absence of full information about Stalin’s regime, there is still no consensus in Russia about mass repressions, forced collectivization, and the organized famine, which depopulated entire areas in Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus.

There is no shortage of books about the gulag in Russia, including Solzhenitsyn’s volumes, which are sold everywhere. In recent decades, scores of memoirs by the gulag survivors were produced. I’ve seen these editions in a kiosk at the entrance to the former Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library) where they are sold by volunteers. Over the years, I noticed fewer people were buying them.

This situation invites a parallel with China where no full account of Mao’s Great Famine has ever been published, while memoirs of victims, less damaging to the current leadership, are available. Thus, a recent book by a journalist Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958–1962, is banned in the mainland China because of the author’s sweeping investigation. Mao’s disastrous policies were closely copied from Stalin’s and the reasons for historical amnesia and censorship in both countries are similar. But while in China is it no longer possible to openly admire Mao, in Russia, Stalin’s cult is being gradually resurrected and a school textbook discussing his accomplishments has been produced.

As I was reading Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22, I stumbled upon the phrase that The Kreutzer Sonata, “was the title of Tolstoy’s own personal favorite among his own works.” Hitchens, who expertly discusses Vladimir Nabokov or Wystan Hugh Auden, among other writers, makes a blunder with Tolstoy whose personal dislike of The Kreutzer Sonata is well-known. True, Tolstoy had made confusing and contradictory pronouncements about his own works, dismissing War and Peace and Anna Karenina and expecting the public to like his ABCs, written for peasant children during his literacy campaign. I don’t know if Tolstoy ever named any of his fictional works as his “personal favorite.” It took him a long time to write and perfect his fiction and non-fiction, but he was rarely satisfied with the result and was also impatient to move on to other projects, not necessarily literature. Having completed The Kreutzer Sonata, he told several people that the novella was “terribly repulsive” to him. This attitude is reflected in several sources and in Sophia’s Diaries: in March 1891, she wrote that Tolstoy “has grown to hate this story and cannot bear its name to be mentioned.”
Of course, nobody is immune from making mistakes, but I wonder why Hitchens, despite his journalistic accuracy, did not check this simple fact about Tolstoy. Or perhaps, he did, but much that has been written about Tolstoy (especially on the Internet) is inaccurate or even untrue.
Take, for example, discussions of the new film Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright. The film itself was recently described in The New Yorker as “forget Tolstoy.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs…

While reading discussions of the film, I stumbled on this posting of November 15, in which Joe McGasko also gives his take on Tolstoy: http://www.biography.com/bio-now/anna….
Describing the later period of Tolstoy’s life, following his religious transformation, McGasko mentions that the writer’s ascetic beliefs generated a lasting conflict in the family. Then he goes on to say something utterly ridiculous:
“This conflict reached its tipping point when Tolstoy announced that he would divest himself of all worldly goods and leave his family to wander the world as a monk. His advanced age almost guaranteed that he wouldn’t get very far; shortly after leaving home, he caught pneumonia and returned home to die at age 82.”
There are many blunders here, but most appallingly, the author of this biographical piece is unaware that Tolstoy could not and did not return home to die; he died in a stationmaster’s hut in Astapovo.
So, why write about Tolstoy without checking basic facts? McGasko quotes Tolstoy as supposedly saying, “I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.” I don’t know where he got this quote, but I wonder if he would discuss Dickens’ life and work with the same assurance.
Misconceptions about Tolstoy abound, not only on the Internet, but, say, in the popular film The Last Station. Unlike the latest version of Anna Karenina, this film was praised far and wide, even though it misinterpreted Tolstoy’s life, showing the writer to enjoy luxury in the Yasnaya Polyana mansion. In fact, the house, with its bare wood floors, became known to visitors for its simplicity. There are numerous inaccuracies in this film, but I just want to mention one particular blunder at the very end. You might remember the text in the epilogue to The Last Station, which reads that the Senate awarded Sophia the copyright to her late husband’s works. This never happened, since Sophia did not challenge Tolstoy’s secret will.
I will be updating you on other inaccuracies concerning Tolstoy as they pour in.

Despite the sweeping success of the Animal Farm, George Orwell suspected his next book would become a failure. Throughout his life, he thought that each of his new undertakings was bound to fail. But Orwell’s fear was not a bad thing, since it drove him to do more and to continually struggle for success.

I am intrigued with famous writers’ lack of contentment when they describe their own successful lives. At eighty-one, Somerset Maugham said in an interview that he did not want his biography written, for his life was “bound to be dull,” and he did not want “to be associated with dullness.” But he never was. Among the most prolific and successful writers, Maugham had seen his plays simultaneously performed in London theaters; his novels, beginning with his masterpiece, Of Human Bondage, were adapted into popular films. He had traveled the world to research his fiction and early on, during the Great War, even did some spying for the British. Throughout his literary career of over six decades Maugham did what he loved, saying that writing was “the most enthralling of human activities.”

Like Charles Strickland in The Moon and the Sixpence, who abruptly changes his career to become an artist, Maugham had left medicine upon discovering his true vocation. But unlike Strickland, who died in oblivion, Maugham enjoyed fame and popular success few serious writers ever achieve. However, it’s not usual for writers to make dismissive remarks about their lives and work. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did just that. When writing The Idiot, his most original novel, Dostoevsky was continually disappointed with its execution and complained that he was implementing only one-tenth of his poetic idea.

One of the most successful writers of all times, Tolstoy, was perennially dissatisfied with his own character, life, and literary production. Later he made his self-dissatisfaction a virtue. According to Tolstoy’s philosophy, one should perennially strive for perfection––an idea that prevented him from celebrating his achievement at any stage. He was rarely content with his writing since it did not measure up to the ideal.

Tolstoy had said that an artist invests the best of himself into his work, “hence his writing is beautiful and his life is bad.” But upon achieving celebrity, he entirely dismissed his great literature, along with his vocation as a novelist. Among writers who had been critical of their own work Tolstoy’s remarks about his novels stand out as most ruthless. Can this be fathomed? This is the topic of my next post.

This post was inspired by Michael Shelden’s biography of Orwell and by Selina Hastings’ The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham.