The pianist Alexander Gol'denveizer recorded this episode from 1896:
Once I met Lev Nikolaevich [Tolstoy] in the street. He again asked me to walk with him. We were somewhere near the Novinsky Boulevard, and Lev Nikolaevich suggested we should take the [horse-drawn] tram. We sat down and took our tickets.
Lev Nikolaevich asked me:
"Can you make a Japanese cockerel?"
"No."
"Look."
Tolstoy took his ticket and very skillfully made it into a rather elaborate cockerel, which, when you pulled its tail, fluttered its wings.
An inspector entered the car and began checking the tickets. L.N., with a smile, held out the cockerel to him and pulled its tail. The cockerel fluttered its wings. But the inspector, with the stern expression of a business man who has no time for trifling, took the cockerel, unfolded it, looked at the number, and tore it up.
L.N. looked at me and said:
"Now our little cockerel is gone..."
-- A. B. Gol'denveizer, Vblizi Tolstogo / Talks with Tolstoi, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (1923)
Tolstoy was on a horse-drawn street car towards the end of his life, but Virginia Woolf (who aided in the editing of these translations and had tried, together with her husband, to learn Russian to collaborate with their friend 'Kot') was a member of what Walter Benjamin called "the generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar”--that is, those who had been subjected to the rapid political and quotidian upheavals of the turn of the century—war, revolution, urban modernity. Never, before this generation, had “experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”
But Tolstoy died in almost modern times too. The week of his final sickness and death at the train station at Astapovo was reported with all the obsessiveness of the Twitter update: more than 1000 telegraphs were sent during that week. (For more on the death of Tolstoy as Russia's first great mass-media event, see William Nickell's marvellous new book).
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Here is a recording of Tolstoy's one alleged musical composition, a waltz for piano. It was apparently written down when Tolstoy played it for Gol'denveizer at Yasnaya Polyana in 1906.
