Leo Tolstoy

3

A Lonely Leader

The last page of Anna Karenina describes Levin’s religious epiphany. The conversion of the hero of the novel roughly coincided with that of the author. As he approached the end of his narrative, Tolstoy came to the conviction that only God could restore meaning to the world permeated with death.

In his Confessions Tolstoy portrayed himself as a sceptic, an atheist even, who had finally recognized the futility of earthly pursuits such as fame and prosperity. His diaries tell a different story. The hope of a religious awakening was Tolstoy’s long-cherished dream, something he had thought about and wrestled with for decades. In June 1851 Tolstoy recorded in his diary that he was fighting with the ‘petty, vicious side of life’, and asked God ‘to receive him into His bosom’. The ‘sweetness of the feeling’ this prayer gave him was ‘impossible to express’ (Ds, p. 26). Another time Tolstoy confessed that, while he could not prove God’s existence to himself, he ‘believed in Him’ and asked Him for help ‘to understand Him’ (Ds, p. 59).

The characters of his novels also experience spiritual epiphanies: Prince Andrei gazing into the sky of Austerlitz and preparing for his death, and Pierre embracing the teaching of the Freemasons and when in French captivity. Anna Karenina and her husband feel the raptures of Christian forgiveness as Anna lies on what seems to be her deathbed. With the evident exception of Andrei’s final revelation, however, these existential experiences are, as the Russian writer and thinker Lydia Ginzburg has put it, ‘reversible’.¹ They cannot change the lives of the characters, who later revert to their old ways. Tolstoy suggests, however, that Levin’s newly found beliefs are different.

In 1873, the year he began writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote to the atheist Fet about the necessity of ‘religious respect’. Despite his contempt for ‘religious rites’, Tolstoy’s brother Sergei had ordered an Orthodox funeral for a deceased child. Both brothers had ‘the feeling almost of revulsion at this ritualism’, but Leo had to confess that he could not imagine any alternatives:

What could my brother have done to carry the decomposing body of his child out of his house at the end? . . . And where should it be put, how should it be buried? What, generally speaking, is a fitting way to end things? Is there anything better than a requiem, incense etc.? (I, at least, can’t think of anything.) And what about growing weak and dying? Should one wet oneself, s…, and nothing more? That’s no good.

I would like to give outward expression to the gravity and importance, the solemnity and the religious awe in the presence of the greatest event in life of every human being. And I can think of nothing more fitting – and fitting for all ages and all stages of development – than a religious setting. (Ls, I, p. 256)

Deaths of close family members moved Tolstoy from ‘religious respect’ to sincere belief. Like Levin, he expected spiritual guidance from the peasants working his land. It only followed that he was eager to accept the religion that supported them in their toils and freed them from fear and anguish of their mortality.

Tolstoy immersed himself in Orthodoxy with characteristic fervour. He fasted and patiently stood during long liturgies, bowing and praying on his knees. He made a pilgrimage to Kiev, the cradle of Russian Christianity, to see relics of the first Russian saints. He visited monasteries to talk to leading clergymen. Especially important was his pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn’, the monastery famous for its elders, who provided spiritual nourishment to many believers including Dostoevsky, who described Optina in The Brothers Karamazov. Tolstoy had long conversations with Amvrosii, the most revered elder of the monastery, the prototype for Dostoevsky’s Zosima. Wishing to read the Gospels in the original, Tolstoy immersed himself in studies of theological literature and biblical Greek.

The longer and harder he studied traditional Orthodoxy, however, the less he felt able to believe in it. As he wrote in his Confessions, he ‘had envied the peasants for their illiteracy and their lack of education’, but their unquestioning faith was beyond his reach:

I was listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation, and a knowledge of faith was opened up to me. I grew closer to the people as I listened to their reflections on life and faith, and I began to understand the truth more and more . . . But as soon as I mixed with learned believers or picked up their books, a certain doubt, dissatisfaction and bitterness over their arguments rose up within me, and I felt that the more I grasped their discourses, the further I strayed from the truth and the closer I came to the abyss. (CW, XXIII, p. 52)

From his early days, Tolstoy had been certain that God endowed human beings with sufficient reason and moral feeling to see the truth. True religion did not need numerous dogmas or the traditional Church; it had to be self-evident, simple and clear. Historic Christianity, rooted in mysteries that one had to believe but could never fully comprehend, did not satisfy him. The sheer number of Christian denominations and fierce theological debates between them was proof, in Tolstoy’s eyes, that none of the existing churches preserved the spirit of the Gospels. Tolstoy’s break with Orthodoxy was the result of tortuous inner reflection, but, as was always the case with him, appeared quick and decisive: at a dinner during one of the fasts, he suddenly asked his son to pass him a meatball prepared for the non-fasting members of the household.

Already during the siege of Sebastopol in 1855 Tolstoy had felt himself ‘capable of devoting’ his entire life to the realization of a ‘great’ and ‘stupendous’ idea – the creation of ‘a new religion appropriate to the stage of development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of mysticism, a practical religion not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth’. The young officer aspired to work ‘consciously . . . towards the union of mankind by religion’ (Ds, p. 87). By the age of fifty, and great novels behind him, Tolstoy found himself ready to embark on that mission. He aspired to refute nearly 2,000 years of errors, self-deceit and outright lies and to present to the world the real, unadulterated word of Christ.

This mission went beyond the reformation or purification of existing Christianity. The mantle of Martin Luther was too tight for Tolstoy. He wanted to bring to the world a new faith based on some parts of the Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount, while totally rejecting other major parts of the New Testament, such as the Acts of the Apostles or the Book of Revelation, and such basic dogmas as the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Trinity and the Resurrection.

Between 1879 and 1882 Tolstoy produced the major theological trilogy that he intended to serve as the foundation of ‘a religion of Christ purged of beliefs and mysticism’. In Confessions he traced his personal evolution from the instinctive religiosity of childhood, through the debauchery and dissipation of youth, the literary and managerial pursuits of his married years, through excruciating despair, acceptance and then renunciation of Orthodoxy before finally arriving at an understanding of the eternal and simple truths of religion that brought him long-sought spiritual peace. In his Critique of Dogmatic Theology Tolstoy set out a theoretical refutation of the doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church as expounded in the Orthodox Dogmatic Theology of Archbishop Makarii, the accepted canonical source of dogma in nineteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy. He also prepared a new annotated translation of the Gospels followed by a digest, The Gospels in Brief, as it is known in English.

Having completed this tripartite demolition of the edifice of historical Christianity, Tolstoy moved on to making a positive exposition of the new faith. In the years 1883–4 he wrote his groundbreaking treatise What I Believe. Over five years he had developed a comprehensive religious, moral, political, social and economic philosophy that was stunning in its logic and consistency. It is easy to reject Tolstoy’s teachings in their entirety, but to unpick them and juxtapose one part against another to show inner contradictions is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Tolstoy found his faith in the Gospels, but interpreted them in a way that resonated with thoughts and feelings he had cherished all his life. His Christ was divine not because he had been conceived by the Holy Spirit and risen from the dead, but because his words and life were the absolute embodiment of God’s wisdom and goodness in a way that was naturally consistent with simple reason and eternal morality:

The doctrine of Christ is the doctrine of truth, and, therefore, faith in Christ is not a trust in anything that refers to Jesus, but a knowledge of the truth. It is impossible to persuade or bribe a man to fulfil it. He who understands the doctrine of Christ will have faith in Him, because His doctrine is truth. He who knows the truth cannot refuse to believe in it. (CW, XXIII, p. 410)

Tolstoy read the Gospels as the story of a poor bastard boy and homeless vagabond who willingly gave his life for the light he brought to the world. The prophet’s humble origins and his shameful death did not diminish the glory and beauty of his word; on the contrary, they gave it a power that could only be undermined by improbable claims of a genealogical descent from the Creator or an artificial happy-end-like Resurrection. The idea that God could have willingly sent his son to the cross sounded to Tolstoy like a blasphemy.

According to Tolstoy, the ‘doctrine of Christ’ consisted of five commandments supplementing, correcting or cancelling the commandments of Moses. The first one was never to condemn anyone or regard anyone as an outlaw. The second was not to commit adultery, which included divorce and remarriage. The third was not to swear oaths, that is, never to pledge loyalty to earthly governments or to participate in legal proceedings. The fourth commandment, and key in Tolstoy’s eyes, was not to resist evil with violence. Even in life-threatening circumstances one should not resort to force, but instead accept one’s fate with humility and prayer. Finally, the fifth commandment was not to regard other human beings as enemies or aliens, thus abolishing the division of mankind into nations.

Tolstoy’s starting point was the opening sentences of Rousseau’s Social Contract: ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.’ Rousseau’s thoughts were echoed by the authors of the Declaration of Independence, who aspired to establish an institutional framework that could preserve and guarantee natural liberty. As was always the way with Tolstoy, his conclusions were more radical than others had dared to conceive. For him, the divinely ordained nature of equality meant that no form of coercion could ever be legitimate and no violence could ever be justified. Tolstoy insisted on a literal interpretation of these precepts. He did not envisage an ideal Christian state, because any state with its monarchs, parliaments, politicians, laws, courts, prisons, soldiers, judges, bureaucrats, tax collectors and so on presupposed the existence of a hierarchy and the exercise of power by some over others.

In War and Peace Tolstoy glorified popular resistance to invasion; now he regarded military service as one of the worst abominations in human history. Native government was no more legitimate than any foreign one; living under the rule of the French, the Turks or whoever else would be a lesser evil for his compatriots than going to war and killing people. Equally, no crime could ever justify violent punishment. Robbers and murderers acting at their own risk deserved more compassion than executioners or judges who send people to the gallows protected by the law and the repressive apparatus of the state. In general, mortals were not entitled to make laws, all they had to do was to obey the eternal rules of God, but even those should not be enforced, as the Church hierarchy and coercion in the sphere of religious beliefs were especially repulsive.

A. N. Wilson, the author of a perceptive biography of Tolstoy, called this anarchist credo ‘the silliest’ and ‘the least Russian’ thing Tolstoy ever said.² The question of ‘silliness’ of Tolstoy’s worldview is, of course, fully dependent upon the perspective of the biographer, but the claim of its ‘un-Russianness’ is plainly wrong.

Tolstoy was a contemporary and a compatriot of such leading figures in the history of European anarchism as Mikhail Bakunin and Piotr Kropotkin. All three of them were aristocratic intellectuals who looked for ideals in the life of Russian peasant communes, in the stubborn resistance of sectarians and Old Believers to the official Church and central authorities, in Cossack settlements providing military support to the crown, but defying state bureaucracy in their way of life. No less important for Tolstoy were the numberless wanderers, pilgrims and beggars who left their homes and villages to search for God. The utopian vision of life without a state, masters or an official Church is no less important for Russian intellectual tradition and popular aspirations than its antithesis: unswerving trust in the secular and spiritual authorities. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky represented the two trends.

In 1881 Dostoevsky met Tolstoy’s cousin Alexandra and asked her to explain to him ‘the new direction taken by Lev Nikolaevich’. Fervently Orthodox, Alexandra regarded Dostoevsky as a prophet. She prepared for him copies of several of Tolstoy’s letters and, at his request, read them out to him. Dostoevsky listened, ‘his hands on his head repeating in a desperate voice: “It’s all wrong”.’ According to Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘he did not sympathize with a single thought of Lev Nikolaevich’ (LNT & AAT, p. 32). Intending to write a refutation, he took home with him both the copies and the originals.

Given Tolstoy’s taste for heated debates, a letter from Dostoevsky could have provoked one of the most fascinating dialogues in literary history. As it happened, Dostoevsky died five days later and his polemical answer to Tolstoy remained unwritten. The letters he borrowed from Alexandra Tolstoy disappeared forever.

Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov shortly afterwards:

I never saw the man and never had any direct relations with him, and suddenly when he died, I realized that he was the closest, dearest and most necessary man for me. I was a writer and all writers are vain and envious – I at least was that sort of writer. But it never occurred to me to measure myself against him, never. Everything that he did (every good and real thing that he did) was such, that the more he did it, the happier I was. Art arouses envy in me and so does intelligence, but the things of the heart arouse only joy. I always considered him my friend, and I never thought otherwise than that we should meet, and that it was my fault that we hadn’t managed to do so yet. And suddenly during dinner – I was late and dining alone – I read that he was dead. Some support gave way under me. I was overcome; but then it became clear how precious he was to me, and I cried and am still crying. (Ls, II, p. 340)

He was fully aware of the differences between his and Dostoevsky’s views, but he also knew that they both understood that the world around them was crumbling and believed that their duty was to prevent it. Now he felt that he had to shoulder the burden and the responsibility alone.

For twenty years Tolstoy’s main preoccupations were novels and family life. In 1881 the need to educate his eldest children compelled him to buy a house in Moscow. In the meantime, his country changed beyond recognition. The abolition of serfdom, rapid industrialization and a demographic boom had unleashed a flood of migrants from the villages to the cities. Railroads enabled massive grain exports that had the effect of pushing up bread prices. The peasants, though liberated from serfdom, could not benefit from this increasing demand because most agricultural land remained in the hands of their former landlords, and the rents rose more steeply than profits from harvests. The land owned by peasants belonged to rural communes and was regularly redistributed between households according to the size of their families. This meant that individual peasants could not sell their land before moving to the city and had little incentive to invest in it to increase productivity. Social changes and the generational imbalance caused by the demographic boom were destroying traditional ways of life and family structures. Crime, drunkenness and prostitution were on the rise both in villages and cities. Tolstoy could now witness the new urban poverty at first hand. The poorest could not rely on the kind of social network provided by rural communes. Their extreme misery and moral degradation was made even more abject and manifest by the stunning economic growth that had belatedly begun in the 1880s.

View from the garden of Tolstoy’s house in Moscow, 1898.

Social crisis brought political unrest. The Great Reforms had boosted the expectations of the growing number of young, active and eager graduates churned out by a proliferating number of universities. A highly stratified society could barely accommodate them or enable them to improve their social status, leading to frustration. Radical groups began a campaign of revolutionary propaganda among the peasants. When this strategy failed they turned to outright terror. The second half of the 1870s was marked by several unsuccessful attempts on the life of Alexander II before the assassins finally succeeded on 1 March 1881, the day before a decree establishing a proto-parliamentary representative body with consultative functions was due to be signed by the reforming tsar. The assassination ushered in a backlash led by the new emperor Alexander III and Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an arch-reactionary whose influence expanded beyond his original role of supervising Church policy and came to define the spirit of the new reign.

Tolstoy had some sympathy for the revolutionaries. He appreciated the power of their convictions, their readiness for martyrdom and sincere compassion for the poor, qualities that, in his view, were entirely wanting in the kind of educated society in which he lived. At the same time, he was appalled by their narrow-mindedness, atheism and positivism, and most of all by their willingness to resort to violence, based on the obstinate belief that they knew the needs of the people they intended to liberate better than those people themselves. From the early 1880s Tolstoy was certain that revolution was approaching and had no doubt that the regime that would emerge from the ruins would be even more tyrannical than the existing one.

He wrote a letter to Pobedonostsev petitioning the new tsar to pardon his father’s assassins. Tolstoy argued that such a pardon would demonstrate moral greatness and Christian feelings and engender a process of reconciliation in society. Both Pobedonostsev and Alexander III refused to consider such an act of clemency that, in their eyes, would be tantamount to encouraging political terror. The new emperor admired Tolstoy as a writer, but began to view his activities as subversive.

In January 1882, hoping to understand the roots of social evil and ways in which it might be alleviated more deeply, Tolstoy volunteered to take part in conducting the census. He chose one of the most notorious parts of Moscow, full of shelters for the homeless and the outcast. He spoke to people, listened to their life stories and gave out significant amounts of money. For a while Tolstoy sought to advance plans for a charity that would collect money by subscription and administer the relief. This venture failed. The rich were not interested in providing the required funds and the poor themselves tended to spend the money Tolstoy gave them on drinking, gambling and fornication.

Charity was not an answer, but Tolstoy could never accept the idea that any problem was completely insoluble. He spent several years working on an essay in which he tried to apply his new religious views to practical social issues. The title What then Must We Do? openly echoed that of Chernyshevsky’s banned novel What Is to Be Done?, in which the main female character organized cooperatives among working-class girls, often real or potential prostitutes, and managed to put their lives back on track. Chernyshevsky did not doubt that given support, guidance and education, the poor would rationally choose what was more beneficial for them.

Tolstoy knew better. He spent time and money researching the reactions of the destitute to the patronizing help of intellectuals. He soon learned that while small gifts, commonly of two or three kopecks, were met with a sort of ritual gratitude, attempts to donate significant sums only provoked animosity and resentment towards the benefactor. The poor interpreted excessive generosity as a paternalistic attempt to subjugate them to the rules and discipline of a society they rejected. Anger and cheating served as perverse means to defend their human dignity.

In his essay Tolstoy proceeded from his own first-hand experience of big city misery to address the problems of division of labour, the nature of money, property, taxation and so on. The structure of his argument was rambling and even included a detailed history of Britain’s colonization of the islands of Fiji, but his conclusions were clear and straightforward. He was convinced that the lifestyle of the leisured classes, centred on artificial needs and dependent upon taxation and property rights, brought destitution to working people and could only be sustained through coercive institutions like the army, the courts and the police.

A social and political order based on violence and injustice was rapidly losing the air of legitimacy it had once held in the eyes of the oppressed. The only way for the rich to avoid imminent catastrophe was to renounce privilege and go back to manual labour, a natural life and the eternal principles of Christian morality. The nineteenth century had seen many refutations of modernity, but no other mainstream thinker had dared to be so uncompromising.

As far as Tolstoy was concerned, no idea, belief or conviction had any value unless it shaped personal behaviour. It took him several years to overhaul his lifestyle completely, but he was constantly making changes. He began working in the fields, wearing peasant clothes and grew a peasant-style beard that was easier to take care of. He reverted to simple food, gradually becoming a complete vegetarian, stopped smoking and drinking and renounced the hunting that had once been his favourite sport. He explained each step in a passionate article. Tolstoy dismissed his personal servants and started to bring water to the house, cut wood and clean his room. The most difficult thing to get used to, by his own admission, was taking out and washing his chamber pot, but he did that too. He also renounced financial transactions and carried only small amounts of cash for the needy. Arguably the most eccentric of his new preoccupations was shoemaking, something he engaged in with such real passion that every success in the craft caused childlike happiness.

Ilya Repin, Leo Tolstoy Ploughing, 1887, oil on card.

Tolstoy’s behaviour provoked in people who surrounded him emotions that ranged from mild amusement to outright indignation. Fet ordered a pair of boots, insisted on paying six roubles and provided an invoice with a pledge to wear them regularly. Most likely, he did not keep his promise. The boots are still on display in the Tolstoy museum in Moscow and do not look worn out. As an atheist, conservative and aesthete, Fet could not approve the ‘new direction’ taken by his friend.

Turgenev’s feelings were stronger. In June 1883, as he readied himself for death, Turgenev wrote a farewell letter to Tolstoy. Too weak to hold a pen, he scribbled with a pencil:

I cannot recover – there is no use thinking of it. I am writing to you particularly to tell you how glad I am to have been your contemporary and to express to you my last, sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you from whence come all the rest. Ah, how happy I should be, if I could think that my request would have an impact on you!! . . . My friend, great writer of the Russian land, heed my request. Let me know if you receive this bit of paper, and permit me once more to embrace you heartily, heartily and your wife and all yours. I can’t write more, too tired. (TP, p. 203)

He died two months later. Tolstoy was moved deeply enough to agree, in spite of his hatred of public ceremonies, to give a speech at Turgenev’s commemoration in Moscow. The appearance of Tolstoy’s name in the announcement made the authorities ban the event altogether. At the same time this final manifestation of Turgenev’s desire to guide him and his excessive rhetorical flourish irritated Tolstoy. Much later he repeated the formula ‘the great writer of the Russian land’, sarcastically adding ‘and what about water?’³ Still, he partially ‘heeded’ Turgenev’s request. After several years he resumed writing prose, but always regarded this as being subordinate to his role as a moral and religious preacher.

The people who were most alarmed by Tolstoy’s evolution were the members of his family. In May 1881, in the wake of the riots and Jewish pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II, Tolstoy recorded his impression of one family conversation:

Seryozha [Sergei, his eldest son] said: ‘Christ’s teaching is well known, but it is difficult’. I said: ‘You would not say it is difficult to run out of a blazing room through the only door . . .’ They began to talk. Hanging is necessary, flogging is necessary, to prevent the people from rioting – that would be terrible. But hitting Jews – that’s not a bad thing. Then without rhyme or reason, they talked about fornication and with relish. Somebody is mad – either them or me. (Ds, p. 175)

Two months later he was appalled by an ‘enormous dinner with champagne’ at which all the Tolstoy and Kuzminsky children wore belts that cost the equivalent of a month’s salary for the hungry and overworked peasants around them. He discussed it with Tatiana Kuzminsky, who used to understand him better than others. After that he contemplated ‘until morning’ about his irreparable rift with the people who were so close to him, writing in despair, ‘They are not human beings’ (Ds, pp. 176–7).

His wife was the main culprit. She was accustomed to shifts in his ‘fickle opinions’, but this crisis threatened the very foundations of her life. Initially Sofia was inclined to interpret it in line with her old fears. After one of their quarrels in 1882, she recorded in her diary that, for the first time in twenty years of living under one roof, Leo had spent the night in a different bed. She was convinced that if he would not come to her, it meant that he loved another woman. Finally he appeared and they reconciled in the usual way. Sofia came to realize that her family problems were not caused by other women, but that did not make her any happier or less jealous.

The couple’s ensuing quarrels and misunderstandings soon became public, engendering divisions among Tolstoy’s admirers that are still alive today. Some blame Sofia, who refused to ‘follow’ her great husband in his spiritual quest, thus turning their lives into an everyday hell. Others exonerate her. She was responsible for the well-being of eight children (as Tolstoy’s religious convictions evolved, she had given birth to three more sons, Andrei in 1877, Mikhail in 1879 and Alexei, who later died at the age of four, in 1881) and could ill afford to accommodate the whims of the genius. In truth, however, the roots of this family tragedy went deeper.

Married at the age of eighteen, Sofia felt a sense of mission no less important than that of Leo’s. While he had renounced his previous life to become a great writer, she had done the same in order to become the wife of a great writer. Copying the manuscripts of War and Peace, she recorded her nearly religious attitude to his art:

It is great delight for me. Morally, I am experiencing the whole world of impressions and thoughts by copying the novel. Nothing affects me as strongly as his thoughts and his talent. It started to happen not long ago. Did I change myself or is the novel really so good – I can’t tell. I write quickly enough to follow the novel and slowly enough to grasp all the interest, think over, feel and discuss his every thought. We often speak about the novel and he for some reason (which makes me proud) listens to my thoughts and strongly believes in them. (SAT-Ds, p. 80)

Twenty years later, in October 1886, she reacted to his profound and intimate thoughts in a very different way:

I often wonder why Levochka puts me in the position of always being guilty without guilt. Because he wants me not to live, but to suffer all the time looking at the poverty, sickness and misfortunes of the people, and wants me to seek them if I do not meet them in my life. This is what he demands from the children as well. Is it necessary? . . . If you meet such a person in the course of your life, help him, but why search for him? (SAT-Ds, p. 112).

One can discern here not only a criticism of Tolstoy’s ethical theories, but a clear feeling that her husband’s sympathy for the poor undermined her status in his life. She belonged to the world of his novels and his rejection of prose challenged her own perception of her identity and mission of ‘a writer’s wife who takes our authorial business close to heart’ – as she once put it in a letter to her sister.⁴

Tolstoy’s new philosophy valued universal love for humankind above ‘exclusive love’ for the objects of personal commitment. In his translation of the Gospels he summarized the relevant lines from Luke and Matthew as ‘For those who understood my teachings neither father, nor mother, wife or children or property would have any meaning.’ Tolstoy saw the absolute embodiment of ‘exclusive love’ in sexuality. The Christian ideal demanded total chastity. Even if original sin could be partially redeemed by procreation, it remained immoral not only outside the family, but within it as well.

Until late in his life Tolstoy felt carnal desires for his wife, but always regarded them as a sign of weakness he was unable to overcome. Sofia repeatedly wrote in her diary and autobiography that after their most passionate lovemaking Lev became cold and detached. In 1908, before his eightieth birthday, he complained in the ‘secret diary’ that his multiple biographies would not discuss his ‘attitude to the seventh commandment’: ‘Although I have never once been unfaithful to my wife, I have experienced loathsome, criminal desire for her. Nothing of this will appear and ever appears in biographies. And this is very important’ (Ds, p. 423).

Tolstoy knew that after his death his diary could become available to his wife and even be made public, yet there is no reason to doubt his claim of being always faithful to his wife. He was never shy about blaming himself for actual or imaginable sins. Once, in 1879, he was close to succumbing to temptation. Heading for an encounter with a house cook, Domna, he was stopped by his son, who asked him for help with his lessons. Tolstoy was certain that divine intervention had saved him, but for a while he lost confidence in his strength to resist the Devil. He asked Vasily Alekseev, the tutor of his children, to accompany him all the time to avoid falling into the abyss. Five years later he described the same episode in detail in a repentant letter to Vladimir Chertkov.

It is notable that the maniacally jealous and suspicious Sofia never accused him of adultery in her own diaries, even though they were full of bitter and venomous reproaches. In her memoirs, written with the specific goal of settling scores with her husband and listing all his offences against her, she wrote that not a single time in her life had she experienced his infidelity. Still, she could not reconcile herself to the role of necessary evil she had to play in her husband’s moral universe. She refused to ‘follow’ Tolstoy, because she knew that he was not calling her anywhere.

Rumours about Tolstoy’s new religious beliefs spread quickly. Scores of visitors eager to discuss God, morality, life and love with the most famous Russian writer flocked to Yasnaya Polyana and Tolstoy’s Moscow house in Khamovniki. Most of them were peasants disillusioned with the official Church, persecuted sectarians, self-appointed prophets, wanderers and mystics – ‘the dark ones’, as Sofia contemptuously called them. Both Sofia and Alexandra Tolstoy wrote about Vasily Siutaev, a peasant from the Tver region, who preached in favour of fraternal relations among people, denied the division of property, condemned church rituals and educational institutions and exerted influence on the author of War and Peace.

The most important visitor Tolstoy ever received, however, came from his own social milieu. Vladimir Chertkov belonged to the cream of the Russian aristocracy and was exceptionally rich. As an officer in an elite guards regiment he had led a dissipated life, but suddenly repented and engaged himself in the education of peasants and charitable work. He had spent time in England, where he became close to the British evangelicals. When he came to see Tolstoy for the first time in 1883, Chertkov was 29: the remaining 53 years of his life, half before and half after Tolstoy’s death, were wholly dedicated to the dissemination of Tolstoy’s work and the popularization of his teachings. He became Tolstoy’s closest friend and most devoted and trusted disciple.

Vasily Siutaev (the first ‘dark one’), 1880s.

Portrait of Vladimir Chertkov by Mikhail Nesterov, 1890.

At first, Sofia was well disposed to Chertkov – at least he was not a ‘dark one’. This mild sympathy, however, soon turned into suspicious resentment and later into intense hatred. She had finally found the most appropriate object for her jealousy. She blamed Chertkov for her estrangement from her husband, even though she knew well enough that her family life had already reached breaking point before Chertkov made an appearance. Several months before Lev’s death, Sofia discovered in his diary for 1851 an entry in which he confessed that he had always loved men more than women. She openly accused her 82-year-old husband of having homosexual relations with Chertkov.

This accusation, based on a statement written nearly sixty years earlier, in which the diarist himself expressed a ‘terrible aversion’ towards homosexuality, was utterly irrational. Yet in a perverse way Sofia was perhaps on to something. The handsome, aristocratic, self-confident Chertkov matched a masculine ideal so successfully described in Tolstoy’s great novels. Vladimir could play Prince Andrei to the somewhat Bezukhovian Lev, never sure of himself, hesitant and prone to scorching self-introspection. Traumatized by the alienation of his elder sons, Tolstoy saw in Chertkov his true spiritual son and heir. At the same time, notwithstanding the difference in age, Chertkov assumed from the very beginning the role of the paternal figure Tolstoy had lacked in his teenage years. The teacher could always confess to his pupil the most intimate movements of his heart, his doubts and fears and be certain to receive clear and definite answers.

Chertkov was also highly efficient. On Tolstoy’s advice, he organized a publishing house called ‘Intermediary’, specializing in cheap editions for the masses. The bulk of its output consisted of popular stories, tales and essays written, edited or recommended by Tolstoy. The rendering of folk tales and composing moral and religious parables for ‘Intermediary’ allowed Tolstoy to satisfy a need for artistic creativity without compromising his renunciation of literature. Some of these stories, such as What Men Live By or How Much Land Does a Man Need?, show that his literary genius had not left him.

Still Tolstoy aspired to produce a work for the educated reader that would be both as psychologically convincing and profound as Anna Karenina, and as dry and didactically unambiguous as his Primer. He achieved this synthesis in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy felt that he had to apologize for this endeavour, as he wrote to Chertkov, ‘I promised to finish this for my wife to include in her new edition, but this article only relates to our circle in its form . . . in content it relates to everyone’ (Ls, II, p. 383). Sofia found the story ‘a bit morbid, but very good’ (CW, XXVI, p. 681), and eagerly included it in the twelfth volume of Tolstoy’s collected works. She still hoped that her husband would return to literature and that this would save their family.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a painfully naturalistic depiction of the agonies of a high-ranking official dying from cancer. Contemporary doctors admired the precision with which Ivan Ilyich’s symptoms were described and were able to diagnose not only the nature of the illness, but the exact location of the tumour and the phases of its progress. Of course, depicting the physiology of dying was not the true focus of Tolstoy’s attention. He was writing about the most important problem he had ever encountered.

The ‘Arzamas horror’ that afflicted Tolstoy in 1869 had taught him that the presence of death can render life meaningless. A successful career, an outwardly functional family life, refined tastes and a dignified lifestyle had made Ivan Ilyich proud of himself, but on his deathbed he has no significant memories to sustain him. His illness starts from a bruise he gets arranging fashionable furniture in his apartment. At the end of his life he feels completely alienated from his wife, children, friends and colleagues, and no one, except his servant, really sympathizes with his demise and tries in earnest to understand his needs and alleviate his pain.

The final turn of the narrative, however, brings Ivan Ilyich closer to Prince Andrei than to Anna Karenina. Pity for his schoolboy son, who bursts into tears and kisses his hand, and for his wife, who stands nearby with tears in her eyes, opens the way for him to feel universal love that melts both the fear of death and death itself. Instead of sucking meaning out of life, death retrospectively endows it with a higher purpose.

Suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him, and would not leave him, was all dropping away at once, from two sides, from ten sides, from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. ‘How good and how simple’, he thought.

‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘What has become of it? Well then, where are you, pain?’ He turned his attention to it. ‘Yes here it is. Well, what of it? Let it be.’

And death . . . Where is it?

He looked for his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear, because there was no death.

In place of death, there was light. (TSF, p. 128)

In 1886, when Tolstoy was finishing The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he hurt his leg trying to help an old peasant woman, which led to a nearly lethal case of septicaemia. A long and painful recovery inspired the treatise On Life, in which Tolstoy supplemented his social and moral teachings with a general philosophy of life and death that brought together his belief in Nature and Reason, his interpretation of the Gospels and interest in Eastern religions and philosophy. The initial title of the essay was On Life and Death, but then Tolstoy cut the second noun, saying ‘There is no death’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 123).

According to this treatise, any individual existence is just a tiny particle of general life, and individual death is a necessary and liberating reunion with the whole. The only manifestation of general life available to humans is love, which can never be limited to one’s kin and has nothing to do with the egotism and possessive instinct inherent in erotic infatuation, but unites the individual with humankind and thus with God. While universal love brings light and makes death blissful, sexual desire is akin to murder. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy compared Vronsky kissing Anna’s body after their first lovemaking with a murderer striking an already dead victim with a knife.

The year after the publication of The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy started writing The Kreutzer Sonata, on which he worked until 1889. In that year he also wrote a draft of a story now known as The Devil. Both stories involved murders carried out or planned by men who were disappointed in their marriages. The basic facts behind each story came from real criminal cases, but Tolstoy processed them through his personal experience and imbued them with his own moral goals. Pozdnyshev, the main character of The Kreutzer Sonata, kills his wife out of jealousy; Irteniev in The Devil murders his former lover because, striving to keep his marriage chaste, he is unable to overcome his sexual obsession. In the first version of The Kreutzer Sonata Pozdnyshev was considering suicide as a possible outcome. As The Devil remained unpublished in Tolstoy’s lifetime, the author did not have to choose between the two variants of the ending he drafted: in one alternative, instead of murdering his lover, Irteniev kills himself.

Tolstoy believed that the tragedies were caused by the sexual licence of young men before marriage, which had taught them to expect the same gratification of carnal desires from their family life. Irteniev’s disaffection with his marriage finds its realization in the spell his former partner still holds over him; Pozdnyshev’s manifests itself in hatred towards his wife and maniacal jealousy. Both male characters remain faithful to their wives, but the cost is insanity that drives them to murder or suicide. As he was writing The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy told his daughter and his niece: ‘There are no bad maidens, and there are no happy marriages.’

He was thinking, of course, of his own family history. The romance between Irteniev and a peasant woman, Stepanida, in The Devil strikingly resembles the relationship between Tolstoy and Aksinya Bazykina. In The Kreutzer Sonata the autobiographical context is less evident, but also present. Pozdnyshev’s wife, after the delivery of her fifth child, submits herself to medical sterilization and starts looking to gratify her need for love. This finally draws her to adultery. Tolstoy’s wife was considering the same type of contraceptive measures having given birth to her fifth child. In a way, Tolstoy was retrospectively imagining what could have happened had he not forbidden her to take such preventive actions.

Tolstoy’s views on adultery were known to the reading public from his essays and not least from Anna Karenina. What made The Kreutzer Sonata so shockingly new was the treatment of male romantic love depicted here as a socially acceptable manifestation of lust, a device for concealing the truth, most importantly from oneself. According to Tolstoy, society poeticizes romantic love and provides sentimental education for young people in order to make lust approvable and enjoyable for both sexes, teaching young females that their main duty is to be sexually attractive to males. In marriage, the nature of this social order becomes explicit; the oscillation of the Pozdnyshevs’ relations between love and hatred reflects the rhythm of erotic passion.

Russian society was facing an irreversible process of female emancipation and ripe for the open discussion of sexuality. Tolstoy’s views were militantly patriarchal, but he spoke about ‘the cursed question’ in his usual straightforward and unequivocal way. This opened the floodgates. The manuscript of the eighth draft of The Kreutzer Sonata had been given to the Kuzminskys. The text was lithographed and hectographed in hundreds of copies. When the censors banned publication of The Kreutzer Sonata, this only fuelled interest in the story, which was also published abroad and smuggled into Russia. Most readers were stunned by Tolstoy’s analysis of the psychology of love, jealousy and murder, but were reluctant to subscribe to his moral conclusions. Some could not believe that the author could really have put his cherished thoughts in the mouth of a repentant murderer, and tried to reinterpret the text.

Many proponents of the ‘soft’ reading of The Kreutzer Sonata argue that in the final version, unlike the previous ones, Tolstoy deliberately leaves the reader in the dark as to whether adultery had actually taken place or whether it was the delusion of a jealous husband. For Tolstoy, however, feelings, motives and desires meant more than physical actions. He gave his story an epigraph from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ Pozdnyshev’s wife ‘committed adultery in her heart’, and this was the only thing that really mattered for Tolstoy. To dispel all possible ambiguities, Tolstoy added an afterword in which he not only reiterated Pozdnyshev’s views, but actually developed them further.

This approach was too extreme even for Chertkov, who by that time was happily married. The disciple pleaded with his teacher to provide ‘half a page or just a few lines’ showing that marital sex is permissible in ‘a moral marriage’. He believed that Tolstoy’s militancy would drive ‘hundreds of millions of modern people’ (CW, LXXXVII, p. 25) away from his teachings. Usually quick to accommodate his second alter ego, Tolstoy this time remained adamant. He responded to Chertkov’s desperate plea with a clear statement that a moral marriage ‘does not exist’ (CW, LXXXVII, p. 24). He was aware that the way to moral perfection was full of obstacles and that he himself was not yet able to practise sexual abstinence within his family. From his perspective, it was possible to forgive human weakness, but not the obstinate refusal to see the truth, as he wrote around the same time to one of his followers: ‘It is impossible to admit the slightest compromise over an idea’ (Ls, II, p. 456).

In this particular case Sofia would probably have agreed with her arch-rival. In 1888 she gave birth to their last child, Ivan, who, as she sarcastically remarked, was the real ‘afterword’ to The Kreutzer Sonata. She wrote that the story humiliated her ‘in the eyes of the entire world and destroyed the last love’ in the family (SAT-ML, p. 167). At the same time, however, she went to St Petersburg for an audience with the emperor to ask him for permission to publish The Kreutzer Sonata in the edition of Tolstoy’s collected works. Alexander III liked the story and Pobedonostsev found it useless to continue the ban against a work that was already widely circulating around Russia. The emperor granted the countess permission, but prohibited separate editions of the book, trying to keep it away from the attention of a mass audience: volume XIII with The Kreutzer Sonata appeared in three subsequent editions, the second of which was published in 20,000 copies.

There are numerous biographical, psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations of the roots of Tolstoy’s attitude to sex. However, one cannot fully understand it outside of the general framework of his anarchistic worldview. Tolstoy saw sexual instinct as a coercive force. Unlike the state or the Church, this force was located inside the body, but that only made it more onerous, as it worked not through external repression, but through the manipulation of desires.

The ideal of chastity was not new to Russian culture and not limited to traditional monastic communities. In a much more radical way, a sect of self-castrators that had a widespread following among Russian peasants believed that men should get rid of the organs that lead them into temptation. Tolstoy firmly rejected this idea. The self-castrators were to him akin to revolutionaries ready to resist evil by violence. According to Tolstoy, an individual needed to free himself from the shackles of animal nature, not through a one-time act of enforced purification, but through incessant moral effort that was itself more valuable that any possible outcome. As he wrote to Yevgeny Popov, his collaborator at ‘Intermediary’:

If men were not lustful, there would be no chastity and no conception of it for him. The mistake is to set oneself the task of chastity (the outward state of chastity) and not the striving towards chastity, the inner recognition, at all times and in all circumstances of life, of the advantages of chastity over dissoluteness, the advantages of greater purity over lesser. This mistake is very important. For a man who has set himself the outward state of chastity as his task, a retreat from that outward state, a fall, destroys everything and halts a possibility of work and living. For a man who has set himself the task of striving towards chastity, there is no fall, no halting of his work; and temptations and a fall cannot halt his striving towards chastity, but often actually intensify it. (Ls, II, p. 469)

Lust was the most powerful, but not the only, enemy with which Tolstoy had to struggle. In order to let universal Christian love reign supreme in his soul, he needed to overcome pride, vanity, anger, bad feelings towards others, exclusive preference for his kin, desire for physical comfort, fear of death and other inborn passions. This was a lifetime task, an ideal he did not hope to attain but merely to strive towards. In 1881 and 1884 he had resumed his diary sporadically, but from 1888 onwards he kept it without major interruptions until the end of his life in order to record all the movements of his mind and to measure them against the gauge of perfection he had created for himself.

The exhaustive struggle with his own bestiality and the egotism that Tolstoy had envisaged for himself was seriously complicated by the popularity of his teachings. When Tolstoy first became engaged in theological research, Sofia had expressed her disappointment that her husband was leaving the field that had brought him universal fame for studies that could hardly have a dozen readers. It is difficult to imagine a less accurate prediction. By the end of the 1880s Tolstoy’s fame has grown to outsize proportions.

The Holy Synod of the Russian Church banned Tolstoy’s treatises, but that did not prevent his ideas from reaching the widest possible audience. In 1890 Pobedonostsev wrote to the emperor that it was impossible

to conceal from oneself that in the last few years intellectual stimulation under the influence of the work of Tolstoy has greatly strengthened and threatens to spread perverted notions about faith, the Church, government and society. The direction is entirely negative, alien not only to the Church, but to nationality. A kind of insanity that is epidemic has taken possession of people’s minds.⁵

Tolstoy’s popularity was not confined to Russia. Converted and potential followers were writing to him from all over the world asking questions about the new revelation and seeking advice about ways to live in accordance with it. Hardly any religious prophet ever managed to gather such a flock within a decade from the day of his first sermon.

Tolstoy owed the speed of his success to the very advance of modernity that he loathed so much. Due to new cheaper printing technology and standardized primary education, the works published by ‘Intermediary’ could be sold in millions of copies. Chertkov’s managerial skills and English connections were also instrumental in ensuring that Tolstoy’s essays started to appear in Europe at roughly the time his international fame as a novelist had reached its zenith. Still, by far the most important factors were the magic of Tolstoy’s voice, the existential seriousness of his rhetoric, his charisma and, no less importantly, perfect timing.

By the end of the 1880s Tolstoy had become the most famous living novelist in the world. Both in Russia and outside of it, the reputation of the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina drew the attention of the reading public towards his stance on religious, moral and political questions. Moreover, the fact that Tolstoy was revered among the rich and the powerful was, in itself, highly significant for the masses that could not read long novels and philosophical treatises. The peasants were more inclined to listen to a repentant count than to ‘one of their own’. The whole northern hemisphere was in the throes of changes of incredible magnitude, but nowhere else were the political system, social structures and governing elites less able to cope with the challenge than in Russia. The decisive moment for Tolstoy to test the appeal and limitations of his teachings arrived in the second half of 1891.

By the summer of that year it had already become clear that a severe drought, following on from two poor harvests in 1889 and 1890, was leading Russia to face one of the most terrible famines of the nineteenth century. In August the government banned grain exports and belatedly started to take preventive measures. At the same time, public discussion of the approaching catastrophe was censored. This prohibition only increased panic. Nationwide the lack of grain was not that drastic, but the worst-hit regions were experiencing major shortages. Many peasants, who barely survived in the good years, were driven to extreme misery made worse by the epidemics that followed in the wake of the famine. The response to the disaster was bungled. Traditional distrust between central and local authorities and the government’s suspicion of public philanthropic initiatives impeded successful cooperation.

Tolstoy was slow to get involved in the relief operation. He mistrusted philanthropy, believing money brought nothing but evil. When he realized the dimensions of the problem, however, he started acting with the fervour and efficiency of a true visionary. Soon he had become the centre of all private efforts. In spite of his aversion to questions of finance, he appealed to the Russian and global public for help and, capitalizing on the universal trust in his moral integrity, presided over the distribution of funds and regularly submitted reports to the press.

Within several months he had managed to collect more than a million roubles from different sources in Russia and abroad. Many donations came from the United States and Britain. Quakers were especially generous in both countries. This assistance helped him to organize and administer around 250 field kitchens providing free meals to 14,000 people. In addition to this, a further 120 kitchens were able to feed 3,000 children. Tolstoy not only coordinated these activities, but was constantly engaged in personally delivering necessary help to the needy. He also wrote a number of articles and essays raising public awareness of the situation, breaking the official taboo against discussion of the famine. The government tried to ban these publications but was forced to react when they appeared abroad. When a Russian newspaper published Tolstoy’s article ‘The Terrible Question’, accusing the authorities of hindering relief by not providing reliable information about regional supplies of grain, an official warning from the Minister of Internal Affairs was followed within a week by the launch of a statistical initiative to deal with the problem.

Tolstoy in 1891 in the village of Rusanovo taking part in hunger relief.

The famine brought Tolstoy’s glory to its summit. Newspapers all over the world were writing about him, while in Russia the government, which believed that his articles ‘must be considered tantamount to a most shocking revolutionary proclamation’,⁶ was unable to stop him. In Begichevka, the village that Tolstoy turned into his headquarters, the peasants were about to riot at the rumours, most likely false, that the police were planning to remove Tolstoy by force. The educated public was even more excited. Chekhov, not at all prone to elevated rhetoric, described him in one of his letters as ‘a giant and a Jupiter’ (Ch-Ls, IV, pp. 322–3).

These tragic events brought a temporary truce to Tolstoy’s family. His adult children joined him in his efforts and worked in temporary kitchens in villages around the region. Sofia, who had to stay in Moscow with the younger ones, was assisting with financial transfers, record-keeping and correspondence with publishers. At last, she could sympathize with what her husband was doing and understand her own place in these activities. Tolstoy wrote in his diary on 19 December 1891, ‘Joy. Relations with Sonya have never been so cordial. I thank Thee, Father, This is what I asked for’ (Ds, p. 266), but unfortunately this idyll was not to last.

Predictably, Tolstoy himself was among the least satisfied with the results of his philanthropic work, describing his activities in Begichevka as ‘stupid’ in a letter to Strakhov, who was appalled (SAT-ML, II, p. 324). He knew those he managed to help were a tiny part of the several hundred thousand people who died during two years of hunger, along with the millions who barely survived. Moreover, he was aware that his efforts could not tackle the roots of the problem. The abundant harvest of 1893 did not mean that hunger, poverty and misery would end. He aspired to change the world and the soul of man, not merely to alleviate the consequences of hunger. In the midst of the relief operation, he was writing, rewriting and correcting his new book The Kingdom of God Is Within Us, in which he concentrated on the problem of non-violence, which he believed was the most important of the five commandments of Jesus.

Since Tolstoy first began to develop his particular Gospel, he found that he was not a voice calling in the wilderness. Many thinkers, sects and communes had been preaching and practising non-violence long before he was converted to the idea. Tolstoy sought to acknowledge the contribution of this disparate community of spiritual brothers and followers for whom he had become a natural leader. He set out to refute the objections of those who thought violence was compatible with Christianity or an engine of progress and necessary condition of human life. He would uproot an unjust and corrupt social order by attacking it at what he considered its most vulnerable point.

For Tolstoy, the power of rulers, government officials, generals and judges depended on the voluntary consent of millions of ordinary people to follow their orders. Thus the most effective way to undermine this was universal rejection of military service in any form. Tolstoy filled the pages of his book with the personal stories of people who had chosen to suffer persecution rather than take up arms or swear oaths that ran counter to their consciences.

Tolstoy had begun writing The Kingdom of God Is Within Us before the famine. On a train to Begichevka he had met soldiers sent to suppress riots caused by a dispute between peasants and a landowner over a mill. According to his follower and early biographer Pavel Biryukov, this encounter with decent, open-faced young men who were nonetheless ready to kill their brethren made as powerful an impression on Tolstoy as that of the death of his brother or the sight of the execution he had witnessed in Paris. In the conclusion to the book, Tolstoy explained this transformation of ordinary people into professional torturers and murderers as a kind of social hypocrisy that allowed a man to believe the atrocities he had to perform were necessary and justifiable. Tolstoy conceded that a person may not always be able to follow his conscience, but at least he should not deceive himself about the real motives for his behaviour. This sincerity was the first step on the road to moral regeneration. Anyone who let the ‘Kingdom of God’ enter his soul would finally find himself unable to resist it.

To submit such a work to a Russian publisher would have been pointless. Having finished the book in 1893, Tolstoy immediately sent it abroad both for translation and publication in the original. Rules were more lenient for books in foreign languages as their audience was inevitably limited to the educated classes, but in this case the Russian censors moved quickly to ban imports of even the French translation of ‘the most harmful book they had ever forbidden’ (CW, XXVIII, p. 366). Nevertheless, this did not stop any literate Russian from reading it in hectographed copies.

Living according to the rules of the Kingdom of God was not easy. In September 1891, after prolonged conflicts, Tolstoy finally convinced his wife to publish a statement renouncing copyright for the works he had written after 1881, the year of his conversion. His earlier works, including the two great novels, remained Sofia’s exclusive property. She also continued publishing and selling Tolstoy’s collected works, even if their contents were not protected by copyright. The next spring Tolstoy gave his land away. Renouncing his rights as a landowner, he transferred ownership not to the peasants but to his wife and children.

This tortured compromise might possibly have worked as a divorce arrangement, but Tolstoy continued to live in the same house. He now had the dubious status of a dependant without responsibility for the well-being of his family and legally unable to interfere in any conflict that might arise between his family and the peasants. In his diaries, letters and conversations Tolstoy often expressed his revulsion at the ‘luxurious’ life he was living. Today’s visitors to his houses at Yasnaya Polyana and in Moscow will struggle to notice this luxury. The houses seem modest, if not ascetic, and inadequate for such a large family. Tolstoy, however, compared himself not to his peers, but to the hungry peasants jammed in dirty huts. He found the minimal comfort he enjoyed unbearable, directly contradicting what he was preaching to a world that could observe and question the conflict between his teachings and his lifestyle.

Tolstoy’s working room in Yasnaya Polyana.

The copyright agreement was no less precarious. In early 1895 Tolstoy promised his new story ‘Master and Man’ to Liubov’ Gurevich, editor of the magazine Severnyi vestnik (Northern Messenger). In this story a rich merchant, Vasily Brekhunov, rushing to complete a profitable deal in spite of repeated warnings, orders his coachman Nikita to drive him in a snowstorm. They lose their way in the country at night. Suddenly, in an outburst of joy and tenderness he has never experienced before, Brekhunov unbuttons his fur coat and warms Nikita with his body, saving his life but dying himself instead.

Sofia had, by this time, reluctantly reconciled herself to the fact that her husband would publish his works for the benefit of the ‘dark ones’ in cheap editions from ‘Intermediary’. But Tolstoy’s preference for a highbrow literary magazine over her collected works edition insulted her. She concluded that his decision had been caused by an infatuation with ‘the scheming half-Jewess’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 233) Gurevich and went into a bout of jealous rage. Intending, or pretending to intend, to commit suicide, she rushed out of the house into the freezing night in her gown and slippers. Tolstoy caught her on the way and convinced her to return, but in the following days she made two new attempts to escape and was brought back by children. Later Sofia wrote that she had relished the thought of freezing herself to death like the character in Tolstoy’s story. Finally, Leo backed down and agreed to let her publish the story simultaneously with Northern Messenger. Sofia recorded this in her diary on 21 February 1895. The same night their six-year-old son Ivan (Vanechka) fell ill. He died two days later.

Both Tolstoys knew that Vanechka was their last child and loved him with the tenderness and devotion of late parents. The boy himself was angelic: intelligent, kind, meek, totally devoid of childish egotism and endowed with a unique ability to understand others. As is typical in dysfunctional families, both parents were pulling their children in opposite directions: the daughters took Leo’s side; the sons, with the exception of Sergei, the eldest, who tried to remain neutral and remote, sympathized with their mother. Vanechka was the only one who tried to bring the family together, showing unending love and compassion for both estranged spouses: ‘Isn’t it better to die than to see how people get angry?’ he once said. The physical and moral suffering he experienced as a result of his parents’ quarrels forced them to control their words and behaviour. In a way, he was the only remaining link that still united the family.

Shortly before his death, speaking to his mother about his late brother Alyosha (Alexei), Vanechka had asked whether it was true that children who died before they were seven became angels. Sofia told him that many people believed that. He replied, ‘It would be better for me, Mama, if I too were to die before seven. My birthday will be soon. And if I don’t die, dear Mama, let me fast so that I will not have sins’ (SAT-Ds, I, 512). After that he started to give away his toys and drawings as presents to his siblings and the servants.

‘Mother is terrible in her grief. All her life was in him, she gave him all her love. Papa is the only one who can help her, but he suffers himself terribly and cries all the time,’ wrote Tolstoy’s daughter Maria in a letter to a friend.⁷ Tolstoy, who believed that Vanechka would be ‘his only son to continue the work of God after him’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 515), had turned overnight from a strong and energetic middle-aged man into a sickly old one. He confessed to his wife that for the first time in his life he felt completely hopeless.

The young writer and future Nobel Prize laureate Ivan Bunin recalls how Tolstoy tried to overcome this despair. Bunin, who visited him in Moscow around that time, began telling Tolstoy how much he admired the recently published ‘Master and Man’:

[Tolstoy] turned red and waved his hands saying: ‘Oh, let’s not talk about this! It is a horrible thing; it is so worthless that I am ashamed even to go out on the street.’ On that evening his face was thin, dark and severe. His seven-year-old son Vanya had died only a short time before; so after disavowing ‘Master and Man’ he began to talk about his son. ‘Yes, yes, he was a dear charming boy. But what does it mean that he is dead? There is no death. As long as we continue to love him, to live by him, he has not died.’

Sofia Tolstoy at the portrait of her late son Vanechka, 1895.

They went out into the snow. Tolstoy walked quickly, repeating abruptly, solemnly, harshly: ‘There is no death, there is no death.’⁸

Tolstoy hoped that the love that Vanechka had brought to the world and common grief over this loss would recreate peace and understanding within the family. He wrote to Alexandra Tolstoy about his astonishment at the ‘spiritual purity and particularly humility’ with which Sofia had accepted the greatest loss of her life:

She . . . only asks Him to teach her how to live without a being in which she had invested the whole power of her love; and so far she does not know how to do so . . . None of us has ever felt as close to each other as we do now, and I have never felt either in Sonya or in myself such a need for love and such an aversion towards all disunity and evil. I have never loved Sonya as much as I do now. And I feel good because of it. (Ls, II, p. 517)

His rigorous psychological analysis failed him here. The reconciliation achieved at the cost of a most terrible tragedy was short-lived. Leo was partially shielded by his philosophy, sense of mission and artistic genius. With none of these things to protect her, Sofia had to find refuges of her own. She had always passionately loved music and now found in it her only consolation. She would play the piano alone and with her husband and children, but her greatest joy came from performances by the famous pianist and composer Sergei Taneyev, Tchaikovsky’s favourite pupil. After Vanechka’s death, the Tolstoys invited Taneyev to spend the summer at Yasnaya Polyana. Like most Russian luminaries of the time, Taneyev admired Tolstoy and was happy to accept the invitation. Very soon members of the family could not fail to notice that Sofia’s love for music was gradually transferring itself to the musician.

None of the participants in this triangle envisaged even the remote possibility of adultery. Taneyev, who was twelve years younger than Sofia, lonely and, most importantly, gay, enjoyed the attention of the great writer and the tender care of his wife. Once he realized, belatedly, that he had involuntarily provoked a family rift, Taneyev gradually distanced himself from the Tolstoys. Sofia was certain of the innocence of her behaviour and believed it was impossible to control one’s inner feelings. Much later, she told her daughters that never in her life had she given so much as a handshake that she could not have given in the presence of her husband. Tolstoy was aware of this, but found Sofia’s ‘exclusive love’ for another man humiliating, especially as it began during the period of their shared grief. Once he confessed that he was close to killing himself because of jealousy. He could not stop trying to convince Sofia that in order to get rid of an evil feeling, one must first admit that it is evil. At some point he confessed that he was on the verge of suicide from jealousy, shame and humiliation, but even that could not convince Sofia to renounce what she considered to be the only and totally innocent source of joy in her life.

Portrait of Sergei Taneyev, 1890s.

In 1897, in the midst of this family crisis, Tolstoy finished his treatise What Is Art?, on which he had been working for the last ten years. Having addressed religion, philosophy, economy and politics, he now turned to a topic he knew intimately. Tolstoy challenged the identification of art with beauty prevalent in Romantic aesthetic thought. Instead, he claimed that art is a vehicle of human communication, a way of transmitting to others, and imbuing them with, the feelings of the author. While the artistic quality of a work depended on the sincerity and novelty of the emotions conveyed and clarity of their expression, its moral value was determined by the religious and ethical views of the author. Beethoven may have been a great musician, but the effect of his art on the souls of the Pozdnyshevs in The Kreutzer Sonata was detrimental and destructive.

Tolstoy attacked modern art not only on moral, but on artistic grounds. He quoted poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine or Maeterlinck that were, in his view, utterly incomprehensible. He understood that in the absence of universal criteria, this objection was relative – the same accusations could be made against the artists he himself admired. However, the notion of looking for a middle ground was not in his nature. Tolstoy had often denigrated his own work and did not hesitate to proclaim that, in order to be considered great, art should be understandable to everyone, including illiterate working people. He allowed for happy exceptions, but as a rule only folklore and religious parables could pass this threshold.

Did he fully believe what he was writing? In real life Tolstoy could not live without music. Taneyev was gradually replaced as his performer of choice by the young pianist Alexander Goldenveizer. In his memoirs Goldenveizer recalled a conversation in 1899 about a poem by Fedor Tyutchev, whom Tolstoy valued more highly than Pushkin and Fet:

L. N. told me: ‘I always say that a work of art is either so good that there is no gauge to measure its value – this is true art. Otherwise, it is just all wrong. Look, I am happy that I found a true work of art. One I cannot read without tears. I learned it by heart. Wait, I’ll recite it to you.’ L. N. began with an unsteady voice: ‘Blue-grey shadows mingled.’ Even on my deathbed, I shall not forget the impression L. N. made on me then. He was lying on his back convulsively gripping in his fingers the edge of the blanket, trying in vain to contain his suffocating tears. Several times, he stopped and started again, but finally, when he reached the end of the first stanza, ‘Everything is in me. I am in everything’, his voice broke.⁹

Tyutchev’s lyrical verse was a long way from being folk poetry, but came close to encapsulating Tolstoy’s long-cherished idyll of a peaceful dissolution in universal love. Tears prevented him from reciting to Goldenveizer the final stanza of Tyutchev’s poem: ‘By the haze of self-oblivion/ Fill my feelings to overflowing/ Let me taste annihilation/ Mix me with the slumbering world.’¹⁰ In spite of his denunciation of all modern artistic forms, at the time of his conversation with Goldenveizer Tolstoy was completing his third and the last major novel: Resurrection.

As usual, Tolstoy’s work on the novel was long and tortuous. In 1887 he had been impressed by a story told to him by the lawyer Anatoly Koni about a man who, sitting as a member of a jury, suddenly recognized in the prostitute accused of theft a woman he had seduced many years earlier. Distraught and repentant, he decided to marry her, but the woman died from typhus acquired in prison before they could wed. At first Tolstoy insisted that Koni, himself a man of letters, should write about this case. Then, changing his mind, Tolstoy asked Koni if he could borrow the plot. Permission was readily granted.

It is not difficult to see why this story fascinated Tolstoy. Feeling perennial disgust towards himself and his former sexual exploits, Tolstoy was thinking about the psychological mechanics of repentance and the possibility of redemption. He believed that those who, like him, were unfit for abstinence should regard their first sexual encounter as a lifetime commitment. The hero of ‘the Koni story’, as Tolstoy always called it in his manuscripts, was not only ashamed of his role as seducer, but belatedly acknowledged that this seduction actually amounted to a marriage that needed only to be sealed.

Tolstoy strongly identified himself with the protagonist of the story. In 1903 he told Pavel Biryukov, who was writing his biography, that he had once seduced his aunt’s maid, Gasha, who had subsequently perished after being driven out of the house. Five years earlier, however, writing in her diary about Resurrection, Sofia recalled that her husband had pointed out to her the same Gasha, now in her seventies and living in the house of Tolstoy’s brother. Most likely we will never know whether Tolstoy’s self-denunciation was caused by an erroneous memory or a deliberate desire to magnify his own guilt.

This time Tolstoy chose not to split his alter ego between two autobiographical characters. Instead, one gradually turns into another. Rich, prosperous and self-confident Prince Nekhlyudov, as he appears at the beginning of the novel, may be seen as a new incarnation of Prince Andrei or Vronsky, but then he is transformed into a sort of Bezukhov or Levin. After the reading of the first draft of the novel, Nikolai Strakhov suggested that Tolstoy was describing Chertkov’s rebirth, an observation that seems especially pertinent if one remembers that Chertkov was for Tolstoy an idealized embodiment of his own spiritual quest.

The first draft of Resurrection was finished in mid-1895. It was a rather short story focused on the seduction and Nekhlyudov’s repentance. It starts in the courtroom, where he sees Katyusha Maslova, the girl he had once seduced, accused of a murder she did not commit. The draft had a happy ending: the protagonist marries his newly rediscovered old love, emigrates to England and becomes a peasant in a commune. As all early versions of Tolstoy’s major works, this draft was supposed to be revised and expanded, but Tolstoy could not bring himself to do this. He was distracted by his essays and reluctant to complete a work that could provoke conflicts of the kind he had experienced with ‘Master and Man’. In 1897, however, he found a good reason to forge ahead.

The most radical of the many Russian sects receptive to Tolstoy’s beliefs were the so-called Spirit Wrestlers, who rejected the institutionalized Church and had been exiled by Nicholas I to the Caucasus. In the 1890s one of their leaders was struck by the deep affinities between his beliefs and the ideas of the famous count and urged his followers to burn their weapons, denounce military service and refuse to take the oath of loyalty to Tsar Nicholas II. As a result of this, some Spirit Wrestlers were beaten to death, others were arrested or deprived of the means to survive in the severe mountain climate where they lived. Tolstoy and his associates issued an appeal on their behalf. Once again, Tolstoy himself was spared any repression, but other signatories, including Chertkov, were arrested. Because of his aristocratic connections, Chertkov was allowed to leave for England; two other prominent Tolstoyans were sent into exile.

Due to Tolstoy’s intervention, the persecution of the Spirit Wrestlers began to attract international attention and the government felt compelled to grant them permission to emigrate to Canada. The resettlement of thousands of people was an expensive operation. Tolstoy therefore suspended, for a time at least, his resolve not to take money for his publications. He decided to donate the income from his new novel to help the sectarians. In the summer of 1898 he started reworking and expanding Resurrection.

Having found a valid excuse for writing prose, Tolstoy worked on it with intensity and passion. He turned the ‘Koni story’ into a full-scale novel that became the most elaborate artistic representation of his philosophy, and the broadest panorama of Russian life not only in his own fiction, but, arguably, in the whole of Russian literature. Apart from aristocrats, peasants and soldiers, whom Tolstoy always enjoyed writing about, the novel abounds with descriptions of civil servants, clerks, judges, gendarmes, merchants, clergymen, criminals and prostitutes. A significant part of the action takes place in Siberia, a place Tolstoy had never visited, but which had intrigued him since the time he had intended to write about the Decembrists. Nekhlyudov follows Katyusha there after her arrest and meets different sorts of convicts, including a number of revolutionaries.

Even before the novel was completed, the first instalments began appearing simultaneously in two versions: a censored one was published in the Russian magazine Niva (Field); the full one was printed in England through a press established by Chertkov. Complete editions appeared within weeks of the end of serialized publication and were immediately followed by English, French and German translations. Tolstoy’s third novel reached a bigger audience in one year than his previous two had achieved in three decades.

On 28 August 1898, the day of his seventieth birthday, Sofia wrote in her diary that Leo ‘was satisfied’ as he had worked well on his novel:

‘You know’, he said to me when I entered his room, ‘he won’t marry her, I reached a final decision today and it is a good one!’ ‘Of course, he won’t marry’, I said, ‘I told it to you long ago, if he were to marry, it would be false.’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 405)

Sofia was also satisfied. Tolstoy’s idea that a man should marry the first woman with whom he had carnal relations meant that she had, at best, no more reason to call herself his wife than Aksinya Bazykina, the housemaid Gasha and many other women, including the unknown prostitute in Kazan by whose bed the teenage Leo had wept in despair. Tolstoy, however, did not make Nekhlyudov change his mind. It is Katyusha who rejects him, preferring instead to marry a political prisoner. She loves the prince, but sacrifices her love because she does not believe he could be happy with her. At the end of the novel, Nekhlyudov reads the Gospels and discovers there the same five commandments of Christ that Tolstoy discussed in What I Believe. The final paragraph of the novel promises the dawn ‘of new life’ for its hero.

This ending and the whole story of a penitent intellectual and a good-hearted prostitute saving each other with mutual love and understanding was familiar to readers of Russian literature. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy had striven to rewrite Madame Bovary. In Resurrection he offered his own version of Crime and Punishment. In spite of his admiration for Dostoevsky as a person, Tolstoy disliked his narrative technique, ‘monotonous language’ and forced plots. He once noted, with surprise, that Dostoevsky, who had often fallen in love, could never describe love in a convincing way. He also agreed with Strakhov, who once said that Sonya in Crime and Punishment was implausible and found himself unable to believe in her.

The day he finished Resurrection, Tolstoy, in a familiar manner, remarked in his diary: ‘It is not good. Not revised. Too hurried. But I am free of it and it does not interest me any more’ (Ds., p. 345). He continued, however, to be interested. The following year he expressed his intention to continue the novel. In July 1904 he wrote of his strong desire to write ‘a second part of Nekhlyudov. His work, tiredness, nascent grand seigneurism, temptation by a woman, fall, mistakes and all against a background of the Robinson community’ (Ds, p. 378). This urge to return to the finished and published text betrays dissatisfaction. Usually Tolstoy was in need of ‘scaffolding’ while writing, but having published the work he began denigrating it to be able to liberate himself and forge ahead. This time publication of the novel did not release him.

Chekhov described Resurrection as ‘a remarkable work of art’, but thought that the story lacked a real ending, and ‘to write so much and then let everything be resolved with a text from the Gospels’ was ‘too theological’. He found the description of ‘princes, generals, aunts, peasants, prisoners, guards . . . the most interesting’, and the relations between Nekhlyudov and Katyusha ‘the least interesting’. The majority of twentieth-century readers and critics have agreed with this assessment, with the exception of the universally admired seduction scene, the erotic power of which disgusted Sofia so much that she considered it inappropriate for their grown-up daughters.

In the same letter in which he discussed Resurrection, Chekhov expressed his attitude to the author:

I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death. If he were to die, there would be a big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of all beliefs, I consider his the nearest and most akin to mine. Secondly, while Tolstoy is in literature, it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even recognizing that one has done nothing and never will do anything is not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all of us. His work is the justification for the enthusiasms and expectations built up around literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand, he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad taste in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will remain in the far background, in the shade. Nothing but his moral authority is capable of maintaining a certain elevation in the so-called mood and tendencies of literature. (Ch-Ls, IX, pp. 29–31)

Chekhov died in 1904, six years before Tolstoy, and this letter was published in 1908. The elder writer, who had just turned eighty, was moved to tears: ‘I never knew he loved me so much’ (Mak, III, 39). He loved Chekhov as well, but could never establish with him any kind of kinship and suspected him of emotional coldness. In a similar way, Tolstoy believed that the artistic perfection of Chekhov’s prose surpassed anything that previous writers, including Turgenev, Dostoevsky and himself, had been able to achieve, but he deplored Chekhov’s lack of religious beliefs and serious moral purpose. There was, however, one exception.

‘The Darling’ is written with the laconic precision typical of the late Chekhov. Over a few pages he traces the entire life of a woman, Olga, who is first married to a theatre impresario, then to a timber merchant, after whose death she begins to cohabit with a vet who is separated from his wife and son. All her partners are described as hopelessly boring, but each time Olga is completely reborn, becoming first an ardent fan of the dramatic arts, then a respectable housewife with a deep understanding of the subtleties of the timber trade, and then a passionate animal lover. Finally she finds consolation in an attachment to the vet’s son and becomes interested only in classical education and homework. Never in her life can she develop her own interests or opinions, borrowing instead from those she loves.

Tolstoy was not deaf to Chekhov’s sarcastic detachment. He enjoyed reading the story aloud, laughing himself and making everyone around him laugh. Many memoirists recall that he was never successful in reading his own prose, but performed the works of the authors he loved brilliantly and that he especially enjoyed comic literature. However, whenever he read ‘The Darling’ to family members and friends he invariably ended up in tears. He had found in Chekhov’s Olga the female ideal he longed for – a woman incapable of self-assertion who would willingly merge with him in one spiritual being. Later Tolstoy made a point of including the story whole in his Cycle of Reading, a personal commonplace book in which he tried to collect the best achievements of spiritual wisdom and moral beauty. In an afterword Tolstoy explained that, in his view, Chekhov had intended to condemn the ‘Darling’, Olga, but

a god of poetry forbade him to do it and ordered that she be blessed, and he did bless her by involuntarily covering that sympathetic creature in such a miraculous light that it will forever remain an example of what a woman may be to be happy herself, and make happy those with whom fate had united her. (CW, XLI, p. 377)

For all he admired Chekhov’s short stories, Tolstoy could never reconcile himself to the plays, which, from Tolstoy’s point of view, lacked coherent plots and dramatic situations. Chekhov loved to tell his friends that Tolstoy had once said to him: ‘I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse.’ Worried that his interlocutor was offended by his bluntness, Tolstoy took his hand, looked into his eyes and said, ‘Anton Pavlovich, you are a fine man,’ and then smiled and added, ‘But your plays are still bad.’¹¹

Chekhov believed that Tolstoy’s frequent praise for his contemporaries always carried a whiff of condescension and Shakespeare was the only author whom he regarded as a worthy rival. At least, Shakespeare was the only writer Tolstoy chose to refute in a special essay that offered a devastating analysis of King Lear, singling out psychological improbabilities, the incoherent plot, bombastic language and the dubious morality of the tragedy.

Drama always fascinated Tolstoy, but it was only in 1886 that he was able to make serious progress on a dramatic project. The Power of Darkness, his first major play, shows that Tolstoy did not idealize peasant life. The plot, based on an actual criminal case, included adultery, murder, infanticide and the spectacular public repentance of the murderer, which was vaguely reminiscent of Crime and Punishment.

Alexander III initially approved the tragedy, but was later convinced by Pobedonostsev to change his mind and ban stage performances. The Power of Darkness was first performed in Paris, followed by productions in nearly a dozen major European cities. The first professional production of the play in Russia did not take place until 1902, when Konstantin Stanislavsky directed and played the main role at the Moscow Art Theatre. Eleven years earlier Stanislavsky had already directed an amateur performance of Tolstoy’s comedy The Fruits of Enlightenment, which ridiculed the spiritualism that was fashionable in Russian society in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The two most important of Tolstoy’s dramatic works did not appear on stage or in print during his lifetime. He started both in the 1890s, then put them aside to concentrate on Resurrection. He resumed work on them in 1900, probably influenced by the first production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which he had seen that January at the Moscow Art Theatre. Tolstoy had left the theatre disappointed and certain that he could produce a more successful dramatic work of art. He nearly completed both dramas, but never tried to publish or stage either of them. The Living Corpse, the most theatrically successful of Tolstoy’s plays, was published in the posthumous edition in 1911 and performed the same year at the Moscow Art Theatre, co-directed by Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.

The main character of the play, Fyodor Protasov, ruins his family by squandering money on Gypsy singers. To free his wife and let her remarry a decent and loving suitor, he fakes his own suicide and disappears. This deceit is uncovered and both spouses are put on trial, Fyodor for fraud and his former wife Liza for bigamy. Eager to cut the knot that ties them both together and, no less importantly, understanding that the court’s verdict will return him to his family, Fyodor actually kills himself.

Like The Kreutzer Sonata, The Power of Darkness and Resurrection, The Living Corpse was based on a real court case. Stories of crime and punishment fascinated Tolstoy no less than Dostoevsky, especially after the death of the latter. However, the plot of this play suspiciously resembled that of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, in which one of the characters performs the same trick and is rewarded with complete success. Having always regarded divorce as being tantamount to adultery, Tolstoy found Chernyshevsky’s novel deeply immoral. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s sympathy with Protasov’s desire to free himself from family bonds is evident and Liza is portrayed as a kind and loving woman who is reasonably happy in her second marriage.

In his diary, Tolstoy referred to The Living Corpse as a ‘small drama’. The moral conclusions of his ‘big drama’, The Light Shines in the Darkness, are even more controversial. This is the only major work by Tolstoy, in any genre, in which the main character is the conscious embodiment of his own religious and philosophical views. To the dismay of his family, Nikolai Saryntsev renounces military service, the Orthodox Church, landownership and money and tries to engage in manual labour. Most of the people around him regard his behaviour as madness, but the local priest, Vasily, and his daughter’s fiancé, Prince Boris Cheremshanov, happen to be receptive to his teachings. The priest is evicted from the parish and forced to repent. Boris heroically refuses to renounce his views, rejects military service, is arrested and sent to a mental asylum and then a military prison. Lyuba, Saryntsev’s daughter, despite her sincere love for Boris, agrees to marry another young man.

Tolstoy did not finish the play. From his plan, we know that in the final act Saryntsev was to be killed by Cheremshanov’s mother, take the blame upon himself and die peacefully. However, the written text concludes with Saryntsev’s desperate prayer: ‘Vasily Nikanorovich has returned. I destroyed Boris. Lyuba is getting married. Am I wrong, wrong to believe in Thee? No. Father, help me’ (CW, XXXI, p. 184). His spiritual anguish remains unresolved.

Dramatic form does not allow the author to claim omniscience. Tolstoy was deprived here of one of his main narrative tools – insight into the hidden depths of the human soul, revealing subtle motives and impulses that are unclear even to the person himself. Possibly these limitations, inherent in the genre, prevented Tolstoy from becoming a real rival to Shakespeare or Chekhov. At the same time, for the very same reason, Tolstoy could allow himself to be more intimate in his plays than in his prose, letters and even diaries, and to give voice to inner doubts for which he could not find an outlet elsewhere.

Saryntsev and Tolstoy suffered because of the contrast between their own safety and comfort and the plight of their followers. The government and the Church were keen to exploit this contrast by ignoring the leader and persecuting his flock. When some officials proposed to silence the dangerous writer, Alexander III adamantly refused, allegedly saying that he ‘had no intention of making a martyr out of him and thus earning for myself universal indignation’.¹² Nicholas II, who inherited the throne in 1894, was not such a great admirer of Tolstoy’s talent as his father, but continued the same policy. Protected by his fame, Tolstoy longed for the martyrdom of a real prophet and continued to provoke the authorities.

Tolstoy included in the text of Resurrection two passages describing a service in the prison church. The first was a merciless parody of the Eucharist. Tolstoy portrayed this ritual, familiar to every Christian, and a most sacred mystery of the Orthodox Church, as a weird and senseless piece of pagan magic. In the second passage he accused the Church of blasphemy and profanation of the letter and spirit of Christ’s word. The real goal of established religions, Tolstoy suggested, was to switch off the personal conscience of believers, to allow them to continue their unjust ways of life and support a cruel and inhuman social order. Even submitting these fragments to the censors was unimaginable, but Chertkov, authorized by Tolstoy, included them in the foreign editions of the novel. Immediately thousands of copies of the full text appeared in Russia. Readers would hectograph the missing parts and stick them in the censored editions they bought.

Sofia, who was copying the manuscripts of Resurrection, wrote in her diary that she was ‘disgusted by the intentional cynicism in the description of the Orthodox service’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 444). For the official Church this was too much to stomach. After more than a year of discussion and deliberation, and, as recent historians argue, contrary to the will of Pobedonostsev, the Holy Synod issued an edict condemning Tolstoy in February 1901. The document was crafted with deliberate ambiguity. In its content it amounted to excommunication, but the word itself was not used. Instead the edict expressed sorrow that Tolstoy had severed his relations with the Church and hope that he would repent and return to its bosom. In any case, it was a consequential decision, making the writer an outlaw in his own country and, at the same time, enhancing his reputation especially among the younger generation that mostly detested the throne and the Church.

Tolstoy was unsure about the meaning of the edict. He asked his friends whether he had been officially anathematized, and looked disappointed having received a negative answer. In his reply to the Synod, he accused his opponents of hypocrisy and of inciting hatred and violence. He wrote that, walking in Moscow on the day of the publication of the edict, he had been called ‘The Devil in human shape’. He chose not to mention the reaction of the crowd of several thousand people who, according to Sofia’s diary, started shouting ‘Hurray, L[ev].N[icolayevich]., hello L[ev].N[icolayevich]., glory to the great man! Hurray!’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 15). As Chekhov wrote, ‘the public reacted to the excommunication with laughter’ (Ch-Ls, IX, p. 213).

In his letter to the Synod, Tolstoy confirmed that he had rejected the dogmas of the ruling Church and declared that repentance was impossible:

I must myself live my own life, and I must myself alone meet death (and that very soon), and therefore I cannot believe otherwise than as I – preparing to go to that God from whom I came – do believe . . . But I can no more return to that from which with such suffering I have escaped, than a flying bird can re-enter the eggshell from which it has emerged . . . I began by loving my Orthodox faith more than my peace, then I loved Christianity more than my Church, and now I love truth more than anything in the world. And up to now, truth, for me, corresponds with Christianity as I understand it. And I hold to this Christianity; and to the degree in which I hold to it, I live peacefully and happily, and peacefully and happily approach death.(CW, XXXIV, pp. 247, 252–3)

Tolstoy may have desecrated the sanctuaries of the official religion, but he had his own sense of what was holy and deserving of reverence. The moment of transition from an individual and temporal life to an eternal and universal one was for him sacred, as he wrote in his diary in 1894: ‘Love is the essence of life, and death removing the cover lays the essence bare’ (CW, LII, p. 119). His niece Elizaveta Obolenskaya recalled how he once asked the art critic Vasily Stasov about his thoughts on death. Stasov replied that he never thinks ‘about that bitch’. According to Obolenskaya, Tolstoy took these words as blasphemy. She wrote that he often spoke about death as a ‘blessing . . . a liberation, but thoughts about it worried him’, and once he remarked that ‘only frivolous people could not be afraid of death.’¹³ It was not the fear of physical annihilation. Tolstoy was afraid he would not be able to prove himself worthy of this most solemn moment. At the end of his life, he confessed that while an unconscious death would be ‘agreeable’, he would prefer to die fully conscious.¹⁴

In the summer of 1901 Tolstoy fell gravely ill. The chief doctor of the Tula hospital where he was taken declared his state to be terminal. In the morning, when Sofia was putting a warm compress on his belly, he said, ‘Thank you, Sonya. Don’t think I am not grateful to you and don’t love you.’ Both wept. The next day, when he started feeling better he told her that he was at a crossroads: ‘forward (to death) is good, and back (to life) is good. If I recover now it is only a delay.’ After a pause, he added, ‘I still have something that I want to say to people’ (SAT-Ds, II, pp. 22–3).

He recovered, but the doctors advised against staying in the damp and cold climate of mainland Russia. In late August the Tolstoys left for the town of Gaspra in the Crimean peninsula. Tolstoy there met with both Chekhov, who was living nearby in Yalta because of his worsening tuberculosis, and Maxim Gorky, the young revolutionary writer who had been exiled to the outer regions of Russia. Tolstoy took an interest in Gorky, eager to see in him a genius who had emerged from the Russian soil. Tolstoy’s infatuation with his younger colleague proved to be short-lived and their ways parted irretrievably. In the autumn of 1901, however, the three most famous living Russian authors enjoyed their conversations and the chance to spend time together.

Chekhov and Tolstoy in Gaspra, c. 1901.

Gorky wrote in his memoirs that during their first meeting Tolstoy had called him the ‘real man from the people’. He used the word muzhik, literally meaning a peasant, which was technically wrong. Like Chekhov, Gorky came from a family of tradesmen, but in his past he had led the life of a vagabond and enjoyed presenting himself as a social pariah. At the same time both Chekhov and Gorky shared a reverence for high culture that allowed them to overcome the limitations of their origins. Gorky, whom Tolstoy accused of being ‘too bookish’,¹⁵ hated both his petit bourgeois background and the peasant culture to which his family was culturally close. He wrote later to Romain Rolland that he ‘owed the best in him to books’.¹⁶ Neither of the younger writers could sympathize with Tolstoy’s desire to throw away the shackles of his elitist upbringing and imbibe the culture of the uneducated masses.

This literary idyll was arguably the last respite in Tolstoy’s life. Shortly after the New Year he fell ill with pneumonia. On 27 January 1902 Chekhov wrote to his wife Olga Knipper-Chekhov, the famous actress of the Moscow Art Theatre, that news of Tolstoy’s death would most likely reach her earlier than the letter he was writing. The next day Tolstoy’s children and their spouses started arriving to bid farewell. Speaking to his sons, Leo said that he would die with the same faith with which he had lived for the last 25 years. He instructed them to ask him before his death, ‘whether this faith was just’,¹⁷ and that he would ‘nod in agreement’ to let them know that this was of help to him in his last moments.

Against all expectations, Tolstoy’s innate strength prevailed. A couple of months later he was again in bed on the verge of dying from typhus. Once again he recovered, but the illnesses had taken their toll, as Sofia recorded in her diary with a characteristic mixture of love and irritation: ‘Poor thing, I can’t look at him, this world celebrity, and in real life a thin, pathetic old man. And he keeps working writing his address to the workers’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 69). Even after thirteen births and three miscarriages, she was still a strong middle-aged woman. In the interval between her husband’s two illnesses she managed to travel to Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow, taking in a visit to the opera and a private concert where Taneyev was playing. It was clear, at any rate, that the Crimea was not benefiting Tolstoy’s health. In the summer of 1902 the couple headed home.

Tolstoy sick in Gaspra, with Sofia, c. 1902.

‘How difficult are these transitions from dying to recovering,’ Tolstoy said to Elizaveta Obolenskaya. ‘I prepared myself for death so well, it was so calm and now I have again to think how to live.’¹⁸ Tolstoy felt that he had lived his life to the end, but then was granted extra time. On his apparent deathbed in Gaspra he had prolonged conversations with his children and tried to gear his message to each of them. Likewise, he now set out to address his last words to different groups of the Russian population: the working people, the government, the clergy, the military and so on. He started this cycle with a letter to the emperor, whom he addressed as ‘Dear Brother’ and whom he urged to abolish private ownership of land.

The people who were close to him were departing. In 1903 Tolstoy wrote two farewell letters to Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘the Granny’. They both knew they would never be able to see each other again. A devout Orthodox Christian, she regarded her cousin’s views as heretical. Their friendly relations continued, but both felt the barrier separating them. Leo made an effort to break it:

The difference of religious convictions not only cannot and should not prevent the loving unity of people, but cannot and should not arouse the desire to convert a person you love to your faith. I write about [this], because I only recently understood it, understood that any sincerely religious person . . . needs his own faith that corresponds to his mind, knowledge, experience, and mainly his heart, and he cannot leave this faith. For me to desire that you would believe like me or for you that I would believe like you is the same as desiring that I would say that it is hot, when I feel cold or that am cold when I am burning with heat . . . Since then, I stopped desiring to bring others to my faith and felt that I love people, whatever their faith is. (LNT & AAT, p. 520)

Alexandra could not accept this olive branch. She was sure that there can be no salvation outside of the Church and in her last letter wrote that she prayed that God would finally grant ‘the blessing of Holy Spirit’ (LNT & AAT, p. 523) to her wayward cousin. She died in March 1904 at the age of 86. In August 1904 Tolstoy visited his dying brother Sergei for the last time. A convinced atheist, Sergei suddenly expressed his desire to receive communion. To the relief of Sergei’s wife and their sister Maria, Leo fully supported this intention.

Both Alexandra and Sergei were his seniors and parting with them was to be expected. The most painful thing for Tolstoy was the loss of his daughter Maria (Masha), spiritually the closest to him among his children, the only one who refused to take her share when the estate was partitioned in 1892. ‘Masha greatly alarms me. I love her very, very much’ (Ds, p. 403), Tolstoy recorded in his diary on 23 November 1906. She died four days later with her father sitting at her deathbed. A month later, Tolstoy wrote:

I go on living and often recall Masha’s last minutes (I don’t like calling her Masha, that simple name is so unsuitable for the creature who left me). She sits here surrounded by pillows and I hold her dear, thin hand and feel life departing, feel her departing. These quarter hours are among the most important, significant time of my life. (Ds, p. 404)

Vanechka’s death eleven years earlier had brought the spouses together at least for a short while. This loss, however, only aggravated their growing alienation. Sofia did not want to conceal her belief that the hard physical work and vegetarianism imposed by her father had ruined Maria’s health and made her unable to have children.

The house was emptying out. The only one of Tolstoy’s offspring still living with her parents was their youngest daughter Alexandra. Highly intelligent and strong-willed, she was an ardent and rather rigid follower of Tolstoy’s ideas. She adored her father, but was well aware that she could never be as intimately close to him as the kind and understanding Maria. In his delirium when he lay dying, Tolstoy would ‘in a loud, joyous voice call out: “Masha, Masha!”’ (AT, II, p. 404).

The only way to cope with these losses was to keep writing. Tolstoy always tried to balance a moral message with artistic perfection. In The Forged Coupon, an unfinished story about the contagiousness of good and evil, the former clearly prevailed, but in Hadji Murat, his other literary preoccupation of 1904 and the last major piece of prose he managed to bring near to completion, the opposite seems to be the case. Tolstoy was ashamed of his attachment to this story, but could not rid himself of the urge to perfect the work. In 1903 he wrote in his diary that his other plans were ‘more important than the stupid Hadji Murat’ (Ds, p. 370), but later confessed to his biographer Pavel Biryukov that he was still editing it during a visit to his sister, who lived in a convent. As Biryukov recalls, ‘it was said in the manner of a schoolboy confessing to his friend that he had eaten a cake’ (CW, XXXV, p. 629).

Hadji Murat was one of the most powerful chieftains in the Northern Caucusus and fought against the Russians in the wars of the 1840s and ’50s. After quarrelling with Imam Shamil, the leader of the insurrection, he had deserted to the Russians but, finding out that they mistrusted him, tried to escape and was killed. The last part of this saga took place when Tolstoy was serving in the region. The character of Hadji Murat and his story had excited the young writer, who used to tell stories about him to his peasant pupils. Half a century later he brought his poetic imagination to bear on these old memories, supplementing them with new information from documents that had recently become available.

Tolstoy began writing the story in the 1890s but work intensified after his return from Gaspra. Although he was already a radical pacifist, in Hadji Murat he made no effort to conceal his fascination with the figure of a fierce and ruthless warrior. He began with an allegory of a thistle that survives in the field, retaining its wild beauty even under the plough, but which immediately loses its shape and flavour when torn from its native soil. Tolstoy initially planned to call his story The Thistle.

In 1904, as Tolstoy was working on Hadji Murat, a major new war had broken out in the Far East. For the first time in its history, Russia was fighting Japan, the new global power. Tolstoy’s reaction was passionate and predictable. Once again, countries were being devastated and bankrupted. People were being separated from their families and everyday labours, taught to kill and dragged off to be killed or maimed for remote chunks of land that were equally useless to the populations of Russia and Japan. In the essay ‘Bethink Yourself’, Tolstoy protested not only at the mass institutionalized murder, but against the tribal ideology of patriotism that incited hatred towards other nations and races. According to his own profession of faith, the fifth commandment of Christ was never to view anyone as an enemy and not to divide people into tribes.

The horrific defeats suffered by the Russian army pained him nonetheless. His daughter Tatiana wrote in her memoirs that, having heard that Russian troops had abandoned the besieged Port Arthur, Tolstoy said that in his youth they did not surrender fortresses without blowing them up. When a Tolstoyan disciple present in the room, and ‘apparently shocked by the Master’s words’, pointed out that this would lead to the loss of human lives, Tolstoy calmly responded: ‘What do you expect? If you are a soldier, you have a job to do. And you do it properly.’¹⁹ Deep inside him, there was still a warrior who could not brook surrender.

The situation was all too familiar to Tolstoy. As at the time of the Crimean War, in which he had fought as a young officer, the government tried to buttress a collapsing political order with a ‘small and victorious war’, as the Russian interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve put it. Once again, the war turned out to be prolonged and bloody. Russia was defeated; von Plehve assassinated by a terrorist. Revolution broke out in 1905.

Like Hadji Murat, who could not find his place among the rebels or with the Russians, Tolstoy could not align himself with either side in the growing divide that was tearing Russian society apart. In 1906 Tolstoy published his ‘Address to the Russian People’, in which he predicted that the government that tried to combine halfhearted political concessions and promises of constitutional reform with new waves of repression would not be able to withstand the revolution ‘under its banner of autocracy even with constitutional amendments’. It could save itself ‘not by a parliament elected in whichever way and even less so by guns, cannon and executions, but only by admitting its sin before the people and trying to redeem itself’ (CW, XXXVI, p. 304).

For the first time Tolstoy attacked the revolutionaries even more fiercely than the authorities. He accused them of being ready ‘to blow up, destroy and kill’ (CW, XXXVI, p. 306) out of a belief in some abstract form of social order, about which they could not even agree among themselves. According to Tolstoy, the government and the opposition shared the same contempt for ordinary people, trying to impose upon them their own views and prejudices. He urged millions of Russian peasants not to resort to violence, but to stop obeying orders and laws.

In August and October 1905 a terrified emperor issued decrees abolishing censorship, guaranteeing basic civil freedoms and announcing the formation of the State Duma, Russia’s first national parliament, which did not, however, receive the right to appoint the government. Belated and forced concessions only increased agitation and militancy. Tolstoy did not believe in political reforms. His main concern was the situation in rural areas, where peasants were burning down the houses of landowners and demanding redistribution of the land. As a rule these uprisings were controlled and contained by the leaders of the peasant communes. Given the dimensions of the turmoil, the level of physical violence remained relatively low.

Tolstoy saw the revolutionary crisis as a make-or-break moment that would either bring peace to Russia and consequently to the whole world, or end in a nightmare of bloodshed and destruction. He believed he knew how to adjust the social order in a way that would pacify the country. Age and precarious health notwithstanding, Tolstoy was tireless in propagating the socioeconomic theories of a thinker who had influenced him no less than Rousseau or Schopenhauer.

The American progressive economist Henry George was one of the most popular social theorists of the second half of the nineteenth century. His philosophy brought together socialist and libertarian ideas in a synthesis that Tolstoy found especially appealing. Like many intellectuals of the time, George had tried to identify the causes for the stark contrast between rapid technological progress and growing poverty.

George’s most famous book, Progress and Poverty, was published in 1879 and sold several million copies. George supported the notion of private property insofar as it concerned the products of a person’s own labour, but not for natural resources: land, in particular, he considered an indivisible asset of humanity. At the same time, he did not propose the nationalization of land. Instead, he suggested the ‘nationalization of rent’ from it in the form of a universal land tax, the level of which would depend upon the productivity and location of the land. In Progress and Poverty George tried to demonstrate by meticulous calculations that a correctly calibrated land tax would increase the productivity of land, lead to its redistribution in a way favourable to farmers, provide enough income to abolish all other taxes and sustain a modest social security network.

It is unlikely that Tolstoy checked George’s figures, but he referred to them as a theorem that had been proven beyond reasonable doubt. He even proposed a range of tax rates that, he believed, would allow Russia to keep the land profitable for cultivation and avoid speculation. He found in George a system that struck him as being fair, simple, reasonable and, most importantly, congruent with the natural sense of justice prevalent among the peasants. In George’s economic theories he had found a ‘green stick’ that would eventually bring happiness to humanity.

Unlike George, Tolstoy was an anarchist who rejected, as a matter of principle, not only the notion of taxation, but the very idea of the state itself. Nonetheless, the ideas of the American theorist showed him a possible way to peacefully transform the current order into a world in which people willing to engage in agricultural labour would have access to enough land and others would have to produce the goods and services necessary for those who cultivate the land. In this utopian world, states, governments and laws would themselves become redundant.

Tolstoy had discovered Henry George in February 1885, when he wrote to Chertkov that he ‘was sick for a week but consumed by George’s latest [Social Problems] and the first book Progress and Poverty, which produced a strong and joyous impression’ on him:

This book is wonderful, but it is beyond value, for it destroys all the cobwebs of Spencer–Mill political economy – it is like the pounding of water and acutely summons people to a moral consciousness of the cause and even defines the cause . . . I see in him a brother, one of those who according to the teachings of the Books of the Apostles [has more] love [for people] than for his own soul. (CW, LXXXV, p. 144)

Moved and flattered by Tolstoy’s approval, Henry George wanted to come to Russia to talk to the great man, but his health did not permit him to make such a journey. When George died in 1897, Tolstoy wrote to Sofia that he was shocked by the death and felt as if he had lost ‘a very close friend’. Around the same time, he made Nekhlyudov in Resurrection give away his land according to George’s principles: ‘What a head this Zhorzha was’ (CW, XXXII, p. 231), an old peasant says admiringly, having finally understood the plan. Tolstoy’s interest in Henry George reached its peak during the revolution of 1905, when he wrote a foreword to the translation of Social Problems that had been made by his follower Sergei Nikolaev and several essays popularizing Georgism.

In June 1907 Nicholas II dissolved the Duma and issued a new electoral law ensuring the victory of loyalists at the next elections. This gave de facto dictatorial powers to Pyotr Stolypin, the minister of interior affairs he had appointed a year before at the height of revolutionary upheaval. Stolypin was known for personal courage, fierce independence and had the reputation of a reformer. Stolypin was also Tolstoy’s distant relative; Tolstoy had personally known and liked his father.

The Russian public hated Stolypin, but this did not deter Tolstoy from acting. In July 1907 he wrote a letter to the all-powerful minister pleading with him to pay attention to Social Problems. As Stolypin did not reply, in October Tolstoy wrote again, asking Stolypin to help an old Tolstoyan who had been arrested and reproaching him for ignoring his first letter. This time the minister answered. He promised to reconsider the criminal case, but not his policy and ideas. He gave a nod to the theories of George, but insisted that these could only be applied in Russia in the remote future:

Do not think that I did not pay attention to your letter. I could not answer, because it wounded me too much. You consider evil what I believe to be good for Russia. It seems to me that the lack of landed property is the cause of all our problems. Nature has imbued man with some inborn instincts like hunger, sexual feelings, and one of the most powerful feelings of this order is the sense of property. One cannot love what belongs to another as well as that which is one’s own and a man will not take care of land he uses on a temporary basis in the same way he would take care of it were it his own . . . I have always considered you a great man, and I have a modest opinion of myself. I have been lifted up by the wave of events, most likely just for a moment! Still, I want to use this moment to the utmost extent of my strength, understanding and feelings for the benefit of the people and my motherland, which I love as they used to love it in the old time. How then can I possibly do what I do not think and consider to be good? And you write to me that I am following the way of evil deeds, ill fame, and most importantly – sin. Believe me, that feeling often the possibility of an approaching death one cannot help thinking about these questions, and my way seems to me to be the honest one.²⁰

Stolypin’s goal was to undermine the peasant commune, the institution most cherished by Tolstoy. Stolypin hoped to put in the place of these communes millions of private landowners who would transform Russian agriculture and the national psyche. In order to provide the land necessary to establish these future American-style farmers without a major land redistribution programme, Stolypin envisaged a mass voluntary resettlement of peasants to Siberia. The Trans-Siberian Railway, which had started functioning in the first years of the century, provided the necessary logistical means to fulfil this plan.

Stolypin had already survived several assassination attempts. Tolstoy could therefore appreciate the power and seriousness of his correspondent’s convictions, but was not able to accept his views. He regarded exclusive preference for one’s own to the common and universal in the same way that he regarded sexual instincts, that is, as something to be fought against, not condoned and cherished. To turn the resources given to humans by God into private property was, for Tolstoy, tantamount to ‘contemporary slavery’ or another kind of serfdom. Moreover, the concept of private land property was, according to him, antithetical to the very essence of the Russian peasant soul. Stolypin’s plans looked to Tolstoy like a new incarnation of Peter’s Westernizing reforms that could only be imposed in the same way, by violence and coercion.

In October 1907 Tolstoy again wrote to Stolypin, using as a pretext the arrest of one of his assistants. With the letter, he sent a copy of Social Problems. In January, not having received an answer, he again pleaded with the minister to think of his own soul and start doing things that corresponded to the hopes and aspirations of the majority of Russians:

You who have already suffered so cruelly from attempts on your life, who are considered to be the most powerful and energetic enemy of revolution, you would suddenly take the side not of revolution, but of eternally distorted truth, thus eliminating the soil that breeds revolution. It might well happen that, however softly and cautiously you would act in suggesting such a new measure to the government, they may not agree with you and remove you from power. As I can understand you, you would not be afraid of this, because you do, what you do now, not to keep yourself in power, but because you consider it to be just and necessary. Let them remove you 20 times, slander you in all possible ways, this would still be better than your current situation. (CW, LXXIX, p. 43)

This letter was signed, ‘loving you Lev Tolstoy’. Stolypin again agreed to intervene in the case Tolstoy mentioned, but had nothing more to say in response. Both were growing tired of each other. Tolstoy later said that it was childish of him to believe that the government would listen to him, but he was still glad he had written to the emperor and to Stolypin, at least to be sure that he had done ‘everything to find out that it is useless to address them’.²¹ Still he felt himself responsible for being so forgiving towards a person he increasingly regarded as a serial murderer or, as he wrote in his last unsent letter to Stolypin in August 1909, ‘the most pitiable man in Russia.’ (Ls, II, p. 690)

To implement his reforms, Stolypin needed to suppress the revolution and he was doing this with increasing cruelty. He started by introducing courts martial for civil crimes. Executions, extremely rare in Russia for a century and a half, were taking place on a daily basis and on an unprecedented scale. Each day the now liberated press reported on new hangings and shootings. On 9 May 1908, after reading one such report, Tolstoy began recording his article ‘I Can’t Be Silent’ on a phonograph, but he was overpowered by emotion and soon found himself unable to continue. He spent the whole following month carefully working on the text, which became what is arguably the most famous and most powerful denunciation of capital punishment ever written in any language. Extracts from it appeared on 4 July 1908 in several Russian newspapers, all of which were fined for publishing it.

Tolstoy begins the article with a naturalistic, detached description of a hanging in which his indignation manifested itself only in the precision of his account of the horrifying details. He wrote about the situation in the country, where hatred was growing and little children were now playing out terrorist acts, expropriations and executions in their games. He insisted that, while all killing is abominable, soldiers who obey orders, terrorists who risk their lives, and even actual executioners, who are mostly illiterate and know that their job is disreputable, are more deserving of pardon than the cold-blooded and self-righteous murderers who send people to the gallows. In closing, Tolstoy acknowledged his own moral responsibility for everything that was happening in his country:

Everything now being done in Russia is done in the name of the general welfare, in the name of the protection and tranquillity of the people of Russia. And if this is so, then it is also done for me, since I live in Russia . . . And being conscious of this, I can no longer endure it, but must free myself from this intolerable position! It is impossible to live so! I, at any rate, cannot and will not live so. That is why I write this and will circulate it by all means in my power, both in Russia and abroad. I hope that one of two things may happen: either that these inhuman deeds may be stopped, or that my connection with them may be terminated by my imprisonment, whereby I may be clearly conscious that these horrors are not committed on my behalf. Or better still (so good that I dare not even dream of such happiness), I hope that they put on me, as on those twelve or twenty peasants, a shroud and a cap and push me too off a bench, so that by my own weight I may tighten the well-soaped noose round my old throat. (CW, XXXVII, p. 94–5)

The resonance of the article was comparable only to that of Zola’s J’accuse, published ten years earlier. Tolstoy was accustomed to admiration and hatred. He had already received death threats and remained unfazed. Still, he was aware that whatever he wrote, he would not be arrested or hanged. For twenty years, the tragedy he described in The Light Shines in the Darkness had been torturing him.

In his later years Tolstoy was especially friendly with Maria Schmidt, an old spinster who had adopted his philosophy and settled near Yasnaya Polyana, sustaining herself with hard manual labour. She was so humble and kind that even Sofia, who disliked Tolstoyans, always mentioned her favourably. Schmidt did not approve of ‘I Can’t Be Silent’ because it lacked ‘love’. With enormous difficulty, she managed to convince the author to omit personal attacks on Stolypin, Nicholas II and others. Tolstoy, who called hatred ‘the most painful of all feelings’, was struggling to contain his fury. Worst of all, it was a fury born of despair.

Overcoming strong resistance from the left and the right, Stolypin succeeded in bulldozing his main reforms through the Duma. The peasants were granted the legal right to leave the commune while retaining their strips of land as private property that they could farm or sell, to buy state land and receive subsidies for resettlement. The peasant commune was doomed. Stolypin wrote that twenty years of internal and external peace would transform Russia – this dream proved to be no less utopian than Tolstoy’s Georgism. He was assassinated by a terrorist in 1911 just as he was about to be dismissed from his post. With the revolution suppressed, the emperor no longer needed a ruthless reforming zealot at the helm of the government. Three years later, Russia entered the First World War, which ended in a new revolution, followed by civil war and later the annihilation of the Russian peasantry in the horrors of forced collectivization and the Gulag. Tolstoy was fortunate not to witness these developments, but he could read the writing on the wall.

Maria Schmidt: the exemplary Tolstoyan, 1886.

In the summer of 1908, when Tolstoy was writing ‘I Can’t Be Silent’, Chertkov returned to Russia after being amnestied, and settled nearby. Conversations with his old friend and favourite disciple gave a lot of comfort and support to the ageing writer. Staying at Chertkov’s house, Tolstoy used to wander around and talk to peasants without being recognized. At Yasnaya Polyana, where everyone knew him, this would have been impossible. He recorded the growing plight and hardening resentment of the poor, who started speaking about the educated elite as ‘parasites’, an epithet Tolstoy had never heard before. Use of this word did not bode well for the privileged; later it became a Bolshevik catchword that justified the extermination of the ruling classes. Some conversations, however, were different.

During one of his strolls, Tolstoy met a handsome, intelligent and hard-working young peasant who quickly acquiesced to the stranger’s admonitions about alcohol and promised to quit drinking. Tolstoy could hardly believe in such rapid success, but that evening the young peasant came by to borrow brochures about the evils of intoxication. With obvious satisfaction, he conveyed his mother’s gratitude to the old man. Proud of himself, he also confessed that he was already engaged to a nice girl.

Having congratulated the convert, Tolstoy asked a question ‘that always interested him when he dealt with the young nice people of our time’:

Forgive me for asking, but please, tell the truth, either don’t answer or tell the whole truth.

He looked at me calmly and attentively. ‘Why is not to say?’

Have you sinned with a woman?

Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered simply, ‘God save me, this has never happened.’

That is good, really good, I said. I am glad for you.

Tolstoy published an essay about this conversation under the title ‘From the Diary’. Several days later, he added a conclusion and a new title, ‘Grateful Soil’. The full text appeared in late July 1910:

What a wonderful soil to sow, what a receptive soil. What a terrible sin it is to throw there the seeds of lies, violence, drunkenness, debauchery . . . We, who have a chance to give back to this people at least a bit of what we have ceaselessly been taking from them, what do we give him in return? Aeroplanes, dreadnoughts, 30-storey buildings, gramophones, the cinematograph and all the useless stupidities that we call science and art. And most importantly, the example of empty, immoral, criminal life . . . ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!’ (CW, XXXVIII, pp. 35–6)

This turned out to be the last work he published in his lifetime.

Tolstoy was never a stubborn technophobe. He rode a bicycle, recorded his voice on a phonograph sent to him by Thomas Edison, used trains and put photographs on the walls of his room. He often said that there was nothing inherently good or bad about railways: the main problem was where and for what reason does one travel. Modernity in his eyes failed this litmus test. There was no hope for the peasant he encountered, even if the young man would be able to abstain from drinking and remain chaste. For decades, Tolstoy was fighting against the overwhelming force of history. He had never surrendered, but now he knew that it was time for him to leave the battlefield.

Tolstoy in 1908.