Natasha's Dance

5

At 4 a.m. on 28 October 1910 Tolstoy crept out of his house at Yasnaya Polyana, took a carriage to the nearby station, and bought a third-class railway ticket to Kozelsk, the station for the monastery at Optina Pustyn. At the age of eighty-two, with just ten days to live, Tolstoy was renouncing everything - his wife and children, his family home in which he had lived for nearly fifty years, his peasants and his literary career - to take refuge in the monastery. He had felt the urge to flee many times before. Since the 1880s he had got into the habit of setting out at night to walk with the pilgrims on the Kiev road that passed by his estate - often not returning until breakfast time. But now his urge was to leave for good. The endless arguments with his wife Sonya, largely over the inheritance of his estate, had made life at home unbearable. He wanted peace and quiet in his final days.

Tolstoy did not know where he was going. He left in a hurry, without plans. But something drew him to Optina. Perhaps it was The Brothers Karamazov, which Tolstoy had just read for the first time; or perhaps it was the presence of his sister Marya, the last survivor of his happy childhood, who was living out her last days at the nearby Shamordino convent under the direction of Optina's monks. The monastery was not far from his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and on several occasions over the previous thirty years he had walked there like a peasant to calm his troubled mind by talking about God with the elder Amvrosy. The ascetic life of the Optina hermits was an

inspiration to Tolstoy: so much so that Father Sergius (1890-98) - his story of an aide-de-camp-turned-hermit from Optina who struggles to find God through prayer and contemplation and at last finds peace as a humble pilgrim on the road - can be read as a monologue on Tolstoy's own religious longing to renounce the world. Some say that Tolstoy was searching at Optina for a final reconciliation with the Church -that he did not want to die before his excommunication (imposed by the Church in 1901) had been rescinded. Certainly, if there was a site where such a reconciliation could have taken place, it was Optina, whose mystical approach to Christianity, uncluttered as it was by the rituals and institutions of the Church, was very close to Tolstoy's own religious faith. But it seems more likely that Tolstoy was driven by the need to 'go away'. He wanted to escape from the affairs of this world to prepare his soul for the journey to the next.

To judge from A Confession, Tolstoy's turn to God was a sudden one - the result of a moral crisis in the latter half of the 1870s. This, too, is the view of most scholars, who draw a sharp distinction between the literary Tolstoy of the pre-crisis decades and the religious thinker of the post-crisis years. But in fact the search for faith was a constant element of Tolstoy's life and art.¹⁰³ His whole identity was bound up in the quest for spiritual meaning and perfection, and he took his inspiration from the life of Christ. Tolstoy thought of God in terms of love and unity. He wanted to belong, to feel himself a part of a community. This was the ideal he sought in marriage and in his communion with the peasantry. For Tolstoy, God is love: where there is love, there is God. The divine core of every human being is in their compassion and ability to love. Sin is loss of love - a punishment itself - and the only way to find redemption is through love itself. This theme runs through all Tolstoy's fiction, from his first published story, 'Family Happiness' (1859) to his final novel, Resurrection (1899). It is misleading to see these literary works as somehow separate from his religious views. Rather, as with Gogol, they are allegories - icons - of these views. All Tolstoy's characters are searching for a form of Christian love, a sense of relatedness to other human beings that alone can give a meaning and a purpose to their lives. That is why Anna Karenina -isolated and thrown back completely on herself - is destined to perish in Tolstoy's universe; or why his most exalted figures, such as Princess

Maria or the peasant Karataev in War and Peace, show their love by suffering for other human beings.

Tolstoy had a mystical approach to God. He thought that God could not be comprehended by the human mind, but only felt through love and prayer. For Tolstoy, prayer is a moment of awareness of divinity, a moment of ecstasy and freedom, when the spirit is released from the personality and merges with the universe.¹⁰⁴ Not a few Orthodox theologians have compared Tolstoy's religion to Buddhism and other oriental faiths.¹⁰⁵ But in fact his mystical approach had more in common with the hermits' way of prayer at Optina. Tolstoy's division from the Russian Church, however, was a fundamental one, and not even Optina could satisfy his spiritual requirements. Tolstoy came to reject the doctrines of the Church - the Trinity, the Resurrection, the whole notion of a divine Christ - and instead began to preach a practical religion based on Christ's example as a living human being. His was a form of Christianity that could not be contained by any Church. It went beyond the walls of the monastery to engage directly with the major social issues - of poverty and inequality, cruelty and oppression - which no Christian in a country such as Russia could ignore. Here was the religious basis of Tolstoy's moral crisis and renunciation of society from the end of the 1870s. Increasingly persuaded that the truly Christian person had to live as Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy vowed to sell his property, to give away his money to the poor, and to live with them in Christian brotherhood. Essentially his beliefs amounted to a kind of Christian socialism - or rather anarchism, insofar as he rejected all forms of Church and state authority. But Tolstoy was not a revolutionary. He rejected the violence of the socialists. He was a pacifist. In his view, the only way to fight injustice and oppression was by obeying Christ's teachings.

The Revolution of 1917 has obscured from our view the threat which Tolstoy's simple reading of the Gospels posed to Church and state. By the time of his excommunication in the 1900s, Tolstoy had a truly national following. His Christian anarchism was hugely appealing to the peasantry, and as such it was perceived as a major threat to the established Church, even to the Tsar. Any social revolution in Russia was bound to have a spiritual base, and even the most atheistic

socialists were conscious of the need to give religious connotations to their stated goals.* 'There are two Tsars in Russia', wrote A. S. Suvorin, editor of the conservative newspaper Novoevremia, in 1901: 'Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which one is stronger? Nicholas II can do nothing about Tolstoy; he cannot shake his throne. But Tolstoy, undoubtedly, is shaking his.'¹⁰⁶ It would not have come to this, if the tsarist authorities had left Tolstoy alone. Few people read his religious writings of the 1880s, and it was only in the 1890s, when the Church began to denounce him for trying to bring down the government, that mass illegal printings of these works began to circulate in the provinces.¹⁰⁷ By 1899, when Tolstoy published Resurrection, he was better known as a social critic and religious dissident than as a writer of fiction. It was the novel's religious attack on the institutions of the tsarist state -the Church, the government, the judicial and penal systems, private property and the social conventions of the aristocracy - that made it, by a long way, his best selling novel in his own lifetime.¹⁰⁸ 'All of Russia is feeding on this book', an ecstatic Stasov wrote to congratulate Tolstoy. 'You cannot imagine the conversations and debates it is provoking… This event has had no equal in all the literature of the nineteenth century.'¹⁰⁹ The more the Church and the state attacked Tolstoy, the greater was the writer's following, until he was finally excommunicated in 1901. The intention of the excommunication had been to provoke a wave of popular hatred against Tolstoy, and there were reactionaries and Orthodox fanatics who responded to the call. Tolstoy received death threats and abusive letters, and the Bishop of Kronstadt, who was notorious for his support of the extreme national-

* The Bolsheviks made the most political capital out of socialism's religious resonance. S. G. Strumilin, in a pamphlet for the rural poor in 1917, compared socialism to the work of Christ and claimed that it would create a 'terrestrial kingdom of fraternity, equality and freedom' (S. Petrashkevich [Strumilin], Pro zemliu i sotsializm: slovo sotsialdemokrata k derevenskoi bednote (Petrograd, 1917), pp. 1-2). The cult of Lenin, which took off in August 1918, after he had been wounded in an assassination attempt, carried explicit religious overtones. Lenin was depicted as a Christ-like figure, ready to die for the people's cause, and, because the bullets had not killed him, blessed by miraculous powers. Pravda (meaning Truth and Justice), the title of the Party's news-paper, had an obvious religious meaning in the peasant consciousness - as did the Red Star, for, according to folklore, the maiden Pravda wore a burning star on her forehead which list up the whole world and brought it truth and happiness.

ists, even wrote a prayer for the writer's death which was circulated widely in the right-wing press.¹¹⁰ Yet for every threatening message, Tolstoy received a hundred letters of support from villages across the land. People wrote to tell him of abuses in their local government, or to thank him for his condemnation of the Tsar in his famous article 'I Cannot Remain Silent', written in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre which sparked the Revolution of 1905. Millions of people who had never read a novel suddenly began to read Tolstoy's. And everywhere the writer went, huge crowds of well-wishers would appear - many more, it was remarked by the police amidst the celebrations for Tolstoy's eightieth birthday in 1908, than turned out to greet the Tsar.

Tolstoy gave all the money he had made from Resurrection to the Dukhobors. The Dukhobors were Tolstoyans before Tolstoy. The religious sect went back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier, when its first communities of Christian brotherhood were established. As pacifists who rejected the authority of Church and state, they had suffered persecution from the very start of their existence in Russia, and in the 1840s they had been forced to settle in the Caucasus. Tolstoy first became interested in the Dukhobors in the early 1880s. The influence of their ideas on his writings is palpable. All the core elements of 'Tolstoyism' - the idea that the Kingdom of God is within oneself, the rejection of the doctrines and rituals of the established Church, the Christian principles of the (imagined) peasant way of life and community - were also part of Dukhobor belief. In 1895 the sect staged a series of mass demonstrations against military conscription. Thousands of Tolstoyans (or pacifists who called themselves by that name) flocked to join their protest in the Caucasus, many of them merging with the Dukhobors. Tolstoy himself publicized their cause, writing several hundred letters to the press and eventually securing and largely paying for their resettlement in Canada (where their dissent proved just as troublesome to the government).¹¹¹

Tolstoy was in close contact with many other sects. There was a natural affinity between his living Christianity and the sects' searching for a True Church in the Russian land: both came from social visions of Utopia. 'Tolstoyism' was itself a kind of sect - or at least its enemies thought so. There were prolonged discussions between Tolstoy's fol-

lowers and the main religious sects about organizing a united movement under Tolstoy's leadership.¹¹² This was a major challenge to the Church. The number of sectarians had grown dramatically, from somewhere in the region of 3 million members in the eighteenth century to perhaps 30 million in the first decade of the twentieth century, although some scholars thought that fully one-third of the Russian population (about 120 million) was sectarian.¹¹³ New sects were formed, or discovered, every year, as the Populist intelligentsia began to study them in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Then, in the 1900s, the theosophists, the anthroposophists, the Symbolists, Rasputinites and mystics of all types started to see in these sects an answer to their yearning for a new and more 'essential' kind of Russian faith. The established Church was in danger of imploding. Politically shackled to the state, its parish life inert, if not spiritually dead, the Church could not prevent its peasant flock from running off to join sects, or fleeing to the city and the socialists, in their search for truth and justice on this earth.

If Tolstoy's Christian anarchism was motivated by the yearning to belong to a free community of Christian love and brotherhood, the personal root of his religion was a fear of death which became more intense with every passing year. Death was an obsession throughout his life and art. He was a child when his parents died; and then as a young man he lost his elder brother Nikolai as well - a haunting episode he pictured in the death scene of another Nikolai, Prince Levin's brother, in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy desperately tried to rationalize death as a part of life. 'People who fear death, fear it because it appears to them as emptiness and blackness', he wrote in 'On Life' (1887), 'but they see emptiness and blackness because they do not see life.'¹¹⁴ Then, under Schopenhauer's influence perhaps, he came to regard death as the dissolution of one's personality in some abstract essence of the universe.¹¹⁵ But none of it was convincing to those who knew him well. As Chekhov put it in a letter to Gorky, Tolstoy was terrified of his own death, but he did not want to admit it, so he calmed himself by reading the Scriptures.¹¹⁶

In 1897 Tolstoy paid a visit to Chekhov. The playwright was gravely ill. His long illness from tuberculosis had taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse, with a massive haemorrhaging of the lungs, and

Chekhov, who had hitherto ignored his condition, was finally obliged to call for the doctors. When Tolstoy arrived at the clinic, six days after the haemorrhage, he found Chekhov sitting up in bed in a cheerful mood, laughing and joking, and coughing blood into a large beer glass. Chekhov was aware of the danger he was in - he was a doctor, after all - but he kept his spirits up, and even talked of plans for the future. Tolstoy, Chekhov noted with his usual cutting wit, was 'almost disappointed' not to find his friend at the point of death. It was clear that Tolstoy had come with the intention of talking about death. He was fascinated by the way that Chekhov seemed to accept death and just get on with life, and, envious of this calm attitude perhaps, he wanted to know more. Soon Tolstoy touched on the topic which is generally taboo around the bed of someone who is gravely ill. As Chekhov lay there spitting blood, he harangued him with a lecture about death and the afterlife. Chekhov listened attentively, but in the end he lost patience and started arguing. He viewed the mysterious force, in which Tolstoy thought the dead would be dissolved, as a 'formless frozen mass', and told Tolstoy that he did not really want that kind of eternal life. In fact, Chekhov said, he did not understand life after death. He saw no point in thinking about it, or in comforting oneself, as he put it, with 'delusions of immortality'.¹¹⁷ Here was the crucial difference between the two men. When Tolstoy thought of death his mind turned to another world, while Chekhov's always returned to this one. 'It is frightening to become nothing,' he told his friend and publisher A. S. Suvorin in the clinic after Tolstoy left. 'They take you to the cemetery, return home, begin drinking tea, and say hypocritical things about you. It's ghastly to think about it!'¹¹⁸

It was not that Chekhov was an atheist - although in the last years of his life he claimed to have no faith.¹¹⁹ His religious attitudes were in fact very complex and ambivalent. Chekhov had grown up in a religious family and throughout his life he retained a strong attachment to the rituals of the Church. He collected icons. At his house in Yalta there was a crucifix on his bedroom wall.¹²⁰ He liked reading about the Russian monasteries and the lives of saints.¹²¹ From his correspondence we learn that Chekhov loved to hear church bells, that he often went to church and enjoyed the services, that he stayed at monasteries, and that on more than one occasion he even thought of becoming a

monk himself.¹²² Chekhov saw the Church as an ally of the artist, and the artist's mission as a spiritual one. As he once said to his friend Gruzinsky, 'the village church is the only place where the peasant can experience something beautiful'.¹²³

Chekhov's literary works are filled with religious characters and themes. No other Russian writer, with the possible exception of Les-kov, wrote so often or with so much tender feeling about people worshipping, or about the rituals of the Church. Many of Chekhov's major stories (such as 'The Bishop', 'The Student', 'On the Road' and 'Ward No. 6') are profoundly concerned with the search for faith. Chekhov himself had religious doubts - he once wrote that he would become a monk if the monasteries took people who were not religious and he did not have to pray.¹²⁴ But he clearly sympathized with people who had faith or spiritual ideals. Perhaps Chekhov's view is best expressed by Masha, when she says in Three Sisters, 'It seems to me that a man must have faith, or be seeking it, otherwise his life is empty, quite empty.'¹²⁵ Chekhov was not overly concerned with the abstract question about the existence of a God. As he told Suvorin, a writer should know better than to ask such things.¹²⁶ But he did embrace the concept of religion as a way of life - a basic moral code - which is what it was for him and what he thought it was for the simple Russian

man.¹²⁷

In his early story 'On the Road' (1886) Chekhov discusses this Russian need for faith. The scene is a highway inn where some travellers are sheltering from bad weather. A young noblewoman gets into a conversation with a gentleman called Likharev. She wants to know why famous Russian writers all find faith before they die. 'As I understand it,' replies Likharev, 'faith is a gift of the spirit. It is a talent: you have to be born with it.'

'As far as I can judge, speaking for myself, and from all that I have seen, this talent is present in the Russian people to the highest degree. Russian life represents an endless series of beliefs and enthusiasms, but it has not, if you ask my advice, it has not yet gone anywhere near not believing or rejecting belief. If a Russian person does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.'¹²⁸

This was close to Chekhov's view - and he himself was very Russian in this sense. Chekhov might have had his own doubts about the existence of a God. But he never once lost sight of the need for Russians to believe. For without faith in a better world to come, life in Chekhov's Russia would be unendurable.

The need to believe was as central to his art as it was to the Russian way of life. Chekhov's plays abound in characters (Dr Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Vershinin in Three Sisters, Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard) who place their faith, as Chekhov himself did, in the ability of work and science to improve life for humanity. They are filled with characters who reconcile themselves to suffer and endure in the Christian hope of a better life to come. As Sonya puts it in those famous (and already cited) closing lines of Uncle Vanya: 'When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, in the other world, we shall say that we have suffered, that we've wept, that we've had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us.'¹²⁹ Chekhov saw the artist as a fellow sufferer - as somebody who worked for a spiritual end. In 1902 he wrote to Diaghilev:

Modern culture is but the beginning of a work for a great future, a work which will go on, perhaps, for ten thousand years, in order that mankind may, even in the remote future, come to know the truth of a real God - that is, not by guessing, not by seeking in Dostoevsky, but by perceiving clearly, as one perceives that twice two is four.¹³⁰

Death is felt in all of Chekhov's works, and in many of his later stories the approach of death is the major theme. Chekhov had confronted death throughout his life - first as a doctor and then as a dying man - and perhaps because he was so close to it he wrote about the subject with a fearless honesty. Chekhov understood that people die in a very ordinary way - for the most part they die thinking about life. He saw that death is simply part of the natural process - and when death came to him, he met it with the dignity and courage, and the same love of life, he had always shown. In June 1904 he booked into a hotel at Badenweiler, Germany, with his wife Olga. 'I am going away to die,' Chekhov told a friend on the eve of their departure. 'Everything is finished."¹³¹On the night of 2 July he woke in a fever, called for a

doctor and told him loudly, 'Ich sterbe' ('I am dying'). The doctor tried to calm him and went away. Chekhov ordered a bottle of champagne, drank a glass, lay down on his bed, and passed away.¹³²

For Tolstoy, death was no such easy thing. Terrified of his own mortality, he attached his religion to a mystical conception of death as a spiritual release, the dissolution of the personality into a 'universal soul'; yet this never quite removed his fear. No other writer wrote so often, or so imaginatively, about the actual moment of dying - his depictions of the deaths of Ivan Ilich and of Prince Andrei in War and Peace are among the best in literature. But these are not just deaths. They are final reckonings - moments when the dying re-evaluate the meaning of their lives and find salvation, or some resolution, in a spiritual truth.¹³³ In The Death of Ivan Ilich (1886) Tolstoy shows a man, a senior judge, who comes to realize the truth about himself as he lies on his deathbed looking back on his life. Ivan Ilich sees that he has existed entirely for himself and that his life has therefore been a waste. He has lived for his career as a judge, but he cared no more for the people who appeared before him than the doctor treating him cares for him now. He has organized his life around his family, but he does not love them, and nor does it appear that they love him, for none of them will recognize the fact that he is dying and try to comfort him. The only real relationship which Ivan Ilich has is with his servant Gerasim, a 'fresh young peasant lad' who looks after him, sits with him at night and brings him comfort by holding up his legs. Gerasim does all of this as a simple act of kindness for a man who, he knows, is about to die, and his recognition of this fact is itself of immense comfort to the dying man. 'The awful, terrible act of his dying was', Ivan Ilich sees,

reduced by those about him to the level of a fortuitous, disagreeable and rather indecent incident (much in the same way as people behave with someone who goes into a drawing-room smelling unpleasantly) - and this was being done in the name of the very decorum he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one was willing even to appreciate his situation. Gerasim was the only person who recognized the position and was sorry for him. And that was why Ivan Ilich was at ease only when Gerasim was with him… Gerasim alone told no lies; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case, and did not consider it necessary to disguise

them, and simply felt sorry for the sick, expiring master. On one occasion when Ivan Ilich was for sending him away to bed he even said straight out:

'We shall all of us die, so what's a little trouble?' meaning by this that he did not mind the extra work because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.¹³⁴

A simple peasant has given to this judge a moral lesson about truth and compassion. He has shown him how to live and how to die - for the peasant's acceptance of the fact of death enables Ivan Ilich, at the final conscious moment of his life, to overcome his fear.

The Death of Ivan Ilich was based upon the death of Tolstoy's friend, Ivan Ilich Mechnikov, an official in the judicial service, whose brother furnished Tolstoy with a detailed account of his final days.¹³⁵ It was not uncommon for the Russian upper classes to draw comfort from their servants' presence at the moment of their death. From diaries and memoirs it would seem that, far more than the priest who came to take confession and administer last rites, the servants helped the dying overcome their fears with their simple peasant faith which 'enabled them to look death in the face'.¹³⁶ The fearless attitude of the peasant towards death was a commonplace of nineteenth-century Russian literature. 'What an astonishing thing is the death of a Russian peasant!' wrote Turgenev in Sketches from a Hunter's Album. 'His state of mind before death could be called neither one of indifference, nor one of stupidity; he dies as if he is performing a ritual act, coldly and simply.'¹³⁷ Turgenev's hunter encounters several peasants at the point of death. One, a woodcutter called Maxim who is crushed by a falling tree, asks his team-mates to forgive him, and then, just before he breathes his last, asks them to make sure that his wife receives a horse for which he has put down money. Another is informed in a country hospital that he has only a few days to live. The peasant thinks about this for a bit, scratches the nape of his neck and puts his cap on, as if to depart. The doctor asks him where he is going.

'Where to? It's obvious where to - home, if things are that bad. If things are like that, there's a lot to be put in order.'

'But you'll do yourself real harm, Vasily Dmitrich. I'm surprised that you even got here at all. Stay here, I beg you.'

'No, Brother Kapiton Timofeich, if I'm going to die, I'll die at home. If I died here, God knows what a mess there'd be at home.'¹³⁸

The same peasant attitudes were noted by Tolstoy in Three Deaths (1856), by Leskov in The Enchanted Pilgrim (1873), by Saltykov-Shchedrin in Old Days in Poshekhonie (1887) and by practically every major Russian writer thereafter, so that in the end the stoicism of the peasants assumed the status of a cultural myth. This was the form in which it was repeated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward (1968), in the scene in which Yefrem remembers how 'the old people used to die back home on the Kama'.

They didn't puff themselves up or fight against it or brag that they were going to die - they took death calmly. They didn't shirk squaring things up, they prepared themselves quietly and in good time, deciding who should have the mare, who the foal, who the coat and who the boots, and they departed easily, as if they were just moving into a new house. None of them would be scared by cancer. Anyway, none of them got it.¹³⁹

But attitudes like this were not just literary invention. They were documented in the memoir sources, medical reports and ethnographic studies of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.¹⁴⁰ Some put down the peasants' resignation to a serf-like fatalism in which death was viewed as a release from suffering. When they talked about their lot, the peasants often referred to the afterlife as a 'kingdom of liberty' where their ancestors lived in 'God's freedom'.¹⁴¹ This was the idea behind Turgenev's Sketches, in the story 'Living Relic', where a sick peasant woman yearns for death to end her suffering. Like many of her class, she believes that she will be rewarded for her suffering in Heaven and this makes her unafraid to die. Others explained such peasant fatalism as a form of self-defence. Death was such a common fact of village life that, to a degree, the peasant must have become hardened towards it. In a society where nearly half the children died before the age of five there had to be some way of coping with the grief. Doctors often noted that the parents of a village child would not react emotionally to its death, and in many of the poorest regions, where there were too many mouths to feed, women would even thank

God for taking it away.¹⁴² There were peasant proverbs to advance the view that 'It's a good day when a child dies'.¹⁴³ Infanticide was not uncommon, especially at times of economic hardship, and with children who were illegitimate it was practically the norm.¹⁴⁴

The desperate peasant woman in The Brothers Karamazov who has lost her boy is told by Zosima that God has taken him and given him the rank of an angel. In peasant Russia it was generally believed, in the words of a villager from Riazan province, that 'the souls of little children go straight up to heaven'.¹⁴⁵ Such thoughts must have been of real comfort. For the peasantry believed in a universe where the earth and spirit worlds were intimately linked in one continuum. The spirit world was a constant presence in their daily lives, with demons and angels at every turn. The fortunes of the souls of their kin were a matter of the highest importance. There were good and bad spirits in the Russian peasant world, and how a person died determined whether his spirit would also be good or bad. The peasant thought it was essential to prepare for death, to make the dying comfortable, to pray for them, to end all arguments with them, to dispose properly of their property, and to give them a Christian burial (sometimes with a candle and a bread ladder to help them on their way) in order that their souls could rise up peacefully to the spirit world.¹⁴⁶ Those who died dissatisfied would return to haunt the living as demons or diseases. Hence, in many places it became the custom to bury murder victims, those who died by suicide or poisoning, deformed people and sorcerers and witches outside the boundaries of the cemetery.

During a severe harvest failure it was even known for the peasants to exhume the corpses of those whose evil spirits were thought to be to blame.¹⁴⁷ In the peasant belief system the spirits of the dead led an active life. Their souls ate and slept, they felt cold and pain, and they often came back to the family household, where by custom they took up residence behind the stove. It was important to feed the dead. All sorts of food would be left around the house where the spirit of the dead was believed to remain for forty days. Water and honey were mandatory, in popular belief, but vodka, too, was often left out to prepare the soul for its long journey to the other world. In some places they left money out, or placed it in the grave, so that the spirit of the dead person could buy land in the next world to feed itself.¹⁴⁸

At set times of the year, but especially at Easter and Pentecost, it was important for the family to give remembrance to the dead and feed their souls, in graveside picnics, with ritual breads and pies and decorated eggs. Breadcrumbs would be scattered on the graves to feed the birds - symbols of the souls that rose up from the ground and flew around the village during Easter time - and if the birds arrived it was taken as a sign that the spirits of the dead were alive and well.¹⁴⁹ Dostoevsky was borrowing from this ancient custom in The Brothers Karamazov when he made Ilyusha, the dying little boy, ask his father to scatter bread around his grave 'so that the sparrows may fly down, and I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone'.¹⁵⁰ The Russian grave was much more than a place of burial. It was a sacred site of social interchange between the living and the dead.

One of the last utterances Tolstoy made, as he lay dying in the stationmaster's little house at Astapovo, was 'What about the peasants? How do peasants die?' He had thought a lot about the question, and had long believed that the peasants died in a different way from the educated classes, a way that showed they knew the meaning of their lives. The peasants died accepting death, and this was the proof of their religious faith. Tolstoy meant to die in that way, too.¹⁵¹ Many years before, he had written in his diary: 'When I am dying I should like to be asked whether I still see life as before, as a progression towards God, an increase of love. If I should not have the strength to speak, and the answer is yes, I shall close my eyes; if it is no, I shall look up.'¹⁵² No one thought of asking him the question at the moment of his death, so we shall never know how he crossed the frontier which had brought him so much agony and so much doubt. There was no reconciliation with the Church, despite Tolstoy's flight to Optina. The Holy Synod tried to win him back and even sent one of the Optina monks to Astapovo, where Tolstoy became stranded, too ill to go on, after he had left the monastery. But the mission failed - none of Tolstoy's family would even let the monk see the dying man - and so in the end the writer was denied a Christian burial.¹⁵³

But if the Church refused to say a mass for the dead man, the people said one for him in another way. Despite the attempts of the police to stop them, thousands of mourners made their way to Yasnaya Polyana, where amid scenes of national grief that were not to be found on the

death of any Tsar, Tolstoy was buried in his favourite childhood spot. It was a place in the woods where, many years before, his brother Nikolai had buried in the ground a magic stick on which he had written the secret about how eternal peace would come and evil would be banished from the world. As Tolstoy's coffin was lowered into the ground, the mourners started singing an ancient Russian chant, and someone shouted, in defiance of the police who had been instructed to impose the Church's excommunication of the writer to the end, 'On your knees! Take off your hats!'¹⁵⁴ Everyone obeyed the Christian ritual and, after hesitating for a moment, the police kneeled down too and removed their caps.

overleaf: Scythian figures: late nineteenth-century archaeological engraving