The Gospel in Brief

FOREWORD

Toward the end of an exceptionally fruitful period of fiction writing in the 1860s and 1870s, in which he produced such enduring classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy was shaken by a personal and spiritual crisis that effectively halted his labors as a novelist. He had fallen into despair, become preoccupied with death and found himself on the verge of suicide, navigating existence with nothing more than the nihilistic belief that he was “an accidental clutter of parts, that there was no purpose in life and that life itself is evil.” In this deep existential anguish, Tolstoy recalled the Christianity he had seen in his youth and located some hope in the memory of the simple believers among whom he had grown up. He saw in these believers an example of a real, fulfilled life, and it was this recollection that encouraged him to begin a deep study of the Christian teaching as found in the Gospel. This spiritual crisis and its consequences are documented in detail in Tolstoy’s subsequent nonfiction work, serving as the impetus for his texts on personal spirituality, such as A Confession, What I Believe and The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

Tolstoy’s study of the Bible, which he began in 1879 purely for personal enlightenment, had developed by the following year into a massive project in which he intended to retranslate the four books of the Gospel and synthesize them into one narrative. This labor, which lasted for close to three years, was transformative. He would later refer to it as a time of intense concentration and “constant, rapturous exertion of my soul.” He felt that he had “come to know the light” and, in the words of his wife, Sofia Andreyevna, this study had made the normally stentorian Tolstoy “calm, concentrated and quiet.”

A large portion of his study was devoted to referencing early Greek texts with the help of books by the biblical scholars Johan Griesbach, Constantin von Tischendorff, Édouard Reuss and Vasilii Grechulevich, as well as checking the Latin Vulgate and certain German, French, and English translations of the Gospels. Tolstoy also frequently made use of his philologist friend and tutor to the Tolstoy children, I. M. Ivakin, who was readily available on the estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He set upon the texts vigorously, dismissing any reservations about the spiritual sanctity of the words themselves, or his theological qualification for such work, asserting with some humor that the most remarkable aspect of this translation process was that “an artillery lieutenant had decided to translate a Greek book for himself.”

The purpose of Tolstoy’s investigation into the Christian Gospel was to find the practical, pure teaching of Jesus Christ, to free it from the linguistic patina of ritual and scripture, removing both the dogmatic and the supernatural. In illustration of this approach, Ivakin recalls an 1881 conversation in which Tolstoy said to him: “What is it to me if [Christ] was resurrected? If he was resurrected, then God bless him! The questions important to me are: What should I do? How should I live?”

The project, and indeed the direction of his own spiritual development, seems to have crystallized with the triumph he felt in translating the first ten verses of the Gospel of John, where he renders the familiar “In the beginning was the Word” as “As the basis and source of all things stood the knowledge of life.” He felt that his usage of “knowledge of life” for “the Word” could be justified philologically, and this gambit seems to typify Tolstoy’s approach to the text as a whole: He stretches the words themselves, ridding them of their encrusted ecclesiastical connotation, in order to reveal a text that corresponds to the deeper spiritual truth that he felt he had discovered in the course of his study.

Such stretching of the Bible verses is especially apparent in the accounts of Jesus’s miracles. For Tolstoy, the miraculous multiplication of fishes and loaves becomes a lesson in communal sharing as his followers each learn to give away their food to others, the story of the healed blind man now operates as a slight metaphor in which restored sight is read as a type of spiritual “enlightenment,” and Jesus’s early temptation in the wilderness plays as a sort of Socratic dialogue with himself.

This labor to infuse the text with greater flexibility comes out more successfully—or more believably—in certain sections than it does in others. Ivakin felt that in many places Tolstoy had stretched things too far in order to support his previously held views, as did Tolstoy’s great confidant and reader Nikolai Strakhov, who, though he supported the work as a whole, saw in his friend’s translation “many weak spots and exaggerations” and took particular exception to his treatment of the first ten verses of the Gospel of John. Readers may also question the consistency of Tolstoy’s translation at certain points. For example, he includes the episode of Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in chapter two and then repeats it without explanation in chapter five, using markedly different wording and emphasizing somewhat different aspects of the story.

Indeed, before long, Tolstoy began to feel the weakness of his philological justifications and admitted that in some places he had stretched meanings further than the original text could sustain. “There are many such places where…the sense is stretched and the translation is contrived. This happened because I wanted, as much as possible, to depolarize, as does a magnet, these words which had been given an entirely nonnative polarity as they have undergone interpretation by the church. To correct that alone would be a beneficial endeavor.” And yet, despite admitting that he had overtaxed the Gospel words, it is clear that Tolstoy felt that his zeal was justified by his goal. His critical feeling toward the weakness of his philological arguments did not make him any less confident in the rightness of his understanding of the essential Christian teaching, a conviction that would carry him through the three years of his work on the Gospel.

By March 1881 he had produced a draft, in manuscript, of his translation, though he still felt that it was far from being ready to be published. It was titled A Synthesis and Translation of the Four Gospels. This work consisted of four distinct parts: an account of his personal spiritual life, his recent attraction to the Christian teaching, and how he came to understand it in his own terms; a discourse on and refutation of the Christian teaching as it had been falsely presented by the church; an investigation into the original teachings of Jesus, as found in the Gospel, and its synthesis into one narrative; and an interpretation of this text, an illumination of its true meaning, and a suggestion of the consequences that follow its teaching.

While the manuscript was in this form, V. I. Alekseyev, who had been staying on the estate as teacher to Tolstoy’s eldest son, asked permission to make a copy of Tolstoy’s text before his departure. Tolstoy consented, but as Alekseyev began his copying he realized that he would only have time for a portion of the work, and decided to copy out the third section where the actual synthesis and translation was located, omitting the other sections as well as all of the philological evidences that Tolstoy had labored over to justify his decisions as translator. Tolstoy examined this copy and approved it, realizing how much he liked the compactness of this shorter account. Shortly afterward, he edited this version of the work, wrote a long preface for it, and titled it A Brief Account of the Gospel. In a November 1881 letter to Strakhov he says that it would make a good small book and that he would like to see it published in the fall, but that it must be published abroad. Tolstoy felt some satisfaction with this condensed text and simultaneously felt so overwhelmed with the unwieldiness and seemingly infinite revisions required for the larger work that, apart from some minor adjusting here and there, he never returned in earnest to finish the project.

One need not read very far into the text to see just how inflammatory Tolstoy’s translation would have been to the leadership of Orthodox Christianity. Not only was it a drastic rewording of sacred text, and therefore sacrilegious, but it went so far as to draw very direct parallels between the Orthodox leaders of the nineteenth century and the Pharisees of the Gospels by referring in many places to the Pharisees as “the orthodox” (pravoslavnye). The preface also made it clear that the translation is a challenge to those against whom he polemicizes, and that reading his new version of the Gospel would leave them two choices—either to choose the path of “humble repentance and renunciation” of the lies they use to hide the true Christian teaching or to persecute him for exposing these deceptions. At a time when state power was tied so closely to church power, Tolstoy could not have hoped to have such subversive writing pass censorship review, and made no effort himself to have the work published in Russia.

Accordingly, the text’s first publication was in a French translation by Tolstoy’s friend L. D. Urusov. This was an abridged version that appeared in the Paris journal La Nouvelle Vague in July 1883. Tolstoy was not satisfied by this version, considering it to be a perversion of his writing. This was followed in 1885 by an English translation in a collection called Christ’s Christianity, which also included What I Believe and A Confession. This version was also heavily edited and included only the introduction and the chapter summaries, without the text from the Gospel verses themselves.

The first Russian-language edition was published in Geneva in 1890, but this was also abundant with mistakes, as it was printed from an uncorrected copy of the manuscript. As with most unpublishable works, many different manuscripts and lithographs of the text were in circulation in Russia, sometimes under the title “The New Gospel.” The first publication in Russia of A Brief Account of the Gospel did not occur until after the 1905 revolution, following a slight relaxation in censorship. It appeared in various editions in 1906, 1911, 1913 and 1918.

Vladimir Chertkov, a devoted follower and publisher of Tolstoy, had established Free Age Press (Svobodnoe slovo) in Christchurch, England, where, in 1905, he published a more authoritative Russian-language edition of Tolstoy’s Gospel. It contained an updated preface that Chertkov had requested from Tolstoy. The text was reorganized by Chertkov, who, in addition to making many editorial changes, placed the chapter summaries into one section at the end of the book, a major departure from the manuscript version. This edition was also missing the conclusion, which Tolstoy had based on the First Epistle of John.

The two main English-language translations still in publication today were completed by Isabel Hapgood and Aylmer Maude, both of whom seem to have based their translations on the Chertkov version of the Russian text, and thus have their translations structured similarly. These translations, done quite early in the twentieth century, feature a preface, twelve chapters without summaries, no conclusion, and an appendix with all of the chapter summaries combined at the end.

In this current translation, I have referred only to the text as it appears in the Soviet-era academic edition of Tolstoy’s complete works in ninety volumes, published by the state publishing house Khudozhestvennaia literatura (GIKhL) and edited by N. N. Gusev. The twenty-fourth volume of this collection, published in 1957, contains the larger, unfinished work (A Synthesis and Translation of the Four Gospels) as well as the condensed A Brief Account of the Gospel. The version produced in that volume was printed from the only existing manuscript to have been edited and approved by the author himself, and avoids the errors that appear in the Chertkov edition and those translations based on it.

I have maintained the original structure of the text, with the preface, an introduction, twelve chapters containing both Tolstoy’s summary and the main text based on the Gospel verses, and the conclusion based on the First Epistle of John. The only structural change I have made is to remove the verse structure, following the precedent of previous translations, in order to allow the text a more cohesive, informal and episodic style. This decision was made in keeping with Tolstoy’s stated desire to depolarize the text and retell the verses with the simplest popular language, which is the broad goal of this new translation. (A “Verse Index” is included at the end of this edition, for those readers who wish to refer to the traditional verse numbers.) In agreement with Gusev’s observation in his notes to the 1881 text that “Tolstoy apparently tried to write his new work so that it was above all else understandable to the working Russian people,” I have made every attempt to present a translation that is both light enough to appeal to a general public but strong enough to transport the profound truths that Tolstoy encountered in his reading of the Gospel.

—Dustin Condren