Tolstoy

In his eagerness to compromise himself irretrievably, he seized every opportunity to defend his "dear brothers suffering for the doctrine of Christ." All the little religious sects being persecuted by Pobyedonos- tsev had no more loyal ally than he. When, on police order, the children of the Molokhans were removed from their parents' custody under pretext that they were not taught to respect the official Orthodoxy, he wrote to the tsar in protest:

"Majesty, for the love of God make an effort and, instead of avoiding the matter and referring it to commissions and committees, decide, without asking anyone's advice, you yourself, acting on your own initiative, that these religious persecutions, which arc causing the shame of Russia, must cease; the exiles must be sent back to their homes, the prisoners released, the children returned to their parents, and, above all, the whole body of administrative laws and regulations be abolished, as they are so complicated and obscure that they are just so many pretexts for illegality."

The Molokhans, who were supposed to send this letter to the emperor, were alarmed by its violence and destroyed it instead. But Tolstoy overrode their fears and rewrote it, and the second copy was handed to Nicholas II by Alexander Olsufyev,* a member of the emperor's military staff. Tolstoy never heard of it again. On September 19, 1897 he wrote another. To no avail. Four months later he instructed his daughter Tanya, who was not married at the time, to make another attempt. On January 27, 1898 she was granted an audience with Pobyc- donostsev and dutifully described the sufferings of the Molokhan parents who had been separated from their children. "Yes, yes, I know," muttered Pobyedonostsev. "The bishop of Samara has gone too far. I shall write to the governor right away." lie was as good as his word. The Molokhan children were returned to their families, and Tolstoy was so flabbergasted that he forgot to rejoice.

Besides, other injustices were already claiming his attention. Some of his friends were urging him to join a group of Russian liberals who were signing a manifesto soliciting a reprieve for the French officer Dreyfus, charged with high treason. Tolstoy became angry. Was Dreyfus a man of the people, a muzhik, a sectarian? No; he was an officer, that is, one of the worst possible sort. Guilty or not, he was unworthy of consideration. "It would be a strange thing that we Russians should take up the defense of Dreyfus, an utterly undistinguished man, when so many exceptional ones have been hanged, deported or imprisoned here at home,"⁰ he exclaimed.

lie was keenly interested, though, when he heard from a supposedly

•The brother of Adam Olsufycv, whom Tolstoy often visited in the country.

well-informed source that the recently founded Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden was considering him for the award. The grant was rumored to amount to one hundred thousand rubles.t Seizing the opportunity, Tolstoy sent a letter to the director of the Swedish newspaper Stockholm Dagbladet, suggesting that the sum be given to the Dukhobors, who had contributed far more than he to the cause of peace by refusing to bear arms. His advice was not followed, and indeed, the Swedish Academy seemed to be in no hurry to choose its first prizewinner. Then Tolstoy, with his old propagandists zeal, multiplied his appeals to public charity, launched a campaign in the foreign press, wrote personal letters to the highest officials in the Caucasus and Siberia exhorting them to give the sectarians more humane treatment, and sent his son Sergey to England to make contact with a relief committee there.

However much sympathy Sonya may have had for the Dukhobors, she was terrified by the enormous risks Lyovochka was taking by defending them. Would he not be deported too, along with his wife and children, to teach him a lesson for provoking the tsar? Unless the dreaded autocrats had some worse fate in store for him! He had recently been receiving anonymous threatening letters, "because he was offending Our Lord Jesus Christ and setting himself up as an adversary of the tsar and the fatherland." Some of them even mentioned a date: the beginning of 1898. If he had not mended his ways by then, he would be executed. "More letters threatening my life," he wrote on December 28, 1897. "I am sorry that there are people who hate mc, but I am scarcely interested and still less concerned."

There were no attempts upon his life, but his mail soon began to bring criticism from friends as well as enemies, llie purest Tolstoyans were complaining that he had betrayed his principles by begging money from the rich to save the poor. He had been faced with a similar conflict when he joined the relief work for the peasants during the great famine, and he had settled it the same way, with the same sense of guilt: "Adopting this solution [giving aid to the unfortunate] means acting contrary to one's ideas," he wrote to Gastev, one of his fiercest critics. "But not adopting it means withholding the word and the deed that might relieve present suffering." He accused himself of "spinclcssncss" because he had yielded to pity. One week he wrote twelve personal letters to people who were known to have vast fortunes, and six more another week.® All the "moneybags" answered his appeal, some with

f Or $283,100.

ten thousand rubles, some with five thousand. Tolstoy contemplated the money with a mixture of loathing and joy.

Meanwhile, in London, Sergey had succeeded in interesting the Quakers in the fate of the Dukhobors, whose doctrines were closely allied with their own; and in St. Petersburg, the government, exasperated by the stir being made over the affair both in Russian society and in the foreign press, authorized the sectarians to emigrate to Canada where tracts of uncleared land were being placed at their disposal by the State. It then remained to find the balance of the amount required for the transport and resettlement of nearly seven thousand emigrants. Despite Tolstoy's efforts, the subscription did not yield enough. Then, once more violating his own principles, he decided to retain his rights to the books he was then writing, sell them at the highest possible price to both Russian and foreign publishers and use the money to help the sectarians. Even though this infringement of his own rules was being made to further a humanitarian undertaking, he was aware of its gravity and apologized to Chertkov: "Although these writings do not satisfy my present aesthetic requirements (they arc not accessible to all in their present form), there is no harm in their substance and they may even be of some use to readers. Therefore I think it would be good to sell them at the highest possible price, publish them without waiting for my death and transfer the money to the Dukhobors' emigration committee."⁷

In this charitable design he hurried Father Sergey to completion and returned to his long novel, Resurrection. Before it was finished he had sold it to the publisher Marx for his review Niva, for the "exorbitant" (in Sonya's own words) sum of one thousand rubiest per sixteen-page sheet.

There are scores of entries in his notebooks to prove that he cared enormously about Father Sergey. Prince Kasatsky, a brilliant lieutenant of the cuirassiers, becomes engaged to the very beautiful Marya, a young lady of the highest society who is a great favorite with the court, only to learn that, the previous year, she had been the mistress of Tsar Nicholas I. Horrified, Kasatsky leaves her, takes holy orders and becomes something of a saint—bather Sergey, whom pilgrims comc to see in his hermitage. In spite of his apparent serenity, Father Sergey must wrestle with two temptations: concupiscence, and a sort of "monastic ambition" or pride in saintliness, which prevents him from finding true salvation. One night, a pretty woman from the neighboring town who has had a little too much to drink makes a bet with some

JOr $2830.

friends that she can seduce the anchorite. She enters his retreat, brushes against him, excites him. And Father Sergey, about to fall, cuts off one of his fingers with an ax. Having punished his flesh, he now believes he will be freed of the demon forever. But later he succumbs to the advances of a sensual and stupid merchant's daughter. Then, horrified at his sin, he runs away and loses himself among the masses of the humble, poor and nameless. Convicted of vagabondage and deported to Siberia, he finds happiness at last in his physical debasement: "He works his employer's vegetable garden, gives lessons to the children and nurses the sick."

After writing this story, which combines elements of The Kreutzer Sonata and What I Believe, Tolstoy could not make up his mind to publish it.* It is brutal, disconcerting, provocative; it may be taxed with absurdity and it is not exempt from melodrama; but by transcending them, the tale achieves greatness. How often was Tolstoy himself tempted to cut off a finger in order to stifle his burgeoning desire? How many times did he dream of finding release from the burdensome glory of apostlchood by running away and living like a muzhik? From Father Sergey to Father Leo, there is only the thickness of a sheet of paper.

And it was himself again that he featured in Resurrection, under the name of Nckhlyudov. Himself—or, at least, the ideas that disturbed him, the remorse that gnawed at him, the indignation that rose up in him at the world in its present state.

The idea for this novel came to him in June 1887 when his friend Koni, who was visiting Yasnaya Polyana, told him the most singular case of his career on the bench. He was representing the State at the St. Petersburg court when a young aristocrat came to him with a com plaint against the prison administration, which refused to give a scaled letter to a woman convict, Rosalie Oni, on the ground that all letters must be read before being distributed. Koni explained to his client that those were indeed the prison regulations and, his curiosity aroused, made an inquiry into the woman's case. He learned that Rosalie, a sharecropper's daughter, had been taken in at her father's death by the owner of the estate, who had kept her on as a house-servant. At sixteen she had been seduced by the son of her benefactress, and when she became pregnant she was driven out of the house. Forced to make a living somehow, she soon became a prostitute of the lowest sort. One of her clients accused her of stealing a hundred rubles from him, and she was arrested and put 011 trial. It so happened that one of the mcin-

⁰ It was not published until after his death.

bcrs of the jury was the very man who had seduced her and brought about her downfall: Koni's young visitor himself! He had rccognizcd his victim in that faded, abandoned woman and, overcome by remorse, offered to marry her to atone for his error. But before the marriage could take place, Rosalie Oni died of typhus in prison.

Listening to this tale, Tolstoy felt himself half-sick with emotion. He, too, had seduced a servant in his youth—Gasha. He, too, had a bastard child by a peasant woman, at Yasnaya Polyana. He, too, was a swine, like the young aristocrat Koni was telling him about. He asked the judge to write out the cruel tale for the Intermediary. In the spring of 1888, Koni still had not done so and Tolstoy spoke to him again, asking him to cede the rights to the story, which Koni was more than willing to do. However, it was not until December 1889 that Tolstoy began what he first called "Koni's story." Then he put it aside for nearly five years. In 1895, in a burst of energy, he wrote a full but relatively short first draft. As with War and Peace, he wanted to build his work on a foundation of unimpeachable documentation. Through the offices of his friend Davydov, State representative at the court of Tula, he was able to visit the prisons, question the prisoners, study the machinery of the law courts. After revising his first draft during the summer months he read it to some friends, and his confidence faltered: "I am now convinccd that it is no good," he said, "the ccnter of gravity is not in the right place, the agricultural question weakens the story. I think I am going to abandon it."

And for another three years he did not touch the manuscript. His scheme to help the Dukhobors sent him excitedly back to his characters, and this time he stuck to them throughout the summer and autumn of 189S. As he progressed, the story expanded. He introduced all the great guiding principles of his life and wrought them into one virulent whole, one scorching testament. "I thought it would be very good to write a long novel in the light of my present opinions," he had noted a few years earlier. Now he was sure the lx)ok would be good. A cargo of dynamite. Enough to blow up the whole rotten old world. Remember to thank God who had enabled him, at the age of seventy (i.I.l.) to carry' out this strenuous undertaking! He wrote to his disciples Shkarvan and Abrikosov: "I am very busy . . . with my novel Resurrection. I am so taken up with it that I can think of nothing else, day and night. I think it will be important."⁸ And to Chertkov: "As a projectile gathers speed ncaring the earth, so I, as the end of my novel approaches, can think of nothing else—absolutely nothing else -but that."⁹

The following year he revised the book from the printed proofs, changing everything, as usual—crossing out whole pages and filling the margins and reverse sides with innumerable additions. At their wit's end, the publishers begged him to forgo some of his revisions; the book was coming out in a weekly review and the slightest delay in sending his copy might hold up publication. Letters and telegrams rained down 011 the desk of the overscrupulous author. To help with the revision he enlisted Sonya, his daughters, Obolensky and the alcoholic scribe Ivanov. Visiting friends occasionally joined the family team. One of them, Goldenwciscr, described the work in the following tenns: "The corrections of the proofs revised by Leo Nikolayevich, which are used as a rough draft, must be copied over onto a clean set of proofs, in two copics. The 'draft proofs' stay in the house, the 'clean proofs' arc sent to Marx, for Niva, and to Chertkov in England. It is interesting work, but exacting and difficult. To replace one sheet of proofs it is sometimes necessary to copy over three or four long pages. Leo Nikolayevich's corrections are often written so close together that they can only be made out with a magnifying glass."¹⁰

The publication of Resurrection in Niva began on March 13, 1899. while Tolstoy was still retouching and expanding the final pages of his manuscript. The imperial censor worried the book like a bone, but even in its amputated and watered-down form, its impact on the public was overwhelming from the very first issues.

In the story of Nckhlyudov, who recognizes the prostitute Katyusha Mazlova as the young peasant girl he seduced long ago and is then impelled by guilt to follow her to Siberia, Tolstoy is indicting the whole of modern society. But whereas in War and Peace and Anna Karenina the pace of the novel was slowed by philosophical and historical digressions, here the author rushes straight ahead, without pausing oncc to becomc entangled in secondary plots. As we move from cliaptcr to chapter we see only Mazlova and Nekhlvudov, at grips with the iniquity, poverty and squalor of the world. They form a pair of "reporters" whom we follow into the hell of criminal justice— "reporters" who are the victims of the universe they unmask. This universe—a place of stench and darkness—begins just on the other side of the paneled walls of drawing rooms, the gilded triptychs in the churches and the marble halls of the law courts. In denouncing the filth camouflaged by this opulent stage-setting, Tolstoy employs a technique of pitiless observation and a brutal style in which every word is calculated to sting the reader to the quick.

First of all, he wants to open his contemporaries' eyes to the prc- posterousness of the imperial institutions. Seen from the wings, the hearing in the court of assizes is enough to finish off the magistracy.

"The president of the court was a big, heavy man who wore long, grizzled side-whiskers. Although married, he lived in a very dissolute fashion, as did his wife. They did not interfere with one another. That morning he had received a message from a Swiss governess who had spent the previous summer with them and was passing through town on her way to St. Petersburg, informing him that she would expect him between three and six at the Italian Hotel. He was accordingly anxious to begin the hearing without delay." To limber up a little before going into court, he does a few turns on the bar in his office. One of his assistants has just quarreled with his wife, the other is worried about his stomach complaint. And yet when they come into the courtroom, these dregs of humanity, propped up by their stiffly starchcd robes, are supposed to intimidate both prisoners and public. The com- cdy continues with the parade of jurymen before a "little old priest with a swollen yellow face, wearing a brown cassock and a golden cross on his breast and some other little decoration pinned on one side." This holy man, who has been officiating for forty-six years, is proud to be working "for the good of Church, State and family; to his own family he was planning to leave a capital of thirty thousand rubles in stocks and bonds, in addition to a house." "His task," the author continues, "consists in administering oaths upon the Gospels, which expressly forbid it."

Still more ruthless is his description of the divine service in a prison: 'The mass consisted of the following procedure: the priest, having decked himself out in a special brocade costume, odd-looking and highly uncomfortable, cut some bread into little pieces which he arranged 011 a plate, before dipping them into a goblet of wine as he uttered various names and prayers. The sacristan, meanwhile, read and sang, alternating with the choir of prisoners, numerous orisons in Slavonic, which were hard enough to understand in themselves and were rendered totally unintelligible by the breakneck pace at which he recited them. The chief object of these prayers was to ask God's blessing upon the emperor and his family." Ilere is the communion: "The priest lifted the napkin covering the plate, cut the central piece of bread into four parts, dipped it in the wine and then put it into his mouth. He was supposed to be eating a piece of the body of God and drinking a mouthful of his blood." After distributing "this bread" and "this wine" among the faithful congregated in front of him, "he carried the goblet behind the partition where he proceeded to eat up all the little pieces of God's body and drink the remaining blood; then he carefully sucked on his mustache, wiped his mouth, clcancd the cup and, feeling very chipper, the thin soles of his calfskin boots creaking smartly, strode resolutely forth."

Sonya was so offended by this passage that after correcting the proofs she wrote in her diary, "I am revolted by his intentionally cynical description of the Orthodox mass. For instance, the place where the priest holds up a gilded cross to the people, 'representing the gallows on which Jesus Christ was executed.' For him, the communion is nothing but bread crumbled into a cup. It is all absurd and cynical, in my opinion, it is nothing but a crude attack on those who have faith, and it disgusts me."¹¹

Naturally, neither prcist, deacon, prison governor, wardens nor prisoners would dream of supposing that what goes on in church is "monstrous and sacrilegious/' "a practical joke played on Christ." For the priests, the ritual hides the truth—just as civil servants have regulations in place of a heart. In his efforts to alleviate the sufferings of Katyusha Mazlova and the other convicts, Nckhlyudov comes into conflict with every possible representative of bureaucracy. Count Charsky, ex- minister, is a perfect example of a parasite, always on the lookout for some unearned preferment or perquisite. "lie had been convinced from earliest childhood that just as it is natural for a bird to eat worms, bear feathers and fly, so it was natural for him to feed on costly dishes prepared by famous cooks, dress in elegant and luxurious clothes and have the most handsome and swiftest horses." General Kriegsmuth, commander of the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress, has been decorated twice, the first time in the Caucasus "because he had killed thousands of natives who were defending their freedom, their homes and their families" and the second time because he had facilitated the crimes of the Russian peasants in Poland. "Nekhlyudov listened to the rasping old voice, stared at the stiff limbs and lifeless eyes beneath the white eyebrows, the pendent shaven jowls supported by the military collar, and the white cross in which he took such evident pride because he had earned it for massacring people in particularly gruesome circumstances, and he realized that it was utterly useless to make any answer to this old man or to explain the meaning of his words." The chief attraction in this gallery of monsters, however, is Toporov, a caricature of Pobye- donostsev, the minister for religious affairs. Shown here with his big skull, blue-veined hands, and lips folded into an ingratiating smirk, he is cold, narrow-minded, hypocritical and cruel, encouraging superstition while feigning to defend the faith.

In the administrative hierarchy, the subordinates are no better than their masters. At every level, the "function" transforms the man into a monster. This rogues' gallery is reminiscent of that in Gogol's Dead