Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  It was to this figure that Tolstoy addressed a short note, which begins, ‘I know you to be a Christian,’ and asking him to pass on a letter to the new Emperor, ‘written by me about the recent terrible events’. The letter is justly famous as a piece of magnificent and imaginative rhetoric; and it is a bold embodiment of Tolstoy’s newly-fashioned and understood Christian belief.

  Sire, If you were . . . to summon these people, to give them money and to send them away somewhere to America, and were to write a manifesto headed by the words: ‘but I say unto you, love your enemies’ – I don’t know about the others but I, a poor loyal subject, would be your dog and your slave. I would weep with emotion, as I am weeping now, every time I heard your name. But what am I saying, ‘I don’t know about the others’? I know that at these words goodness and love would flow across Russia in a torrent. The truths of Christ are alive in the hearts of man, and they only are alive, and we love others only in the name of these truths.34

  The words are of course directed not to Alexander III, who could barely be expected to understand them, but to Pobedonostsev. When he read Tolstoy’s letter, the Emperor remarked, ‘If the crime had concerned me personally, I should have the right to pardon those who were guilty of it, but I could not pardon them on behalf of my father.’35 All Tolstoy’s letter had done had been to mark him down, in the Government’s eyes, as a troublemaker.

  The reaction of Tolstoy’s wife to the matter was one of simple outrage. She hated the anarchists, some of whom had started to write to Tolstoy, even to visit him and hang on his words. She felt a perfectly natural fear that the Government would associate Tolstoy with the murderers and revolutionaries, and that this would inevitably bring trouble to the family.

  The dispute between them over the letter to the Tsar was a symptom of a much deeper rift which was growing and developing between them. On April 3, the six murderers were hanged. The children watched with a mixture of anguish, admiration and embarrassment the effect this had on their father. During May, Tolstoy noted that he had had conversations with Sergey, Tanya and Ilya about non-resistance to evil. He felt completely isolated by what he saw as their stubborn refusal to understand him. Later that summer, he announced that he wanted to make another pilgrimage to the Optina monastery. He set off on June 10, 1881, with an old peasant coat, bark shoes and a staff in his hand. Being unused to walking such long distances and having homemade shoes which were quite inadequate for the journey, he arrived covered in blisters. The return journey was done by train.

  The family might reasonably have wondered what he was up to. His diary reveals his belief that ‘the family is the flesh’ and that he wanted to commit suicide.36 Their mother had the more practical fear that if they remained in the country the children’s education would be neglected. This necessitated buying a house in Moscow. Tolstoy by now had an income of over thirty thousand roubles per annum, two thirds of which derived from his novels and one third from his farms. In addition to the estates of Yasnaya Polyana, he now had thousands of acres in Samara, where he could escape his worldly family, hob-nob with the kumys drinkers (Molokans) and think simple thoughts. Initially, he was so opposed to the idea of adding to their wealth by buying a Moscow house that Sofya Andreyevna went off to take a rented house from Tolstoy’s Volkonsky cousins in Denezhny Lane (Money Lane) in Moscow. Later, in October 1882, they bought a house in Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street. Of necessity, it was large. Yasnaya Polyana, with its small number of moderately sized rooms, was becoming uncomfortable for the eight surviving children, and all their entourage of servants, tutors and nannies, not to mention their father’s eccentric visitors – the ‘dark ones’ who came to Tolstoy, expecting and usually receiving a sympathetic ear for their madcap views.

  Tolstoy’s son Ilya recalls that, by this stage of the family history, ‘the world was divided into two camps. . . . with Papa in one and Maman and everyone else in the other’.37 Yet for his sisters, whose devotion to their father was intense, there was soon to come a time when they felt that they could not serve God and maman. Sofya’s increasing bad temper and absence of sympathy for her husband was to have the effect of alienating some of the children and making them side with their father.

  By the end of Tolstoy’s life, these divisions had hardened into embattled positions. In this period of childhood and adolescence it was a cause of confusion and agony for all the children. Both their parents were highly remarkable and the children realised that they owed them so much. Ilya had fully believed his mother when she said that, if they did not go to Moscow, he would never be educated. But he had no sooner enrolled at his Gymnasium than he realised that he knew Greek better than any boy in his class. How had he learnt it? From Papa reading Xenophon to them in the nursery.38

  Sofya Andreyevna was happier in Moscow than she had been for a long time at Yasnaya Polyana. Friends and relations came in and out each day; she was near her own family, the Berses. But, as she admitted to Tanya, ‘I cried every day for the first two weeks because Lyovochka became not just sad, but even fell into a kind of desperate apathy. He did not eat or sleep and sometimes literally wept, and I thought I really would go mad. You would be surprised to see how I have changed, and how thin I have grown.’39

  Although the move was what family life and common sense required, it was precisely out of tune with the movements of Tolstoy’s imagination at that time. With no fiction to write, he was busy making a fictitious character out of himself. While he was with the Molokans in the absolute remoteness of Samara, his fantasy knew no check. He could be a humble servant of Christ, drinking kumys and wearing malodorous clothes and thinking peaceable thoughts. In a town house, where servants bowed every time you passed, all this became impossible.

  As a countryman, he in any case had less and less taste for city life. ‘Stench, stones, luxury, poverty, debauchery. Malefactors have come together, robbing the people; they have collected soldiers and set up law courts to protect their orgies and they feast. There is nothing for the people to do except to take advantage of the passions of these others and lure back from them what has been stolen. The peasants are cleverest at this. Their wives remain at home, while they wax our floors, rub our bodies in the bath and ply as cabmen.’40

  There is a Dickensian vision of the city here, as a seething mass of multifarious humanity, mingled with a Proudhon-like certainty that anyone with property is a thief. And there is also here a sly old country squire’s hatred of town.

  But Tolstoy’s vision of Moscow also reflects an actual change which had come upon the city since he had known it as a young man. The census of 1864, taken not long after Tolstoy got married, reckoned the population of Moscow as three hundred and seventy-eight thousand, showing an increase of barely thirty thousand since 1833. By the end of the nineteenth century, the population of Moscow was nearly two million. Russia was ceasing to be a primarily (almost, a solely) agricultural economy. Mining, metal-work, cotton, sugar, textile manufacture, all knew an enormous increase in the last four decades of the century. Since the liberation of the serfs in 1861, there had been an inevitable drift away from the land. Peasant farmers and agricultural workers, tiring of the struggle to make a living from the land, drifted into the cities. Russia was creating its own urban, industrial proletariat – the wage-slave class who, in England, gave Marx and Engels the hope that there would be a revolution of ‘the people’ – in other words, not of peasants but of factory-workers.41

  All Tolstoy’s instincts were repelled by the industrialisation of Russia. He shared with John Ruskin and Henry David Thoreau a vision of human life itself being destroyed by the smoke, the noise, the squalor. At the same time, although he pined for some way in which he could be dispossessed, he had all the rural landowner’s contempt for what the merchant and industrial classes had done to the towns.

  As often as he could, he escaped, and went back to Yasnaya Polyana. When they were together, he and his wife had become increasingly quarrelsome. Indeed, the more he wrote about relig
ion, the more quarrelsome he became.

  The flavour of marital life at this period is caught in Sofya Andreyevna’s diary entry for August 26, 1882:

  It was twenty years ago when I was young and happy that I started writing the story of my love for Lyovochka in this book: there is virtually nothing but love in it in fact. Twenty years later, here I am sitting up all night on my own, reading and mourning its loss. For the first time in my life, Lyovochka has run off to sleep alone in the study. We were quarrelling about such silly things – I accused him of taking no interest in the children and not helping me look after Ilya, who is sick, or making them all jackets. But it has nothing to do with jackets and everything to do with his growing coldness towards me and the children. Today he shouted at the top of his voice that his dearest wish was to leave his family. I shall carry the memory of that heart-felt, heart-rending cry of his to my grave. . . . – Lord help me! I long to take my life, my thoughts are so confused. The clock is striking four.

  I have decided that if he doesn’t come in to see me, it must mean he loves another woman. He has not come. I used to know what my duty was – but what now?

  He did come in, but it was the next day before we made it up. We both cried and I realised to my joy that his love for me, which I had mourned all through that terrible night, was not dead. . . .42

  The doubts, however, could never be altogether stilled. The old Tolstoy, who loved his wife and wrote novels, was now a shadowy figure, glimpsed only occasionally.

  Tolstoy’s wife was not the only one to mourn him. The readers of War and Peace and Anna Karenina were waiting in vain for another novel from the great writer’s pen. No one was more generous in his mourning than Tolstoy’s fellow novelist Turgenev, whose last letter, in the summer of 1883, was an urgent plea to Tolstoy not to abandon art.

  Kind and dear Lev Nikolayevich. It is a long time since I wrote to you, for I have been and am, frankly speaking, on my deathbed. I cannot recover – there is no use thinking 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 whence comes all the rest. Ah, how happy I should be if I could think that my request would have an effect on you!! I am a doomed man – even the doctors do not know what to call my malady, Névralgie stomacale goutteuse. I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep. It is even wearisome to repeat all this! 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 write no more. I am weary.43

  Two months later, Turgenev was dead. In September, Tolstoy was asked by the Society of the Lovers of Russian Literature to speak at a memorial meeting in honour of Turgenev. These literary meetings in honour of great writers who had died often became the occasion for the pronouncement of some great words, ex cathedra, by the writer selected to make the chief speech. Dostoyevsky had made a great speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument some years before. Nekrasov’s funeral was a similarly public occasion, with speeches made about the state of literature and the condition of contemporary Russia.

  Tolstoy’s second cousin Dmitry was the Minister for the Interior. When the bureaucrats got to hear that Lev Nikolayevich was planning a speech at the Turgenev commemoration, he drafted a memorandum in which he denounced the author of War and Peace as ‘a madman, from whom one might expect anything; he may say unbelievable things and there may be a considerable scandal’. It was not long before the Governor-General of Moscow had informed the President of the Society of the Lovers of Russian Literature that their meeting in honour of Turgenev had been ‘postponed for an indefinite time’.

  The rebuttal came as no surprise. Ever since the assassination of the previous Tsar, the Government had become more and more autocratic and reactionary. No great public speaker, Tolstoy was probably not even particularly disappointed that the authorities should have stopped his mouth. They could not do the same to his pen.

  What I Believe was finished in the autumn of 1883. In it, the processes which had been at work in his earlier religious writings – A Confession, the Four Gospels, and the Critique – reached their culmination. Few scholars of the New Testament nowadays would ‘accept’ his readings in their entirety. That is, they would think that on a factual level, he had misread the Greek. It simply is not true that the word vóμoς (law) in the New Testament is always to be identified with civil order. ‘Jesus denounced the institution of all human tribunals of whatever sort’44 (Chapter III). Well, did He? We have already spoken of the impossibility of using the Gospels as a quarry from which we could reconstruct in such vivid biographical terms what Jesus was like. But if He did denounce all forms of human tribunal, it is odd, for example, that He never mentioned this fact to the ‘ruler of the synagogue’ when raising his daughter from the dead; or that He kept His mouth shut in front of Pontius Pilate. Again, even the most sceptical reader of the New Testament will raise an eyebrow to be informed that ‘Jesus not only did not recognise the resurrection but denied it every time He met with the idea. . . .’45 Fighting words, but how can they be justified? Either you take the Modernist line that it is impossible to know what Jesus said, only what the Evangelists make Him say; or you are a Fundamentalist and believe that His words are recorded in the Gospels. In which case, what are we to make of His words to the widow of Nain? Or to Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’? The four Gospels all in their different ways (not surprisingly, they are written from the point of view of faith) all depict Jesus as repeatedly calling men to Himself. ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden.’ ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ etc. etc. Tolstoy tells us, ‘Jesus never asked men to have faith in His person.’

  Even to begin to unpick the many ways in which Tolstoy contradicts (or as a modern critic would say, misreads) the New Testament is to miss the point. The point is, as he says, that ‘I alone understand the doctrine of Jesus.’ And again, ‘That is why, after eighteen hundred years, it so singularly happened that I discovered the meaning of the doctrine of Jesus as some new thing.’46 You cannot argue with a man who writes like that.

  I am lost with my companions in a snowstorm. One of them assures me with the utmost sincerity that he sees a light in the distance, but it is only a mirage which deceives us both; we strive to reach this light, but we never can find it. Another resolutely brushes away the snow; he seeks and finds the road, and he cries to us, ‘Go not that way, the light you see is false, you will wander to destruction; here is the road, feel it beneath your feet; we are saved.’ It is very little, we say. We had faith in that light that gleamed in our deluded eyes, that told us of a refuge, a warm shelter, rest, deliverance – and now in exchange for it we have nothing but the road. Ah, but if we continue to travel toward the imaginary light, we shall perish; if we follow the road, we shall surely arrive at the haven of safety.47

  And this road is none other than the following of Jesus’s five commandments, as interpreted by Tolstoy himself. Old heresies, like old jokes, acquire their own particular kind of pathetic obsolescence. But read in a nineteenth-century context, What I Believe is an intensely exciting, invigorating piece of heresy. While all over Europe the clergy was agonising about whether the Book of Genesis was compatible with the discoveries of Charles Darwin, or whether Noah’s Ark was historically true, Tolstoy was resurrecting the much more urgent question – is the moral teaching of Jesus true? If it is, it makes demands upon us. We must change the way we live. In our day, the shape of the battleground has altered. But one can guess that he would not have been very interested in the fact that some modern-minded bishop did not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. He would have seen why such derisory figures only excite the notice of newspapermen, while the imagination of the entire world has been moved by the Christlike example of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The appeal of Mother Teresa is not that she
is a woman or a Roman Catholic but simply that she is one of those rare people who has taken the commandments of Jesus quite literally, and given up everything, and clothed the naked, and fed the little ones. As Chesterton once said, Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has hardly ever been tried.

  Tolstoy wanted to try. That is what his Credo explains. But he was too much of an egotist and a rationalist to submit to the teachings and disciplines of a church. ‘To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of mind, unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinance, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.’ But Samuel Johnson’s censure of a great English heresiarch did not foresee the possibility that someone might invent a religion which was animated by no faith at all, save in the power of love; whose ‘calls to worship’ came from within, rather than without; but who had, by the time he finished What I Believe, the very distinct intention of starting a new religion. Ever since the idea of Christianity purged of its miraculous and irrational elements had first dawned on his mind while still a subaltern in the Caucasus, the idea had been subliminally present in Tolstoy’s mind. Perhaps it went (as so many biographers have wanted to tell us) to the Ant Brotherhood of his childish years.