by A. N. Wilson
The Church that sought to detach men from error and to weld them together again by the solemn affirmation that it alone was the truth has long since fallen to decay. But the Church composed of men united, not by promises or sacraments, but by deeds of truth and love, has always lived and will live forever. Now, as eighteen hundred years ago, this Church is made up not of those who say ‘Lord, Lord’, and bring forth iniquity, but of those who hear the words of truth and reveal them in their lives. The members of this Church . . . practise the commandments of Jesus and thereby teach them to others. Whether this Church be in numbers little or great, it is, nevertheless, the Church that will never perish, the Church that shall finally unite within its bonds the hearts of all mankind. ‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good purpose to give you the Kingdom.’48
It was only little over a decade since the Supreme Pontiff in Rome had declared himself the Infallible Vicar of Christ, a claim which was vigorously denied by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Patriarch of Moscow. Now, it appeared, in the autumn of 1883, Christ had raised up a new guardian of His truth on earth. And all that was lacking, as the Patriarch of Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street put the finishing touches to his encyclical, was a devotee ardent enough to take the Gospel to the world. The Papacy of the Counter-reformation was immeasurably strengthened by the energies of St. Ignatius Loyola. The very Gospel of Christ might never have been preached beyond the bounds of Jewry had it not been for the fervour of Paul of Tarsus. Tolstoyism awaited its archpriest. And on October 15, 1883, on the steps of the house on Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street, he rang the doorbell.
Chapter Fourteen
Real Christianity
1884 – 1887
I hope no Reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the Defence of Real Christianity, such as used in Primitive Times (if we may believe the Authors of those Ages) to have an Influence upon Mens Belief and Actions: To offer at the restoring of That would indeed be a wild Project; It would be to dig up Foundations, to destroy at one Blow all the Wit, and half the Learning of the Kingdom; to break the entire Frame and Constitution of Things, to ruin Trade, extinguish Arts and Sciences with the Professors of them; In short, to turn our Courts, Exchanges and shops into Deserts. . . .
Jonathan Swift, ‘An argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England may, as Things now stand, be attended with some Inconveniences. . . .’ 1708
Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov was at the time of his meeting with Tolstoy an army officer aged twenty-nine. He was a handsome, even a slightly beautiful, young man with watery, dark eyes, and sharp, aquiline ears and nose. His is the face of a gentle, religious aristocrat: the sort of man, in fact, who so fascinated Dostoyevsky. His father, who was very rich, was a general and an aide-de-camp to the Tsar. His mother, née Chernishev-Kuglikov, was an intimate with the Empress. She was a religious woman, who had come under the influence of the English Evangelical preacher Lord Radstock and undergone a ‘conversion’. Vladimir Grigoryevich, having had the usual sort of aristocratic Russian youth – cards, drink, women – had also been converted by Lord Radstock’s ideas. He was always very close to his mother. This conversion of Chertkov’s had happened in 1879, when he was only twenty-five. He had gone to England, at his mother’s prompting, joined the Piccadilly Club and the Cricket and Skating Club, read a great deal of Evangelical literature, and lodged with a sympathetic clergyman.
He appears to have started reading Tolstoy in earnest on his return to St. Petersburg in 1880, and evidently got to learn from mutual acquaintances, most notably N. V. Davydov, of the religious evolutions which were going on in the Master’s mind. The final sections of Anna Karenina made a profound impression on him, and he longed to meet Tolstoy. Davydov thought that it could be arranged. Towards the end of October 1883, Chertkov made plans to journey to Yasnaya Polyana. He too, like Levin, wished to abandon the pursuit of worldly success, live in the country and think simple thoughts. He too, moreover, had become a pacifist. He had already resigned his commission in the army and gone to live on his mother’s estate in order to teach peasant children. He felt sure that talking with Tolstoy would help to clear his mind. Then, just as he was about to set out to Yasnaya Polyana, he received a telegram from Davydov: TOLSTOY IN MOSCOW, and he boldly paid a call at the house.
For Chertkov, it felt as if he was meeting an old friend. Tolstoy, it seemed, had already heard about Chertkov from a third party (Davydov or Rusanov). Tolstoy read him some of What I Believe which he had just finished. Chertkov was profoundly excited. Though disturbed by the fact that Tolstoy had discarded the doctrine of grace, he was electrified by the spiritual kinship which immediately established itself between them. He visited Tolstoy several times before returning to his maternal estates at Lizinovka. ‘Everything is lovely here,’ he wrote to Tolstoy. ‘We have just had our first fall of snow, and there is great joy. Tomorrow the boys start work in the handicraft school. It will be very lively and even more, fun.’1 With this letter he enclosed some Evangelical books, expounding the divinity of Christ. ‘I want him to read them,’ he confided to his diary, ‘because I want him to understand me better, so as to be able to help me.’2 Tolstoy was not helped by the books. ‘Dear kind Vladimir Grigoryevich, who are so close to me,’ he wrote back, ‘I got your books, and I thank you for them. I have read them and though you will think me proud, I found nothing in them. But I love you so much that I cannot but tell you the truth.’3
The intensity of Tolstoy’s feelings for the young man must have alarmed Chertkov’s mother. So must the fact that it was quite obvious that Vladimir Grigoryevich was so much under Tolstoy’s spell that there was not much future for his Evangelical beliefs. Nothing that the general his father knew of Tolstoy, from Court gossip, could have recommended the association either. In the spring of 1884, while staying in the country, Chertkov started to translate What I Believe into English. The geographical distances between the two friends had meant that they were not able to meet as often as they would like, but they wrote such full letters to one another that Chertkov sometimes felt closer to Tolstoy when they were apart than when they were having to snatch hours together away from the family in the Tolstoy house in Moscow. He spent April in St. Petersburg with his parents, writing what Tolstoy considered a ‘splendid’ letter about the frivolous manner in which the St. Petersburg aristocracy celebrated Easter.
Chertkov was by now using Tolstoy as his father confessor, and in one letter, he poured out revelations about the ‘dark’ side of his character. Tolstoy knew so well the perils of reconciling sexual passion with a desire to be good, and remembered from his own resolutions, when he was Chertkov’s age, the dangers of climbing the ladder of perfection.
Any letter of yours disturbs me. I’ll tell you my feelings when I get your letters: I am frightened and alarmed in case you should break your neck. And not because I do not trust in your strength, or that I don’t value you highly; not because you have climbed up terribly high in my opinion (where you need to be) but because I think you are insecure there. I say this because I love you very much and because the work you are doing on this bell-tower is very dear to me. I want to give advice and am frightened of interfering. One thing I can’t help saying in reply to your last letter but one. You ought to get married – i.e. I think you will be safer high up there if you tie this rope around you. I was alarmed by the words in your last letter but one. ‘I have had a lot to drink and I have depraved thoughts.’ I know you deliberately exaggerate what is shameful, and in this respect I always make you an example for myself. But this is frightening. Another thing – I am afraid that you are carried away by proselytism – by conversion as an end in itself. . . .4
Chertkov replied that he had no plans for marrying just yet, and that he was not in love with anyone. But this was obviously untrue. He was patently in love with Tolstoy, and Tolstoy with him; though not in a sexual sense.
At the end of April, Chertkov’s father suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died.
Not long afterwards, evidently thinking that she could break the dangerous friendship, Chertkov’s mother sent him once more to England.
The summer at Yasnaya Polyana without him was wretched. Tolstoy felt a series of crushing depressions, and quite alienated from the family.
Cranks and devotees had started to make the pilgrimage to see the author of A Confession and What I Believe. Some, like Isaak Feinerman, were political revolutionaries, who were disillusioned with socialism and came to discover more about Tolstoy’s social and religious vision. Others journeyed from further afield, like the Russian-born American William Frey (born V. K. Geins) who had attempted to found various kinds of agricultural communes in the United States. Religious seekers, social malcontents, pilgrims and beggars all beat a path to Tolstoy’s door. They helped to exacerbate the alienation which he felt from his family. The strangers, however wild or odd they may have been, were trying to listen to him, and understand him. But this could not be said of his nearest family. The Gospel saying was coming true: ‘And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.’ He tried to talk to his children but, young or old, it was the same story. ‘Seryozha is impossibly obtuse. The same castrated mind that his mother has. . . .’5 ‘Talked with the children about how to live – to be one’s own servant. Verochka said, “Well, that’s all right for a week, but surely you can’t live like that!” And this is what we bring our children to!’6 Letters from Chertkov were the only ray of light ‘in the darkness that has thickened even more since the arrival of Tanya’. His sister-in-law, who, as a young woman, had provided him with so much of Natasha Rostova’s joie-de-vivre was now, as far as he was concerned, a bore; her husband Kuzminsky ‘tedious. . . . lifeless’.7 The Kuzminskys were quarrelling a lot. So were the Tolstoys, Lev Nikolayevich and Sofya Andreyevna. Tempers were not improved by Tolstoy’s (successful) attempts during the summer of 1884 to abandon one of his greatest passions: smoking tobacco. By this stage, he was also beginning to think that he should give up alcohol and become a vegetarian. Simplicity and humility were now thunderously insisted upon. He was not ‘Sir’ or ‘Count’: just plain Lev Nikolayevich, and woe betide the servant who forgot this. At table, there were outbursts of rage if the food was too elaborate for the tastes of the aspirant saint. He wandered round the village, causing a mixture of awe, gratitude, bewilderment and embarrassment as he fraternised with his peasant friends. One day he helped an old woman to rebuild her hut. Another day he would go and chop wood for some poor family. When he returned to the big house in the evening, however, Sofya Andreyevna, tired and hot, and near her twelfth confinement, taunted him with his inconsistency.
‘He pumps water for the whole house,’ she complained to her sister, ‘and lugs it in an enormous tub. . . . He does not eat white bread, and he postively doesn’t go anywhere.’8 For Sofya, this was simply playing at Robinson Crusoe, while his true work was intellectual. She was profoundly worried that, since his conversion to the simple life, the farm had run down, and he had made rudimentary efforts to make over the property at Yasnaya to his wife, so that he might technically be said to have abandoned the property. But he was still the owner of vast estates in Samara and, as yet, he still received his considerable literary royalties. Such inconsistencies were a source of moral torment to Tolstoy himself, who did genuinely desire to escape it all. For his wife, they were a crazy aberration and, with eleven children and a twelfth on the way, it was terrifying that her husband should take this view of money and possessions. The more Tolstoy attempted to imitate Christ, the more violent the atmosphere became. Such quarrels reduced him to a state of nervous exhaustion. Pathetically, he was toying with the idea of writing a novel about peasant life, but of course it would not come.
On June 18, he went out to do some mowing and returned to the house to bathe. He found his wife waiting for him, and once more she started to rail at him, asking him why, if he was so humble, he kept so many horses. He felt he had had enough, and set out for Tula, resolved – one of many such resolutions – to leave home for good and let them all stew in their own juice. But when he had got angrily half-way on his journey, he turned back. He realised that he could not leave her, heavily pregnant as she was. He came up the drive. Two of his sons were playing vint with some bearded peasants. ‘Where is your mother?’ ‘Oh,’ said their sister Tanya, ‘on the croquet lawn, didn’t you see her?’ ‘I don’t want to see her,’ was the reply.9 He went to his study, resolved to spend the night there, but the terrible sadness of it all prevented him from sleeping, and filled his heart with pity. But the pity was not strong enough to make him go and see if she was all right. He dropped off to sleep and at two in the morning, she woke him. ‘Forgive me, I’m in labour, perhaps I’ll die.’ He took her upstairs. Labour had begun. ‘What is the most joyful and happy event in a family passed off like something unnecessary and depressing,’ he noted mercilessly in his diary.10 The baby was Alexandra (Sasha) who only died in 1979 and was to keep a candle burning at her father’s shrine until the end.
The confinement was a miserable one, and they all remained miserable for the next month. Sofya and Lev quarrelled. She complained at his non-stop tea-drinking, and a row flared up. But, most revealingly, this began to tempt him carnally. ‘I’d like to refrain, but feel I won’t in present conditions. But cohabitation with a woman alien in spirit – i.e. with her – is terribly vile.’11 He had just finished writing this sentence on July 7, 1884, when she came into the room and started shouting at him hysterically. She said that she wanted to run away. He took her back upstairs, and tried to calm her down, ‘like a sick woman’ – which, having given birth only three weeks before in very difficult circumstances, she was. He then returned to his study to finish his diary entry. ‘She will remain a millstone around my neck and round the children’s until I die.’12
The following week, on July 14, he insisted upon his marital rights. She refused ‘with cold spitefulness and a desire to hurt me’.13 He immediately started to pack, and decided once more that he had to leave home. Then he woke her up and told her that she was no longer any use either as a wife or mother. ‘I was wrong not to have gone away,’ he added to the diary. But in fact, after all this rowing and quarrelling, she had yielded to him, and a severe haemorrhage followed. The midwife was summoned the next morning, and ordered them not to have conjugal relations for a month.14
The hot weather and the quarrels were having a sad effect on the children too. Twenty-one-year-old Seryozha was getting on his father’s nerves. ‘He was rude without any cause. I was angry and gave him a thorough reprimand – bourgeois habits, and obtuseness and spitefulness, and self-satisfaction. Suddenly he said that nobody loved him, and began to cry. God, how it hurt me. I walked about all day and managed to catch Seryozha after dinner and said to him, “I’m ashamed.” He suddenly burst out sobbing and started to kiss me, and say “Forgive me, forgive me. . . .”’15
Into this household, so torn apart by misery and strife, there came almost each day Chertkov’s letters from England, and not just letters, but cuttings from Matthew Arnold, accounts of the Salvation Army and its doings and beliefs, and helpful novels such as the anonymous The Ground Ash.16
It is a sad tale. Squire Risley, wishing to enact for their son his wife’s dying wish – ‘Teach him to be like Christ’ – is faced with a quandary. The squire sees as clearly as Tolstoy did that the ideals of Christ are fundamentally at variance with the wisdom of this world. ‘Now the character and teaching of Christ may be summed up in one short word and that word the most distasteful to the present generation. I might fairly say, but that I am unwilling to appear irreverent, that it was “spoony”.* No other epithet can be fairly applied to a system of morals which placed all humanity in a state of helpless, abject dependence on divine grace, which declared persecution to be a blessed thing, which forbade men to resist evil, and which enjoined that he who was smitten on the cheek should turn the other to the smiter.’ Nevertheless, in spite of his misgivings, the Squire plac
es his son in the care of a fanatical clergyman called Mr. Sheen, who is so rigid in his following of the Gospel precepts that he will not even allow the little boy to name the heathen divinities in Greek lessons. When young Risley goes on to Weston, a public school, he soon learns the truth of his father’s view that ‘any child who attempted to keep his Baptismal vows would be thought of as a muff and a mollycoddle and a spoony and a sop and everything else that is odious and abominable in the eyes of his schoolfellows’. Needless to say, young Risley gets hell from the other boys, and from the masters, who resent his refusal to construe passages from heathen literature just as much as the boys take a dim view of his lofty attitude to their smutty talk and rough games. The final disaster occurs when Risley smashes his fag-master’s statue of Apollo. All the prefects take a stick of ground ash and take it in turns to give him ‘one cut apiece’. He is either hit, or cut, or thrashed, or kicked by every boy in the house. Squire Risley rushes in at this point to rescue his boy, and he is carried to matron’s room in a state of great weakness. The reader imagines that he has died, but he flickers to life for just long enough to have an affecting reconciliation with his tormentors.
‘Forgive me, Risley!’ he cried, kneeling by the bedside and laying his hand tenderly on Nigel’s arm. . . . ‘I’ll promise you one thing, at any rate, that I will never use my ground ash again as long as I live.’
‘And will you take up the Cross instead?’ asked the dying boy.
