by A. N. Wilson
In the Cathedral of Our Lady at Leningrad, outside the iconostasis, there are two western pulpits, the gift of some foreign potentate to the Tsars. The pulpit has no place in the devotional life of the Orthodox. When a sermon is preached it is from the steps just outside the iconostasis. These decorative pieces of ecclesiastical furniture in the cathedral have only been used once. On February 24, 1901, Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg ascended into one of these pulpits and read the document which formally excommunicated Tolstoy from the Orthodox Church. It was published in the journal of the Church’s Holy Synod and a decree went out through all the Empire that it was to be pinned to every church door in Russia.
Well known to the world as a writer, Russian by birth, Orthodox by baptism and education, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, seduced by intellectual pride, has arrogantly risen against the Lord and His Christ and His Holy heritage, and has plainly in the sight of all repudiated his Orthodox Mother Church which reared and educated him and has dedicated his literary activity and the talent given to him by God to disseminating among the people teachings opposed to Christ and the Church, and to destroying in the minds and hearts of people their national faith, that Orthodox faith which has been confirmed by the Universe and in which our forefathers lived and were saved, and to which Holy Russia until now has clung and in which it has been strong. . . .75
There followed an itemisation of his particular heresies and a declaration that ‘the Church does not reckon him as its member’.
Since Tolstoy had not reckoned himself a member of the Church for at least twenty years, one might think that all this, from the bishops, came a little late. No novel in the history of literature has ever achieved quite such an accolade, unless one considers that the Pope paid Charles Kingsley a greater compliment by placing The Water Babies on the Index of Forbidden Books. In the strange times in which Tolstoy was living, the denunciation of Resurrection by an irate, brocaded figure with a beard was a serious matter.
As Lenin knew so well, the majority of Russian people would never opt for a violent, still less for a Marxist revolution. But equally, there was an overpowering feeling that something had to be done, that things could not go on as before, that the bureaucracy was unfit to govern the Empire. Tolstoy became a focus for all this discontent precisely because he was so insistently not of any party, precisely because his howls of rage against the authorities were so irrational, and because he produced no serious programme of alternative action. He was no good at saying what should be done, but very good at saying what was wrong. Everyone with eyes in their head could see it. Pobedonostsev could see it. The fact that they excommunicated him after twenty years of attacking the Orthodox religion was just one symptom of the fact that their nerve was beginning to fail.
The edict of excommunication caused a sensation. At the time, there was a painting by Repin, ‘Tolstoy at Prayer’, on exhibit in a St. Petersburg gallery. It depicted the sage kneeling barefooted in the woods, a latter-day St. Francis. ‘Repin painted me barefooted in a shirt. I have to thank him for not having taken my trousers off too,’ Tolstoy remarked to Goldenweiser.76
On the day that the edict was pronounced, the Government forbade any mention of Tolstoy in the press. But crowds gathered in the gallery around this painting. People adorned it with flowers. It had become an icon.
Tolstoy himself was in Moscow that day. As he turned into Lubyanskaya Square, he saw a crowd of several thousand. ‘There he is!’ called out a voice and quoted with heavy irony from the deed of excommunication. ‘The Devil in human form!’ Cheers broke out. ‘Hurrah, Lev Nikolayevich! Greetings! Hail to the great man!’77 Dunayev, who was with Tolstoy at the time, managed to hustle him into a taxi, but this demonstration of solidarity, not to say idolatry, must have been pleasing to the newly denounced heretic. So, too, were the flood of letters, flowers, telegrams and expressions of sympathy which poured in as a result of the excommunication.
It was a common joke that there were two Tsars at that time in Russia: Nicholas II and Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. His novel had touched a nerve and it was providing the most glaring demonstration of the political power of art. But that power was not just political. While the crowds hurrahed and the bishops had time to wonder whether they had done the right thing in giving the book so much free publicity, Tolstoy felt – most unusual for him – an intense feeling of inner satisfaction, of artistic achievement. After Anna Karenina, there had been a nervous and imaginative collapse which made him revile his own genius, and hate the ‘magazine story about an officer falling in love with a married woman’. With Resurrection he suffered no such spiritual reaction. Gorky describes him reading passages of the book aloud to a group of friends. When he had finished, he paused and looked up with a smile. He said, ‘The old man wrote it well.’78
Chapter Eighteen
Sad Steps
1901 – 1905
To be Ant Brothers meant only to screen ourselves from everyone, to separate ourselves from everyone and everything.
Tolstoy, Reminiscences
‘The public has laughed at Tolstoy’s excommunication. In vain did the bishops insert a Church Slavonic text into their statement. It was all too insincere, or smelling of insincerity.’1 This was Anton Chekhov’s view, and he probably spoke for most intelligent people. In order to emphasise the boorishness of the Church authorities, Tolstoy wrote a reply to Pobedonostsev and his ecclesiastical quislings, in which he was frank in his disbeliefs, and attractively humble in his expression of belief. He admitted that he did not think Jesus was God. Indeed, he said that to pray to Jesus as if He were God was the greatest blasphemy. But he did believe in love. The more love everybody had, the closer we would all be to establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. Governments hate this sort of thing as much as the idealistically-minded young like it. Copies of Tolstoy’s Credo were circulated in great numbers among the students and the malcontents.
Meanwhile, it looked as if the God of the Church might be displeased with Tolstoy, who became increasingly frail, and at the end of June, 1901, nearly died of malaria.2 He had no sooner recovered from the first attack than he was struck down by a second. The doctors ordered him south for the winter, and a kind friend of Cousin Alexandrine’s, the Countess S. V. Panina, offered him the run of her luxurious villa at Gaspra, on the southern shore of the Crimea. In September, accompanied by his wife, and two of his daughters, Sasha and Masha, he set out. Two Tolstoyan disciples managed to attach themselves to the party – Boulanger and Goldenweiser. They were able to note down the extraordinary popularity of the Master. As the train stopped at Kharkov, for example, throngs of students, having heard that Tolstoy was on board, ran up and down the platform peering through the train windows to catch a glimpse. ‘Get well soon! God bless you! Hurrah for Tolstoy!’ The whole station echoed to such cries when the old man agreed to appear at the window of his carriage to wave to the young people.
He was well enough, as they made their journey through the Crimea, to explore Sebastopol on foot, and to point out to Boulanger war relics in the museum. But then they came upon a photograph of himself, and the place lost its savour. ‘How sad. What’s the point in that expensive building, and that elaborate collection of old buttons and shell fragments? All this horror should be forgotten, it’s terrible, terrible. . . .’3
The confrontation with an old self was what horrified him at Sebastopol. Once settled in the warmth and the comfort of Countess Panina’s villa at Gaspra, however, the images of former selves occasionally fascinated him.
One day, as he sat looking at the sea, with two younger literary visitors, he turned to one, Anton Chekhov, and asked, ‘Did you fuck a lot of whores in your youth?’ Chekhov was embarrassed and mumbled. Tolstoy, momentarily aglow with the excitements of his earlier sins, said clearly, ‘I was an indefatigable fucker.’ The other man, Maxim Gorky, who did not expect such ‘peasant’ vocabulary from an aristocrat, was disconcerted by the exchange, and noted it down in his Reminiscences of Tolstoy.
It was a happy conjunction, this, of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky all in the Crimea at the same time. Chekhov, who was within a few years of his premature death, and had just got married, had come to live at Yalta in the hope that the climate would help his tuberculosis. In his youth, Chekhov had idolised Tolstoy and been carried away by ‘Tolstoyan’ ideas, but his natural sense of irony and common sense had weaned him away from such dreams. Nevertheless, he saw in Tolstoy a great moral force for good, as well as the greatest of Russian writers. Tolstoy, too, profoundly admired Chekhov’s fiction, and had copied the story Darling into his daily breviary, The Circle of Reading. ‘Chekhov has given us an ideal type of woman in Darling – self-sacrificing, kindly, whose main attribute is love, and without thought of self she serves to the end the person she loves.’
‘That is what Lyovochka likes!’ interrupted his wife, with some justice. ‘A type of woman – a she-animal, slave, lacking in all initiative, interests! Wait on your husband, serve him, bear and feed children!’4
The one thing Tolstoy was unable to admire in Chekhov was his dramatic bent. ‘Shakespeare’s plays are bad enough,’ he would say, putting his arm around Chekhov and squeezing him, ‘but yours are even worse!’ ‘There is no real action,’ as he noted after a production of Uncle Vanya, ‘no movement towards which the conversation of the neurasthenic intellectuals tend. It is incomprehensible what Chekhov wanted to say anyway.’5
Chekhov took all this criticism in good part. The photographs of Tolstoy in the Crimea with his family and with ‘literary’ visitors give us a sad glimpse of the manner in which his last days might have been spent. He always got on best with young or younger men, and life was much happier when he was surrounded by people who revered him for his literary genius rather than for his views.
These views inevitably cropped up. But it was a different matter when they were aired with intelligent friends who had minds of their own. There was the comical moment – after he had shocked Gorky with his foul language – when he leant forward and fixed the young man with his deep-set eyes. ‘I’m more of a peasant than you!’ he asserted – surprising words for the low-born genius Gorky to hear from a count.6 Gorky, who dreamed of violent revolution in Russia, and threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks, nevertheless recognised in Tolstoy something which transcended politics, and even art itself.
‘Why don’t you believe in God?’ Tolstoy asked him one day.
‘I have no faith.’
‘That is not true. You are a natural believer, and you can’t live without God. You will come to feel it soon. If you don’t believe it is out of stubbornness or hatred, because the world is not the way you want it to be. Another thing is that people sometimes don’t believe because they don’t dare. That happens to the young. They worship some woman but they don’t want to let her see it; they are afraid that she won’t understand – they’ve no courage. Faith, like love, demands courage and boldness. You must tell yourself, “believe” and everything will be all right.’
Gorky greeted this speech with silence, but Tolstoy raised a finger and said, ‘You can’t avoid that question by saying nothing.’ ‘And I,’ Gorky remembered, ‘who do not believe in God, looked at him, I don’t know why, with a great deal of circumspection and a little awe too. I looked at him and I thought “This man is like God.”’7
How much better it would have been for Tolstoy to have died there when he was living at Gaspra – the family all around him, and reasonably at peace, and in the company of two of the greatest Russian writers, Chekhov and Gorky.
When they parted, Tolstoy kissed Chekhov and said, ‘Don’t write any more plays, old thing.’8
Tolstoy used to say that Chekhov would have been a better writer had he not also been a doctor. Chekhov’s professional opinion was that Tolstoy was a very sick man and might die suddenly at any minute. In fact, when they parted in 1902, Tolstoy had eight miserable years to live, and Chekhov himself less than a couple.
His health returned and he went back to Yasnaya Polyana. From St. Petersburg, he heard that his dear ‘old girl’ Alexandrine had been extremely ill, and close to death. ‘I too was close to death,’ he wrote to her, ‘but here I am still not dead and sometimes I regret it – it was so good to be dying. . . . But sometimes I rejoice, because our senile lives are simply not useless, as people often think, but on the contrary, are of the utmost importance in terms of the influence which the old can exert on other people. You, with your ardent religious feeling and heart of gold, have probably experienced and are experiencing the enlightenment that illness gives My faith and the faith of all good people (forgive me for the immodesty of including myself among them) are one and the same thing: belief in God the Father who sent us into this world to do his will. . . .’9
Alexandrine struggled to reply, and thanked him for his letter in which she felt that note of sincerity which had echoed between them in younger days. She was on the way out. A few months later, she died – on March 4, 1904 – and yet another link with Tolstoy’s youth was severed. But they were deceiving themselves if they thought that they shared a common faith. In more vigorous days, they had reached the point of agreeing not to discuss religion, since she had failed to convince Tolstoy of the truth of Orthodoxy, and he was unable to be polite about the subject.
Nineteen hundred and three was the year in which he wrote what is perhaps his most devastating assault on institutional Christianity – The Restoration of Hell, a fable worthy of Swift. For about three hundred years after the death of Christ, Hell is empty, save for Beelzebub himself. Christ has led out the captive souls, and taught them a new way of living, which the Christians all follow. But after a long period of loneliness, Beelzebub hears noises above his head, and a minor devil pops down to see him. This junior tempter reveals, almost without prompting, that human beings have overthrown the teachings of Jesus in favour of something called the Church. They have taken to ignoring Christ’s words, squabbling about trivialities and persecuting anyone with whom they disagree.
‘But can it be that things are exactly as they were before? Are there fornicators, robbers and murderers?’ asked Beelzebub, already beginning to cheer up.
The devils, also cheerful now, spoke at once, trying to show off in front of Beelzebub.
‘Not exactly as they were before – but better than ever!’ one of them shouted. ‘We can’t cram all the adulterers into the old quarters,’ another one piped up. . . .10
The piece ends with a terrible dance, in which the devils who have invented art, culture, education, medicine, socialism, drunkenness, women’s rights and science all join the devil who invented the Church and parade themselves gleefully before the chief of devils. It is Tolstoy’s most acidly despondent, most hilariously misanthropic piece of work.
Within months of losing Alexandrine, Tolstoy was faced with the death of his last surviving brother, Sergey. In appearance the two old men were remarkably alike. Photographs of the pair, with their long, white, Santa Claus beards, could be of twins. And yet there is something lacking in Sergey’s face: to the camera, it looks merely as though Sergey lacks Lev’s anguish. We know that he lacked his brother’s genius. And, as far as Lev was capable of judging, he entirely lacked his brother and sister’s religious feelings.
Nevertheless, for Tolstoy blood was thicker than water. It did not in the end matter to him very much that his brother rejected the great truths of Tolstoyism as so much tommy-rot. Pirogovo, the Volkonsky estate which Sergey had inherited at the time of his majority, had been run on very different lines from Yasnaya Polyana. There, the serfs were still serfs. They bowed at their master’s approach. He was a strict, if benign, landlord, who, unlike his younger brother Lev, kept things neat and in order. Lawns got mown. Harvests were gathered in due season. Fences were mended. Pot-holes were filled in. His stables were still full of splendid horses. He was a hard-drinking, cynical squire. His gipsy wife Masha had been married grudgingly long after the birth of her children, and was kept in subjugation. B
ut none of this stopped friendly, and quite frequent, visits between the two brothers. By August 1904, Sergey was dying, hideously, of cancer of the face and tongue. Lev went over to visit him for one last time, and came back to Yasnaya on August 22. There was no point in staying. His brother was in too much pain. When he died four days later, without any awareness he was dying, and without any faith, Tolstoy realised that death reduced all differences to the level of triviality. ‘All is well with him just the same.’11
At Sergey’s funeral, Tolstoy helped to carry the coffin; the last of the brothers. Now, it was just Lev and Marya who remembered the Ant Brotherhood. In his Reminiscences, composed a few years later, Tolstoy recalled that, much as he had loved his other two brothers, ‘I was enraptured by Sergey, copied him, adored him and wanted to be like him. I was enraptured by his handsome appearance, his voice (he was always singing), his drawing, his high spirits and in particular (though it seems an odd thing to say) the spontaneity of his egotism,’12 a highly Tolstoyan thing to admire. Memories of the boy Sergey surged back: Sergey keeping chickens, sketching and painting them to perfection, and feeding the birds by squeezing long sausages of black and white bread through the keyhole of their coop; Sergey and some village boy, at the age of about nine, tobogganing down a hill at Yasnaya Polyana and narrowly avoiding death as they whooshed beneath the feet of three horses pulling along a troyka in the snow. He remembered the Ant Brotherhood huddled under chairs and conversing in low secret voices. For ‘to be “Ant Brothers” . . . meant only to screen ourselves from everyone, to separate ourselves from everyone and everything. . . .’ What had begun, for orphans, as an emotional necessity had developed into a habit. To be born the child of privilege, with many siblings, is to enjoy a peculiar emotional advantage over the rest of the world.
