Natasha's Dance (57 page)

    According to Dostoevsky’s friend and fellow writer Vladimir Solov-

    iev,
The Brothers Karamazov
was planned as the first of a series of novels in which the writer would expound his ideal of the Church as a social union of Christian love.
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One can see this vision unfolding in the final scene of
The Brothers Karamazov,
where Alyosha (who has left the monastery and gone into the world) attends the funeral of the poor child Ilyusha, struck down by tuberculosis. After the service, he gathers around him a group of boys who had followed him in caring for the dying boy. There are twelve of these apostles. They gather at the stone where Ilyusha’s father had wanted to bury his son. In a farewell speech of remembrance, Alyosha tells the children that the spirit of the dead boy will live on for ever in their hearts. It will be a source of kindness in their lives and it will remind them, as Alyosha tells them, ‘How good life is when you do something that is good and just!’
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Here was a vision of a Church that lived outside the walls of any monastery, a Church that reached out to the heart of every child; a Church in which, as Alyosha had once dreamed, ‘ “there will be no more rich or poor, exalted nor humbled, but all men will be as the children of God and the real Kingdom of Christ will arrive”’.
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    The censors banned large parts of Dostoevsky’s novel, claiming that such passages had more to do with socialism than with Christ.
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It is perhaps ironic for a writer who is best known as an anti-socialist, but Dostoevsky’s vision of a democratic Church remained close to the socialist ideals which he espoused in his youth. The emphasis had changed - as a socialist he had believed in the moral need for the transformation of society, whereas as a Christian he had come to see that spiritual reform was the only way to effect social change - but essentially his quest for Truth had always been the same. Dostoevsky’s whole life can be seen as a struggle to combine the teaching of the Gospels with the need for social justice on this earth, and he thought he found his answer in the ‘Russian soul’. In one of his final writings Dostoevsky summarized his vision of the Russian Church:

    I am speaking now not about church buildings and not about sermons: I am speaking about our Russian ‘socialism’ (and, however strange it may seem, I am taking this word, which is quite the opposite of all that the Church represents, to explain my idea), whose purpose and final outcome is the

    establishment of the universal church on earth, insofar as the earth is capable of containing it. I am speaking of the ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great, general, universal union of brotherhood in the name of Christ. And if this union does not yet exist, if the Church has not yet been fully established - not merely in prayers alone, but in fact - then the instinct for this Church and the ceaseless longing for it… is still to be found in the hearts of the millions of our people. It is not in Communism, not in mechanical forms that we find the socialism of the Russian people: they believe that salvation is ultimately to be found in worldwide union in the name of Christ. That is our Russian socialism!
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    At 4 a.m. on 28 October 1910 Tolstoy crept out of his house at Yasnaya Polyana, took a carriage to the nearby station, and bought a third-class railway ticket to Kozelsk, the station for the monastery at Optina Pustyn. At the age of eighty-two, with just ten days to live, Tolstoy was renouncing everything - his wife and children, his family home in which he had lived for nearly fifty years, his peasants and his literary career - to take refuge in the monastery. He had felt the urge to flee many times before. Since the 1880s he had got into the habit of setting out at night to walk with the pilgrims on the Kiev road that passed by his estate - often not returning until breakfast time. But now his urge was to leave for good. The endless arguments with his wife Sonya, largely over the inheritance of his estate, had made life at home unbearable. He wanted peace and quiet in his final days.

    Tolstoy did not know where he was going. He left in a hurry, without plans. But something drew him to Optina. Perhaps it was
The Brothers Karamazov,
which Tolstoy had just read for the first time; or perhaps it was the presence of his sister Marya, the last survivor of his happy childhood, who was living out her last days at the nearby Shamordino convent under the direction of Optina’s monks. The monastery was not far from his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and on several occasions over the previous thirty years he had walked there like a peasant to calm his troubled mind by talking about God with the elder Amvrosy. The ascetic life of the Optina hermits was an

    inspiration to Tolstoy: so much so that
Father Sergius
(1890-98) - his story of an aide-de-camp-turned-hermit from Optina who struggles to find God through prayer and contemplation and at last finds peace as a humble pilgrim on the road - can be read as a monologue on Tolstoy’s own religious longing to renounce the world. Some say that Tolstoy was searching at Optina for a final reconciliation with the Church -that he did not want to die before his excommunication (imposed by the Church in 1901) had been rescinded. Certainly, if there was a site where such a reconciliation could have taken place, it was Optina, whose mystical approach to Christianity, uncluttered as it was by the rituals and institutions of the Church, was very close to Tolstoy’s own religious faith. But it seems more likely that Tolstoy was driven by the need to ‘go away’. He wanted to escape from the affairs of this world to prepare his soul for the journey to the next.

    To judge from
A Confession,
Tolstoy’s turn to God was a sudden one - the result of a moral crisis in the latter half of the 1870s. This, too, is the view of most scholars, who draw a sharp distinction between the literary Tolstoy of the pre-crisis decades and the religious thinker of the post-crisis years. But in fact the search for faith was a constant element of Tolstoy’s life and art.
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His whole identity was bound up in the quest for spiritual meaning and perfection, and he took his inspiration from the life of Christ. Tolstoy thought of God in terms of love and unity. He wanted to belong, to feel himself a part of a community. This was the ideal he sought in marriage and in his communion with the peasantry. For Tolstoy, God is love: where there is love, there is God. The divine core of every human being is in their compassion and ability to love. Sin is loss of love - a punishment itself - and the only way to find redemption is through love itself. This theme runs through all Tolstoy’s fiction, from his first published story, ‘Family Happiness’ (1859) to his final novel,
Resurrection
(1899). It is misleading to see these literary works as somehow separate from his religious views. Rather, as with Gogol, they are allegories - icons - of these views. All Tolstoy’s characters are searching for a form of Christian love, a sense of relatedness to other human beings that alone can give a meaning and a purpose to their lives. That is why Anna Karenina -isolated and thrown back completely on herself - is destined to perish in Tolstoy’s universe; or why his most exalted figures, such as Princess

    Maria or the peasant Karataev in
War and Peace,
show their love by suffering for other human beings.

    Tolstoy had a mystical approach to God. He thought that God could not be comprehended by the human mind, but only felt through love and prayer. For Tolstoy, prayer is a moment of awareness of divinity, a moment of ecstasy and freedom, when the spirit is released from the personality and merges with the universe.
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Not a few Orthodox theologians have compared Tolstoy’s religion to Buddhism and other oriental faiths.
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But in fact his mystical approach had more in common with the hermits’ way of prayer at Optina. Tolstoy’s division from the Russian Church, however, was a fundamental one, and not even Optina could satisfy his spiritual requirements. Tolstoy came to reject the doctrines of the Church - the Trinity, the Resurrection, the whole notion of a divine Christ - and instead began to preach a practical religion based on Christ’s example as a living human being. His was a form of Christianity that could not be contained by any Church. It went beyond the walls of the monastery to engage directly with the major social issues - of poverty and inequality, cruelty and oppression - which no Christian in a country such as Russia could ignore. Here was the religious basis of Tolstoy’s moral crisis and renunciation of society from the end of the 1870s. Increasingly persuaded that the truly Christian person had to live as Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy vowed to sell his property, to give away his money to the poor, and to live with them in Christian brotherhood. Essentially his beliefs amounted to a kind of Christian socialism - or rather anarchism, insofar as he rejected all forms of Church and state authority. But Tolstoy was not a revolutionary. He rejected the violence of the socialists. He was a pacifist. In his view, the only way to fight injustice and oppression was by obeying Christ’s teachings.

    The Revolution of 1917 has obscured from our view the threat which Tolstoy’s simple reading of the Gospels posed to Church and state. By the time of his excommunication in the 1900s, Tolstoy had a truly national following. His Christian anarchism was hugely appealing to the peasantry, and as such it was perceived as a major threat to the established Church, even to the Tsar. Any social revolution in Russia was bound to have a spiritual base, and even the most atheistic

    socialists were conscious of the need to give religious connotations to their stated goals.* ‘There are two Tsars in Russia’, wrote A. S. Suvorin, editor of the conservative newspaper
Novoevremia,
in 1901: ‘Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which one is stronger? Nicholas II can do nothing about Tolstoy; he cannot shake his throne. But Tolstoy, undoubtedly, is shaking his.’
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It would not have come to this, if the tsarist authorities had left Tolstoy alone. Few people read his religious writings of the 1880s, and it was only in the 1890s, when the Church began to denounce him for trying to bring down the government, that mass illegal printings of these works began to circulate in the provinces.
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By 1899, when Tolstoy published
Resurrection,
he was better known as a social critic and religious dissident than as a writer of fiction. It was the novel’s religious attack on the institutions of the tsarist state -the Church, the government, the judicial and penal systems, private property and the social conventions of the aristocracy - that made it, by a long way, his best selling novel in his own lifetime.
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‘All of Russia is feeding on this book’, an ecstatic Stasov wrote to congratulate Tolstoy. ‘You cannot imagine the conversations and debates it is provoking… This event has had no equal in all the literature of the nineteenth century.’
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The more the Church and the state attacked Tolstoy, the greater was the writer’s following, until he was finally excommunicated in 1901. The intention of the excommunication had been to provoke a wave of popular hatred against Tolstoy, and there were reactionaries and Orthodox fanatics who responded to the call. Tolstoy received death threats and abusive letters, and the Bishop of Kronstadt, who was notorious for his support of the extreme national-

    * The Bolsheviks made the most political capital out of socialism’s religious resonance. S. G. Strumilin, in a pamphlet for the rural poor in 1917, compared socialism to the work of Christ and claimed that it would create a ‘terrestrial kingdom of fraternity, equality and freedom’ (S. Petrashkevich [Strumilin],
Pro zemliu i sotsializm: slovo sotsialdemokrata k derevenskoi bednote
(Petrograd, 1917), pp. 1-2). The cult of Lenin, which took off in August 1918, after he had been wounded in an assassination attempt, carried explicit religious overtones. Lenin was depicted as a Christ-like figure, ready to die for the people’s cause, and, because the bullets had not killed him, blessed by miraculous powers.
Pravda
(meaning Truth and Justice), the title of the Party’s news-paper, had an obvious religious meaning in the peasant consciousness - as did the Red Star, for, according to folklore, the maiden Pravda wore a burning star on her forehead which list up the whole world and brought it truth and happiness.

    ists, even wrote a prayer for the writer’s death which was circulated widely in the right-wing press.
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Yet for every threatening message, Tolstoy received a hundred letters of support from villages across the land. People wrote to tell him of abuses in their local government, or to thank him for his condemnation of the Tsar in his famous article ‘I Cannot Remain Silent’, written in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre which sparked the Revolution of 1905. Millions of people who had never read a novel suddenly began to read Tolstoy’s. And everywhere the writer went, huge crowds of well-wishers would appear - many more, it was remarked by the police amidst the celebrations for Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday in 1908, than turned out to greet the Tsar.

    Tolstoy gave all the money he had made from
Resurrection
to the Dukhobors. The Dukhobors were Tolstoyans before Tolstoy. The religious sect went back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier, when its first communities of Christian brotherhood were established. As pacifists who rejected the authority of Church and state, they had suffered persecution from the very start of their existence in Russia, and in the 1840s they had been forced to settle in the Caucasus. Tolstoy first became interested in the Dukhobors in the early 1880s. The influence of their ideas on his writings is palpable. All the core elements of ‘Tolstoyism’ - the idea that the Kingdom of God is within oneself, the rejection of the doctrines and rituals of the established Church, the Christian principles of the (imagined) peasant way of life and community - were also part of Dukhobor belief. In 1895 the sect staged a series of mass demonstrations against military conscription. Thousands of Tolstoyans (or pacifists who called themselves by that name) flocked to join their protest in the Caucasus, many of them merging with the Dukhobors. Tolstoy himself publicized their cause, writing several hundred letters to the press and eventually securing and largely paying for their resettlement in Canada (where their dissent proved just as troublesome to the government).
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