Tolstoy (50 page)

Having sorted out the family's teachers at the beginning of 1878, Tolstoy was keen to get back to fiction, and his religious views did not yet interfere with those plans. Some twenty years after writing
War and Peace,
he was keen to write another historical novel, and he was still fixated on the Decembrist Uprising. Back in the early 1860s Tolstoy had found himself going back in time from the 1825 uprising to the 1812 war with Napoleon, and finally to the events of 1805 before feeling he was at the right place to begin. But he had got no further than the immediate aftermath of 1812 in
War and Peace,
so he had never followed Pierre Bezukhov's transformation into a Decembrist, or written about the uprising. Now, in the late 1870s, he began to be drawn to the events surrounding Nicholas I's accession, and to the Russo-Turkish War of 1829. At the same time he was also interested in writing a novel about Russian peasant settlers colonising new lands, such as the territories east of the Volga near Samara and Orenburg with which he was personally familiar. He was excited by the prospect of somehow combining both these topics, and 1878 was a year of frenetic activity in which he gathered a mass of historical material and oral testimony in order first to bring the period alive for himself. In February 1878 Tolstoy went to Moscow on a foraging expedition, and held the first of many meetings with various Decembrists and their descendants. He also started marshalling his friends in libraries and archives to send him materials, which meant renewing his contact with Pyotr Bartenev, the editor of the journal
Russian Archive,
and depending, as usual, on Strakhov. He also began bombarding relatives with contacts in high places (such as Alexandrine and Sonya's uncle Alexander Bers) with requests for help with primary sources. Tolstoy had further meetings with Decembrists in Moscow in March before travelling on St Petersburg to continue his research, and also tie up a new property deal which enabled him to enlarge his Samara estate by over 10,000 acres.

Tolstoy had not been in the capital for seventeen years, and he did not like it any more in 1878 than in 1861. Alexandrine had offered Tolstoy accommodation with her brother on Mokhovaya Street, but he decided to stay with his old friend and mother-in-law Lyubov Bers in her apartment on Ertelev Lane, which was also right in the heart of the city. He arrived on 6 March and was back home within the week, disappointing many acquaintances who had hoped to see him (such as the painter Kramskoy), but he packed a lot into his four days in St Petersburg. He made a chilling visit to the St Peter and Paul Fortress, where the governor showed him the irons the Decembrists had been clamped in, but the cells where they had actually been held in 1825 were off-limits to all visitors except the Tsar and the chief of police. When he later drove past the equestrian statue of Nicholas I which had been erected in St Isaac's Square, Tolstoy realised that his revulsion for the man who in his opinion had destroyed the best part of the Russian aristocracy had increased.
³⁹
A much more enjoyable visit was to the Imperial Public Library, where Tolstoy went to see Nikolay Strakhov and to meet the indomitable critic Vladimir Stasov, who had himself been imprisoned in the St Peter and Paul Fortress in 1849 for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle. Tolstoy was not so interested in Stasov the tireless and sometimes also tiresome propagandist of Russian national art as in Stasov the librarian, who had first been appointed specifically to research the reign of Nicholas I. For Tolstoy he was one more useful contact who could help him track down valuable historical sources.

Another notable event during Tolstoy's visit to St Petersburg was his attendance at one of the public lectures on the topic of 'divine humanity' given by a young religious philosopher with flowing locks called Vladimir Solovyov (son of the famous historian Sergey Mikhailovich). It was a notable event, not because Tolstoy found the lecture interesting (he dismissed it as 'childish nonsense'
⁴⁰
), but because it was the only occasion on which he and Dostoyevsky were in spitting distance of each other. Strakhov was a friend of both the great writers, but he honoured Tolstoy's request not to introduce him to anyone, and so the two passed like ships in the night, to their subsequent mutual regret. Much later, Tolstoy described in letters the horrible experience of having to sit in a stuffy hall which was packed so full that there were even high-society ladies in evening dress perched on window ledges. As someone who went out of his way to avoid being part of the crowd, and who disdained having anything to do with polite society or fashion, his blood must have boiled at having to wait until the emaciated figure of the twenty-four-year-old philosopher decided to make a grand theatrical entrance in his billowing white silk cravat. Tolstoy certainly did not have the patience to sit and listen to some boy 'with a huge head consisting of hair and eyes' spout pretentious pseudo-profundities. After the first string of German quotations and references to cherubim and seraphim, he got up and walked out, leaving Strakhov to carry on listening to the 'ravings of a lunatic'.
⁴¹
The rest of Tolstoy's time in St Petersburg was taken up with concluding his property deal and meeting historians, including Mikhail Semevsky, editor of the important journal
Russian Antiquity,
who promised to send him unpublished Decembrist memoirs from its extensive archives.
⁴²
Otherwise Tolstoy spent time with family. Apart from Sonya's younger brothers Pyotr, Stepan and Vyacheslav, the one person Tolstoy wanted to see during his stay in Petersburg was Alexandrine, whom he had not seen since i860. They had several long and (for her) reassuring conversations about religion, and Alexandrine noted in her diary how happy she was to see him after so many years. Indeed, she had initially feared she might expire under the weight of all the things she wanted to share with him. Tolstoy seemed nicer to her than ever before, and on the day he left Petersburg, she registered in her diary their discussions about religion:

After many years of seeking the truth, he has finally reached the jetty. He has constructed this jetty of course in his own way, but the One leading him is nevertheless the same One and Only Comforter. Lev is now at the beginning of a new work, and I am sure this confession of his faith, or rather the confession of his new faith will now be reflected in it.
⁴³

One positive outcome of Tolstoy's new Christian outlook was his desire to save his soul, as he put it, which meant being at peace with the world. There was, of course, one conspicuous person he needed to make his peace with, and that was Turgenev.

Tolstoy had gone to Petersburg during Great Lent, the traditional time for penitence, and he wrote to Turgenev on the penultimate day of the forty-day fast. Filling two pages with his imperious, aristocratic handwriting, he apologised to his old friend and proposed that they bury their differences. It is tempting to think that Tolstoy's recent trip to St Petersburg had played a part in prompting this peace-offering. The last time he had been in the capital was 1861, and his return to the city must have brought back a flood of memories—of first meeting and becoming friends with Turgenev there in 1855, of arguing with him over the way he had treated his sister during his visit to Petersburg in 1859,
⁴⁴
and of no doubt feeling still angry with him when he returned the following year with Masha and her children Varya, Liza and Nikolay, when they had walked together through the city to visit St Isaac's Cathedral and the Bronze Horseman. It is likely Turgenev came into Tolstoy's mind again on this visit seventeen years later when he walked across St Isaac's Square to visit Alexandrine in her apartment in the Mariinsky Palace. Now that he was nearly fifty years old, and his outlook and ambitions quite different, perhaps he suddenly realised the absurdity of his feud with Turgenev. It was with surprise and delight that Turgenev received Tolstoy's letter at home in France. Responding at once with a page and a half of his own neat, diffident handwriting, he enthusiastically agreed that they should renew their friendship, and promised to visit during his trip to Russia later that summer.
⁴⁵

During Holy Week in 1878, shortly after writing his letter to Turgenev, Tolstoy prepared to take communion. He had been reading the Gospels and Renan's
Life of Jesus,
and he decided to start keeping a regular diary again for the first time in thirteen years. After Easter he made another trip to Moscow for further meetings with Decembrists, and to talk to publishers about the next edition of his writings, but he also wanted to attend the annual Easter debates about faith between the Orthodox faithful and Old Believers which had been taking place in the square in front of the Kremlin Cathedrals since the seventeenth century. Tolstoy had never taken any noticeable interest in sectarians before, but now he became increasingly drawn to them. In March he had asked Stasov to send him the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum and other Old Believer 'raw materials',
⁴⁶
and began educating himself about this powerful underground current of Russian society. During his six-week koumiss cure in Samara later that summer, Tolstoy pursued his new interest further: he went to talk to the 'Molokans'—sectarians who lived amongst the Bashkirs and Russian peasant colonists. They were on the fringes of society and on the fringes of the empire for a good reason.

Religious dissent had a long and eventful history in Russia which the government had done its best to suppress over the centuries. Orthodoxy was the official religion, and the state made vigorous efforts to try to ensure the population conformed to it, seeing the Church as a useful tool in promoting and maintaining civil obedience in the face of the potentially dangerous political threat of dissent. The ecclesiastical authorities had little choice but to acquiesce with state policy, since they were actually subordinate to it. In i72i Peter the Great had abolished the once-powerful Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a secular institution headed by a lay person, the better to consolidate the power of the autocracy. Yet this fatal undermining of the Church's moral authority, combined with an influx of Protestantism from German settlers, had only led to sectarian religions becoming more popular. The government systematically understated their numbers, but by the nineteenth century there were millions of Russians who had turned away from Orthodoxy, and who were at best discriminated against, or actively persecuted. It has been estimated that as many as a quarter of the Russian Empire's population were sectarians by the time of the 1917 Revolution.
⁴⁷

The largest group of religious dissenters in Russia were the Old Believers, a group who had refused to go along with Patriarch Nikon's reforms to the rite in the 1660s and so caused a schism in the Church which had far-reaching repercussions. In part because Constantinople (and with it the entire Byzantine Empire) had fallen into the 'heresy' of Islam after being conquered by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, thousands of zealous Orthodox believers in old Rus insisted on clinging to the rituals and wordings to which they had become accustomed, regardless of the fact that they had gradually diverged from Greek practice over the centuries. Far from this being a Reformation in the Russian Orthodox Church, it amounted to the opposite, as large numbers actively resisted change—perhaps as many as half the total population at that time.
⁴⁸
Becoming known as
staroobryadtsy
('adherents of the old rite') or
raskolniki
('schismatics'), the Old Believers caused the first serious weakening of the Russian Orthodox Church, and they were dealt with ruthlessly, with many choosing the path of mass self-immolation rather than suffer exile to Siberia or capitulation. One of their leaders was the Archpriest Avvakum, who was eventually burned at the stake in 1682, leaving behind the remarkable autobiography which Tolstoy asked Strakhov to send him in 1878. The fact that this document (the first masterpiece of Russian literature written in the living vernacular) was officially suppressed until 1861 speaks volumes about the authorities' identification of religious dissent with popular rebellion. The repressive measures were particularly harsh during the reign of Nicholas I, and it was only after his death, as part of the liberalisation introduced by Alexander II, that it first became possible to write about the Schism (a change in policy which Musorgsky took full advantage of with the composition of his second opera
Khovanshchina,
which ends with old Believers committing suicide).

As the religious and political thinker Nikolay Berdyaev remarked in 1916, sectarianism was in fact an 'integral part of the spiritual life of the Russian people'.
⁴⁹
Alongside the vast numbers of Old Believers were many other groups whose sectarian origins in some cases actually pre-dated the Schism. Many were offshoots of the mystical
Khristovery
('Believers in Christ') or Khlysty, as they became known, whose peasant founder was believed to be the Lord of Sabaoth himself.
⁵⁰
These included the
Skoptsy
('self-castrators'), who appeared in the eighteenth century, and the
Skakuny
('jumpers') who appeared in the nineteenth century. There were also radical schismatics who sought to break all ties with society: the
Stranniki
('wanderers'),
Pustynniki
('hermits') and
Beguny
('runners'). And then there were a number of 'rationalist' and quasi-Protestant sects who were to hold a particular interest for Tolstoy. One group he was later to become deeply involved with were the
Dukhobory,
a pejorative label which the 'spirit-wrestlers' turned to their own advantage by styling themselves as
Dukhobortsy
('wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit'). Tolstoy also had deep respect for the
Molokany
('milk-drinkers'), or 'spiritual Christians' as they called themselves, a large number of whom lived out in the steppe beyond Samara.