Tolstoy (51 page)

Old Believers and sectarians were granted limited privileges in a decree of 1863, but these were not turned into full civil rights until 1905, when all religious dissenters were finally allowed to practise their faith without fear of persecution. By and large, the adherents of Russian sects came from peasant backgrounds and lived in thinly populated areas on the edges of the empire, either because they had been deported by the government to keep them from contaminating the Orthodox population, or because they had fled to avoid persecution. There was one important exception, and that was the upper-class Protestant evangelists in St Petersburg and Moscow whom Tolstoy sati-rises towards the end of
Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy was not the only Russian to want a Church which communicated its message in an intelligible language. A century and a half of the Orthodox Church being part of Russian officialdom had led to apathy and disillusionment amongst the educated classes and when Granville Waldegrave, 3rd Baron Radstock, first travelled as a missionary from London to St Petersburg in 1874, he was greeted with open arms by Russian aristocrats, who welcomed his message of personal salvation through independent Bible study. The New Testament had first been translated from Church Slavonic into modern Russian in 1823, but then suppressed by the Orthodox Church for political reasons. It first became widely available in 1876, and then thousands of copies started to be disseminated as a result of the missionary activities of Baptists and figures such as Lord Radstock. The first complete Bible in Russian followed in 1882.

When Radstock was inevitably banned from Russia in i878, the 'Radsto-kisty' became 'Pashkovtsy'. Colonel Vasily Pashkov took over Radstock's missionary activities until he too was sent into exile abroad in 1884. By that time his Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading had already distributed millions of pamphlets amongst the peasants, and caused a mass exodus from the Orthodox Church.
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The religious revival sparked by the conservative and upper-class 'Pashkovites'arose partly to counter the rising tide of atheism embraced by the young generation of Russian nihilists who preached the religion of socialism. One tangible result was the capacity attendance at lectures like the one given by Vladimir Solovyov which Tolstoy had gone to.
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Tolstoy was keenly interested in knowing more about Radstock. Indeed, he had met one of his followers and found him very persuasive, but had never met the baron himself. Alexandrine, however, knew him well, and at Tolstoy's request provided him with full details about Radstock's activities by letter in March 1876. It all went into
Anna Karenina.
In May 1877 Alexandrine wrote from Tsarskoye Selo to tell Tolstoy that she had spent the previous evening with the Empress, and that the closing chapters of Part Seven of
Anna Karenina
had been read aloud to the assembled company. She reported that everyone had laughed heartily at his merciless caricature of Radstock's followers.
⁵³

Tolstoy had little time for aristocratic religious dissenters who became Christian evangelists without changing their privileged (and to his mind corrupt) lifestyles, but peasant sectarians were something else entirely. He must have been aware of the Molokans out in Samara ever since he had first spent time in the steppe, but it was only now that he wanted to meet them and talk to them about their beliefs. Conversations about religion with the Molokans were the highlight of Tolstoy's stay in Samara in the summer of i878. The Molokans were apparently so-called because of their refusal to cease the consumption of milk products during the 200 fasting days in the Orthodox calendar, but others argued that they took their name from a river in southern Russia. Like many of the 'rational' sects in Russia, the Molokans distinguished themselves from the general peasant population by eschewing alcohol and leading modest, industrious lives.
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They dispensed not only with all rituals (from holding services to crossing themselves), but also with clergy, sacred buildings and artefacts such as icons, engaging instead in independent Bible study.

The Times
correspondent Donald Mackenzie Wallace, who visited the same area ofthe steppe beyond Samara where Tolstoy had his estate in the early 1870s, was greatly intrigued by the Molokans, but ascertaining the exact nature of their beliefs through direct questioning proved to be frustratingly difficult. It was only through a lengthy process of innocently comparing the weather and crops in Russia with the weather and crops in Scotland, and then gradually moving on to religion, that he was finally able to make headway during a conversation with one local Molokan peasant. Mackenzie Wallace came to the conclusion that there were strong similarities with the Presbyterian Church:

When the peasant heard that there is a country where the people interpret the Scriptures for themselves, have no bishops, and consider the veneration of Icons as idolatry, he invariably listened with profound attention and when he learned further that in that wonderful country the parishes annually send deputies to an assembly in which all matters pertaining to the Church are freely and publicly discussed, he almost always gave free expression to his astonishment, and I had to answer a whole volley of questions. 'Where is that country?' 'Is is to the east, or the west?' 'Is it very far away?' 'If our Presbyter could only hear all that!'
⁵⁵

When he was out in the steppe, Mackenzie Wallace also enjoyed the hospitality of the Bashkirs in a kibitka, and his description of the way dinner was prepared and consumed may partly explain why the fastidious Frenchman Jules Montels, who had accompanied Tolstoy's sons Ilya and Lev on their trip in 1878, did not terribly enjoy his time on the steppe. It was a long way from the bistros of Paris:

A sheep was brought near the door of our tent, and there killed, skinned, cut up into pieces, and put into an immense pot, under which a fire had been kindled. The dinner was not less primitive than the method of preparing it ... There were no plates, knives, forks, spoons, or chop-sticks. Guests were expected all to eat out of a common wooden bowl, and to use the instruments with which Nature had provided them ... The fare was copious, but not varied—consisting of boiled mutton, without bread or other substitute, and a little salted horse-flesh thrown in as an
entrée:
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Sonya had planned to stay behind that summer while Sergey took the annual end-of-year school exams (to ensure he was on target for university entrance), but the telegraphist missed out the crucial words 'do not' from Tolstoy's telegram: 'House, water, horses, carriages good; but dung, flies, drought; [do not] advise you come.' She duly arrived with the rest of the family. Strakhov also came out to the steppe for the first time that summer, and he greatly enjoyed the 'oceans of wheat and endless herds of horses and flocks of sheep', but could not help noticing Tolstoy was restless and out of sorts.
⁵⁷

On 8 August, two days after everyone arrived back at Yasnaya Polyana, Turgenev arrived for his first visit in nearly twenty years. He had never met Sonya, let alone any of the six children, who now ranged in age from fifteen down to nine months, and it was a joyous reunion. Meeting the tall, white-haired writer with the sad, kind eyes was very exciting for the children, and Sonya made him play chess with Sergey, so her son would have a story to dine out on later (he was soundly beaten).
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Turgenev's second visit a month later, when he was on his way back to Paris from his estate in Oryol province, was less euphoric. Despite his new Christian-inspired humility, Tolstoy could only deal with Turgenev in small doses. He still felt riled that Turgenev only 'played at life', and realised that they would never be fully reconciled. That summer Tolstoy had built himself a hut in the woods so he could work in peace and quiet; one day Sonya found them both there arguing heatedly with each other. The usually mild-mannered, urbane Turgenev was gesticulating wildly, red in the face. After so much time apart, Turgenev had no real inkling of the changes taking place in his friend's spiritual life, and the biggest shock for him was encountering Tolstoy's new, dismissive attitude to his own published fiction. The Tolstoy he knew, after all, was the peerless writer who effortlessly outclassed his entire generation, and he was bewildered by this uncompromising new stance.
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Tolstoy's decision to move his study to another room in the house that autumn was perhaps a symptom of his changing outlook during this time. He was still trying to get his novel about the Decembrists off the ground, but he derived more enjoyment from reading Dickens
(Martin Chuzzlewit
and
Dombey and Son).
In February 1879 he eventually gave up with the Decembrists, just as he had with his Peter the Great novel. He had produced seventeen different versions of an opening chapter, and twelve of them were set in a peasant environment, but his heart was not in it. The problem, he found, was not so much that the Decembrist movement owed its origins to Russian officers coming into contact with French ideas during their occupation of Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, but that so many of the Decembrists were in fact French Catholics who had escaped to Russia after the 1789 Revolution.
⁶⁰

One person disappointed never to see the publication of the Decembrist novel was Monsieur Nief, or rather Jules Montels, himself a revolutionary who had been forced to flee from France. Although he describes Tolstoy as a 'model husband, excellent father, relatively rich', it was his memories of Tolstoy's research for 'The Decembrists' which stood out for him during the two years he lived at Yasnaya Polyana. This is the subject of the short memoir he published in an anarchist journal in Paris immediately after Tolstoy's death. Montels must have found it hard not to blow his cover while he talked to Tolstoy about the Decembrists. He was clearly electrified when Tolstoy showed him the original letter written by the Decembrist leader Sergey Muravyov-Apostol to his parents on the eve of his execution in 1826. The letter, written in French, 'in that fine and expansive handwriting of our grandfathers' ('de cette bonne et grosse écriture de nos grands pères'), had been entrusted to Tolstoy by Muravyov-Apostol's elder brother Matvey, whom Tolstoy met in February 1878 in Moscow. Matvey Muravyov-Apostol spent thirty years in exile in Siberia before returning to settle in Moscow after the 1856 amnesty.
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In 1910 Montels felt there must have been a sensational reason for the disappearance of what would have been an explosive novel showing how a generation of young Russians acquired ideas of 'Liberté et Justice'. He wondered whether the
comtesse
(i.e. Sonya) had burned the manuscript, or whether a jittery government, reeling from three assassination attempts on Alexander II between 1879 and 1880, had ordered its destruction.
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The truth was rather more prosaic.

Tolstoy's interest in the Decembrists palled, but he could not sit still for long. Poring over Prince Pyotr Dolgorukov's volumes on Russian heraldry stimulated a creative interest in his own ancestors, so he now turned back to the eighteenth century, and pondered writing a novel about the fate of one of his ancestors. There was a story in his family that one of his maternal great-uncles had been exiled to Siberia for some murky deed, and he was curious to know more, so he fired off a barrage of letters to friends and relatives.
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A distant relative wrote back to tell him that, according to family lore, his great-uncle Vasily Gorchakov had been sent to Siberia for bringing back to Russia a grand piano stuffed with banknotes. That was enough to fire Tolstoy's imagination: he drafted four beginnings of a new novel, and one of them was written in the 'uneducated', simple language he had pledged to use when he was writing stories for his
ABC.
He reiterated this vow to Sonya in 1878, by saying that anything he wrote in future would be in a language simple enough for children to understand every word.
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As it turned out, none of Tolstoy's contacts could produce any more information about Gorchakov's case, so that project was stopped in its tracks.

Tolstoy now switched his attention back to the time of Peter the Great and his successor Anna Ioannovna (who reigned from 1730 to 1740), this time sketching out a novel which would explore its 'unofficial' history—including that of the Old Believers.
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Alexandrine had difficulty keeping up with Tolstoy's plans for his new novel. One moment he was asking for help with materials about the Decembrists, then he was interested in his ancestor Vasily Gorchakov, and now in March 1879 he asked her to help him gain access to secret archives relating to early-eighteenth-century Russian history. At the same time he asked for her help in securing the release of three Old Believer bishops who had been sitting in a prison in Suzdal for twenty-two years as 'religious criminals'. One of them was ninety. Tolstoy had found about their plight from another Old Believer bishop he had been meeting with in Tula.
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All that month, in fact, he had been spending time on the highway linking Moscow and Kiev which ran close to Yasnaya Polyana, and talking to the crowds of pilgrims making their way to the 'holy places' on foot.

Tolstoy had given up thinking he could ever gain any religious insight from people who came from his own class, and whose lives seemed to be a contradiction of their faith. But for the poor and illiterate, be they monks, peasants or sectarians, religion seemed to be an indispensable part of their lives, and it was from them that Tolstoy finally discovered the truth about faith and salvation which he had been seeking. Some of them were Stranniki—wanderers who spent their lives going from monastery to monastery, carrying all their worldly goods in a bundle on their back. Tolstoy walked a part of the way with some of the pilgrims he met. One was an old man of ninety-four, heading to Kiev for the fourth time. Others walked barefoot or carried heavy chains as penance. They had already walked well over 100 miles from the Trinity St Sergius Monastery outside Moscow, and they had another 400 to go.