Tolstoy (55 page)

Tolstoy had been working sporadically on the short story 'What Men Live By' throughout 1881. Utterly different from
Anna Karenina,
his last published work, which was a sophisticated novel aimed at an educated audience, this new work was a story from peasant life, and a parable which put forward his new Christian views about love. A reworking of a well-known legend about an angel sent to earth by God to learn 'what men live by', the story had been told to him by Vasily Shchegolenok, one of the last living peasant 'reciters' of oral folk epics from the Russian north. He had come to stay at Yasnaya Polyana in 1879 when he was already an old man (and still illiterate), and Tolstoy had listened to him with rapt attention. He took particular care to write 'What Men Live By' in a simple and lucid language, and incorporated several of the folk expressions he had heard during his conversations with Shchegolenok, and also with the pilgrims and wanderers on the road to Kiev near Yasnaya Polyana. Despite its simplicity, Tolstoy's work on the story was characteristically meticulous. He produced thirty-two manuscripts and nine different beginnings before being satisfied with the draft he submitted for publication. The eight epigraphs about love which preface the story are taken from his own version of St John's Gospel. Writing morally engaged fiction in a clear and simple style was one way Tolstoy planned to propagate his Christian ideals. He also now felt a need to protest in public about the evil he saw around him, and this was something he would do in an increasingly loud voice for the remaining three decades of his life.

11. SECTARIAN, ANARCHIST, HOLY FOOL

There is one way to live joyously and that is to be an apostle. Not just in the sense of going around and talking, but in the sense that your arms, and your legs, and your stomach, and your sides as well as your tongue all serve the truth...

Letter to Vasily Alexeyev, December 1884
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TOLSTOY'S CRUSADE
to bring Christian principles into the lives of educated Russians began with a newspaper article he published on 20 January 1882. He had been shocked by the degradation and poverty he encountered when he went to visit a doss-house in one of Moscow's worst slum areas a few weeks earlier, and when he learned that a census was to be held in the city, he seized the opportunity to speak out. It was not the first time he had appealed to the consciences of his fellow countrymen, as he had publicised the plight of starving peasants during the Samara famine in 1873, and been successful in raising millions of roubles in aid. Now, however, his mission was not merely humanitarian but religious—he did not want cash but Christian brotherly love. Tolstoy was also determined to lead by example, having applied to be one of the eighty people appointed to supervise the census. He specifically requested to work in one of the poorest districts, moreover, near to where he himself lived in the western part of the city. The night before Tolstoy's article 'About the Census in Moscow' appeared on the front page of one of the city's most popular daily newspapers, he went to the city Duma to read it out to the organisation committee, and then distributed hundreds of copies to everyone involved in conducting the census when it began three days later.

Tolstoy was profoundly disturbed by the prospect of the 2,000 (mostly student) census-takers entering crowded, infested tenements to ask routine statistical questions of people dying of starvation, and he wasted no time in his article in confronting the issue:

What does this census mean for us Muscovites conducting the census who are not academics? Two things. Firstly, we will probably discover among the tens of thousands of us who live on an income running into the tens of thousands that there are tens of thousands of people without food, clothes and shelter; and secondly, that our brothers and sons will be going to look at all this, and calmly noting down on the forms how many are dying of hunger and cold.

Both of these things are very bad.
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True to the anarchic spirit which would become more and more apparent in Tolstoy's thought during the following decade, he rejected the idea of institutional involvement, either at the government or the philanthropic level, likewise conventional charitable enterprises such as fundraising balls, bazaars and theatre performances. Money, he insisted, was in itself an evil, so there should be no public proclamations of the sums donated by wealthy individuals. Throwing money at the problem was no substitute for practical assistance as far as he was concerned, and merely let people off the hook. Tolstoy took his inspiration straight from the New Testament, by paraphrasing Jesus's parable of 'The Sheep and the Goats' in St Matthew's Gospel: 'For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
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Tolstoy urged Muscovites to overcome their fears of coming into contact with the bedbugs, fleas, typhoid, diphtheria and smallpox which were rife in the filthy conditions the poor were forced to live in. He called on the young census-takers to sit down with those in need, and show them love and respect by talking to them about their lives.

Unfortunately for Tolstoy, some census-takers were so impoverished themselves that they undoubtedly greeted this exhortation to practise Christian charity with bemusement. One of them was a twenty-two-year-old medical student called Anton Chekhov, then living in Moscow's red-light district in the north of the city. His father was a former small-time merchant who had fled their provincial hometown after going bankrupt, and Chekhov had started contributing to low-grade comic journals in order to keep his family afloat. Working as a census-taker provided him with a few extra kopecks, and also good material for his next humorous piece, which as usual he signed with a nom de plume, thinking ahead to the future scholarly publications he dreamed of writing. The official census consisted of fifteen standard questions relating to name, gender, age, marital status, place of birth, faith, occupation and so on. In the 'Supplementary Questions to the Personal Forms of the Statistical Census Suggested by Antosha Chekhonte', a further ten questions were added, including:

16. Are you a
clever
person or a
fool?

17. Are you an honest person? a swindler? a robber? a scoundrel? a lawyer? or?

20. Is your wife blonde? brunette? chestnut? a redhead?

21. Does your wife
beat
you or
not?
Do you
beat
her or
not?

22. How much did you weigh when you were ten years old?

23. Do you consume hot drinks?
yes
or
no
?
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It is unlikely that Tolstoy ever read
The Alarm Clock,
where this irreverent skit appeared, but he would develop a great admiration for the short stories Chekhov wrote for literary journals later on in his career. If Chekhov paid scant attention to 'About the Census in Moscow' for his part, he nevertheless regarded Tolstoy as Russia's greatest living artist, and would also succumb for a while to his hypnotic powers of rational argument.

Tolstoy failed in his mission to induce Muscovites to show brotherly love to the poor, as his appeal only resulted in him receiving requests for financial help, and misunderstanding on the part of the press, but his article nevertheless won him an early follower. Indeed, the article's impact on the painter Nikolay Ge was so tumultuous that he left his remote farmhouse in the Ukraine and got on a train to Moscow so that he could come and embrace the 'great man' who had written it. Like Tolstoy, Ge (a descendant of a French émigré called Gay) had become preoccupied with religious and moral questions in the 1870s and had come to the same conclusions: art should not be practised for commercial gain, while engaging in physical labour was the path to saving one's soul. In early March 1882 Ge turned up at Tolstoy's front door in Moscow, and the discovery of their shared beliefs led to the blossoming of a close friendship.
⁵

Ge was lucky to find Tolstoy at home. Several times that spring Sonya was left to fend on her own while her husband retreated to Yasnaya Polyana to recuperate from the trauma of living in Moscow, which he condemned as a 'foul sewer'.
⁶
For the first time, however, Sonya found herself almost wishing Tolstoy would stay at Yasnaya Polyana.
⁷
She had her hands full with the family (two of their eight children were under five in 1882), but she was also beginning to take her first steps into Moscow society. As Countess Tolstoy she had an entrée into all the best drawing rooms, and as the wife of the famous novelist she was now also a celebrity in her own right, and she found it rather intoxicating being the centre of attention for once. She had missed out on going to balls and soirées in her youth, but now she prepared to live vicariously through their daughter Tanya, who was about to turn eighteen, and as keen to dress up and go out as she was. Sonya was only thirty-eight in 1882, and still very attractive. Tolstoy, by contrast, desired only to simplify his life now, and wanted nothing to do with the conventions of polite society. Instead he gravitated towards peasant sectarians like Vasily Syutayev and ascetics like the 'Moscow Socrates' Nikolay Fyodorov, the eccentric philosopher-librarian of the Rumyantsev Library who deplored all material possessions (even refusing a salary), and slept on bare planks covered only by his threadbare overcoat.

Vasily Syutayev came to visit Tolstoy after the census, and his arrival caused a great stir in Moscow. The tiny sect that he had established in Tver was the subject of a recently published article in the new journal
Russian Thought,
and such was Syutayev's popularity that one art shop in Moscow even stocked copies of his photograph for purchase.
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Tolstoy also encouraged his new friend Ilya Repin to come and paint Syutayev's portrait in his study. Family friends who came to visit Sonya were so curious about the peasant prophet that they abandoned the drawing room in order to go to Tolstoy's study and hear what he had to say. His sister Masha was particularly piqued to have her conversation with Syutayev interrupted, and hoped he would be able to go and have a cup of tea with her one evening so they could continue their discussion.
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Syutayev's visit to Moscow was cut short, however, when word of his presence in the city reached Prince Dolgorukov, the city's governor general, who swiftly despatched one of his gendarmes to arrest him and send him back to Tver (where the local clergy had already taken him to court for refusing to christen his son). Tolstoy refused to speak to the young gendarme, and slammed the door in his face, prompting Dolgorukov to send round one of his officials, Vladimir Istomin, who was a family friend. Tolstoy's brusque response to Istomin's invitation to come and explain himself to Prince Dolgorukov was that the governor general could perfectly well come and see him himself if he wanted to talk to him. Syutayev and Tolstoy were henceforth prohibited from seeing each other.
¹⁰

Sectarian,
Repin's portrait of Syutayev, was acquired for Tretyakov's gallery on Tolstoy's recommendation. In due course Repin would paint a series of celebrated portraits of Tolstoy, with whom he now embarked on a thirty-year friendship. He had first acquired fame in 1873 with an epic canvas depicting a group of destitute peasants forced into earning a demeaning living by hauling barges up the Volga, and henceforth had come to be seen as the 'Tolstoy of painting'. There was thus an inevitability to him meeting the Tolstoy of literature, just as there was an inevitability to the author of
An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology
challenging Repin on the subject of his painting
Religious Procession,
which is what he had been working on when he received a surprise visitor at his Moscow studio one evening in the autumn of 1880. The subject of Repin's painting—the annual procession accompanying the twenty-mile journey of one of Russia's most precious icons from the Znamensky Cathedral in Kursk to the Korennaya Hermitage where it first appeared—represented for Tolstoy the epitome of Russian Orthodox ritual and superstition, and he could not see the point of making it the subject of a painting.

Since the time it had first taken place in the early seventeenth century, the Kursk procession had been drawing Russians from all sections of society in ever greater numbers. There were a few dozen members of Syutayev's sect, but well over 60,000 people took part in the three-mile-long Kursk procession by the 1880s, including mounted police, pilgrims carrying the wonder-working icon, deacons carrying banners, choristers, clergy, the provincial governor and his staff in full dress uniforms, the Bishop of Kursk in ceremonial regalia, officials and their families, merchants and peasants, all in strict hierarchical sequence.
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Whether or not Tolstoy's reproof had anything to do with it, by the time
Religious Procession in Kursk Province
was finished three years later, Repin's painting had been transformed into a thinly disguised attack on Russia's entrenched caste system, with strong hints that it was maintained by means of brutality and violence. The canvas attracted 4,000 visitors in one week when it was first exhibited in 1883 due to its provocative content, and was acquired for the Tretyakov Gallery at the record price of 10,000 roubles, despite Repin's refusal to tone down its trenchant social criticism.
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