Tolstoy (56 page)

Two very different worlds had merged during Syutayev's visit to the Tolstoy household in 1882, but this was an exception. As Tolstoy and his wife were very well aware, their paths were now diverging. 'The difference between my husband and myself came about, not because
I
in my heart went away from him,' Sonya wrote later; 'I and my life remained the same as before. It was
he
who went away.'
¹³
Perhaps if she had not endured twelve pregnancies, three miscarriages and ensuing bouts of serious illness, and had not borne the responsibilities of running a large household on her shoulders, she could have followed her husband on his spiritual journey and spent her time reading books. She had grown into adulthood under his tutelage, and now she was expected to renounce all the values he had inculcated in her and meekly follow him. But she wondered how it would be possible to eke out an existence on next to no income with eight children to clothe and feed.

Undeterred by his setback with the Moscow census, Tolstoy now channelled his missionary zeal into the written word. Apart from his article about the census and his story 'What Men Live By', he had not published anything new since the last instalment of
Anna Karenina
appeared in 1877. Five years on, he was ready to disseminate his newfound religious ideas to the wider public, and he began that process by reading the manuscript of his
Confession
to Sergey Yuriev, one of the editors of the journal
Russian Thought.
Not least because Tolstoy had burned his bridges with Katkov and the
Russian Messenger
over his views regarding the Serbo-Turkish War,
Russian Thought
was the obvious journal to turn to. Based in Moscow, it had immediately acquired a distinguished reputation for its liberal views when it was founded in 1880—Tolstoy's friend Prugavin, for example, had already published several articles about schismatics and peasant sectarians in it.
¹⁴
Yuriev agreed to publish
Confession
as soon as he heard it, and within a few weeks Tolstoy was holding the proofs in his hands. The projected May issue of
Russian Thought
was duly submitted to the office of the religious censor, and after Tolstoy complied with requests for revisions, both he and Yuriev were hopeful of the issue being approved for publication.

At this point,
Confession
was still entitled 'Introduction to an Unpublished Work'—the work in question being
An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology,
his response to Metropolitan Makary's
Orthodox Dogmatic Theology.
All secular writing which touched on questions of faith, or was related to the Church in some way, had to be submitted for approval by the religious censor committee. Its members were based at the Trinity St Sergius Monastery outside Moscow, but were beholden to the Holy Synod, the secular governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had its headquarters in St Petersburg. On 21 June the committee finally gave its verdict. On the basis of a close examination of Tolstoy's text, Archpriest Filaret, Rector of the Moscow Theological Seminary, came to the conclusion that Tolstoy's attitude to Orthodoxy was disrespectful and so his article was therefore inadmissible. The committee demanded that it be cut from each printed copy of the journal and destroyed by the police. Despite this edict, which made headline news in the press,
Confession
was soon widely read. Such was the interest aroused by any new work by Tolstoy that several senior figures in the government demanded to be sent copies before they were destroyed, and these soon circulated. Multiple copies were also made from the few offprints of the final proofs which had remained in the
Russian Thought
editorial office. These were then hectographed or lithographed and distributed throughout Russia with the help of a student organisation in Petersburg which specialised in this kind of samizdat (and whose main warehouse was ironically a Petersburg apartment whose owner had an indirect connection to the Minister for Internal Affairs—head of the Russian police).
Confession
became available for purchase at three roubles a copy, and thus reached a far wider readership than it would have done through the legitimate means of the 3,000-circulation
Russian Thought
.
¹⁵
Turgenev even heard about it in Paris, and wrote to ask Tolstoy for a copy. Despite finding it rather depressing to read (its argument was based on false principles in his opinion, which led to a kind of nihilistic negation of all forms of human life), he nevertheless still regarded Tolstoy as the most remarkable individual in Russia.
¹⁶

Tolstoy viewed
Confession
as the first part of a tetralogy, of which the second and third parts, his
Investigation of Dogmatic Theology
and
Union and Translation of the Four Gospels
remained unpublished. Completing a first draft of the fourth part,
What I Believe,
became his task for the summer of 1882. If the first three parts of this major new project were designed to expose the falsity of the Church's doctrine, the goal of
What I Believe
was to reveal the true meaning of Christianity, as set out in the Gospels. For Tolstoy, that meaning was essentially contained in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, 5-7), which alone offered the possibility of creating heaven on earth in his opinion. He was also convinced that it was the Church's teachings which actually made it impossible to follow the prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount to the letter.
¹⁷

Completing the first draft of
What I Believe
produced a state of spiritual euphoria in Tolstoy, and reawakened a desire which had lain dormant ever since he had set out on his quest to live a life consonant with the religious and moral principles he had painfully been hammering out for himself. He wanted to leave his family and make a complete break with his former life, but voicing this desire aloud to his wife resulted in the first serious rift between them. The violent row on a hot August night which led to them sleeping apart was not easily forgotten. Sonya had devoted her life to her husband and his writings, and to bringing up their children. She was already angry that he had been neglecting them ever since they had moved to Moscow, and the thought of him leaving altogether was devastating. Tolstoy was, in fact, deeply conflicted. He was repelled by his family's patrician lifestyle, but he still loved Sonya deeply—they would have two more children during the next few difficult years—and he had a keen sense of his obligations. In the spring of 1882, after resigning himself to the fact that his family was going to live in Moscow whether he liked it or not, Tolstoy went house-hunting. Days after delivering the proofs of
Confession
to the editorial office of
Russian Thought,
he finally decided to buy an old wooden house for them in a quiet back street on the outskirts of the city centre. He had been to visit it several times and negotiated a price of 36,000 roubles. He then spent part of the summer carrying out improvements and repairs so the family could move in at the beginning of autumn.

The house, which dated back to 1808, had belonged to a merchant couple who had bred large numbers of dogs, and was not in a fashionable residential area.
¹⁸
Sonya was crestfallen when she first came to Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Lane and set eyes on the rather shabby and nondescript house, which had a lunatic asylum and a brewery for neighbours and stood opposite a textile factory. But it had a lush, tranquil garden which made it seem more like a country estate than an inner-city house, and Tolstoy's mind was made up by the profusion of roses, gooseberry bushes and fruit trees it contained.
¹⁹
Tolstoy worked conscientiously that summer: as well as whitewashing, wallpapering and plastering, there were stoves to repair, parquet floors to lay and pieces of furniture to buy. The family moved in on 8 October, happy to be settled at last in what would be their home for the winter months. While Sonya became caught up in a hectic whirl of activities, as she sought to keep all the children under control as well as entertain them, Tolstoy consoled himself that autumn by studying Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi, who was rather taken aback to find his pupil arguing with him about the meaning of certain passages of the Old Testament after only a few lessons.
²⁰

As time went on, Tolstoy sought to bring more aspects of his life into line with his religious ideals, and 1883 was a pivotal year in this regard. He now wore peasant clothes in the city as well as at home in the country, dispensed with his title wherever possible and tried to avoid having to be waited upon, but he was conscious that there was a lot more he could do. While visiting Yasnaya Polyana that May, after doing what he could to help put out a fire in the village which destroyed twenty-two peasant homes, he took the first steps in divesting himself of his property, including his literary works, by handing to Sonya power of attorney. Immediately afterwards he travelled for the last time to Samara, where he sold his horses and cattle. He also divided up his land there into five plots to let to peasants.
²¹
During his month on the steppe, Tolstoy engaged in heated discussions with a peasant revolutionary living under police surveillance, and endeavoured to show him and his comrades that the use of violence was both immoral and futile.
²²
He also wrote to Sonya to tell her he had renewed his contact with the local Molokans, with whom he had further long conversations about Christianity. He knew full well that this contact would come to the attention of the police, but despite Sonya's qualms, his response was 'Let them report it'.
²³

Fearless as Tolstoy was, he was probably unaware of the extent of the police operation which had been mounted to follow his every move. At the same time, the police probably had no idea quite how much trouble Tolstoy was going to cause them in the coming years. His meetings with Prugavin and the Molokans out on the steppe had been immediately reported to the Bishop of Samara by a local priest back in the summer of 1881, and since then, the matter had been transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg, which now began to monitor his 'harmful activities'. In September, for the first time since 1862 (when his peasant school activities had resulted in Yasnaya Polyana being searched for seditious material), Tolstoy was placed under permanent covert surveillance.
²⁴
In December that year Tolstoy was improbably nominated to be the next Marshal of the Nobility in his district by the Tula local government, which had not yet been informed about the surveillance activities. Unaware that Tolstoy had immediately turned down the appointment, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, wrote to warn the new Minister of Internal Affairs, Count Dmitry Tolstoy (the distant relative who in the 1870s had been Minister of Education):

In recent years Count Tolstoy's fantasies have suddenly changed once again, and he has succumbed to religious mania. This has resulted in his complete estrangement from Christianity—in the sense of belief. He has put together a retelling of the Gospels in his own words with a commentary, full of cynicism, in which he preaches Christian morality in the rational sense, rejecting the teaching of a personal God and the divinity of Christ the saviour. He had intended to publish this work abroad, but refrained after earnest pleading from his wife (his last child has not been christened, despite his wife's entreaties), and it is now circulating in manuscript. He is in contact with all the rational sects, the Molokans, the [Syutayevites] and so on...
²⁵

Tolstoy's movements during his trip to Samara in the summer of 1883 were indeed watched closely. A local police agent reported that Tolstoy had tried to preach the principle of equality to a group of peasants, whom he had exhorted to renounce private property, and reject the government. A few days later it was reported that he had been persuading peasants that they were wasting their time decorating churches and going to services.
²⁶
From now on, the police would sedulously follow Tolstoy's every move, noting in its regular bulletins his arrivals and departures from Moscow.
²⁷

Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana that July to find a brief letter from Turgenev, with whom he had been in affectionate correspondence. Turgenev informed him he was now on his deathbed, but that was not the main reason for writing:

I'm actually writing to you in order to tell you how glad I was to be your contemporary, and to put to you my last, sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! This gift has come to you from where everything else comes from. Oh, how happy I would be if I could think that my request makes an impact on you!! I am a finished man—the doctors do not even know what to call my malady, Névralgie stomacale goutteuse. I can't walk, I can't eat, I can't sleep, but so what! It's even boring to repeat all this! My friend, great writer of the Russian land—heed my request! Let me know that you have received this note, and let me once again embrace you, and your family very, very warmly, can't write more, too tired.
²⁸

Tolstoy was deeply touched by this letter (although he was later probably rather annoyed when Turgenev's phrase 'great writer of the Russian land' became a cliché regularly fixed to his name). Turgenev died the following month, unaware that his friend had in fact partially returned to literature. In 1881 Tolstoy had started work on a new novella which would in time receive the title
The Death of Ivan Ilych.
He had put it aside in 1883, but would return to work on it the following year, placating Sonya, who also longed for her husband to return to fiction so that she could once again be part of his creative life as his copyist.