Tolstoy (65 page)

Despite her feelings of distaste, Sonya had to learn to live with
tyomnye
Tolstoyans in their midst. One devoted early follower of her husband was a woman of her own age, Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt, an unmarried teacher at a prim Moscow girls' school. In March 1884 Maria Alexandrovna had turned up on Tolstoy's doorstep with her friend Olga Barsheva and asked him for a copy of his
Gospel.
When Tolstoy informed her he only had it in manuscript, she responded brightly that they would be happy to copy it. And so the two friends divided the manuscript up, and spent several evenings in Tolstoy's study becoming acquainted with his ideas. Soon Maria Alexandrovna was taken on as an assistant to Tolstoy's main copyist at that time, Alexander Ivanov. Her services were soon required, as Alexander Ivanov was an alcoholic former officer who often absconded on drinking bouts. He did very good work on the days that he was sober, but Tolstoy had to rescue him from various slums on a regular basis.
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Maria Alexandrovna's life changed utterly when she was won over to Tolstoy's
Gospel.
She had been an ardent Orthodox Christian, but she now took down her icons and replaced them with Tolstoy's portrait.
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She also resigned her teaching position, went with her friend Olga to join one of the first Tolstoyan communes down in the Caucasus, then in 1893 came back north when Olga died. By this time she wanted to be near Tolstoy, with whom she had become close friends. After settling into a tiny thatch-covered
izba
on Tanya Lvovna's newly inherited land, three miles away from Yasnaya Polyana, she led a model Tolstoyan life until the end of her days. Sometimes she would come up to Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy's sister was making her annual summer visit from her convent, and her skeletal frame stood in stark contrast to the rotund figure of Maria Nikolayevna, who was famously fond of eating. It was Maria Alexandrovna, with her abstemious diet of cabbage soup and grain, who somehow seemed far more like a nun.
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Maria Alexandrovna relished living like an anchorite by the sweat of her brow with the help of her vegetable patch and her cow Manechka, but there were other Tolstoyans who wanted the security of feeling they were part of an organisation. In 1893, before
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
was even finished, let alone copied and distributed, unfounded rumours started flying of an imminent Tolstoyan congress. Tolstoy was both amused and horrified at the idea. 'That's wonderful!' he exclaimed. 'We'll turn up to this congress and set up some kind of Salvation Army. We'll get a uniform - some hats with a cockade. Maybe they will make me a general. Masha can sew me some blue trousers.'
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Tolstoy was happy to show leadership by setting out and imparting to the world what he believed to be the truth, but he did not want actually to lead anything - the whole point was to get away from organisations. In his ideal world, in fact, there would be no organisations, yet he could not avoid a movement forming amongst those attracted to his ideas, and many of his followers were fanatics. The other unsavoury side of Tolstoyanism for Sonya was the 'militancy' with which her husband's followers clung to the doctrine of non-violence, thereby placing themselves in an openly antagonistic position with regard to the Russian government. There were inevitable unpleasant repercussions, but these only seemed to goad Tolstoy to campaign more vigorously for human rights, at both ends of the social spectrum.

One person who received Tolstoy's direct support was Prince Dmitry Khilkov, who became a key figure amongst the Tolstoyans (before he went over to the other side and became a revolutionary).
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Khilkov was a graduate of the prestigious Corps des Pages in St Petersburg, and the youngest officer to be appointed a colonel in the Russian army.
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Like Chertkov, who was four years older than him, Khilkov turned his back on a brilliant military career. By the time he resigned from the army in 1884, the experience of killing a Turkish soldier in the Russo-Turkish War while serving in a Cossack regiment, and contacts with sectarians while stationed in the Caucasus, had turned him into a pronounced pacifist, and a Christian after Tolstoy's heart. Inspired by reading Tolstoy's
What I Believe,
he went back to his estate in Kharkov province, sold the land to his peasants for a fraction of its real value, built himself a simple farmhouse to live in, threw away his Western-style clothing and started leading a simplified, agricultural life. In 1887, when he was twenty-nine, Khilkov came to Moscow to meet Tolstoy, with whom he established an instant rapport.
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The concern Khilkov had shown for sectarians, ethnic minorities and rank and file soldiers (whose conditions had barely improved since the Crimean War) had already attracted the attention of the secret police, and their surveillance activities only intensified after he became friends with Tolstoy.

Khilkov turned his small thatched farmhouse into a local centre of Tolstoyan Christianity, and opened a library so that peasants could read the central texts in the Tolstoyan canon, which aroused hostility among landowners and clergy. Things came to a head in 1891. In March, following Khilkov's successful missionary activity in the area, Tolstoy was anathematised in Kharkov cathedral, and then in August Khilkov wrote to tell Tolstoy about his frosty encounter with Father Ioann (John) of Kronstadt, with whom he had argued about baptism.
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He had been curious to set eyes on this charismatic priest when he came on a visit to Kharkov as he had attracted a large following amongst the populace, and so had acceded to his mother's request that he go and meet him, but it had not gone well. Khilkov's mother was outraged that her son had not consecrated his recent marriage in a church, or baptised his one-year-old child, thus depriving him by law of his title. In November Chief Procurator Pobedonostsev wrote to Alexander III to warn him of the dangers of the impact of Tolstoyanism on the peasantry in an area where there was already unrest. Out of the 6,000 parishioners in Khilkov's district, he wrote, only five old women were now going to church, and large numbers were refusing to enlist in the army.
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The authorities now moved quickly. In January 1892 Khilkov was exiled to the Caucasus, causing Tolstoy to express envy, but those feelings were tempered in October the following year. With the blessing of Father Ioann of Kronstadt, his mother arrived in the Caucasus accompanied by police officers. Princess Khilkova proceeded to remove her three-and-a-half-year-old grandson and two-year-old granddaughter from their horrified parents and take them back to St Petersburg, where she christened them without their parents' consent.
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Tolstoy wrote a letter to Alexander III to protest, and Khilkov's wife travelled to St Petersburg to petition the Tsar personally, but to no avail, despite the public outcry.

Khilkov's Tolstoyan ministry had certainly produced results. The peasant schoolteacher Evdokim Drozhzhin was rapidly converted to Tolstoyanism after meeting Khilkov in 1889, and two years later he was jailed after he refused to enlist when called up for military service. There were to be many other conscientious objectors who refused to be conscripted on religious grounds, but Tolstoy took a particular interest in Drozhzhin, and was deeply concerned when he was first kept for twelve months in solitary confinement, and then sent to serve in a disciplinary battalion in Voronezh. The conditions were truly brutal, as Chertkov discovered when he visited Drozhzhin, and he successfully campaigned to have him transferred to a regular prison, but it was too late. In January 1894, at the age of twenty-eight, Drozhzhin died of consumption at the start of his nine-year sentence. Tolstoyanism had claimed its first martyr, but there were chroniclers and hagiographers ready to spring into action, as well as secret police agents watching like hawks. In June, soon after Tolstoy's follower Evgeny Popov finished a book about Drozhzhin, his home in Moscow was searched by the police and the manuscript confiscated. A few months later the Russian press was placed under orders not to publish anything at all about Drozhzhin.
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Popov nevertheless managed to resurrect his book from drafts that had carefully been stored elsewhere, and Tolstoy completed it by writing a foreword. There was, of course, no chance it would pass the censor in Russia, and it was published in Berlin in 1895.
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The son of an impoverished noble from Perm province, Popov had joined Tolstoy's growing number of followers in 1886 when he was twenty-two. Convinced that Tolstoy could tell him about the meaning of life, he one day got on a train to Yasnaya Polyana to go and talk to him. Before long he had become a vegetarian and was tilling the land. After separating from his wealthy young wife, who did not share his new beliefs, Popov led a rather peripatetic existence, moving from one Tolstoyan colony to another, but then went to work for The Intermediary in Moscow. In 1889 Popov got to know Tolstoy better when he accompanied him on his annual three-day journey by foot from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana at the beginning of the summer. This was the third time Tolstoy had undertaken to walk the full 120 miles home. He would take with him only a small bundle, plus a notebook and pencil, so he could jot down ideas and stories he heard along the way, and would find overnight accommodation with hospitable peasants. It was his way of protesting against the intrusion of the railways into rural Russia, which had brought about mass peasant migration into the cities.

As well as working for The Intermediary, Popov also spent some time at the main headquarters of the Tolstoyan movement at Chertkov's estate in Voronezh province. In 1892 he was employed for a time as Tolstoy's copyist at Yasnaya Polyana, and assisted him in the famine relief effort at Begichevka. After next writing the book about Drozhzhin, he collaborated with Tolstoy on a Russian version of Lao Tzu's
Tao Te Ching
for The Intermediary. This was a project which Tolstoy cared deeply about. Victor von Strauss had produced the first German translation of the
Tao Te Ching
in 1870, and this was the text which Popov translated into Russian.
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Tolstoy checked over Popov's translation and wrote an introduction to them, explaining that the basic teaching in the
Tao Te Ching
was the same as in all great religions. Back in the 1870s he had chiselled away at his translations of Aesop's already pithy fables in order to distil their essence, and it is not hard to see why Tolstoy was drawn to Lao Tzu's lapidary insights, which accorded so much with his own hard-won beliefs:

People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes,
carrying weapons,
drinking a lot and eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money:
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
isn't the way.
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Tolstoy's attraction to the religions of the Orient only increased towards the end of his life. Some people even argued that his pared-down belief system had more in common with Buddhism than with Christianity.
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After translating Lao Tzu, Popov took up the cause of another Tolstoyan conscientious objector, who was about to be exiled to Siberia after serving his term in a disciplinary battalion. While visiting him at the central transit prison in Moscow in December 1894, Popov was intrigued by three men dressed half like peasants, half like Cossacks.
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They were Dukhobors - 'wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit' - and they had come up from their home in the Caucasus to meet with Pyotr Verigin, who was their leader. Verigin had already spent seven years in exile in the northern province of Arkhangelsk, following disputes with other Dukhobors over his leadership, and he was now about to be sent to Berezov, in the Siberian province of Tobolsk, where he faced another seven years of exile. Popov introduced himself to the three Dukhobors, and swiftly arranged another meeting to which he could bring Tolstoy when he heard their story. It was to be a fateful encounter.

The lack of historical records makes tracing their origins difficult, but the Dukhobors seem to have emerged from disparate groups of like-minded religious dissenters in the Ukraine who were forced to settle along Russia's southern borders at some point in the eighteenth century. It was only under Nicholas I that they formed a distinct community, however, when in the 1830s they were again forcibly resettled by imperial decree in the more remote reaches of the Russian Empire's new Caucasian territories, close to the border with the Ottoman Empire. Like many peasant sectarians, the Dukhobors acquired a reputation for their abstemious, hard-working and humble way of life. Believing, like Tolstoy, that 'The Kingdom of God is Within You', they revered the sanctity of all human life, thus were opposed not only to taking up arms, but to almost every aspect of the Russian Orthodox Church, since it supported the state during warfare. This meant rejecting all rituals, sacraments, icons, clergy, sacred buildings, and also the Scriptures themselves, in favour of seeking guidance from the voice of individual conscience. The Dukhobors first came into serious conflict with the Russian government in 1887, when military conscription was introduced in the Caucasus, and the situation worsened in 1894, when all Russian citizens were required to swear allegiance to the Tsar.
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Before his first meetings with the Dukhobors, Tolstoy knew very little about their beliefs, since their existence was officially frowned upon and barely documented. Tolstoy could not meet Verigin himself, who was imprisoned like a convicted criminal while awaiting his departure for Siberia, but on 9 December 1894 Popov and Biryukov accompanied him to a meeting with the three Dukhobors who had come to see Verigin off, one of whom was his brother Vasily. To his delight, Tolstoy discovered that the Dukhobor views on private property, organised religion, secular authority and non-resistance to violence were remarkably similar to his own. Verigin had already made this discovery. Even before he had started reading Tolstoy's banned religious writings (procured via contacts with political exiles in the far north) he had begun inciting Dukhobors to renounce tobacco, alchohol and the eating of meat. Now he realised that a concerted application of the principles contained in Tolstoy's writings offered an effective means for the Dukhobors to stand up against the government. He started plotting various strategies for mass resistance.
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