Tolstoy (80 page)

As a fervent admirer of Tolstoy, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was one of the distinguished foreign visitors invited to Russia to take part in the centenary celebrations in 1928. The celebrations were launched with a commemorative evening at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 9 September. Like everything else at that time, it was held up by Soviet bureaucrats who fussed over memoranda and permits. 'The principal event which was announced for six o'clock began at 9.30,' Zweig later recollected. 'When I left the opera house exhausted at three in the morning, the speakers were still hard at it.'
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The festivities then transferred to Yasnaya Polyana. At 7.00 a.m. on 12 September, in pouring rain, Alexandra made her way to the Yasnaya Polyana railway station (as Zaseka was now called) along with journalists, photographers and curious locals. There they greeted the official delegation of eighty guests who had travelled down from Moscow, and included the actress Olga Knipper (Chekhov's widow), esteemed professors and foreign guests, who were easy to spot because they were not shabbily dressed.
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On the train down, Zweig had chatted to Lunacharsky about whether Tolstoy was a revolutionary or a reactionary, and whether the great writer had even known himself. Lunacharsky suggested that in his eagerness to change the whole world 'in a flick of the wrist', Tolstoy was an ingrained Russian, just like the Bolsheviks who wanted to modernise their country overnight.
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As the minister responsible for Soviet culture in the 1920s, Lunacharsky played a key role in orchestrating the assimilation of Tolstoy into Bolshevik ideology in the early Stalinist years, and he published a volume of his writings on Tolstoy in 1928. A cultured and educated man, he did not always find his task easy, and since there was no place for even Lunacharsky's comparatively moderate views in the Soviet regime, he lost his job the following year. Both sides of his personality were on show on 12 September at Yasnaya Polyana. First he produced the standard official peroration, cutting off attempts by a Slovak guest and Alexandra to speak out about their harassment by Communist Party militants, but then gave an impassioned, personal and sincere speech about how much Tolstoy meant to him. After a day of speeches, a choir of 250 Yasnaya Polyana schoolchildren sang the 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's 9th Symphony (later condemned by a
Pravda
correspondent, who thought they had been singing a psalm), and village women dug out old embroidered blouses and coloured sarafans from their trunks and sang folksongs.
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There was a good deal of press coverage of the Tolstoy Jubilee. An unsigned editorial in
Pravda
published on 9 September may well have been written by Stalin himself. After questioning whether the Bolsheviks, who had 'chosen revolutionary violence', and regarded religion as the 'opium of the people', should honour a writer who 'did not understand' the proletarian movement, and to whom the revolution was alien, the conclusion was that they should.
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Nevertheless, a list of twenty acceptable works of fiction by Tolstoy was now drawn up, Lenin's articles criticising Tolstoy were continually cited, and the writer's philosophical views were roundly condemned. Some important advances in Tolstoy scholarship had been made in the 1920s by literary scholars (such as the Formalists Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Shklovsky), but the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers played safe by basing their interpretation of Tolstoy on Lenin's literary criticism, namely his famous 1908 characterisation of Tolstoy's method as the 'tearing off of masks', which was proffered as a good model for budding Soviet writers to follow. It was, in fact, political figures like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg who dominated publications on Tolstoy around the time of the centenary. One volume published in 1929 may have included the very last Russian publication by Trotsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union that year.
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The chapter headings for one of the many centenary volumes about Tolstoy published in 1928 reflect the efforts that were made by the Soviet government to render the great writer acceptable to the regime:

Part 1: The Jubilee and Our Tasks

Part 2: Tolstoy as a Thinker
Tolstoy and his Epoch
The Lack of Synthesis; The Social Reasons for This
Dialectical Materialism and Religious Idealism
Class war/Struggle and Non-Resistance to Evil
Tolstoy's Criticism of Capitalism
Tolstoy's Criticism of Patriotism and Militarism

Part 3: Tolstoy as Artist

Part 4: Tolstoy and the Soviet Public
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In the face of this ideological onslaught, Alexandra's work at Yasnaya Polyana became more and more difficult. Once the Jubilee was over, she was once again subjected to harassment by local Party officials when she refused to comply with their demands. Eventually she was forced to accept as her deputy at the estate-museum an anonymous Soviet writer who proposed using Tolstoy's teachings as a weapon in the anti-religious campaign. The requirement by the 'League of the Godless' that pupils at the Yasnaya Polyana school were to have lessons on Easter Sunday, in keeping with Stalin's calendar 'reforms', was the last straw. In the autumn of 1929 Alexandra got on a train for Vladivostok, en route for Japan, where she had been invited to lecture. She never returned to Russia.
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By 1930, only two volumes of the Jubilee Edition had appeared, and there were still problems with obtaining funds to keep going. Chertkov was seventy-six and very ill by this time, but this was his life's work and he plodded resolutely on, despite having exhausted all his savings to fund the enterprise. In February 1934 he wrote about the lack of funds to Molotov, who had been head of Sovnarkom (Council of Ministers) since 1930, but he received no answer. On 27 May he wrote to Stalin:

The situation of our editorial team is now completely hopeless as a result of the lack of funds to complete our work, the release of which, to the tune of 75,000 roubles, I requested from Sovnarkom. Meanwhile, my requests to accelerate the publication and fund the editing work to the end, as I have been informed by Sovnarkom, have not met with any objections in principle, and the entire delay is to do with the paperwork, which has been going on for four months already. I am not writing again to Comrade Molotov, because I have already written to him twice, and having not received a reply, I am not sure that he has the time to turn his personal attention to my appeal to him amongst many complex governmental affairs. But I am being so bold as to appeal to you, esteemed Iosif Vissarionovich, as the comrade on whose initiative this project was essentially launched following the lead of the late V. I. Lenin. I think that just one word from you would be enough to bring an immediate conclusion to the formal side of the protracted satisfaction of my requests, as set out in my letter of 23 February 1934 to Comrade Molotov...
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There was again no response, nor to a letter Chertkov wrote in July 1934, by which time he was so ill he was no longer in full control of his faculties, but in August that year the money started to trickle through at last.

Lenin had supposedly expressly stipulated that the edition should include everything ever written by Tolstoy, without any changes, and should restore cuts made by tsarist censors. His word was law, but the Stalinist government soon realised how subversive some of the material was. There was indeed a good deal of criticism by Tolstoy of the revolutionary movement in his late writings, and Chertkov, as chief editor, came in for criticism himself now from the Bolsheviks for not compiling the commentaries to Tolstoy's texts from a Marxist point of view.
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Chertkov, of course, ever the aristocrat like Tolstoy, had never deigned to pay obeisance to contemptible Bolshevik ideology, and his persistently apolitical stance is all the more remarkable - and brave - given the militant rhetoric and coercive policies of the times. The Soviet government certainly came to regret giving Chertkov so much autonomy.

The great irony of the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition was that it made Tolstoy's works no more accessible than they had been during his lifetime. Not only was each volume extremely expensive, as Alexandra feared, but the print run was tiny: 5,000 or at the most 10,000. By the time that Nikolay Rodionov took over as chief editor when Chertkov died in 1936 at the age of eighty-two (the same age that Tolstoy had been when he died), seventy-two volumes were ready to be printed, but only twenty-nine had been published. They were appearing, moreover, in a strange order. Volume fifty-nine was published in 1935, for example, but it would not be until 1952 that volume thirty-four was published.
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Eight volumes appeared in 1937, the year after Chertkov died, but this was the height of the purges, and Solomon Lozovsky, the new head of the state publishing house, now restyled as the acronym Goslitizdat, literally feared for his life. He had been appointed in 1936, having already been arrested once on Stalin's orders. The editorial team, whose office by a strange quirk of fate was located near the Lubyanka, now lost its independence, and were forced to take orders from Goslitizdat. In such fearful times there was no chance that Lozovsky could even contemplate approving the volumes in the Jubilee Edition which included Tolstoy's principal religious writings (volumes 23, 28, 48, 49, for example).

Between 1939 and 1949 publication ground to a complete halt, with staff working without a salary and Rodionov courageously seeking new ways to continue by trying to play the apparatchiks at their own game, and by empha-sising Lenin's imprimatur on the whole enterprise. In the late thirties, under constant threat of arrest, the team doggedly prepared for publication more innocuous volumes, such as those containing Tolstoy's correspondence to his wife (83, 84), and they flagged up quotations by Lenin at the expense of their own commentary. The Tolstoy scholar Inessa Medzhibovskaya is right to liken Rodionov's dealings with Soviet bureaucracy during the purges to the literature of the absurd. In her review of a book published in 2002 by Lev Osterman, which has been one of the many important post-Soviet sources to explode the myth of Tolstoy's hallowed status after 1917, she gives an amusing abridged version of the transcript Osterman provides of Rodionov's encounter in 1939 with Pyotr Pospelov, deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee:

RODIONOV:
I have been so insistently trying to gain a chance to see you in order to seek your advice, receive your guidance for action as to how we may resolve this painful situation without violating the will of L. N. Tolstoy and, at the same time, act in accordance with the current guidelines that the Central Committee of the Party has in mind.

POSPELOV:
You have committed serious errors. The first one is your lengthy commentaries. Tolstoy's
Complete Works
are replaced with the complete works of his commentators. The second error is your method of commentary. You do not observe the contract and the contract stresses the need to be objective. Yet who could be more objective than Lenin? Why don't you enlist this most objective of sources? Why do you write long biographies about the most insignificant people, even about those who ended up being counter-revolutionary?
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The Jubilee Edition was only properly resuscitated after Stalin's death in 1953. The last volumes were eventually all published by 1958, by which time the heroic scholars of the original editorial team had been relegated to assistant status by Goslitizdat, and the names of Chertkov and Alexandra Tolstaya were no longer mentioned on the masthead. It had taken thirty years. The scholarship in the volumes published later inevitably suffered, and fresh rounds of 'editing' were so drastic that some volumes had to double up with others. The much-touted total of ninety volumes, in fact, comprises only seventy-eight separate books.
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Once Tolstoy's religious works had appeared in the Jubilee Edition, they were banned from future publication. Nevertheless, in the 'official' history of the publication of the Jubilee Edition which Rodionov published in 1961, he could with justification point to it being compared to the 143 volumes of the benchmark Weimar Goethe edition, despite the necessary political accommodation with the regime.
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Forty years later, in a very different political climate, Osterman's book
Srazhenie za Tolstogo (The Battle for Tolstoy)
would reveal the true story behind the publication of this extraordinary edition.

Over the course of the first few decades of Soviet power, Tolstoy was successfully transformed by the Bolsheviks from a 'socially alien' writer into one whose name was 'synonymous with Russia herself', as has been pointed out by Alexander Fodor in a valuable book which explores the history of Russia's relationship with Tolstoy.
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A key role in this process of transformation was played by World War II. During the celebrations to mark the October Revolution in besieged Leningrad in 1941, Tolstoy's stories about the defence of Sebastopol were broadcast via loudspeaker in Palace Square.
War and Peace
also became a vitally important work while Russians fought to defend their country from the Nazi invasion. By this time, twenty-five trunks from the archive at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow had been evacuated to Tomsk in Siberia, with other precious items directed to Tashkent. Tomsk was also the destination for the most valuable exhibits at Yasnaya Polyana, which was invaded by the Nazis on 30 October 1941, two days after the last party of tourists had been shown round its empty rooms.
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