Tolstoy (82 page)

The Soviet Tolstoyans had a great attachment to the written word: without it their stories would have never come to light. From the 1950s onwards they tried to donate their memoirs and correspondence to the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, but archivists refused to accept them, through understandable fear of political reprisals.
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The Tolstoyans also zealously defended Tolstoy from what they regarded as slander by Orthodox Soviet literary critics. Boris Mazurin followed publications on Tolstoy particularly closely, even from the remote Siberian village where he lived, and made it a point of principle to pen carefully written and robustly argued letters whenever he felt something needed to be corrected. He tackled Party member Boris Meilakh, for example, after the publication in 1961 of his book about Tolstoy's departure and death. 'You often talk in your book about the "weak" places in Tolstoy's worldview, calling them weak in view of their incompatibility with Marxist views, particularly as regards the possibility of changing life for the better through violence...', he wrote in his letter to Meilakh. To his credit, Meilakh replied, but Mazurin was still not satisfied, and wrote again to take issue with him about the idea that Tolstoy had been involved in any kind of political struggle to acquire power over people: 'It's impossible to imagine Tolstoy as a government figure leading and organising people by means of the necessary instruments of state power. And it is equally impossible to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent in such awful years as 1937 and 1938.'
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It is indeed hard to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent, but it is harder still to imagine that he would have survived the Purges. It is more likely that he would simply have been shot at the first opportunity.

The Tolstoyans were disappointed to see Chertkov's name now blackened, both in Meilakh's book, and also in the new edition of Valentin Bulgakov's memoir ofTolstoy, which was published in 1964. But most painful of all to them was the speech given by the establishment writer Leonid Leonov to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy's death at the Bolshoi Theatre on 19 November 1960. It was reprinted in all the major Soviet newspapers, and issued as a separate publication the following year. Leonov, recipient of Stalin and Lenin prizes, a Hero of Socialist Labour and a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet, parroted the standard view on Tolstoy, implying it was shortcomings in his philosophical and religious views which explained why there were no longer any apostles or ardent acolytes around to continue his ideas except for a few sectarians scattered about the globe. After much discussion with fellow Tolstoyans, who were understandably indignant, Mazurin wrote Leonov a lengthy riposte in February 1962, then travelled all the way to Moscow with it, only to be rebuffed by officials when seeking to find his address. Eventually he got his letter to Leonov, however, and in September 1962 he actually received a reply. Rather predictably, Leonov failed to answer any of Mazurin's criticisms.
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Many other Tolstoyans vigorously proclaimed their existence, and challenged untruths. In 1975 Dmitry Morgachev sent an open letter to Alexander Klibanov, with copies to leading newspapers, after the latter published a book about religious sectarianism in which he alleged, for example, that the Tolstoyans had refused to join collective farms because they were essentially kulaks.
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When James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, asked Mark Popovsky in the early eighties why he had chosen to research the history of a small group whose influence had been negligible, he answered that he had been impressed with the intelligent way the Tolstoyans had protested against the status quo, by simply living individual lives in accordance with their moral principles.
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Their patience and determination to bear witness was finally rewarded a few years later. Russian scholarship on Tolstoy entered a new phase with the publication in May 1988 of Vladimir Lakshin's article 'The Return of Tolstoy the Thinker'. It was obvious that Tolstoy could no longer be seen as just a mirror reflecting the contradictions of the 1905 Revolution, he wrote, since Tolstoy was a laser - a laser of humanity.
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With the onset of perestroika and glasnost, the story of the Tolstoyans' tenacious struggle to establish communes and till the land in the communist Eden of the Soviet Union could finally be told in Russia as well as in the West. Everything changed in Russia in the late 1980s with the arrival of Gorbachev's reforms and the lifting of censorship. Mazurin, at the age of eighty-seven years, lived to witness the sensation produced by the publication of his memoirs in Russia's most prestigious literary magazine
Novy mir,
which in 1988 had a subscription of well over a million.
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Many other articles and books followed.

Tolstoy did not believe in the idea of an afterlife in the Christian sense; indeed, the prospect of death summarily curtailing his existence, at a time which he had no control over, was the biggest problem he ever wrestled with. He did not believe his works would be remembered for very long after his death, nor did he believe he had all that many followers. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the final liberation of literary and cultural historians from the shackles of ideology, an important position in the wealth of new publications about Tolstoy's legacy in Russia has been occupied by materials shedding light on the lives of those who sought to put his ideas into practice after his death. Not only have they made it possible to piece together the complex and fascinating story of Tolstoy's 'afterlife', but they have shown how just how deeply Tolstoy's ideas continued to resonate well into the twentieth century.

In April 1990 an application was made by a group of scholars to the Tula educational authorities to found an L. N. Tolstoy School research institute, with the aim of reintroducing Tolstoy's pedagogical ideas into teaching and learning in contemporary Russian education.
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In 1998 its achievements in developing a three-stage educational programme from kindergarten to university entrance were recognised when the Russian government awarded it the status of a 'Federal Experimental Platform', and by 2010 there were already hundreds in Russia and abroad using Tolstoy's methods.
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The revival of Tolstoyan schools was the brainchild of Vitaly Remizov, who became director of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow in 2001. In an interview in 2005 he explained that the schools aimed to nurture independence in their pupils above all, in an atmosphere of freedom, using at the primary level the texts developed by Tolstoy in the 1870s.
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In November 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the religious association 'Spiritual Unity (the Church of Lev Tolstoy)' was registered in Moscow with the Russian Ministry of Justice, a step that would have been unthinkable in the Soviet era. Its statutes proclaimed its goal to be the dissemination of a Tolstoyan understanding of religion and spiritual life.
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Its umbrella organisation was named as the Unity Church, which was initially founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City in 1889 under the inspiration of Tolstoy's teachings. The Unity Church describes itself as 'a positive, practical, progressive approach to Christianity based on the teachings of Jesus and the power of prayer' which honours 'the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual's right to choose a spiritual path'.
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In 1996 a new Department of Tolstoy's Spiritual Heritage with eight faculty members opened its doors at the L. N. Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical Institute.

In 2000, three years before she died at the age of seventy-eight, the distinguished Tolstoy scholar Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya published the first volume in the new Academy of Sciences edition of Tolstoy's
Complete Collected Works.
Drawing on the many new materials which have come to light since the publication of the Jubilee Edition, this edition will run to 100 volumes, and, as the editors take pains to note, will be the first to be
truly
complete; it will not be marred by 'omissions or constraints', unlike the Jubilee Edition.

When the project was first conceived in the late 1980s, Gromova-Opulskaya commented on its aims:

Tolstoy is published and re-published in our country with print runs running into the millions. The 90-volume
Complete Collected Works,
published between 1928 and 1958, is so significant and monumental a publication that we continue to be proud of it. Nevertheless, Russian textual scholarship has not completely fulfilled its duty. The texts of many of the works of this great world writer remain unverified, manuscripts have been published incomplete and unsystematically. These are the main tasks in the new, probably ioo-volume, genuinely academic edition on which work has now begun.
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While Tolstoy scholarship may no longer be hostage to political mandates, the harsh realities of the market economy in contemporary Russia dictate that the progress of the new edition may well be slow.

It seems the only institution in Russia still refusing to open its doors as far as Tolstoy is concerned is the Orthodox Church. In 1994 Tolstoy's great-great-grandson Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy was appointed as the new director of Yasnaya Polyana, which is still one of the most famous museums in Russia. In early January 2001 he wrote to the Moscow Patriarch with a suggestion that the Church reflect on the significance of the excommunication which had taken place 100 years earlier. Patriarch Alexy's refusal to discuss the issue created a stir. Vladimir Tolstoy certainly never doubted the importance of the excommunication. 'I am deeply convinced,' he declared in an interview at the time, 'that it was one of the most important historical events in the history of the Russian state, which either obliquely or directly affected future developments, and divided Russian society along both vertical and horizontal axes.'

Just how great the reverberations of Tolstoy's excommunication were with regards to Russian national life is perhaps most eloquently expressed by the fact that the first official meeting between the Orthodox Church and the Tolstoy estate took place in 2006 - 105 years after the event. The occasion was a special conference held in March 2006 at Yasnaya Polyana, when scholars met representatives from the Orthodox Church to debate the significance of the excommunication. As well as re-examining the sources of the original conflict and the legal aspects of the Holy Synod's decree, delegates discussed its moral, spiritual and social dimensions and consequences, including its continuing public resonance today. The conference was widely reported in the Russian press, which noted that the unprecedented debate between the Church and literary community was 'heated, to say the least'. As the writer Alexey Varlamov remarked in one paper, the conflict between Tolstoy and the church was one of the most painful points of the twentieth century, and crucial to the cause of the Russian Revolution. Another delegate, Father Georgy Orekhanov, who spoke on the spiritual aspect of Tolstoy's death, defended the Church's actions in 1901, but acknowledged that it was important to understand why so many people had immediately supported the writer at this 'significant moment' in Russian history. In the light of the collapse of communism and the subsequent resurgence of Christianity, he added, the question of the relationship between the Russian people and the Orthodox Church was just as topical now.
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Father Orekhanov gave another conference paper on Tolstoy in January 2009 at a panel devoted to topical problems in the history of the Orthodox Church,
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but it is unlikely that discussion will move beyond the academic sphere. To a church and state once again forging close bonds in today's authoritarian Russia, Tolstoy's teachings must seem as problematic and as dangerous as ever.

NOTES

Abbreviations Used in Notes

References to V. G. Chertkov's 'Jubilee Edition' of Tolstoy's complete collected works are indicated by 'JE', followed by volume number and page reference (e.g. JE 68, 49). The six volumes of
L. N. Tolstoi: materialy k biografii
are distinguished by author and volume (e.g. 'Gusev 1', 'Opul'skaya 2'). The two volumes of the
Letopis'zhizni i tvorchestva
are indicated as '
Letopis'
1' and '
Letopis
' 2'.

Introduction

1. R. M. Meiendorf, 'Stranichka vospominanii o L've Nikolaeviche Tolstom', in
Letopisi Gosudarstvennogo literaturnogo muzeya,
vol. 12:
L. N. Tolstoi: K 120-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya (1828-1848),
ed. N. N. Gusev, Moscow, 1948, 369.

2. Henry Norman,
All the Russias,
London, 1902, 47; cited in Alexander Fodor,
Tolstoy and the Russians: Reflections on a Relationship,
Ann Arbor, 1984, 15.

3. Stefan Zweig,
Adepts in Self-Portraiture: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy,
New York, 1928 (a translation of his
Drei Dichter ihres Lebens: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoi,
Leipzig, 1928), 218-219, cited in Fodor,
Tolstoy and the Russians,
15.

4. N. Berdyaev,
The Origin of Russian Communism,
tr. R. M. French (first published 1937), Ann Arbor, 1960, 8.

5. E. D. Meleshko,
Khristianskaya etika L. N. Tolstogo,
Moscow, 2006, 272.

6. Sjeng Scheijen,
Diaghilev: A Life,
London, 2009, 47-48.

7. T. A. Sukhotina-Tolstaya,
Dnevnik,
ed. T. Volkova, Moscow, 1984, 526-527.