Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Tolstoy’s anarchism, which became more and more extreme as the years progressed, would have struck a particularly jarring note in the ears of his Orthodox hearers. In the various legends on which the western mind likes to focus – whether of Becket and Henry II, or More and Henry VIII, or Innocent XI or Pascal versus the Bourbon Monarchy – the interest of civil rulers in ecclesiastical affairs is seen as interference. The ideal Christian Church, it is felt, is one where the secular authority has no control, and the very notion that kings or doges might have a say in the running of the Church is seen as ‘Erastian’ by western Christians as different as Blue Bonnets or Ultramontanes. The Kirchenkampf in the 1930s in Germany was but the culmination in the West of a whole series of confrontations which had been going on ever since the days of Hildebrand between the civil and the ecclesiastical powers.

  But the East had fed its mind on different stories. The first Christian city, Tsargorod, or Constantinople, had, like the First Ecumenical Council of the Church at Nicaea, come into being through the decree of a Christian emperor, Constantine, in western eyes a figure who symbolises a compromising of a gospel which is not of this world, in the East revered as a saint. It was he who made the Empire Christian. His cult derives from an idea of power which is found in the New Testament, that strand of thought which bids us render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and to submit ourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake. ‘The powers that be,’ wrote the Apostle Paul during the reign of the Emperor Nero, ‘are ordained of God.’ If this were true of a pagan Caesar, how much truer it must have been of the Potentate who founded Christendom itself. Equally was it true, in Russian eyes, of the monarch of old Rus whose conversion to Byzantine Christianity in 988 marked the beginning of ‘Holy Russia’. Vladimir, like the Emperor Constantine, bears the title ‘Isapostolus’, which means ‘equal to an Apostle’. In the West, the majority of monarch-saints are martyrs, or those who have somehow failed to exercise their monarchical authority. It was easier to be canonised in the East just for being a king. The Eastern Churches have a less narrowly sacerdotal vision of humanity than those of the Latin rite. All believers, for the Orthodox, are kings and priests. Christian kings, princes and governors, no less than bishops, are God’s ministers. Since all power belongs to God, and comes from God, there can be nothing wrong, by this view, in allowing the secular authority to exercise power even in the ecclesiastical sphere. So, in nineteenth-century Russia, it was a layman who was Procurator of the Holy Synod, and the Tsar who decided even doctrinal matters. In 1842, the Procurator was a retired army officer called Pratasov who was able to forbid the Metropolitan of Moscow to prepare a commentary on the Holy Scriptures. Nicholas I, himself only an army officer with no theological training, was consulted about the afterlife and decreed, rather to the consternation of his clergy, that there was no purgatory. Nevertheless, the stubbornness or ignorance of the laity is no more or less troubling than that of the clergy to the Orthodox. And Eastern believers have looked askance at the various attempts at theocracy in the history of the West, where in their suspicion of ‘Christian kings, princes and governors’, clergymen have seized for themselves a secular influence and created such un-Evangelical anomalies as the state of Geneva under Calvin or the quasi-Imperial pomps of the Vatican.

  Tolstoy was no doubt reacting against the corruption and abuse which he deemed to have overcome the Court and the Church in nineteenth-century Russia. But his anarchical distrust of civil authority per se is deeply un-Russian. In his devotion to the Beatitudes, in his pacifism, in his distrust of material possessions and his desire to live like a beggar and a pilgrim, it is almost possible to believe that Tolstoy drew unconscious inspiration from the traditions of Russian Orthodoxy. But the anarchism was not a native flowering. It is all of a piece with his fierce independence of mind and his exaggerated sense of self. It was fed from a variety of sources: from Rousseau, from Proudhon, as well as from the American sectaries with whom he was in correspondence, most especially from the Quakers.

  It also has to be said that, as well as being the least Russian, it is also the silliest of his teachings. Neither common sense, nor the New Testament (and the two are not always coincident) suggest to us that civil government is in itself an evil. No one would deny that Christ came to found a kingdom not of this world. But it is from Proudhon and not from Christ that Tolstoy derives his belief that all governments are of necessity founded upon violence. And one is bound to ask – since Tolstoy never really supplies an answer – why Christianity should necessarily consider it sinful to supply a populace with food, roads and drains, none of which, in the history of mankind, have ever been available without the intervention of some centralised authority. Tolstoy’s reasons for doubting the validity of civil defence, not to mention wars or prisons, are explained very fully in his writings, though his failure to distinguish between the violence of an individual (which Christianity has always condemned) and a magistrate’s duty to defend the defenceless citizens, stems directly from his anarchic understanding of the state. One has to add that when hunger befell Russia in 1891 he would immediately lay aside his anarchist principles and become once more the authoritative officer-type, organising relief on a huge scale. Likewise, his objection to owning his own copyrights was forgotten when he wished to raise money to give to religious dissidents safe conduct to the New World. The virtue of Tolstoy’s deeds quite often belied the absurdity of his attitudes. And one should remember this when reading his religious stuff.

  The whole bent of Tolstoy’s mind is towards making things clear and simple. The New Testament, however, is neither clear nor simple. It is not really possible to approach it in the way that Tolstoy approached it, because it does not yield answers so easily. A scholar might suppose that there is simply a lack of evidence. After a hundred and fifty years of ‘critical’ analysis of the Gospels, no one has been able to prove even such simple questions as when or where they were written. It is as if they are in fact placed in a unique position, as if their hiddenness and mystery eluded modern scientific analysis.

  A theologian might see here something providential, the master-touch of One who in the days of His flesh thanked God for concealing Himself from the wise and revealing Himself to the simple; One who in the days of His resurrection revealed Himself to Paul as the ultimate mystery. For the Evangelist Mark, the resurrection is the ultimate mystery too, a messianic secret revealed to a tiny handful of people, an empty tomb, and women running away because they were afraid. For Paul, it was a mystery of the spirit, groaning and travailing through all creation to reconcile man to God and to undo his sins, a reconciliation which took place in the darkness of Christ’s Passion. To the author of Hebrews, it is a mystery: Christ is seen metaphorically as the High Priest, entering the veil of the Holy of Holies and offering sacrifice – Himself – for sin. To Evangelistic John, the pre-existent Word has become Flesh, and to the Apocalyptic John, the Son of Man from the Book of Daniel has appeared in the sky. From beginning to end, the New Testament is caught up in mystery. Its difficulties will never be solved by scholars, though there is no harm in their trying. Glints of what the mystery was, and is, are only discernible through worship.

  Tolstoy had tried that, but it did not answer. His rationalistic, nineteenth-century knees lacked health until they had stopped genuflecting. But he was enough, au fond, a Russian Orthodox to know that he could not refuse to worship without, as it were, divine sanction. And so the Gospels themselves had to be looted and plundered and robbed of the mystery which is their essence. If he were doing so as a conscious act of blasphemy, perhaps his action would have had small effect. But all-unconscious of any impurity of motive, he laboured on, with total sincerity. With devastating clear-sightedness he kept asking the question, how is it that Christians can refuse to obey the words of Christ? He wrote from conviction. More than anything he had ever desired, he now desired to obey those words himself, to identify with the poor and the oppressed, to abandon his wealth, t
o live in peace and forgiveness with all men. Is it any wonder that his thoughts had such an appeal? Dostoyevsky on an imaginative level recaptured the Holy Redeemer, the Christ who against all logic and all deserving, redeems the sins of the world. Tolstoy, with no less imaginative panache, restored to the world Christ’s starkest and most revolutionary moral demands.

  While all these thoughts were brewing, two deaths occurred which were of the utmost significance in Tolstoy’s life: Dostoyevsky’s and the Tsar’s.

  Dostoyevsky died on January 28, 1881, lying on his sofa, with the copy of the New Testament which had been given to him by wives of the Decembrists thirty years before when he had been on his way to the prison at Omsk. In a scene which he could have composed himself (and in a sense did), he got his wife Anna to carry a flickering candle to the Testament and hold it to a text which fell open at random. It was the Baptist’s encounter with Jesus at the beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel: ‘But John restrained Him and said, “I need to be baptised by you, and you come to me?” But Jesus said to him in reply: “Do not restrain me, for this is how we have to fulfil all righteousness.”’ Anna Dostoyevsky in her memoirs believed that this text actually ‘killed’ her husband, because he took the words ‘Do not restrain me’ to be a portent of the fact that he had no longer to live.28

  When Tolstoy heard the news of his death from Strakhov, he wrote at once,

  I never saw the man, and never had any direct relations with him, and suddenly when he died I realised that he was the very closest, dearest and most necessary man for me. I was a writer, and all writers are vain and envious – I at least was that sort of writer. But it never occurred to me to measure myself against him, never. . . .29

  This is the best commentary on relations between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. There was probably no literary rivalry in the vulgar sense between the two giants. But there was an acute consciousness in each of the other, an acutely strong desire, on both their parts, not to be like each other. It would almost be a plausible exaggeration to claim that in his art – though not in his views – Tolstoy was henceforth to feel free to trespass, as it were, on Dostoyevsky’s territory, to write the books which, in Dostoyevsky’s lifetime, he would not have been able to write for fear of being Dostoyevskian. That is too crude and simple a way of looking at it. Let Tolstoy’s own words stand.

  A month after Dostoyevsky died, there was enacted a scene such as he might have written into The Devils. Six attempts had been made on the life of Tsar Alexander II, by nihilists and revolutionary groups. On February 17, 1880, a violent explosion had shaken the Winter Palace, killing forty Finnish guards. The Tsar, who was entertaining the Prince of Bulgaria at the time, looked up from his whist as the chandeliers tinkled above their heads and said calmly, ‘God has saved me again.’ ‘One is tempted,’ the German Ambassador remarked privately afterwards, ‘to regard as moribund a social body which fails to react to such a shock.’30

  The reign had been blighted by these assassination attempts. After the first of them, in 1866, the liberalising, reforming instincts of the Tsar had been put firmly in check by his advisers. Count Dmitry Tolstoy, for example, heavily egged on by Katkov, was appointed Minister of Education in 1866, and caused an immediate about-turn in educational policies. He regarded the superficial materialist outlook of the young to have been caused by their not doing enough Latin and Greek, and he abolished the teaching of science in all Russian grammar schools. The police, the army, the Holy Synod were all, likewise, put into reverse gear, and foreign policy both on the Polish border and in the Russo-Turkish conflict had become more unashamedly jingoistic. The more repressive the regime had become, the wider the discontents grew; and the more violent the reactions of the malcontents, the fiercer the Government felt itself right to become.

  But Alexander II had been persuaded by some of his ministers to take tentative steps towards the establishment of some form of constitutional advisory body, the first steps towards a constitutional monarchy on an English pattern. The liberalisers received the support of the Tsar’s mistress (subsequently his morganatic wife, Catherine Dolgoruky) while it was opposed by the Tsarina and her conservative friends like Pobedonostsev. But there is no doubt that some such reforms would have gone through in the spring of 1881 if it had not been for the Tsar’s assassination.

  The Government’s battle with the terrorists appeared to be gaining ground. Indeed, in February 1881, Andrey Ivanovich Zhelyabov, the leader of one of the most dangerous organisations, was arrested. One of his accomplices, Sofya Perovskaya, resolved on murdering the Tsar before Zhelyabov’s interrogators blew their cover.

  On the cold morning of Sunday, March 1, the Tsar signed General Loris-Melikov’s reforming charter. Then he went, as he did each Sunday, to inspect the Guard, a formal, slow business, which took several hours. Then, again as he did each week, he called on his cousin the Grand Duchess Catherine.

  It was part of the security arrangements that the Tsar should always return to the Winter Palace by a different route. Nevertheless, the terrorists this morning were to get their man. A mining student called Ryssakov threw a bomb as the Tsar’s sledge passed by. The Emperor insisted on stopping the sledge and inquiring after the Cossack, his escort, who had been wounded. Someone in the crowd called out to Alexander himself, to ask if he was wounded. ‘Thank God, no!’ he called back. And at that point another anarchist, a Polish student called Hrieniewicki, threw a bomb directly at Alexander’s feet. Both the legs were shattered. He whispered, ‘Home to the Palace, to die there.’ Escorted by bleeding Cossacks on blood-spattered horses, the poor little body of the Emperor was taken back to die in the arms of the morganatic wife on whom he so childishly doted. The liberator of the Russian serfs had died, like the liberator of the American Negro, by the violent hands of an assassin.

  When the news reached Yasnaya Polyana, the assassins had already been rounded up and stood trial for their lives. Having decided that all forms of civil government were wrong, that revenge in all circumstances was wrong, that taking a man’s life was always wrong, it was not surprising that Tolstoy thought that the terrorists should be pardoned. The most solemn moments of life can be reduced to farce if general questions of public morality become a matter for private domestic dispute. For a long time, Tolstoy had begun to find that the only member of the household he could really ‘talk to’ was his children’s tutor, an avowed atheist, and a rather charming young man called Vasily Ivanovich Alexeyev. To judge from Alexeyev’s memories of the conversations, the great man was capable of provoking, as well as speaking, some fairly considerable nonsense. (‘I once asked him what sort of music he liked best. He replied, “Simple folk [narodnuyu] music. And my favourite composer is – the people [narod].”’) Without wishing to emphasise the idiocy of this sort of thing, Alexeyev is punctilious in his memoirs to show Tolstoy’s eyes filling with tears as he listens to Beethoven. And it was Beethoven and Chopin that he himself played, not folk songs, when he sat down at the piano. Or again, Tolstoy claimed to Alexeyev that he did not like verse, only prose. Poets were forced to say things they did not really mean for the sake of the rhyme. But next time he went to Moscow, Tolstoy brought Alexeyev a present, a copy of Tyutchev, whom he loved to declaim. In particular, he liked to intone the lines

  Moлчи cкpывaиcя итaи

  И чyвcтвa и мeчти твoи . . .

  [. . . . be quiet, lie low and hide

  Your feelings and your dreams. . . .]31

  Tolstoy’s ability to get along well with young men, almost to flirt with them, was always a source of peculiar annoyance to his wife, who – in a few words which, again, Alexeyev does not appear to have meant maliciously – just happened to overhear the things the two men were saying to each other as she listened through the study door. They were talking about the assassination of the Tsar, and agreeing with one another that the terrorists should be pardoned. It was more than she could stand. She burst into the room, yelling, as was her wont. ‘Vasily Ivanovich, w
hat are you saying?’ she called. ‘If it were my son and daughter in here with you, and not Lev Nikolayevich, I would order you to clear off immediately!’32

  Tolstoy took refuge in sleep, and dozed off on the study sofa. He dreamt that he was both the executioner and one of the criminals, and he woke up in a cold sweat. It is tedious to keep repeating this point, but how wonderful this faculty of completely imagining himself into the other man’s shoes would be in a novelist. But Lev Nikolayevich is no longer a novelist. He has put such vanities behind him. He is a prophet. And so, his capacity to be the criminal, to be the executioner took the form of an intense and literal sympathy with all concerned.

  Tolstoy was not a fool. Nor was he out of touch with what was going on at Court. Cousins and friends of his were all involved with the Court at its most intimate levels. He knew perfectly well that Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, who had recently become Procurator of the Holy Synod, had now in effect assumed the reins of power. When he had been the new Tsar’s tutor, Pobedonostsev had openly stated his conviction that Alexander Alexandrovich was fundamentally stupid. But this made it all the more imperative that as Alexander III, and Emperor of all the Russias, the new Tsar should have sound advisers. It had been rightly said that Pobedonostsev exercised over Alexander III an ascendancy similar to that exercised by Torquemada over Ferdinand and Isabella or by Père Lachaise over Louis XIV. Pobedonostsev’s conviction was that reforms and liberalising had gone far enough, and that the constitutional reforms of Loris-Melikov should be scrapped. It has to be said that the policy of repression of which Pobedonostsev was the architect worked. The Revolution was held off for another quarter-century and more. And it could be argued that if the reactionaries had not given in in 1905, they would not have been caught off guard twelve years later by the comparatively small insurrection of the Bolsheviks. So Pobedonostsev should not be viewed as an ostrich-like fool who was blind to the ‘inevitability’ of revolution in Russia. In 1881, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about it. Pobedonostsev was, we are told by a contemporary, a man of ‘thin, dry, somewhat pinched features, cast in the Byzantine mould; cold, sharp eyes, rendered colder still by the spectacles that shield them, and whose glance is as frigid and cheerless as the cheerless ray of the winter’s sun’. Pobedonostsev may have been cold, but he was not unthinking. His own memoirs are a highly intelligent defence of the conservative religious position33 and, as his friendship with Dostoyevsky shows, he was big enough a man to ‘take’ from a writer of genius a degree of religious speculation which, in a lesser mortal, would have been thought wholly unacceptable.