Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Chapter Sixteen

  Terrible Questions

  1890 – 1893

  Our feet have reached the holy places but our hearts may not have done so.

  Father Sergius

  The summer of 1891 was extremely hot; and for Tolstoy it was a productive one.1 He spent the months of June doodling with the stories which would become Father Sergius and Resurrection, and talking about vegetarianism and sexual abstinence with the hordes of ‘dark ones’, foreign sightseers, seekers after truth and other nuisances clamouring for a glimpse of the great man. His wife, who found him ‘extraordinarily sweet, cheerful and affectionate at the moment’, purred contentedly to her diary: ‘If only the people who read The Kreutzer Sonata so reverently had an inkling of the voluptuous life he leads, and realised that it was only this which made him happy and good-natured, then they would cast this deity from the pedestal where they have placed him!’2

  It is rather a cheering thing to read from the pen of someone twenty-six years married. This very juxtaposition between the happily sexual private Tolstoy and the tormented prophet of abstinence is what gave birth to Father Sergius, the most powerfully erotic of all his stories. ‘I love him when he is kind and normal and full of human weaknesses,’ his wife said. ‘One should not be an animal, but nor should one preach virtues one does not have.’3

  Father Sergius is a famous starets. In his youth he had been a nobly born army officer, who abandoned his fiancée when he discovered that she had been the mistress of Emperor Nicholas I. ‘His disillusionment with Mary, whom he had imagined to be a person of angelic purity, and his sense of hurt were so strong that they led him to despair; and the despair led him – to what – to God, to the faith of his childhood. . . .’4

  Sergius does not merely become a monk, he becomes a famed master of the spiritual life, who eventually leaves his monastery to become a hermit. The first powerful moment of sexual temptation in the story occurs when he is forty-nine years old. A passing group of frivolous rich people see if they can’t seduce ‘Kasatsky the handsome hermit’ by loosing to him a vampish (female) member of their party. She pretends that she is a stranger who has lost her way, and asks for shelter from the cold in his cell. He is so tempted by her that the only means by which he can resist is through the infliction of physical torment on himself, and he takes an axe and cuts off a finger of his left hand. She is so impressed by this demonstration that she herself is converted and becomes a nun.

  Yet Sergius is not really a saint. He became a monk because he was jealous and hurt, not because his heart loved God. And now he enjoys a ‘spiritual reparation’ in a way which is almost as carnal as ‘worldly fame’. As with his creator, Tolstoy, there is within him a perpetual sense of dislocation. Everyone else is convinced; and he is not exactly putting on an act. Yet ‘he was often astonished that he, Stepan Kasatsky, had come to be such an extraordinary saint.’

  Then, one day, he was visited by a merchant whose daughter had a nervous disorder. She was a plump, fair girl of twenty-two with a ‘very developed female figure’. When they are alone together, the afflicted one and the saint become a woman and a man. She tells Father Sergius that she has had erotic dreams about him, and it is only a matter of minutes before she embraces him and places his hands on her breasts.

  He wanders out of his cell, a completely disillusioned man; disillusioned, that is to say, with his own self-image. After a spell of wandering, he comes upon his former fiancée, now an old babushka with an unsatisfactory son-in-law and very little money. He realises that his renunciation of her has been priggish and ultimately ungodly. It is she who must bless him, and not the other way around.

  After this aperçu, he becomes a wandering pilgrim, ‘and little by little God started to reveal Himself to him’. Sometimes he goes alone, and sometimes he walks with the other wanderers. On one occasion when he is walking in such a group some French tourists stop and stare, and, thinking that no one in that ragged band will understand their language, one says to another: ‘Demandez-leur s’ils sont bien sûrs de ce que leur pélérinage est agréable à Dieu.’*

  An old woman replies to them, ‘As God accepts it. Our feet have reached the holy places, but our hearts may not have done so.’5

  The gap between Tolstoy’s ideals and his actual behaviour have made those who do not want to understand him dub him a hypocrite. But a hypocrite is a man who pretends that such gaps do not exist. In Tolstoy there was no such pretence.

  Well, but you, Lev Nikolayevich; you preach – but how about practice? People always put it to me and always triumphantly shut my mouth with it. You preach, but how do you live? And I reply that I do not preach and cannot preach, though I passionately desire to do so. I could only preach by deeds; and my deeds are bad. What I say is not a sermon but only a refutation of the false understanding of the Christian teaching and an explanation of its real meaning. . . . Blame me – I do that myself – but blame me and not the path I tread, and show to those who ask me where in my opinion the road lies! If I know the road home and go along it drunk, staggering from side to side – does that make the road along which I go the wrong one?6

  Father Sergius reveals, however, not only Tolstoy’s absence of humbug – but the strange awareness which his artistic self (so long forced to play second fiddle to his prophetic soul) had of his real nature. And, as in nearly every story of his later period, we think of Dostoyevsky. What could be more Dostoyevskian than the thought that a monk who has fallen into sin comes closer to God than a pillar of rectitude?

  As well as being a minor artistic masterpiece, and one of Tolstoy’s most effective religious statements, Father Sergius is, even more than most of the Tolstoyan œuvre, crammed to bursting with him. But Sergius is not a self-portrait any more than the child in Childhood is one. Sergius, in fact (his handsomeness, his connections at Court, his loftiness), is much more like Chertkov than Tolstoy. Just as in Childhood, the novelist is best able to explore his own nature by imagining what it would be like to be someone else. The reason that Father Sergius was never published in Tolstoy’s lifetime is that it was too near the bone – too vivid a dissection of what was wrong not only with Chertkov, but also with the whole Tolstoyan way of looking at the world. The story derives much of its power from buried self-knowledge, its furtive, almost masturbatory mixture of self-acceptance and self-disgust. The complexity of his nature is contained here, and almost explained.

  Paradoxically, the year in which Tolstoy did most work on Father Sergius, 1891, was also the year in which it seems least possible to blame him for the path he had chosen. It is the year in which he shines out as a hero.

  More important than any of the ‘dark ones’ who visited Yasnaya Polyana that summer was an official of the local Tula zemstvo named Ivan Ivanovich Rayevsky. He had a loose acquaintance with Tolstoy dating back over many years: they had even briefly attended classes together at the Moscow Gymnasium in their boyhood. Rayevsky, on his visits to Yasnaya, liked to tease the ‘great man’ and remind him of all his inconsistencies: at one point claiming that it was wicked to own land, and at another buying huge tracts of Samara, on the very borders of civilisation; at one stage being more Orthodox than the Orthodox and observing the fasts; at another, breaking away from the Church and starting a religion of his own. Instead of taking this furiously, like the Countess Tolstoy, or solemnly, like Chertkov and the disciples, Rayevsky was able to laugh at his old friend. But he recognised Tolstoy’s moral authority; after good-humoured conversations about the subject with his neighbour at Yasnaya, Rayevsky had, for example, given up tobacco; and he had become a conscience-stricken landlord, attempting to better the lot of his peasants through the activities of the local zemstvo. He was a practical man. It was he who first brought to Tolstoy’s attention the fact that Russia was threatened with one of the worst famines in its history.

  Since working out his own intellectual position on the matter, Tolstoy had remained fixed in his view (What Then Must We Do?) that ‘relief’ for
the poor in terms of handouts from the rich actually exacerbated the social problem. He was therefore slow to respond to what Rayevsky was saying. Disturbed by the talk of famine, and by the evidence of crop failure in his own district, Rayevsky invited Tolstoy’s three sons, Sergey, Ilya and Lev and the family tutor at the time, A. M. Novikov, to take a census of the crops and stores in a neighbouring district. Tolstoy was busy with his writing. ‘It is more important to love than to feed,’ he wrote airily to his fellow novelist Leskov. ‘I think the most effective remedy against famine is to write something which might touch the hearts of the rich.’7

  He had no idea what was going on, nor of the extent of the catastrophe. Very few people did, even in the Government. And this was not so much, as used to be thought, because the Government was hushing things up, as because it did not know itself, and was paralysed by the appalling communications system of Russia, by the sheer size of the place, and by the natural tendency towards secretiveness with which the country has always been dogged. In a society where the free press is censored, rumour goes unchecked. By April, stories had reached St. Petersburg that the winter grain had failed in all the eastern provinces, and the wildest stories began to gain credence. It was said that in the Simbirsk province all the children had died.8 There were stories of the Emperor giving fifty million roubles out of his own fortune to help the starving, and of local governors, and even the Red Cross, embezzling relief funds. The Committee of Ministers was cautious in the extent to which it admitted the crisis, insisting upon the use of the terms neurozhai (crop failure) and bedstviye (calamity, misfortune) rather than the emotive golod (famine). Behind the scenes, ministers quarrelled among themselves. The Minister of Finance had a policy of selling cheap grain abroad and, since the harvests were bad all over Europe in that year, it was partly the export of cheap Russian grain which exacerbated the plight of the peasants. Yet when the Taxation Minister Yermolov, an underling of the Chief Finance Minister Vyshnegradsky, threatened to make clear the extent of the crisis to the other members of the Committee, he was told firmly by Vyshnegradsky, ‘No one should know of this – otherwise you will spoil my rate of exchange.’9 Durnovo, the Minister for the Interior, eventually overruled the Treasury and insisted on getting aid to the starving, but in spite of the Government’s efforts, most of the aid got through too late, and it was badly hampered by bad communications, by the fact that roads in the stricken areas were often impassable, and railways had not been built, and by inbuilt suspicion of local government which had been part of Pobedonostsev’s counter-reforms. Since the autocracy felt that it was selling the pass to deal with the local assemblies, the zemstvos, rather than directly with the individual local nobility, the Government was hamstrung. The Government of Alexander III behaved with gross incompetence, but not, as has sometimes been suggested, with total callousness on this occasion. It was merely finding out and demonstrating the fact that Catherine the Great had long ago discovered that the country was too large to be governable. It was a fact which the revolutionaries savoured, as they stirred up panic during these years. Small wonder that there were riots, and that mobs tried to attack the grain trains as they rumbled over the border taking cheap food to Germany and Austria.

  Tolstoy’s interest in the matter was slow to dawn, and his conscience was slow to be pricked. But when his sons and Novikov returned in July 1891 to tell him the things which they had seen on his own doorstep, he was immediately stirred. Within two days of seeing the desolation for himself, he determined to act.10

  The sight of a peasant izba in these districts was shocking to someone even as well acquainted with peasant life as Tolstoy. The stables had long ago emptied. The animals had been sold to pay for grain, and the grain had all been eaten. As winter drew on, the only fuel available for heating was human dung, and this was not always readily available since there was wide-spread suffering from dysentery and diarrhoea – not yet brought on by the hideous typhus epidemic which was to follow in the wake of the famine so much as by the bitter yellow bread which some of the peasants made (they called it golodnyi khleb, famine bread) from tiny amounts of rye and weeds such as goosefoot. Children with bloated features and dirty yellow skin would have lolled on the doorsteps or, as the weather grew colder, huddled on the stove.

  Tolstoy’s son Lev was at once dispatched to their estates in the Samara district to work there, which he did tirelessly until his own health collapsed. The two eldest boys worked in the Tula province in the Chern district. Tolstoy, with Tatyana, Masha and Sofya Andreyevna moved to Rayevsky’s estate Begichevka, about a hundred miles southeast of Yasnaya Polyana. They threw all their energies into setting up soup kitchens on the pattern devised by Rayevsky.

  Throughout the famine, and the epidemics which followed it, the Tolstoy family were thus occupied, and although they returned home for short intervals in order to be ill, and although he continued to write, it was the practical relief of human suffering which marked the next two years of the family’s life. Their example had a powerful effect, and there were many landowners, as well as sympathisers coming out from the towns, who assisted with these soup kitchens. As well as collecting, distributing and conserving food, the Tolstoys were able to set up care for the children of the villages where they worked, and basic medical supplies. Some of the time, Sofya Andreyevna helped in these makeshift hospitals, kindergartens and dining rooms. She fully entered into the need to help the destitute, and she was as disgusted as they all were by the indifference of Tolstoy’s brother Sergey who greeted Lev Nikolayevich and Tatyana coldly when they appealed to him for help, and said he was just a pauper. For much of the winter of 1891–92, however, Tolstoy and his wife were apart. She was at Yasnaya Polyana dealing with the enormous correspondence which Tolstoy’s public appeals were generating. She sent them as much money as she deemed wise from the profits of Volumes XII and XIII of the Collected Works and between November 3 and 12, 1891, she received nine thousand roubles in donations from strangers and well-wishers.

  But the whole matter gave her cause not only for delight in the strange manner by which pity can beautify human character, but also fear for her husband’s safety and reputation. In November, Tolstoy published an article in the liberal newspaper Russkiye Vedomosti entitled ‘A Terrible Question’ (strashny vopros): and that question was whether Russia was capable of feeding itself. The rhetoric of the piece was deliberately inflammatory and it lashed out at the callous Governmental incompetence which was making the crisis worse rather than better. A few days later, the conservative Moscow Gazette discussed the article in disapproving terms, and suggested that Tolstoy was bringing to birth a ‘new political party with liberal tendencies’. She herself wrote letters to Russkiye Vedomosti supporting her husband and attacking the appalling contrasts between rich and poor which existed in that society. Shortly thereafter, the newspapers received notice from the Government that no more letters from Tolstoy would be published.

  He would not be silent. Perhaps in part, his courage and tirelessness were strengthened by the death of Rayevsky, who caught influenza at the beginning of his campaign for the hungry and wore himself out in their service. Perhaps it was simply the natural justice of it. And the old soldier and the squire in Tolstoy were good at organising. By July 1892, he had set up two hundred and forty-six kitchens, feeding thirteen thousand people daily, and a hundred and twenty-four special children’s kitchens, feeding three thousand daily. He had personally raised a hundred and forty-one thousand roubles for the relief of the poor, which included half a million dollars from America, and a quite independent donation from the English Quakers of twenty-six thousand pounds.

  Through Chertkov, he had access to the English press, and he defied his own Government’s censorship by printing appeals in The Daily Telegraph. Rumours began to reach the Tolstoys that the Government was thinking of taking action against him. Alexander III felt that he had been tricked into receiving Sofya Andreyevna. The Minister for the Interior told the Emperor that Tolstoy’s le
tter to the English press ‘must be considered tantamount to a most shocking revolutionary proclamation’: not a judgement that can often have been made of a letter to The Daily Telegraph. Alexander III began to believe that it was all part of an English plot and the Moscow Gazette, which was fed from the Government, denounced Tolstoy’s letters as ‘frank propaganda for the overthrow of the whole social and economic structure of the world’.11

  Sofya Andreyevna wrote to the Minister of the Interior, Durnovo, denying that her husband was planning to overthrow the Government; and she tried to write letters to the press to the same effect, but by now they were censored.12 Priests were dispatched to Begichevka to investigate what Tolstoy was up to, and to spread abroad the idea that Tolstoy was the Antichrist. They found Tolstoy and his wife living simply in one room. They found canteens where ragged, thin-faced people were queuing up for rye bread and cabbage soup.13 ‘You think that Antichrist will come in an evil guise,’ the priests told the hungry peasants. ‘No, he will come to you with kindness, with bread at the very time when you will be dying of hunger. But woe to him who is seduced by this bread.’ The peasants were not impressed. Sofya Andreyevna’s sister Tanya wrote from St. Petersburg to say that there were rumours of a plan to send Tolstoy into exile in England. (In fact there had been, but when the proposals reached Alexander III he had written on the papers, ‘No action yet’.) When a party of uniformed Government officials arrived at Begichevka to inspect the place, the peasants surrounded the house where Tolstoy was. It was a false alarm, and when he left, in the summer of 1892, crowds followed him down the road. They knew who their friends were.