Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Now this angelic and attractive presence had been removed from the Tolstoy household. Doubtless, his canonisation in the eyes of the family took place partly because, during the last month of his life, his parents had been so engaged in bitter dispute that they had barely noticed the infant saint and prodigy in their midst. Sofya Andreyevna never fully recovered from this death. For once, the cliché was true and she was ‘never the same again’.

  ‘She was in the habit of taking refuge from everything in life which was painful, incomprehensible and vaguely worrying to her in her love, her passionate and reciprocated love for this boy, who was exceptionally gifted, both spiritually and emotionally,’ Tolstoy wrote. ‘He was one of those children sent prematurely by God into a world which is not yet ready for them, someone ahead of his time, like swallows arriving too early and freezing to death.’24

  As he contemplated her grief, Tolstoy was astonished by his wife’s spiritual purity. He admitted to his cousin Alexandrine, ‘This loss was painful to me, but I don’t feel it nearly so much as Sofya, firstly because I had and still have another life, a spiritual one, and secondly because Sofya’s grief prevents me from seeing my own loss, and because I see something great is taking place in her soul, and I pity her and worry about her condition. Generally speaking, I can say that I am well.’25 The rest of the family prepared for Easter. Tolstoy, who was above all that kind of thing, looked on with sympathetic condescension. He even felt entitled to be privy to his wife’s Easter confession which was made to some holy-man friend of his nun sister. This ‘very intelligent priest’, Father Valentin told her that mothers who lost their children always turn to God initially and then return to the cares of the world. He warned her against this. ‘I don’t think this will happen in her case,’ added Lev Nikolayevich, the spiritual expert in his summing up of the matter.26

  During the spring, while his wife grieved and lost weight and spent much of her time in bed with influenza, Tolstoy felt himself ‘becoming the bearer of God’s will’. Dostoyevsky had believed that the Russian people, under their Church and Emperor, were the God-bearers. For Tolstoy, the exact opposite was true. His nation was God-less and he was the chosen vessel of Heaven who, like another prophet in another land, ‘did but prompt the age to quit their clogs’.

  The sadness of his own domestic scene was in itself a positive encouragement to take an interest in public affairs. (Prophets and Evangelists are often enough people for whom home has become intolerable.) Each week brought news, either from John Kenworthy, or from Chertkov, or from some other source, of further Government brutality. He wrote, with great perspicacity, in his diary: ‘A man is considered disgraced if he lets himself be beaten or if he is accused of theft, brawling or not paying card debts etc., but not if he signs a death sentence, takes part in an execution, reads other people’s letters, separates fathers and husbands and wives from their families, confiscates people’s resources or puts them in prison. But surely that is worse.’27

  During March, while his wife languished in bed and communed with her priest, Tolstoy visited the dissident Izyumchenko in prison (he had been sentenced to two years in a penal battalion for refusing military service) and his friend Kolkhov in the psychiatric hospital in Moscow. The doctors suggested that Sofya Andreyevna should be taken abroad for her health, but the risk was too great that, once out of the country, Tolstoy would find readmission refused. At some stages of his life, he had relished the thought of exile. But now? Exile from his friends, his books, his daughters? Marooned in some foreign house with a wife whom he pitied but no longer liked? At the end of April he sent Sofya Andreyevna off to Kiev with their daughter Tanya. ‘The woman must live,’ he observed smugly in his diary, ‘but there is nothing to live by. She lacks the habit of, even the strength for, a spiritual life because all her strength has been expended on her children who are no longer there.’28 In all his writings on the subject, he had made it clear that this was what women were for: to breed and devote themselves to children. If this made the life of the soul impossible, it was tantamount to saying that women do not have souls, or anyway not souls that matter.

  While his poor trivial wife and daughter went off to Kiev, the spiritual Master decided to take lessons in riding a bicycle. His ardent disciple Popov was scandalised by this concession to industrialisation and modernity. What could be less Tolstoyan than using a machine to convey you from one spot to another? ‘It’s quite harmless,’ thought the fountainhead, ‘and it amuses me in a childish way.’29

  Meanwhile, as he wobbled his bicycle around the arena in a riding stable or paced the Moscow streets, Tolstoy’s mind moved backwards and forwards in a series of melancholic reflections. He took Sasha and a friend to the theatre and felt sorry for the little girls being so excited by the electric lights. There was only one important progress and this was not electricity, not learning to fly, but ‘the establishment of the Kingdom of God upon earth’. It was not a thought calculated to enliven a matinée; and, as they paced home through the Moscow streets, the Kingdom did not look as though it were drawing nigh. Few of the faces which passed by were undisfigured by alcohol, nicotine or syphilis. ‘Their feebleness is terribly pitiful and offensive.’30

  Like nearly all men who have wanted to establish a kingdom of peace and love on this earth, Tolstoy had an ambivalent attitude towards the human race. Sometimes he was able to disguise his misanthropy as a scheme of universal improvement and sometimes not. In moods of self-awareness, he knew that he was a much less simple character than his guru-poses would allow. However much he wanted to be a secular starets, a self-made saint, he knew that he was (because so much more complicated) in fact much weaker than the godless hordes, his wife included, on whom he looked down with such condescension when in one of his ‘spiritual’ moods. ‘All life is a struggle between the flesh and the spirit,’ he wrote and added realistically, ‘gradually the flesh triumphs over the spirit.’31

  It was such a sombre thought as that which inspired Father Sergius, the short story at which he began to work around this date. Sergius the failed ascetic is one of Tolstoy’s more brilliantly lurid self-projections. Into him is poured Tolstoy’s everlasting war with lust. And there is also the much more insidious pleasure of being famed for a spiritual role to which he was actually unsuited. Then there is the dream of martyrdom at the hands of the authorities, exile, and a life of genuine simplicity and obscurity. If Tolstoy, like Sergius, had found employment by a muzhik as family tutor and general dogsbody, would the arrangement have been a success? The question (unlike those schoolroom exercises in Latin with num and nonne) is not ‘expecting the answer’ yes or no. However self-deceiving he may have been, Tolstoy probably genuinely believed that such a life would bring happiness. The wretchedness of relations with his wife lent sweetness to the idea of the Government sending him into exile in Siberia. The risk was quite genuine, as he increased his vocal defence of such fringe groups as the Dukhobors.

  The Dukhobors were a rum lot, even by the rum standards of Russian religious eccentrics. Their origins, some time in the eighteenth century, are obscure and it is hard to pin down many details of their beliefs or customs since most of them have been illiterate. Indeed, since they object to written records or formulated dogmas, illiteracy is rather cherished by them. Even the New Testament is rejected in favour of The Living Book – that is, the guidance of the spirit in individual Dukhobor leaders. Mutatis mutandis, there is much in the Dukhobor position which will be familiar to the post-Barthes schools of criticism in Paris or Yale.

  Some English and American Quakers who visited a Dukhobor community in 1819 were scandalised by their complete absence of interest in the historical Christ whom they considered less important than their own leader of the moment. The great thing seemed to be prophecy: the prophetic utterance of the living spirit.

  The movement had its ups and downs and (inevitably) its schisms. Alexander I was tolerant towards them. (The Dukhobors were, and perhaps are, among those who believed that th
e liberal Tsar did not die in 1825 but, rather like King Arthur, continued a mysterious existence which would one day be known to the faithful; in this case, they believed, not that Alexander was sleeping in Avalon, but alive on the shores of the Baltic, and practising the religion of the Dukhobors.) Gradually, as the century wore on, the Dukhobor renunciation of property was compromised. By the close of the century there were many Dukhobor peasants who were, by peasant standards, rich; there were even Dukhobors who had compromised their pacifist principles by doing national service in the army. Then there was a revival of the old values, and squabbles broke out within the movement. The larger group of Dukhobors, and the more reactionary, called themselves the Large Party. They chose, ‘in the spirit of Christ’, a leader called Pyotr Vasilyevich Verigin, who took the title of Peter the Lordly.

  Verigin pretty soon fell foul of the intolerant spirit of the times. His insistence that property and warfare were sinful got him thrown into prison in 1887, and then exiled to Shenkursk in the Arctic Circle. It was there that he read Tolstoy’s religious writings and absorbed many of his teachings. The authors of the standard history of the Dukhobors make out a convincing case for believing that it was really their Tolstoyism which got them into trouble.

  Peter the Lordly, who claimed for himself a divine infallibility as absolute as the Apostolic successors of Peter the Fisherman in Rome, was naturally unwilling to admit that many of his ideas were derived from books. He had no sooner read Tolstoy than he imagined that Tolstoyan ideas had been fed directly into his brain by God; and during the years 1893 and 1894 Peter the Lordly, having now been released from prison, issued a series of directives which were to have dire consequences upon the lives of his followers in the Caucasus. Their only weapons were those of civil disobedience as prescribed by Tolstoy. Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod, had rather stronger weapons at his disposal.

  The first thing which Peter the Lordly did was to ban the consumption of meat. This announcement led to a further schism among the Dukhobors between the Fasters (those who accepted the new teaching) and the Butchers, who lived in a cold mountain climate where it was impossible to grow grain, and who therefore depended for survival upon a meat diet.

  Meanwhile, Cossack troops were sent to the Dukhobor villages to demonstrate what the Government thought of their refusal to do military service. The Cossacks were authorised to beat and violate any Dukhobor they found. General Surovzev, who supervised some of these licensed debaucheries, accused the Dukhobors of not being prepared to lay down their lives for their Emperor. They replied: ‘You say wrong. We are ready to lay down our life for every man, including the Tsar: if we saw him being tortured, we would lay down our life for his sake, as well as for any other man, but we cannot murder for any man, because it is forbidden by God.’

  It was an answer of which Tolstoy himself would have been proud. He first heard of their plight from Prince Khilkov, his disciple who was stationed in the Caucasus after the Russo-Turkish war. Peter the Lordly, with peasant cunning, concealed from Khilkov the fact that he had read Tolstoy, so that when accounts of Dukhobor beliefs and customs began to reach Yasnaya Polyana, the similarities between the things which Lev Nikolayevich had written and those which had been ‘revealed’ to Peter the Lordly were so striking as almost to appear miraculous. Tolstoy, with all his energy and learning, had spent years poring over the Greek Testament, reading the philosophers and the scholars and studying non-Christian religions before deciding that the essence of the Gospel was contained in the doctrine of non-violence and the refusal to recognise civil authorities. Celibacy and vegetarianism were later thrown in for good measure. The Church had arrogantly rejected his claim to have rescued the authentic Jesus from its maw. And yet here, in Russia, eighteen hundred years after Christ, were a group of simple, unlettered peasants, who had managed to preserve the Gospel intact. It never crossed Tolstoy’s mind that it was rather less than ten years since Verigin had read What Then Must We Do? and other tracts. For Tolstoy, the ‘survival’ of the Dukhobors was tantamount to ‘the resurrection of Christ himself’.32

  He therefore needed no encouragement from his friends to start a campaign on behalf of the Dukhobors; and this had far-reaching consequences: for Tolstoy and his art; for his wife and family; for Chertkov; and, more than for anyone, for the Dukhobors. What had begun as some crazy ideas buzzing about in the heads of a few thousand peasants in the mountain villages of the Caucasus was to be a drama played out on the world stage. On October 23, 1895, The Times (of London) published Tolstoy’s letter ‘The Persecution of Christians in Russia’, followed a month later by a lengthy article in The Contemporary Review.

  Much the most energetic and well-organised of Tolstoy’s informants about the struggle for religious freedom in Russia was Chertkov, who had by now become a full-time agitator. In December 1896, he and two other friends Tregubov and Biryukov drafted a pamphlet called An Appeal for Help. ‘A terrible cruelty is now being perpetrated in the Caucasus. More than four thousand people are suffering and dying from hunger, disease and exhaustion, blows, tortures and other persecutions at the hands of the Russian authorities.’

  In January, they published the pamphlet, and all three were immediately arrested. Tregubov and Biryukov were exiled to Estonia, as was Prince Khilkov, whose continued presence in the Caucasus was thought undesirable. Chertkov had already taken the precaution of sending his fanatical wife and his children to England. In February, he was allowed to follow them. He would not return to Russia for another eight years.

  Tolstoy was bitterly distressed. For all he knew, Chertkov had gone for ever. True, he would be able to meet up with Kenworthy and the other English Tolstoyans; and, like Herzen in an earlier generation, he would be in a stronger position to expose the evils of the Russian Government from the freedom of a country where there was virtually no censorship. Nevertheless, the idea of Chertkov’s exile made the Master uneasy: ‘I’m very much afraid that you’ll be corrupted in England. I’ve just received the Review of Reviews and read it, and I caught such a breath of that astonishing English self-satisfied dullness that I put myself in your place and tried to think how you would get on with them.’33

  Chertkov’s sojourn in England was of great importance to the future of Tolstoy’s work in Russia. Not only were the greater portion of Tolstoy’s works – published and unpublished, literary and didactic – collected by Chertkov in exile. The period of exile itself was to establish Chertkov’s bona fide credentials later on when, under the regime of Lenin, the great ninety-volume edition of Tolstoy’s works was undertaken. Such was the strength of Chertkov’s personality, and his skill at organising his team of assistant editors, that this ‘Jubilee Edition’ (the first volumes were published to coincide with the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth, 1928) continued to roll from the presses and be bound in the handsome blue cloth quarto editions throughout the blackest years of Soviet history. By the time of Chertkov’s death in 1936, the bulk of the work was done. Of course, such a lavish work was beyond the pocket of ordinary Soviet citizens. But those who could sneak into a library were able to enjoy the paradoxical pleasure during the 1930s (when all other religious and revisionist literature was banned, and the Stalinist purges had destroyed all literary and religious freedoms) of reading Tolstoy’s denunciations of political power, and urging of private individuals to follow conscience alone and to submit to no laws but those of God. This strange literary paradox was a fruit of Chertkov’s English years.

  ‘The Croydon Brotherhood’, the Tolstoyan group founded by the ex-Methodist minister John Kenworthy, had moved to the suburb of Croydon and established a land settlement at Purleigh in Essex. The idea seems to have resembled a modern kibbutz, only without the common discipline or common sense which has made the kibbutz experiment so (comparatively) successful. The Purleigh Community, in which Tolstoy himself took the keenest interest, was not to last. Aylmer and Louise Maude tried to live there for a while, but they did not stay. There were quarrels. Ken
worthy was destined to die in a lunatic asylum.

  Chertkov did not join the Purleigh community. It would have been intolerable to him to belong to any organisation of which he was not the recognised leader. He lost no time, after his arrival in England, in putting money and energy into something called the Free Age Press, run by A. C. Fifield. This enterprise managed to produce no less than four hundred and twenty-four million pages of Tolstoy’s writing.34

  Finding Purleigh altogether uncongenial, Chertkov moved his centre of operations to Tuckton House, near Bournemouth, taking over the disused Christchurch waterworks nearby as his publishing house. Tuckton, a red-brick edifice of fairly recent construction, became a centre of Tolstoyism. A picture of Tolstoy hung in the hall. So zealous was Chertkov to preserve Tolstoy’s manuscripts and papers that he constructed a special strongroom for the purpose, lined with steel and fireproof bricks. When, for some reason, the room had to be demolished in 1965, it took two workmen a whole week to make a tiny hole in the wall of this room. Nobody was ever allowed access to the room during Chertkov’s time at Tuckton, and it was there, piecemeal, that he built up the material for his ninety-volume edition. From 1902 onwards, he began the process of copying all Tolstoy’s correspondence. Meanwhile, the house became a sort of international refuge for malcontents. The anarchist Prince Kropotkin was one of the many visitors from Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, Holland, all over.

  Chertkov did not limit his energies to propagating Tolstoyism among the Slavs. He made sorties to Oxford to address undergraduate societies on the subject, and he gave lectures to local clubs and Women’s Institutes. It is hard to guess how Chertkov responded to the inescapably low key (emotionally and politically) of everything which went on in England. He had known it before, when he had been to London as a young Evangelical convert of Lord Radstock’s, joined various London clubs, played cricket, and so on. Perhaps he was so naturally fervent a person that he never quite noticed the capacity of English liberalism to make everything vapid. A good example of what Tolstoy feared when he spoke of ‘that astonishing English self-satisfied dullness’ is to be found in the writings of Aylmer Maude, who had come back to Chertkov in 1897 and, finding him insufferably arrogant, quickly parted company with him. In his introduction to What Then Must We Do?, perhaps the most violently despondent of all Tolstoy’s political reflections, an exposure of the gap between rich and poor which leaves no reader unaffected, Maude felt that the English had gone some small way towards solving the difficulty. ‘Some attempt to bridge the gulf and supply mental sustenance where it is badly needed may be found in our village Women’s Institutes, as well as in various amateur dramatic groups up and down the country and in the Citizen House movement at Bath.’35 There is a sort of craziness about this which could never be translated into the Russian language, let alone the Russian context. In the year that Maude wrote it, the Great Terror was at its height, and tens of thousands of Russians were herded to their death, or sentenced to imprisonment in concentration camps.