Tolstoy (53 page)

While it is hard to imagine Tolstoy standing beside Dostoyevsky and Turgenev to honour Russia's first truly great writer at this stage in his career, his refusal does in retrospect look a little churlish. The occasion for the celebrations was the unveiling of the first statue of Pushkin in Russia. It was scandalous that it had not happened sooner (Pushkin died in 1837), but none of the nineteenth-century tsars was prepared to sanction the official veneration of a rebellious and subversive poet fatally wounded in a duel. What was therefore important about this statue is that it was paid for entirely by public subscription, and its unveiling was a cause for celebration precisely because it had nothing to do with the government. The fact that Turgenev came especially from Paris for the occasion, and that Dostoyevsky, who was gravely ill, broke off writing
The Brothers Karamazov
at his country house south of Novgorod to come and take part, speaks eloquently about the importance of this occasion as a public event, which lasted for four days and was widely seen as a triumph for the Russian intelligentsia, and for Russian culture generally. As Turgenev said in his speech, the whole of educated Russia had in some way contributed to the erection of the statue, and this was a sign of its love for one of its greatest fellow countrymen. It was Pushkin, he proclaimed, who had completed the final refinement of 'our language, which in its richness, force, logic and beauty of form is acknowledged by even foreign philolo-gists to be the best after ancient Greek'. Pushkin, he said, 'spoke with typical images, and immortal sounds embracing all aspects of Russian life'. Tolstoy did not care much for 'educated Russia', and now scorned the intelligentsia, and yet he was in some ways biting the hand which had fed him, for as a writer he too owed an enormous debt to Pushkin.

Turgenev's rhetoric was nothing compared to Dostoyevsky's messianic identification of Pushkin with Russia and Christ, which was greeted by an ecstatic thirty-minute ovation. Writing to his wife afterwards, Dostoyevsky told her 'strangers in the audience were weeping, sobbing, embracing one another, and
swearing to one another to be better, not to hate each other in the future, but to love
. Even Turgenev was moved to embrace his old opponent.
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Tolstoy was at this very moment immersed in Christ's teaching of brotherly love, as he had begun to coordinate and translate the Gospels, but his ego would never have permitted him to join in the communal rejoicing at this extraordinary, unparalleled event. Many years later he explained that, much as he valued Pushkin's genius, he had not gone to Moscow because he felt there was something unnatural about such celebrations, something, which, while not exactly false, did not meet his 'emotional requirements'.
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Tolstoy's conspicuous absence from the celebrations in Moscow was certainly much commented on. Rumour had it that he was ill, going mad, or already mad. Dostoyevsky was tempted to travel to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy finally, but decided against it. In little over half a year he would be dead, and only then, sitting alone at dinner one cold, dark February evening, having arrived home late, and crying into his plate, did Tolstoy realise quite how dear Dostoyevsky was to him.
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When he had been ill the previous September, Tolstoy had re-read
Notes from the House of the Dead,
the book which allegorises Dostoyevsky's spiritual rebirth during his years of hard labour in a Siberian prison, and he had marvelled at its 'sincere, natural and Christian point of view'. He had asked Strakhov to pass on affectionate greetings to Dostoyevsky,
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who was terribly pleased by this, but less so by Tolstoy's lack of reverence for Pushkin. Strakhov tried to mollify Dostoyevsky by saying that Tolstoy had become even more of a 'free-thinker' than he had been before.
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Tolstoy's belated appreciation of Dostoyevsky is revealing of his sentimentality, for the truth is that he was utterly repelled by the mixture of piety and patriotism in Dostoyevsky's later worldview. The feeling was mutual. Alexandrine had become close to Dostoyevsky shortly before he died, and the writer had bristled with indignation when she showed him some of Tolstoy's recent letters about religion.
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Sonya reported to Strakhov in March 1880 that her husband was working to exhaustion and getting terrible headaches, but could not be torn from his desk.
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Tolstoy was, in fact, so excited by the challenge of confronting the Orthodox Church that he carried on working through the spring and into the summer, contrary to his usual routine.
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There was no rest cure in Samara in 1880, but just three short trips to Moscow in late autumn to find new teachers for the children. One by one, the eleven volumes of the latest edition of his writings went on sale, but another year passed without Tolstoy venturing into print with anything new. He was aware that he would face difficulties with publishing all three of the projects he was working on now, but bringing them to completion was a matter of life importance to him. Their eventual publication abroad would set the seal on the antagonistic position he had taken up in relation to the Orthodox Church, and from that point on there would be no going back.

Once Tolstoy had worked through the 1,000–plus pages of Makary's
Orthodox Dogmatic Theology,
as well as other key expositions of the Eastern Christian doctrine by authors ranging from St John of Damascus to other recent Moscow metropolitans, he began his critical exegesis, setting out in painstaking detail its major flaws, as he saw them. The Tula priest who had originally recommended that Tolstoy read Makary was startled to receive a second visit from the count a year later. Tolstoy declared that he had read
Orthodox Dogmatic Theology
from cover to cover, and furthermore, he informed Father Alexander with evident satisfaction, his year of study had not only
not
convinced him of the truth of Orthodox dogma, but in fact the opposite. He now realised that the apostles had actually distorted Christ's teaching. Indeed, when he had come to see that Orthodox doctrine was just an artificial confection of often opaque and contradictory expressions of faith, he said, he began to understand why Russian seminaries produced so many atheists. Here Tolstoy was alluding to the many graduates of seminaries who had become revolutionaries. Chernyshevsky, who was still languishing in Siberian exile, was one, and in the 1890s Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) would become another.
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The first draft of Tolstoy's own weighty
Investigation of Dogmatic Theology
was finally finished in 1882.
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He does not pull any punches in it, at one point calling Makary an outright liar, dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a 'vile, criminal, blasphemous lie' and subjecting it to ridicule by describing biblical mysteries in his own words (as in 'God had a three-way conversation with his son and the Holy Spirit').
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As Tolstoy goes on, his tone becomes more aggressive. He does not just refute the notion that Christ redeemed all of mankind by dying on the cross, since people afterwards were 'just the same', but goes on to accuse the Church of inventing the sacraments and the idea that Christ was divine sometime back in the third century. Pointing out that he is probably the only person to have read Makary from cover to cover apart from seminarists studying for exams, Tolstoy ends his obloquy with the allegation that the Orthodox Church no longer enjoyed any moral authority amongst either the educated classes or the common people in Russia. Tolstoy toned down his criticisms for publication in 1891, but only a little.
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Aware that readers of his novels might be a little taken aback to be confronted suddenly by a tendentious theological monograph in which the minutiae of Orthodox doctrine were submitted to rational scrutiny, Tolstoy felt he should preface it with a personal account of how he had come to embark on his critique of the Church.
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The much briefer, and frankly far more readable,
Confession
was thus initially entitled 'Introduction to an Unpublished Work', and was completed in 1880. Bearing obvious comparison with the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, Tolstoy's interrogation of the meaning of life begins in his childhood, and charts his spiritual evolution with a painful and engaging honesty which Sonya summarised in notes made in her 1881 diary. She writes that her husband saw the 'light', as he put it, when he realised the source of 'goodness, forbearance and love' amongst the people was the Gospels, not the Church. It was the Church which had, in fact, obscured this message by insisting that salvation was only possible through the sacraments of christening, communion, fasting and so on. Tolstoy's 'whole outlook was illuminated by this light', she wrote, leading him to see millions of people as his brothers, his conscience greatly troubled by the poverty and injustice he saw around him.
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Fundamental to Tolstoy's repudiation of Orthodox doctrine was his own new 'unified' translation of the Gospels, which he worked on intensely in the second half of 1880 and 'finished' in July 1881. He was aware that he needed to work further on it, but at that point wanted to move on to other things. Tolstoy now considered his
Union and Translation of the Four Gospels
to be the most important thing he had done in his life.
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With the assistance of Ivan Ivakin, the new family tutor who arrived in September 1880, he methodically worked his way through the New Testament in the original Greek, using academic editions supplied by the ever-helpful Strakhov. These included the authoritative edition produced in the 1770s by Johann Griesbach, Professor of Theology at the University ofJena, whose philological rigour had launched a new era in biblical scholarship, and the heavily annotated new French translation produced by another Protestant theologian, Professor Edouard Reuss, based at the University of Strasbourg.
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Tolstoy's aim was to make sense of the morass of contradictions and obscurities he found in the Scriptures, clarify their central message, and extract some practical moral guidance which could be applied to daily living.

The experience of going back to the original texts was a revelation to Tolstoy. Drawing from each of the four Gospels to produce one unified text ('since they set out the same events and the same teaching, although in conflicting ways'), and accompanying it with his commentary, Tolstoy produced twelve titled chapters which follow Christ's life from birth to death. Each biblical excerpt in his version is given firstly in the original Greek, secondly in a modern Russian translation of the Church Slavonic biblical text (which would have been as archaic to a nineteenth-century Russian ear as the English of the Wycliffe Bible would have seemed to a nineteenth-century British ear), and thirdly in his own more accessible version. For the latter, he deliberately used colloquial words wherever possible, with a peasant readership in mind.

This is no ordinary summary of the New Testament, for the Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to Lev is a Christian after Tolstoy's own heart: an ordinary man who is critical oforganised religion, and unafraid to speak out against attempts to obstruct his ethical message. The Jesus projected by Tolstoy is a lone crusader swimming against the current of public opinion, a 'humble sectarian' with whom he could identify, as well as look up to morally.
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This was paramount, and one is reminded of his practice as a novelist. It is striking that what he had most admired about Peter the Great when he had sought to write a novel about him, for example, was his huge energy and productivity—qualities he himself possessed in abundance. Tolstoy essentially stripped the Gospels down to their moral message. By discarding accounts of Christ's baptism and early childhood, all miracles, the story of the Resurrection, anything referring to Jesus as a divine or historical figure, and passages highlighting the special mission of anointed apostles, Tolstoy ended up with about half of the original texts from the New Testament. He did, however, retain all direct quotations of Jesus' speech, which means the Gospel according to St John features far more than the Gospel according to St Mark, which includes many miracles. The key importance of St Matthew's Gospel for Tolstoy was due to the Sermon on the Mount, which was to become the cornerstone of his teaching.
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Ivan Ivakin, the new tutor at Yasnaya Polyana, was a Moscow University graduate, and at first he could not understand why Tolstoy wanted to talk about the finer details of New Testament wording, since the gossip columns in Russian newspapers at the time were still talking about him writing a novel about the Decembrists. Ivakin was soon initiated into Tolstoy's work in progress, and when it became clear that his knowledge of Greek was far superior to that of his employer, he was immediately inveigled into helping out. The pale-faced young man with exceptionally slender fingers left some vivid memoirs of his time at Yasnaya Polyana. It has to be said, he was not very impressed with Tolstoy's command of Greek, and took a rather wry view of his selective and distinctly unacademic approach, which jettisoned concrete details: '"Why should we be interested to know that Christ went out into the courtyard?" he would say. "Why do I need to know that he was resurrected? Good for him if he was! For me what is important is knowing what to do, and how I should live."'
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