Tolstoy (62 page)

Russia's holy fools deliberately challenged social conventions to mock the falsehood of the temporal world, unafraid of speaking the truth to all classes, including rulers. Relinquishing all material comforts, they dressed in rags and led ascetic lives like the vagabond Stranniks, voluntarily accepting humiliation and insults in order to conquer their pride and thus achieve greater humility and meekness. Since they lived amongst people, unlike hermits in monasteries, and so were in the public eye, they went out of their way to avoid being accorded any respect for their piety, and welcomed censure. Tolstoy had known and revered holy fools from the days of his childhood, thanks to his pious aunts who welcomed them to Yasnaya Polyana.
Childhood,
his first work of fiction, notably features a holy fool, as does
War and Peace,
and it can been argued that three other characters in that novel, Pierre, Natasha and Kutuzov, are 'stylised' holy fools.
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Pashenka, the heroine in 'Father Sergius', the story Tolstoy worked on between 1890 and 1898, is another version of the holy fool. Back in 1877 Tolstoy had told his friend Strakhov that he most wanted to be a holy fool rather than a monk, and after his religious crisis he expressed the view that the best path to goodness was to be an involuntary holy fool. But projecting oneself as worse than in reality was a conscious act for a holy fool, and was a strategy adopted by Tolstoy from the time he wrote his historic letter to Alexander III in 1881. His merciless self-criticism allowed him to express himself more freely with the Tsar. Tolstoy's self-flagellation continued until his last days. In August 1910, just a few months before his death, he noted in his diary that he had never encountered anyone else who had the full complement of vices—sensuality, self-interest, spite, vanity and, above all, narcissism.
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As pointed out earlier, Sonya took a dim view of her husband donning the mask of the holy fool. For him, however, it was a fundamental medium for the communication of his message. In this regard, a comment Tolstoy made in his diary when he was writing
The Kreutzer Sonata
in August 1889 is revealing. 'I need to be a holy fool in my writing too,' he noted, realising that perfect execution alone would not make his arguments more convincing.
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Sadly, Chekhov for one was unimpressed, to judge from further disparaging comments in his letter to Suvorin of December 1890. Dismissing in withering terms Tolstoy's afterword to
The Kreutzer Sonata
as the product of a holy fool, he asserts that his philosophy is 'not worth even one of the little mares in "Strider"'. (Tolstoy's superlative story about a horse, which he had begun many years earlier, when he still had ambition as an artist, was finally completed and published for the first time in i8 8 6.
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)

As much as the holy fool is integral to the Russian Church, the character of 'Ivan the Fool', is integral to Russian folklore.
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'The Tale of Ivan the Fool', a popular story for The Intermediary which Tolstoy dashed off in an evening in 1885, was one he particularly cherished.
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The story was published the following year in Sonya's first edition of the collected works, and also by The Intermediary, but was eventually banned by the religious censor as a work unsuitable for mass readership. The authorities took exception to the way in which the story promoted the idea of a kingdom which had no need for an army, money or intellectuals, while its tsar should at least be 'no different from a muzhik'.
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In fact, even some of Tolstoy's closest friends took exception to its bald moralising and its denigration of intellectual endeavour in favour of physical labour.

By the summer of 1891, after the controversy surrounding
The Kreutzer Sonata
had died down, Tolstoy found himself struggling to concentrate on the new treatise he had begun the previous summer about non-violence. He had ideas for new fictional works which he wanted to develop (the future novel
Resurrection
and the story 'Father Sergius'), and he also wanted to complete an article about gluttony. He had been greatly impressed with Howard Williams's history of vegetarianism,
The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating,
which had been published in London in 1883, after serial publication in
The Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger
(the monthlyjournal of the Vegetarian Society), and he wanted to write a preface for its Russian translation. His article, 'The First Step', was completed in July, after a sobering visit to the abattoir in Tula, and published the following year in the journal
Issues in Philosophy and Psychology,
which was edited by his friend Nikolay Grot, a professor at Moscow University.
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If the article came hard on the heels of
The Kreutzer Sonata,
it was because Tolstoy drew a direct link between gastronomic and sexual indulgence, arguing that carnal consumption stimulated carnal desire. Like chastity, vegetarianism was a precondition of the Christian ascetic life to which he aspired.
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Tolstoy was bound to become a hero of the animal rights movement, for he did not, as it were, mince his words when graphically describing the cruelties involved in the slaughter of animals:

Through the door opposite the one at which I was standing, a big, red, well-fed ox was led in. Two men were dragging it, and hardly had it entered when I saw a butcher raise a knife above its neck and stab it. The ox, as if all four legs had suddenly given way, fell heavily upon its belly, immediately turned over on one side, and began to work its legs and all its hind-quarters. Another butcher at once threw himself upon the ox from the side opposite to the twitching legs, caught its horns and twisted its head down to the ground, while another butcher cut its throat with a knife. From beneath the head there flowed a stream of blackish-red blood, which a besmeared boy caught in a tin basin. All the time this was going on the ox kept incessantly twitching its head as if trying to get up, and waved its four legs in the air. The basin was quickly filling, but the ox still lived, and, its stomach heaving heavily, both hind and fore legs worked so violently that the butchers held aloof. When one basin was full, the boy carried it away on his head to the albumen factory, while another boy placed a fresh basin, which also soon began to fill up. But still the ox heaved its body and worked its hind legs...

...[W]e cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat. If it were really indispensable, or, if not indispensable, at least in some way useful! But it is quite unnecessary, and only serves to develop animal feelings, to excite desire, and to promote fornication and drunkenness. And this is continually being confirmed by the fact that young, kind, undepraved people—especially women and girls—without knowing how it logically follows, feel that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and, as soon as they wish to be good, give up eating flesh.
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Contemporary writers may not be following the same spiritual path as Tolstoy, but the fact that revelations of animal cruelty in the twenty-first century still have the capacity to shock shows that we still behave like ostriches. Over a century after Tolstoy's 'First Step' was published, many abattoirs are only a little more humane.
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There is a grim irony about the fact that Tolstoy's broadside against needlessly excessive consumption was written just as reports of a major famine started reaching him. The Volga and central 'black earth' regions had already suffered two poor harvests in consecutive years, and in 1891 there was a drought which affected about 14 million people in an area stretching across thirteen regions in the European part of Russia, all the way from Tolstoy's own Tula region in the west to Samara, hundreds of miles to the east. The combination of adverse weather conditions, outdated farming implements, poor transportation and the Russian government's failure to act in time, compounded by its further failure to provide adequate help for peasants who were already desperately poor and malnourished, was fatal. Half a million people died of cholera alone. The crisis was certainly not helped by Russia's centralised government with its bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, since officials had little conception of what was really going on in the provinces, and little autonomous power.

Tolstoy's ideas had begun to win him increasing numbers of followers by the end of the 1880s, but he also had his share of critics. In 1891, however, when he seized the initiative to help victims of the famine which had begun to rage in Russia, Tolstoy assumed an unassailable position of national moral leadership to the extent that his strident religious views were subsequently indulged more as eccentricities, at least by the people. Despite Chekhov's impatience with Tolstoy's retrogressive ideas, he was serious about placing him as the No. i most important person in Russia in December i890 (he categorised himself as No. 877),
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and he had nothing but admiration for his famine relief work. As he wrote in another letter exactly a year later, 'You need the courage and authority of a Tolstoy to swim against the current, defy the prohibitions and the general climate of opinion, and do what your duty calls you to do.'
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Chekhov did sterling work himself during the famine, but Tolstoy got there first, and he put the Russian government to shame.

Tolstoy soon became intensely irritated that the Russian affluent classes were up in arms about the approaching crisis in the summer of 1891. Dire poverty was an everyday reality for most peasants, so why was it they only wanted to help the peasantry during the extreme conditions of a famine?
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In September he went off on horseback round Tula province to see for himself what was happening, having already resolved not to spend that winter in Moscow. At the end of the month he returned home and started writing an article, 'About the Famine', in which he excoriated the educated classes for their indifference to the plight of all those millions of peasants who barely managed to subsist even in normal circumstances. On 15 October he sent his devastating report to
Issues in Philosophy and Psychology,
and ten days later Nikolay Grot wrote to give Tolstoy the unsurprising news that the issue in which it was slated to appear had been confiscated by the censor. The next day Tolstoy set off for Ryazan province with his eldest daughters, Tanya and Masha, ready to do what he could to help: the plan was to live at his friend Ivan Rayevsky's estate and set up soup kitchens and provide practical help to the peasants in the area. Rayevsky had come to visit Tolstoy that summer to tell him about what was going on, and it was his selfless devotion to the cause which inspired Tolstoy himself to act (he tragically died of influenza a month after Tolstoy's arrival).
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Tolstoy's twenty-two-year-old son Lev went off to his newly inherited estate in Samara to help out with the famine there, electing to take a period of leave from his university studies, but the experience was traumatic, and took a great toll on his frail health—the conditions were so extreme in Samara that it was hard just to produce any foodstuffs at all, let alone set up soup kitchens.
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Sonya still had four children between the ages of three and fourteen to look after at home in Moscow, so was housebound, but she was keen to help as well. On 3 November 1891 she published an appeal for help in the
Russian Gazette
(it was also printed in many newspapers in Europe and the United States), and she received 9,000 roubles in the first week alone.
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It was not just the wives of wealthy tea-merchants in Kyakhta, on the border with China, who sent Sonya money—donors included Old Believer fishermen in Bessarabia who gave up most of their earnings, a retired lieutenant-colonel in Nizhny Novgorod who donated his pension, as well as postmen, village schoolteachers and even peasants.
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Sonya was glad to be able to contribute, as she recalls in her autobiography:

I bought trucks of corn, beans, onions, cabbage, everything needed for the feeding centres where the famine-stricken poor from the villages were fed. To pay for this, I received money which was sent to me in considerable sums. From the material sent to me by textile manufacturers I had [bed linen] made by poor women for small wages, and I sent it to the places where it was needed most, chiefly for those suffering from typhoid.
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From her Moscow base, Sonya coordinated donations, and published regular bulletins over the next few months detailing the contributions received. She also spent days sewing shirts from the fabric supplied by the great textile magnate Savva Morozov, together with Dunyasha Popova, the family housekeeper, the nanny and the English governess.
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Tolstoy's mind was naturally taken back to the events of 1873 in Samara, when he first had seen the effects of famine in Russia. Ever since writing his article about the Moscow census back in 1882, Tolstoy was adamant that just throwing money at such a deep-rooted problem was no remedy: what was needed above all was practical action. After settling in at Rayevsky's estate in the village of Begichevka, Tolstoy wrote another article on the famine. 'A Terrible Question' (the question being whether Russia could feed itself) was duly published in the
Russian Gazette
on 6 November. Thus began months of getting up early every day, setting up and operating free soup kitchens, supervising volunteers and buying provisions with the donations received (Tolstoy himself took 600 roubles of his own money with him). By the end of November there were thirty soup kitchens up and running, and by the end of December there were seventy. They were vitally needed. Tolstoy wrote to tell Sonya that he had been to a village where there was only one cow for every nine households, and to another where nearly all the inhabitants were destitute. By January 4,000 peasants were receiving free food every day.
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