Tolstoy (64 page)

In March 1893, as soon as
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
was finished, Tolstoy started despatching his manuscript abroad for translation and publication. French and Italian translations appeared at the end of 1893, and in a letter to Tolstoy of 29 October Nikolay Strakhov reported from St Petersburg that the religious censor had deemed the French translation of
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
to be the most harmful foreign book it had ever had occasion to ban from distribution in Russia. The French and Italian translations were followed in early 1894 by a German translation and three in English, two of which were published in London and one in America. One of these editions reached a twenty-five-year-old Indian lawyer working in South Africa called Mohandas Gandhi. He was already practising non-violence, but had succumbed to doubts which were completely and immediately erased when he read Tolstoy's text. Gandhi was particularly struck by the fact that Tolstoy practised what he preached, and was not willing to compromise when it came to searching for the truth.
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The first Russian edition of
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
appeared in early 1894, although even this émigré publication was abridged—the two pages about Kaiser Wilhelm had to be removed, as well as derogatory references to Catherine II, who was born a German. By this time Tolstoy's text had circulated widely in Russia via samizdat, but copies of the Russian edition published in Germany were also smuggled in. A secret government memo in May 1894 expressed alarm at the number of copies that had already been imported into Russia illegally, and advised that all typographers, lithographers and even individuals in possession of typewriters were to be put under close covert surveillance. Apparently, typewritten copies particularly proliferated in the 'southern provinces'. The first unexpurgated Russian edition of
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
was published in 1896 in Geneva by Mikhail Elpidin.
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Alexander III had earlier declared that he did not want to add a martyr's crown to Tolstoy's fame by exiling him, but he was horrified by this new book, which he read a few months before his untimely death in the autumn of 1894. Even he now itched to be able to bring his rebellious subject to task.
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12. ELDER, APOSTATE, AND TSAR

Someone said that each person has their own specific smell. However strange it may seem, I think Tolstoy has a very devout, church-like smell: cypress, vestments, communion wafers...

Valentin Bulgakov, diary entry, 12 February 1910
¹

WITH THE PUBLICATION
of
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
in 1893, Tolstoy's 'gospel' was complete. It was not a coincidence that the illegal printing presses which produced copies for distribution in Russia also handled revolutionary propaganda. Apart from his complete and utter commitment to non-violence, Tolstoy also sought to bring down the Russian government. As the Polish Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg was later to comment:

The criticism to which Tolstoy has submitted the existing order is radical; it knows no limits, no retrospective glances, no compromises ... The ultimate destruction of private property and the state, universal obligation to work, full economic and social equality, a complete abolition of militarism, brotherhood of nations, universal peace and equality of everything that bears the human image - this is the ideal which Tolstoy has been tirelessly preaching with the stubbornness of a great and vehement prophet.
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In the years to come Tolstoy would write dozens more articles in which he set out his religious and ethical views. Some of them, such as 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' (written in response to the assassination of King Umberto I in 1900), and 'I Cannot Be Silent' (prompted by the news that twenty peasants had been hanged in 1908 for attempted robbery), were occasioned by specific events. Others, such as 'Religion and Morality', 'The Law of Violence and the Law of Love' and 'The Essence of Christian Teaching' expressed his thinking as it continued to evolve in the last decade and a half of his life. They were all essentially variations on a theme, and mostly quite a lot shorter, but also quite a lot more abrasive.

Tolstoy had already proved to be a remarkably effective apostle. Capitalis-ing on the fame he had already acquired as a writer, he began winning converts to his version of Christianity very soon after he started disseminating his new beliefs in the 1880s. When he had first set out on his crusade, he had complained of loneliness, and had actively sought out kindred spirits. A decade later it was the kindred spirits who came to him - in droves, from all over the world, more often than not conceiving their journey as a 'pilgrimage'. Where Tolstoy previously used to have two or three visitors a week at most in the early 1880s, there were sometimes as many as thirty-five people a day wanting to see him during the last years of his life.
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There were those who approached him with reverence as an elder
(starets),
hoping he would provide spiritual guidance and give them answers to diverse problems, and then there were others who wanted to see him in the flesh simply because he was such a celebrity.

Just how famous Tolstoy became can be ascertained from the way in which the British journalist William Stead prefaced his account of the week he spent at Yasnaya Polyana in 1888:

In Russia and out of Russia, I have found people more interested in the personality of Count Leo Tolstoi, the novelist, than in that of any other living Russian. He is the first man of letters in contemporary Russia, but that alone would not account for the widespread interest in his character. He is a great original, an independent thinker, a religious teacher, and the founder of a something that is midway between a Church, a school, and a socio-political organisation. He not only thinks strange things, and says them with rugged force and vivid utterance - he does strange things; and what is more, he induces others to do the same. A man of genius who spends his time in planting potatoes and cobbling shoes, a great literary artist who has founded a propaganda of Christian anarchy, an aristocrat who spends his life as a peasant - such a man in any country would command attention. In Russia he monopolises it, and the fame of his originalities has spread abroad so far until it is probable that there are more people anxious to 'hear about Tolstoi' in Boston and San Francisco than there are even in Petersburg and Moscow.
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Tolstoy's major artistic and religious writings had only appeared in translation a couple of years earlier yet he was already a household name throughout the world. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was profoundly affected by Tolstoy's ideas when he came across them in Paris in 1885:

Tolstoy, whose recently translated novel
War and Peace
has aroused the admiration of the Parisians, Tolstoy, a Count, a wealthy man, a decorated soldier from the battles at Sebastopol, a brilliant writer, has broken with society, turned his back on literary writing and in the polemical works
Confession
and
What I Believe
has taken Rousseau's side, declared war on culture, and has put his teaching into practice himself by turning himself into a peasant.
⁵

Strindberg wrote his book
Among French Peasants
(which was published in 1889) under the immediate influence of Tolstoy's ideas. Matthew Arnold had fired the imagination of British readers, while a pioneering study of the Russian novel published in 1886 by the Vicomte Eugene-Melchior de Vogue (who had served at the French Embassy in St Petersburg in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and married a Russian noblewoman) served to fuel the European reading public's intense interest in Tolstoy on the Continent.
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In 1887 an American critic published an article in
Harper's Bazaar
about the tumultuous reaction to the sudden arrival of Russian literature in the English-speaking world, describing Tolstoy as the greatest ever writer of fiction, 'living or dead'.
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At the end of the decade a German writer set off to Yasnaya Polyana to do research: the first biography of Tolstoy was published in Berlin in 1892, two years before one even appeared in Russia.
⁸
Tolstoy was sixty-four.

9. Cartoon showing 'Tolstoy at work., published in 1908

The dynamics of Tolstoy's life had changed radically while he had been formulating his doctrine of brotherly love and non-resistance to violence in the 1880s. He had become teetotal, a vegetarian, he had given up smoking and hunting animals, and he had also stopped handling money insofar as it was possible. In the 1890s the dynamics of his life were to change again, and not just because he took up bicycling at the age of sixty-five, and soon needed a secretary to help him deal with the voluminous correspondence he found himself conducting with readers from all around the world. When he now went head to head with the Russian government by taking up the cause of persecuted sectarians scattered across the country, its ministers responded by sending his closest followers into exile, and excommunicating him from the Orthodox Church - which only increased his fame. The dynamics of Russian life also changed in the 1890s. Nicholas II, the last Romanov, ascended to the throne in 1894 amidst growing social and political unrest, and the rapid development of new technologies which began to revolutionise daily life. Before he died in 1910, Tolstoy lived to see the movie camera, the motor car, the phonograph and the typewriter, and even talked to Chekhov on the telephone.

Remarkably, Tolstoy found time to write fiction during the hectic last period of his life, when he was also sometimes extremely unwell. Apart from his novel
Resurrection,
completed in 1899, he worked on a handful of superlative stories, and also composed a substantial treatise on the meaning of art. These works were written alongside all the religious articles and diatribes against the immoral practices of the tsarist regime, which remained as reactionary as it had been under Alexander III. But Tolstoy's main writing project at the end of his life was the compilation of several exhaustive volumes of daily sayings and maxims from his favourite writers and philosophers. He was in need of their solace, as he was unhappy for much of the last fifteen years of his life. He still felt obligations to his family, but found it endlessly painful having to put up with the trappings of his once seigneurial lifestyle when he was longing to take to the road as a penniless and penitent Strannik. And as his friend Vladimir Chertkov assumed ever more influence over his affairs, Tolstoy's relationship with his wife steadily deteriorated.

Sonya had grown up in fairly humble surroundings despite her parents' flat being located in the Kremlin, so when she married Tolstoy she had adapted quickly to Yasnaya Polyana, but its spartan furnishings invariably took foreign visitors by surprise. The intrepid American traveller George Kennan, for example, who came to Yasnaya Polyana in June 1886 after travelling across Siberia, was clearly expecting Tolstoy's study to be a bit grander:

The floor was bare; the furniture was old-fashioned in form, with two or three plain chairs, a deep sofa, or settle, upholstered with worn green morocco, and a small cheap table without a cover. There was a marble bust [of Tolstoy's brother Nikolay] in a niche behind the settle, and the only pictures which the room contained were a small engraved portrait of Dickens and another of Schopenhauer. It would be impossible to imagine anything plainer or simpler than the room and its contents. More evidences of wealth and luxury might be found in many a peasant's cabin in Eastern Siberia.
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Anna Armfeldt had asked Kennan to smuggle out a manuscript copy of
Confession
to her daughter Natalya in the convict mine at Kara, and he had been so shocked by what he had seen of the Russian penal system in Siberia that it turned him into a vociferous opponent of the tsarist regime. Tolstoy was consequently extremely interested to hear what he had to say. Kennan's book
Siberia and the Exile System
was banned from Russia along with its author as soon as it was published in 1891.

Sonya did not need to live in luxury, and she even did not mind the additional burden of having to prepare special dishes at mealtimes for her husband and the growing number of vegetarians at Yasnaya Polyana. Tanya and Masha became vegetarians like their father, and all the Tolstoyans, beginning with Chertkov, refused to eat meat. Then there were other loyal friends of Tolstoy who were vegetarians, like the painter Repin, whose colourful companion Natalya Nordman at one point promoted a diet of grass and hay.
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All of that the conventional Sonya could just about tolerate, but she did not warm to her husband's followers. 'These people who are adherents of Lev Nikolayevich's teaching are all so unlikeable! Not one normal person,' she exclaimed in her diary in August 1890.
¹¹
In general, she viewed the Tolstoyans as the opposite of the
svetskie
(polite society) people from her own milieu, and by playing on the word
svet,
which means 'light' as well as 'society' and 'world', Sonya took to calling them
tyomnye
(dark). She noticed
tyomnye
Tolstoyans coming out of the woodwork as soon as illegal copies of
The Gospel in Brief
and
Confession
started circulating. Sonya made an exception initially for the highborn Chertkov, who had exquisite manners, and also the artist Nikolay Ge, who became a friend of the whole family (he died in 1894). She also tolerated Pavel Biryukov ('Posha'), who was meek and intelligent, but she found the sectarians and peasants hard to deal with, and positively recoiled from the social misfits who seemed to be drawn to her husband like magnets, and became fanatical followers, having failed to carve conventionally successful careers for themselves. Sonya recorded in her diary the knock on the door that woke them all up at four in the morning one icy January day in 1895, for example: the visitor turned out to be a 'bedraggled, flea-bitten,
tyomny
who was desperate to marry their daughter Tanya.
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