The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the Church. The break was not as severe as it seemed, however. Tolstoy’s gift had always been for a radical estrangement from what others claimed to live by. He had never been comfortable with his era, his rank, his society, his self, and the pleasure he received from writing had always struck him as illicit. Renouncing both War and Peace and Anna Karenina as “counterfeit art,” he declared the mission of his final thirty years to be moral philosophy – of a thunderous sort. Beginning in the early 1880s, treatises went forth from Yasnaya Polyana attacking the major institutions of imperial Russia: state, military, Church, the aristocracy as a class, the Table of Ranks, private property, schools, Western ideas of progress. Tolstoy became a pacifist and vegetarian. His ideal was “Christian anarchism,” into which he eventually incorporated some Buddhist precepts: non-participation in evil, the cultivation of loving habits toward all living things, a restraint of appetites, a simple life of manual labor close to the soil, and no obligations except to one’s own conscience. Tolstoy distrusted the idea of “news” – which, in his view, was merely a distraction from one’s own spiritual growth – and he disliked the fadmongery of “current events.” He was pursuing the eternal. Tolstoy was not a newspaper man.

Yet by some curious twist of fate, Tolstoy’s quest to simplify human nature and return us to nature coincided with the worldwide graphic revolution. Dos-toevsky (d. 1881) had been his own agent and handler. The printed word was his medium. Tolstoy, living three decades longer, became the world’s first multimedia celebrity – and he was handled by others. Not only photographers but car-toonistsand newspaper columnists pursuedhim, orbetterstalked him, through telegraph, wax cylinder, color photo, newsreel, film. The “wealthy Count dressing up as a peasant” was mercilessly satirized in the public domain.6 But the media assisted Tolstoy too. Even while parodying his image, it spread his word. This mattered, because Tolstoy did not like to travel or to speak publicly from podiums, as Dostoevsky had loved to do; he preferred to receive guests at home, one on one. As Yasnaya Polyana became a place of pilgrimage for “Tolstoyans” from around the world, access to the great man was increasingly controlled by his wife, children, and domestic staff. Some Tolstoyans were arrested and imprisoned for their beliefs; others were exiled. Beyond his excommunication by the Church in 1901, however, Tolstoy, to his anguish, was not touched by the arm of the state. For the final twenty-five years of his life Tolstoy was kept under police surveillance, but neither Tsar Alexander III (r. 1881–94) nor Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) was foolish enough to add a martyr’s crown to his glory.

At century’s end, Maksim Gorky (1868–1937) came to know both the aging Tolstoy and the ailing Chekhov in the Crimea. In a complex tribute to the older writer composed after Tolstoy’s flight from Yasnaya Polyana and final illness, Gorky wrote: “I have always been repelled by that stubborn and despotic urge of his to turn the life of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy into the saintly Life of our

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BlessedboyarLev.”7 Itwould havesanctifiedhis wisdom andmadeit irresistible, equal to those leg-iron scars that lent such authority to Dostoevsky’s word. But as a radical activist devoted to social reform, Gorky saw only part of the truth. Dostoevsky had been tied to his time; his scars were historically determined and thus inevitably dated. Tolstoy’s relatively “empty,” unpersecuted life freed him up to become a carrier for ideas valid for all people of all times. And this is what Tolstoy craved. The one section of The Brothers Karamazov that Tolstoy admired (his bedside reading during the last month of his life) was Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” Alyosha’s compilation of peak life-moments and homilies from his mentor, the Elder Zosima.