Tolstoy

The Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea had been founded in the fifteenth century by two Stakhanovite monks who regarded life in a normal cloister too easy an option. They had sought instead a life of the utmost physical privation in emulation of the desert ascetics of early Christianity and found it on ‘Solovki’, the remote Solovetsky islands, where there is no daylight in deepest winter. The piety of the monastery’s founding forefathers stood in stark contrast to the barbarity of Ivan the Terrible, who saw nothing untoward in establishing a prison in its sacred grounds. With its harsh climate, it was a particularly bleak place to serve a sentence. Pyotr Andreyevich’s son Ivan, who accompanied him into exile, died the year after they arrived. Within eight months, Pyotr Andreyevich was also dead.

A century and a half later, in the 1870s, their descendant Lev Tolstoy became fascinated by this chapter of his family history while planning a novel set in the times of Peter the Great. Writing to his friend and relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in June 1879, when he was making notes on the case in the Moscow archive of the Ministry of Justice, he declared that the exile of Pyotr and Ivan was the ‘darkest episode’ in the lives of their ancestors. For him, the time of Peter the Great was the ‘beginning of everything’, and he became so interested in Pyotr Andreyevich’s fate that he thought seriously for a while about visiting his place of exile that summer, in the hope of finding out more about him.¹⁷ By this time the monastery had become one of the most sacred places in Russia (and was attracting around 20,000 pilgrims each year),¹⁸ but in the 1870s it was still not an easy place to get to. Tolstoy heard more about Solovki at this time from a peasant storyteller from northern Russia who shared with him the popular legend of the Three Elders.

In 1886, as part of his mission to provide the masses with high-quality reading matter, Tolstoy reworked the story for a popular weekly journal. It is a typically subversive work, in keeping with the ideas he had begun to develop at the time. The story is about the events which take place during a journey to the monastery on one of the boats ferrying pilgrims to the islands from Arkhangelsk. A bishop asks to be set down on an island inhabited by three legendary ‘holy men’ whom he wants to meet. To his consternation, their modest, unconventional and practical Christianity proves to contain more holiness than the ‘official’ Church dogma he tries to inculcate them with. The bishop is humbled by his meeting with the Three Elders. Such provocative ideas caused Tolstoy to become the Russian government’s greatest threat. He was so determined to expose the lies and hypocrisy he saw embedded in the fabric of the tsarist system that he positively hoped he could emulate his ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich, but the government refused to allow him to become a martyr. Alexander III once famously remarked, ‘Tolstoy wants me to exile him to Solovki, but I am not going to give him the publicity.’¹⁹ After the 1917 Revolution Solovki became one of the Soviet Union’s most notorious concentration camps, and it is grimly ironic that some of Tolstoy’s followers ended up there in 1930 simply for refusing to give up their beliefs about non-resistance to violence and the abolition of private property.²⁰

Fourteen children were born to Tolstoy and his wife Sonya during their long marriage, but Lev Nikolayevich was not the first Tolstoy to have so many offspring. Pyotr Andreyevich’s eldest son Ivan had five sons and five daughters before he died in the Solovetsky prison at the age of forty-three in 1728, and the second son was Andrey Ivanovich (1721–1803). This was Tolstoy’s great-grandfather, about whom not much is known beyond the fact that he was christened ‘Big Nest’ because he had twenty-three children, twelve of whom reached adulthood.²¹ Tolstoy’s aunt once told him that Andrey Ivanovich had married at such a young age that he apparently burst into tears when his equally young wife Alexandra went to a ball one evening without saying goodbye to him.²²