Tolstoy

Amongst the sacred works which most inspired Tolstoy was the ChetiMenei (‘monthly readings’), a voluminous compendium of religious texts arranged chronologically, and designed to be read on the feast days of the Orthodox saints.⁵⁰ The policy of the Byzantine Empire had always been for its missionaries to translate the Gospel for the heathen peoples they converted. After the adoption of the cyrillic alphabet, which had been devised by the two Greek monks Cyril and Methodius, literary activity in Russia had accordingly been exclusively religious in character to begin with, and followed Byzantine practice. But in the sixteenth century, after Metropolitan Makary of Novgorod incorporated texts such as the lives of newly canonised Russian saints, the originally Greek but now Russianised Cheti-Menei began to occupy a position of supreme importance in the nation’s spiritual and literary life. Another important edition of the Cheti-Menei was later produced in the seventeenth century by Dmitry of Rostov (himself later canonised), and the copy of the 1864 edition Tolstoy acquired was soon densely annotated by him.⁵¹ Tolstoy regarded the texts of the Cheti-Menei as Russia’s ‘real poetry’⁵² (he famously did not think much of verse written by contemporary poets), and he chose extracts from both collections to include in the reading primer sections of his ABC alongside passages from the Bible and the oldest Russian chronicle, dating back to the twelfth century. One was a miraculous episode from Makary’s life of St Simeon Stylites the Younger (a hermit who lived on a pillar near Antioch), in which a robber is inspired to repent of his sins. Another was a shortened version of Dmitry’s life of St Sergius of Radonezh, the Patron Saint of Russia and founder of the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church, the fourteenth-century Trinity Lavra of St Sergius outside Moscow.

If Tolstoy alighted particularly on Sergius, it may have been because the saint’s life resonated with certain of his own aspirations on a subliminal level (although it would not be for another decade that he became fully cognisant of what those aspirations really were). St Sergius, the first great Russian ascetic, had turned his back on his noble background as a boy to seek out a life of poverty and seclusion in the ‘desert’ in emulation of St Antony of Egypt, the founder of monasticism. The rural wilderness was the Russian equivalent of the ‘desert’ – a deep forest in the case of St Sergius – and the disciples he attracted later followed his example by deliberately founding more than forty monasteries in parts of Russia that were similarly remote and inhospitable and far away from cities. Sergius’s life was a model of humility. He turned down the opportunity to assume the pre-eminent position in the Russian ecclesiastical hierarchy he was offered, preferring instead to continue his life of poverty, engaged in hard physical work. Tolstoy would not forget his study of the Cheti-Menei. He would draw on the life of St Sergius in 1890 when he came to write his story ‘Father Sergius’,⁵³ which is about the struggles of a monk and former nobleman to overcome his pride and live up to his Christian ideals. Tolstoy’s Father Sergius finally finds peace living as a Strannik –that specifically Russian type of religious wanderer dependent on alms, whose asceticism is based on a life of constant pilgrimage without material possessions. It also became Tolstoy’s dream to detach himself from the world and become a wanderer, and eventually he would fulfil this dream, but in his own way, like everything else in his life.

Tolstoy was awed by the beauty of the writing in Russian hagiography, and it was aesthetic criteria as much as anything else which guided his selection of texts for the ABC – he wanted young children to be brought into contact with poetic language from the very beginning. But it was the secular legacy of the medieval oral epic, the bylina, which really bewitched him. Collections of narrative poems chronicling the exploits of Russia’s semi-mythological warriors (bogatyry) had first been put together in the eighteenth century,⁵⁴ but it was not until the 1860s that they began to be made widely available. For Tolstoy, as for many of his contemporaries, they were a thrilling discovery, and even more tantalising was the revelation that this oral tradition had not yet died out. Pavel Rybnikov, an ethnographer who had been exiled to the far north for alleged revolutionary propaganda, found that there were peasants in the region still singing and reciting bylinas. He created a sensation in the 1860s by noting them down and publishing them.⁵⁵