Tolstoy

Tolstoy remained, as ever, a shrewd businessman when it came to financial negotiations. Nevertheless, there were also clear signs of his new piety. In the summer of 1877, accompanied by Strakhov, Tolstoy made the first of several visits to the famed Optina Pustyn Monastery in kaluga province, some 135 miles west of Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy hoped to be granted an audience with Elder Ambrosy. He had heard about Ambrosy from his aunts, who had instilled in him and his siblings a reverence for Optina Pustyn from an early age.⁸ His devout aunt Aline was even buried there, having made annual pilgrimages from Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy also knew about Ambrosy from his peasants. After a full day’s travel, he and Strakhov arrived at three in the morning in their tarantass. Tolstoy did not want to be accorded special treatment because of who he was, and so they put up in the monastery’s spartan and crowded hostel. It turned out that Father Feoktist, the monk running the monastery hostel, was one of his family’s former serfs, however, and as soon as Count Tolstoy’s identity was known, there was pressure on him to move to the more luxurious quarters available, which he resisted.

There were reasons why Tolstoy chose to come to Optina Pustyn rather than any other monastery. Despite its sixteenth-century foundations, the anti-clerical reforms launched by Peter the Great and continued by Catherine the Great had almost forced it to close at the end of the eighteenth century, by which time there were only three monks left, and one of them was blind.⁹ From this moribund state, however, Optina Pustyn recovered to become the centre of an extraordinary religious revival in the nineteenth century. This was due to its charismatic ‘elders’. An elder (starets) was a monk who through long ascetic practice, constant prayer and solitude had become an unofficial leader of the spiritual life of his monastery.¹⁰ Believing they possessed powers of healing and clairvoyance in addition to unusual wisdom, thousands of lay visitors would come annually from all over Russia to seek guidance from Elders on a wide array of problems in their lives. Many petitioners were peasants, but Optina Pustyn also attracted large numbers of the Russian intelligentsia, including many noted writers.¹¹

The ancient tradition of eldership was brought to Russia by disciples of the eighteenth-century spiritual leader Paisy Velichkovsky. At the age of seventeen, after taking his monastic vows, Paisy moved from his native Poltava to Mount Athos, where he established a hermitage and immersed himself in the Eastern Christian practice of Hesychasm (‘inner stillness’). In 1764, after two and a half decades of attempting to reach a state of perpetual prayer and reconnect with the traditions of the early Church Fathers, he was invited to revive spiritual life in Moldavia. By the time of his death in 1794, the monastery he founded at Neamt had around 700 monks. As well as introducing eldership to the Slavonic world, Paisy Velichkovsky left an important legacy of published writings on prayer which were very influential on the monks who revived Optina Pustyn in the dark days of the early nineteenth century. The mystical texts he compiled for his Slavonic Philokalia (‘love of the beautiful’), in particular, cemented the vital link he had forged with the Hesychast traditions of Mount Athos and the early Christians who had lived in the desert. The nineteenth-century Russian elders who followed Velichkovsky’s example were monks who emulated the Church Fathers by living in a remote hermitage, which was the nearest equivalent in Russia to retreating to the desert, and it is no coincidence that the word pustyn’ (hermitage) is related to the word pustynya, which means desert as well as wilderness. To ensure a stricter and more solitary existence than that of regular monks, however, the elders also lived in a skete – a kind of monastery within a monastery. At the time of Tolstoy’s visit, the elder in charge of Optina Pustyn was Ambrosy, who was by then sixty-five, and one of the most famous men in Russia. It was Ambrosy upon whom Dostoyevsky would model his character of zosima in The Brothers Karamazov following three meetings with him during his pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn in 1878.