Tolstoy

The largest group of religious dissenters in Russia were the Old Believers, a group who had refused to go along with Patriarch Nikon’s reforms to the rite in the 1660s and so caused a schism in the Church which had far-reaching repercussions. In part because Constantinople (and with it the entire Byzantine Empire) had fallen into the ‘heresy’ of Islam after being conquered by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, thousands of zealous Orthodox believers in old Rus insisted on clinging to the rituals and wordings to which they had become accustomed, regardless of the fact that they had gradually diverged from Greek practice over the centuries. Far from this being a Reformation in the Russian Orthodox Church, it amounted to the opposite, as large numbers actively resisted change – perhaps as many as half the total population at that time.⁴⁸ Becoming known as staroobryadtsy (‘adherents of the old rite’) or raskolniki (‘schismatics’), the Old Believers caused the first serious weakening of the Russian Orthodox Church, and they were dealt with ruthlessly, with many choosing the path of mass self-immolation rather than suffer exile to Siberia or capitulation. One of their leaders was the Archpriest Avvakum, who was eventually burned at the stake in 1682, leaving behind the remarkable autobiography which Tolstoy asked Strakhov to send him in 1878. The fact that this document (the first masterpiece of Russian literature written in the living vernacular) was officially suppressed until 1861 speaks volumes about the authorities’ identification of religious dissent with popular rebellion. The repressive measures were particularly harsh during the reign of Nicholas I, and it was only after his death, as part of the liberalisation introduced by Alexander II, that it first became possible to write about the Schism (a change in policy which Musorgsky took full advantage of with the composition of his second opera Khovanshchina, which ends with old Believers committing suicide).

As the religious and political thinker Nikolay Berdyaev remarked in 1916, sectarianism was in fact an ‘integral part of the spiritual life of the Russian people’.⁴⁹ Alongside the vast numbers of Old Believers were many other groups whose sectarian origins in some cases actually pre-dated the Schism. Many were offshoots of the mystical Khristovery (‘Believers in Christ’) or khlysty, as they became known, whose peasant founder was believed to be the Lord of Sabaoth himself.⁵⁰ These included the Skoptsy (‘self-castrators’), who appeared in the eighteenth century, and the Skakuny (‘jumpers’) who appeared in the nineteenth century. There were also radical schismatics who sought to break all ties with society: the Stranniki (‘wanderers’), Pustynniki (‘hermits’) and Beguny (‘runners’). And then there were a number of ‘ratio-nalist’ and quasi-Protestant sects who were to hold a particular interest for Tolstoy. One group he was later to become deeply involved with were the Dukhobory, a pejorative label which the ‘spirit-wrestlers’ turned to their own advantage by styling themselves as Dukhobortsy (‘wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit’). Tolstoy also had deep respect for the Molokany (‘milk-drinkers’), or ‘spiritual Christians’ as they called themselves, a large number of whom lived out in the steppe beyond Samara.