Tolstoy

One person disappointed never to see the publication of the Decembrist novel was Monsieur Nief, or rather Jules Montels, himself a revolutionary who had been forced to flee from France. Although he describes Tolstoy as a ‘model husband, excellent father, relatively rich’, it was his memories of Tolstoy’s research for ‘The Decembrists’ which stood out for him during the two years he lived at Yasnaya Polyana. This is the subject of the short memoir he published in an anarchist journal in Paris immediately after Tolstoy’s death. Montels must have found it hard not to blow his cover while he talked to Tolstoy about the Decembrists. He was clearly electrified when Tolstoy showed him the original letter written by the Decembrist leader Sergey Muravyov-Apostol to his parents on the eve of his execution in 1826. The letter, written in French, ‘in that fine and expansive handwriting of our grandfathers’ (‘de cette bonne et grosse écriture de nos grands pères’), had been entrusted to Tolstoy by Muravyov-Apostol’s elder brother Matvey, whom Tolstoy met in February 1878 in Moscow. Matvey Muravyov-Apostol spent thirty years in exile in Siberia before returning to settle in Moscow after the 1856 amnesty.⁶¹ In 1910 Montels felt there must have been a sensational reason for the disappearance of what would have been an explosive novel showing how a generation of young Russians acquired ideas of ‘Liberté et Justice’. He wondered whether the comtesse (i.e. Sonya) had burned the manuscript, or whether a jittery government, reeling from three assassination attempts on Alexander II between 1879 and 1880, had ordered its destruction.⁶² The truth was rather more prosaic.

Tolstoy’s interest in the Decembrists palled, but he could not sit still for long. Poring over Prince Pyotr Dolgorukov’s volumes on Russian heraldry stimulated a creative interest in his own ancestors, so he now turned back to the eighteenth century, and pondered writing a novel about the fate of one of his ancestors. There was a story in his family that one of his maternal great-uncles had been exiled to Siberia for some murky deed, and he was curious to know more, so he fired off a barrage of letters to friends and relatives.⁶³ A distant relative wrote back to tell him that, according to family lore, his great-uncle Vasily Gorchakov had been sent to Siberia for bringing back to Russia a grand piano stuffed with banknotes. That was enough to fire Tolstoy’s imagination: he drafted four beginnings of a new novel, and one of them was written in the ‘uneducated’, simple language he had pledged to use when he was writing stories for his ABC. He reiterated this vow to Sonya in 1878, by saying that anything he wrote in future would be in a language simple enough for children to understand every word.⁶⁴ As it turned out, none of Tolstoy’s contacts could produce any more information about Gorchakov’s case, so that project was stopped in its tracks.

Tolstoy now switched his attention back to the time of Peter the Great and his successor Anna Ioannovna (who reigned from 1730 to 1740), this time sketching out a novel which would explore its ‘unofficial’ history – including that of the Old Believers.⁶⁵ Alexandrine had difficulty keeping up with Tolstoy’s plans for his new novel. One moment he was asking for help with materials about the Decembrists, then he was interested in his ancestor Vasily Gorchakov, and now in March 1879 he asked her to help him gain access to secret archives relating to early-eighteenth-century Russian history. At the same time he asked for her help in securing the release of three Old Believer bishops who had been sitting in a prison in Suzdal for twenty-two years as ‘religious criminals’. One of them was ninety. Tolstoy had found about their plight from another Old Believer bishop he had been meeting with in Tula.⁶⁶ All that month, in fact, he had been spending time on the highway linking Moscow and kiev which ran close to Yasnaya Polyana, and talking to the crowds of pilgrims making their way to the ‘holy places’ on foot.

Tolstoy had given up thinking he could ever gain any religious insight from people who came from his own class, and whose lives seemed to be a contradiction of their faith. But for the poor and illiterate, be they monks, peasants or sectarians, religion seemed to be an indispensable part of their lives, and it was from them that Tolstoy finally discovered the truth about faith and salvation which he had been seeking. Some of them were Stranniki – wanderers who spent their lives going from monastery to monastery, carrying all their worldly goods in a bundle on their back. Tolstoy walked a part of the way with some of the pilgrims he met. One was an old man of ninety-four, heading to kiev for the fourth time. Others walked barefoot or carried heavy chains as penance. They had already walked well over 100 miles from the Trinity St Sergius Monastery outside Moscow, and they had another 400 to go.