Tolstoy

Tolstoy began to feel it was time he too went on another pilgrimage. While researching his latest project he had become very interested in the fate of his ancestors Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy and his son Ivan Petrovich who had both died in exile at the prison-monastery on the remote Solovetsky islands in the 1720s. Naturally, Alexandrine received another letter asking if she could help him provide any information about the first Count Tolstoy, who had been one of Peter the Great’s most trusted statesmen.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, Pyotr Andreyevich’s descendant conceived the idea of travelling up to the Arctic waters of the White Sea himself that summer, and in May he wrote to Strakhov to ask if would like to accompany him.⁶⁸ Thousands of pilgrims undertook the long journey north during the brief summer months to the fifteenth-century monastery, which was one of the holiest places in Russia, but it turned out that Strakhov did not want to be one of their number.

In the end, Tolstoy went to kiev, the cradle of Russian civilisation, to visit the famed Caves Monastery which dated back to the early eleventh century. He had high expectations, having been inspired by his conversations with all the wanderers he had talked to, who had told him that the monks in kiev lived as ascetically as the early Church Fathers.⁶⁹ He was to be bitterly disappointed: as far as he could see, the holy relics on show were fakes, and the monk he went to talk to about faith turned him away, saying he was too busy. Tolstoy presumed it was because he had dressed as an ordinary pilgrim, and did not reveal his true identity, which would have commanded greater respect.⁷⁰ What he did not take into account, however, was that he was one of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who arrived in kiev every year, and the monastery had difficulty coping. There were some who arrived on foot, but large numbers, including Tolstoy, were able to use the new railway network to travel comfortably by train, and the huge increase in visitors posed a very real threat to the spiritual integrity of sacred institutions which were traditionally used to silence and contemplation.⁷¹ Be that as it may, Tolstoy’s pilgrimage to the Caves Monastery in kiev was a turning point on his religious journey.

In the autumn of 1879 Tolstoy’s thoughts returned yet again to his historical novel. He went to Moscow in September to do some more foraging in the archives. All year, the archivist of the Ministry of Justice had been sending him materials relating to Russian criminal cases in early-eighteenth-century Russia. In October he would send further documents which shed light on how the people had related to Peter the Great’s reforms, but by this time Tolstoy had lost interest. It was religious questions which were at the fore-front of his mind during that visit to Moscow, and he now urgently wanted some answers. Tolstoy wanted to know, for example, why the Church had prayed for the imperial army to prevail in the recent Russo-Turkish War, when killing people went against one of the most basic tenets of the Christian faith. He wanted to know why the Orthodox Church was intolerant of people who practised other faiths, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, Old Believers or sectarians. And at a time when increasing numbers of revolutionaries were being executed, he wanted to know why the Church in Russia supported capital punishment.⁷² In order to try to find some answers to these pressing questions, Tolstoy went straight to the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had meetings with Moscow’s august Metropolitan Makary, and with the Bishop of Mozhaysk, and then travelled out to Sergiev Posad, to visit the most important monastery in Russia. Named after St Sergius of Radonezh, who founded it in the fourteenth century, the Trinity St Sergius Monastery was by the time of Tolstoy’s visit a vast and wealthy institution with some 400 monks and roughly half a million annual pilgrims. That year, Tolstoy was one of them.⁷³