Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s conspicuous absence from the celebrations in Moscow was certainly much commented on. Rumour had it that he was ill, going mad, or already mad. Dostoyevsky was tempted to travel to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy finally, but decided against it. In little over half a year he would be dead, and only then, sitting alone at dinner one cold, dark February evening, having arrived home late, and crying into his plate, did Tolstoy realise quite how dear Dostoyevsky was to him.⁸⁹ When he had been ill the previous September, Tolstoy had re-read Notes from the House of the Dead, the book which allegorises Dostoyevsky’s spiritual rebirth during his years of hard labour in a Siberian prison, and he had marvelled at its ‘sincere, natural and Christian point of view’. He had asked Strakhov to pass on affectionate greetings to Dostoyevsky,⁹⁰ who was terribly pleased by this, but less so by Tolstoy’s lack of reverence for Pushkin. Strakhov tried to mollify Dostoyevsky by saying that Tolstoy had become even more of a ‘free-thinker’ than he had been before.⁹¹ Tolstoy’s belated appreciation of Dostoyevsky is revealing of his sentimentality, for the truth is that he was utterly repelled by the mixture of piety and patriotism in Dostoyevsky’s later worldview. The feeling was mutual. Alexandrine had become close to Dostoyevsky shortly before he died, and the writer had bristled with indignation when she showed him some of Tolstoy’s recent letters about religion.⁹²

Sonya reported to Strakhov in March 1880 that her husband was working to exhaustion and getting terrible headaches, but could not be torn from his desk.⁹³ Tolstoy was, in fact, so excited by the challenge of confronting the Orthodox Church that he carried on working through the spring and into the summer, contrary to his usual routine.⁹⁴ There was no rest cure in Samara in 1880, but just three short trips to Moscow in late autumn to find new teachers for the children. One by one, the eleven volumes of the latest edition of his writings went on sale, but another year passed without Tolstoy venturing into print with anything new. He was aware that he would face difficulties with publishing all three of the projects he was working on now, but bringing them to completion was a matter of life importance to him. Their eventual publication abroad would set the seal on the antagonistic position he had taken up in relation to the Orthodox Church, and from that point on there would be no going back.

Once Tolstoy had worked through the 1,000-plus pages of Makary’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, as well as other key expositions of the Eastern Christian doctrine by authors ranging from St John of Damascus to other recent Moscow metropolitans, he began his critical exegesis, setting out in painstaking detail its major flaws, as he saw them. The Tula priest who had originally recommended that Tolstoy read Makary was startled to receive a second visit from the count a year later. Tolstoy declared that he had read Orthodox Dogmatic Theology from cover to cover, and furthermore, he informed Father Alexander with evident satisfaction, his year of study had not only not convinced him of the truth of Orthodox dogma, but in fact the opposite. He now realised that the apostles had actually distorted Christ’s teaching. Indeed, when he had come to see that Orthodox doctrine was just an artificial confection of often opaque and contradictory expressions of faith, he said, he began to understand why Russian seminaries produced so many atheists. Here Tolstoy was alluding to the many graduates of seminaries who had become revolutionaries. Chernyshevsky, who was still languishing in Siberian exile, was one, and in the 1890s Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) would become another.⁹⁵