Tolstoy

This is no ordinary summary of the New Testament, for the Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to Lev is a Christian after Tolstoy’s own heart: an ordinary man who is critical of organised religion, and unafraid to speak out against attempts to obstruct his ethical message. The Jesus projected by Tolstoy is a lone crusader swimming against the current of public opinion, a ‘humble sectarian’ with whom he could identify, as well as look up to morally.¹⁰³ This was paramount, and one is reminded of his practice as a novelist. It is striking that what he had most admired about Peter the Great when he had sought to write a novel about him, for example, was his huge energy and productivity – qualities he himself possessed in abundance. Tolstoy essentially stripped the Gospels down to their moral message. By discarding accounts of Christ’s baptism and early childhood, all miracles, the story of the Resurrection, anything referring to Jesus as a divine or historical figure, and passages highlighting the special mission of anointed apostles, Tolstoy ended up with about half of the original texts from the New Testament. He did, however, retain all direct quotations of Jesus’ speech, which means the Gospel according to St John features far more than the Gospel according to St Mark, which includes many miracles. The key importance of St Matthew’s Gospel for Tolstoy was due to the Sermon on the Mount, which was to become the cornerstone of his teaching.¹⁰⁴

Ivan Ivakin, the new tutor at Yasnaya Polyana, was a Moscow University graduate, and at first he could not understand why Tolstoy wanted to talk about the finer details of New Testament wording, since the gossip columns in Russian newspapers at the time were still talking about him writing a novel about the Decembrists. Ivakin was soon initiated into Tolstoy’s work in progress, and when it became clear that his knowledge of Greek was far superior to that of his employer, he was immediately inveigled into helping out. The pale-faced young man with exceptionally slender fingers left some vivid memoirs of his time at Yasnaya Polyana. It has to be said, he was not very impressed with Tolstoy’s command of Greek, and took a rather wry view of his selective and distinctly unacademic approach, which jettisoned concrete details: ‘“Why should we be interested to know that Christ went out into the courtyard?” he would say. “Why do I need to know that he was resurrected? Good for him if he was! For me what is important is knowing what to do, and how I should live.”’¹⁰⁵

Ivakin clearly found it sometimes a little challenging to work with Tolstoy, since the ‘inimitable’ author was even parti pris when it came to translating the New Testament passages dealing with ethics which survived his ruthless editing. In War and Peace, Tolstoy had manipulated events and people to suit the particular view of history he was proposing. Now he wanted Christ’s apostles to confirm views he had already formed:

Sometimes he would come running to me from his study with the Greek Gospel and ask me to translate some extract or other. I would do the translation, and usually it came out the same as the accepted Church translation. ‘But couldn’t you give this such and such a meaning?’ he would ask, and he would say how much he hoped that would be possible.¹⁰⁶

Tolstoy spent a particularly long time mulling over the opening paragraph in the Gospel of St John (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…’). He fairly swiftly decided to interpret the Greek logos as ‘reasoning’ rather than ‘the word’ (the Russian word razumenie implying both rational enquiry and understanding), but he then came up against the problem of translating pros ton theon (‘with God’), which the first Church Slavonic Bible renders as ‘from God’. Dismissing the literal meaning of ‘towards God’ as meaningless, and condemning the Vulgate ‘apud Deum’ and Luther’s ‘bei Gott’ as meaningless and also inaccurate, Tolstoy’s far more radical version, on the basis of a lengthy discussion of the preposition pros was ‘and reasoning replaced God’.¹⁰⁷

6. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905