Tolstoy

There is one way to live joyously and that is to be an apostle. Not just in the sense of going around and talking, but in the sense that your arms, and your legs, and your stomach, and your sides as well as your tongue all serve the truth …

Letter to Vasily Alexeyev, December 1884¹

TOLSTOY’S CRUSADE to bring Christian principles into the lives of educated Russians began with a newspaper article he published on 20 January 1882. He had been shocked by the degradation and poverty he encountered when he went to visit a doss-house in one of Moscow’s worst slum areas a few weeks earlier, and when he learned that a census was to be held in the city, he seized the opportunity to speak out. It was not the first time he had appealed to the consciences of his fellow countrymen, as he had publicised the plight of starving peasants during the Samara famine in 1873, and been successful in raising millions of roubles in aid. Now, however, his mission was not merely humanitarian but religious – he did not want cash but Christian brotherly love. Tolstoy was also determined to lead by example, having applied to be one of the eighty people appointed to supervise the census. He specifically requested to work in one of the poorest districts, moreover, near to where he himself lived in the western part of the city. The night before Tolstoy’s article ‘About the Census in Moscow’ appeared on the front page of one of the city’s most popular daily newspapers, he went to the city Duma to read it out to the organisation committee, and then distributed hundreds of copies to everyone involved in conducting the census when it began three days later.

Tolstoy was profoundly disturbed by the prospect of the 2,000 (mostly student) census-takers entering crowded, infested tenements to ask routine statistical questions of people dying of starvation, and he wasted no time in his article in confronting the issue:

What does this census mean for us Muscovites conducting the census who are not academics? Two things. Firstly, we will probably discover among the tens of thousands of us who live on an income running into the tens of thousands that there are tens of thousands of people without food, clothes and shelter; and secondly, that our brothers and sons will be going to look at all this, and calmly noting down on the forms how many are dying of hunger and cold.

Both of these things are very bad.²

True to the anarchic spirit which would become more and more apparent in Tolstoy’s thought during the following decade, he rejected the idea of institutional involvement, either at the government or the philanthropic level, likewise conventional charitable enterprises such as fundraising balls, bazaars and theatre performances. Money, he insisted, was in itself an evil, so there should be no public proclamations of the sums donated by wealthy individuals. Throwing money at the problem was no substitute for practical assistance as far as he was concerned, and merely let people off the hook. Tolstoy took his inspiration straight from the New Testament, by paraphrasing Jesus’s parable of ‘The Sheep and the Goats’ in St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’³ Tolstoy urged Muscovites to overcome their fears of coming into contact with the bedbugs, fleas, typhoid, diphtheria and smallpox which were rife in the filthy conditions the poor were forced to live in. He called on the young census-takers to sit down with those in need, and show them love and respect by talking to them about their lives.

Unfortunately for Tolstoy, some census-takers were so impoverished themselves that they undoubtedly greeted this exhortation to practise Christian charity with bemusement. One of them was a twenty-two-year-old medical student called Anton Chekhov, then living in Moscow’s red-light district in the north of the city. His father was a former small-time merchant who had fled their provincial hometown after going bankrupt, and Chekhov had started contributing to low-grade comic journals in order to keep his family afloat. Working as a census-taker provided him with a few extra kopecks, and also good material for his next humorous piece, which as usual he signed with a nom de plume, thinking ahead to the future scholarly publications he dreamed of writing. The official census consisted of fifteen standard questions relating to name, gender, age, marital status, place of birth, faith, occupation and so on. In the ‘Supplementary Questions to the Personal Forms of the Statistical Census Suggested by Antosha Chekhonte’, a further ten questions were added, including:

16. Are you a clever person or a fool?

17. Are you an honest person? a swindler? a robber? a scoundrel? a lawyer? or?

20. Is your wife blonde? brunette? chestnut? a redhead?