Tolstoy

Sectarian, Repin’s portrait of Syutayev, was acquired for Tretyakov’s gallery on Tolstoy’s recommendation. In due course Repin would paint a series of celebrated portraits of Tolstoy, with whom he now embarked on a thirty-year friendship. He had first acquired fame in 1873 with an epic canvas depicting a group of destitute peasants forced into earning a demeaning living by hauling barges up the Volga, and henceforth had come to be seen as the ‘Tolstoy of painting’. There was thus an inevitability to him meeting the Tolstoy of literature, just as there was an inevitability to the author of An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology challenging Repin on the subject of his painting Religious Procession, which is what he had been working on when he received a surprise visitor at his Moscow studio one evening in the autumn of 1880. The subject of Repin’s painting – the annual procession accompanying the twenty-mile journey of one of Russia’s most precious icons from the znamensky Cathedral in kursk to the korennaya Hermitage where it first appeared – represented for Tolstoy the epitome of Russian Orthodox ritual and superstition, and he could not see the point of making it the subject of a painting.

Since the time it had first taken place in the early seventeenth century, the kursk procession had been drawing Russians from all sections of society in ever greater numbers. There were a few dozen members of Syutayev’s sect, but well over 60,000 people took part in the three-mile-long kursk procession by the 1880s, including mounted police, pilgrims carrying the wonder-working icon, deacons carrying banners, choristers, clergy, the provincial governor and his staff in full dress uniforms, the Bishop of kursk in ceremonial regalia, officials and their families, merchants and peasants, all in strict hierarchical sequence.¹¹ Whether or not Tolstoy’s reproof had anything to do with it, by the time Religious Procession in Kursk Province was finished three years later, Repin’s painting had been transformed into a thinly disguised attack on Russia’s entrenched caste system, with strong hints that it was maintained by means of brutality and violence. The canvas attracted 4,000 visitors in one week when it was first exhibited in 1883 due to its provocative content, and was acquired for the Tretyakov Gallery at the record price of 10,000 roubles, despite Repin’s refusal to tone down its trenchant social criticism.¹²

Two very different worlds had merged during Syutayev’s visit to the Tolstoy household in 1882, but this was an exception. As Tolstoy and his wife were very well aware, their paths were now diverging. ‘The difference between my husband and myself came about, not because I in my heart went away from him,’ Sonya wrote later; ‘I and my life remained the same as before. It was he who went away.’¹³ Perhaps if she had not endured twelve pregnancies, three miscarriages and ensuing bouts of serious illness, and had not borne the responsibilities of running a large household on her shoulders, she could have followed her husband on his spiritual journey and spent her time reading books. She had grown into adulthood under his tutelage, and now she was expected to renounce all the values he had inculcated in her and meekly follow him. But she wondered how it would be possible to eke out an existence on next to no income with eight children to clothe and feed.

Undeterred by his setback with the Moscow census, Tolstoy now channelled his missionary zeal into the written word. Apart from his article about the census and his story ‘What Men Live By’, he had not published anything new since the last instalment of Anna Karenina appeared in 1877. Five years on, he was ready to disseminate his newfound religious ideas to the wider public, and he began that process by reading the manuscript of his Confession to Sergey Yuriev, one of the editors of the journal Russian Thought. Not least because Tolstoy had burned his bridges with katkov and the Russian Messenger over his views regarding the Serbo-Turkish War, Russian Thought was the obvious journal to turn to. Based in Moscow, it had immediately acquired a distinguished reputation for its liberal views when it was founded in 1880 – Tolstoy’s friend Prugavin, for example, had already published several articles about schismatics and peasant sectarians in it.¹⁴ Yuriev agreed to publish Confession as soon as he heard it, and within a few weeks Tolstoy was holding the proofs in his hands. The projected May issue of Russian Thought was duly submitted to the office of the religious censor, and after Tolstoy complied with requests for revisions, both he and Yuriev were hopeful of the issue being approved for publication.