Tolstoy

Fearless as Tolstoy was, he was probably unaware of the extent of the police operation which had been mounted to follow his every move. At the same time, the police probably had no idea quite how much trouble Tolstoy was going to cause them in the coming years. His meetings with Prugavin and the Molokans out on the steppe had been immediately reported to the Bishop of Samara by a local priest back in the summer of 1881, and since then, the matter had then been transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg, which now began to monitor his ‘harmful activities’. In September, for the first time since 1862 (when his peasant school activities had resulted in Yasnaya Polyana being searched for seditious material), Tolstoy was placed under permanent covert surveillance.²⁴ In December that year Tolstoy was improbably nominated to be the next Marshal of the Nobility in his district by the Tula local government, which had not yet been informed about the surveillance activities. Unaware that Tolstoy had immediately turned down the appointment, konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, wrote to warn the new Minister of Internal Affairs, Count Dmitry Tolstoy (the distant relative who in the 1870s had been Minister of Education):

In recent years Count Tolstoy’s fantasies have suddenly changed once again, and he has succumbed to religious mania. This has resulted in his complete estrangement from Christianity – in the sense of belief. He has put together a retelling of the Gospels in his own words with a commentary, full of cynicism, in which he preaches Christian morality in the rational sense, rejecting the teaching of a personal God and the divinity of Christ the saviour. He had intended to publish this work abroad, but refrained after earnest pleading from his wife (his last child has not been christened, despite his wife’s entreaties), and it is now circulating in manuscript. He is in contact with all the rational sects, the Molokans, the [Syutayevites] and so on …²⁵

Tolstoy’s movements during his trip to Samara in the summer of 1883 were indeed watched closely. A local police agent reported that Tolstoy had tried to preach the principle of equality to a group of peasants, whom he had exhorted to renounce private property, and reject the government. A few days later it was reported that he had been persuading peasants that they were wasting their time decorating churches and going to services.²⁶ From now on, the police would sedulously follow Tolstoy’s every move, noting in its regular bulletins his arrivals and departures from Moscow.²⁷

Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana that July to find a brief letter from Turgenev, with whom he had been in affectionate correspondence. Turgenev informed him he was now on his deathbed, but that was not the main reason for writing:

I’m actually writing to you in order to tell you how glad I was to be your contemporary, and to put to you my last, sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! This gift has come to you from where everything else comes from. Oh, how happy I would be if I could think that my request makes an impact on you!! I am a finished man – the doctors do not even know what to call my malady, Névralgie stomacale goutteuse. I can’t walk, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, but so what! It’s even boring to repeat all this! My friend, great writer of the Russian land – heed my request! Let me know that you have received this note, and let me once again embrace you, and your family very, very warmly, can’t write more, too tired.²⁸

Tolstoy was deeply touched by this letter (although he was later probably rather annoyed when Turgenev’s phrase ‘great writer of the Russian land’ became a cliché regularly fixed to his name). Turgenev died the following month, unaware that his friend had in fact partially returned to literature. In 1881 Tolstoy had started work on a new novella which would in time receive the title The Death of Ivan Ilych. He had put it aside in 1883, but would return to work on it the following year, placating Sonya, who also longed for her husband to return to fiction so that she could once again be part of his creative life as his copyist.