Tolstoy

Another new friend who provided crucial moral support in the later stages of finishing What I Believe, when Tolstoy felt like a ‘writing machine’, was Nikolay Ge, who came to Moscow to paint his portrait in 1884. In contrast to kramskoy’s portrait, in which the writer’s gaze is firmly fixed on the viewer, Ge depicted Tolstoy sitting pen in hand at his desk, his head bowed over his manuscript in deep concentration.⁴⁴ By deliberately not showing Tolstoy’s eyes, Ge broke with the conventional rules of portraiture, and many were shocked when his painting was first exhibited. Like Tolstoy, Ge was a firm believer in manual work (his speciality was building stoves), and he was one of the first ‘Tolstoyans’. He tried to follow Tolstoy’s precepts to the letter, and became a fanatical vegetarian, sometimes eating almost nothing at all. He also tried valiantly to make himself eat things he did not like, so refused buckwheat and chewed his way penitently through dishes of wheat grain with either hemp oil, or no oil at all, rather than butter. In 1886 he gave away all his property to his family. Like Tolstoy, he had a wife who did not share his views.⁴⁵

Tolstoy’s strategy for getting What I Believe past the censor was to write from a deliberately subjective point of view, print only fifty copies and set the price at an eye-watering twenty-five roubles, but he was deluding himself if thought his unequivocal rejection of both secular and ecclesiastical power would be condoned.⁴⁶ On 18 February 1884 the thirty-nine copies remaining at the printer were confiscated, but to Tolstoy’s delight they were not destroyed. Instead they were sent to Petersburg, where, along with the eight copies which Tolstoy had been required to submit for inspection, they were delivered to the many high-ranking figures in the government and the imperial court who were anxious to read Tolstoy’s latest work. They then passed the book on to others. In no time, What I Believe was also being lithographed and sold for four roubles a copy.⁴⁷ Tolstoy himself was a willing accomplice in the illegal samizdat operation, and paid scribes fifteen roubles to make copies of his manuscript for distribution.⁴⁸ French, German and English translations were soon underway.

What I Believe was an important work for Tolstoy, and one he had been building up to in his previous religious writings. He took particular care with its exposition as it was the first systematic explanation of his religious and ethical views, his ‘creed’. Tolstoy wanted a religion which would stand up to rational scrutiny. He wanted a clear, straightforward set of rules to follow in his daily life, and he found them in Christ’s five commandments in his Sermon on the Mount, which can be briefly summarised as follows:

1. Live in peace with all men (‘anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgement’).

2. Do not lust (‘anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart’) and do not divorce (‘anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery’).

3. Do not swear (‘Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great king’).

4. Do not resist evil (‘If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’).

5. Do not hate (‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’).

If everyone followed these commandments, there would be no more wars and no need for armies. Indeed, living a Tolstoyan Christian life would eradicate the need for courts, police officers, personal property and any form of government. Morality was the cornerstone of Christianity for Tolstoy, and he now saw life in simple black-and-white terms. As he writes in What I Believe:

Everything which used to seem good and noble to me – ambition, fame, education, wealth, a complex and sophisticated lifestyle, environment, food, clothes, and formal manners – has become bad and sordid. Everything which seemed bad and sordid – the peasant lifestyle, obscurity, poverty, crudity, simple surroundings, food, clothes, manners – has become good and noble.⁴⁹

It was not surprising that Nikolay Berdyaev later defined as one of Tolstoy’s many paradoxes the fact that this man who was Russian to the core of his being started preaching ‘Anglo-Saxon religiosity’,⁵⁰ for there were striking parallels with the reformist views that Matthew Arnold had been promoting in Victorian England in the 1870s.