Tolstoy

Like Tolstoy, Arnold had increasingly turned to religious questions later in his career, although in his case he was impelled by a desire to navigate the crisis caused by the resistance of the Church of England’s conservative theologians to the onslaught of scientific, rational thought (Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published in 1859). Tolstoy, of course, had met Arnold briefly in London in 1861, and when in 1885 he read Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible, the controversial book Arnold published in 1873, he exclaimed excitedly in a letter to a friend that he had found half of his own ideas in it.⁵¹ Tolstoy ensured that Arnold was sent a copy of What I Believe as soon as it appeared in translation. It was, incidentally, Matthew Arnold who first awakened a serious interest in Tolstoy in England, where he was largely unknown until the middle of the 1880s. In the essay he published in 1887, a few months before he died, Arnold introduced British readers to Tolstoy’s fiction. As well as presenting a strong case for the superiority of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary, it is interesting to note that he also presented a summary of Tolstoy’s religious philosophy to date. While sympathetic to its general thrust, Arnold had some judicious comments to make. Even without having the opportunity to read any of Tolstoy’s later religious writings, Arnold’s main exposure of the basic flaw in Tolstoy’s thinking, based on a reading of What I Believe, is in many ways unsurpassed in its lucidity and concision:

Christianity cannot be packed into any set of commandments. As I have somewhere or other said, ‘Christianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon of the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up.’⁵²

Tolstoy was not a man to make concessions, however. In the spring of 1884, as he recovered from the exhaustion of completing the initial writing of What I Believe and then the various stages of proofreading (the number of changes he introduced at the first stage cost him about the same as the sum he was charged for the typesetting), he learned how to cobble shoes, and read Confucius and Lao Tzu.⁵³

Family life in the Tolstoy home in Moscow was rather surreal in the early part of 1884. In one part of the house, Tolstoy was paring his footprint on the earth down to a minimum and castigating such depraved activities as physical adornment and dancing at balls, closely watched by the governor general.⁵⁴ In another part of the house, Sonya and Tanya were dressing up in tulle and velvet to go to society balls where they fraternised with the governor general, who went out of his way to be friendly and curry favour with them.⁵⁵ Sonya was still breast-feeding their two-year old son Alyosha, and she was pregnant again, but she was determined to enjoy herself. Tolstoy deplored the money his wife was spending on Tanya’s coming-out that season. Each dress alone cost up to 250 roubles, and he was well aware that twenty-five horses could have been bought with that money. He was also pained to think of the old coachmen shivering in the cold outside grand mansions while their employers partied, and so he absconded back to Yasnaya Polyana for a while to rest his frayed nerves. Sonya was also pained to think of her husband sitting in his dirty woollen socks at home, sewing misshapen boots for their old servant Agafya Mikhailovna, while their teenage sons Ilya and Lev were being delinquent and neglecting their schoolwork. She was fed up with him being a ‘holy fool’, she complained to her sister, reneging on his duties as a father, and no longer even interested in being part of family life.⁵⁶ While Sonya wrote complaining letters to her sister Tanya, Tolstoy recorded in his diary, and in letters to Chertkov, the discord with his wife which prevented him from aligning their family’s life with his convictions. He felt he was the only sane person living in a madhouse run by madmen. But it was Tolstoy who was the madman according to his brother Sergey, who had as little sympathy for his suffering as Sonya.⁵⁷