Tolstoy

The Intermediary was a huge success – 12 million of the little books it produced were sold in the first four years of its existence. They filled a real gap in the market, where previously there was little available to the burgeoning numbers of literate peasants and urban workers beyond saints’ lives and crudely written stories of a very low literary quality. Tolstoy advised Chertkov on which foreign authors to publish (including Dickens and Eliot), but he also made a very valuable original contribution himself. The Intermediary presented him with an opportunity to pick up the work of his ABC where he had left off, and, in fact, one of The Intermediary’s publications was his story ‘Captive in the Caucasus’, which he had written back in the 1870s for his ABC.⁷⁴ He also wrote twenty finely executed new stories over the next few years for The Intermediary, and a select few journals.⁷⁵ These brief tales were considerably better crafted than the boots he made, which he proudly described to Sonya as ‘un bijou’. Tolstoy was an expert at retelling fables and folk stories in a vivid and simple way, deploying humour and an admirably light touch with the moral each contained.

While Tolstoy was busy writing stories for the masses, his wife was learning the ropes in a different area of the publishing sector. Her very real anxieties about the family’s loss of income had led Tolstoy to suggest that she produce the next editions of his collected works and his ABC books. Previously the sales of Tolstoy’s collected works had been handled by the husband of his niece Varya (Masha’s daughter). Sonya now decided to retain the rights to the publication of her husband’s works, and to convert the outbuilding at their Moscow house into a warehouse. In January 1885 Sonya got down to business, and the proofs for the new, fifth edition started arriving the following month. New works by Tolstoy completed since 1881 which were earmarked for the new twelfth volume of this edition included his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, ‘Strider’, and a couple of the stories Tolstoy had just written for The Intermediary, including ‘The Tale of Ivan the Fool’.⁷⁶ In February Sonya set off to St Petersburg to obtain permission for this volume to be published, and also to consult Dostoyevsky’s widow about the most profitable way to go about her new publishing venture. One of the most valuable pieces of advice from Anna Grigorievna was to give booksellers only five per cent discount.⁷⁷ She also recommended that Sonya should not insist on each volume being published in chronological order. Sonya proved to be an accomplished businesswoman. The twelfth volume was banned, but in November 1885 she was already making her second visit to St Petersburg to lobby for the ban to be lifted (it was eventually published in 1886), and to initiate the process of publishing the sixth edition of Tolstoy’s works.⁷⁸ By 1889 she was already releasing the eighth edition.⁷⁹

Letting Sonya publish everything he had written before his spiritual crisis (plus the occasional new work of fiction) was Tolstoy’s concession to her, and he helped her with the proofs, but he was much more interested in proselytising. Since 1882 he had been working on and off on a major new treatise, What Then Must We Do?, which drew on his experiences in the Moscow slums while working for the census. Its topics were poverty, exploitation and the evils of money and private property, but the solution to these perennial problems was not technology or modernisation, but physical labour, humility and personal endeavour:

So these are the replies I found to my question: What must we do?

First: not to lie to myself; and – however far my path of life may be from the true path disclosed by my reason – not to fear the truth.

Secondly: to reject the belief in my own righteousness and in privileges and peculiarities distinguishing me from others, and to acknowledge myself as being to blame.

Thirdly: to fulfil the eternal, indubitable law of man, and with the labour of my whole being to struggle with nature for the maintenance of my own and other people’s lives.⁸⁰

At the end of 1884 Tolstoy handed over the first chapters for publication in Russian Thought. Despite the eternal optimism of his editors, the censor vetoed their publication, but copies were naturally made from the proofs for informal distribution.