Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s religious works were now also beginning to reach a wide audience abroad: in 1884 Mikhail Elpidin had published Confession as a separate book for the first time in Geneva, and in 1885 French, German and English translations of What I Believe were published. In the volume Christ’s Christianity, published in London, Chertkov included his translations of Confession and The Gospel in Brief along with What I Believe. Readers outside Russia thus became acquainted with Tolstoy’s religious writings and his major fiction simultaneously, as if his entire career to date had been telescoped: while the first French translation of War and Peace appeared in 1879, it was not until 1885 that Anna Karenina was also published in French translation. The first English translations (completed by the American Nathan Haskell Dole) of both novels appeared in 1886.⁸¹

While Tolstoy was keen to disseminate his ideas abroad, it was in Russia that he wanted to make an impact, and the first concrete sign that he was succeeding came in the spring of 1885, when it became known that a young man had refused to serve in the army on the grounds of his Tolstoy-inspired religious convictions.⁸² A number of writers and thinkers now started to make an impact on Tolstoy’s thought, as it continued to evolve. Although he had by now articulated the major tenets of his new worldview, he remained very receptive to currents of thought which seemed to echo or amplify his own ideas, and there were three important people who shaped his thinking in 1885: an American political economist in New York, a self-educated peasant in Siberia, and an émigré religious positivist based in London.

Henry George, who rose from humble origins in Philadelphia to stand against Theodore Roosevelt for Mayor of New York in 1886, was an evangelical Protestant who wrote a best-selling book in 1879 about social inequality called Progress and Poverty.⁸³ Articles about this book began appearing in the Russian press in 1883, and in February 1885 Tolstoy started reading the book itself. He was riveted by George’s central idea that all land should become common property. Regarding it as a major turning point, he predicted that the emancipation from private ownership would be as momentous as the emancipation of the serfs.⁸⁴ George’s philosophy was inspired by the observations he had made during his extensive international travels. He had noticed that poverty was greater in populated areas than in those which were less developed. In his book he argued for a single tax, so that private property, and ultimately poverty, could be eliminated. Tolstoy was all for the abolition of private property, but at this point he was quite hostile to the idea of a tax applied by a government, due to the element of coercion inherent in such an action. Nevertheless, he would come to change his mind a decade later, and wholeheartedly embrace George’s proposals.

In July 1885 Tolstoy found himself being stimulated by another thinker in whom he recognised a kindred spirit when a political exile in Siberia sent him a manuscript by Timofey Bondarev. He had first read about The Triumph of the Farmer or Industry and Parasitism a few months earlier in a journal article, and was curious to read it. Taking his inspiration from Genesis 3: 19 (‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food …’), Bondarev argued that it was each person’s moral and religious duty to earn their bread through physical labour, regardless of their social station. Tolstoy was electrified by the ideas contained in this manuscript, and by the author’s passionate diatribe against the wealthy ruling classes. He was also struck by the rich mixture of biblical and colloquial language the treatise was written in, and he read it aloud to everyone at Yasnaya Polyana on the day he received it. He then set about writing to the author, and finding out more about him. Timofey Bondarev, it turned out, was a former serf from southern Russia. In the 1850s, at the age of thirty-seven, he had been forced to abandon his wife and four children when his owner recruited him into the army, where he faced the standard period of conscription of twenty-five years. In 1867, after serving for ten years, Bondarev was arrested for renouncing his Orthodox beliefs and becoming a Subbotnik (‘Sabbatarian’ – a splinter group of the Molokans). He was exiled for life to a remote village on the Yenisey river, not far from Mongolia, along with other sectarian ‘apostates’. As he was the only person who could read and write in the village, he set up a school, in which he taught for thirty years. He devoted the rest of his time to tilling the land and writing his treatise.