Tolstoy agreed with ‘everything’ in the treatise, and entered into an enthusiastic correspondence with Bondarev, telling him that he frequently read out his manuscript to his acquaintances, though adding rather tactlessly that most of them usually got up and walked out. He also confided to Bondarev that this had given him the idea of narrating his manuscript whenever he had boring visitors: it was a successful ploy in getting rid of them.85 Tolstoy went out of his way to get Bondarev’s manuscript published. After its inclusion in the journal
In the course of my lifetime, there have been two Russian thinking people who have had a deep moral influence on me, enriched my thinking, and clarified my worldview. These people were not Russian poets, scholars or preachers, but are two remarkable men who are alive today, and have both spent their whole lives working on the land – the peasants Syutayev and Bondarev.88
Another crucial person in Tolstoy’s campaign to promote a life of non-violence in harmony with the land was William Frey, the gifted son of an army general from the Baltic nobility who had abruptly turned his back on a brilliant military career in St Petersburg in the 1860s in order to seek the truth. In 1868, at the age of twenty-nine, after dabbling with radical left-wing politics, Frey emigrated with his bride to America and changed his name from Vladimir Geins to the symbolic Frey (‘free’). In the mid-1870s he had been part of the disastrous kansas commune along with Vasily Alexeyev and Alexander Malikov, but in 1884 he moved with his family to London, by this time a fervent positivist, and a devotee of Comte and Spencer. The following summer he set off to preach the ‘religion of mankind’ in Russia, where he very quickly came across samizdat copies of
Frey was interesting, Tolstoy wrote teasingly to his sister-in-law Tanya, because of his absolute refusal to recognise ‘Anke Cake’, which was his ultimate symbol of bourgeois self-satisfaction and unearned privilege. Anke Cake was served on special occasions at Yasnaya Polyana, and was named after a friend and medical colleague of Sonya’s father, also of German descent. In her recipe book, Sonya does not provide instructions, merely a list of ingredients:
1 pound of flour
½ pound of butter
¼ pound of caster sugar
3 egg yolks
1 glass of water
The butter should come straight from the cellar, it needs to be on the cold side.
Melt a quarter of a pound of butter, then mix in two eggs, half a pound of caster sugar, the grated rind of two lemons and the juice of three lemons. Heat until it is as thick as honey.90