Tolstoy

When there was no longer any money to pay the teachers, the local schools had been forced to close, but Tolstoy had done what he could to reopen some of them. Stadling was full of admiration for all the Tolstoys – for the indefatigable Sonya, dealing on her own with an enormous correspondence in Moscow, for Lev Lvovich, heading the relief effort in Samara (where Stadling also volunteered), and the two dedicated daughters Tanya and Masha, who assisted their father not only with the operation of the soup kitchens and the establishment of separate premises for feeding children, but also with the procurement of feed for the horses and the distribution amongst the peasants of fuel, seed for planting, and flax and bast, to give them some work.

By the autumn of 1892, when Tolstoy eventually returned to Yasnaya Polyana, donations of over 100,000 roubles, plus two ships from America with a cargo of flour, grain and potatoes, had helped with the setting up of 212 emergency soup kitchens in four districts, which had functioned until July. Along with teaching at the Yasnaya Polyana school, and his work on the ABC books, Tolstoy later declared that this had been one of the happiest times of his life. In September he returned to Begichevka for another visit, and carefully toned down his language when he wrote a moving account of how the donations received between April and July had been used. It was published on 31 October in the Russian Gazette, and at least 5,000 extra copies had to be printed to meet the demand.¹⁶⁵ Tolstoy would continue to make further visits to Begichevka in the winter of 1893, but he was now free to spend more time working on the treatise about non-violence which he had begun two years earlier. He had worked further on it during the three weeks he had spent resting in Moscow back in January, and in April Chertkov had sent out to him in Begichevka not only his latest manuscript, but also a young peasant with good handwriting keen to work as a copyist. Tolstoy had thus been able to continue writing, and now that he was back in the peace and quiet of Yasnaya Polyana he was able to give his treatise his full attention.

After Tolstoy’s religious writings began to be published abroad, he had started to receive letters, books and pamphlets from enthusiastic readers from all over the world who were sympathetic to his cause. When Alice Stock-ham had come to visit Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy had been greatly interested in what she had to tell him about all the various branches of Christianity in America which were ‘moving towards practical Christianity, towards a universal brotherhood and the sign of this is non-resistance’.¹⁶⁶ He began to learn for the first time about Universalists, Unitarians, Quakers, spiritualists, Swedenborgians and also Shakers. On 30 March 1889 the Shaker Asenath Stickney had sent Tolstoy photographs of the leaders of their community, and two books: The Shaker Answer and George Lomas’s Plain Talks upon Practical Religion: Being Candid Answers to Earnest Inquirers. In the autumn of 1889 Tolstoy entered into correspondence with another Shaker, Alonzo Hollister, explaining where he agreed and disagreed with their beliefs.¹⁶⁷ Tolstoy also now came into contact with the Quakers, who had preached non-resistance for over 200 years, and refused to take arms even in self-defence. Wendell Garrison, who edited a journal called Non-resistance, sent Tolstoy works by his father, the famous abolitionist and social reformer William Lloyd Garrison (who had died in 1879). And in 1889 Tolstoy was also sent Adin Ballou’s Catechism of Non-violence, which he was very impressed by. Ballou was an abolitionist pastor who had formed a utopian community to live a rigorous life of Christian non-violence in Massachusetts back in 1841. Tolstoy exchanged warm letters with the eighty-seven-year-old pastor in the last year of his life.¹⁶⁸