Tolstoy

The first Russian edition of The Kingdom of God Is Within You appeared in early 1894, although even this émigré publication was abridged – the two pages about kaiser Wilhelm had to be removed, as well as derogatory references to Catherine II, who was born a German. By this time Tolstoy’s text had circulated widely in Russia via samizdat, but copies of the Russian edition published in Germany were also smuggled in. A secret government memo in May 1894 expressed alarm at the number of copies that had already been imported into Russia illegally, and advised that all typographers, lithographers and even individuals in possession of typewriters were to be put under close covert surveillance. For some reason, typewritten copies particularly proliferated in the ‘southern provinces’. The first unexpurgated Russian edition of The Kingdom of God Is Within You was published in 1896 in Geneva by Mikhail Elpidin.¹⁷⁴ Alexander III had earlier declared that he did not want to add a martyr’s crown to Tolstoy’s fame by exiling him, but he was horrified by this new book, which he read a few months before his untimely death in the autumn of 1894. Even he now itched to be able to bring his rebellious subject to task.¹⁷⁵

12

ELDER, APOSTATE AND TSAR

Someone said that each person has their own specific smell. However strange it may seem, I think Tolstoy has a very devout, church-like smell: cypress, vestments, communion wafers …

Valentin Bulgakov, diary entry, 12 February 1910¹

WITH THE PUBLICATION of The Kingdom of God Is Within You in 1893, Tolstoy’s ‘gospel’ was complete. It was not a coincidence that the illegal printing presses which produced copies for distribution in Russia also handled revolutionary propaganda. Except for his complete and utter commitment to non-violence, Tolstoy also sought to bring down the Russian government. As the Polish Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg was later to comment:

The criticism to which Tolstoy has submitted the existing order is radical; it knows no limits, no retrospective glances, no compromises … The ultimate destruction of private property and the state, universal obligation to work, full economic and social equality, a complete abolition of militarism, brotherhood of nations, universal peace and equality of everything that bears the human image – this is the ideal which Tolstoy has been tirelessly preaching with the stubbornness of a great and vehement prophet.²

In the years to come Tolstoy would write dozens more articles in which he set out his religious and ethical views. Some of them, such as ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ (written in response to the assassination of King Umberto I in 1900), and ‘I Cannot Be Silent’ (prompted by the news that twenty peasants had been hanged in 1908 for attempted robbery), were occasioned by specific events. Others, such as ‘Religion and Morality’, ‘The Law of Violence and the Law of Love’ and ‘The Essence of Christian Teaching’ expressed his thinking as it continued to evolve in the last decade and a half of his life. They were all essentially variations on a theme, and mostly quite a lot shorter, but also quite a lot more abrasive.

Tolstoy had already proved to be a remarkably effective apostle. Capitalising on the fame he had already acquired as a writer, he began winning converts to his version of Christianity almost immediately he started disseminating his new beliefs in the 1880s. When he had first set out on his crusade, he had complained of loneliness, and had actively sought out kindred spirits. A decade later it was the kindred spirits who came to him – in droves, from all over the world, more often than not conceiving their journey as a ‘pilgrimage’. Where Tolstoy previously used to have two or three visitors a week at most in the early 1880s, there were sometimes as many as thirty-five people a day wanting to see him during the last years of his life.³ There were those who approached him with reverence as an elder (starets), hoping he would provide spiritual guidance and give them answers to diverse problems, and then there were others who wanted to see him in the flesh simply because he was such a celebrity.

Just how famous Tolstoy became can be ascertained from the way in which the British journalist William Stead prefaced his account of the week he spent at Yasnaya Polyana in 1888: