Tolstoy

The hundreds of events marking the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1928 were the first to be undertaken by the Soviet government in honour of a pre-revolutionary writer on a nationwide scale. Because of the ambivalence surrounding the Jubilee, the Bolsheviks were concerned to use the occasion to educate Soviet citizens on how to approach Tolstoy. Thus, along with the issue of commemorative stamps, there were guides providing instructions on how the Tolstoy centenary should be celebrated. Pride of place in all writing on Tolstoy, from now until the end of the Soviet regime, was taken by Lenin’s 1908 article.⁷⁹ The main centenary celebrations began on Tolstoy’s birthday on 9 September (as 28 August had become according to the new calendar), and they lasted a week. According to Lunacharsky in the speech he made, such was the ‘gigantic interest’ in Tolstoy in the new Soviet state that the writer was not dead at all.⁸⁰ Tolstoy was, in fact, the most widely read author in Russia at this point according to data compiled by the Bolshevik journal Red Librarian, and the only writer to have maintained his pre-revolutionary popularity. Even in the countryside, readers often had to queue up for months to read the one copy of War and Peace held by their local library.⁸¹

As a fervent admirer of Tolstoy, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was one of the distinguished foreign visitors invited to Russia to take part in the centenary celebrations in 1928. The celebrations were launched with a commemorative evening at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 9 September. Like everything else at that time, it was held up by Soviet bureaucrats who fussed over memoranda and permits. ‘The principal event which was announced for six o’clock began at 9.30,’ Zweig later recollected. ‘When I left the opera house exhausted at three in the morning, the speakers were still hard at it.’⁸² The festivities then transferred to Yasnaya Polyana. At 7.00 a.m. on 12 September, in pouring rain, Alexandra made her way to the Yasnaya Polyana railway station (as Zaseka was now called) along with journalists, photographers and curious locals. There they greeted the official delegation of eighty guests who had travelled down from Moscow, and included the actress Olga Knipper (Chekhov’s widow), esteemed professors and foreign guests, who were easy to spot because they were not shabbily dressed.⁸³ On the train down, Zweig had chatted to Lunacharsky about whether Tolstoy was a revolutionary or a reactionary, and whether the great writer had even known himself. Lunacharsky suggested that in his eagerness to change the whole world ‘in a flick of the wrist’, Tolstoy was an ingrained Russian, just like the Bolsheviks who wanted to modernise their country overnight.⁸⁴

As the minister responsible for Soviet culture in the 1920s, Lunacharsky played a key role in orchestrating the assimilation of Tolstoy into Bolshevik ideology in the early Stalinist years, and he published a volume of his writings on Tolstoy in 1928. A cultured and educated man, he did not always find his task easy, and since there was no place for even Lunacharsky’s comparatively moderate views in the Soviet regime, he lost his job the following year. Both sides of his personality were on show on 12 September at Yasnaya Polyana. First he produced the standard official peroration, cutting off attempts by a Slovak guest and Alexandra to speak out about their harassment by Communist Party militants, but then gave an impassioned, personal and sincere speech about how much Tolstoy meant to him. After a day of speeches, a choir of 250 Yasnaya Polyana schoolchildren sang the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (later condemned by a Pravda correspondent, who thought they had been singing a psalm), and village women dug out old embroidered blouses and coloured sarafans from their trunks and sang folksongs.⁸⁵