Tolstoy

Lenin had supposedly expressly stipulated that the edition should include everything ever written by Tolstoy, without any changes, and should restore cuts made by tsarist censors. His word was law, but the Stalinist government soon realised how subversive some of the material was. There was indeed a good deal of criticism by Tolstoy of the revolutionary movement in his late writings, and Chertkov, as chief editor, came in for criticism himself now from the Bolsheviks for not compiling the commentaries to Tolstoy’s texts from a Marxist point of view.⁹¹ Chertkov, of course, ever the aristocrat like Tolstoy, had never deigned to pay obeisance to contemptible Bolshevik ideology, and his persistently apolitical stance is all the more remarkable – and brave – given the militant rhetoric and coercive policies of the times. The Soviet government certainly came to regret giving Chertkov so much autonomy.

The great irony of the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition was that it made Tolstoy’s works no more accessible than they had been during his lifetime. Not only was each volume extremely expensive, as Alexandra feared, but the print run was tiny: 5,000 or at the most 10,000. By the time that Nikolay Rodionov took over as chief editor when Chertkov died in 1936 at the age of eighty-two (the same age that Tolstoy had been when he died), seventy-two volumes were ready to be printed, but only twenty-nine had been published. They were appearing, moreover, in a strange order. Volume fifty-nine was published in 1935, for example, but it would not be until 1952 that volume thirty-four was published.⁹² Eight volumes appeared in 1937, the year after Chertkov died, but this was the height of the purges, and Solomon Lozovsky, the new head of the state publishing house, now restyled as the acronym Goslitizdat, literally feared for his life. He had been appointed in 1936, having already been arrested once on Stalin’s orders. The editorial team, whose office by a strange quirk of fate was located near the Lubyanka, now lost its independence, and were forced to take orders from Goslitizdat. In such fearful times there was no chance that Lozovsky could even contemplate approving the volumes in the Jubilee Edition which included Tolstoy’s principal religious writings (volumes 23, 28, 48, 49, for example).

Between 1939 and 1949 publication ground to a complete halt, with staff working without a salary and Rodionov courageously seeking new ways to continue by trying to play the apparatchiks at their own game, and by emphasising Lenin’s imprimatur on the whole enterprise. In the late thirties, under constant threat of arrest, the team doggedly prepared for publication more innocuous volumes, such as those containing Tolstoy’s correspondence to his wife (83, 84), and they flagged up quotations by Lenin at the expense of their own commentary. The Tolstoy scholar Inessa Medzhibovskaya is right to liken Rodionov’s dealings with Soviet bureaucracy during the purges to the literature of the absurd. In her review of a book published in 2002 by Lev Osterman, which has been one of the many important post-Soviet sources to explode the myth of Tolstoy’s hallowed status after 1917, she gives an amusing abridged version of the transcript Osterman provides of Rodionov’s encounter in 1939 with Pyotr Pospelov, deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation department of the Central Committee:

RODIONOV: I have been so insistently trying to gain a chance to see you in order to seek your advice, receive your guidance for action as to how we may resolve this painful situation without violating the will of L. N. Tolstoy and, at the same time, act in accordance with the current guidelines that the Central Committee of the Party has in mind.

POSPELOV: You have committed serious errors. The first one is your lengthy commentaries. Tolstoy’s Complete Works are replaced with the complete works of his commentators. The second error is your method of commentary. You do not observe the contract and the contract stresses the need to be objective. Yet who could be more objective than Lenin? Why don’t you enlist this most objective of sources? Why do you write long biographies about the most insignificant people, even about those who ended up being counter-revolutionary?⁹³