Tolstoy

When James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, asked Mark Popovsky in the early eighties why he had chosen to research the history of a small group whose influence had been negligible, he answered that he had been impressed with the intelligent way the Tolstoyans had protested against the status quo, by simply living individual lives in accordance with their moral principles.¹¹² Their patience and determination to bear witness was finally rewarded a few years later. Russian scholarship on Tolstoy entered a new phase with the publication in May 1988 of Vladimir Lakshin’s article ‘The Return of Tolstoy the Thinker’. It was obvious that Tolstoy could no longer be seen as just a mirror reflecting the contradictions of the 1905 Revolution, he wrote, since Tolstoy was a laser – a laser of humanity.¹¹³ With the onset of perestroika and glasnost, the story of the Tolstoyans’ tenacious struggle to establish communes and till the land in the communist Eden of the Soviet Union could finally be told in Russia as well as in the West. Everything changed in Russia in the late 1980s with the arrival of Gorbachev’s reforms and the lifting of censorship. Mazurin, at the age of eighty-seven years, lived to witness the sensation produced by the publication of his memoirs in Russia’s most prestigious literary magazine Novy mir, which in 1988 had a subscription of well over a million.¹¹⁴ Many other articles and books followed.

Tolstoy did not believe in the idea of an afterlife in the Christian sense; indeed, the prospect of death summarily curtailing his existence, at a time which he had no control over, was the biggest problem he ever wrestled with. He did not believe his works would be remembered for very long after his death, nor did he believe he had all that many followers. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the final liberation of literary and cultural historians from the shackles of ideology, an important position in the wealth of new publications about Tolstoy’s legacy in Russia has been occupied by materials shedding light on the lives of those who sought to put his ideas into practice after his death. Not only have they made it possible to piece together the complex and fascinating story of Tolstoy’s ‘afterlife’, but they have shown how just how deeply Tolstoy’s ideas continued to resonate well into the twentieth century.

In April 1990 an application was made by a group of scholars to the Tula educational authorities to found an L. N. Tolstoy School research institute, with the aim of reintroducing Tolstoy’s pedagogical ideas into teaching and learning in contemporary Russian education.¹¹⁵ In 1998 its achievements in developing a three-stage educational programme from kindergarten to university entrance were recognised when the Russian government awarded it the status of a ‘Federal Experimental Platform’, and by 2010 there were already hundreds in Russia and abroad using Tolstoy’s methods.¹¹⁶ The revival of Tolstoyan schools was the brainchild of Vitaly Remizov, who became director of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow in 2001. In an interview in 2005 he explained that the schools aimed to nurture independence in their pupils above all, in an atmosphere of freedom, using at the primary level the texts developed by Tolstoy in the 1870s.¹¹⁷

In November 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the religious association ‘Spiritual Unity (the Church of Lev Tolstoy)’ was registered in Moscow with the Russian Ministry of Justice, a step that would have been unthinkable in the Soviet era. Its statutes proclaimed its goal to be the dissemination of a Tolstoyan understanding of religion and spiritual life.¹¹⁸ Its umbrella organisation was named as the Unity Church, which was initially founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City in 1889 under the inspiration of Tolstoy’s teachings. The Unity Church describes itself as ‘a positive, practical, progressive approach to Christianity based on the teachings of Jesus and the power of prayer’ which honours ‘the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual’s right to choose a spiritual path’.¹¹⁹ In 1996 a new department of Tolstoy’s Spiritual Heritage with eight faculty members opened its doors at the L. N. Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical Institute.

In 2000, three years before she died at the age of seventy-eight, the distinguished Tolstoy scholar Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya published the first volume in the new Academy of Sciences edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works. drawing on the many new materials which have come to light since the publication of the Jubilee Edition, this edition will run to 100 volumes, and, as the editors take pains to note, will be the first to be truly complete; it will not be marred by ‘omissions or constraints’, unlike the Jubilee Edition. When the project was first conceived in the late 1980s, Gromova-Opulskaya commented on its aims: