Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s overactive conscience would not allow him to continue along the path of great novelist, and in the first half of the 1870s he went back to education. This time he devised his own system for teaching Russian children from all backgrounds how to read and write, by putting together an ABC and several reading primers. He taught himself Greek, then produced his own simplified translations of Aesop’s fables, as well as stories of his own, a compilation of tales about Russian bogatyrs and extracts from sacred readings. The Yasnaya Polyana school was reopened, with some of the elder Tolstoy children as teachers. Tolstoy was more of a father during these years than at any other time, and he took his family off to his newly acquired estate on the Samaran steppe for an unorthodox summer holiday amongst Bashkirs and horses. He revelled in the raw, primitive lifestyle, even if his wife did not.

In the second half of the 1870s everything began to unravel. In 1873, the year in which he began Anna Karenina, Tolstoy first spoke out on behalf of the impoverished peasantry by appealing nationwide for help in the face of impending famine. Anna Karenina, set in contemporary Russia, reflects Tolstoy’s own search for meaning in the face of depression and thoughts of death. Initially, he found meaning in religious faith and became one of the millions of pilgrims criss-crossing the Russian land on their way to visit its hallowed monasteries. Like many fellow intellectuals, Tolstoy was drawn to the Elders of the Optina Pustyn Monastery – monks who had distanced themselves from the official ecclesiastical hierarchy by resurrecting the ascetic traditions of the early Church Fathers, and who were revered for their spiritual wisdom. He found it was the peasants who had more wisdom to impart, however, and the next time he went to Optina Pustyn, he walked there, dressed in peasant clothes and bast shoes like a Strannik (‘wanderer’). The Stranniks were a sect who spent their lives walking in pilgrimage from one monastery to another, living on alms. The nomadic spirit runs deep in Russia, and Tolstoy increasingly hankered as time went on to join their ranks. He had long ago started dressing like a peasant, but he soon wanted to dispense with money and private property altogether.

From extreme piety Tolstoy went to extreme nihilism. At the end of the 1870s he began to see the light, and he set down his spiritual journey in a work which came to be known as his Confession. He also undertook a critical investigation of Russian Orthodox theology, and produced a ‘new, improved’ translation of the Gospels. Over the course of the 1880s he became an apostle for the Christian teaching which emerged from his root-and-branch review of the original sources, and at the same time his newfound faith compelled him to speak out against the immorality he now saw in all state institutions, from the monarchy downwards. Home life now became very strained, particularly after Tolstoy renounced the copyright on all his new writings and gave away all his property to his family. He discovered kindred spirits amongst the unofficial sectarian faiths which proliferated across Russia, whose followers were mostly peasants, and gradually became the leader of a new sectarian faith, although his followers were mostly conscience-stricken gentry like himself. These ‘Tolstoyans’ sometimes vied with each other to lead the most morally pure life, giving up money and property, living by the sweat of their brow and treating everyone as their ‘brother’. Thus one zealous Tolstoyan even gave up his kaftan, hat and bast shoes one summer, glad to be no longer a slave to his personal possessions.⁵

By the 1890s Tolstoy had become the most famous man in Russia, celebrated for a number of compellingly written and explosive tracts setting out his views on Christianity, the Orthodox Church and the Russian government, which were read all the more avidly for having been banned: they circulated very successfully in samizdat. It was when Tolstoy spearheaded the relief effort during the widespread famine of 1892 that his position as Russia’s greatest moral authority became unassailable. The result was a constant stream of visitors at his front door in Moscow, many of whom simply wanted to shake his hand. One of them was the twenty-three-year-old Sergey Diaghilev, who with characteristic chutzpah turned up one day with his cousin, and immediately noticed the incongruity of Tolstoy’s peasant dress and ‘gentlemanly way of behaving and speaking’. Tolstoy had come for a rest from the famine-relief work he had been doing in Ryazan province, and talked to the sophisticated young aesthetes from St Petersburg about soup kitchens. Diaghilev shared his impressions with his stepmother: