Tolstoy

When we got out into the street, our first words were exclamations: ‘But he’s a saint, he’s really a saint!’ We were so moved we almost wept. There was something inexpressibly sincere, touching and holy in the whole person of the great man. It’s funny that we could smell his beard for a long time, which we had touched as we embraced him …⁶

Tolstoy received thousands of visitors in the last decades of his life, and he had a reputation for rarely turning anyone away. Before long, he became known as the ‘Elder of Yasnaya Polyana’.

Tolstoy received over 50,000 letters during his lifetime, 9,000 of which came from abroad. With the help of the eminence grise of the Tolstoyan movement, Vladimir Chertkov, who found him secretaries, he did his best to answer as many as he could (there are 8,500 letters printed in his Collected Works, and there must have been many more).⁷ Chertkov was the scion of a distinguished noble family who became Tolstoy’s trusted friend, and the chief publisher of his late writings. Tolstoy’s family often felt neglected. It was his wife Sonya who bore the brunt of domestic duties, almost as a single parent of their eight children, some of whom were very unruly. She also had the demanding job of publishing her husband’s old writings, which guaranteed the family some income, even if her profitable enterprise caused him pain. It was not easy being a member of Tolstoy’s family. Sonya wrote to her husband in 1892: ‘Tanya told someone in Moscow, “I’m so tired of being the daughter of a famous father”. And I’m tired of being the wife of a famous husband, I can tell you!’⁸

Tolstoy’s fame increased further when he published his last novel Resurrection in order to aid the members of the Dukhobor sect to emigrate to Canada, where they could practise their beliefs freely and without persecution. Finally exasperated by Tolstoy’s blistering satire of a mass in one of its chapters, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him, and so Tolstoy joined the illustrious ranks of Russian apostates – rebels like Stenka Razin and Emelyan Pugachev. Because of his fame, Tolstoy was able to do what few others in Russia could: speak out. The government was powerless to stop him, as it knew there would be international outrage if he was either arrested or exiled. Tolstoy took advantage of the situation by behaving like a ‘holy fool’ so that he could speak frankly to the Tsar about his failure as a national leader. There was a widespread feeling in Russia in the last decade of Tolstoy’s life that he was the ‘real’ Tsar.

Tolstoy lived many lives in the course of his eighty-two years, but there are some noticeable exceptions from the roster of Russian archetypes. He had a longstanding aversion to merchants, for example, who formed a separate class in Russian society, and had a similarly aristocratic disdain for the chinovnik, that representative of the imperial bureaucracy, and the raznochi-nets, the ‘mixed class’ members of the intelligentsia who came from lowly backgrounds and were often radical ‘Westernisers’, anxious to fight for social reform. Tolstoy was also no ‘Oblomov’ – the Russian bear who is Goucharov’s most famous fictional character, and who takes several chapters to get out of bed. Despite all his efforts, Tolstoy failed to acquire that cardinal Russian virtue of humility which Oblomov so effortlessly manifests. And yet there is one life we might add albeit not a Russian one: Tolstoy is seen almost as an honorary Chechen. The small Tolstoy Museum in Starogladkovskaya, the Russian military base where Tolstoy was billeted in the 1850s, was the only museum on Chechen territory not to close during the more recent war with Russia, while the national museum in Grozny was desecrated. The statue of Tolstoy in front of the museum also remained unscathed.

The Chechens admire Tolstoy for making friends with them during his time in the Caucasus (this was indeed highly unusual for Russian officers, who tended to treat the natives with contempt), and for writing about them in a positive light. According to Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson Vladimir Ilych, who became director at the Yasnaya Polyana Museum in 1994, ‘The Chechen people think that Tolstoy wrote most truthfully of the events that happened then and the character of the mountain peoples, their striving to be independent, for freedom, and their religious, ethnic and other particularities’. Salavdi Zagibov, who succeeded his father as director of the Starogladkovskaya Tolstoy Museum in 2008, has also noted the similarities between the pacifist teachings of Tolstoy and the nineteenth-century Sufi leader Sheikh Kunta Khadji, a Chechen shepherd.⁹ The Starogladkovskaya Museum was reopened in December 2009 after renovation, which was funded by the personal foundation of Ramzan Kadyrov, President of Chechnya.