Tolstoy

When news of Russia’s latest defeat at Evpatoria reached the Tsar on 12 February 1855, he had wept like a child, and no longer wanted to hear any more despatches from the front. On 18 February Nicholas I died. He had ruled Russia with an iron fist for thirty years and his death at the age of fifty-eight was completely unexpected. As far as most of the educated population of Russia was concerned, however, the news was more a reason for celebration than for mourning. The relaxation in censorship which followed soon after Alexander’s accession would make an immediate impact, and Russians would begin to speak about a ‘thaw’, just as they would a century later after Stalin’s death. Down in the Crimea, Tolstoy clearly now felt emboldened to extend his reforming plans for the military, for in early March he began sketching out a plan for modernising the entire army, not just the artillery’s weapons. He did not mince his words. ‘We don’t have an army,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘but a mob of oppressed disciplined slaves who have submitted to robbers and mercenaries.’ The Russian soldier, he went on, was someone legally constricted from satisfying even his most basic needs, and he was certainly not given enough to prevent him from suffering from hunger and cold. Tolstoy divided Russian soldiers into the oppressed, the oppressors and the desperate. It was hardly surprising that an oppressed soldier spent the niggardly seventy kopecks he received every quarter (a ‘bitter mockery of his poverty’) on drink, and that morale was low. Tolstoy had nothing good to say about those in charge: a lot of the officers were crooks devoid of any sense of duty or honour, while the generals were more often appointed for their acceptability to the Tsar rather than for their abilities.⁸⁰ Tolstoy abandoned this ambitious project after a few days, no doubt because he realised it would not go anywhere even in the new climate, but it is important to realise that there was a precedent for speaking out when he began railing in public against social and political injustices thirty years later.

At the same time that Tolstoy was preoccupied with military matters, he was also thinking deeply about religious questions. On 4 March 1855 he took communion and made a remarkable declaration in his diary about the founding of a new religion. It is often quoted in view of its prophetic nature:

Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.⁸¹

In a sense, all of Tolstoy’s future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist. Tolstoy’s literary works, in the compelling argument of Richard Gustafson, can even be seen as ‘verbal icons’ of his religious view. until the nineteenth century the icon had fulfilled the role of theology in the Russian Orthodox Church. There simply was no written theological tradition in Russia as there was in the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, and when the art of icon painting fell into decline in the nineteenth century, after the Orthodox Church was made into a department of state, it was literature which took its place. As Gustafson has commented, people in Russia began instinctively to understand the role of literature as theology: ‘the images created by artists were taken seriously as words which reveal the Truth’. Tolstoy’s writing is hailed for its realism, but it is a very emblematic, religious kind of realism.⁸²