10. PILGRIM, NIHILIST, MUZHIK

If I was on my own, I wouldn't be a monk, I would be a holy fool—that is, I wouldn't cherish anything in life, and would do no one any harm.

Letter to Nikolay Strakhov, 6 November 1877¹

AS SOMEONE WHO CAME TO BELIEVE fervently in the idea that our lives are made up of seven-year cycles, and who was also extremely superstitious, Tolstoy was bound to look upon his forty-ninth year as being of special significance—particularly since this birthday fell in the seventh year of the seventh decade of the century. And so it was, for looking back in October 1884, when seven more years had passed, he realised that the most radical change in his life had indeed been, as he put it numerically in a letter to his wife, '7 x 7 = 49'.² It was in 1877 that Tolstoy began to tread more firmly on the path he had first tentatively started out on when he set up his Yasnaya Polyana school—the path of living in accordance with Christian ethics. Twice he had been diverted—when he married and again when he committed himself to writing Anna Karenina. But this time there was to be no straying, and the further he progressed along the path that was taking him away from his artistic calling as a novelist, and also away from his wife, the lighter his step became. He did not stop writing fiction entirely, but it became secondary to the more pressing task of exposing the hypocrisy and immorality he saw around him.

It was perhaps inevitable that a man who did nothing by half-measures would experience something beyond the typical mid-life crisis. The decade following Tolstoy's forty-ninth birthday would indeed turn out to be the most tumultuous in his life thus far. Moving to Moscow was the event which loomed largest for the rest of his family during this period (it was a life-changing experience for all the children and certainly for Sonya, after the long years of being sequestered at Yasnaya Polyana). But that was not what Tolstoy was referring to when he defined these years as a time of tempestuous inner struggle and change. He became a devout Orthodox communicant, then a trenchant critic of the Church. He undertook a root-and-branch study of all the major world religions and wrote a searing work of spiritual autobiography about his quest for the meaning of life. He produced a new translation of the Gospels, and set out to follow Christ's teaching. And then he began protesting loudly in the name of that teaching against the Orthodox Church. At the end of the 1880s Alexander III would brand Tolstoy as a godless nihilist, and a dangerous figure who needed to be stopped.³

There was a journey to be undertaken before Tolstoy reached the point of formulating and articulating his new ideas, however, and it began with a period of intense religious searching, as reflected in the chapters at the end of Anna Karenina where Levin questions the meaning of life. The spiritual crisis that Dostoyevsky underwent during his years of Siberian exile in the early 1850s resulted in him jettisoning atheism and socialism and embracing Christianity, specifically Russian Orthodox Christianity, with ever greater fervour. Tolstoy did more or less the opposite, the spiritual crisis he underwent at the end of the 1870s resulting in him jettisoning not just Russian Orthodoxy but a large part of Christianity too. But he began his spiritual crisis by first becoming devout—the most devout he had ever been in his life.

Up until this point, Tolstoy had only notionally been a member of the Orthodox faith he was baptised into, like most members of his class. He had given up praying at sixteen and lost his belief at eighteen, but in his late forties he began to yearn for the guidance provided by strong religious beliefs. Writing to Alexandrine at the beginning of February 1877, Tolstoy confessed that for the past two years he had been like a drowning man, desperate to find something to hold on to. He told her he had been pinning his hopes on finding salvation in religion, that he and his friend Strakhov were both agreed that philosophy could not provide the answers, and that they could not live without religion. At the same time, he wrote, they just could not believe in God.⁴ A month later, however, Tolstoy had changed course totally, and almost on a whim, after conversations with his 'materialist' doctor Grigory Zakharin and Sergey Levitsky, the celebrated 'patriarch' of Russian photography who had taken the group portrait of The Contemporaryswriters in Paris back in 1856.⁵ He started reading the theological writings of the Slavophile thinker Alexey Khomyakov, just like his character Levin at the end of Anna Karenina.⁶ Like Levin, he found them wanting. Even so, he was soon saying his prayers every day as he had in childhood, going to church on Sundays and fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Tolstoy's newfound religious fervour did not stop him from going off hunting with his friends for wolves and elk, or seeking to publish his fiction profitably—yet. He had come back to his old publisher Theodor Ries to arrange for the separate publication of 'The Eighth and Last Part' of Anna Karenina after the Russian Messenger debacle, and soon after it appeared in print in July 1877 he handed over a slightly revised version of the complete novel for its first publication in book form the following year. The 1878 edition was never reprinted. By subsequently including the novel as part of his collected works, Tolstoy cunningly obliged all those who wanted their own copy to splash out on the complete set. In May 1878 he ascertained from his Moscow distributor that there were 2,700 copies left of the original print run of 4,800, and 800 unsold copies of his nine-volume collected works. The new, fourth edition of his collected works, planned for 1880, would be swelled by the addition of two final volumes incorporatingAnna Karenina, and would go on sale for sixteen and a half roubles. If 5,000 copies were printed, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov, that meant a total revenue of 82,500 roubles, of which 20,000 would go on printing costs, but he would sell the distribution rights for 30,000 roubles, so he stood to do extremely well out of the deal.⁷

Tolstoy remained, as ever, a shrewd businessman when it came to financial negotiations. Nevertheless, there were also clear signs of his new piety. In the summer of 1877, accompanied by Strakhov, Tolstoy made the first of several visits to the famed Optina Pustyn Monastery in Kaluga province, some 135 miles west of Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy hoped to be granted an audience with Elder Ambrosy. He had heard about Ambrosy from his aunts, who had instilled in him and his siblings a reverence for Optina Pustyn from an early age.⁸ His devout aunt Aline was even buried there, having made annual pilgrimages from Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy also knew about Ambrosy from his peasants. After a full day's travel, he and Strakhov arrived at three in the morning in theirtarantass. Tolstoy did not want to be accorded special treatment because of who he was, and so they put up in the monastery's spartan and crowded hostel. It turned out that Father Feoktist, the monk running the monastery hostel, was one of his family's former serfs, however, and as soon as Count Tolstoy's identity was known, there was pressure on him to move to the more luxurious quarters available, which he resisted.

There were reasons why Tolstoy chose to come to Optina Pustyn rather than any other monastery. Despite its sixteenth-century foundations, the anti-clerical reforms launched by Peter the Great and continued by Catherine the Great had almost forced it to close at the end of the eighteenth century, by which time there were only three monks left, and one of them was blind.⁹ From this moribund state, however, Optina Pustyn recovered to become the centre of an extraordinary religious revival in the nineteenth century. This was due to its charismatic 'elders'. An elder (starets) was a monk who through long ascetic practice, constant prayer and solitude had become an unofficial leader of the spiritual life of his monastery.¹⁰ Believing they possessed powers of healing and clairvoyance in addition to unusual wisdom, thousands of lay visitors would come annually from all over Russia to seek guidance from Elders on a wide array of problems in their lives. Many peti-tioners were peasants, but Optina Pustyn also attracted large numbers of the Russian intelligentsia, including many noted writers.¹¹

The ancient tradition of eldership was brought to Russia by disciples of the eighteenth-century spiritual leader Paisy Velichkovsky. At the age of seventeen, after taking his monastic vows, Paisy moved from his native Poltava to Mount Athos, where he established a hermitage and immersed himself in the Eastern Christian practice of Hesychasm ('inner stillness'). In 1764, after two and a half decades of attempting to reach a state of perpetual prayer and reconnect with the traditions of the early Church Fathers, he was invited to revive spiritual life in Moldavia. By the time of his death in 1794, the monastery he founded at Neamt had around 700 monks. As well as introducing eldership to the Slavonic world, Paisy Velichkovsky left an important legacy of published writings on prayer which were very influential on the monks who revived Optina Pustyn in the dark days of the early nineteenth century. The mystical texts he compiled for his Slavonic Philokalia ('love of the beautiful'), in particular, cemented the vital link he had forged with the Hesychast traditions of Mount Athos and the early Christians who had lived in the desert. The nineteenth-century Russian elders who followed Velichkovsky's example were monks who emulated the Church Fathers by living in a remote hermitage, which was the nearest equivalent in Russia to retreating to the desert, and it is no coincidence that the word pustyn (hermitage) is related to the word pustynya, which means desert as well as wilderness. To ensure a stricter and more solitary existence than that of regular monks, however, the elders also lived in a skete—a kind of monastery within a monastery. At the time of Tolstoy's visit, the elder in charge of Optina Pustyn was Ambrosy, who was by then sixty-five, and one of the most famous men in Russia. It was Ambrosy upon whom Dostoyevsky would model his character of Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov following three meetings with him during his pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn in 1878.

Tolstoy was not best pleased that his cover was blown when he arrived at the monastery in May 1877, but it did mean that he was granted an audience with Ambrosy straight away. So many people came to see the elder that the vast majority would have to wait days or even weeks before being granted access (women were not allowed into the hermitage itself, but thronged round a specially built extension to Ambrosy's cell).¹² The spiritual assistance people requested was extremely varied. Mothers sought his advice on how to bring up their children, merchants wanted to know whether to make a particular purchase or not, uncles consulted him about whom their nieces should marry, while innumerable others sought prayers which might effect a cure for a grave illness, or merely some comfort in their afflictions.¹³ Tolstoy came to Elder Ambrosy with no particular agenda, other than a hope that he might find answers to the spiritual questions which tormented him. After heeding Ambrosy's suggestion that he go to confession and take communion, Tolstoy stood through the four hours of the monastery's vespers service. He also spent time during his pilgrimage talking to the monastery's archimandrite (a Guards officer in his previous life), but his heart was most deeply touched by the ingenuous humility of Father Pimen, a former painter and decorator whose kind and down-to-earth ways had made him very popular with female supplicants. At one point in Tolstoy's conversation with the archimandrite, Pimen quietly nodded off on his chair, ¹⁴ but he was not as sleepy as he seemed. He later commented that Tolstoy had said a lot of eloquent but empty things, and should think about his soul. Ambrosy, meanwhile, later recounted to a friend of Strakhov, after a long sigh, that he had found Tolstoy challenging. In 1907 this friend published what the Elder had told him about Tolstoy:

  

5. Father Ambrosy, the Elder at Optina Pustyn Monastery, whom Tolstoy visited for the first time in 1877

His heart seeks God, but there is muddle and a lack of belief in his thoughts. He suffers from a great deal of pride, spiritual pride. He will cause a lot of harm with his arbitrary and empty interpretation of the Gospels, which in his opinion no one has understood before him, but everything is God's will.¹⁵

This same acquaintance told Strakhov privately at the time, however, that the Holy Fathers had thought Tolstoy had a 'wonderful soul', and were particularly pleased that he did not suffer from intellectual pride, unlike Gogol, who had visited the monastery in 1850. Wherever the truth lies, Tolstoy was buoyed by his first pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn—he was genuinely impressed by the wisdom of the monastery's elders, and by Father Ambrosy's spiritual powers in particular.¹⁶ Meanwhile, his own faith was strengthened. When he returned to Yasnaya Polyana at the end of July, he started having long conversations with the local priest and getting up at dawn to go to early matins, saddling his horse himself so as not to wake his servant.¹⁷

Russia had finally declared war on Turkey in April 1877, just as Tolstoy was finishing Anna Karenina. In the middle of August, accompanied by Sonya and various other members of their family, Tolstoy went to visit the Turkish prisoners of war who were being held at an old sugar factory on the road to Tula. He had hoped to start a new historical novel that summer, but news from the front kept preventing him from being able to concentrate, regardless of whether he was in a good or a bad mood, he wrote to Strakhov.¹⁸Tolstoy naturally could not help remembering being stationed himself on the Danube, before being transferred to the disastrous Sebastopol campaign during the Crimean War, and for a while he pondered writing Alexander II a letter about the state of Russia, and the reasons for the army's failures in the most recent hostilities with Turkey. But it was religion that was uppermost in his mind, and so it was faith that he wanted to talk about to the Turkish prisoners of war, not politics. He wanted to know whether they each had their own copy of the Koran, and who their mullah was.¹⁹ Tolstoy's religious quest took him well beyond Russia's borders. The books which he asked Strakhov to send him later in the year included the Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauss's Old and New Faith, a work which had caused almost as much scandal in Germany in 1872 as his 'historical' Life of Jesus, in which he had denied Christ's divinity some thirty years earlier. Tolstoy also asked Strakhov to procure for him Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, an equally notorious volume with the same title which had provoked a storm of controversy in the Catholic world, and which had been banned in Russia ever since its first publication in France in 1863. Other authors who interested Tolstoy at this time were the orientalists Eugène Burnouf, who had published a history of Indian Buddhism in 1844, and his student Max Müller, later regarded as the father of Religionswissenschaft. Müller had become Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Theology in 1868, and wrote extensively on Indian philosophy and Vedic religion.²⁰

Strakhov continued to be a sounding-board for Tolstoy's ideas, but he was not thirsting for faith in the same way, and so did not accompany his friend on the next leg of his spiritual journey. As Elder Ambrosy had noted during their visit to Optina Pustyn, Strakhov's lack of belief was deeply entrenched; faith for him was 'merely poetry', despite an attraction to the monastic way of life which inspired him to travel to Mount Athos in 1881.²¹ At Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's newfound religious fervour was greeted with slight bemusement, particularly by Sonya, for whom Orthodox belief had always been an unobtrusive but integral part of her life. She was glad her husband had 'calmed down' after the violent mood swings of the previous years (particularly the periods of deep depression), and she could only rejoice that his character seemed to be changing for the better. In her diary, she was optimistic that Tolstoy had somehow reached the end of his spiritual journey:

Although he has always been modest and undemanding in all his habits, he is now becoming even more modest, meek and patient. And this eternal struggle that he began in his youth, aimed at achieving moral perfection, is being crowned with complete success.²²

She must have winced later at her naivety. Tolstoy's religious strivings certainly brought some peace and harmony to Yasnaya Polyana, but he had begun to walk alone, for none of his family felt inclined to take Christianity as seriously as he did.

Tolstoy's greatest inspiration at this time came from an unlikely source. Vasily Alexeyev, a thin, rather frail young man with a wispy ginger beard and candid blue eyes, was the latest tutor engaged to teach his eldest children, and he would have a surprisingly powerful influence on Tolstoy's evolving religious philosophy during the next few years.²³ In many ways, he was a Tolstoyan avant le lettre. He arrived at Yasnaya Polyana in October 1877 after being recommended by the Tolstoys' midwife Maria Abramovich (Sonya was at this point seven months pregnant with Andrey, her ninth child), and he was to stay with the Tolstoys for four years.²⁴ Given his background in radical politics, the surprising thing is not that Sonya eventually asked him to leave, but that he stayed as long as he did.²⁵ Alexeyev was openly socialist and atheist, and yet he was a model of Christian ethics in his personal conduct. He provided Tolstoy with much-needed moral support at this critical time in his life, and Tolstoy defended him to the hilt whenever his pious friend Sergey Urusov tried to attack Alexeyev as a 'nihilist' and 'the son of the devil'. 'I know few people other than him who are not only good, but kind and religious in feeling,' Tolstoy assured Urusov, another time stressing his meekness, and devotion to serving others.²⁶

Vasily Alexeyev was the son of a retired officer and minor landowner who had married one of his serfs, whom he was known to beat. He grew up in the far western province of Pskov, hundreds of miles from Moscow.²⁷ One of eight brothers and sisters, Alexeyev had excelled academically at an early age and won a place to study mathematics at St Petersburg University, where he became increasingly involved in left-wing politics. This was at the height of the Populist movement in the early 1870s and Alexeyev had got to know the revolutionary Nikolay Chaikovsky, leader of a circle involved in spreading socialist propaganda amongst the peasantry. It was Chaikovsky who introduced Alexeyev to Alexander Malikov, who was more of a religious idealist than a revolutionary and who came from a peasant background. Malikov had already spent time in prison and in exile because of his political beliefs, and now set his hopes on a mystical doctrine he had founded called Godmanhood, which combined socialist theory with Christian ethics. Seduced by his passionate oratory, Alexeyev became one of Malikov's followers, but the Russian government inevitably viewed attempts to disseminate the teaching of Godmanhood as revolutionary propaganda and promptly arrested him. Although Alexeyev was soon released due to the lack of incriminating evidence, his father disowned him.

Malikov and Alexeyev realised it was going to be impossible to put their ideas into practice in Russia, where they were seen as subversive. Along with about a dozen others, they decided to emigrate to America in 1875, hoping to fulfil their dreams of living a morally pure life in the Land of the Free. Chaikovsky was already there, having fled Russia to avoid arrest, and so was the positivist Vladimir Geins, another disillusioned revolutionary who had rechristened himself William Frey (the closest possible transliteration in Cyrillic of the English word 'free'). The group decided to settle in the Midwest. The southern part of Kansas had been acquired from the Native Americans only five years earlier, and land was extremely cheap. By pooling their resources, the group were able to buy 160 acres of land in Cedarville, near Wichita, for the total sum of twenty-five dollars. Crowding into the two rooms of the small farmhouse on their holding, the young Russian pioneers attempted to set up a utopian agricultural commune.²⁸Although they augmented the two horses and a cow already on the land with more livestock, and sowed corn and wheat, there were immediate problems. No one knew how to milk a cow, for example. The community started out with noble ascetic ideals, and was happy to give up alcohol, meat, coffee, tea and sugar, but the fanatical and dogmatic Frey also banned bread, arguing that only food in its 'natural' state was acceptable. Medicines were also banned by him. But what finally undid the commune were the weekly meetings of 'mutual criticism' and 'public confession' which only exacerbated the numerous personal tensions that arose. The experiment was a disaster and the commune barely survived two years.

In late May 1877 Alexeyev returned to Russia, now with Malikov's peasant wife Elizaveta and her two children in tow, one of whom was his. They had been dreadfully homesick in the American plains, and crossed the border on Trinity Sunday (Troitsa) to see young people dancing in the fields through the train window. In pre-revolutionary times, Russians traditionally celebrated Troitsa as the day on which the Holy Spirit descended on all of nature, not just the apostles. 'Green Yuletide', as it was also called in reference to the pagan traditions which accompanied all the major Christian holy days, was a particularly fertile and joyous time, when everything was in full bloom. It was also a date in the calendar particularly associated with youth, so it was a poignant day for Alexeyev to return to Russia—at twenty-nine he was four years younger than his future employer Countess Tolstoy. Trinity Sunday was celebrated at Yasnaya Polyana like everywhere else²⁹—the Tolstoy children would go to church in their Sunday best bearing armfuls of flowers, then take part in the dancing. Sonya would plant flowers and the local village girls would ask the cuckoos how many years awaited them before they married, calculating their answer from the number of calls they heard.³⁰ Homes and village streets would be decorated with greenery, with bunches of carnations placed behind icons, and a profusion of periwinkles, peonies, cornflowers, violets and lilies placed on window-ledges. When Tolstoy went to worship that morning in May 1877 he would have encountered birch saplings and freshly cut grass and fragrant thyme strewn on the floor of the church. Along with other parishioners he would also have held a birch twig or flowers during the service as symbols of the Holy Spirit coming down to bring renewal.³¹ As well as the ritual songs and dances that came after church on Trinity Sunday in Russia, village girls at Yasnaya Polyana would weave garlands which they would throw on to ponds and lakes, in the hope they would float—a sign of long life.

Given his moral convictions and his past experiences, Alexeyev was understandably reluctant at first to become tutor to the Tolstoy children. Despite being desperately poor and in need of a job, he recoiled at the idea of coming to live in the house of a count, where meals were served by white-gloved servants. When Tolstoy heard this, however, he took an immediate interest in Alexeyev, and persuaded him to come just for a visit. Alexeyev's doubts vanished as soon as they set off for a walk, during which he was closely questioned about his outlook on life. Tolstoy was a good listener, and Alexeyev was soon unbuttoning himself completely. He felt so uninhibited he even went into propaganda mode and showed Tolstoy the calloused hands he had acquired from all the manual labour he had done in America, imagining he was talking to an upper-class writer who had never picked up a tool. To his surprise, Tolstoy declared they were worth far more than the huge salaries earned by civil servants, and opened up to Alexeyev about his own ideals, sharing with him his despair at not being able to find answers to the questions that tormented him. He even showed Alexeyev the bough in the garden he had considered hanging himself from to escape from his afflictions. Tolstoy carried on talking to Alexeyev in his study for the rest of that day, and by evening Alexeyev had agreed to take the job, accepting Tolstoy's suggestion that he rent the cottage just outside the Yasnaya Polyana gates for his family. Soon he was coming to the house every morning at eight to have coffee with the children before starting lessons in Russian and mathematics with Sergey, Tanya and Ilya. Within a year he felt so at home in the Tolstoy household that he moved with his family into the guest wing which Sonya's sister stayed in during the summer months. The fact that he and Elizaveta were not actually married (which Sonya would not have approved of) was somehow glossed over.

Alexeyev was a gifted teacher and popular, particularly with fourteen-year-old Sergey, who became very attached to him. Sergey was the most musical of the Tolstoy children, and Alexeyev records in his memoirs his pupil playing Chopin's D Flat Major Prelude especially for him. Eleven-year-old Ilya, by contrast, only seemed interested in dogs and hunting, and took great delight in taking his violin outside and playing mournful sounds on it, attracting all the dogs in the vicinity to gather round and start howling in unison.³² There was, however, one time that Ilya also gave a bravura performance of some Chopin during Alexeyev's time as tutor. Tolstoy loved Chopin, and hearing one of his opuses played at an insane tempo with a torrent of mistakes prompted him to come out of his study and put his head round the door to see what was going on. Tolstoy realised that Ilya was playing to an audience. Ilya's fortissimo dynamics, with his foot hard down on the pedal, were for the benefit of Prokhor, the family carpenter, who was in the drawing room putting in secondary-glazing panes for the winter. The phrase 'for Prokhor' entered Tolstoy family lore, and was ever afterwards affectionately trotted out whenever any member of the family seemed to be showing off.³³

Tolstoy's fondness for Vasily Alexeyev stemmed from the fact that he shared with him the same basic philanthropic impulse to improve the life of the peasantry. This very Russian priority was well summarised by the English positivist Edward Spencer Beesly when characterising Alexeyev's former partner William Frey after his death in 1888:

He was filled with that extraordinary enthusiasm which prompts so many Russians of the well-born and wealthy class to strip themselves of all advantages and cast in their lot with the poorest, humblest and most miserable. I do not know where we are to find anything like it, except in the spirit which so often led persons of rank in the Middle Ages to fly from the world and embrace the privations and humility of monastic life. But among them the motive was unsocial—a selfish desire to save their own souls. These Russians are animated by a burning desire for social improvement. To some of them inequality is in itself shocking—the root and sum of all social evil. They plunge into the humblest life to escape in their own persons from this taint. They cannot be happy till they have freed themselves from it. Others perhaps embrace a life of poverty and manual labour for a somewhat different reason. They desire to spread their political and social aspirations among the mass of their poorer countrymen. They find that they are impeded in doing this by the barriers of rank and wealth. Such is their propagandist ardour, such their faith in their principles, that wealth, comfort, and material advantages of every kind seem to them cheap, if by sacrificing them they can gain the opportunity they desire of approaching and getting the ear of the people. Whatever we may think of the principles and reasoning which lead to this conduct, it is impossible not to admire the sincerity and enthusiasm of those who practise it. They have subdued some of the strongest and most selfish of human impulses, whether they are turning the victory to the best account or not.³⁴

Frey settled in England after the American escapade, but he would find his way to Yasnaya Polyana during the one brief trip he made to Russia before his untimely death, and make a deep impression on Tolstoy.

Alexeyev was convinced Tolstoy would dismiss him once he knew he was a socialist, but his employer was unperturbed.³⁵ Christianity was really the only sticking point in their long and frank conversations. Tolstoy was still a fully paid-up member of the Orthodox Church in 1878, and Alexeyev could not understand this. In an oft-quoted passage in his memoirs, he describes Tolstoy pointing one winter morning to the frosty patterns made on the window pane by the sun, which he compared to popular religious belief. The people see the patterns, he explained, whereas he wanted to look beyond them towards the source of the light. But Tolstoy's faith was intimately linked to popular religious belief, and Alexeyev observed that he went to church not simply to perform the rites alongside peasants, but to study exactly what it was the peasants believed in, because their faith was so strong. Tolstoy also wanted to learn how to make himself more comprehensible in the exposition of his religious beliefs, and over time he grew impatient with the impenetrable and high-flown Church Slavonic of the liturgy. If he himself could barely understand it, what hope was there that the peasants could glean its message? Tolstoy relayed to Alexeyev how in church he would hear the men discussing farming matters, and the women whispering the latest gossip to each other at the most solemn moments of the service, as if it had nothing to do with them. He would stand there hearing the constant thud of fingers on sheepskin as peasants crossed themselves unthinkingly beside him while the lofty language of the liturgy went far above the heads. It began to bother Tolstoy that the Church made so little effort to meet the spiritual needs of the peasants and he started to understand why so many of them were drawn to sectarian religions, which did at least attempt to explain Christ's teaching in plain Russian.

Tolstoy would get up most days around eight in the morning, and his children would usually run out to greet him as he headed downstairs to get dressed. Sometimes he would do a few turns on the parallel bars in the hall before returning upstairs for coffee in the small drawing room, next to the main family dining room. This is when Tolstoy and Alexeyev usually got into conversation, and Sonya was now sometimes alarmed by what she overheard her husband talking about while she was dressing. Having acquired the habit of staying up until the small hours to copy out manuscripts, Sonya tended to get up later, and since their bedroom was next to the drawing room, she could not help overhearing the constant conversations about religion and ethics. She was longing to hear Tolstoy talk about literature again. Writing on religion was never going to be a good earner, even for a writer of Tolstoy's fame. Sonya was unstinting in her praise of Alexeyev as a teacher in her autobiography, and she was happy to declare that Tanya never learned as much from anyone else as she had from him. She recollected Alexeyev's love of hard work, and his warm-hearted, simple nature, ³⁶ but in time she would see him as a threat to the family's emotional and financial stability.

At around eleven o'clock every morning Tolstoy would head back downstairs with a cup of tea to go and work in his study, sometimes picking up the first bit of paper which came to hand even if it was an old envelope, in his desire to set down as quickly as possible whatever thought he had in his mind. He would not emerge again until four, which was his time to go riding or for a walk, sometimes breaking off a stalk of sweet-pea by the house to sniff at as he strode along in the summer months, as he loved the scent. At some point he began to take his daily constitutionals with Alexeyev, who often had difficulty keeping up with him. But Tolstoy needed Alexeyev by his side, as he one day confessed to his young friend that he was wildly attracted to a tall young woman called Domna who worked in the servants' kitchen. Her husband had been recruited into the army, and Tolstoy had been following her around and softly whistling to her to catch her attention. Finally he had struck up a conversation with her, and had arranged a rendezvous on a shady path under some nut trees in a distant part of the garden. Tolstoy confessed to Alexeyev that he had set off from the house only to be called back by Ilya, shouting from the window to remind him about his Greek lesson. After that bracing reality check, Tolstoy ensured that Alexeyev always accompanied him on his walks, and took steps for Domna to be 'removed' from view.³⁷ He found that praying was not much help when it came to battling his feelings of lust, but he certainly repented. The incident was to find reflection in a story he wrote in 1889 called 'The Devil', which also drew on his experiences with his peasant 'wife' Aksinya. For obvious reasons, Tolstoy stuffed the manuscript down the back of an armchair to keep it hidden from Sonya, and it was not published until the year after he died.

A new French tutor arrived at Yasnaya Polyana a few months after Alexeyev in January 1878. Hiding behind the false identity of 'Monsieur Nief' was the militant young anarchist Vicomte Jules Montels, who had served as colonel of the 12th Federated Legion in the Paris Commune in 1871. After its two-month reign of power came to an end, Montels had fled to Geneva, where he became an active member of the French exile group of the International Workingmen's Association (the First International), its 'propaganda and socialist-revolutionary action section' to be precise. In 1877, after six years of living with a death-sentence on his head, he found himself in Moscow getting on a train to Tula, disguised as 'Monsieur Nief'. He had been recommended to the Tolstoys by the wife of the Russian priest in Geneva. Sonya had some justification for later exclaiming to her husband, 'You found me two nihilists!' Yasnaya Polyana was beginning to turn into a hotbed of radical left-wing politics.

The Tolstoys learned the full story about their enigmatic French tutor only after he had left their employ in late 1879. In 1880 the Communards were amnestied and the dapper, mustachioed Vicomte Montels returned to France, taking with him the Tolstoys' French-Swiss governess Lucie Gachet. They later married and then moved to Tunisia, where Montels became editor of the Tunis Journal. Mademoiselle Gachet had arrived as a French teacher for Tanya and Masha in September 1876, ³⁸ at around the same time as the latest English governess Annie Phillips, and had first been hotly pursued by the family's Russian tutor Vladimir Rozhdestvensky. The Tolstoys had been amongst the first Russians to acquire an English croquet set when they became available in Moscow in the 1870s, and they became avid players on warm summer evenings when the air was cooler. Rozhdestvensky took a particular delight in hitting Lucie Gachet's ball in the direction of the pond, telling her he was sending it to the frogs. Like Jules Rey, he had a drink problem, and was soon dismissed, no doubt to Mlle Gachet's relief. Sergey Tolstoy extended sympathy towards the family's young male tutors when he was writing his memoirs much later. They were always on display, as he put it, occupying a difficult position somewhere between servants and employers, and they were usually rather bored. As a consequence, when they were not at loggerheads with each other they tended to develop infatuations with the family's pretty young governesses.

Having sorted out the family's teachers at the beginning of 1878, Tolstoy was keen to get back to fiction, and his religious views did not yet interfere with those plans. Some twenty years after writing War and Peace, he was keen to write another historical novel, and he was still fixated on the Decembrist Uprising. Back in the early 1860s Tolstoy had found himself going back in time from the 1825 uprising to the 1812 war with Napoleon, and finally to the events of 1805 before feeling he was at the right place to begin. But he had got no further than the immediate aftermath of 1812 in War and Peace, so he had never followed Pierre Bezukhov's transformation into a Decembrist, or written about the uprising. Now, in the late 1870s, he began to be drawn to the events surrounding Nicholas I's accession, and to the Russo-Turkish War of 1829. At the same time he was also interested in writing a novel about Russian peasant settlers colonising new lands, such as the territories east of the Volga near Samara and Orenburg with which he was personally familiar. He was excited by the prospect of somehow combining both these topics, and 1878 was a year of frenetic activity in which he gathered a mass of historical material and oral testimony in order first to bring the period alive for himself. In February 1878 Tolstoy went to Moscow on a foraging expedition, and held the first of many meetings with various Decembrists and their descendants. He also started marshalling his friends in libraries and archives to send him materials, which meant renewing his contact with Pyotr Bartenev, the editor of the journal Russian Archive, and depending, as usual, on Strakhov. He also began bombarding relatives with contacts in high places (such as Alexandrine and Sonya's uncle Alexander Bers) with requests for help with primary sources. Tolstoy had further meetings with Decembrists in Moscow in March before travelling on St Petersburg to continue his research, and also tie up a new property deal which enabled him to enlarge his Samara estate by over 10,000 acres.

Tolstoy had not been in the capital for seventeen years, and he did not like it any more in 1878 than in 1861. Alexandrine had offered Tolstoy accommodation with her brother on Mokhovaya Street, but he decided to stay with his old friend and mother-in-law Lyubov Bers in her apartment on Ertelev Lane, which was also right in the heart of the city. He arrived on 6 March and was back home within the week, disappointing many acquaintances who had hoped to see him (such as the painter Kramskoy), but he packed a lot into his four days in St Petersburg. He made a chilling visit to the St Peter and Paul Fortress, where the governor showed him the irons the Decembrists had been clamped in, but the cells where they had actually been held in 1825 were off-limits to all visitors except the Tsar and the chief of police. When he later drove past the equestrian statue of Nicholas I which had been erected in St Isaac's Square, Tolstoy realised that his revulsion for the man who in his opinion had destroyed the best part of the Russian aristocracy had increased.³⁹ A much more enjoyable visit was to the Imperial Public Library, where Tolstoy went to see Nikolay Strakhov and to meet the indomitable critic Vladimir Stasov, who had himself been imprisoned in the St Peter and Paul Fortress in 1849 for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle. Tolstoy was not so interested in Stasov the tireless and sometimes also tiresome propagandist of Russian national art as in Stasov the librarian, who had first been appointed specifically to research the reign of Nicholas I. For Tolstoy he was one more useful contact who could help him track down valuable historical sources.

Another notable event during Tolstoy's visit to St Petersburg was his attendance at one of the public lectures on the topic of 'divine humanity' given by a young religious philosopher with flowing locks called Vladimir Solovyov (son of the famous historian Sergey Mikhailovich). It was a notable event, not because Tolstoy found the lecture interesting (he dismissed it as 'childish nonsense'⁴⁰), but because it was the only occasion on which he and Dostoyevsky were in spitting distance of each other. Strakhov was a friend of both the great writers, but he honoured Tolstoy's request not to introduce him to anyone, and so the two passed like ships in the night, to their subsequent mutual regret. Much later, Tolstoy described in letters the horrible experience of having to sit in a stuffy hall which was packed so full that there were even high-society ladies in evening dress perched on window ledges. As someone who went out of his way to avoid being part of the crowd, and who disdained having anything to do with polite society or fashion, his blood must have boiled at having to wait until the emaciated figure of the twenty-four-year-old philosopher decided to make a grand theatrical entrance in his billowing white silk cravat. Tolstoy certainly did not have the patience to sit and listen to some boy 'with a huge head consisting of hair and eyes' spout pretentious pseudo-profundities. After the first string of German quotations and references to cherubim and seraphim, he got up and walked out, leaving Strakhov to carry on listening to the 'ravings of a lunatic'.⁴¹ The rest of Tolstoy's time in St Petersburg was taken up with concluding his property deal and meeting historians, including Mikhail Semevsky, editor of the important journal Russian Antiquity, who promised to send him unpublished Decembrist memoirs from its extensive archives.⁴² Otherwise Tolstoy spent time with family. Apart from Sonya's younger brothers Pyotr, Stepan and Vyacheslav, the one person Tolstoy wanted to see during his stay in Petersburg was Alexandrine, whom he had not seen since i860. They had several long and (for her) reassuring conversations about religion, and Alexandrine noted in her diary how happy she was to see him after so many years. Indeed, she had initially feared she might expire under the weight of all the things she wanted to share with him. Tolstoy seemed nicer to her than ever before, and on the day he left Petersburg, she registered in her diary their discussions about religion:

After many years of seeking the truth, he has finally reached the jetty. He has constructed this jetty of course in his own way, but the One leading him is nevertheless the same One and Only Comforter. Lev is now at the beginning of a new work, and I am sure this confession of his faith, or rather the confession of his new faith will now be reflected in it.⁴³

One positive outcome of Tolstoy's new Christian outlook was his desire to save his soul, as he put it, which meant being at peace with the world. There was, of course, one conspicuous person he needed to make his peace with, and that was Turgenev.

Tolstoy had gone to Petersburg during Great Lent, the traditional time for penitence, and he wrote to Turgenev on the penultimate day of the forty-day fast. Filling two pages with his imperious, aristocratic handwriting, he apologised to his old friend and proposed that they bury their differences. It is tempting to think that Tolstoy's recent trip to St Petersburg had played a part in prompting this peace-offering. The last time he had been in the capital was 1861, and his return to the city must have brought back a flood of memories—of first meeting and becoming friends with Turgenev there in 1855, of arguing with him over the way he had treated his sister during his visit to Petersburg in 1859, ⁴⁴ and of no doubt feeling still angry with him when he returned the following year with Masha and her children Varya, Liza and Nikolay, when they had walked together through the city to visit St Isaac's Cathedral and the Bronze Horseman. It is likely Turgenev came into Tolstoy's mind again on this visit seventeen years later when he walked across St Isaac's Square to visit Alexandrine in her apartment in the Mariinsky Palace. Now that he was nearly fifty years old, and his outlook and ambitions quite different, perhaps he suddenly realised the absurdity of his feud with Turgenev. It was with surprise and delight that Turgenev received Tolstoy's letter at home in France. Responding at once with a page and a half of his own neat, diffident handwriting, he enthusiastically agreed that they should renew their friendship, and promised to visit during his trip to Russia later that summer.⁴⁵

During Holy Week in 1878, shortly after writing his letter to Turgenev, Tolstoy prepared to take communion. He had been reading the Gospels and Renan's Life of Jesus, and he decided to start keeping a regular diary again for the first time in thirteen years. After Easter he made another trip to Moscow for further meetings with Decembrists, and to talk to publishers about the next edition of his writings, but he also wanted to attend the annual Easter debates about faith between the Orthodox faithful and Old Believers which had been taking place in the square in front of the Kremlin Cathedrals since the seventeenth century. Tolstoy had never taken any noticeable interest in sectarians before, but now he became increasingly drawn to them. In March he had asked Stasov to send him the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum and other Old Believer 'raw materials', ⁴⁶ and began educating himself about this powerful underground current of Russian society. During his six-week koumiss cure in Samara later that summer, Tolstoy pursued his new interest further: he went to talk to the 'Molokans'—sectarians who lived amongst the Bashkirs and Russian peasant colonists. They were on the fringes of society and on the fringes of the empire for a good reason.

Religious dissent had a long and eventful history in Russia which the government had done its best to suppress over the centuries. Orthodoxy was the official religion, and the state made vigorous efforts to try to ensure the population conformed to it, seeing the Church as a useful tool in promoting and maintaining civil obedience in the face of the potentially dangerous political threat of dissent. The ecclesiastical authorities had little choice but to acquiesce with state policy, since they were actually subordinate to it. In i72i Peter the Great had abolished the once-powerful Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a secular institution headed by a lay person, the better to consolidate the power of the autocracy. Yet this fatal undermining of the Church's moral authority, combined with an influx of Protestantism from German settlers, had only led to sectarian religions becoming more popular. The government systematically understated their numbers, but by the nineteenth century there were millions of Russians who had turned away from Orthodoxy, and who were at best discriminated against, or actively persecuted. It has been estimated that as many as a quarter of the Russian Empire's population were sectarians by the time of the 1917 Revolution.⁴⁷

The largest group of religious dissenters in Russia were the Old Believers, a group who had refused to go along with Patriarch Nikon's reforms to the rite in the 1660s and so caused a schism in the Church which had far-reaching repercussions. In part because Constantinople (and with it the entire Byzantine Empire) had fallen into the 'heresy' of Islam after being conquered by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, thousands of zealous Orthodox believers in old Rus insisted on clinging to the rituals and wordings to which they had become accustomed, regardless of the fact that they had gradually diverged from Greek practice over the centuries. Far from this being a Reformation in the Russian Orthodox Church, it amounted to the opposite, as large numbers actively resisted change—perhaps as many as half the total population at that time.⁴⁸ Becoming known as staroobryadtsy ('adherents of the old rite') or raskolniki ('schismatics'), the Old Believers caused the first serious weakening of the Russian Orthodox Church, and they were dealt with ruthlessly, with many choosing the path of mass self-immolation rather than suffer exile to Siberia or capitulation. One of their leaders was the Archpriest Avvakum, who was eventually burned at the stake in 1682, leaving behind the remarkable autobiography which Tolstoy asked Strakhov to send him in 1878. The fact that this document (the first masterpiece of Russian literature written in the living vernacular) was officially suppressed until 1861 speaks volumes about the authorities' identification of religious dissent with popular rebellion. The repressive measures were particularly harsh during the reign of Nicholas I, and it was only after his death, as part of the liberalisation introduced by Alexander II, that it first became possible to write about the Schism (a change in policy which Musorgsky took full advantage of with the composition of his second opera Khovanshchina, which ends with old Believers committing suicide).

As the religious and political thinker Nikolay Berdyaev remarked in 1916, sectarianism was in fact an 'integral part of the spiritual life of the Russian people'.⁴⁹ Alongside the vast numbers of Old Believers were many other groups whose sectarian origins in some cases actually pre-dated the Schism. Many were offshoots of the mystical Khristovery ('Believers in Christ') or Khlysty, as they became known, whose peasant founder was believed to be the Lord of Sabaoth himself.⁵⁰ These included the Skoptsy('self-castrators'), who appeared in the eighteenth century, and the Skakuny ('jumpers') who appeared in the nineteenth century. There were also radical schismatics who sought to break all ties with society: the Stranniki ('wanderers'), Pustynniki ('hermits') andBeguny('runners'). And then there were a number of 'rationalist' and quasi-Protestant sects who were to hold a particular interest for Tolstoy. One group he was later to become deeply involved with were the Dukhobory, a pejorative label which the 'spirit-wrestlers' turned to their own advantage by styling themselves as Dukhobortsy ('wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit'). Tolstoy also had deep respect for the Molokany ('milk-drinkers'), or 'spiritual Christians' as they called themselves, a large number of whom lived out in the steppe beyond Samara.

Old Believers and sectarians were granted limited privileges in a decree of 1863, but these were not turned into full civil rights until 1905, when all religious dissenters were finally allowed to practise their faith without fear of persecution. By and large, the adherents of Russian sects came from peasant backgrounds and lived in thinly populated areas on the edges of the empire, either because they had been deported by the government to keep them from contaminating the Orthodox population, or because they had fled to avoid persecution. There was one important exception, and that was the upper-class Protestant evangelists in St Petersburg and Moscow whom Tolstoy sati-rises towards the end of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was not the only Russian to want a Church which communicated its message in an intelligible language. A century and a half of the Orthodox Church being part of Russian officialdom had led to apathy and disillusionment amongst the educated classes and when Granville Waldegrave, 3rd Baron Radstock, first travelled as a missionary from London to St Petersburg in 1874, he was greeted with open arms by Russian aristocrats, who welcomed his message of personal salvation through independent Bible study. The New Testament had first been translated from Church Slavonic into modern Russian in 1823, but then suppressed by the Orthodox Church for political reasons. It first became widely available in 1876, and then thousands of copies started to be disseminated as a result of the missionary activities of Baptists and figures such as Lord Radstock. The first complete Bible in Russian followed in 1882.

When Radstock was inevitably banned from Russia in i878, the 'Radsto-kisty' became 'Pashkovtsy'. Colonel Vasily Pashkov took over Radstock's missionary activities until he too was sent into exile abroad in 1884. By that time his Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading had already distributed millions of pamphlets amongst the peasants, and caused a mass exodus from the Orthodox Church.⁵¹ The religious revival sparked by the conservative and upper-class 'Pashkovites'arose partly to counter the rising tide of atheism embraced by the young generation of Russian nihilists who preached the religion of socialism. One tangible result was the capacity attendance at lectures like the one given by Vladimir Solovyov which Tolstoy had gone to.⁵²Tolstoy was keenly interested in knowing more about Radstock. Indeed, he had met one of his followers and found him very persuasive, but had never met the baron himself. Alexandrine, however, knew him well, and at Tolstoy's request provided him with full details about Radstock's activities by letter in March 1876. It all went into Anna Karenina. In May 1877 Alexandrine wrote from Tsarskoye Selo to tell Tolstoy that she had spent the previous evening with the Empress, and that the closing chapters of Part Seven ofAnna Karenina had been read aloud to the assembled company. She reported that everyone had laughed heartily at his merciless caricature of Radstock's followers.⁵³

Tolstoy had little time for aristocratic religious dissenters who became Christian evangelists without changing their privileged (and to his mind corrupt) lifestyles, but peasant sectarians were something else entirely. He must have been aware of the Molokans out in Samara ever since he had first spent time in the steppe, but it was only now that he wanted to meet them and talk to them about their beliefs. Conversations about religion with the Molokans were the highlight of Tolstoy's stay in Samara in the summer of i878. The Molokans were apparently so-called because of their refusal to cease the consumption of milk products during the 200 fasting days in the Orthodox calendar, but others argued that they took their name from a river in southern Russia. Like many of the 'rational' sects in Russia, the Molokans distinguished themselves from the general peasant population by eschewing alcohol and leading modest, industrious lives.⁵⁴ They dispensed not only with all rituals (from holding services to crossing themselves), but also with clergy, sacred buildings and artefacts such as icons, engaging instead in independent Bible study.

The Times correspondent Donald Mackenzie Wallace, who visited the same area ofthe steppe beyond Samara where Tolstoy had his estate in the early 1870s, was greatly intrigued by the Molokans, but ascertaining the exact nature of their beliefs through direct questioning proved to be frustratingly difficult. It was only through a lengthy process of innocently comparing the weather and crops in Russia with the weather and crops in Scotland, and then gradually moving on to religion, that he was finally able to make headway during a conversation with one local Molokan peasant. Mackenzie Wallace came to the conclusion that there were strong similarities with the Presbyterian Church:

When the peasant heard that there is a country where the people interpret the Scriptures for themselves, have no bishops, and consider the veneration of Icons as idolatry, he invariably listened with profound attention and when he learned further that in that wonderful country the parishes annually send deputies to an assembly in which all matters pertaining to the Church are freely and publicly discussed, he almost always gave free expression to his astonishment, and I had to answer a whole volley of questions. 'Where is that country?' 'Is is to the east, or the west?' 'Is it very far away?' 'If our Presbyter could only hear all that!' ⁵⁵

When he was out in the steppe, Mackenzie Wallace also enjoyed the hospitality of the Bashkirs in a kibitka, and his description of the way dinner was prepared and consumed may partly explain why the fastidious Frenchman Jules Montels, who had accompanied Tolstoy's sons Ilya and Lev on their trip in 1878, did not terribly enjoy his time on the steppe. It was a long way from the bistros of Paris:

A sheep was brought near the door of our tent, and there killed, skinned, cut up into pieces, and put into an immense pot, under which a fire had been kindled. The dinner was not less primitive than the method of preparing it ... There were no plates, knives, forks, spoons, or chop-sticks. Guests were expected all to eat out of a common wooden bowl, and to use the instruments with which Nature had provided them ... The fare was copious, but not varied—consisting of boiled mutton, without bread or other substitute, and a little salted horse-flesh thrown in as an entrée:⁵⁶

Sonya had planned to stay behind that summer while Sergey took the annual end-of-year school exams (to ensure he was on target for university entrance), but the telegraphist missed out the crucial words 'do not' from Tolstoy's telegram: 'House, water, horses, carriages good; but dung, flies, drought; [do not] advise you come.' She duly arrived with the rest of the family. Strakhov also came out to the steppe for the first time that summer, and he greatly enjoyed the 'oceans of wheat and endless herds of horses and flocks of sheep', but could not help noticing Tolstoy was restless and out of sorts.⁵⁷

On 8 August, two days after everyone arrived back at Yasnaya Polyana, Turgenev arrived for his first visit in nearly twenty years. He had never met Sonya, let alone any of the six children, who now ranged in age from fifteen down to nine months, and it was a joyous reunion. Meeting the tall, white-haired writer with the sad, kind eyes was very exciting for the children, and Sonya made him play chess with Sergey, so her son would have a story to dine out on later (he was soundly beaten).⁵⁸ Turgenev's second visit a month later, when he was on his way back to Paris from his estate in Oryol province, was less euphoric. Despite his new Christian-inspired humility, Tolstoy could only deal with Turgenev in small doses. He still felt riled that Turgenev only 'played at life', and realised that they would never be fully reconciled. That summer Tolstoy had built himself a hut in the woods so he could work in peace and quiet; one day Sonya found them both there arguing heatedly with each other. The usually mild-mannered, urbane Turgenev was gesticulating wildly, red in the face. After so much time apart, Turgenev had no real inkling of the changes taking place in his friend's spiritual life, and the biggest shock for him was encountering Tolstoy's new, dismissive attitude to his own published fiction. The Tolstoy he knew, after all, was the peerless writer who effortlessly outclassed his entire generation, and he was bewildered by this uncompromising new stance.⁵⁹

Tolstoy's decision to move his study to another room in the house that autumn was perhaps a symptom of his changing outlook during this time. He was still trying to get his novel about the Decembrists off the ground, but he derived more enjoyment from reading Dickens (Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son). In February 1879 he eventually gave up with the Decembrists, just as he had with his Peter the Great novel. He had produced seventeen different versions of an opening chapter, and twelve of them were set in a peasant environment, but his heart was not in it. The problem, he found, was not so much that the Decembrist movement owed its origins to Russian officers coming into contact with French ideas during their occupation of Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, but that so many of the Decembrists were in fact French Catholics who had escaped to Russia after the 1789 Revolution.⁶⁰

One person disappointed never to see the publication of the Decembrist novel was Monsieur Nief, or rather Jules Montels, himself a revolutionary who had been forced to flee from France. Although he describes Tolstoy as a 'model husband, excellent father, relatively rich', it was his memories of Tolstoy's research for 'The Decembrists' which stood out for him during the two years he lived at Yasnaya Polyana. This is the subject of the short memoir he published in an anarchist journal in Paris immediately after Tolstoy's death. Montels must have found it hard not to blow his cover while he talked to Tolstoy about the Decembrists. He was clearly electrified when Tolstoy showed him the original letter written by the Decembrist leader Sergey Muravyov-Apostol to his parents on the eve of his execution in 1826. The letter, written in French, 'in that fine and expansive handwriting of our grandfathers' ('de cette bonne et grosse écriture de nos grands pères'), had been entrusted to Tolstoy by Muravyov-Apostol's elder brother Matvey, whom Tolstoy met in February 1878 in Moscow. Matvey Muravyov-Apostol spent thirty years in exile in Siberia before returning to settle in Moscow after the 1856 amnesty.⁶¹ In 1910 Montels felt there must have been a sensational reason for the disappearance of what would have been an explosive novel showing how a generation of young Russians acquired ideas of 'Liberté et Justice'. He wondered whether the comtesse (i.e. Sonya) had burned the manuscript, or whether a jittery government, reeling from three assassination attempts on Alexander II between 1879 and 1880, had ordered its destruction.⁶² The truth was rather more prosaic.

Tolstoy's interest in the Decembrists palled, but he could not sit still for long. Poring over Prince Pyotr Dolgorukov's volumes on Russian heraldry stimulated a creative interest in his own ancestors, so he now turned back to the eighteenth century, and pondered writing a novel about the fate of one of his ancestors. There was a story in his family that one of his maternal great-uncles had been exiled to Siberia for some murky deed, and he was curious to know more, so he fired off a barrage of letters to friends and relatives.⁶³ A distant relative wrote back to tell him that, according to family lore, his great-uncle Vasily Gorchakov had been sent to Siberia for bringing back to Russia a grand piano stuffed with banknotes. That was enough to fire Tolstoy's imagination: he drafted four beginnings of a new novel, and one of them was written in the 'uneducated', simple language he had pledged to use when he was writing stories for his ABC. He reiterated this vow to Sonya in 1878, by saying that anything he wrote in future would be in a language simple enough for children to understand every word.⁶⁴ As it turned out, none of Tolstoy's contacts could produce any more information about Gorchakov's case, so that project was stopped in its tracks.

Tolstoy now switched his attention back to the time of Peter the Great and his successor Anna Ioannovna (who reigned from 1730 to 1740), this time sketching out a novel which would explore its 'unofficial' history—including that of the Old Believers.⁶⁵Alexandrine had difficulty keeping up with Tolstoy's plans for his new novel. One moment he was asking for help with materials about the Decembrists, then he was interested in his ancestor Vasily Gorchakov, and now in March 1879 he asked her to help him gain access to secret archives relating to early-eighteenth-century Russian history. At the same time he asked for her help in securing the release of three Old Believer bishops who had been sitting in a prison in Suzdal for twenty-two years as 'religious criminals'. One of them was ninety. Tolstoy had found about their plight from another Old Believer bishop he had been meeting with in Tula.⁶⁶ All that month, in fact, he had been spending time on the highway linking Moscow and Kiev which ran close to Yasnaya Polyana, and talking to the crowds of pilgrims making their way to the 'holy places' on foot.

Tolstoy had given up thinking he could ever gain any religious insight from people who came from his own class, and whose lives seemed to be a contradiction of their faith. But for the poor and illiterate, be they monks, peasants or sectarians, religion seemed to be an indispensable part of their lives, and it was from them that Tolstoy finally discovered the truth about faith and salvation which he had been seeking. Some of them were Stranniki—wanderers who spent their lives going from monastery to monastery, carrying all their worldly goods in a bundle on their back. Tolstoy walked a part of the way with some of the pilgrims he met. One was an old man of ninety-four, heading to Kiev for the fourth time. Others walked barefoot or carried heavy chains as penance. They had already walked well over 100 miles from the Trinity St Sergius Monastery outside Moscow, and they had another 400 to go.

Tolstoy began to feel it was time he too went on another pilgrimage. While researching his latest project he had become very interested in the fate of his ancestors Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy and his son Ivan Petrovich who had both died in exile at the prison-monastery on the remote Solovetsky islands in the 1720s. Naturally, Alexandrine received another letter asking if she could help him provide any information about the first Count Tolstoy, who had been one of Peter the Great's most trusted statesmen.⁶⁷Meanwhile, Pyotr Andreyevich's descendant conceived the idea of travelling up to the Arctic waters of the White Sea himself that summer, and in May he wrote to Strakhov to ask if he would like to accompany him.⁶⁸ Thousands of pilgrims undertook the long journey north during the brief summer months to the fifteenth-century monastery, which was one of the holiest places in Russia, but it turned out that Strakhov did not want to be one of their number.

In the end, Tolstoy went to Kiev, the cradle of Russian civilisation, to visit the famed Caves Monastery which dated back to the early eleventh century. He had high expectations, having been inspired by his conversations with all the wanderers he had talked to, who had told him that the monks in Kiev lived as ascetically as the early Church Fathers.⁶⁹ He was to be bitterly disappointed: as far as he could see, the holy relics on show were fakes, and the monk he went to talk to about faith turned him away, saying he was too busy. Tolstoy presumed it was because he had dressed as an ordinary pilgrim, and did not reveal his true identity, which would have commanded greater respect.⁷⁰ What he did not take into account, however, was that he was one of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who arrived in Kiev every year, and the monastery had difficulty coping. There were some who arrived on foot, but large numbers, including Tolstoy, were able to use the new railway network to travel comfortably by train, and the huge increase in visitors posed a very real threat to the spiritual integrity of sacred institutions which were traditionally used to silence and contemplation.⁷¹ Be that as it may, Tolstoy's pilgrimage to the Caves Monastery in Kiev was a turning point on his religious journey.

In the autumn of 1879 Tolstoy's thoughts returned yet again to his historical novel. He went to Moscow in September to do some more foraging in the archives. All year, the archivist of the Ministry of Justice had been sending him materials relating to Russian criminal cases in early-eighteenth-century Russia. In October he would send further documents which shed light on how the people had related to Peter the Great's reforms, but by this time Tolstoy had lost interest. It was religious questions which were at the forefront of his mind during that visit to Moscow, and he now urgently wanted some answers. Tolstoy wanted to know, for example, why the Church had prayed for the imperial army to prevail in the recent Russo-Turkish War, when killing people went against one of the most basic tenets of the Christian faith. He wanted to know why the Orthodox Church was intolerant of people who practised other faiths, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, Old Believers or sectarians. And at a time when increasing numbers of revolutionaries were being executed, he wanted to know why the Church in Russia supported capital punishment.⁷² In order to try to find some answers to these pressing questions, Tolstoy went straight to the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had meetings with Moscow's august Metropolitan Makary, and with the Bishop of Mozhaysk, and then travelled out to Sergiev Posad, to visit the most important monastery in Russia. Named after St Sergius of Radonezh, who founded it in the fourteenth century, the Trinity St Sergius Monastery was by the time of Tolstoy's visit a vast and wealthy institution with some 400 monks and roughly half a million annual pilgrims. That year, Tolstoy was one of them.⁷³

Father Nikon was deputed to show Tolstoy round the monastery's cathedrals, and also the sacristy, where some of the chains worn by ascetic monks in the past were on display. Tolstoy was not impressed to learn that the tradition had not been maintained by the monastery's monks. After attending a meeting of the Moscow Spiritual Academy, which was based there, one of its eminent faculty innocently asked him when his next novel was coming out. Quoting a verse from the second book of Peter, Tolstoy spat back that he did not want to be like a dog returning to his own vomit. Those present were probably too shocked to be impressed by his close familiarity with the Gospels, but they were certainly left in no doubt as to how he now related to his artistic works. Tolstoy submitted the monastery's archimandrite to the same volley of questions he had posed to the representatives of the Church in Moscow. He was not satisfied by any of the answers he received. The archimandrite was rather shocked to encounter such pride, and produced the verdict: 'I fear it will end badly.'⁷⁴

After returning home to Yasnaya Polyana in early October, Tolstoy made a note in his diary: 'The Church, from the present day all the way back to the third century, is one long series oflies, cruelty and deception.' By its very nature, he went on to observe, religious faith cannot submit to political power.⁷⁵ The tide had turned. In December Tolstoy went to talk to the Bishop ofTula about the faith of the common people, about pilgrimage and asceticism, and evidently scared the living daylights out of him by pinning him to the wall with his 'burning questions' and allowing no compromises.⁷⁶ The bishop advised the count to talk to Father Alexander, another priest in Tula, and Tolstoy typically acted on his suggestion immediately. It was Father Alexander who recommended that he study Metropolitan Makary's Dogmatic Theology. Metropolitan Makary was a high-ranking church figure, but also a prolific scholar renowned for his thirty-volume History of the Russian Church. His authoritative Orthodox Dogmatic Theology was an award-winning five-volume work which went into many editions. Tolstoy wasted no time in obtaining a copy, and then sat down to study it very carefully.⁷⁷ He now had a project: he would put Orthodox theology to the test. He also began to write down the story of his spiritual journey, and embark on his own translation of the Gospels.

While Tolstoy's soul was in ferment, family life went on around him at Yasnaya Polyana. Lessons, birthday parties, weddings, musical evenings, picnics, housework, and visits from family and friends all continued as usual. Sonya was always busy. When she was not teaching the children she was running the household, and she had very little time to herself. She had also been pregnant for most of 1879, and on 18 December, just after Tolstoy started getting to grips with Orthodox dogma, she gave birth to their seventh son, Mikhail (Misha). Another small baby meant postponing again any time for herself. That spring she had enjoyed doing some gardening, with the help of Jules Montels (who was also very deft at producing omelettes and cups of hot chocolate for their summer picnics). The window boxes and flower-beds she had sown with stocks, asters, verbena and phlox brought wonderful colour and heavenly scent. Sewing clothes, which also occupied her that spring, was not nearly as enjoyable as sowing seeds. She had to sew summer clothes for all her six children and it became very arduous. 'I've been sewing away and I'm now sick to death of it and totally desperate,' she wrote to her sister Tanya in March 1879. 'I've got throat spasms, my head hurts ... but I've still got to keep sewing. Sometimes I want to break down these walls and escape to freedom.' ⁷⁸ Tolstoy had been to Moscow twice that autumn, but Sonya had not even gone beyond the gates of Yasnaya Polyana. In January 1880 she wrote a particularly plaintive letter to her sister Tanya:

My captive life is sometimes so hard! Just think, Tanya, I haven't been out of the house since September. The same prison, even if it's quite bright in the moral and material sense. But sometimes there is still the feeling that someone has locked me up, keeping me here, and I want to push everything away, break everything around me and break out no matter where—as soon as I can!⁷⁹

More than ever before, Sonya now lived for the summer months, when Tanya brought her family to stay. She often felt very lonely, and longed to enjoy herself amongst the bright lights of the big city. She had initially welcomed her husband's embrace of Russian Orthodoxy, but now he seemed to be losing his exuberant joie de vivre. He seemed to be less and less interested in the family, and also in running the estate. She was not mistaken. Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov in October 1880 that he had been misguided all his adult life by equating goodness first with his aspirations to be awarded the St George Cross, then with the writing of novels and owning land, and finally with having a family, as he now knew that true goodness could only be found in the Gospels.⁸⁰

In 1880 Tolstoy began to break with old friends and relatives, who were left feeling hurt and confused. In January he went to St Petersburg to hand over the final payment for the land that he had bought, and he went to see Alexandrine the day after he arrived. After telling her he now rejected the divinity of Christ, he had a violent argument with her which lasted all morning, and he returned to continue it that evening, leaving her so agitated she could feel her heart thumping in her chest. After being unable to sleep that night, Tolstoy then left Petersburg first thing the next morning, and Alexandrine felt deeply wounded that he did not come to say goodbye.⁸¹ Tolstoy's sister Masha also became intensely religious at this time, but her spiritual journey took her in the opposite direction, deep into the bosom of the Orthodox Church. Her only son Nikolay had married in October 1878, with Tolstoy as best man, but the following summer, just as her illegitimate daughter Elena was finishing her education in Switzerland and Masha was preparing to bring her to settle in Russia, he died of typhoid.⁸² It was a terrible blow for Masha, from which she never really recovered. Instead, under the spiritual guidance of Elder Ambrosy at Optina Pustyn, she became more and more devout, and eventually in 1888 she decided to become a nun. After a stint in a convent in Tula, she settled in a convent near to Optina Pustyn, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Masha remained close to her brother, but they had no common ground when it came to religion.

It took a while for Tolstoy's friends to acclimatise to his new state of mind. Nothing seemed to be able to faze Strakhov, but the deeply religious Sergey Urusov could not accept Tolstoy's new views, which he regarded as heretical, and their friendship foundered. Tolstoy's friendship with Afanasy Fet also disintegrated. Ironically, it was just when Tolstoy decided he wanted to abandon belles-lettres under the influence of his new religious views that his fiction began to become available to the French and English-speaking worlds. The combined Childhood and Youth appeared in English in 1862, ⁸³ but it was not until Eugene Schuyler published his translation of The Cossacks in 1878 that there was anything else available by Tolstoy. Turgenev's friend, the Russian specialist and translator William Ralston, was rebuffed by Tolstoy when he wrote to him asking for biographical information in preparation for an article he was writing about him in October 1878.⁸⁴ 'I cannot partake the temporary illusion of some friends of mine, which seem to be sure, that my works must occupy some place in the Russian literature,' Tolstoy wrote back in decorous but distinctly Russian English to Mr Ralston's address in Bedford Square, London. 'Quite sincerely not knowing, if my works shall be read after 100 years, or will be forgotten in 100 days,' he continued, 'I do not wish to take a ridiculous part in the very probable mistake of my friends.'⁸⁵ Ralston filled in the blanks with the help of Turgenev, and published his pioneering article on 'Count Leo Tolstoy's Novels' in 1879. For the subject of Anna Karenina, Ralston wrote, Tolstoy had chosen 'society as it exists at the present day in Russian aristocratic circles, combining with his graphic descriptions of the life now led by the upper classes, a series of subtle studies of an erring woman's heart.'

Ralston was right on the mark in claiming Anna Karenina had made more money for its author than any other previous work of Russian literature, but some way off it when he speculated that Anna Karenina and War and Peace were unlikely to be translated into English.⁸⁶ In fact, the first French translation of War and Peace had already appeared in the same year as his article, and it had been this momentous event which prompted Turgenev to promote Tolstoy as a great novelist in his letter to Edmond About in January 1880. English translations soon followed. In May 1880, Turgenev came to spend a couple of days at Yasnaya Polyana. It was now three years since Tolstoy had finished Anna Karenina, and he had published nothing new since. Turgenev was hopeful that his friend would come back to fiction. He was also hoping he could persuade Tolstoy to take part in the Pushkin celebrations in Moscow the following month, but he was to be disappointed on both counts. Probably about the only thing they agreed on now was hunting, for which they still shared a passion.

While it is hard to imagine Tolstoy standing beside Dostoyevsky and Turgenev to honour Russia's first truly great writer at this stage in his career, his refusal does in retrospect look a little churlish. The occasion for the celebrations was the unveiling of the first statue of Pushkin in Russia. It was scandalous that it had not happened sooner (Pushkin died in 1837), but none of the nineteenth-century tsars was prepared to sanction the official veneration of a rebellious and subversive poet fatally wounded in a duel. What was therefore important about this statue is that it was paid for entirely by public subscription, and its unveiling was a cause for celebration precisely because it had nothing to do with the government. The fact that Turgenev came especially from Paris for the occasion, and that Dostoyevsky, who was gravely ill, broke off writing The Brothers Karamazov at his country house south of Novgorod to come and take part, speaks eloquently about the importance of this occasion as a public event, which lasted for four days and was widely seen as a triumph for the Russian intelligentsia, and for Russian culture generally. As Turgenev said in his speech, the whole of educated Russia had in some way contributed to the erection of the statue, and this was a sign of its love for one of its greatest fellow countrymen. It was Pushkin, he proclaimed, who had completed the final refinement of 'our language, which in its richness, force, logic and beauty of form is acknowledged by even foreign philolo-gists to be the best after ancient Greek'. Pushkin, he said, 'spoke with typical images, and immortal sounds embracing all aspects of Russian life'. Tolstoy did not care much for 'educated Russia', and now scorned the intelligentsia, and yet he was in some ways biting the hand which had fed him, for as a writer he too owed an enormous debt to Pushkin.

Turgenev's rhetoric was nothing compared to Dostoyevsky's messianic identification of Pushkin with Russia and Christ, which was greeted by an ecstatic thirty-minute ovation. Writing to his wife afterwards, Dostoyevsky told her 'strangers in the audience were weeping, sobbing, embracing one another, and swearing to one another to be better, not to hate each other in the future, but to love. Even Turgenev was moved to embrace his old opponent.⁸⁷ Tolstoy was at this very moment immersed in Christ's teaching of brotherly love, as he had begun to coordinate and translate the Gospels, but his ego would never have permitted him to join in the communal rejoicing at this extraordinary, unparalleled event. Many years later he explained that, much as he valued Pushkin's genius, he had not gone to Moscow because he felt there was something unnatural about such celebrations, something, which, while not exactly false, did not meet his 'emotional requirements'.⁸⁸

Tolstoy's conspicuous absence from the celebrations in Moscow was certainly much commented on. Rumour had it that he was ill, going mad, or already mad. Dostoyevsky was tempted to travel to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy finally, but decided against it. In little over half a year he would be dead, and only then, sitting alone at dinner one cold, dark February evening, having arrived home late, and crying into his plate, did Tolstoy realise quite how dear Dostoyevsky was to him.⁸⁹ When he had been ill the previous September, Tolstoy had re-read Notes from the House of the Dead, the book which allegorises Dostoyevsky's spiritual rebirth during his years of hard labour in a Siberian prison, and he had marvelled at its 'sincere, natural and Christian point of view'. He had asked Strakhov to pass on affectionate greetings to Dostoyevsky, ⁹⁰ who was terribly pleased by this, but less so by Tolstoy's lack of reverence for Pushkin. Strakhov tried to mollify Dostoyevsky by saying that Tolstoy had become even more of a 'free-thinker' than he had been before.⁹¹ Tolstoy's belated appreciation of Dostoyevsky is revealing of his sentimentality, for the truth is that he was utterly repelled by the mixture of piety and patriotism in Dostoyevsky's later worldview. The feeling was mutual. Alexandrine had become close to Dostoyevsky shortly before he died, and the writer had bristled with indignation when she showed him some of Tolstoy's recent letters about religion.⁹²

Sonya reported to Strakhov in March 1880 that her husband was working to exhaustion and getting terrible headaches, but could not be torn from his desk.⁹³ Tolstoy was, in fact, so excited by the challenge of confronting the Orthodox Church that he carried on working through the spring and into the summer, contrary to his usual routine.⁹⁴ There was no rest cure in Samara in 1880, but just three short trips to Moscow in late autumn to find new teachers for the children. One by one, the eleven volumes of the latest edition of his writings went on sale, but another year passed without Tolstoy venturing into print with anything new. He was aware that he would face difficulties with publishing all three of the projects he was working on now, but bringing them to completion was a matter of life importance to him. Their eventual publication abroad would set the seal on the antagonistic position he had taken up in relation to the Orthodox Church, and from that point on there would be no going back.

Once Tolstoy had worked through the 1,000–plus pages of Makary's Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, as well as other key expositions of the Eastern Christian doctrine by authors ranging from St John of Damascus to other recent Moscow metropolitans, he began his critical exegesis, setting out in painstaking detail its major flaws, as he saw them. The Tula priest who had originally recommended that Tolstoy read Makary was startled to receive a second visit from the count a year later. Tolstoy declared that he had readOrthodox Dogmatic Theology from cover to cover, and furthermore, he informed Father Alexander with evident satisfaction, his year of study had not only not convinced him of the truth of Orthodox dogma, but in fact the opposite. He now realised that the apostles had actually distorted Christ's teaching. Indeed, when he had come to see that Orthodox doctrine was just an artificial confection of often opaque and contradictory expressions of faith, he said, he began to understand why Russian seminaries produced so many atheists. Here Tolstoy was alluding to the many graduates of seminaries who had become revolutionaries. Chernyshevsky, who was still languishing in Siberian exile, was one, and in the 1890s Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) would become another.⁹⁵

The first draft of Tolstoy's own weighty Investigation of Dogmatic Theology was finally finished in 1882.⁹⁶ He does not pull any punches in it, at one point calling Makary an outright liar, dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a 'vile, criminal, blasphemous lie' and subjecting it to ridicule by describing biblical mysteries in his own words (as in 'God had a three-way conversation with his son and the Holy Spirit').⁹⁷ As Tolstoy goes on, his tone becomes more aggressive. He does not just refute the notion that Christ redeemed all of mankind by dying on the cross, since people afterwards were 'just the same', but goes on to accuse the Church of inventing the sacraments and the idea that Christ was divine sometime back in the third century. Pointing out that he is probably the only person to have read Makary from cover to cover apart from seminarists studying for exams, Tolstoy ends his obloquy with the allegation that the Orthodox Church no longer enjoyed any moral authority amongst either the educated classes or the common people in Russia. Tolstoy toned down his criticisms for publication in 1891, but only a little.⁹⁸

Aware that readers of his novels might be a little taken aback to be confronted suddenly by a tendentious theological monograph in which the minutiae of Orthodox doctrine were submitted to rational scrutiny, Tolstoy felt he should preface it with a personal account of how he had come to embark on his critique of the Church.⁹⁹ The much briefer, and frankly far more readable, Confession was thus initially entitled 'Introduction to an Unpublished Work', and was completed in 1880. Bearing obvious comparison with the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, Tolstoy's interrogation of the meaning of life begins in his childhood, and charts his spiritual evolution with a painful and engaging honesty which Sonya summarised in notes made in her 1881 diary. She writes that her husband saw the 'light', as he put it, when he realised the source of 'goodness, forbearance and love' amongst the people was the Gospels, not the Church. It was the Church which had, in fact, obscured this message by insisting that salvation was only possible through the sacraments of christening, communion, fasting and so on. Tolstoy's 'whole outlook was illuminated by this light', she wrote, leading him to see millions of people as his brothers, his conscience greatly troubled by the poverty and injustice he saw around him.¹⁰⁰

Fundamental to Tolstoy's repudiation of Orthodox doctrine was his own new 'unified' translation of the Gospels, which he worked on intensely in the second half of 1880 and 'finished' in July 1881. He was aware that he needed to work further on it, but at that point wanted to move on to other things. Tolstoy now considered his Union and Translation of the Four Gospels to be the most important thing he had done in his life.¹⁰¹ With the assistance of Ivan Ivakin, the new family tutor who arrived in September 1880, he methodically worked his way through the New Testament in the original Greek, using academic editions supplied by the ever-helpful Strakhov. These included the authoritative edition produced in the 1770s by Johann Griesbach, Professor of Theology at the University ofJena, whose philological rigour had launched a new era in biblical scholarship, and the heavily annotated new French translation produced by another Protestant theologian, Professor Edouard Reuss, based at the University of Strasbourg.¹⁰²Tolstoy's aim was to make sense of the morass of contradictions and obscurities he found in the Scriptures, clarify their central message, and extract some practical moral guidance which could be applied to daily living.

The experience of going back to the original texts was a revelation to Tolstoy. Drawing from each of the four Gospels to produce one unified text ('since they set out the same events and the same teaching, although in conflicting ways'), and accompanying it with his commentary, Tolstoy produced twelve titled chapters which follow Christ's life from birth to death. Each biblical excerpt in his version is given firstly in the original Greek, secondly in a modern Russian translation of the Church Slavonic biblical text (which would have been as archaic to a nineteenth-century Russian ear as the English of the Wycliffe Bible would have seemed to a nineteenth-century British ear), and thirdly in his own more accessible version. For the latter, he deliberately used colloquial words wherever possible, with a peasant readership in mind.

This is no ordinary summary of the New Testament, for the Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to Lev is a Christian after Tolstoy's own heart: an ordinary man who is critical oforganised religion, and unafraid to speak out against attempts to obstruct his ethical message. The Jesus projected by Tolstoy is a lone crusader swimming against the current of public opinion, a 'humble sectarian' with whom he could identify, as well as look up to morally.¹⁰³ This was paramount, and one is reminded of his practice as a novelist. It is striking that what he had most admired about Peter the Great when he had sought to write a novel about him, for example, was his huge energy and productivity—qualities he himself possessed in abundance. Tolstoy essentially stripped the Gospels down to their moral message. By discarding accounts of Christ's baptism and early childhood, all miracles, the story of the Resurrection, anything referring to Jesus as a divine or historical figure, and passages highlighting the special mission of anointed apostles, Tolstoy ended up with about half of the original texts from the New Testament. He did, however, retain all direct quotations of Jesus' speech, which means the Gospel according to St John features far more than the Gospel according to St Mark, which includes many miracles. The key importance of St Matthew's Gospel for Tolstoy was due to the Sermon on the Mount, which was to become the cornerstone of his teaching.¹⁰⁴

Ivan Ivakin, the new tutor at Yasnaya Polyana, was a Moscow University graduate, and at first he could not understand why Tolstoy wanted to talk about the finer details of New Testament wording, since the gossip columns in Russian newspapers at the time were still talking about him writing a novel about the Decembrists. Ivakin was soon initiated into Tolstoy's work in progress, and when it became clear that his knowledge of Greek was far superior to that of his employer, he was immediately inveigled into helping out. The pale-faced young man with exceptionally slender fingers left some vivid memoirs of his time at Yasnaya Polyana. It has to be said, he was not very impressed with Tolstoy's command of Greek, and took a rather wry view of his selective and distinctly unacademic approach, which jettisoned concrete details: '"Why should we be interested to know that Christ went out into the courtyard?" he would say. "Why do I need to know that he was resurrected? Good for him if he was! For me what is important is knowing what to do, and how I should live."'¹⁰⁵

Ivakin clearly found it sometimes a little challenging to work with Tolstoy, since the 'inimitable' author was even partipris when it came to translating the New Testament passages dealing with ethics which survived his ruthless editing. In War and Peace, Tolstoy had manipulated events and people to suit the particular view of history he was proposing. Now he wanted Christ's apostles to confirm views he had already formed:

Sometimes he would come running to me from his study with the Greek Gospel and ask me to translate some extract or other. I would do the translation, and usually it came out the same as the accepted Church translation. 'But couldn't you give this such and such a meaning?' he would ask, and he would say how much he hoped that would be possible.¹⁰⁶

Tolstoy spent a particularly long time mulling over the opening paragraph in the Gospel of St John ('In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God...'). He fairly swiftly decided to interpret the Greek logos as 'reasoning' rather than 'the word' (the Russian word razumenie implying both rational enquiry and understanding), but he then came up against the problem of translating pros ton theon ('with God'), which the first Church Slavonic Bible renders as 'from God'. Dismissing the literal meaning of 'towards God' as meaningless, and condemning the Vulgate 'apud Deum' and Luther's 'bei Gott' as meaningless and also inaccurate, Tolstoy's far more radical version, on the basis of a lengthy discussion of the preposition pros was 'and reasoning replaced God'.¹⁰⁷

  

6. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905

By the time Alexander II was assassinated by revolutionaries on 1 March 1881, Tolstoy was ready to become, if not quite a Protestant, certainly a protestant in terms of the Orthodox Church, and his boldness was compared on more than one occasion with that of Luther, Jan Hus and Calvin.¹⁰⁸ Horrified by the thought of the conspirators being executed, Tolstoy sat down and wrote a letter to the new tsar, Alexander III, pleading for clemency in the name of Christian forgiveness. He then wrote a letter to the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, asking him to pass his letter on to the Tsar, and another to Strakhov, asking him to hand both letters over to Pobedonostsev. Sonya reacted with equanimity to having to go into national mourning by dressing in black crêpe from head to foot, ¹⁰⁹ but she was aghast at her husband's latest action. It had been bad enough while he had been devout, and had insisted on observing the fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays. To retaliate, she had insisted on providing non-Lenten food for Vasily Alexeyev and Jules Montels, neither of whom were Orthodox, despite their readiness to eat what was offered, and she had then enforced the family's Lenten diet even more strictly when she noticed Tolstoy's faith wavering. On Good Friday, the strictest day of fasting, temptation had got the better of Tolstoy and he gave up eating Lenten food for ever after tucking into some of the meat that had been prepared for the two tutors. Sonya also stopped copying her husband's new manuscripts. She had found the pedagogical materials turgid, but the theological writing was far worse, and she confided in a letter to her sister Tanya that she had thought of leaving Tolstoy that spring. She reckoned that life at Yasnaya Polyana had been a lot better without Christianity.¹¹⁰ She was also pregnant again.

The friction between the Tolstoys was now coming out into the open more and more frequently. When Sonya overheard Vasily Alexeyev supporting her husband's plea for clemency for the Tsar's assassins one morning over coffee, she exploded, terrified at the repercussions that Tolstoy's letter might cause. Alexeyev realised it was time for him to leave Yasnaya Polyana, and he asked Tolstoy for permission to make a personal copy of his Gospel translations to take away with him, knowing they could never be published in Russia. Since time was not on his side, he restricted himself to copying Tolstoy's Gospel excerpts and the general summaries in each chapter. This text was later prefaced by Tolstoy's introduction and entitled Gospel in Brief. It would be the first of his religious works to be published abroad. During World War I, Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief made a profound impression on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who chanced to find it in a bookshop in Galicia. He later claimed it had virtually kept him alive.¹¹¹

Friends and relatives who came to visit Yasnaya Polyana in the spring of 1881 were drawn into vituperative arguments about capital punishment and the Church, and Sonya started to worry that her husband's Christian charity was going to result in him giving away all they had to the poverty-stricken peasants who were coming to Yasnaya Polyana in ever increasing numbers, knowing they would not leave empty-handed. To begin with, Tolstoy wrote a thumbnail sketch of each petitioner down in his diary, noting, for example, one old woman's tears dropping on to the dust and another peasant's toothless smile (Tolstoy himself was toothless by this time).¹¹² Needless to say, Pobedonostsev refused to pass on Tolstoy's letter to the Tsar, and the conspirators were hanged in early April. 'Our Christ is not your Christ,' wrote Pobedonostsev crisply in the letter he finally sent Tolstoy in June.¹¹³ Tolstoy brought his work on the Gospels to a halt that month, because he wanted to make another pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn. This time, instead of Strakhov, he took along as companion his servant Sergey Arbuzov, and instead of travelling by train he went on foot, dressed like a muzhik, complete with bast shoes he had specially commissioned from a peasant in the village.

They spent the first night sleeping on straw in an old woman's peasant hut, where they were woken at dawn the next morning by the swallows nesting in the roof. Four days later they arrived at the monastery, where they were put up without ceremony together with other peasant pilgrims in a dormitory infested with bedbugs. When word got out that the scruffy looking old peasant was actually Count Tolstoy in disguise, he was obliged to move to more salubrious accommodation, but it did mean that he was again granted an immediate audience with Elder Ambrosy, rather than having to wait almost a week. Tolstoy had not come to Optina Pustyn this time to find religious solace, but to challenge Ambrosy and the other monks about the Orthodox Church's distortion of Christ's teaching. He went away dissatisfied, having at one point demonstrated his superior knowledge of the Gospels.¹¹⁴ On the way home, Tolstoy and his servant walked as far as Kaluga, which had quite a large population of sectarians, including Molokans and two offshoots of that sect, Subbotniks ('Sabbatarians') and Vozdykhantsy ('Sighers'), a tiny new faction whose believers, instead of crossing themselves, sighed while lifting their gaze upwards. Tolstoy set off to find them as soon as he learned this, to talk to them about their faith. He had been sickened to see the Optina Pustyn monks treat the destitute pilgrims with contempt while deferring to wealthy visitors, but he found the rest of the trip very invigorating.

In July 1881, a month after returning home, Tolstoy set off for his Samara estate with his son Sergey, who had just passed the end-of-school exams which were a requirement for university entrance. He felt listless there this time. He no longer had the stomach for working to make his land profitable, and the poverty in the region seemed to be even more starkly evident than in previous years. During this trip he had further contact with the Molokans, and attended one of their prayer meetings, after which two of their leaders came to visit him so they could continue the conversation. Naturally, Tolstoy was preaching to the converted when he read them extracts from his Gospel in Brief, for they also thought the Orthodox Church had mutilated Christ's teachings. On 19 July Tolstoy made an interesting new acquaintance when he met Alexander Prugavin, a young ethnographer who had become interested in the Russian sectarians after meeting many of them while exiled in the far north. Since 1879 Prugavin had been publishing articles in progressive journals about Russian schismatics and sectarians, ranging from the three Old Believer bishops Tolstoy had tried to help to the Pashkovites. Tolstoy was particularly interested to hear from Prugavin about a Tver peasant called Vasily Syutayev who had started preaching brotherly love and the abolition of private property. As soon as he learned from Prugavin that one of Syutayev's sons had refused to do military service, Tolstoy immediately declared that he wanted to meet him. The opportunity would soon present itself.

During his month out on the steppe, Tolstoy was affectionate in his letters to Sonya. He felt guilty. Many years earlier they had decided they would move to Moscow when the time came for Sergey to go to university, and that day had now dawned. With so much political unrest amongst the student body following the assassination of Alexander II, Sonya felt it was even more important to protect her son from being caught up in the revolutionary movement by going to live in Moscow herself. But this was also the liberation she had been longing for, particularly during the last few years when her husband had shunned any kind of social life, turning his back on his career as a successful novelist and condemning the depravity of their lifestyle. For Tolstoy, moving to Moscow was a nightmare prospect, and he had so far refused to help Sonya find somewhere for them to live. She was six months pregnant when she went flat-hunting in Moscow before he left for Samara, and she had to face the hot and dusty city the following month again in order to prepare everything for the family's arrival. Tolstoy suddenly felt remorse at having neglected her and left her to do everything on her own. He promised to help her on his return, yet when he returned home and found the house full of summer guests, he once again felt the painful contrast between his beliefs and his surroundings.¹¹⁵

The nine Tolstoys left Yasnaya Polyana on 15 September, and took up residence in a rented apartment in a house in the best residential area of Moscow. Sergey became a student in natural sciences at Moscow University and Ilya and Lev became pupils at the very popular private boys' school founded in 1868 by Lev Polivanov, who had masterminded the Pushkin celebrations the year before. Later that autumn, Tanya became a student at the main art school in Moscow. Despite Tolstoy's pledge to help Sonya in Moscow, he soon forgot it. It was sheer misery for him to move to the city, and Sonya told her sister by letter that he was neither sleeping nor eating and had sunk into apathy, while she had spent the first two weeks constantly in tears. After he had arrived in Moscow, Tolstoy had gone to visit the city's slums, and had then returned home, walked up carpeted stairs to their new home and sat down to dinner, waited upon by two servants in white tie and tails.¹¹⁶ The close proximity of luxury and poverty sickened him.

Relief came when Tolstoy escaped Moscow at the end of the month to go north to Tver province and meet Vasily Syutayev, the peasant sectarian Prugavin had told him about. Apart from their difference in social backgrounds, Syutayev was almost Tolstoy's mirror image in terms of their religious beliefs, which astonished him. Syutayev's doctrine of brotherly love was derived exclusively from the modern Russian translation of the New Testament, which he knew by heart, and like Tolstoy, he had dedicated his life to pursuing the ideal of self-perfection. Syutayev, who later came to visit Tolstoy in Moscow, was to become a source of deep inspiration for him.¹¹⁷ Another source of spiritual support for Tolstoy at this time would come from his correspondence with his family's former tutor Vasily Alexeyev, and from his friendship with the librarian of the Rumyantsev Public Library, Nikolay Fyodorov, whose asceticism made Tolstoy's simple tastes seem positively sybaritic.

By the beginning of October Tolstoy was back in Moscow and trying to work. The walls in the flat proved to be paper-thin, however, so there was constant noise and he could not concentrate, for which he squarely blamed Sonya. He was also unhappy about her spending money needlessly. How could she have wasted twenty-two roubles on an armchair when that money could have bought a peasant a horse or a cow? Things improved a little after he rented two small rooms in another wing of the house for six roubles a month. Finally, he had some peace of mind, and to salve his conscience he crossed the Moscow river to go and chop wood every afternoon with the peasants on the Sparrow Hills. But relations with Sonya were no better. Two weeks before she gave birth, Sonya wrote again to Tanya to tell her that her husband had reduced her to complete despair. Tolstoy told his diary it had been the most painful month in all his life.¹¹⁸ Alexey was born on 31 October. A few weeks later Tolstoy published a story about an angel in the new children's journal edited by Sonya's brother Petya. It was his first publication in four years.

Tolstoy had been working sporadically on the short story 'What Men Live By' throughout 1881. Utterly different from Anna Karenina, his last published work, which was a sophisticated novel aimed at an educated audience, this new work was a story from peasant life, and a parable which put forward his new Christian views about love. A reworking of a well-known legend about an angel sent to earth by God to learn 'what men live by', the story had been told to him by Vasily Shchegolenok, one of the last living peasant 'reciters' of oral folk epics from the Russian north. He had come to stay at Yasnaya Polyana in 1879 when he was already an old man (and still illiterate), and Tolstoy had listened to him with rapt attention. He took particular care to write 'What Men Live By' in a simple and lucid language, and incorporated several of the folk expressions he had heard during his conversations with Shchegolenok, and also with the pilgrims and wanderers on the road to Kiev near Yasnaya Polyana. Despite its simplicity, Tolstoy's work on the story was characteristically meticulous. He produced thirty-two manuscripts and nine different beginnings before being satisfied with the draft he submitted for publication. The eight epigraphs about love which preface the story are taken from his own version of St John's Gospel. Writing morally engaged fiction in a clear and simple style was one way Tolstoy planned to propagate his Christian ideals. He also now felt a need to protest in public about the evil he saw around him, and this was something he would do in an increasingly loud voice for the remaining three decades of his life.