11. SECTARIAN, ANARCHIST, HOLY FOOL

There is one way to live joyously and that is to be an apostle. Not just in the sense of going around and talking, but in the sense that your arms, and your legs, and your stomach, and your sides as well as your tongue all serve the truth...

Letter to Vasily Alexeyev, December 1884¹

TOLSTOY'S CRUSADE to bring Christian principles into the lives of educated Russians began with a newspaper article he published on 20 January 1882. He had been shocked by the degradation and poverty he encountered when he went to visit a doss-house in one of Moscow's worst slum areas a few weeks earlier, and when he learned that a census was to be held in the city, he seized the opportunity to speak out. It was not the first time he had appealed to the consciences of his fellow countrymen, as he had publicised the plight of starving peasants during the Samara famine in 1873, and been successful in raising millions of roubles in aid. Now, however, his mission was not merely humanitarian but religious—he did not want cash but Christian brotherly love. Tolstoy was also determined to lead by example, having applied to be one of the eighty people appointed to supervise the census. He specifically requested to work in one of the poorest districts, moreover, near to where he himself lived in the western part of the city. The night before Tolstoy's article 'About the Census in Moscow' appeared on the front page of one of the city's most popular daily newspapers, he went to the city Duma to read it out to the organisation committee, and then distributed hundreds of copies to everyone involved in conducting the census when it began three days later.

Tolstoy was profoundly disturbed by the prospect of the 2,000 (mostly student) census-takers entering crowded, infested tenements to ask routine statistical questions of people dying of starvation, and he wasted no time in his article in confronting the issue:

What does this census mean for us Muscovites conducting the census who are not academics? Two things. Firstly, we will probably discover among the tens of thousands of us who live on an income running into the tens of thousands that there are tens of thousands of people without food, clothes and shelter; and secondly, that our brothers and sons will be going to look at all this, and calmly noting down on the forms how many are dying of hunger and cold.

Both of these things are very bad.²

True to the anarchic spirit which would become more and more apparent in Tolstoy's thought during the following decade, he rejected the idea of institutional involvement, either at the government or the philanthropic level, likewise conventional charitable enterprises such as fundraising balls, bazaars and theatre performances. Money, he insisted, was in itself an evil, so there should be no public proclamations of the sums donated by wealthy individuals. Throwing money at the problem was no substitute for practical assistance as far as he was concerned, and merely let people off the hook. Tolstoy took his inspiration straight from the New Testament, by paraphrasing Jesus's parable of 'The Sheep and the Goats' in St Matthew's Gospel: 'For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'³ Tolstoy urged Muscovites to overcome their fears of coming into contact with the bedbugs, fleas, typhoid, diphtheria and smallpox which were rife in the filthy conditions the poor were forced to live in. He called on the young census-takers to sit down with those in need, and show them love and respect by talking to them about their lives.

Unfortunately for Tolstoy, some census-takers were so impoverished themselves that they undoubtedly greeted this exhortation to practise Christian charity with bemusement. One of them was a twenty-two-year-old medical student called Anton Chekhov, then living in Moscow's red-light district in the north of the city. His father was a former small-time merchant who had fled their provincial hometown after going bankrupt, and Chekhov had started contributing to low-grade comic journals in order to keep his family afloat. Working as a census-taker provided him with a few extra kopecks, and also good material for his next humorous piece, which as usual he signed with a nom de plume, thinking ahead to the future scholarly publications he dreamed of writing. The official census consisted of fifteen standard questions relating to name, gender, age, marital status, place of birth, faith, occupation and so on. In the 'Supplementary Questions to the Personal Forms of the Statistical Census Suggested by Antosha Chekhonte', a further ten questions were added, including:

16. Are you a clever person or a fool?

17. Are you an honest person? a swindler? a robber? a scoundrel? a lawyer? or?

20. Is your wife blonde? brunette? chestnut? a redhead?

21. Does your wife beat you or not? Do you beat her or not?

22. How much did you weigh when you were ten years old?

23. Do you consume hot drinks? yes or no?⁴

It is unlikely that Tolstoy ever read The Alarm Clock, where this irreverent skit appeared, but he would develop a great admiration for the short stories Chekhov wrote for literary journals later on in his career. If Chekhov paid scant attention to 'About the Census in Moscow' for his part, he nevertheless regarded Tolstoy as Russia's greatest living artist, and would also succumb for a while to his hypnotic powers of rational argument.

Tolstoy failed in his mission to induce Muscovites to show brotherly love to the poor, as his appeal only resulted in him receiving requests for financial help, and misunderstanding on the part of the press, but his article nevertheless won him an early follower. Indeed, the article's impact on the painter Nikolay Ge was so tumultuous that he left his remote farmhouse in the Ukraine and got on a train to Moscow so that he could come and embrace the 'great man' who had written it. Like Tolstoy, Ge (a descendant of a French émigré called Gay) had become preoccupied with religious and moral questions in the 1870s and had come to the same conclusions: art should not be practised for commercial gain, while engaging in physical labour was the path to saving one's soul. In early March 1882 Ge turned up at Tolstoy's front door in Moscow, and the discovery of their shared beliefs led to the blossoming of a close friendship.⁵

Ge was lucky to find Tolstoy at home. Several times that spring Sonya was left to fend on her own while her husband retreated to Yasnaya Polyana to recuperate from the trauma of living in Moscow, which he condemned as a 'foul sewer'.⁶ For the first time, however, Sonya found herself almost wishing Tolstoy would stay at Yasnaya Polyana.⁷ She had her hands full with the family (two of their eight children were under five in 1882), but she was also beginning to take her first steps into Moscow society. As Countess Tolstoy she had an entrée into all the best drawing rooms, and as the wife of the famous novelist she was now also a celebrity in her own right, and she found it rather intoxicating being the centre of attention for once. She had missed out on going to balls and soirées in her youth, but now she prepared to live vicariously through their daughter Tanya, who was about to turn eighteen, and as keen to dress up and go out as she was. Sonya was only thirty-eight in 1882, and still very attractive. Tolstoy, by contrast, desired only to simplify his life now, and wanted nothing to do with the conventions of polite society. Instead he gravitated towards peasant sectarians like Vasily Syutayev and ascetics like the 'Moscow Socrates' Nikolay Fyodorov, the eccentric philosopher-librarian of the Rumyantsev Library who deplored all material possessions (even refusing a salary), and slept on bare planks covered only by his threadbare overcoat.

Vasily Syutayev came to visit Tolstoy after the census, and his arrival caused a great stir in Moscow. The tiny sect that he had established in Tver was the subject of a recently published article in the new journal Russian Thought, and such was Syutayev's popularity that one art shop in Moscow even stocked copies of his photograph for purchase.⁸ Tolstoy also encouraged his new friend Ilya Repin to come and paint Syutayev's portrait in his study. Family friends who came to visit Sonya were so curious about the peasant prophet that they abandoned the drawing room in order to go to Tolstoy's study and hear what he had to say. His sister Masha was particularly piqued to have her conversation with Syutayev interrupted, and hoped he would be able to go and have a cup of tea with her one evening so they could continue their discussion.⁹ Syutayev's visit to Moscow was cut short, however, when word of his presence in the city reached Prince Dolgorukov, the city's governor general, who swiftly despatched one of his gendarmes to arrest him and send him back to Tver (where the local clergy had already taken him to court for refusing to christen his son). Tolstoy refused to speak to the young gendarme, and slammed the door in his face, prompting Dolgorukov to send round one of his officials, Vladimir Istomin, who was a family friend. Tolstoy's brusque response to Istomin's invitation to come and explain himself to Prince Dolgorukov was that the governor general could perfectly well come and see him himself if he wanted to talk to him. Syutayev and Tolstoy were henceforth prohibited from seeing each other.¹⁰

Sectarian, Repin's portrait of Syutayev, was acquired for Tretyakov's gallery on Tolstoy's recommendation. In due course Repin would paint a series of celebrated portraits of Tolstoy, with whom he now embarked on a thirty-year friendship. He had first acquired fame in 1873 with an epic canvas depicting a group of destitute peasants forced into earning a demeaning living by hauling barges up the Volga, and henceforth had come to be seen as the 'Tolstoy of painting'. There was thus an inevitability to him meeting the Tolstoy of literature, just as there was an inevitability to the author of An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology challenging Repin on the subject of his painting Religious Procession, which is what he had been working on when he received a surprise visitor at his Moscow studio one evening in the autumn of 1880. The subject of Repin's painting—the annual procession accompanying the twenty-mile journey of one of Russia's most precious icons from the Znamensky Cathedral in Kursk to the Korennaya Hermitage where it first appeared—represented for Tolstoy the epitome of Russian Orthodox ritual and superstition, and he could not see the point of making it the subject of a painting.

Since the time it had first taken place in the early seventeenth century, the Kursk procession had been drawing Russians from all sections of society in ever greater numbers. There were a few dozen members of Syutayev's sect, but well over 60,000 people took part in the three-mile-long Kursk procession by the 1880s, including mounted police, pilgrims carrying the wonder-working icon, deacons carrying banners, choristers, clergy, the provincial governor and his staff in full dress uniforms, the Bishop of Kursk in ceremonial regalia, officials and their families, merchants and peasants, all in strict hierarchical sequence.¹¹ Whether or not Tolstoy's reproof had anything to do with it, by the time Religious Procession in Kursk Province was finished three years later, Repin's painting had been transformed into a thinly disguised attack on Russia's entrenched caste system, with strong hints that it was maintained by means of brutality and violence. The canvas attracted 4,000 visitors in one week when it was first exhibited in 1883 due to its provocative content, and was acquired for the Tretyakov Gallery at the record price of 10,000 roubles, despite Repin's refusal to tone down its trenchant social criticism.¹²

Two very different worlds had merged during Syutayev's visit to the Tolstoy household in 1882, but this was an exception. As Tolstoy and his wife were very well aware, their paths were now diverging. 'The difference between my husband and myself came about, not because I in my heart went away from him,' Sonya wrote later; 'I and my life remained the same as before. It was he who went away.' ¹³ Perhaps if she had not endured twelve pregnancies, three miscarriages and ensuing bouts of serious illness, and had not borne the responsibilities of running a large household on her shoulders, she could have followed her husband on his spiritual journey and spent her time reading books. She had grown into adulthood under his tutelage, and now she was expected to renounce all the values he had inculcated in her and meekly follow him. But she wondered how it would be possible to eke out an existence on next to no income with eight children to clothe and feed.

Undeterred by his setback with the Moscow census, Tolstoy now channelled his missionary zeal into the written word. Apart from his article about the census and his story 'What Men Live By', he had not published anything new since the last instalment of Anna Karenina appeared in 1877. Five years on, he was ready to disseminate his newfound religious ideas to the wider public, and he began that process by reading the manuscript of his Confession to Sergey Yuriev, one of the editors of the journalRussian Thought.Not least because Tolstoy had burned his bridges with Katkov and the Russian Messenger over his views regarding the Serbo-Turkish War, Russian Thought was the obvious journal to turn to. Based in Moscow, it had immediately acquired a distinguished reputation for its liberal views when it was founded in 1880—Tolstoy's friend Prugavin, for example, had already published several articles about schismatics and peasant sectarians in it.¹⁴ Yuriev agreed to publish Confession as soon as he heard it, and within a few weeks Tolstoy was holding the proofs in his hands. The projected May issue of Russian Thought was duly submitted to the office of the religious censor, and after Tolstoy complied with requests for revisions, both he and Yuriev were hopeful of the issue being approved for publication.

At this point, Confession was still entitled 'Introduction to an Unpublished Work'—the work in question being An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology, his response to Metropolitan Makary's Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. All secular writing which touched on questions of faith, or was related to the Church in some way, had to be submitted for approval by the religious censor committee. Its members were based at the Trinity St Sergius Monastery outside Moscow, but were beholden to the Holy Synod, the secular governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had its headquarters in St Petersburg. On 21 June the committee finally gave its verdict. On the basis of a close examination of Tolstoy's text, Archpriest Filaret, Rector of the Moscow Theological Seminary, came to the conclusion that Tolstoy's attitude to Orthodoxy was disrespectful and so his article was therefore inadmissible. The committee demanded that it be cut from each printed copy of the journal and destroyed by the police. Despite this edict, which made headline news in the press, Confession was soon widely read. Such was the interest aroused by any new work by Tolstoy that several senior figures in the government demanded to be sent copies before they were destroyed, and these soon circulated. Multiple copies were also made from the few offprints of the final proofs which had remained in the Russian Thought editorial office. These were then hectographed or lithographed and distributed throughout Russia with the help of a student organisation in Petersburg which specialised in this kind of samizdat (and whose main warehouse was ironically a Petersburg apartment whose owner had an indirect connection to the Minister for Internal Affairs—head of the Russian police). Confession became available for purchase at three roubles a copy, and thus reached a far wider readership than it would have done through the legitimate means of the 3,000-circulation Russian Thought.¹⁵ Turgenev even heard about it in Paris, and wrote to ask Tolstoy for a copy. Despite finding it rather depressing to read (its argument was based on false principles in his opinion, which led to a kind of nihilistic negation of all forms of human life), he nevertheless still regarded Tolstoy as the most remarkable individual in Russia.¹⁶

Tolstoy viewed Confession as the first part of a tetralogy, of which the second and third parts, his Investigation of Dogmatic Theology and Union and Translation of the Four Gospels remained unpublished. Completing a first draft of the fourth part,What I Believe, became his task for the summer of 1882. If the first three parts of this major new project were designed to expose the falsity of the Church's doctrine, the goal of What I Believe was to reveal the true meaning of Christianity, as set out in the Gospels. For Tolstoy, that meaning was essentially contained in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, 5-7), which alone offered the possibility of creating heaven on earth in his opinion. He was also convinced that it was the Church's teachings which actually made it impossible to follow the prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount to the letter.¹⁷

Completing the first draft of What I Believe produced a state of spiritual euphoria in Tolstoy, and reawakened a desire which had lain dormant ever since he had set out on his quest to live a life consonant with the religious and moral principles he had painfully been hammering out for himself. He wanted to leave his family and make a complete break with his former life, but voicing this desire aloud to his wife resulted in the first serious rift between them. The violent row on a hot August night which led to them sleeping apart was not easily forgotten. Sonya had devoted her life to her husband and his writings, and to bringing up their children. She was already angry that he had been neglecting them ever since they had moved to Moscow, and the thought of him leaving altogether was devastating. Tolstoy was, in fact, deeply conflicted. He was repelled by his family's patrician lifestyle, but he still loved Sonya deeply—they would have two more children during the next few difficult years—and he had a keen sense of his obligations. In the spring of 1882, after resigning himself to the fact that his family was going to live in Moscow whether he liked it or not, Tolstoy went house-hunting. Days after delivering the proofs of Confession to the editorial office of Russian Thought, he finally decided to buy an old wooden house for them in a quiet back street on the outskirts of the city centre. He had been to visit it several times and negotiated a price of 36,000 roubles. He then spent part of the summer carrying out improvements and repairs so the family could move in at the beginning of autumn.

The house, which dated back to 1808, had belonged to a merchant couple who had bred large numbers of dogs, and was not in a fashionable residential area.¹⁸ Sonya was crestfallen when she first came to Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Lane and set eyes on the rather shabby and nondescript house, which had a lunatic asylum and a brewery for neighbours and stood opposite a textile factory. But it had a lush, tranquil garden which made it seem more like a country estate than an inner-city house, and Tolstoy's mind was made up by the profusion of roses, gooseberry bushes and fruit trees it contained.¹⁹ Tolstoy worked conscientiously that summer: as well as whitewashing, wallpapering and plastering, there were stoves to repair, parquet floors to lay and pieces of furniture to buy. The family moved in on 8 October, happy to be settled at last in what would be their home for the winter months. While Sonya became caught up in a hectic whirl of activities, as she sought to keep all the children under control as well as entertain them, Tolstoy consoled himself that autumn by studying Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi, who was rather taken aback to find his pupil arguing with him about the meaning of certain passages of the Old Testament after only a few lessons.²⁰

As time went on, Tolstoy sought to bring more aspects of his life into line with his religious ideals, and 1883 was a pivotal year in this regard. He now wore peasant clothes in the city as well as at home in the country, dispensed with his title wherever possible and tried to avoid having to be waited upon, but he was conscious that there was a lot more he could do. While visiting Yasnaya Polyana that May, after doing what he could to help put out a fire in the village which destroyed twenty-two peasant homes, he took the first steps in divesting himself of his property, including his literary works, by handing to Sonya power of attorney. Immediately afterwards he travelled for the last time to Samara, where he sold his horses and cattle. He also divided up his land there into five plots to let to peasants.²¹ During his month on the steppe, Tolstoy engaged in heated discussions with a peasant revolutionary living under police surveillance, and endeavoured to show him and his comrades that the use of violence was both immoral and futile.²²He also wrote to Sonya to tell her he had renewed his contact with the local Molokans, with whom he had further long conversations about Christianity. He knew full well that this contact would come to the attention of the police, but despite Sonya's qualms, his response was 'Let them report it'.²³

Fearless as Tolstoy was, he was probably unaware of the extent of the police operation which had been mounted to follow his every move. At the same time, the police probably had no idea quite how much trouble Tolstoy was going to cause them in the coming years. His meetings with Prugavin and the Molokans out on the steppe had been immediately reported to the Bishop of Samara by a local priest back in the summer of 1881, and since then, the matter had been transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg, which now began to monitor his 'harmful activities'. In September, for the first time since 1862 (when his peasant school activities had resulted in Yasnaya Polyana being searched for seditious material), Tolstoy was placed under permanent covert surveillance.²⁴ In December that year Tolstoy was improbably nominated to be the next Marshal of the Nobility in his district by the Tula local government, which had not yet been informed about the surveillance activities. Unaware that Tolstoy had immediately turned down the appointment, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, wrote to warn the new Minister of Internal Affairs, Count Dmitry Tolstoy (the distant relative who in the 1870s had been Minister of Education):

In recent years Count Tolstoy's fantasies have suddenly changed once again, and he has succumbed to religious mania. This has resulted in his complete estrangement from Christianity—in the sense of belief. He has put together a retelling of the Gospels in his own words with a commentary, full of cynicism, in which he preaches Christian morality in the rational sense, rejecting the teaching of a personal God and the divinity of Christ the saviour. He had intended to publish this work abroad, but refrained after earnest pleading from his wife (his last child has not been christened, despite his wife's entreaties), and it is now circulating in manuscript. He is in contact with all the rational sects, the Molokans, the [Syutayevites] and so on...²⁵

Tolstoy's movements during his trip to Samara in the summer of 1883 were indeed watched closely. A local police agent reported that Tolstoy had tried to preach the principle of equality to a group of peasants, whom he had exhorted to renounce private property, and reject the government. A few days later it was reported that he had been persuading peasants that they were wasting their time decorating churches and going to services.²⁶ From now on, the police would sedulously follow Tolstoy's every move, noting in its regular bulletins his arrivals and departures from Moscow.²⁷

Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana that July to find a brief letter from Turgenev, with whom he had been in affectionate correspondence. Turgenev informed him he was now on his deathbed, but that was not the main reason for writing:

I'm actually writing to you in order to tell you how glad I was to be your contemporary, and to put to you my last, sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! This gift has come to you from where everything else comes from. Oh, how happy I would be if I could think that my request makes an impact on you!! I am a finished man—the doctors do not even know what to call my malady, Névralgie stomacale goutteuse. I can't walk, I can't eat, I can't sleep, but so what! It's even boring to repeat all this! My friend, great writer of the Russian land—heed my request! Let me know that you have received this note, and let me once again embrace you, and your family very, very warmly, can't write more, too tired.²⁸

Tolstoy was deeply touched by this letter (although he was later probably rather annoyed when Turgenev's phrase 'great writer of the Russian land' became a cliché regularly fixed to his name). Turgenev died the following month, unaware that his friend had in fact partially returned to literature. In 1881 Tolstoy had started work on a new novella which would in time receive the title The Death of Ivan Ilych. He had put it aside in 1883, but would return to work on it the following year, placating Sonya, who also longed for her husband to return to fiction so that she could once again be part of his creative life as his copyist.

Although Tolstoy did not return to literature in the way Turgenev would have liked (fiction would never claim his attention again in the way it had earlier), he was nevertheless keen to honour his friend. He therefore readily agreed to speak at the commemorative meeting of Moscow's venerable Russian Literature Society that was planned for late October 1883, perhaps prompted by his conscience, having rather arrogantly refused to take part in the Pushkin celebrations in 1880. When it became known that Tolstoy was going to give a public lecture, the news spread rapidly throughout the city and was considered sufficiently important to be reported in the press. The head of press censorship wrote at once to inform the Minister of Internal Affairs: 'Tolstoy is a lunatic, you can expect anything from him; he may say incredible things and there will be a huge scandal'. Dmitry Tolstoy took action by informing the Moscow governor, Prince Dolgorukov, who promptly banned the commemorative meeting from taking place. There was bitter disappointment amongst the Moscow intelligentsia.²⁹

Count Dmitry Tolstoy was forced to deal with his anarchic relative about another matter that autumn. Tolstoy was appointed to be a juror for the Tula regional court, and his refusal to serve on religious grounds was again reported in Russia's main newspapers. Fearing that the authority of the courts might be undermined if others followed his example, this time Dmitry Tolstoy expressed his concerns to the Tsar.³⁰ But Tolstoy was now unstoppable. In 1883, instalments of Confession began to appear in the revolutionary émigré journal The Common Cause, which was based in Geneva.³¹ The first separate edition of Confession, as it was now called, was produced by the journal's publisher Mikhail Elpidin the following year. Elpidin was another former seminary student turned revolutionary who had escaped from prison and fled abroad, where he also published the first edition of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? in 1867. The émigré edition of Confession was reprinted many times. In June 1883 a French translation of Tolstoy'sGospel in Briefwas also published in a Paris journal. Its translator, Leonid Urusov, the vice-governor of Tula, and a friend sympathetic to Tolstoy's views, had already started working on a French translation of What I Believe?³² Tolstoy had planned to 'publish' What I Believe in Russian Thought, anticipating that hectographed copies of the proofs would circulate, following certain prohibition by the censor, as had been the case with Confession. It was now too voluminous to be submitted as an article, however, and Tolstoy resolved to publish it as a book instead.³³ The work on What I Believe had been intense, but in early October, exhausted but jubilant, he was ready to hand the manuscript over for typesetting. He made an interesting new acquaintance when he stopped off in Tula on his way to Moscow. The Sanskrit scholar Ivan Minaev, Professor of Comparative Philology at St Petersburg University, was Russia's greatest expert on Buddhism, and had travelled extensively in India. Tolstoy's interest in the Eastern religions was to grow exponentially in the last decades of his life, and he grilled Minaev for over five hours on the precise aspects of Buddhism on which he wanted clarification.³⁴

Although Tolstoy felt extremely lonely in the midst of his uncomprehending family, he was beginning to find more people from an educated background with whom he could have meaningful conversations, either in person or by letter. The first had been his children's teacher Vasily Alexeyev, who had moved out to work on his Samara estate in 1881, and with whom he was still in regular contact. People were also beginning to make their way to him. At the end of 1882 Tolstoy had embarked on an intense, brief correspondence with a former university student exiled on his father's estate in Smolensk province.³⁵ But it was in Vladimir Chertkov, who came to visit Tolstoy in Moscow in October 1883, that he found his greatest kindred spirit and most devoted disciple. From this point until Tolstoy's death Chertkov would occupy an ever more important role in his life as his closest friend and partner in their shared mission to disseminate what they saw as true Christianity.

Chertkov was twenty-nine when they met, Tolstoy fifty-five. He did not have a title, but his background was even more distinguished than Tolstoy's. Both his parents were descended from old aristocratic families (one paternal relative had founded the Chertkov Library which Tolstoy had worked in when he was writing War and Peace), and they were very close to the court. The future Alexander III was Chertkov's playmate when he was a child, while Alexander II was a regular visitor to the family's opulent mansion in St Petersburg while he grew up, and showed him particular favour from a young age. As well as inviting Chertkov and his parents to holiday at the Romanov palace in Livadia in the Crimea, the Tsar singled him out during cavalry parades. At the age of nineteen, after an elite education, Chertkov had followed his father into the army, where a brilliant career awaited him.³⁶ 'Le beau Dima', as he was known, was enormously wealthy, as well as being tall, handsome, and on the guest list of all the most exclusive balls and social gatherings. He was also famous for a certain eccentricity: his refusal to dance with Empress Maria Fyodorovna on one occasion had caused a sensation in a world which took protocol very seriously. In 1879 Chertkov had taken an eleven-month leave, which he spent in England, and shocked his parents soon after his return by informing them of his decision to resign from the army. Since 1881 he had been living at Lizinovka, his parents' enormous estate in Voronezh province, where he had thrown himself into philanthropic works for the benefit of the peasants by setting up schools, libraries and training facilities.³⁷

Chertkov's desire to devote his life to the peasantry was not the only reason he was drawn to Tolstoy. He was also inspired by unorthodox Christian ideals which he initially inherited from his mother, who had become a Protestant evangelist after the untimely deaths of her eldest and youngest sons. It was his dynamic mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna, who had been instrumental in bringing Lord Radstock to Russia in 1874. It was she who had effected his introduction to all the best salons in St Petersburg, and introduced him to her brother-in-law, Colonel Vasily Pashkov, who carried on Radstock's work after he was expelled from Russia in 1878. One of the richest men in Russia, Pashkov also came from the aristocracy, but after becoming an evangelical Christian he had eschewed high society salons for prayer meetings held at his house, which sometimes attracted over 1,000 followers. He had also founded the Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading which disseminated copies of the Gospels translated into Russian, and other edifying literature. When Chertkov had gone to England, he naturally met with Lord Radstock, ³⁸ who gave him introductions to the British aristocratic and political elite, including the future Edward VII.³⁹

  

7. Vladimir Chertkov as a young man, 1880s

Chertkov had practised a Christian way of life since returning from England, but he was not an evangelist like his mother. His religious views were much more in tune with Tolstoy's beliefs, which explains why, when they met, it felt to them almost as if they were already old friends. Tolstoy was the first person Chertkov had ever known who shared his views on the incompatibility of Christianity with military service.⁴⁰ As for Tolstoy, he was dazzled by his young visitor, and the bond that was immediately formed between them was strengthened by not only their shared religious convictions, but also their common aristocratic background.⁴¹ Chertkov had found his messiah and Tolstoy had found the confidant he had longed for. Throughout their friendship, much of their communication was by letter: their correspondence fills five separate volumes of Tolstoy's collected works in the edition which Chertkov launched in the 1920s. Tolstoy had also found in Chertkov an unexpected source of protection, for his friend's formidable connections to the court meant they could embark on their programme of planned activities with a degree of impunity.⁴² As well as proposing a publishing venture, Chertkov wanted to help disseminate Tolstoy's writings abroad, and soon after their first meeting he began translating What I Believe into English, a language of which he had a flawless command.⁴³

Another new friend who provided crucial moral support in the later stages of finishing What I Believe, when Tolstoy felt like a 'writing machine', was Nikolay Ge, who came to Moscow to paint his portrait in 1884. In contrast to Kramskoy's portrait, in which the writer's gaze is firmly fixed on the viewer, Ge depicted Tolstoy sitting pen in hand at his desk, his head bowed over his manuscript in deep concentration.⁴⁴ By deliberately not showing Tolstoy's eyes, Ge broke with the conventional rules of portraiture, and many were shocked when his painting was first exhibited. Like Tolstoy, Ge was a firm believer in manual work (his speciality was building stoves), and he was one of the first 'Tolstoyans'. He tried to follow Tolstoy's precepts to the letter, and became a fanatical vegetarian, sometimes eating almost nothing at all. He also tried valiantly to make himself eat things he did not like, so refused buckwheat and chewed his way penitently through dishes of wheat grain with either hemp oil, or no oil at all, rather than butter. In 1886 he gave away all his property to his family. Like Tolstoy, he had a wife who did not share his views.⁴⁵

Tolstoy's strategy for getting What I Believe past the censor was to write from a deliberately subjective point of view, print only fifty copies and set the price at an eye-watering twenty-five roubles, but he was deluding himself if he thought his unequivocal rejection of both secular and ecclesiastical power would be condoned.⁴⁶ On 18 February 1884 the thirty-nine copies remaining at the printer were confiscated, but to Tolstoy's delight they were not destroyed. Instead they were sent to Petersburg, where, along with the eight copies which Tolstoy had been required to submit for inspection, they were delivered to the many high-ranking figures in the government and the imperial court who were anxious to read Tolstoy's latest work. They then passed the book on to others. In no time, What I Believe was also being lithographed and sold for four roubles a copy.⁴⁷ Tolstoy himself was a willing accomplice in the illegal samizdat operation, and paid scribes fifteen roubles to make copies of his manuscript for distribution.⁴⁸French, German and English translations were soon underway.

What I Believe was an important work for Tolstoy, and one he had been building up to in his previous religious writings. He took particular care with its exposition as it was the first systematic explanation of his religious and ethical views, his 'creed'. Tolstoy wanted a religion which would stand up to rational scrutiny. He wanted a clear, straightforward set of rules to follow in his daily life, and he found them in Christ's five commandments in his Sermon on the Mount, which can be briefly summarised as follows:

1.     Live in peace with all men ('anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgement').

2.     Do not lust ('anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart') and do not divorce ('anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery').

3.     Do not swear ('Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King').

4.     Do not resist evil ('If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also').

5.     Do not hate ('Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you').

If everyone followed these commandments, there would be no more wars and no need for armies. Indeed, living a Tolstoyan Christian life would eradicate the need for courts, police officers, personal property and any form of government. Morality was the cornerstone of Christianity for Tolstoy, and he now saw life in simple black-and-white terms. As he writes in What I Believe:

Everything which used to seem good and noble to me—ambition, fame, education, wealth, a complex and sophisticated lifestyle, environment, food, clothes, and formal manners—has become bad and sordid. Everything which seemed bad and sordid—the peasant lifestyle, obscurity, poverty, crudity, simple surroundings, food, clothes, manners—has become good and noble.⁴⁹

It was not surprising that Nikolay Berdyaev later defined as one of Tolstoy's many paradoxes the fact that this man who was Russian to the core of his being started preaching 'Anglo-Saxon religiosity', ⁵⁰ for there were striking parallels with the reformist views that Matthew Arnold had been promoting in Victorian England in the 1870s.

Like Tolstoy, Arnold had increasingly turned to religious questions later in his career, although in his case he was impelled by a desire to navigate the crisis caused by the resistance of the Church of England's conservative theologians to the onslaught of scientific, rational thought (Darwin's Origin of Species had been published in 1859). Tolstoy, of course, had met Arnold briefly in London in 1861, and when in 1885 he read Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible, the controversial book Arnold published in 1873, he exclaimed excitedly in a letter to a friend that he had found half of his own ideas in it.⁵¹ Tolstoy ensured that Arnold was sent a copy of What I Believe as soon as it appeared in translation. It was, incidentally, Matthew Arnold who first awakened a serious interest in Tolstoy in England, where he was largely unknown until the middle of the 1880s. In the essay he published in 1887, a few months before he died, Arnold introduced British readers to Tolstoy's fiction. As well as presenting a strong case for the superiority of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary, it is interesting to note that he also presented a summary of Tolstoy's religious philosophy to date. While sympathetic to its general thrust, Arnold had some judicious comments to make. Even without having the opportunity to read any of Tolstoy's later religious writings, Arnold's main exposure of the basic flaw in Tolstoy's thinking, based on a reading of What I Believe, is in many ways unsurpassed in its lucidity and concision:

Christianity cannot be packed into any set of commandments. As I have somewhere or other said, 'Christianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon of the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up.' ⁵²

Tolstoy was not a man to make concessions, however. In the spring of 1884, as he recovered from the exhaustion of completing the initial writing of What I Believe and then the various stages of proofreading (the number of changes he introduced at the first stage cost him about the same as the sum he was charged for the typesetting), he learned how to cobble shoes, and read Confucius and Lao Tzu.⁵³

Family life in the Tolstoy home in Moscow was rather surreal in the early part of 1884. In one part of the house, Tolstoy, closely watched by the governor general, was paring his footprint on the earth down to a minimum and castigating such depraved activities as physical adornment and dancing at balls.⁵⁴ In another part of the house, Sonya and Tanya were dressing up in tulle and velvet to go to society balls where they fraternised with the governor general, who went out of his way to be friendly and curry favour with them.⁵⁵ Sonya was still breast-feeding their two-year old son Alyosha, and she was pregnant again, but she was determined to enjoy herself. Tolstoy deplored the money his wife was spending on Tanya's coming-out that season. Each dress alone cost up to 250 roubles, and he was well aware that twenty-five horses could have been bought with that money. He was also pained to think of the old coachmen shivering in the cold outside grand mansions while their employers partied, and so he absconded back to Yasnaya Polyana for a while to rest his frayed nerves. Sonya was also pained to think of her husband sitting in his dirty woollen socks at home, sewing misshapen boots for their old servant Agafya Mikhailovna, while their teenage sons Ilya and Lev were being delinquent and neglecting their schoolwork. She was fed up with him being a 'holy fool', she complained to her sister, reneging on his duties as a father, and no longer even interested in being part of family life.⁵⁶ While Sonya wrote complaining letters to her sister Tanya, Tolstoy recorded in his diary, and in letters to Chertkov, the discord with his wife which prevented him from aligning their family's life with his convictions. He felt he was the only sane person living in a madhouse run by madmen. But it was Tolstoy who was the madman according to his brother Sergey, who had as little sympathy for his suffering as Sonya.⁵⁷

Relations continued to be strained that summer when the family moved back to Yasnaya Polyana, and Tanya arrived as usual to take up her summer residence in the other house, along with her children (as a rule, her husband, Alexander Kuzminsky, did not join them). The summer days which Sonya spent with her sister were still the happiest time of year for her, but she was increasingly living apart from her husband. He had now started getting up even earlier, so he could do more physical work, and spent long days mowing with the peasants. He now also gave up eating meat, stopped drinking wine and tried to give up smoking.⁵⁸ His personal self-discipline was not sufficient to maintain a cool head in his altercations with Sonya, however, and by early June he was longing to leave Yasnaya Polyana and move away from his family. There was a particularly bitter argument with Sonya about money on 17 June, just before she gave birth. Late that afternoon Tolstoy decided to leave, and he got halfway to Tula before feelings of guilt made him turn back. When the two bearded young men playing cards in the house (two of his sons) told him the rest of the family were outside playing croquet he retreated to his study, to be woken at three in the morning by Sonya, who had gone into labour.

The birth of Alexandra (Sasha) was not a happy occasion—Sonya had not wanted another child, she had dreaded giving birth, and she hired a wet-nurse this time in a fit of pique. Later she explained in her autobiography that Tolstoy was perennially so cold and unpleasant with her during this time, and so unhelpful around the house, that she felt no compunction about defying him in this matter.⁵⁹ That July she was so unhappy that she could not refrain from unburdening herself in a letter to her husband's former confidante Alexandrine. 'Lyovochka has never been before in such an extreme frame of mind,' she wrote, describing how difficult it was to find any common ground between them where they could both make compromises. She also found it hard that Tolstoy was complaining about her in letters, and telling his correspondents how lonely he was.⁶⁰ Alexandrine was no doubt sympathetic. Her irascible relative had barely been in touch since they had fallen out over their divergent views on Christianity, and then suddenly that spring she had been bombarded with four letters from him in quick succession. Tolstoy wanted her to intercede on behalf of Anna Armfeldt, the widow of a Moscow University professor. Her daughter Natalya was a revolutionary who had been sentenced to fourteen years' hard labour in Kara, a particularly harsh prison in eastern Siberia, just north of the border with China (where convicts worked the gold mines). Natalya had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and her mother wanted to be able to settle near her.⁶¹

Tolstoy's relations with Sonya improved somewhat when post-natal complications made her ill.⁶² Tanya reported to her absent husband in July that her sister was still weak, and that her brother-in-law was still preaching about the need to sell everything up and dismiss the servants, but he became more solicitous.⁶³ One rare source of merriment during these tense years was the Yasnaya Polyana post box. Every member of the household was invited to drop unsigned stories, news items, poems and anecdotes into a locked box placed on the landing by the grandfather clock for Sunday evening readings around the samovar. On 22 August 1884, which was Sonya's birthday, Tolstoy compiled twenty-three medical histories for the mentally ill inmates at the Yasnaya Polyana hospital, who all suffered from a particular mania. He began with himself, describing his own mania as Weltverbesserungswahn (a desire to improve the world), and its symptoms as a dissatisfaction with the status quo, condemnation of everyone but himself, an annoying loquacity with no thought for his listeners, and frequent descents from anger and irritability to an unnatural lachrymose sensitivity. He prescribed complete indifference from everyone around him to anything he might say as his cure.

Tolstoy diagnosed his wife as suffering from petulantia toropigis maxima (unruly haste), a condition causing the patient to believe that everything depends on her, and a concomitant fear that she cannot manage to do everything.⁶⁴ In her autobiography, Sonya records some of the 'Ideals of Yasnaya Polyana' that were posted:

·         Lev Nikolayevich: Poverty, peace and harmony. To burn everything he used to have reverence for, and to have reverence for everything he has burned.

·         Sofya Andreyevna: Seneca. To have 150 babies who will never grow up.

·         Tatyana Andreyevna: Eternal youth, female emancipation.

·         Ilya Lvovich: To carefully conceal from everyone that he has a heart, and to give the impression that he has killed 100 wolves.⁶⁵

Sonya did not have much time to read, but she enjoyed leafing through a French edition of the Roman Stoic philosopher's complete works, which their friend Leonid Urusov had lent her, along with Marcus Aurelius, Plato and Epictetus.⁶⁶ Tolstoy was on to the transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson by this time.

By the autumn of 1884 family relations were much improved, partly because Tolstoy had been able to stay behind for a few weeks after everyone left for Moscow, and live according to his ideals. He dismissed the cook and the caretaker, cooked his own simple dishes like baked turnip, lit the samovar himself, stopped using horses and walked every evening down to the railway station to post his letters to Sonya and pick up the post.⁶⁷ He also took walks during the daytime to the highway to resume his conversations with pilgrims. He wrote to Sonya about meeting two old Stranniks from Siberia who had dedicated themselves to a life of permanent pilgrimage and were returning from Jerusalem and Mount Athos, a journey which they had undertaken without a single kopeck to their name. On another day he met two old gentlemen from the far north of Russia, whom he invited back to Yasnaya Polyana for tea—they completely drained the samovar. Tolstoy finally gave up hunting that autumn, having discovered, apart from a feeling of shame, that when he went out on horseback with his dogs he now hoped his quarry would get away. This meant a major change in his routine (his daughter Tanya had noted in her diary that he had killed fifty-five rabbits and ten foxes during the course of one autumn a few years earlier).⁶⁸ Tolstoy also now decided to take over the running of all the farming at Yasnaya Polyana from his steward, ⁶⁹ and his spirits rose when Sonya decided she would not take their daughter Tanya into society for a second season, or attend any high-profile social events herself. But the dynamics within the family were also beginning to change, which raised Tolstoy's spirits. Although Tolstoy's relationship with his sons remained largely cool, his elder daughters, particularly Masha, were slowly coming round to his point of view.

In November 1884 Tolstoy published two of the draft openings to his abandoned novel about the Decembrists. It was the first fiction he had published for an educated audience since Anna Karenina, but his heart was now in a new project conceived by Vladimir Chertkov. Tolstoy had been engaged in a lively correspondence with Chertkov (whom he had already sent thirty-six letters since their meeting the previous year), and amongst their topics for discussion was a plan to produce quality literature for the masses. Chertkov wanted to emulate the pamphlets which had been put out under the auspices of the (now banned) Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading by Vasily Pashkov, who had just been sent into permanent exile by the government. He had met Pashkov in England that summer, and realised that inexpensive publications for the masses offered an excellent means to promote Tolstoy's new creed.⁷⁰ Tolstoy was only too keen to collaborate, and they discussed these plans further when Chertkov came to Moscow in November. After a productive meeting with Ivan Sytin, an enterprising young publisher of popular woodcuts and pictures who had worked his way up from lowly beginnings as an apprentice in a bookshop, Chertkov was ready to sign a contract. The new publishing house they set up was given the name 'Posrednik' (The Intermediary), and they agreed they would publish superior but accessible Russian and foreign literature in translation with illustrations for a few kopecks a copy. That they were able to do so may well have been due to Chertkov's mother, who gave her son a 20,000-rouble annual allowance—more than the Tolstoy family's entire expenditure in a year.⁷¹ Chertkov's wealth proved to be a rare but lingering bone of contention between him and Tolstoy.⁷²

In April 1885 Chertkov opened a bookshop in Moscow, set up a warehouse in St Petersburg and hired a young female assistant, whom he would later marry, and a co-editor, Pavel Biryukov, who was to become another of Tolstoy's devoted friends and disciples (in time he would write a voluminous and reverential biography). Biryukov was a graduate of the Naval Academy, and had been working as a physicist in the main observatory in St Petersburg. He came from the nobility, but occupied a far lower place in the pecking order than either Chertkov or Tolstoy, which became a stumbling block when he tried to marry Tolstoy's daughter Masha a few years later.⁷³

The Intermediary was a huge success—12 million of the little books it produced were sold in the first four years of its existence. They filled a real gap in the market, where previously there was little available to the burgeoning numbers of literate peasants and urban workers beyond saints' lives and crudely written stories of a very low literary quality. Tolstoy advised Chertkov on which foreign authors to publish (including Dickens and Eliot), but he also made a very valuable original contribution himself. The Intermediary presented him with an opportunity to pick up the work of his ABC where he had left off, and, in fact, one of The Intermediary's publications was his story 'Captive in the Caucasus', which he had written back in the 1870s for his ABC.⁷⁴ He also wrote twenty finely executed new stories over the next few years for The Intermediary, and a select few journals.⁷⁵ These brief tales were considerably better crafted than the boots he made, which he proudly described to Sonya as 'un bijou'. Tolstoy was an expert at retelling fables and folk stories in a vivid and simple way, deploying humour and an admirably light touch with the moral each contained.

While Tolstoy was busy writing stories for the masses, his wife was learning the ropes in a different area of the publishing sector. Her very real anxieties about the family's loss of income had led Tolstoy to suggest that she produce the next editions of his collected works and his ABC books. Previously the sales of Tolstoy's collected works had been handled by the husband of his niece Varya (Masha's daughter). Sonya now decided to retain the rights to the publication of her husband's works, and to convert the outbuilding at their Moscow house into a warehouse. In January 1885 Sonya got down to business, and the proofs for the new, fifth edition started arriving the following month. New works by Tolstoy completed since 1881 which were earmarked for the new twelfth volume of this edition included his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 'Strider', and a couple of the stories Tolstoy had just written for The Intermediary, including 'The Tale of Ivan the Fool'.⁷⁶ In February Sonya set off to St Petersburg to obtain permission for this volume to be published, and also to consult Dostoyevsky's widow about the most profitable way to go about her new publishing venture. One of the most valuable pieces of advice from Anna Grigorievna was to give booksellers only five per cent discount.⁷⁷ She also recommended that Sonya should not insist on each volume being published in chronological order. Sonya proved to be an accomplished businesswoman. The twelfth volume was banned, but in November 1885 she was already making her second visit to St Petersburg to lobby for the ban to be lifted (it was eventually published in 1886), and to initiate the process of publishing the sixth edition of Tolstoy's works.⁷⁸ By 1889 she was already releasing the eighth edition.⁷⁹

Letting Sonya publish everything he had written before his spiritual crisis (plus the occasional new work of fiction) was Tolstoy's concession to her, and he helped her with the proofs, but he was much more interested in proselytis-ing. Since 1882 he had been working on and off on a major new treatise, WhatThen Must We Do?, which drew on his experiences in the Moscow slums while working for the census. Its topics were poverty, exploitation and the evils of money and private property, but the solution to these perennial problems was not technology or modernisation, but physical labour, humility and personal endeavour:

So these are the replies I found to my question: What must we do?

First: not to lie to myself; and—however far my path of life may be from the true path disclosed by my reason—not to fear the truth.

Secondly: to reject the belief in my own righteousness and in privileges and peculiarities distinguishing me from others, and to acknowledge myself as being to blame.

Thirdly: to fulfil the eternal, indubitable law of man, and with the labour of my whole being to struggle with nature for the maintenance of my own and other people's lives.⁸⁰

At the end of 1884 Tolstoy handed over the first chapters for publication in Russian Thought. Despite the eternal optimism of his editors, the censor vetoed their publication, but copies were naturally made from the proofs for informal distribution.

Tolstoy's religious works were now also beginning to reach a wide audience abroad: in 1884 Mikhail Elpidin had published Confession as a separate book for the first time in Geneva, and in 1885 French, German and English translations of What I Believe were published. In the volume Christ's Christianity, published in London, Chertkov included his translations of Confession and The Gospel in Brief along with What I Believe. Readers outside Russia thus became acquainted with Tolstoy's religious writings and his major fiction simultaneously, as if his entire career to date had been telescoped: while the first French translation of War and Peace appeared in 1879, it was not until 1885 that Anna Karenina was also published in French translation. The first English translations (completed by the American Nathan Haskell Dole) of both novels appeared in 1886.⁸¹

While Tolstoy was keen to disseminate his ideas abroad, it was in Russia that he wanted to make an impact, and the first concrete sign that he was succeeding came in the spring of 1885, when it became known that a young man had refused to serve in the army on the grounds of his Tolstoy-inspired religious convictions.⁸² A number of writers and thinkers now started to make an impact on Tolstoy's thought, as it continued to evolve. Although he had by now articulated the major tenets of his new worldview, he remained very receptive to currents of thought which seemed to echo or amplify his own ideas, and there were three important people who shaped his thinking in 1885: an American political economist in New York, a self-educated peasant in Siberia, and an émigré religious positivist based in London.

Henry George, who rose from humble origins in Philadelphia to stand against Theodore Roosevelt for Mayor of New York in 1886, was an evangelical Protestant who wrote a best-selling book in 1879 about social inequality called Progress and Poverty.⁸³Articles about this book began appearing in the Russian press in 1883, and in February 1885 Tolstoy started reading the book itself. He was riveted by George's central idea that all land should become common property. Regarding it as a major turning point, he predicted that the emancipation from private ownership would be as momentous as the emancipation of the serfs.⁸⁴ George's philosophy was inspired by the observations he had made during his extensive international travels. He had noticed that poverty was greater in populated areas than in those which were less developed. In his book he argued for a single tax, so that private property, and ultimately poverty, could be eliminated. Tolstoy was all for the abolition of private property, but at this point he was quite hostile to the idea of a tax applied by a government, due to the element of coercion inherent in such an action. Nevertheless, he would come to change his mind a decade later, and wholeheartedly embrace George's proposals.

In July 1885 Tolstoy found himself being stimulated by another thinker in whom he recognised a kindred spirit when a political exile in Siberia sent him a manuscript by Timofey Bondarev. He had first read about The Triumph of the Farmer or Industry and Parasitism a few months earlier in a journal article, and was curious to read it. Taking his inspiration from Genesis 3: 19 ('By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food...'), Bondarev argued that it was each person's moral and religious duty to earn their bread through physical labour, regardless of their social station. Tolstoy was electrified by the ideas contained in this manuscript, and by the author's passionate diatribe against the wealthy ruling classes. He was also struck by the rich mixture of biblical and colloquial language the treatise was written in, and he read it aloud to everyone at Yasnaya Polyana on the day he received it. He then set about

 

8. Pencil drawing by Repin of Tolstoy reading in his grandfather's chair at Yasnaya Polyana, 1887

writing to the author, and finding out more about him. Timofey Bondarev, it turned out, was a former serf from southern Russia. In the 1850s, at the age of thirty-seven, he had been forced to abandon his wife and four children when his owner recruited him into the army, where he faced the standard period of conscription of twenty-five years. In 1867, after serving for ten years, Bondarev was arrested for renouncing his Orthodox beliefs and becoming a Subbotnik ('Sabbatarian'—a splinter group of the Molokans). He was exiled for life to a remote village on the Yenisey river, not far from Mongolia, along with other sectarian 'apostates'. As he was the only person who could read and write in the village, he set up a school, in which he taught for thirty years. He devoted the rest of his time to tilling the land and writing his treatise.

Tolstoy agreed with 'everything' in the treatise, and entered into an enthusiastic correspondence with Bondarev, telling him that he frequently read out his manuscript to his acquaintances, though adding rather tactlessly that most of them usually got up and walked out. He also confided to Bondarev that this had given him the idea of narrating his manuscript whenever he had boring visitors: it was a successful ploy in getting rid of them.⁸⁵ Tolstoy went out of his way to get Bondarev's manuscript published. After its inclusion in the journal Russian Wealth was censored at the last moment in 1886, he persevered, only to see it being physically cut from Russian Antiquity in 1888. Eventually an edited version of Bondarev's manuscript, accompanied by an article by Tolstoy, appeared later in the year in The Russian Cause, its editor receiving a caution from the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a result.⁸⁶ Much later it was published by The Intermediary, prefaced by Tolstoy's introduction.⁸⁷ Both Bondarev and Syutayev were pivotal figures for Tolstoy in his quest to persuade people to live in harmony with the land, as he made clear in a footnote to What Then Must We Do?, which he finally finished revising in 1886:

In the course of my lifetime, there have been two Russian thinking people who have had a deep moral influence on me, enriched my thinking, and clarified my worldview. These people were not Russian poets, scholars or preachers, but are two remarkable men who are alive today, and have both spent their whole lives working on the land—the peasants Syutayev and Bondarev.⁸⁸

Another crucial person in Tolstoy's campaign to promote a life of non-violence in harmony with the land was William Frey, the gifted son of an army general from the Baltic nobility who had abruptly turned his back on a brilliant military career in St Petersburg in the 1860s in order to seek the truth. In 1868, at the age of twenty-nine, after dabbling with radical left-wing politics, Frey emigrated with his bride to America and changed his name from Vladimir Geins to the symbolic Frey ('free'). In the mid-i87os he had been part of the disastrous Kansas commune along with Vasily Alexeyev and Alexander Malikov, but in 1884 he moved with his family to London, by this time a fervent positivist, and a devotee of Comte and Spencer. The following summer he set off to preach the 'religion of mankind' in Russia, where he very quickly came across samizdat copies of Confession and What I Believe, which made a deep impression on him. After sending Tolstoy a sixty-page letter outlining the superiority of the 'religion of mankind', he received an invitation to visit Yasnaya Polyana, and he arrived in October 1885.⁸⁹ Tolstoy was enchanted by Frey, whom he described as a serious, clever and sincere person with a pure heart. He was not persuaded by Frey's arguments about religion, but he was encouraged by his example to persevere with his efforts to give up meat, alcohol and tobacco. And he was captivated by Frey's stories of life in the Wild West, and his experiences ofliving in communes where there was no private property, and where everyone worked with their hands rather than with their heads.

Frey was interesting, Tolstoy wrote teasingly to his sister-in-law Tanya, because of his absolute refusal to recognise 'Anke Cake', which was his ultimate symbol of bourgeois self-satisfaction and unearned privilege. Anke Cake was served on special occasions at Yasnaya Polyana, and was named after a friend and medical colleague of Sonya's father, also of German descent. In her recipe book, Sonya does not provide instructions, merely a list of ingredients:

Anke Cake

1	pound of flour
½	pound of butter
¼	pound of caster sugar
3	egg yolks
1	glass of water
	The butter should come straight from the cellar, it needs to be on the cold side.

Filling

Melt a quarter of a pound of butter, then mix in two eggs, half a pound of caster sugar, the grated rind of two lemons and the juice of three lemons. Heat until it is as thick as honey.90

There was also a sour cream version, which involved mixing ten eggs with twenty dessert spoons of sour cream, a cup of sugar, and two dessert spoons of flour, lining a tin with jam, pouring the mixture onto it and baking it in the oven.⁹¹ The puritanical Frey would have considered it immoral to partake of something so rich and indulgent, and Tolstoy was now of the same opinion. Frey had a further meeting with Tolstoy in Moscow that December, but he was forced to leave Russia in March 1886 after failing to win over Tolstoy, or indeed anyone else, to his religion of mankind. He returned to London, where he died in extreme poverty of tuberculosis two years later at the age of forty-nine. Tolstoy recollected that he was one of the 'best' people he had ever known.⁹²

Tolstoy had focused his energies in the first half of the 1880s on articulating and disseminating his new worldview. In 1886, after he finished setting out the practical proposals contained in What Then Must We Do?, he turned to the abstract realm of ideas. His new project was initially conceived as a treatise 'about life and death', in which he wanted to set out the philosophy underpinning his ideas. Even though he may have stopped feeling suicidal, thoughts of death had never left Tolstoy, as can be seen from all three of his major artistic works written in the 1880s (The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Power of Darkness and The Kreutzer Sonata), the last two of which deal with violent death by murder. Death was also never far away in Tolstoy's personal life, but he now had a new attitude to it. In the late summer of 1885 he had been saddened to hear of the death of his faithful friend and supporter Leonid Urusov, whom he had accompanied on a trip to the Crimea that spring (it was the first time he had been back to Sebastopol since the war).⁹³ More testing, however, was the experience of death in the family: in January 1886 four-year-old Alyosha died. Tolstoy discovered that he was now able to approach the death of his youngest son with equanimity. He wrote to tell Chertkov that he had previously regarded the death of a child as cruel and incomprehensible, but now saw it in a positive light.⁹⁴

Sonya's only response to Alyosha's death was grief, but despite feeling distraught, she shrank from paying the 250 roubles required for burial at the prestigious cemetery next to the Novodevichy Convent, which was close to their house. Instead, she and the family's nanny placed the small coffin in the sleigh they had only recently used to take Alyosha to the zoo, and travelled north of Moscow to bury him at Pokrovskoye, where the Bers family had rented a dacha when she was a young girl.⁹⁵ In November 1886 Sonya had to cope with another death when her sixty-year-old mother fell gravely ill, and she too travelled to the Crimea. She was with her mother in Yalta during her last days.⁹⁶ If Tolstoy barely seemed to register the demise of Lyubov Alexandrovna, his old friend from childhood, ⁹⁷ it was perhaps because he himself was seriously unwell that autumn. Death was an ever-present subject in his conversations, and in his correspondence.⁹⁸

The thirty-five chapters of Tolstoy's voluminous treatise about life and death, which was later given the final title On Life, present the philosophical foundations underpinning his new worldview. He invested a great deal of mental energy in the exposition of his ideas, writing over 2,000 pages before the manuscript was complete in August 1887.⁹⁹ Sonya agreed to copy it out, which helped to create a peaceful atmosphere between them during its composition. Although she still could not accept the fundamental proposition that one should reject the 'material, personal life' in favour of the life of the spirit and 'universal love', as she noted in her diary, ¹⁰⁰ she liked the fact that it was not tendentious like his earlier religious writings. Nevertheless, a work which replaced religious doctrine with reason and personal conscience never stood a chance of being approved by the censor. It had been planned that the 600 copies printed in 1888 would constitute a new thirteenth volume ofTolstoy's collected works, but the Holy Synod ordered their confiscation. All but three copies were burned, and the first publication of On Life was the French translation which appeared in 1889. The Archbishop of Kherson, who had examined the treatise, confided in a letter to one of Tolstoy's acquaintances that the Holy Synod was now seriously considering anathematising him.¹⁰¹

After The Death of Ivan Ilych, which had won many accolades from critics, Tolstoy wrote only two major artistic works in the late 1880s: the play The Powers of Darkness, and the novella The Kreutzer Sonata. He had first tackled the dramatic genre back in the 1860s, but had taken neither of his efforts back then very seriously. Now he was drawn towards popular drama. The books published by The Intermediary had already immeasurably improved the calibre of literature available to the peasantry, and Tolstoy wanted to transform the crude repertoire of drama on offer to the masses. He began in the spring of 1886 with a comedy on the evils of alcoholism called The First Distiller. It was published by The Intermediary and then staged in June at the open-air theatre attached to a porcelain factory outside St Petersburg. Despite the rain, 3,000 workers made up an enthusiastic audience. Two years later it was banned by the theatrical censor for featuring imps and devils, and an act set in hell.¹⁰²

The Powers of Darkness, which is also drawn from peasant life, is a much more serious work. Based on a recent criminal case involving murder and adultery heard in the Tula court, it was completed in the autumn of 1886. The theatrical censor immediately banned it. This was a setback, as the script had already been typeset at three different printers, and Tolstoy had agreed that the play could be performed for the actress Maria Savina's benefit night—he himself was very keen to see it staged. Sonya fired off a letter to the government's head of censorship, Evgeny Feoktistkov, who expressly forbade its performance, but did now consent to its publication. Over 100,000 copies were printed in the first months of 1887, including an edition with The Intermediary which sold for three kopecks.¹⁰³ Meanwhile, Chertkov started a sophisticated public relations operation. As anticipated, the reading he organised at the home of Countess Shuvalov, using his formidable society connections, soon set people talking. Not only was it reported positively in the press, but soon the Tsar's curiosity was aroused. A special reading was arranged for him in the Winter Palace on 27 January, which was attended by the Empress, grand dukes and duchesses, and other members of the court. Alexander III declared that he liked the play very much, and ordered it to be staged by the Imperial Theatres. He was soon forced to back down, however, after being reprimanded by Pobedonostsev. The Chief Procurator had been horrified to learn of the Tsar's irresponsible attitude to the 'crude realism' and 'denigration of moral feeling' in this appalling play—he told the Tsar he had never seen anything like it.¹⁰⁴

There was much worse to come. The Kreutzer Sonata, a worthy successor to Anna Karenina in terms of its association of carnal love with extreme violence, would be his most scandalous work yet. It owed its inspiration to several sources. First of all there was an anonymous female correspondent who wrote to complain to Tolstoy in February 1886 about the distressing situation of women in contemporary society, and their debasement by men.¹⁰⁵ Then there was the acquaintance who told a story about once sitting in a train carriage opposite a man who confessed that he had been unfaithful to his wife. And there was a direct musical stimulus: on several occasions in 1887 Tolstoy's son Sergey, a fine pianist, accompanied Lev and Misha's violin teacher Yuly Lyasotta in performances of Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, the Kreutzer Sonata, both in Moscow and at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy certainly knew Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata very well, and it was one of relatively few opuses to feature on the list of his favourite musical works later compiled by Sergey.¹⁰⁶ It is the first of the sonata's three movements which has the greatest parallel with the story. The frenzied dialogue between violin and piano in its central presto section performed by Pozdnyshev's wife and her male violinist partner suggests to Pozdnyshev a dialogue of a different kind, which provokes him to fits of jealousy he can eventually no longer control.

On one of the occasions when the sonata was performed at the Tolstoys' home, the painter Repin was present, and Tolstoy even toyed with the idea of his friend accompanying his story with a painting.¹⁰⁷ Tolstoy would have certainly discussed his ideas for the story with Repin, for he found himself posing for another portrait in the summer of 1887 during the painter's stay at Yasnaya Polyana. They had been acquainted for seven years by this point, but Repin had bided his time, clearly wanting to get to know Tolstoy better before fixing him on canvas. The portrait, which depicts him sitting calmly in a chair with a book in his hand, dressed in black, seemed to many to be reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet.

Another oblique source for The Kreutzer Sonata were certain events in Tolstoy's own family life which touched a raw nerve. In the autumn of 1887 his second eldest son Ilya proposed to his sweetheart Sofya Filosofova. Tolstoy was a concerned father, as the couple did not have very good prospects and were both very young: Ilya was twenty-one, Sofya was twenty. Ilya had failed to graduate from his lycée, so was ineligible for university, and he had returned from spending two years in the army without any plans for earning his living. The Tolstoys were friends with his fiancée's family, but they were well aware she was no better off: her father worked at the Moscow art school where Tanya had trained. Tolstoy wrote Ilya several letters entreating him to consider carefully the step he was about to take, but his son's heart was set. There were further reasons why Tolstoy should have marital relations at the forefront of his mind at this time. In September 1887 he and Sonya celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and his wife was pregnant again. Their son Ivan (Vanechka) was born on 31 March 1888, a month after Ilya's marriage. On Christmas Eve of that year their first grandchild Anna was born.

Apart from the Tolstoys' eldest child Sergey (who had left Moscow University and was now working for the Tula peasant bank), only Ilya lived away from home at this time.¹⁰⁸ In the spring of 1889 Tolstoy went to visit him and his family, and was appalled to find coachmen, carriages, horses and other trappings of a comfortable lifestyle which he felt they should abjure. Ilya was not the only one of his sons with whom Tolstoy seriously fell out during these years.¹⁰⁹ His third eldest son Lev, then in his last year of school, constantly argued with him. Tolstoy also seriously risked falling out with his daughter Masha, whom his follower Pavel Biryukov proposed to at the end of 1888. Sonya was not prepared for her daughter to marry a 'Tolstoyan', even if he was of noble background, and she blocked it. Biryukov went away to lick his wounds but reappeared in Tolstoy's life in 1891 after sailing to Japan with the future Nicholas II on his nine-month 'grand tour'.¹¹⁰ Masha accepted her lot meekly. Since she was Tolstoy's favourite daughter, whom he relied upon for assistance and moral support, he was secretly glad, and he himself would later thwart Masha's romantic dreams on more than one occasion in a selfish attempt to keep her near him. Tolstoy had little to do with his youngest children Andrey, Misha and Alexandra, eleven, nine and four respectively, who barely saw their father, let alone baby Vanechka. Unlike the elder children, whom he had personally taught, the youngest came under the care of tutors and governesses, and were essentially brought up by Sonya.

Ilya's marriage, and the births of his son and granddaughter in quick succession, had a profound effect on Tolstoy, particularly the birth of Vanechka, which had been very difficult for Sonya. She was forty-three, he was fifty-nine, and he felt ashamed that while he had successfully been able to fight the temptation to drink wine and eat meat, he had been unable to master his physical desire for his wife, particularly knowing how reluctant she was to become pregnant again. He despised himself for his weakness, and ended up venting his self-loathing in his fiction, which Sonya perceived as barbs personally directed at her. Having exalted the sanctity of marriage in What I Believe a few years earlier, Tolstoy now regarded it as an institution to be roundly condemned. He had always taken violent exception to the idea of marriage without children, but now even procreation could not redeem its sinfulness. Not for the first time in his life the mercurial writer had changed his tune. Well might Sonya find her husband's sudden advocacy of chastity, even within marriage, hypocritical and hard to take. According to her first Russian biographer, she became pregnant yet again in 1890, and was relieved to miscarry.¹¹¹

Tolstoy had started The Kreutzer Sonata in 1887, but most of the work on it took place in the spring and summer of 1889. One book which made an impact on him during this time was a practical guide to gynaecology and midwifery called Tokology: A Book for Every Woman, which was issued by the Sanitary Publishing Company in Chicago in 1883 ('tokology' comes from the Greek word for obstetrics). It had been sent to him by its author Dr Alice Bunker Stockham, who had been brought up as a Quaker, and was one of the very first women to qualify as a doctor in the United States. Having specialised in gynaecology, she came to believe that women should not have continual pregnancies, and that men should control their sexual urges.¹¹² She also advocated abstinence from alcohol and tobacco and campaigned against prostitution. The book was of interest to Tolstoy for religious rather than medical reasons, he later told his daughter Tanya, and he wrote in November 1888 to tell Alice Stockham in his slightly creaky but elegant English that it was 'truly a book, not only for woman but for mankind':

Without labour in this direction mankind cannot go forward; and it seems to me especially in the matter treated in your book in chapter XI ['Chastity in Marital Relations'—Stockham discouraged sexual relations during pregnancy], we are very much behindhand. It is strange, that last week I have written a long letter to one of my friends [Chertkov] on the same subject. That sexual relation without the wish and possibility of having children is worse than prostitution and onanism, and in fact is both. I say it is worse, because a person who commits these crimes, not being married, is always conscious of doing wrong, but a husband and a wife, which commit the same sin, think that they are quite righteous.¹¹³

Tolstoy had indeed just written to Chertkov to castigate himself for the fact that it was too late to atone for having lived 'like an animal'.¹¹⁴ In October 1889, the month in which his sister Masha decided to take the veil (she spent a year living with 400 nuns at a convent in Tula before moving to the convent next to Optina Pustyn), Alice Stockham came to visit Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.¹¹⁵ She probably quickly discovered that they were not in complete agreement about everything—she was not as uncompromising as Tolstoy, for example, when it came to condemning all sex that was not for procreative purposes, ¹¹⁶ but they enjoyed rewarding conversations about the American sects which practised chastity. In 1892 a translation of her book with an introduction by Tolstoy was published in Russia. It was because Stockham viewed childbirth in such sacred terms that she promoted the idea of sexual continence. Nevertheless, her novel ideas about a spiritualised form of human intimacy were not always well received. In her later book on the 'ethics of marriage', her 'method of promoting marital happiness [whereby] sexual intimacy may take place without completing the act' received withering scorn from a critic writing for a scholarly journal.¹¹⁷

Completion of the ninth and final draft of The Kreutzer Sonata provoked the question of where it could be published. Chertkov wanted the story for The Intermediary, Sonya wanted it for the new edition of the collected works, while Tolstoy now only cared about renouncing his copyright and avoiding arguments. On this occasion Tolstoy's story started circulating in samizdat even before it was submitted to the censor. The manuscript was taken to St Petersburg by Tolstoy's niece Masha Kuzminskaya, who arranged a reading attended by thirty friends, including Alexandrine and Nikolay Strakhov. After another late-night reading at the offices of The Intermediary, the editorial staff portioned the manuscript amongst themselves and then sat up all night to copy it before returning it to the Kuzminskys the next morning. Within a few days, much to Tolstoy's chagrin (he was only ever content to disseminate his work after the proofreading stage, which always involved him making myriad corrections), 300 lithographed copies appeared, which themselves were soon copied and distributed further. The story soon became the hottest property in St Petersburg, and sold for the exorbitant sum of ten, and sometimes even fifteen roubles (Sonya sold Tolstoy's entire collected works for eight roubles).¹¹⁸

It was agreed that The Kreutzer Sonata would be published first in an ephemeral weekly newspaper which did not have such strict censorship, and then handed over to Sonya, ¹¹⁹ but rumours that it would be banned even from this publication started spreading at the beginning of December 1889. They were confirmed later that month.¹²⁰ In the detailed review of the story Pobedonostsev sent his colleague Evgeny Feoktistov in February 1890, he conceded it was a 'powerful' work, and that he could not in good conscience ban a story which promoted chastity in the name of morality, but the overwhelmingly bleak message this sent out about the future of the human race made it unacceptable for publication. Alexander III enjoyed the story as much as The Power of Darknesswhen it was read to him at the Winter Palace, but his wife was shocked—as Theodore Roosevelt would be when translations reached the United States later that year. As US Attorney General, he forbade the distribution of the newspapers which printed it. By February 1890 illegal copies of The Kreutzer Sonata were being read all over Moscow, as we know from statements by Anton Chekhov, who had largely left his medical career behind and was by now a celebrated writer. He had been publishing under his own name in Russia's most prestigious literary journals for twelve years at this point, and was just beginning to appear on Tolstoy's radar. In the letter that Chekhov wrote to his friend Alexey Pleshcheyev about The Kreutzer Sonata, his typically incisive, clear-sighted observations bring a breath of fresh air into a debate that was highly charged:

Did you really not like The Kreutzer Sonata ? I don't say that it is a work of immortal genius—I'm not able to judge that—but I do consider that, compared to most of what is being written today both here and abroad, it would be hard to find anything to compare with the importance of its theme and the beauty of its execution. Aside from its artistic merits, which are in places stupendous, we must above all be grateful to the story for its power to excite our minds to their limits. Reading it, you can scarcely forbear to exclaim: 'That's so true!' or alternatively 'That's stupid!' There is no doubt that it has some irritating defects. As well as those you have listed, there is one for which it is hard to forgive the author, and that is his arrogance in discussing matters about which he understands nothing and is prevented by obstinacy from even wanting to understand anything. Thus his opinions on syphilis, foundling hospitals, women's distaste for sexual intercourse and so on, are not only contentious but show what an ignorant man in some respects he is, a man who has never in his long life taken the trouble to read one or two books written by specialists on the subject. But at the same time the story's virtues render these faults so insignificant that they waft away practically unnoticed, like feathers on the wind, and if we do notice them they serve merely to remind us of the fate of all human endeavour without exception, which is to be incomplete and never entirely free of blemishes.¹²¹

Chekhov undertook his momentous journey to study the notorious penal colony on the island of Sakhalin in the summer of 1890, and when he came back that autumn he was able to read the afterword that Tolstoy had now written—also in samizdat. In response to the furore caused by his story, Tolstoy clarified that chastity was merely an ideal, and that he was not advocating the end of the human race. The time Chekhov spent in Siberia changed him, and also his view of Tolstoy's story, as in the letter he wrote in December 1890 to his great friend Alexey Suvorin (editor of New Times), his outlook was quite different:

Before my trip, The Kreutzer Sonata was a great event for me, but now I find it ridiculous and it seems quite absurd ... To hell with the philosophy of the great men of this world! All great wise men are as despotic as generals and as rude and insensitive as generals, because they are confident of their impunity. Diogenes spat in people's beards knowing nothing would come of it; Tolstoy lambasts doctors as scoundrels and exposes his ignorance of the important issues because he is another Diogenes whom no one will arrest or criticise in the newspapers...¹²²

By the spring of 1891 The Kreutzer Sonata had still not been published, and Sonya decided to take matters into her own hands. Despite the personal affront she felt with regard to the content of The Kreutzer Sonata, she was keen to see it in print—in her edition. Accordingly, she had gone ahead and had the story typeset in Moscow, but a decision was made on 25 February that neither the story nor the afterword Tolstoy had written could be included in the thirteenth volume of his collected works. On 1 March, the day after the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II, Tolstoy was even formally anathematised for the first time in a sermon read in Kharkov, which was then published. The Kreutzer Sonata was condemned as an 'incoherent, filthy and amoral story'. Ten days later Sonya received word about the ban, and on 28 March she set off for St Petersburg with the intention of petitioning for an audience with the Tsar, so she could ask him personally for permission to publish The Kreutzer Sonata. It was granted on the proviso that the story was only published as part of the multi-volume collected works that were less readily available to vulnerable younger readers. Alexander III was, in fact, very gracious, and in an apparent nod to rumours that Vladimir Chertkov was the illegitimate son of Alexander II, Sonya noted in her diary that their tone of voice and manner of speaking were somewhat similar.¹²³ Empress Maria Fyodorovna, who also received Sonya, was just as solicitous as her husband.¹²⁴ The thirteenth volume of Tolstoy's collected works appeared in June 1891.¹²⁵ Naturally Pobedonostsev was furious when he learned of the Tsar's leniency.¹²⁶ That Alexander III was consistently indulgent towards Tolstoy's subversive activities makes one wonder whether he was protected by his friendship with the influential Chertkov. There is certainly an eerie resemblance between photographs of the young Alexander III and Vladimir Chertkov—perhaps they really were half-brothers.

Sonya's trip to St Petersburg was another nail in the coffin of the Tolstoys' marriage. Tolstoy regarded the very idea of petitioning the Tsar as demeaning, and he wished for no profits to be made from his writing. Sonya, on the other hand, felt bound to earn money even if just to pay for the upkeep of their nine children. Unceasing arguments now led Tolstoy to make a decision to renounce all his property. In April 1891 the entire family gathered at Yasnaya Polyana to sort out the allocations on an equal basis. Sergey, for example, received Nikolskoye, which had once belonged to Tolstoy's brother Nikolay, but was obliged to pay his sister Tanya and his mother a certain sum of money over the next fifteen years. Lev received the Samara estate and, as the youngest, three-year-old Vanechka by tradition received the bulk of Yasnaya Polyana, along with Sonya. Masha, as her father's devoted daughter and follower, renounced her share (although she would change her mind when she eventually married in 1897).¹²⁷ The arguments with Sonya continued when Tolstoy insisted she send to the press a letter announcing his renunciation of the copyright on his writings. It finally appeared in all of Russia's major newspapers on 19 September 1891.¹²⁸

The whole experience of dividing up his estate reminded Tolstoy of a famous literary antecedent, and he told his children to go away and read King Lear.¹²⁹ It was probably the only time in his life that he actually recommended Shakespeare, but he had clearly been ruminating on King Lear for a while. In 1888 he had talked about the play to the campaigning journalist William Stead, who arrived in Yasnaya Polyana that May fresh from his audience with Alexander III in St Petersburg (he seems to have been the only man ever to have interviewed a Russian tsar). Stead was anxious to quiz Tolstoy about English authors: 'Shakespeare, of course, came first,' he later recalled. 'He said that most of his plays were translated into Russian, and some of them were very popular. "Which most?" I asked. "King Lear," said he, instantly; "it embodies the experience of every Russian izba."'¹³⁰ The nearest British equivalent to Tolstoy in terms of his zeal to expose the hypocrisy of Victorian society, and focus attention on poverty and vice, Stead was a controversial figure, but also a committed pacifist (he was on his way to take part in a peace congress in New York in 1912 when he went down with the Titanic).¹³¹ The character of King Lear at the end of Shakespeare's play, meanwhile, is English literature's nearest equivalent to the holy fool (yurodivy)—that peculiarly Russian form of sainthood to which Tolstoy aspired, and which is not encountered in any other religious culture.

Russia's holy fools deliberately challenged social conventions to mock the falsehood of the temporal world, unafraid of speaking the truth to all classes, including rulers. Relinquishing all material comforts, they dressed in rags and led ascetic lives like the vagabond Stranniks, voluntarily accepting humiliation and insults in order to conquer their pride and thus achieve greater humility and meekness. Since they lived amongst people, unlike hermits in monasteries, and so were in the public eye, they went out of their way to avoid being accorded any respect for their piety, and welcomed censure. Tolstoy had known and revered holy fools from the days of his childhood, thanks to his pious aunts who welcomed them to Yasnaya Polyana. Childhood, his first work of fiction, notably features a holy fool, as does War and Peace, and it can been argued that three other characters in that novel, Pierre, Natasha and Kutuzov, are 'stylised' holy fools.¹³² Pashenka, the heroine in 'Father Sergius', the story Tolstoy worked on between 1890 and 1898, is another version of the holy fool. Back in 1877 Tolstoy had told his friend Strakhov that he most wanted to be a holy fool rather than a monk, and after his religious crisis he expressed the view that the best path to goodness was to be an involuntary holy fool. But projecting oneself as worse than in reality was a conscious act for a holy fool, and was a strategy adopted by Tolstoy from the time he wrote his historic letter to Alexander III in 1881. His merciless self-criticism allowed him to express himself more freely with the Tsar. Tolstoy's self-flagellation continued until his last days. In August 1910, just a few months before his death, he noted in his diary that he had never encountered anyone else who had the full complement of vices—sensuality, self-interest, spite, vanity and, above all, narcissism.¹³³

As pointed out earlier, Sonya took a dim view of her husband donning the mask of the holy fool. For him, however, it was a fundamental medium for the communication of his message. In this regard, a comment Tolstoy made in his diary when he was writingThe Kreutzer Sonata in August 1889 is revealing. 'I need to be a holy fool in my writing too,' he noted, realising that perfect execution alone would not make his arguments more convincing.¹³⁴ Sadly, Chekhov for one was unimpressed, to judge from further disparaging comments in his letter to Suvorin of December 1890. Dismissing in withering terms Tolstoy's afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata as the product of a holy fool, he asserts that his philosophy is 'not worth even one of the little mares in "Strider"'. (Tolstoy's superlative story about a horse, which he had begun many years earlier, when he still had ambition as an artist, was finally completed and published for the first time in i8 8 6.¹³⁵)

As much as the holy fool is integral to the Russian Church, the character of 'Ivan the Fool', is integral to Russian folklore.¹³⁶ 'The Tale of Ivan the Fool', a popular story for The Intermediary which Tolstoy dashed off in an evening in 1885, was one he particularly cherished.¹³⁷ The story was published the following year in Sonya's first edition of the collected works, and also by The Intermediary, but was eventually banned by the religious censor as a work unsuitable for mass readership. The authorities took exception to the way in which the story promoted the idea of a kingdom which had no need for an army, money or intellectuals, while its tsar should at least be 'no different from a muzhik'.¹³⁸ In fact, even some of Tolstoy's closest friends took exception to its bald moralising and its denigration of intellectual endeavour in favour of physical labour.

By the summer of 1891, after the controversy surrounding The Kreutzer Sonata had died down, Tolstoy found himself struggling to concentrate on the new treatise he had begun the previous summer about non-violence. He had ideas for new fictional works which he wanted to develop (the future novel Resurrection and the story 'Father Sergius'), and he also wanted to complete an article about gluttony. He had been greatly impressed with Howard Williams's history of vegetarianism, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating, which had been published in London in 1883, after serial publication in The Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (the monthlyjournal of the Vegetarian Society), and he wanted to write a preface for its Russian translation. His article, 'The First Step', was completed in July, after a sobering visit to the abattoir in Tula, and published the following year in the journal Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, which was edited by his friend Nikolay Grot, a professor at Moscow University.¹³⁹ If the article came hard on the heels of The Kreutzer Sonata, it was because Tolstoy drew a direct link between gastronomic and sexual indulgence, arguing that carnal consumption stimulated carnal desire. Like chastity, vegetarianism was a precondition of the Christian ascetic life to which he aspired.¹⁴⁰ Tolstoy was bound to become a hero of the animal rights movement, for he did not, as it were, mince his words when graphically describing the cruelties involved in the slaughter of animals:

Through the door opposite the one at which I was standing, a big, red, well-fed ox was led in. Two men were dragging it, and hardly had it entered when I saw a butcher raise a knife above its neck and stab it. The ox, as if all four legs had suddenly given way, fell heavily upon its belly, immediately turned over on one side, and began to work its legs and all its hind-quarters. Another butcher at once threw himself upon the ox from the side opposite to the twitching legs, caught its horns and twisted its head down to the ground, while another butcher cut its throat with a knife. From beneath the head there flowed a stream of blackish-red blood, which a besmeared boy caught in a tin basin. All the time this was going on the ox kept incessantly twitching its head as if trying to get up, and waved its four legs in the air. The basin was quickly filling, but the ox still lived, and, its stomach heaving heavily, both hind and fore legs worked so violently that the butchers held aloof. When one basin was full, the boy carried it away on his head to the albumen factory, while another boy placed a fresh basin, which also soon began to fill up. But still the ox heaved its body and worked its hind legs...

...[W]e cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat. If it were really indispensable, or, if not indispensable, at least in some way useful! But it is quite unnecessary, and only serves to develop animal feelings, to excite desire, and to promote fornication and drunkenness. And this is continually being confirmed by the fact that young, kind, undepraved people—especially women and girls—without knowing how it logically follows, feel that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and, as soon as they wish to be good, give up eating flesh.¹⁴¹

Contemporary writers may not be following the same spiritual path as Tolstoy, but the fact that revelations of animal cruelty in the twenty-first century still have the capacity to shock shows that we still behave like ostriches. Over a century after Tolstoy's 'First Step' was published, many abattoirs are only a little more humane.¹⁴²

There is a grim irony about the fact that Tolstoy's broadside against needlessly excessive consumption was written just as reports of a major famine started reaching him. The Volga and central 'black earth' regions had already suffered two poor harvests in consecutive years, and in 1891 there was a drought which affected about 14 million people in an area stretching across thirteen regions in the European part of Russia, all the way from Tolstoy's own Tula region in the west to Samara, hundreds of miles to the east. The combination of adverse weather conditions, outdated farming implements, poor transportation and the Russian government's failure to act in time, compounded by its further failure to provide adequate help for peasants who were already desperately poor and malnourished, was fatal. Half a million people died of cholera alone. The crisis was certainly not helped by Russia's centralised government with its bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, since officials had little conception of what was really going on in the provinces, and little autonomous power.

Tolstoy's ideas had begun to win him increasing numbers of followers by the end of the 1880s, but he also had his share of critics. In 1891, however, when he seized the initiative to help victims of the famine which had begun to rage in Russia, Tolstoy assumed an unassailable position of national moral leadership to the extent that his strident religious views were subsequently indulged more as eccentricities, at least by the people. Despite Chekhov's impatience with Tolstoy's retrogressive ideas, he was serious about placing him as the No. i most important person in Russia in December i890 (he categorised himself as No. 877), ¹⁴³ and he had nothing but admiration for his famine relief work. As he wrote in another letter exactly a year later, 'You need the courage and authority of a Tolstoy to swim against the current, defy the prohibitions and the general climate of opinion, and do what your duty calls you to do.'¹⁴⁴ Chekhov did sterling work himself during the famine, but Tolstoy got there first, and he put the Russian government to shame.

Tolstoy soon became intensely irritated that the Russian affluent classes were up in arms about the approaching crisis in the summer of 1891. Dire poverty was an everyday reality for most peasants, so why was it they only wanted to help the peasantry during the extreme conditions of a famine?¹⁴⁵ In September he went off on horseback round Tula province to see for himself what was happening, having already resolved not to spend that winter in Moscow. At the end of the month he returned home and started writing an article, 'About the Famine', in which he excoriated the educated classes for their indifference to the plight of all those millions of peasants who barely managed to subsist even in normal circumstances. On 15 October he sent his devastating report to Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, and ten days later Nikolay Grot wrote to give Tolstoy the unsurprising news that the issue in which it was slated to appear had been confiscated by the censor. The next day Tolstoy set off for Ryazan province with his eldest daughters, Tanya and Masha, ready to do what he could to help: the plan was to live at his friend Ivan Rayevsky's estate and set up soup kitchens and provide practical help to the peasants in the area. Rayevsky had come to visit Tolstoy that summer to tell him about what was going on, and it was his selfless devotion to the cause which inspired Tolstoy himself to act (he tragically died of influenza a month after Tolstoy's arrival).¹⁴⁶

Tolstoy's twenty-two-year-old son Lev went off to his newly inherited estate in Samara to help out with the famine there, electing to take a period of leave from his university studies, but the experience was traumatic, and took a great toll on his frail health—the conditions were so extreme in Samara that it was hard just to produce any foodstuffs at all, let alone set up soup kitchens.¹⁴⁷ Sonya still had four children between the ages of three and fourteen to look after at home in Moscow, so was housebound, but she was keen to help as well. On 3 November 1891 she published an appeal for help in the Russian Gazette (it was also printed in many newspapers in Europe and the United States), and she received 9,000 roubles in the first week alone.¹⁴⁸ It was not just the wives of wealthy tea-merchants in Kyakhta, on the border with China, who sent Sonya money—donors included Old Believer fishermen in Bessarabia who gave up most of their earnings, a retired lieutenant-colonel in Nizhny Novgorod who donated his pension, as well as postmen, village schoolteachers and even peasants.¹⁴⁹ Sonya was glad to be able to contribute, as she recalls in her autobiography:

I bought trucks of corn, beans, onions, cabbage, everything needed for the feeding centres where the famine-stricken poor from the villages were fed. To pay for this, I received money which was sent to me in considerable sums. From the material sent to me by textile manufacturers I had [bed linen] made by poor women for small wages, and I sent it to the places where it was needed most, chiefly for those suffering from typhoid.¹⁵⁰

From her Moscow base, Sonya coordinated donations, and published regular bulletins over the next few months detailing the contributions received. She also spent days sewing shirts from the fabric supplied by the great textile magnate Savva Morozov, together with Dunyasha Popova, the family housekeeper, the nanny and the English governess.¹⁵¹

Tolstoy's mind was naturally taken back to the events of 1873 in Samara, when he first had seen the effects of famine in Russia. Ever since writing his article about the Moscow census back in 1882, Tolstoy was adamant that just throwing money at such a deep-rooted problem was no remedy: what was needed above all was practical action. After settling in at Rayevsky's estate in the village of Begichevka, Tolstoy wrote another article on the famine. 'A Terrible Question' (the question being whether Russia could feed itself) was duly published in the Russian Gazette on 6 November. Thus began months of getting up early every day, setting up and operating free soup kitchens, supervising volunteers and buying provisions with the donations received (Tolstoy himself took 600 roubles of his own money with him). By the end of November there were thirty soup kitchens up and running, and by the end of December there were seventy. They were vitally needed. Tolstoy wrote to tell Sonya that he had been to a village where there was only one cow for every nine households, and to another where nearly all the inhabitants were destitute. By January 4,000 peasants were receiving free food every day.¹⁵²

The government had initially discouraged ordinary Russians from becoming involved in famine relief, but they were obliged to change policy in the face of their own helplessness. Nevertheless they were alarmed by Tolstoy's activities, and sent out a circular to all Russian newspapers forbidding them to publish any articles by him. The editor of the Russian Gazette had received a reprimand for publishing 'A Terrible Question', but on 10 December he went ahead and published its sequel: 'About Ways to Help the Population Suffering from the Failed Harvest'. Chekhov exclaimed the next day in a letter to Suvorin that Tolstoy was no longer just a man, but a 'giant, a Jupiter', and immediately contributed an article of his own to the collection of essays put together by the newspaper. Tolstoy's friend Nikolay Grot, meanwhile, called him a 'spiritual tsar' on whom all of Russia's hopes were pinned at this difficult time.¹⁵³ But an enormous scandal was brewing. 'About the Famine' had now finally been approved for publication after drastic editing, and it was published in The Week in early January 1892. Tolstoy also wanted his uncensored text to be known abroad, and he now got in touch with various foreign acquaintances to ask them to translate it. Isabel Hapgood produced a translation for publication in America, and she printed an announcement in the New York Evening Post that she was setting up a campaign to raise funds to help those starving in Russia (contributions had already started arriving from England, France and Germany).¹⁵⁴Emile Dillon, an English academic who had been teaching at the University of Kharkov, placed his translation of Tolstoy's article in the Daily Telegraph on 14 (26) January. It was given the inflammatory title 'Why Are Russian Peasants Starving?'. As Tolstoy had hoped, extracts were then translated back into Russian for the press at home, but his words were twisted by right-wing publications, and immediately denounced by the more reactionary journalists as the most dangerous revolutionary propaganda. Tolstoy found himself being branded as the Antichrist, and as someone inciting the peasants to revolt.¹⁵⁵

There was no way the liberal-minded Nikolay Grot could publish Tolstoy's article in his journal now. Conversations at court revolved around whether Tolstoy should be locked up in the Suzdal Monastery prison (the traditional place of incarceration for heretics in Russia), sent into exile abroad, or committed to a lunatic asylum (the link between holy fools and madness was well established in Russia).¹⁵⁶ In faraway Smolensk there was even a rumour that Tolstoy had already been exiled to the Solovetsky Monastery prison (the place of his ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich's incarceration), and before the SECTARIAN, ANARCHIST, HOLY FOOL writer and journalist Jonas Stadling left his native Sweden to volunteer, he heard reports that Tolstoy was a 'prisoner on his estate, and that he was to be banished from the country'.¹⁵⁷ But once again Alexander III opted for clemency—not for the first time was Alexandrine forced to answer for her wayward relative at court, but her very proximity to the Tsar was a guarantee of his safety.¹⁵⁸ Tolstoy was longing for martyrdom, so was infuriated that he could continue unhindered. But as Suvorin pointed out in a letter he wrote at the time, Tolstoy was the only person who managed to do anything, while everybody else had to clothe their ideas 'in velvet' in order for any action to be taken: 'they are persecuting him, but to no avail; he can't be touched, and even if he is, he will just be pleased, for how many times has he said to me: "Why aren't they arresting me, why aren't they putting me in jail?" It's an enviable lot.'¹⁵⁹

Sonya was concerned that their whole family was on the brink of ruin, and she wondered what had happened to Tolstoy's doctrine of love and pacifism.¹⁶⁰ Her commitment to the cause had brought them together, however, which made him very happy, and she also came out to Begichevka for a ten-day visit at the end of January 1892.¹⁶¹ She had been collecting donations and publishing reports, and now she saw for herself emaciated, shivering peasants dressed in rags, their sad expressions speaking of the humiliation they felt to receive charity.¹⁶² She also saw what difficult and exhausting work it was for her husband and daughters (Tolstoy sometimes sat up until three in the morning in an attempt to continue with his writing). Apart from the physical challenges of working during the freezing winter months in villages where people had no means of feeding themselves or heating their homes, the sheer scale of the disaster was sometimes demoralising—it was impossible to help everyone. When she returned to Moscow in February, Sonya found herself having to nurse three-year-old Vanechka, who was seriously unwell again, but also soothe ruffled feathers. The repercussions of Dillon's translation of Tolstoy's article in the Daily Telegraph amongst ministers and court officials were such that she was obliged to send mollifying letters, and make repeated visits to Governor General Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich and his wife Elizaveta Fyodorovna.¹⁶³

The Tolstoys' famine-relief work proved to be infectious; soon they were joined by friends and relatives who wanted to help, and then by foreign volunteers like Jonas Stadling, who arrived in February 1892. In the book he later published about his experiences, Stadling described accompanying Tolstoy's daughter Masha on her visits on his first day, including one to a school:

We stopped at one of the izbas, in which the Count had opened a school and eating-room. For some time after our entrance we could see nothing distinctly, but our feet told us that the naked soil served as floor. When our eyes grew accustomed to the gloom we saw a number of benches, and standing between them about thirty children, silently looking at us ... In one corner were a couple of elderly people. From the neighbourhood of the [stove] came heavy breathing, and lying on top of it, we saw three children, covered with black small-pox. I suggested that these ought to be removed at once, and the Countess replied that it would be done as soon as possible, but as there were no hospitals, and almost every house was infected, it was not easy to isolate the sick. These poor children had been brought to the school 'because it was warm there'.¹⁶⁴

When there was no longer any money to pay the teachers, the local schools had been forced to close, but Tolstoy had done what he could to reopen some of them. Stadling was full of admiration for all the Tolstoys—for the indefatigable Sonya, dealing on her own with an enormous correspondence in Moscow, for Lev Lvovich, heading the relief effort in Samara (where Stadling also volunteered), and the two dedicated daughters Tanya and Masha, who assisted their father not only with the operation of the soup kitchens and the establishment of separate premises for feeding children, but also with the procurement of feed for the horses and the distribution amongst the peasants of fuel, seed for planting, and flax and bast, to give them some work.

By the autumn of 1892, when Tolstoy eventually returned to Yasnaya Polyana, donations of over 100,000 roubles, plus two ships from America with a cargo of flour, grain and potatoes, had helped with the setting up of 212 emergency soup kitchens in four districts, which had functioned until July. Along with teaching at the Yasnaya Polyana school, and his work on the ABC books, Tolstoy later declared that this had been one of the happiest times of his life. In September he returned to Begichevka for another visit, and carefully toned down his language when he wrote a moving account of how the donations received between April and July had been used. It was published on 31 October in the Russian Gazette, and at least 5,000 extra copies had to be printed to meet the demand.¹⁶⁵ Tolstoy would continue to make further visits to Begichevka in the winter of 1893, but he was now free to spend more time working on the treatise about non-violence which he had begun two years earlier. He had worked further on it during the three weeks he had spent resting in Moscow back in January, and in April Chertkov had sent out to him in Begichevka not only his latest manuscript, but also a young peasant with good handwriting keen to work as a copyist. Tolstoy had thus been able to continue writing, and now that he was back in the peace and quiet of Yasnaya Polyana he was able to give his treatise his full attention.

After Tolstoy's religious writings began to be published abroad, he had started to receive letters, books and pamphlets from enthusiastic readers from all over the world who were sympathetic to his cause. When Alice Stockham had come to visit Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy had been greatly interested in what she had to tell him about all the various branches of Christianity in America which were 'moving towards practical Christianity, towards a universal brotherhood and the sign of this is non-resistance'.¹⁶⁶He began to learn for the first time about Universalists, Unitarians, Quakers, spiritualists, Swedenborgians and also Shakers. On 30 March 1889 the Shaker Asenath Stickney had sent Tolstoy photographs of the leaders of their community, and two books: The Shaker Answer and George Lomas's Plain Talks upon Practical Religion: Being Candid Answers to Earnest Inquirers. In the autumn of 1889 Tolstoy entered into correspondence with another Shaker, Alonzo Hollister, explaining where he agreed and disagreed with their beliefs.¹⁶⁷ Tolstoy also now came into contact with the Quakers, who had preached non-resistance for over 200 years, and refused to take arms even in self-defence. Wendell Garrison, who edited a journal called Non-resistance, sent Tolstoy works by his father, the famous abolitionist and social reformer William Lloyd Garrison (who had died in 1879). And in 1889 Tolstoy was also sent Adin Ballou's Catechism of Non-violence, which he was very impressed by. Ballou was an abolitionist pastor who had formed a utopian community to live a rigorous life of Christian non-violence in Massachusetts back in 1841. Tolstoy exchanged warm letters with the eighty-seven-year-old pastor in the last year of his life.¹⁶⁸

As Tolstoy's ideas matured, partly under the impact of all the kindred spirits with whom he had come into contact, he began to realise that there was one more important book he needed to write after What I Believe. The idea of non-resistance to violence was a central plank in his religious and ethical system, but he did not feel his exegesis had been sufficiently wide-ranging in works he had published thus far. As Jonas Stadling described it after conversations with Tolstoy at Begichevka, the new book was going to be 'a kind of counterblast to the increasingly martial spirit of the time, that seemed almost personified in the young German Emperor'.¹⁶⁹ Tolstoy had thought initially that he would be able to write this new book quickly, and he already had a full draft two days after his return to Yasnaya Polyana, but he would not be satisfied with his manuscript for another year. The Kingdom of God Is Within You became his magnum opus amongst his religious writings, and its importance can be gauged by the fact that when Tolstoy finally finished it in May 1893, he had written over 13,000 manuscript pages—almost as many as he wrote for War and Peace, Anna Karenina and his later novel Resurrection put together.¹⁷⁰ It was also his most strident work yet.

Tolstoy begins by discussing some of the people who had felt moved to express their support after reading What I Believe by sending him letters, brochures and books. He also answers his critics, before going on to assert that neither believers nor non-believers understand Christianity, and that it is impossible to live as a true Christian in conventional society. Finally, he analyses contemporary attitudes to war and the meaning of conscription, and is categoric about the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity with any form of government. By the end of the book Tolstoy is no longer able to maintain the calm tone with which he begins his treatise. In his twelfth and incandescent last chapter he recounts meeting a battalion of 400 soldiers when he was on his way to Begichevka for the last time. Armed with rifles, they were travelling by special train to quell disturbances amongst the starving peasants whom he had been trying to help. For Tolstoy, this served only to confirm the validity of his ideas.¹⁷¹ In July 1892 Tolstoy set out a useful summary of the main ideas in his treatise in a letter to Charles Turner, an English teacher who had settled in Russia, and translated some of his works:

In this book there are three main ideas: 1) Christianity is not only worship of God and a doctrine on salvation, as it is understood by the majority of false Christians, but is first of all a different understanding of life, which changes the whole structure of human society; 2) from the time of the arrival of Christianity there have been two opposing tendencies: one that has been clarifying over time the new and genuine understanding of life which it has given people, and another which has been distorting Christianity and turning it into a pagan doctrine; in our time that contradiction has become particularly acute and is fully expressed in universal armament and general military conscription; 3) the necessary solution of this critical contradiction, which has been concealed by an absurd degree of hypocrisy in our time, can only happen through the sincere effort made by each individual person to coordinate one's life and actions with those moral foundations one considers to be true, regardless of the demands of family, society and government.¹⁷²

In March 1893, as soon as The Kingdom of God Is Within You was finished, Tolstoy started despatching his manuscript abroad for translation and publication. French and Italian translations appeared at the end of 1893, and in a letter to Tolstoy of 29 October Nikolay Strakhov reported from St Petersburg that the religious censor had deemed the French translation of The Kingdom of God Is Within You to be the most harmful foreign book it had ever had occasion to ban from distribution in Russia. The French and Italian translations were followed in early 1894 by a German translation and three in English, two of which were published in London and one in America. One of these editions reached a twenty-five-year-old Indian lawyer working in South Africa called Mohandas Gandhi. He was already practising non-violence, but had succumbed to doubts which were completely and immediately erased when he read Tolstoy's text. Gandhi was particularly struck by the fact that Tolstoy practised what he preached, and was not willing to compromise when it came to searching for the truth.¹⁷³

The first Russian edition of The Kingdom of God Is Within You appeared in early 1894, although even this émigré publication was abridged—the two pages about Kaiser Wilhelm had to be removed, as well as derogatory references to Catherine II, who was born a German. By this time Tolstoy's text had circulated widely in Russia via samizdat, but copies of the Russian edition published in Germany were also smuggled in. A secret government memo in May 1894 expressed alarm at the number of copies that had already been imported into Russia illegally, and advised that all typographers, lithographers and even individuals in possession of typewriters were to be put under close covert surveillance. Apparently, typewritten copies particularly proliferated in the 'southern provinces'. The first unexpurgated Russian edition of The Kingdom of God Is Within You was published in 1896 in Geneva by Mikhail Elpidin.¹⁷⁴ Alexander III had earlier declared that he did not want to add a martyr's crown to Tolstoy's fame by exiling him, but he was horrified by this new book, which he read a few months before his untimely death in the autumn of 1894. Even he now itched to be able to bring his rebellious subject to task.¹⁷⁵