12. ELDER, APOSTATE, AND TSAR

Someone said that each person has their own specific smell. However strange it may seem, I think Tolstoy has a very devout, church-like smell: cypress, vestments, communion wafers...

Valentin Bulgakov, diary entry, 12 February 1910¹

WITH THE PUBLICATION of The Kingdom of God Is Within You in 1893, Tolstoy's 'gospel' was complete. It was not a coincidence that the illegal printing presses which produced copies for distribution in Russia also handled revolutionary propaganda. Apart from his complete and utter commitment to non-violence, Tolstoy also sought to bring down the Russian government. As the Polish Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg was later to comment:

The criticism to which Tolstoy has submitted the existing order is radical; it knows no limits, no retrospective glances, no compromises ... The ultimate destruction of private property and the state, universal obligation to work, full economic and social equality, a complete abolition of militarism, brotherhood of nations, universal peace and equality of everything that bears the human image - this is the ideal which Tolstoy has been tirelessly preaching with the stubbornness of a great and vehement prophet.²

In the years to come Tolstoy would write dozens more articles in which he set out his religious and ethical views. Some of them, such as 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' (written in response to the assassination of King Umberto I in 1900), and 'I Cannot Be Silent' (prompted by the news that twenty peasants had been hanged in 1908 for attempted robbery), were occasioned by specific events. Others, such as 'Religion and Morality', 'The Law of Violence and the Law of Love' and 'The Essence of Christian Teaching' expressed his thinking as it continued to evolve in the last decade and a half of his life. They were all essentially variations on a theme, and mostly quite a lot shorter, but also quite a lot more abrasive.

Tolstoy had already proved to be a remarkably effective apostle. Capitalis-ing on the fame he had already acquired as a writer, he began winning converts to his version of Christianity very soon after he started disseminating his new beliefs in the 1880s. When he had first set out on his crusade, he had complained of loneliness, and had actively sought out kindred spirits. A decade later it was the kindred spirits who came to him - in droves, from all over the world, more often than not conceiving their journey as a 'pilgrimage'. Where Tolstoy previously used to have two or three visitors a week at most in the early 1880s, there were sometimes as many as thirty-five people a day wanting to see him during the last years of his life.³ There were those who approached him with reverence as an elder (starets), hoping he would provide spiritual guidance and give them answers to diverse problems, and then there were others who wanted to see him in the flesh simply because he was such a celebrity.

Just how famous Tolstoy became can be ascertained from the way in which the British journalist William Stead prefaced his account of the week he spent at Yasnaya Polyana in 1888:

In Russia and out of Russia, I have found people more interested in the personality of Count Leo Tolstoi, the novelist, than in that of any other living Russian. He is the first man of letters in contemporary Russia, but that alone would not account for the widespread interest in his character. He is a great original, an independent thinker, a religious teacher, and the founder of a something that is midway between a Church, a school, and a socio-political organisation. He not only thinks strange things, and says them with rugged force and vivid utterance - he does strange things; and what is more, he induces others to do the same. A man of genius who spends his time in planting potatoes and cobbling shoes, a great literary artist who has founded a propaganda of Christian anarchy, an aristocrat who spends his life as a peasant - such a man in any country would command attention. In Russia he monopolises it, and the fame of his originalities has spread abroad so far until it is probable that there are more people anxious to 'hear about Tolstoi' in Boston and San Francisco than there are even in Petersburg and Moscow.⁴

Tolstoy's major artistic and religious writings had only appeared in translation a couple of years earlier yet he was already a household name throughout the world. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was profoundly affected by Tolstoy's ideas when he came across them in Paris in 1885:

Tolstoy, whose recently translated novel War and Peace has aroused the admiration of the Parisians, Tolstoy, a Count, a wealthy man, a decorated soldier from the battles at Sebastopol, a brilliant writer, has broken with society, turned his back on literary writing and in the polemical works Confession and What I Believe has taken Rousseau's side, declared war on culture, and has put his teaching into practice himself by turning himself into a peasant.⁵

Strindberg wrote his book Among French Peasants (which was published in 1889) under the immediate influence of Tolstoy's ideas. Matthew Arnold had fired the imagination of British readers, while a pioneering study of the Russian novel published in 1886 by the Vicomte Eugene-Melchior de Vogue (who had served at the French Embassy in St Petersburg in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and married a Russian noblewoman) served to fuel the European reading public's intense interest in Tolstoy on the Continent.⁶ In 1887 an American critic published an article in Harper's Bazaar about the tumultuous reaction to the sudden arrival of Russian literature in the English-speaking world, describing Tolstoy as the greatest ever writer of fiction, 'living or dead'.⁷ At the end of the decade a German writer set off to Yasnaya Polyana to do research: the first biography of Tolstoy was published in Berlin in 1892, two years before one even appeared in Russia.⁸ Tolstoy was sixty-four.

9. Cartoon showing 'Tolstoy at work., published in 1908

The dynamics of Tolstoy's life had changed radically while he had been formulating his doctrine of brotherly love and non-resistance to violence in the 1880s. He had become teetotal, a vegetarian, he had given up smoking and hunting animals, and he had also stopped handling money insofar as it was possible. In the 1890s the dynamics of his life were to change again, and not just because he took up bicycling at the age of sixty-five, and soon needed a secretary to help him deal with the voluminous correspondence he found himself conducting with readers from all around the world. When he now went head to head with the Russian government by taking up the cause of persecuted sectarians scattered across the country, its ministers responded by sending his closest followers into exile, and excommunicating him from the Orthodox Church - which only increased his fame. The dynamics of Russian life also changed in the 1890s. Nicholas II, the last Romanov, ascended to the throne in 1894 amidst growing social and political unrest, and the rapid development of new technologies which began to revolutionise daily life. Before he died in 1910, Tolstoy lived to see the movie camera, the motor car, the phonograph and the typewriter, and even talked to Chekhov on the telephone.

Remarkably, Tolstoy found time to write fiction during the hectic last period of his life, when he was also sometimes extremely unwell. Apart from his novel Resurrection, completed in 1899, he worked on a handful of superlative stories, and also composed a substantial treatise on the meaning of art. These works were written alongside all the religious articles and diatribes against the immoral practices of the tsarist regime, which remained as reactionary as it had been under Alexander III. But Tolstoy's main writing project at the end of his life was the compilation of several exhaustive volumes of daily sayings and maxims from his favourite writers and philosophers. He was in need of their solace, as he was unhappy for much of the last fifteen years of his life. He still felt obligations to his family, but found it endlessly painful having to put up with the trappings of his once seigneurial lifestyle when he was longing to take to the road as a penniless and penitent Strannik. And as his friend Vladimir Chertkov assumed ever more influence over his affairs, Tolstoy's relationship with his wife steadily deteriorated.

Sonya had grown up in fairly humble surroundings despite her parents' flat being located in the Kremlin, so when she married Tolstoy she had adapted quickly to Yasnaya Polyana, but its spartan furnishings invariably took foreign visitors by surprise. The intrepid American traveller George Kennan, for example, who came to Yasnaya Polyana in June 1886 after travelling across Siberia, was clearly expecting Tolstoy's study to be a bit grander:

The floor was bare; the furniture was old-fashioned in form, with two or three plain chairs, a deep sofa, or settle, upholstered with worn green morocco, and a small cheap table without a cover. There was a marble bust [of Tolstoy's brother Nikolay] in a niche behind the settle, and the only pictures which the room contained were a small engraved portrait of Dickens and another of Schopenhauer. It would be impossible to imagine anything plainer or simpler than the room and its contents. More evidences of wealth and luxury might be found in many a peasant's cabin in Eastern Siberia.⁹

Anna Armfeldt had asked Kennan to smuggle out a manuscript copy of Confession to her daughter Natalya in the convict mine at Kara, and he had been so shocked by what he had seen of the Russian penal system in Siberia that it turned him into a vociferous opponent of the tsarist regime. Tolstoy was consequently extremely interested to hear what he had to say. Kennan's book Siberia and the Exile System was banned from Russia along with its author as soon as it was published in 1891.

Sonya did not need to live in luxury, and she even did not mind the additional burden of having to prepare special dishes at mealtimes for her husband and the growing number of vegetarians at Yasnaya Polyana. Tanya and Masha became vegetarians like their father, and all the Tolstoyans, beginning with Chertkov, refused to eat meat. Then there were other loyal friends of Tolstoy who were vegetarians, like the painter Repin, whose colourful companion Natalya Nordman at one point promoted a diet of grass and hay.¹⁰ All of that the conventional Sonya could just about tolerate, but she did not warm to her husband's followers. 'These people who are adherents of Lev Nikolayevich's teaching are all so unlikeable! Not one normal person,' she exclaimed in her diary in August 1890.¹¹ In general, she viewed the Tolstoyans as the opposite of the svetskie (polite society) people from her own milieu, and by playing on the word svet, which means 'light' as well as 'society' and 'world', Sonya took to calling them tyomnye (dark). She noticed tyomnye Tolstoyans coming out of the woodwork as soon as illegal copies of The Gospel in Brief and Confession started circulating. Sonya made an exception initially for the highborn Chertkov, who had exquisite manners, and also the artist Nikolay Ge, who became a friend of the whole family (he died in 1894). She also tolerated Pavel Biryukov ('Posha'), who was meek and intelligent, but she found the sectarians and peasants hard to deal with, and positively recoiled from the social misfits who seemed to be drawn to her husband like magnets, and became fanatical followers, having failed to carve conventionally successful careers for themselves. Sonya recorded in her diary the knock on the door that woke them all up at four in the morning one icy January day in 1895, for example: the visitor turned out to be a 'bedraggled, flea-bitten, tyomny who was desperate to marry their daughter Tanya.¹²

Despite her feelings of distaste, Sonya had to learn to live with tyomnye Tolstoyans in their midst. One devoted early follower of her husband was a woman of her own age, Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt, an unmarried teacher at a prim Moscow girls' school. In March 1884 Maria Alexandrovna had turned up on Tolstoy's doorstep with her friend Olga Barsheva and asked him for a copy of his Gospel. When Tolstoy informed her he only had it in manuscript, she responded brightly that they would be happy to copy it. And so the two friends divided the manuscript up, and spent several evenings in Tolstoy's study becoming acquainted with his ideas. Soon Maria Alexandrovna was taken on as an assistant to Tolstoy's main copyist at that time, Alexander Ivanov. Her services were soon required, as Alexander Ivanov was an alcoholic former officer who often absconded on drinking bouts. He did very good work on the days that he was sober, but Tolstoy had to rescue him from various slums on a regular basis.¹³ Maria Alexandrovna's life changed utterly when she was won over to Tolstoy's Gospel. She had been an ardent Orthodox Christian, but she now took down her icons and replaced them with Tolstoy's portrait.¹⁴ She also resigned her teaching position, went with her friend Olga to join one of the first Tolstoyan communes down in the Caucasus, then in 1893 came back north when Olga died. By this time she wanted to be near Tolstoy, with whom she had become close friends. After settling into a tiny thatch-covered izba on Tanya Lvovna's newly inherited land, three miles away from Yasnaya Polyana, she led a model Tolstoyan life until the end of her days. Sometimes she would come up to Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy's sister was making her annual summer visit from her convent, and her skeletal frame stood in stark contrast to the rotund figure of Maria Nikolayevna, who was famously fond of eating. It was Maria Alexandrovna, with her abstemious diet of cabbage soup and grain, who somehow seemed far more like a nun.¹⁵

Maria Alexandrovna relished living like an anchorite by the sweat of her brow with the help of her vegetable patch and her cow Manechka, but there were other Tolstoyans who wanted the security of feeling they were part of an organisation. In 1893, before The Kingdom of God Is Within You was even finished, let alone copied and distributed, unfounded rumours started flying of an imminent Tolstoyan congress. Tolstoy was both amused and horrified at the idea. 'That's wonderful!' he exclaimed. 'We'll turn up to this congress and set up some kind of Salvation Army. We'll get a uniform - some hats with a cockade. Maybe they will make me a general. Masha can sew me some blue trousers.'¹⁶ Tolstoy was happy to show leadership by setting out and imparting to the world what he believed to be the truth, but he did not want actually to lead anything - the whole point was to get away from organisations. In his ideal world, in fact, there would be no organisations, yet he could not avoid a movement forming amongst those attracted to his ideas, and many of his followers were fanatics. The other unsavoury side of Tolstoyanism for Sonya was the 'militancy' with which her husband's followers clung to the doctrine of non-violence, thereby placing themselves in an openly antagonistic position with regard to the Russian government. There were inevitable unpleasant repercussions, but these only seemed to goad Tolstoy to campaign more vigorously for human rights, at both ends of the social spectrum.

One person who received Tolstoy's direct support was Prince Dmitry Khilkov, who became a key figure amongst the Tolstoyans (before he went over to the other side and became a revolutionary).¹⁷ Khilkov was a graduate of the prestigious Corps des Pages in St Petersburg, and the youngest officer to be appointed a colonel in the Russian army.¹⁸ Like Chertkov, who was four years older than him, Khilkov turned his back on a brilliant military career. By the time he resigned from the army in 1884, the experience of killing a Turkish soldier in the Russo-Turkish War while serving in a Cossack regiment, and contacts with sectarians while stationed in the Caucasus, had turned him into a pronounced pacifist, and a Christian after Tolstoy's heart. Inspired by reading Tolstoy'sWhat I Believe, he went back to his estate in Kharkov province, sold the land to his peasants for a fraction of its real value, built himself a simple farmhouse to live in, threw away his Western-style clothing and started leading a simplified, agricultural life. In 1887, when he was twenty-nine, Khilkov came to Moscow to meet Tolstoy, with whom he established an instant rapport.¹⁹ The concern Khilkov had shown for sectarians, ethnic minorities and rank and file soldiers (whose conditions had barely improved since the Crimean War) had already attracted the attention of the secret police, and their surveillance activities only intensified after he became friends with Tolstoy.

Khilkov turned his small thatched farmhouse into a local centre of Tolstoyan Christianity, and opened a library so that peasants could read the central texts in the Tolstoyan canon, which aroused hostility among landowners and clergy. Things came to a head in 1891. In March, following Khilkov's successful missionary activity in the area, Tolstoy was anathematised in Kharkov cathedral, and then in August Khilkov wrote to tell Tolstoy about his frosty encounter with Father Ioann (John) of Kronstadt, with whom he had argued about baptism.²⁰ He had been curious to set eyes on this charismatic priest when he came on a visit to Kharkov as he had attracted a large following amongst the populace, and so had acceded to his mother's request that he go and meet him, but it had not gone well. Khilkov's mother was outraged that her son had not consecrated his recent marriage in a church, or baptised his one-year-old child, thus depriving him by law of his title. In November Chief Procurator Pobedonostsev wrote to Alexander III to warn him of the dangers of the impact of Tolstoyanism on the peasantry in an area where there was already unrest. Out of the 6,000 parishioners in Khilkov's district, he wrote, only five old women were now going to church, and large numbers were refusing to enlist in the army.²¹ The authorities now moved quickly. In January 1892 Khilkov was exiled to the Caucasus, causing Tolstoy to express envy, but those feelings were tempered in October the following year. With the blessing of Father Ioann of Kronstadt, his mother arrived in the Caucasus accompanied by police officers. Princess Khilkova proceeded to remove her three-and-a-half-year-old grandson and two-year-old granddaughter from their horrified parents and take them back to St Petersburg, where she christened them without their parents' consent.²² Tolstoy wrote a letter to Alexander III to protest, and Khilkov's wife travelled to St Petersburg to petition the Tsar personally, but to no avail, despite the public outcry.

Khilkov's Tolstoyan ministry had certainly produced results. The peasant schoolteacher Evdokim Drozhzhin was rapidly converted to Tolstoyanism after meeting Khilkov in 1889, and two years later he was jailed after he refused to enlist when called up for military service. There were to be many other conscientious objectors who refused to be conscripted on religious grounds, but Tolstoy took a particular interest in Drozhzhin, and was deeply concerned when he was first kept for twelve months in solitary confinement, and then sent to serve in a disciplinary battalion in Voronezh. The conditions were truly brutal, as Chertkov discovered when he visited Drozhzhin, and he successfully campaigned to have him transferred to a regular prison, but it was too late. In January 1894, at the age of twenty-eight, Drozhzhin died of consumption at the start of his nine-year sentence. Tolstoyanism had claimed its first martyr, but there were chroniclers and hagiographers ready to spring into action, as well as secret police agents watching like hawks. In June, soon after Tolstoy's follower Evgeny Popov finished a book about Drozhzhin, his home in Moscow was searched by the police and the manuscript confiscated. A few months later the Russian press was placed under orders not to publish anything at all about Drozhzhin.²³ Popov nevertheless managed to resurrect his book from drafts that had carefully been stored elsewhere, and Tolstoy completed it by writing a foreword. There was, of course, no chance it would pass the censor in Russia, and it was published in Berlin in 1895.²⁴

The son of an impoverished noble from Perm province, Popov had joined Tolstoy's growing number of followers in 1886 when he was twenty-two. Convinced that Tolstoy could tell him about the meaning of life, he one day got on a train to Yasnaya Polyana to go and talk to him. Before long he had become a vegetarian and was tilling the land. After separating from his wealthy young wife, who did not share his new beliefs, Popov led a rather peripatetic existence, moving from one Tolstoyan colony to another, but then went to work for The Intermediary in Moscow. In 1889 Popov got to know Tolstoy better when he accompanied him on his annual three-day journey by foot from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana at the beginning of the summer. This was the third time Tolstoy had undertaken to walk the full 120 miles home. He would take with him only a small bundle, plus a notebook and pencil, so he could jot down ideas and stories he heard along the way, and would find overnight accommodation with hospitable peasants. It was his way of protesting against the intrusion of the railways into rural Russia, which had brought about mass peasant migration into the cities.

As well as working for The Intermediary, Popov also spent some time at the main headquarters of the Tolstoyan movement at Chertkov's estate in Voronezh province. In 1892 he was employed for a time as Tolstoy's copyist at Yasnaya Polyana, and assisted him in the famine relief effort at Begichevka. After next writing the book about Drozhzhin, he collaborated with Tolstoy on a Russian version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching for The Intermediary. This was a project which Tolstoy cared deeply about. Victor von Strauss had produced the first German translation of the Tao Te Ching in 1870, and this was the text which Popov translated into Russian.²⁵ Tolstoy checked over Popov's translation and wrote an introduction to them, explaining that the basic teaching in the Tao Te Ching was the same as in all great religions. Back in the 1870s he had chiselled away at his translations of Aesop's already pithy fables in order to distil their essence, and it is not hard to see why Tolstoy was drawn to Lao Tzu's lapidary insights, which accorded so much with his own hard-won beliefs:

People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes,
carrying weapons,
drinking a lot and eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money:
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
isn't the way.²⁶

Tolstoy's attraction to the religions of the Orient only increased towards the end of his life. Some people even argued that his pared-down belief system had more in common with Buddhism than with Christianity.²⁷

After translating Lao Tzu, Popov took up the cause of another Tolstoyan conscientious objector, who was about to be exiled to Siberia after serving his term in a disciplinary battalion. While visiting him at the central transit prison in Moscow in December 1894, Popov was intrigued by three men dressed half like peasants, half like Cossacks.²⁸ They were Dukhobors - 'wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit' - and they had come up from their home in the Caucasus to meet with Pyotr Verigin, who was their leader. Verigin had already spent seven years in exile in the northern province of Arkhangelsk, following disputes with other Dukhobors over his leadership, and he was now about to be sent to Berezov, in the Siberian province of Tobolsk, where he faced another seven years of exile. Popov introduced himself to the three Dukhobors, and swiftly arranged another meeting to which he could bring Tolstoy when he heard their story. It was to be a fateful encounter.

The lack of historical records makes tracing their origins difficult, but the Dukhobors seem to have emerged from disparate groups of like-minded religious dissenters in the Ukraine who were forced to settle along Russia's southern borders at some point in the eighteenth century. It was only under Nicholas I that they formed a distinct community, however, when in the 1830s they were again forcibly resettled by imperial decree in the more remote reaches of the Russian Empire's new Caucasian territories, close to the border with the Ottoman Empire. Like many peasant sectarians, the Dukhobors acquired a reputation for their abstemious, hard-working and humble way of life. Believing, like Tolstoy, that 'The Kingdom of God is Within You', they revered the sanctity of all human life, thus were opposed not only to taking up arms, but to almost every aspect of the Russian Orthodox Church, since it supported the state during warfare. This meant rejecting all rituals, sacraments, icons, clergy, sacred buildings, and also the Scriptures themselves, in favour of seeking guidance from the voice of individual conscience. The Dukhobors first came into serious conflict with the Russian government in 1887, when military conscription was introduced in the Caucasus, and the situation worsened in 1894, when all Russian citizens were required to swear allegiance to the Tsar.²⁹

Before his first meetings with the Dukhobors, Tolstoy knew very little about their beliefs, since their existence was officially frowned upon and barely documented. Tolstoy could not meet Verigin himself, who was imprisoned like a convicted criminal while awaiting his departure for Siberia, but on 9 December 1894 Popov and Biryukov accompanied him to a meeting with the three Dukhobors who had come to see Verigin off, one of whom was his brother Vasily. To his delight, Tolstoy discovered that the Dukhobor views on private property, organised religion, secular authority and non-resistance to violence were remarkably similar to his own. Verigin had already made this discovery. Even before he had started reading Tolstoy's banned religious writings (procured via contacts with political exiles in the far north) he had begun inciting Dukhobors to renounce tobacco, alchohol and the eating of meat. Now he realised that a concerted application of the principles contained in Tolstoy's writings offered an effective means for the Dukhobors to stand up against the government. He started plotting various strategies for mass resistance.³⁰

Chertkov passed through Moscow that December. He was on his way to St Petersburg where he planned to campaign for Dmitry Khilkov's children to be returned to their parents, and he persuaded Tolstoy to have his photograph taken with him and the other Tolstoyans involved with The Intermediary. As well as Popov and Biryukov, there were two other young recruits: Ivan Tregubov, yet another priest's son who had graduated as an atheist from a seminary, and Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, the son of an engineer.³¹Tolstoy's loyal daughters Tanya and Masha were put out by the covert way in which Chertkov had arranged this group portrait of five male Tolstoyans with their 'teacher', as they were used to being privy to their father's activities and were deeply involved in his work themselves. As for Sonya, it was one step too far, and as soon as she found out she marched off to the photographer's studio to collect the negatives and deface them. She then sat up until three in the morning trying to erase Tolstoy's face from the picture with one of her diamond earrings. It was fine for pupils at a school to have group photographs, she thought, but the idea of institutionalising Tolstoyanism was abhorrent to her. She felt it did not become her husband's status as a great writer to be pictured alongside such dubious people, and feared that thousands of people would want to buy copies of the photograph.³² Tolstoy acquiesced, but Chertkov later more than made up for the loss of this early group portrait by bringing an English professional photographer called Thomas Tapsell to Russia to help him take hundreds of images of the great man for posterity. Tolstoy was a vain man, and he acquiesced to that too.³³

Tolstoy had been putting the finishing touches to a new story in the month that he met the Dukhobors. 'Master and Man' (the Russian title 'Kho-zyain i rabotnik' literally means 'The Master and the Worker') is about a rich landowner who redeems his selfish, avaricious ways in the middle of a snowstorm by sacrificing his life for that of his downtrodden peasant. The news that Tolstoy was going to publish this story, for nothing, in the expensive Petersburg journal Northern Messenger (its annual subscription was thirteen roubles) provoked another outburst from Sonya, who felt betrayed and jealous, not least because the editor was a young woman. She wanted the rights to new fiction by her husband, and in the first of many over-dramatic 'suicide attempts' she ran out into the snowy street late one January night in just her dressing gown and slippers.³⁴ Peace was temporarily restored after Tolstoy brought her back into the house and agreed to her demands. Along with its appearance in Northern Messenger, his new story was published simultaneously as a supplement to the thirteenth volume of Sonya's edition of the collected works (10,000 copies sold for fifty kopecks in a matter of days), and also by The Intermediary (15,000 copies sold for less half that price in four days flat). A 'popular' edition which went on sale for three kopecks was then published and reprinted several times.³⁵

Sonya's suicide attempts were really just desperate ploys to seek attention: she was exhausted by the stress of caring for six-year-old Vanechka, who was frequently sick, and by the struggle to keep her marriage going and raise their four youngest children on her own. In the event, petty concerns about money and personal loyalties were soon pushed to one side as the Tolstoys suffered a terrible bereavement just before the story appeared in print. Days before his seventh birthday their youngest son Vanechka died of scarlet fever. This time both parents were equally devastated, as the angelic, frail Vanechka had been universally adored by everyone in the family for his preternatural goodness and his supposed likeness to his father. Tolstoy, indeed, had already begun to nurture dreams of Vanechka carrying on his work after his death. His sister Masha, who had been visiting Moscow from her convent, prayed constantly over Vanechka in his last few hours, then helped comb his long, blond hair and dress him in a white shirt after he passed away. Numb with grief, Sonya wrote to tell her sister Tanya how she had placed a small icon on Vanechka's chest, and lit the traditional candle by his head. For the next three days the nursery filled with flowers, and then came another sleigh-ride north of the city to the graveyard of the Church of St Nicholas at Pokrovskoye, to bury Vanechka next to his brother Alyosha.³⁶ 'Mama is grief-stricken,' wrote Masha to a friend. 'Her whole life was in him, she gave him all her love. Papa is the only one who can help her, he's the only one who can do that. But he is suffering terribly himself, and keeps crying all the time.' For Tolstoy, indeed, this death was on a level with that of his brother Nikolay.³⁷

The death of Vanechka was a major turning point for both his parents. Grieving for Vanechka brought them together, and Tolstoy thought about taking Sonya that summer to Germany for a rest (she had never been abroad, and had a longing to hear Wagner's Ringcycle at Bayreuth), but that plan had to be shelved when it became clear that they would probably not be allowed to return to Russia.³⁸ Sonya stopped writing in her diary for over a year, and never really recovered. Tolstoy started making notes in his diary about how he wanted his own death to be handled, which would ideally lead to him being buried in the most humble cemetery possible, with no flowers, preferably no priest, and definitely no obituaries.³⁹ He also employed a classic displacement technique to deal with his grief: he learned to ride a bicycle.

The British-made 'safety' bicycle, which was the first to replace the penny-farthing and become commercially successful, was a newfangled form of transport just coming into vogue in Russia. Tolstoy equipped himself with a 'Rover' (a popular model first developed in Coventry in 1885 by the inventor of the modern bicycle John Starley) and went off to have lessons. These were held in the Moscow Manège, the long classical building in front of the Kremlin used for parades, where he had once learned to fence. Tolstoy acquired a reputation for riding alone, apart from the other trainee cyclists, with an intense look of concentration on his face. Once he had demonstrated his proficiency to the police and acquired a licence, he was free to pedal round the city. The high-minded Evgeny Popov disapproved of his mentor indulging in such a frivolous activity, but Tolstoy saw cycling as a kind of 'innocent holy foolishness', and did not care what people thought of a sixty-six-year-old man on wheels.⁴⁰ That summer Tolstoy took his bicycle to Yasnaya Polyana and exhausted himself by going on rides all the way to Tula and back.⁴¹ As with all his enthusiasms, cycling became an obsessive passion for a while, and Tolstoy even managed to persuade the pianist and composer Sergey Taneyev to take it up. Taneyev, then thirty-nine, was a family acquaintance who sometimes went ice-skating with Tolstoy.⁴² Apart from being rather portly, he was extremely short-sighted and slightly cross-eyed, and did not like going out at night without a chaperone for fear of stumbling, but he was very game. Taneyev was also very game about playing the piano for Sonya. It was in music rather than sport that Sonya sought consolation from her grief.

10. Tolstoy skating in the back garden of his Moscow house in 1898. Photograph taken by Sonya Tolstaya.

Since her sister was not coming to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1895, Sonya offered the wing to Taneyev for a token rent, and in June he arrived to spend a month, accompanied by his wrinkled old nanny Pelageya Vasilievna and his seventeen-year-old composition pupil Yury Pomerantsev.⁴³ Taneyev filled the house with exquisite piano music during his stay, and unwittingly became an emotional crutch for Sonya while she mourned the loss of Vanechka. Music acted as a kind of tranquilliser for her. Tolstoy had been affectionate and caring that spring, but he soon became preoccupied again with his missionary activities. It was Chertkov he wanted to spend time with. They had been exchanging frequent and sometimes very long letters, but had been able to meet only rarely during the first decade of their friendship, and usually only when Chertkov was passing through Moscow on the way from his estate to St Petersburg or vice versa. In 1894 all that had changed when Tolstoy found a dacha near Yasnaya Polyana for Chertkov, his frail wife and five-year-old son Vladimir (also known as Dima, like his father). It meant Tolstoy and Chertkov could spend finally long summer days in uninterrupted conversation. The Chertkovs returned to spend their summers in the house in 1895 and in 1896, so it is not surprising that Sonya found Tolstoy's emotional absence hard to bear. Taneyev was a placid, unobtrusive sort of person, completely wrapped up in his music, but he provided a sympathetic ear to Sonya, who was clearly very lonely.

To begin with, Tolstoy did not mind - he and Taneyev played a lot of chess together, and he certainly enjoyed the composer's peerless performances of the classical repertoire of which he was so fond. Taneyev had been a pupil of Tchaikovsky and Nikolay Rubinstein, and in 1875, at the age ofjust nineteen, had been the first Moscow Conservatoire student to graduate with the Gold Medal in composition and performance. That year he had been the soloist in the premiere of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, and in 1878 replaced him as teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire (his many pupils would include Scriabin and Rachmaninov). Tolstoy even shared an enthusiasm for Esperanto with Taneyev, who was unusual in being one of Russia's first speakers of the language - he wrote songs with lyrics in Esperanto, as well his frankly rather unexciting diary entries. Tolstoy had nothing but praise for Esperanto's inventor Lazar Zamenhof and the book he published in 1887: Lingvo inter-nada. Antaüparolo kaj plena lernolibro(International Language. Foreword and Complete Textbook).

A native Russian speaker from Bialystok in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, Zamenhof published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful), a name which expressed his dream that Esperanto would bring peace and understanding between peoples all over the world. Tolstoy expressed his support for the language in a letter he wrote to some Esperanto enthusiasts in early 1894. He told them he had received Zamenhof's book soon after it was published, and claimed to have learned to read the language fluently in two hours. This gave the resourceful Tolstoyans the idea of using the journal Esperantisto as an ideological platform. In May 1895 Esperantisto published translations of both Tolstoy's 1894 letter and his article 'On Reason in Religion'. The Russian government reacted by promptly banning any further imports of the journal from its editorial base in Nuremberg. By August Esperantisto was forced to close, since three-quarters of its 600 subscribers lived in Russia. Amongst them must have been Taneyev.⁴⁴

A shared love of Esperanto was unfortunately not sufficient to prevent Tolstoy developing absurd feelings of jealousy towards the hapless Taneyev, despite the fact that the composer was a confirmed bachelor. Taneyev was clearly extremely fond of his young pupil 'Yusha' Pomerantsev, who studied harmony and counterpoint with him for several years, and was frequently by his side, but the composer's lifelong companion was his old nanny. As one former student later commented, Taneyev simultaneously experienced fear, respect and contempt towards 'ladies', their appearance at his home invariably throwing him off kilter and making him less 'straightforward and natural'.⁴⁵ Taneyev's ecstatic comments about bicycling, moreover ('I think that even the experiences of newly-weds on their wedding night cannot compare with the sensations experienced by a bicyclist'), ought to have been enough to put Tolstoy's mind at rest.⁴⁶ Some might even argue that Tolstoy should have been indulgent of his wife simply for sitting through the premiere of Taneyev's interminably long opera The Oresteia at the Mariinsky Theatre in October 1895 (which rapidly disappeared from the repertoire after he refused to cut it).

Taneyev was hardly a surrogate husband, more someone for Sonya to talk to, particularly about the day-to-day matters concerning life at Yasnaya Polyana which Tolstoy had washed his hands of years before. Tolstoy might have been magnanimous, even if he did think his wife was making a fool of herself by fawning on a man much younger than herself. After all, he was doing the same now that Chertkov had replaced her as the chief object of his affections and confidences. Later on, Sonya would actually accuse her husband of having a homosexual relationship with Chertkov.⁴⁷ It is a charge that cannot be substantiated, although the tone of many of Tolstoy's letters to his younger friend just after he was deported to England is sometimes that of an infatuated adolescent, and his affection was at least reciprocated with an obsessive devotion on Chertkov's part.⁴⁸

Sonya's dependency on music after Vanechka's death stimulated Tolstoy to reflect further on questions of aesthetics which would be fully articulated a few years later in his treatise What is Art?, but his central mission in the 1890s was as a non-violent Christian soldier fighting for truth and justice. It was extremely gratifying to him that his ideas were now beginning to bear fruit abroad. When a British businessman called John Kenworthy had stumbled across Tolstoy's writings in America in 1890, for example, they had completely changed his life. He abandoned all desire to settle in America and make money, and returned home to England to live and work amongst the poor in the East End of London. In 1893 he published a book entitled Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics. To the vegetarian pacifist Ernest Crosby, a reforming American lawyer and Tolstoyan, Kenworthy described the day in March 1894 when he received his first letter from Tolstoy as the happiest in his life.⁴⁹ For his part, Tolstoy told Kenworthy that it was a 'joy' to be in communication with him, and that he had not only read his book, but had commissioned a Russian translation.⁵⁰

In May 1894 Kenworthy became honorary pastor of the newly established 'Croydon Brotherhood Church', a Tolstoy-inspired organisation whose congregation, according to one member of its committee of management, included every possible kind of crank, including 'Atheists, Spiritualists, Individualists, Communists, Anarchists, ordinary politicians, Vegetarians, Anti-vivisectionists and Anti-vaccinationists'.⁵¹ In October that year Tolstoy acquired another British follower when he received a letter from Arthur St John, a former officer in the Inniskilling Fusiliers in his early thirties. St John wrote to tell Tolstoy that after reading The Kingdom of God Is Within You while returning from Burma on sick leave, he had left the army and joined an agricultural community. He commented later about the power of Tolstoy's inspiration:

It had so tremendous an effect upon me that within two or three months I had given up my commission and found myself launched out in the world with no job and no capabilities for any work other than soldiering. I was clear about very little but among the little was Tolstoy's dictum that if you want to work for peace there was no use in preparing for war.⁵²

All across Europe, Tolstoy's ideas were falling on fertile ground. In February 1895 Tolstoy heard about a twenty-six-year-old Slovak doctor called Albert Skarvan who had been so influenced by his religious writings that he had become a conscientious objector. When Skarvan refused to complete his military service, the Habsburg authorities first had him examined in a Viennese psychiatric ward, and then imprisoned him in a military jail.⁵³ Kenworthy, St John and Skarvan would all soon become actively involved in supporting Tolstoy's endeavours.

Tolstoy also had an ardent supporter in Russian-occupied Finland, where the nationalist movement was steadily gaining momentum in the face of recent militant Russification. Like his composer brother-in-law Jean Sibelius, Arvid Jarnefelt was committed to Finnish independence, but his devotion to Tolstoy was greater. A lawyer who had spent two years studying Russian in Moscow in the late 1880s, Jarnefelt first encountered Tolstoy's writings in 1891 while working in the civil service in Helsinki. Against his family's wishes, he abandoned his profession to become a full-time farmer, writer and cobbler, and even ceased sexual relations with his wife. Jarnefelt translated some of Tolstoy's works into Finnish, and preached his ideas of land reform through his own writings.⁵⁴ In February 1895 Tolstoy wrote to thank him for sending him his recently completed autobiographical novella My Awakening (Heráámiseni), and in particular the chapter he had helpfully translated into Russian which discusses why he could not become a judge.⁵⁵

It gladdened Tolstoy's heart to develop contacts with like-minded Christian thinkers abroad, but his main concern was the plight of fellow-brethren in Russia who were persecuted for their beliefs. In May 1895, a few months after Tolstoy had first met with the Dukhobors in Moscow, Chertkov received a letter from the exiled Dmitry Khilkov in the Caucasus, who wrote to tell him that eleven Dukhobor soldiers had refused to go on Easter parade, and no longer wanted to continue their military service.⁵⁶ In June there was a mass burning of arms by Verigin's followers in protest against conscription. A ferocious wave of repressions followed. About 200 Dukhobors were jailed, while aggressive Cossacks were billeted to their villages and their families dispersed amongst Tatar, Armenian and Georgian communities. Tolstoy decided to take action. On 23 October his letter to John Kenworthy about the Dukhobors was published in The Times in London, along with an edited version of an account of what had been going on written by Biryukov, who had travelled down to the Caucasus to investigate.⁵⁷ That autumn Tolstoy wrote his first letter to Pyotr Verigin, and Chertkov began collecting materials documenting government persecution of the Dukhobors.

After deciding to relinquish the management of The Intermediary in 1893, Chertkov threw his energies into collecting materials on the persecution of sectarians in Russia. By 1902 he had a file consisting of 4,000 documents.⁵⁸ He also wanted to devote himself to the dissemination and preservation of Tolstoy's literary legacy; this, in fact, became his life's work. Since 1889 he had been systematically copying everything Tolstoy wrote and maintaining an archive of Tolstoy's new manuscripts, which were dutifully sent on from Yasnaya Polyana. Now he wanted to publish all of Tolstoy's banned works in England. He had been deliberating about whether to move there with his family, but shelved that idea, to Tolstoy's relief, when he heard that John Kenworthy had decided to relinquish the pastorship of the Brotherhood Church in order to found the Brotherhood Publishing Company. Chertkov invited him to Moscow. At their meeting in December Kenworthy was given the rights to publish Tolstoy's new work in English, and in February 1896 the members of his community sent Tolstoy a letter of support to the Dukhobors in the Caucasus which they asked him to pass on. It was in 1896 that Tolstoy began writing his magnificent short novel Hadji Murat, which he continued to work on until 1904 and which remained unpublished at his death. It is set in the Caucasus, during Russia's war with the Chechen and Daghestani highlanders. Although the story fictionalises an historical event - the capture by the Russians in 1851 of Hadji Murat, one of Imam Shamil's former henchmen - and draws on Tolstoy's own experiences fighting in the Caucasus, the story is also coloured philosophically by his new Christian beliefs, and inspired by the Dukhobors' heroic resistance.

The Dukhobors continued to prey on Tolstoy's mind throughout 1896 - a year in which Nicholas II was finally crowned in Moscow, and thousands were crushed to death or injured during the celebrations which followed. The combination of this horrifying spectacle with the magnificent splendour of state pageantry seemed eloquently to sum up the extremes of Russia's autocratic regime. In December that year Chertkov completed a direct appeal for help for the Dukhobors with the assistance of Biryukov and Tregubov. They published it in England in early 1897 together with an afterword by Tolstoy. Chertkov then went on to Petersburg to start active campaigning, but the Russian government intervened. Before Nicholas II's coronation, Pobedonostsev had despaired of Tolstoy in a letter:

It's terrible to think of Lev Tolstoy, as he's spreading a terrible infection of anarchy and atheism throughout the whole of Russia! It's as if he was possessed by the devil - but what should be done with him? Obviously he is an enemy of the church, an enemy of any government and any civil order. There is a suggestion in the Synod that he be excommunicated from the church to avoid any doubts and confusion amongst the people, who see and hear that the entire intelligentsia worships Tolstoy. Probably, after the coronation the question will arise: what should be done with Tolstoy?⁵⁹

The moment had arrived to answer that question. From this point until Tolstoy's death thirteen years later, the Russian government deployed an effective strategy of leaving him alone, while taking punitive action against his followers. On 5 February Chertkov's Petersburg apartment was searched, and he was informed he was to be sent into exile for illicit involvement in the affairs of sectarians, and for spreading subversive propaganda. His powerful connections had not given him complete immunity, but they did ensure he was not sent to Siberia. Vladimir Ulyanov, a lawyer turned revolutionary from Simbirsk, was not so lucky. He had been languishing in a Petersburg jail for conspiring against Alexander III, and that same month was exiled to a village on the River Yenisey, south of Krasnoyarsk (he later renamed himself Lenin, after the Lena, another mighty Siberian river). Chertkov had the much gentler option of going to England, a country he loved. Biryukov and Tregubov were also dealt with leniently: they were exiled to villages in the empire's Baltic territories.

Accompanied by Sonya, Tolstoy came to St Petersburg to see his friends off - he had not been in the city since 1880, and it would be his last ever visit to the capital. The secret police had a field day, filing detailed reports on his every movement, including to the barber on Panteleimon Street where he had his beard trimmed. They even embellished their despatches with loving details about Tolstoy's couture (a short coat tied with a grey belt, dark trousers and a dark grey knitted hat one day, and a heavy coat with a lambswool collar, dark grey trousers and a grey felt hat the next).⁶⁰ Tolstoy was mobbed everywhere he went, and given a huge ovation at the railway station when he left to go back to Moscow. There were only two people he did not enjoy seeing. One was Chertkov's indomitable mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna, who loathed him for leading her only son astray (she also thought he was imbued with the spirit of the Antichrist for not acknowledging Christ's resurrection).⁶¹ The other was his implacably devout old relative Alexandra Andreyevna, no longer his dear friend and confidante Alexandrine.⁶²

Tolstoy was abandoned by another of his devoted followers in 1897: six months after Chertkov's departure, his daughter Masha suddenly announced that she was to be married. She was twenty-six, and had finally decided to insist on some independence after several potential engagements had been thwarted by her father.⁶³ Tolstoy was no happier about Masha marrying Nikolay Obolensky, the son of his niece Liza, who was a feckless youth without an income. He noted in his diary that seeing Masha get married to someone like Obolensky was like watching a thoroughbred horse being ruined by being made to carry water. He was also not happy about the fact that Masha now reneged on her earlier principles and demanded her share of the family property. But most importantly, Masha had been his faithful helpmeet - meek, quiet and always willing to help, so her departure from Yasnaya Polyana, even though she did not go far, left a huge hole in her father's life. It was Masha he loved best of all amongst his children.

Soon after Chertkov's departure, Masha's elder sister Tanya also began to loosen her ties to her father by beginning an affair with a man fourteen years older than her who had six children. She felt she had sullied herself and was overwhelmed by guilt. Mikhail Sukhotin was unhappily married to a woman who was gravely ill, and who in fact died later that year, but that did not make it easier. Tanya's previous romantic life had also been quite unhappy. It was difficult living in a house where all the attention was directed at her father. Everything revolved around him, and Tanya felt aggrieved that he gave his time to just about anyone who turned up to see him, but not to his own daughter.⁶⁴ She had been devastated in October 1886 when Chertkov, at the age of thirty-two, had married Anna Diterikhs, a general's daughter from St Petersburg. Anna Konstantinovna, or Galya, as she was universally known, was twenty-seven (Tanya was then twenty-two), and not only was she educated, having been one of the first graduates of the university courses that had finally been opened to women in 1878, but also beautiful - Yaroshenko had painted her portrait in his famous 1883 painting The Student. Galya was also earnest and principled, and completely committed to Tolstoyan ideals. It was not that Tanya was in love with Chertkov, but she admired him, and she felt dejected to be always on the sidelines, never quite beautiful, clever or noble enough to take centre stage.⁶⁵ Tanya had also been very drawn to the handsome Evgeny Popov while he was living at Yasnaya Polyana in 1894. He was exactly her age, but he was still technically married, and even less eligible in her parents' eyes than Pavel Biryukov, the Tolstoyan who had courted Masha.⁶⁶ Following the lead of her parents, who still read each other's diaries manically, Tanya showed Popov her diaries, and received his to read. Tolstoy also got to see his daughter's diary, and then he put a stop to the relationship.⁶⁷ He and Sonya were no happier about Tanya's liaison with Misha Sukhotin, but it led to a happy marriage.

Tanya had been a peacemaker for her parents, and she was keenly missed. In the summer of 1897 Masha lamented in a letter to Galya Chertkova that there was a sadness at Yasnaya Polyana, with each person dealing with their own issues, and feeling very lonely.⁶⁸ There certainly seemed to be many problems in both generations of the Tolstoy family that year. Sergey's marriage had gone wrong soon after he married in 1895, and in 1897 his wife divorced him after their son was born.⁶⁹ Ilya now had three children (a fourth had died before his second birthday), his wife Sonya was expecting another, and he was always short of money. Lev junior had recovered from the nervous breakdown he had suffered after the famine-relief work out in Samara, and had married the daughter of the Swedish doctor who had cured him in Stockholm, but, like most of his brothers, he was fanatically opposed to his father's views. After he and his wife moved into the wing at Yasnaya Polyana, there had been many bitter rows with Lev senior. The situation with the three youngest children was not much better. Andrey, who turned twenty in 1897, had been expelled from school for tearing up a picture of Nicholas II, and was leading a dissipated life. He was already a notorious womaniser, first angering his father by wanting to marry a peasant girl from Yasnaya Polyana whom he had become involved with at the age of fifteen, then absconding to the Caucasus where he fell in love with a Georgian princess, who in due course was also unceremoniously dropped.⁷⁰Andrey constantly ran up large debts, and expected his mother to bail him out. Eighteen-year-old Misha, still at school in Moscow, was suffering teenage angst, and Alexandra (Sasha), who turned thirteen in 1897, had turned into a tomboy with an unwavering hostility towards her mother. This was hardly surprising as Sonya had neglected her youngest daughter from the moment she was born.

There were also problems over at Pirogovo. To the horror of Tolstoy's brother Sergey, whose way of life was very ancien régime, despite his unconventional marriage, both his daughters had become fervent Tolstoyans. In 1897 Varya became the common-law wife of Vladimir Vasiliev, who was one of Sergey's peasants, and she left home. Her elder sister Vera was also a free spirit who shocked her father by having a child out of wedlock a couple of years later with Abdurashid Sarafov, a Bashkir who had come to Pirogovo to provide them with koumiss.⁷¹ Tolstoy felt very guilty. In 1897 Sonya's strange obsession with Taneyev and his playing showed no sign of abating, and Tolstoy yearned again to leave home. At one point he got as far as writing a farewell letter to Sonya, but ended up stuffing it down the back of a chair after they made up.⁷² Sonya agreed not to invite Taneyev to Yasnaya Polyana again, and Tolstoy channelled his feelings about music, and what he regarded as its dangerous powers, on to the page. The product was his iconoclastic treatise What is Art?, which he had been thinking about writing ever since his daughter Tanya had become a student at the Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1881.

What is Art? is of a piece with Tolstoy's religious writings, in that it promotes the sort of Christian art to which he himself aspired. Art for Tolstoy was the ability to communicate universal feelings of brotherly love to the widest possible audience. Everything else is made the subject of condemnation as 'counterfeit art', namely:

all novels and poems which transmit ecclesiastical or patriotic feelings, and also exclusive feelings pertaining only to the class of the idle rich, such as aristocratic honour, satiety, spleen, pessimism, and refined and vicious feelings flowing from sex-love - quite incomprehensible to the great majority of mankind.

In painting we must similarly place in the class of bad art all the Church, patriotic, and exclusive pictures; all the pictures representing the amusements and allurements of a rich and idle life; all the so-called symbolic pictures, in which the very meaning of the symbol is comprehensible only to the people of a certain circle; and, above all, pictures with voluptuous subjects - all that odious female nudity which fills all the exhibitions and galleries. And to this class belongs almost all the chamber and opera music of our times, beginning especially with Beethoven (Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner) - by its subject-matter devoted to the expression of feelings accessible only to people who have developed in themselves an unhealthy, nervous irritation evoked by this exclusive, artificial, and complex music...⁷³

Into the category of 'counterfeit art' falls most of modern Western culture, deplored by Tolstoy as degenerate and elitist, not to mention all the fiction he himself wrote before he became an overtly Christian artist (such as the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina).

Looking back over the trajectory of Tolstoy's career, it is possible to see that he took pains to transform himself into a different kind of artist long before his religious 'conversion' at the end of the 1870s. The love and care he invested in his ABC books is testament to his desire to simplify his artistic expression, just as the distress and discomfort he experienced writing Anna Karenina is witness to the pangs of conscience provoked by his return to writing for an educated audience. Tolstoy was never less than a consummate artist, however. The simplicity of the message conveyed by his late masterpiece The Death of Ivan Ilyich belies the sophisticated means with which the story is constructed on both the narrative and thematic levels, and his hard-won clarity exerted a huge impact on younger writers like Chekhov, whose linguistic register is deliberately unpretentious and straightforward. Tolstoy certainly recognised Chekhov as a major artist - they had warmed to each other at their first meeting, when Chekhov visited Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1895 (stealing Tanya's heart, before Sonya nipped the development of any romantic feelings in the bud).⁷⁴ All the same, Tolstoy's impossibly narrow criteria meant that most of Chekhov's greatest stories (and all his plays) failed to make the grade as true art.

Of all the arts, Tolstoy regarded music as the most powerful, and also the most dangerous. He was a sentimental man, often reduced to tears by his favourite pieces, and it was probably his inability to control his emotional reactions to music as much as his moral scruples which made him condemn much of it. There is a link here, of course, to Tolstoy's punitive attitude to female sensuality, which also exerted a hypnotic hold over him, and which he also censured on moral grounds in works like The Kreutzer Sonata.The writer D. H. Lawrence, for one, was incensed that the vibrant, warm-hearted Anna Karenina had to fall victim to Tolstoy's didactic urge and be essentially punished for her sexuality. As someone who in 1912 himself eloped with a married woman who had three children, Lawrence took strong exception to the idea that Tolstoy's admirably brave and passionate heroine should have to pay for committing adultery by committing suicide.⁷⁵ Similarly, Tolstoy seemed to find it easier to deal with the 'terrible power' of music by dismissing it.⁷⁶

There was always a lot of music at Yasnaya Polyana, and the Becker concert grand in the main drawing room was at some point joined by a second, smaller model made by the same firm, which was reputed to be the best in Russia. (Jakob Becker, a German immigrant, had set up his piano manufacturing business in St Petersburg in 1841.) Both Tolstoy and his sister Masha were keen pianists who sometimes played for hours at a stretch (Sergey Tolstoy remembered his father sometimes playing until one in the morning in the 1870s while he was growing up), while Sonya also played, and her sister Tanya had a fine soprano voice. Of the Tolstoy children, Sergey and Misha were musically the most talented. Sergey went on to become a respected composer and ethnomusicologist who collaborated with the Indian Sufi musician and philosopher Inayat Khan, and he taught at the Moscow Conservatoire in the late 1930s. Misha was an accomplished pianist and violinist.

Apart from the family's amateur music-making (which involved lots of duets), there were also impromptu concerts given by the professional musicians who came to visit Yasnaya Polyana and the house in Moscow. These increased as Tolstoy grew more famous. Visitors ranged from the legendary Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who performed Rameau, to Boris Troyanovsky, the first great virtuoso balalaika player, whose repertoire consisted mostly of Russian folk tunes. Tolstoy personally invited this 'Russian Paganini' to Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1909, shortly before he played for Queen Alexandra at Windsor Castle. The opera singers Nikolay and Medea Figner came up to Yasnaya Polyana from their nearby dacha on a number of occasions and bewitched the local peasants with their powerful voices, while one winter's evening Shaliapin and Rachmaninov turned up to perform at the Moscow house. The musician to whom Tolstoy became closest, despite the almost fifty years difference between their ages, was the pianist Alexander Goldenweiser, whom he got to know in 1897. Goldenweiser often played Tolstoy's favourite Chopin pieces, and later became a trusted friend of Chertkov - the memoirs he began publishing in 1922 are heavily biased against Sonya.

Even Goldenweiser had to admit that Tolstoy was a dilettante when it came to music.⁷⁷ Tolstoy liked folk music and gypsy music, and most of Haydn, but otherwise was very selective about approving works by the other major western European composers. According to his son Sergey, Tolstoy liked Mozart's symphonies, some of his sonatas and a few of his arias, and he liked certain early Beethoven sonatas (definitely none of the late works). He liked some of Schumann's piano pieces and the Dichterliebe,one of Schubert's impromptus, and a handful of his Lieder. Otherwise his favourite composer, despite his general animus towards elite Western culture, was by far and away Chopin, which is somewhat ironic given that he was the salon musician par excellence.⁷⁸Tolstoy certainly did not like Taneyev's own music, but then there was barely any contemporary music he had time for, Russian or otherwise. He professed to being choked by the news of Tchaikovsky's untimely death in October 1893, but he had not always been very complimentary about his music.

They had met in 1876 at the Moscow Conservatoire at Tolstoy's express insistence. Tchaikovsky was very flattered that Tolstoy wanted to meet him (he was still at a relatively early stage of his career) but he was a very retiring man, and found the one serious conversation they had very onerous. It was not just that he was constantly terrified the novelist's penetrating gaze would bore straight into the 'innermost recesses' of his soul, but that he also did not enjoy being lectured at about music. He recounted the gruesome experience afterwards in a letter:

[N]o sooner had we met than he straightaway started expounding his views on music. According to him Beethoven lacked talent. And that was his starting point. So, this great writer, this brilliant student of human nature began, in a tone of the utmost conviction, by delivering himself of an observation which was both fatuous and offensive to every musician. What is one to do in circumstances such as this? Argue?...Although my acquaintance with Tolstoy has convinced me that he is a somewhat paradoxical, but good and straightforward man, even, in his own way, sensitive to music, all the same, my acquaintance with him, as with anyone, has brought me nothing but weariness and torment.

The meeting was followed by an evening of chamber music put on in Tolstoy's honour, which included a performance of Tchaikovsky's First Quartet, op. 11, written in 1871. The fabled andante cantabile of its second movement is based on a Russian folk tune which Tchaikovsky had heard a carpenter sing while he was composing at his sister's house in Ukraine, and it brought tears to Tolstoy's eyes. That, at least, Tchaikovsky found touching.⁷⁹

Tolstoy went to very few public musical performances, so his knowledge of, say, Mozart's symphonies mostly came from four-hand piano arrangements. His antipathy to the artificial conventions of opera, meanwhile, was developed at an early age (and expressed through his faux-naive account of Natasha's night at the opera in War and Peace, which is seen as if through her eyes). Tolstoy even exhorted Tchaikovsky to abandon writing operas,⁸⁰ so his response to the performance of Wagner's Siegfried that he went to at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1896 was perhaps entirely predictable. Tolstoy writes more about Wagner than any other artist in What is Art? Criticism of the performance of Siegfried, and of Wagnerian opera, takes up an entire chapter. Taneyev shared a box with the Tolstoys at the performance they attended on 18 April 1896, and although he liked Wagner no more than Tolstoy, he was heartily ridiculed for following with a score and listening seriously.⁸¹ Tolstoy arrived late, and walked out before the end.

As with his analysis of Metropolitan Makary's Orthodox Dogmatic Theology back in 1880, Tolstoy was very parti pris when it came to analysing Wagner's Siegfried - in both cases he took two isolated works out of context as exemplary of the whole, the easier to demolish them. Siegfried is the third part of a tetralogy, and by common consent the least engaging part of The Ring, so was a surprising repertoire choice for the sleepy Bolshoi Theatre in 1894, several years before even the Mariinsky, Imperial Russia's premier opera house, had staged any of Wagner's music dramas - works which place special demands both on singers and orchestra. The Mariinsky would finally complete a distinguished Ring cycle in 1907, but this Bolshoi Siegfried, sung in Russian, while a valiant effort, left a lot to be desired. Attendance at one of the two isolated revival performances in April 1896 was hardly the appropriate basis for a general assessment of Wagnerian art.⁸²

Tolstoy had more or less built an entire artistic and religious edifice on the foundation of one aspect of Christianity (the Sermon on the Mount), and although he can be forgiven for not reading Wagner's ponderous aesthetic writings, here was a classic case of him wilfully refusing to consider all the dimensions of a structure in his path that did not conform to his specifications in the rush to tear it down. Although Wagner and Tolstoy were in certain important respects poles apart (the composer's bombast and love of luxury spring to mind), there are also some intriguing parallels between them. Under the influence of Schopenhauer both formulated a religious vision based on a highly idiosyncratic theology of redemptive love which had little in common with traditional Christianity.⁸³ Redemption can be attained only by renouncing eros and practising compassion or agape, the word for love used in the New Testament: such are the lessons of Wagner's last work Parsifal and all of Tolstoy's late works from The Death of Ivan Ilyichonwards. Only love can redeem mankind and bring about a state where human beings can be at peace with themselves and with each other. Thomas Mann was quite correct when he wrote in 1933 that the pattern of Tolstoy's artistic career was identical to that of Wagner, for in both cases, everything in their later oeuvre was prefigured in their earlier works.⁸⁴ For all its enthralling narrative, for example, War and Peace is ultimately about sin (separation from God, and the absence of human relatedness) and redemption (the restoration of love), as can be seen by following Natasha Rostova's spiritual journey.

Mann's comparison of the consistency of Wagner's artistic evolution with that of Tolstoy is instructive, for both Wagner and Tolstoy came to distinguish the simple religion of love and compassion for the poor and oppressed that Jesus Christ had founded from the deforming edifice of the Christian church (it is striking that they both made a serious study of Renan's Life of Jesus in 1878). They both wished to revive the spiritual essence of Christianity by removing its superstitious elements and the Old Testament notion of a vengeful God in order to create a purer and more practical religion. And the pacifism and vegetarianism both espoused in their final years went hand in hand with their views on the regeneration of society and a corresponding desire to simplify their aesthetic style. Before he died in 1883, Wagner came to see vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists as the harbingers of cultural renewal, and, ever the Romantic idealist, he hoped that through the medium of religious art (specifically music, his kind of music) a culture of compassion would replace the contemporary 'civilisation' of power and aggression. Tolstoy came to the same conclusions, but naturally the religious art he had in mind was primarily of the verbal kind. Both Wagner and Tolstoy were anxious for the rest of the world to gain insight into Jesus' radical idea that responding to violence with more violence can only lead to the further desecration of nature.

Tolstoy's deliberations in What is Art? were the fruit of long reflection and characteristically intense study, but were not at all objective, and out of step with the age in which he lived. As the age of modernism dawned, Tolstoy himself was now an anomaly as an artist. It was in 1896, after all, that Chekhov's Seagull was first performed, a play which Tolstoy thought was complete rubbish. In his pointed comparison of 'new' and 'old' art in the play, Chekhov offers subtle comments of his own on the question of 'What is art?', but typically refuses to be partisan. Like his stories, his great plays stand on the cusp of a new aesthetic sensibility, indebted on the one hand to the legacy of Tolstoy's generation, but also heralding things to come. Tolstoy was still alive as Russian artists began to become leaders of the European avant-garde, and he died only three years before the Futurists declared in their manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste that they wished to throw 'Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc. etc.' overboard from the ship of modernity.

Tolstoy's chaotic publishing habits had not improved over the course of his career; indeed, they became more chaotic in his last years when different versions of his works appeared in Russia and England. Apart from the problems with negotiating censors, Tolstoy continually revised his manuscripts, and then his proofs, and he also continually changed his mind about where and how he wanted his works to appear in print. This did not make it easy for his editors and translators, and that was certainly the case withWhat is Art?, the first English edition of which was prepared by Aylmer Maude, an important figure in anglophone Tolstoy studies. Maude was the son of an Ipswich vicar and a Quaker mother, and had moved to Moscow in the early 1870s when he was sixteen years old. While he was working as a manager of the Russian Carpet Company, he married Louise Shanks, who was also English but born in Russia, and later they pooled their considerable linguistic resources to become distinguished translators of Tolstoy's writings. Maude had fallen under Tolstoy's spell after first meeting him in 1888, and their conversations in the 1890s led him to the conclusion that he could not spend his life selling carpets. In 1897, when the Maudes moved back to London, they stayed first at the Brotherhood Church in Croydon, as Chertkov's family had done earlier that year, and then followed them to Purleigh, near Maldon in Essex, where the first English Tolstoyan colony had been set up the year before.

In 1896 the colony consisted of just three men, all anxious to chase the utopian dream of living off the plot of land that had been bought by the more affluent members of the Brotherhood Church, but their number had already risen to fifteen by the end of 1897, and there were a further thirty-five or so like-minded people living nearby. The Maudes contributed generously by donating two cows, providing meals and holding concerts at their farmhouse. It was in Essex that Aylmer Maude completed his translation ofWhat is Art?, which was no small feat, as he himself has described in the biography of Tolstoy he started publishing in 1908:

As proof followed proof, each covered with fresh alterations, excisions, and additions, often very illegibly written, it required the closest attention to keep the text correct and to discriminate between changes made voluntarily, and changes made for the Censor which I was to disregard [for the English edition].⁸⁵

Maude sent Tolstoy twenty-three long letters with detailed queries as he worked his way painstakingly through the text, which was finally published in full in 1898. The socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw, a didactic writer like Tolstoy who would enter into correspondence with him in his last years, was almost the only critic to write an enthusiastic review in England. There was a certain degree of mutual admiration between the two, but Tolstoy later chided Shaw for a lack of seriousness.⁸⁶ In Russia most people shared the view about What is Art? expressed by the artist Isaak Levitan, who described it in a letter to his friend Chekhov in Nice as brilliant and ridiculous at the same time. Five thousand copies were sold in the first week.⁸⁷

Tolstoy was glad to get aesthetics out of the way, as his major project in 1898 was to help persecuted sectarians. In 1897 some Molokans came from Samara to ask for his help and advice: police had raided their villages late at night and taken away their children in order to bring them up in the Orthodox faith at an orphanage. Tolstoy wrote a lengthy letter to Nicholas II, and then a few months later wrote again when there was no response. His second letter was also greeted with silence, as was the letter he published in the St Petersburg Gazette that October. The Molokan children were returned to their parents only after Tolstoy's daughter Tanya succeeded in gaining an audience with Pobedonostsev in January 1898.⁸⁸ That left Tolstoy free to concentrate all his energies on the mission to help the Dukhobors, who finally learned that month that they were going to be allowed to settle abroad. Tolstoy had been tinkering since 1889 with a new novel, and this news gave him the impetus to finish it. He now decided he would make an exception and sell the rights, so that he could raise money to help pay for the Dukhobors to emigrate. As it turned out later, the funds would go to pay their passage to Canada, the country which expressed a willingness to receive them.

Resurrection, as the novel came to be called, drew on a story Tolstoy had heard from a lawyer friend. A nobleman appointed as a jury member had recognised a defendant on trial for theft as a poor woman he had once seduced, and been overcome with remorse. When she was sentenced to exile in Siberia, he offered to marry her, but she had died before he could atone for his sins. Hearing the story aroused guilty feelings in Tolstoy, who could not help but remember having taken advantage of his sister's servant girl Gasha Trubetskaya when he was a young man. He now combined the story he had heard from his lawyer friend with that of his own spiritual journey. Accordingly, the central character Prince Nekhlyudov breaks with his former life once he recognises in court his aunt's former peasant girl Katyusha Maslova, whom he once callously seduced. After she is sentenced to hard labour in Siberia through a miscarriage of justice, Nekhlyudov gives his land away to his peasants and follows her to Siberia in the hope of expiating his sins. Sonya had found it hard enough to deal with her husband's sanctimonious advocacy of chastity in The Kreutzer Sonata back in 1889, while still being forced to satisfy his apparently unquenchable sexual appetite. A decade later, when it was finally beginning to subside (when Masha had married in 1897, Sonya had moved into her bedroom at Yasnaya Polyana),⁸⁹ she read with distaste her husband's sensual description of the ravishing of Katyusha Maslova. But Resurrection was more than a love story and Bildungsroman, as Tolstoy suppressed the dictates of his artistic conscience to exploit another opportunity for lambasting all his favourite targets, namely the government, the Church and the judicial system, as well as private property and upper-class mores. Not all his readers would find the resulting mixture of intense lyricism, biting satire and moralising demagoguery terribly appealing, even if it was a compulsively readable narrative, like everything else that Tolstoy wrote, with flashes of brilliance.

Tolstoy worked on Resurrection throughout 1898, even on 28 August, his seventieth birthday. The government had forbidden the press from publishing any celebratory articles, but he received over a hundred congratulatory telegrams, and his picture appeared in shop windows in cities and towns all over Russia.⁹⁰ By autumn, Tolstoy was ready to negotiate a contract for the publication of Resurrection, and in October he signed a record-breaking deal with Adolf Marx, a publishing magnate based in Petersburg. Marx was proprietor of the weekly illustrated family magazine The Cornfield, which was enormously popular. Tolstoy had been paid 500 roubles per printer's sheet for his last novel, Anna Karenina, which appeared in an elite literary journal with a readership of a few thousand. For Resurrection, published in instalments in The Cornfield, which had 200,000 subscribers, Tolstoy received twice that, and a 12,000-rouble advance. The novel appeared throughout 1899, illustrated by Leonid Pasternak, and was a runaway success, being the first novel by Russia's most famous writer in over twenty years. It was an exhausting year for Tolstoy, since it entailed checking weekly sets of proofs, dealing with savage cuts made by the censor and being in constant communication with Chertkov in England.

Since arriving in England in the spring of 1897, Chertkov's main interest had been in propagandising Tolstoy's works throughout the world. He had begun by collaborating with John Kenworthy's Brotherhood Publishing Company, but very soon had set up his own Russian-language publishing operation which took up most of his time. The goal of the Free Word Press, which was established near to the house with the apple orchard he had rented for his family near Purleigh, was to publish everything by Tolstoy that was banned in Russia, as well as articles he and other Tolstoyans had written. These writings were primarily destined for readers in Russia.⁹¹ There were nine publications in 1897 alone, one of which was Tolstoy's afterword to the earlier Tolstoyan brochure 'Help! A Public Appeal Regarding the Caucasian Dukhobors'.⁹² Chertkov now expanded his activities to act as Tolstoy's literary agent by orchestrating the publication of Resurrection abroad, both in Russian and in translation. His authorised edition of the novel for the Free Word Press was also the only unexpurgated Russian version printed, and it was published in book form at the end of 1899 at the same time as the first separate edition issued by Adolf Marx in St Petersburg. The novel was reprinted five times in 1900,⁹³ and was smuggled into Russia in enormous quantities. Chertkov also coordinated the British and American publication of Louise Maude's English translation by the Brotherhood Publishing Company in 1900. The success of Resurrection was phenomenal and unprecedented. Once it had appeared in The Cornfield, all rights were waived, and there were soon forty different editions in print in Russia, while fifteen different editions appeared in France in 1900.⁹⁴ The novel was read by literally hundreds of thousands of readers in the first few years of its publication. The Slovak translation was produced by Albert Skarvan, whom Chertkov had invited to Russia, and taken to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy back in 1896.⁹⁵

Assisted by Tolstoy's royalties, handsome contributions from wealthy Moscow merchants, unstinting donations from members of Kenworthy's colony at Purleigh (which brought it to near bankruptcy)⁹⁶ and English Quakers, over 7,500 Dukhobors made it to Canada on several specially chartered ships between December 1898 and May 1899. It was an enormous enterprise, involving Arthur St John, who travelled out to the Caucasus and was arrested and deported from Tiflis in February 1898, and Dmitry Khilkov, who had now completed his term of exile and took one group of Dukhobors initially to Cyprus, where conditions did not prove to be satisfactory. Then in March 1898, Chertkov happened to read an article by the exiled anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who was living in London but had just been to Canada in his capacity as a geographer to lecture on the glacial deposits in Finland.

In his article, Kropotkin wrote about the Mennonites who had left Russia in the 1870s to avoid conscription. They had settled in Canada, where they were now farming prairie land with considerable success. Chertkov invited Kropotkin to come to Purleigh to meet with him and the two Dukhobor representatives who had come to discuss their situation. After Kropotkin had convinced them that Canada was indeed the best place for the Dukhobors to settle, Aylmer Maude and Khilkov went on ahead to make arrangements (as a Tolstoyan, the seasick Maude was embarrassed at having to travel in a first-class cabin).⁹⁷

By October 1898 agreement had been reached with the Canadian authorities, and with the help of Kropotkin's friend James Mavor, a Scottish-born Professor of Political Economy at the University ofToronto and Pavel Biryukov in Geneva, who acted as intermediary in the communications between Russia and Canada, the Lake Huron was chartered to make the first of several month-long sailings between the port of Batumi on the Black Sea and Halifax, Nova Scotia. The future Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich accompanied one of the sailings. He had a deep interest in the oral tradition of Dukhobor hymns and psalms, and remained in Canada for a year in order to study their culture. Later, as secretary to Lenin, he would play a crucial role in protecting the Tolstoyans for a short while when they in turn became victims of persecution after the Bolshevik Revolution. Amongst the many other volunteers who also took part in the operation was Tolstoy's son Sergey who set off first for England in August 1898 to have discussions with Chertkov and the Quakers. During his stay in London, Sergey and the two Dukhobor representatives who had been visiting Chertkov were shown round the British Museum by Kropotkin. Wherever they went they were followed by a top-hatted Russian spy and curious glances aroused by the exotic clothes of the Dukhobors, who were dressed in traditional blue beshmets (the belted knee-length coats worn by the Caucasian Cossacks), baggy trousers and wool caps.⁹⁸ From London, Sergey went to Paris to help negotiate first French rights to Resurrection, and then in December he accompanied 2,140 Dukhobors on the first sailing to Canada.⁹⁹ Tolstoy was overjoyed by the rapprochement with his eldest son.¹⁰⁰

The exertion involved in writing and publishing Resurrection in serial form took a heavy toll on Tolstoy's health, and news that he had fallen ill spread rapidly throughout Russia. One person who was greatly concerned was Anton Chekhov, who a year earlier had gone to live in exile in the Crimea in a

11. Dmitry Khilkov (left) and Sergey Lvovich Tolstoy (right) standing amongst a group of those accompanying the Dukhobors to Canada, 1899

desperate attempt to stem the rapid advance of tuberculosis. He had suffered his first serious haemorrhage in Moscow in March 1897, and been taken to a clinic near Tolstoy's house. After Tolstoy came to visit him and spent hours talking to him about immortality, he had suffered another haemorrhage.¹⁰¹ Even though he was in faraway Yalta, Chekhov not only managed to procure a copy of Resurrection the minute it was published as a complete novel, but had already finished it by the end of January 1900, as he declared in a letter to the journalist Mikhail Menshikov: 'I read it straight through in one gulp, not in instalments or in fits and starts. It is a magnificent work of art.' ¹⁰² In this letter, Chekhov also confessed that Tolstoy's illness had alarmed him and kept him in a 'constant state of tension'. He went on to speak for no doubt millions of Russians when he explained why that was. It is a remarkable letter that deserves quoting at length:

I fear the death of Tolstoy. If he were to die, a large empty space would appear in my life. In the first place, there is no other person whom I love as I love him; I am not a religious person, but of all faiths I find his the closest to me and the most congenial. Secondly, when literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know that you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy stands proud, his authority is colossal, and so long as he lives, bad taste in literature, all vulgarity, insolence and snivelling, all crude, embittered vainglory, will stay banished into outer darkness. He is the one person whose moral authority is sufficient in itself to maintain so-called literary fashions and movements on an acceptable level. Were it not for him the world of literature would be a flock of sheep without a shepherd, a stew in which it would be hard for us to find our way.¹⁰³

In fact, it was the much younger Chekhov who would die first.

It was just as Tolstoy fell ill in November 1899 that Orthodox hierarchs began to discuss seriously the question of what to do with the heretic in their midst. Some of the most scathing chapters in Resurrection had been directed at the Orthodox Church, and this was an acute problem for an institution whose prestige and moral authority were closely bound up with those of the Russian government, which felt threatened on several fronts by the end of the nineteenth century. The final instalment of Resurrection had yet to appear, but Tolstoy had already provided enough evidence of his blasphemy in the eyes of the Holy Synod, not least in his vicious satire of the thinly disguised Chief Procurator Toporov, and two infamous chapters describing a service held for convicts which subject Orthodox rites to merciless ridicule. Consider, for example, Tolstoy's infamous description of the Holy Eucharist in chapter 39 of Part One:

The essence of the service consisted in the supposition that the bits [of bread] cut up by the priest and put by him into the wine, when manipulated and prayed over in a certain way, turned into the flesh and blood of God. These manipulations consisted in the priest's regularly lifting and holding up his arms, though hampered by the gold cloth sack he had on, then, sinking on to his knees and kissing the table and all that was on it, but chiefly in his taking a cloth by two of its corners and waving it regularly and softly over the silver saucer and golden cup. It was supposed that, at this point, the bread and the wine turned into flesh and blood; therefore, this part of the service was performed with the utmost solemnity.¹⁰⁴

The publication of Resurrection brought the question of the excommunication of Tolstoy back to the top of the Holy Synod's agenda.

Tolstoy's rebellion against the Orthodox Church was driven by his perception of its supine position as the mainstay of Russian autocracy. 'The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity,' he had thundered in his 1886 article 'Church and State'. Supporting the state when it went to war was tantamount to the direct sanction of violence, and this was completely untenable as far as he was concerned, for it was a flat contradiction of Christ's teaching, not to mention one of the Ten Commandments. The Orthodox Church was vulnerable to Tolstoy's charges, and for the root causes of its moribund state at the end of the nineteenth century we need to look back to the fundamental changes to its autonomous status wrought by Peter the Great. The Russian Orthodox Church was still a very powerful institution when Peter became tsar in 1682, but his determination to forestall any challenge to his autocratic powers led him to take the momentous decision not to replace Patriarch Adrian after his death in 1700. Instead he placed the Church under the jurisdiction of a newly created department of state, the 'Most Holy Synod', which was established in the secular capital of St Petersburg in 1721 to replace the Patriarchate in 'Holy Mother Moscow'. Overseen by a lay chief procurator, whose title in Russian - Ober-prokurator - betrays the German Protestant origins of Peter's reformist ideas, the Russian Orthodox Church now became for many simply a tool of the government. Peter introduced formal seminary training to Russia in order to raise standards, but he also reduced the large number of Orthodox clergy, only a third of whom were actually ordained and had received some form of education. Peter's organisation of the state into a hierarchy of service ranks effectively also created a caste system in Russia which separated the clergy from all other classes and made it more or less hereditary, because only the sons of priests were eligible to enter seminaries and train for the priesthood.¹⁰⁵

Most clergy were very poor. They received no salary and were dependent for their livelihood (and that of their often numerous families) on the small sums offered by parishioners in return for the performance of church offices. This was only slightly augmented by the income from farming the small plot of land attached to their parish, so their standard of living was often scarcely better than the average peasant. Chekhov's story 'A Nightmare', written in 1886, describes the embarrassment of a conscientious young priest who is too poor even to be able to offer tea to a visitor. His church is as shabby as his ill-fitting, patched cassock and his house, which is described as being 'no different from the peasant izbas, except that the straw on the roof was a bit more even, and there were little white curtains in the windows'.¹⁰⁶ It is quite a different picture from the usual portrayal in English fiction of the country vicar in his comfortable parsonage, a respected and educated member of the community, and socially inferior only to the local squire. The status of most rural Russian priests, who depended on the peasantry for their basic income, remained very low.

The moral authority of the clergy had steadily eroded over the course of the nineteenth century for understandable reasons. Reliant on assistance from the local peasants in tilling their land, parish priests were understandably disinclined to offend them by refusing their hospitality during icon processions, or by proffering unwelcome moral reproof. The clergy often found themselves equally compromised, for different reasons, when it came to their relations with members of the nobility. Priests found themselves having to pander to the whims of despotic, lawless landowners by carrying out forced marriages or burials of serfs who had died in suspicious circumstances. The overall result of Peter the Great's 'reform' was a highly conservative Church with no interest in doctrinal development, and a demoralised and corrupt clergy which was little respected.¹⁰⁷ The publication abroad in 1858 of a frank exposure of the realities of Russian parish life written by a priest hopeful of change created a sensation when it was illicitly read in Russia on the eve of the Great Reforms.¹⁰⁸ Attempts were made in the late 1860s to improve the church education system (in 1863 seminary graduates were allowed for the first time to go to university, and in 1864 children of clergy were allowed the privilege of attending a state lycée), but the reforms went no further after the seminaries became hotbeds of revolutionary activity.¹⁰⁹ Against such a background, the rise in spiritual prestige of the Optina Pustyn Monastery becomes clearer: by reviving the Hesychast traditions of the Church Fathers, its elders were able to separate themselves from the tainted world of ecclesiastical officialdom.

At the end of the nineteenth century the Russian Orthodox Church certainly felt embattled. The legendary piety of the peasantry expressed itself more in ritual observance of fasts and processions than in attendance at church, its acquaintance with the Scriptures severely restricted by the archaic Church Slavonic which remained the ecclesiastical language of both the Bible and all services.¹¹⁰ There were already about 180 fast days of differing severity in the Orthodox calendar, but it was quite common for peasants to observe extra fasting days. One old woman confessed to her priest that she had eaten forbidden food on a fast day: radishes whose seeds had been soaked in milk before planting. Many peasants regarded it as sinful to drink tea with sugar on fast days, as they not only regarded tea as 'semi-sinful', but thought that sugar was made of animal bones (dog bones, in fact). There were even some fiercely ascetic peasants who regarded mother's milk as sinful. The Church had also long before ceased to be looked up to as a spiritual authority by the intelligentsia, whose more radical members typically tended to see themselves as morally superior to the clergy, while the aristocracy tended to be apathetic, and their religious devotions merely notional. This is why Protestant Evangelists like Lord Radstock who championed private Bible study made great inroads in high-society circles frequented by people like Chertkov's mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna. By resisting the production of modern Russian translations of the Bible for so long, the Church played its own part in sustaining the rich world of superstitions which the Russian people lived by. Fearing that ordinary believers might make their own erroneous interpretations, and challenge its authority, it was only in 1876 that the Synod officially approved a translation from Church Slavonic into the modern vernacular as mentioned earlier. Even then it tried to control access, but by the end of the nineteenth century about a million copies had been successfully distributed by Russian and foreign religious groups.¹¹¹

The other main challenge to the Russian Orthodox Church came from religious dissenters. In order to dissuade the peasantry from being drawn to the Old Believers, who had been identified with popular rebellion by the authorities ever since the schism of the 1660s, clergy were exhorted in the 1880s to make their services as sumptuous as possible.¹¹² Most threatening of all to the Church and government, however, were the many newer sects which grew rapidly in popularity in the nineteenth century. The Old Believers, and to a lesser extent sects such as the Khlysty and the Skoptsy at least subscribed essentially to the same faith - their differences were over details of ritual. The so-called 'rational' sectarian faiths, however, dispensed fundamentally with religious ritual, along with priests, churches, icons and all other paraphernalia. Their adherents preached a Christian doctrine of love, equality and freedom which did not recognise governmental authority. On the one hand there were the descendants of German colonists known as 'Stundists', whose economic enterprise, teetotalism and devotion to personal Bible reading in the vernacular began to attract large numbers of Russian peasants in the nineteenth century, while on the other there were the indigenous Dukhobors and the Molokans.

Tolstoy's spiritual rebellion, then, did not arise in a vacuum, and should be seen in this important socio-religious context. Unceasing expansion had made Russia an enormous multi-ethnic empire, and by the time of the 1897 Missionary Congress thirty per cent of its population were Muslim, Jewish or belonged to other faiths. Nevertheless, only the Orthodox Church was allowed to engage in missionary activities within the borders of the empire. The first two Missionary Congresses, held in Moscow in 1887 and 1891, had mostly focused on ways to corral the Old Believers into coming back into the fold of Orthodoxy, but the third, held in Kazan, had focused on countering the influence in Russia of sects and Bible-based Protestant and Evangelist denominations. These, it found, were on the increase, despite missionary work and government initiatives. Metropolitan Melety of Ryazan won support at the Congress with his proposal that sectarians should be deported to special camps in the Siberian tundra. He also proposed that their property should be confiscated, and their children removed.¹¹³ Only fear of widespread protests from Baptists abroad apparently prevented Nicholas II from making this official policy. Confident that the peasantry would never follow political revolutionaries, he was far more worried about evangelical Christians and figures like Tolstoy. The liberal newspaper Russian Gazette reported that the 200 bishops, priests and ecclesiastical figures at the 1897 Missionary Congress had classified Tolstoyanism as a sect like any other:

The Congress placed the religious-moral views of Count Lev Tolstoy amongst the new sectarian faiths, asserting that his followers made up a 'fully formed sect'. Asserting also that this sect fully conformed to the definition of sects which were 'particularly dangerous to the Church and the state', the Congress resolved to ask the Holy Synod to propose to the government that the law established with regard to 'particularly dangerous' sects be applied to its adherents.¹¹⁴

Tolstoyanism was seen as all the more pernicious for its potential to appeal simultaneously to the educated elite and the peasantry, and the influence of Tolstoy's ideas on Pyotr Verigin and the Dukhobors shows the reality of this threat.

Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who had become Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod in 1880, a post which he held for twenty-five years, regarded Tolstoy as his arch-enemy. Tolstoy had first antagonised him by asking him to pass on the letter he wrote in 1881 to Alexander III, in which he asked for clemency for his father's assassins. Convinced from the time of reading that letter (which he had refused to pass on), that Tolstoy was intent on bringing down the government, Pobedonostsev had led a vigorous campaign to silence his opponent. This had resulted in Tolstoy's religious teachings being regularly denounced by Church figures, and the constant, and often intrusive, surveillance of his private life (even the Yasnaya Polyana priest was obliged to send reports to the Bishop of Tula).¹¹⁵ The ambitious son of a Moscow priest, who rose to become a professor of law before occupying the post of Procurator, Pobedonostsev was devoted to his duty. The wonderfully named Hermann von Samson-Himmelstierna provides a vivid thumbnail portrait of him in the history of Alexander III's reign which he published in 1893:

There are two classes of fanatics, the cold and the hot - that is, fanatics from reflection and fanatics by temperament. It is easy to know to which Pobedonostsev belongs. His looks betray him. He is old and of a spare build, his nose is pointed, his eyes are keen and penetrating, he wears spectacles, his forehead is fringed with a few grey hairs, his face is clean-shaven, and his expression is keen.¹¹⁶

Both Pobedonostsev and Tolstoy, who were almost exact contemporaries, felt Russian society needed to be healed, but they certainly differed in their diagnosis of its ailments.

When Tolstoy fell ill at the end of 1899, while he was completing Resurrection, the Holy Synod decided first to ban all prayers in his memory after his death, anticipating that he might not have much longer to live. When he regained his health it then pressed on with its ill-conceived excommunication plan. In his zeal to shore up the foundations of the Orthodox Church, Pobedonostsev had long ago clamoured for Tolstoy to be excommunicated, but it was Metropolitan Antony of St Petersburg who now took the initiative, motivated by fears that even the clergy might succumb to Tolstoyanism. There was some justification for this. In 1898 Grigory Petrov, a charismatic young priest in St Petersburg, had published a book called The Gospel as the Foundation of Life which focused on the Tolstoyan idea of the practical application of Christianity in everyday living; it went into twenty editions. In early February 1901 Petrov was reprimanded by Metropolitan Antony for discussing Tolstoy in a positive light at a meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society: he had declared that Tolstoy was doing for Russian society what Virgil had done for Dante, by leading people who had lost their way spiritually out of purgatory.¹¹⁷ The process to excommunicate Tolstoy was initiated the next day, and was announced ten days later. Nicholas II was apparently angry not to have been asked for his approval beforehand, and Pobedonostsev was forced to apologise.¹¹⁸

Metropolitan Antony had actually been keen to act earlier, so that the Synod's edict could be announced on 18 February, which was the first Sunday of Great Lent. Until 1869 it had been traditional to pronounce an annual anathema in church against enemies of the state on the first Sunday of Lent, just before the 'Victory of Orthodoxy' week, and no doubt the Church would have liked to include Tolstoy in its roster of heretics at least in memory of the traditional proclamation:

To those who do not believe that the Orthodox monarchs have been raised to the throne by virtue of a special grace of God - and that, at the moment the sacred oil is laid on them, the gifts of the Holy Ghost are infused into them anent the accomplishment of their exalted mission; and to those who dare to rise and rebel against them, such as Grisha Otrepev, Ivan Mazeppa, and others like them: Anathema! Anathema! Anathema!¹¹⁹

Back in 1837 the German travel writer J. G. Kohl had the chance to witness the 'cursing of the heretics' first-hand at the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, and so many believers wanted to attend, he claimed, that police had to be called to keep order. He described it as 'the most extraordinary, incomprehensible, and terrible service of the Eastern Church', the only one where cursing could be heard in a country where the people were generally more inclined to bless nearly everything:

The anathematizing began with a long service, with singing, reading, opening and shutting of doors; lighting of tapers, and burning of incense; coming and going, &c...[The Venerable Metropolitan] stepped forward and called down anathemas upon a number of people; on the false Demetrius, on Boris Godunoff, Mazeppa, Stenka Razin and Pugatsheff; and after these political heretics followed the religious ones, but they were only mentioned in general terms. Each person or class was first characterized by a few introductory words, their names pronounced, and then followed two or three times, like thunder after lightning, the word: anafema, anafema ... ¹²⁰

Tolstoy was in lofty company. In 1901, clergy in Russian churches had to make do with an anathema on Tolstoy's Resurrection, rather than on his person. Nonetheless it was an event of huge social and political significance.

The Church had historically only anathematised individuals after repeated efforts to bring about repentance. The edict about Tolstoy stressed that he had preached fanatically against Orthodox dogma, so could not be regarded as a member of the Church unless he repented, but it was all very measured. The words 'anathema' or 'excommunication' were not in fact explicitly mentioned in the edict, which was announced on the front page of the weekly Church News (the official publication of the Holy Synod since 1888), and followed by an explanatory letter.¹²¹ Edict No. 577, dated 20-22 February, was signed by the three metropolitans, an archbishop and three bishops, none of whom was under any illusion that it would frighten Tolstoy, or even bring him to heel. But by having it published on the front page of every major Russian newspaper on 25 February, and issuing a government decree banning its discussion in the press, the Synod hoped it could undermine the public support for Tolstoy which was steadily growing in Russia amongst all sections of the population. The intention was to provoke a backlash of hostility towards him and diminish his authority at a critical time of social and political unrest, while simultaneously enhancing the profile of the Orthodox Church. The reality was the opposite - it was a dismal failure. No one except the ecclesiastical authorities took the excommunication seriously, and yet it proved to be an event whose repercussions would be far-reaching.

Tolstoy was in Moscow at the beginning of 1901. As usual, his preoccupations were intellectual. He had begun the year by reading The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy by Max Müller, and alongside his engagement with Hindu and Nietzschean philosophy, continued his study of Dutch. Sonya's concerns were, as usual, more worldly. She was as busy as ever. She travelled to Yasnaya Polyana to look after their daughter Tanya after she had a stillborn child, then came back to Moscow to help with the preparations for their son Misha's wedding to Alexandra Glebova on 31 January: she sewed little bags which would later be filled with sweets and given to the guests. The wedding was a high-society event attended by Grand Dukes (one of whom came specially from St Petersburg) but pointedly not by her husband. On 12 February she went back to Yasnaya Polyana when she heard that Masha had miscarried, and then came back to take care of the household in Moscow, and a gloomy husband who was expressing his fears of death. The seven weeks of the Great Lent began, and with it fasting, so on 16 February she went to the mushroom market with Semyon Nikolayevich the cook, and on to church. The next day she took herself off to buy toys for the children in the Moscow orphanage of which she had become patron.

On the day the excommunication became public, Tolstoy declared in a letter to his daughter Masha that the only thing he really wanted to write about now was people's lack of religion, which he believed was the cause of all the horrors in the world.¹²²He was far more serious about living in accordance with Christian principles than the majority of those in his class, and he believed in God more than most, so there was an irony in the Church excommunicating someone with such deeply held, if unorthodox, Christian views. He had been oblivious to all the machinations earlier, and so he just carried on writing outspoken polemical articles and letters of protest attacking the corruption of the Church and the government whose militarist policies it supported. From Sonya's diary we learn that there was wonderful weather at the time ofTolstoy's excommunication - clear days and moonlit nights. She records how affectionate and passionate her husband suddenly became when the edict was published, and how his health and state of mind improved in the peculiarly festive atmosphere that prevailed at that time. She immediately wrote an impassioned letter to Pobedonostsev and Metropolitan Antony to protest against the edict, then went back to knitting woolly hats for the orphanage. Unusually, both Sonya's letter and the response from Metropolitan Antony were printed in Church News.

The Holy Synod marshalled its minions to send poison-pen letters and death threats to Tolstoy when the excommunication was announced, but there were far more demonstrations, petitions and ovations in his honour. The Tolstoy house in Moscow was immediately besieged with visitors wanting to take action, and mounted police had to intervene when Tolstoy was mobbed by enthusiastic students who spotted him walking in the centre of the city on the day the excommunication was made public. Far from diminishing Tolstoy's stature, the Holy Synod's edict only enhanced it, particularly in view of the government's ban on the publication of all telegrams and expressions of support. The excommunication also intensified interest in Tolstoy's writings. People who had never read him before started asking for his books in libraries, and Russians abroad were immediately questioned about him as soon as their nationality became known.¹²³ Employees at the Maltsev Glass Factory outside Moscow sent Tolstoy a lump of green glass with their message to him incised in gold:

12. Cartoon showing Tolstoy as a mighty giant next to the tiny figure of Tsar Nicholas II, 1901

You have shared the fate of many great people ahead of their time, esteemed Lev Nikolayevich. They used to be burned at the stake, left to rot in jails and in exile. Let the hypocrite priests excommunicate you however they want. Russian people will always be proud, seeing you as their own great dearly beloved.

Tolstoy was the conscience of the nation, and the excommunication was the most eloquent expression of the abyss separating the Church from educated Russian society. In Moscow, as elsewhere, the intelligentsia saw the excommunication primarily as an act of political vengeance. Alexey Suvorin, editor of New Times, quipped that Russia now had two tsars. While Nicholas II was clearly unable to make Tolstoy's throne wobble, he observed, Tolstoy was destabilising the entire Romanov dynasty.¹²⁴ Tolstoy finally started drafting an article in response to the Holy Synod's edict on 24 March, which carried new denunciations. The letter was sent to Chertkov for publication in England. He was still hoping he might one day be arrested.¹²⁵

Repin had an important new portrait of Tolstoy on show at the 29th Wanderers Exhibition in Petersburg which had opened a week before the excommunication was announced. Ironically it depicted the writer at prayer, barefoot in the woods at Yasnaya Polyana. When the exhibition opened, the portrait was immediately surrounded with flowers, and naturally attracted more attention after the excommunication. Before the exhibition closed on 25 March a student stood on a chair and tied bouquets round the entire frame, as if it was a venerated popular icon, then gave an impromptu speech. A telegram of support signed by the 400 people present was sent to Tolstoy, and even more people festooned Repin's portrait with flowers.¹²⁶ This led to the painting being taken down, and it was not shown when the exhibition moved to Moscow and the provinces.

The excommunication caused a sensation amongst Russia's educated classes, but it is worth pointing out that many Russian rural priests had scant knowledge of Tolstoy beyond knowing that he was an aristocrat who wrote society novels. The majority of peasants, meanwhile, knew only that he was a count, and thus representative of the nobility who were hated and distrusted,¹²⁷ but there was nevertheless a significant number who followed Father Ioann of Kronstadt in believing that Tolstoy was the Antichrist. Father Ioann, an even more charismatic figure than Grigory Petrov (who ended up leaving the Church), was not a prominent bishop or theologian, but a parish priest who was seen by many as Russia's third 'tsar' in view of his extraordinary popularity.¹²⁸ Born one year after Tolstoy into an impoverished sacristan's family in Arkhangelsk province in 1829, he married in 1855 and was ordained that year in St Andrew's Cathedral in Kronstadt, where his father-in-law was the senior priest. During the fifty years in which Father Ioann served in the port of Kronstadt outside St Petersburg, home to the imperial navy's Baltic Fleet, he acquired renown for his Populist, informal style, and for the unusual mass confessions which were held at his church. Father Ioann encouraged charity and greater piety, and by the time he administered to Alexander III on his deathbed in 1894, he had become famous throughout Russia. Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra also revered Father Ioann: they had a picture of him on the wall behind their bed at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea.

In the 1890s Father Ioann began condemning Tolstoy for teaching that Christ was not divine, that Mary was simply an unmarried mother, and that the Orthodox Church was pagan and idolatrous. 'You ought to have a stone hung round your neck and be lowered with it into the depths of the sea; you ought not to have any place on earth' - it was in these terms that Father Ioann denounced Tolstoy, and a collection of his diatribes against Tolstoy was published in 1902.¹²⁹ Father Ioann was perhaps Tolstoy's most famous public opponent, and his polar opposite. Indeed, for the writer Nikolay Leskov, Tolstoy and Father Ioann represented the opposing forces struggling for Russia's future.¹³⁰ Father Ioann was seen as the pastor of the people, whereas Tolstoy was worshipped more by the intelligentsia, and yet there were some striking similarities between them. Like Tolstoy, Father Ioann also aspired to an ascetic ideal. In maintaining a celibate marriage (his wife Elizaveta would have liked children), he was rather more successful in curbing his libido than Tolstoy. Father Ioann was also strict about food consumption, which, like Tolstoy, he linked to sensuality: 'Buckwheat kasha is good, cream bad'; 'No horseradish with vinegar!'; 'NEVER EAT SUPPER!' Father Ioann saw his wife's cooking as a threat to his spirituality.¹³¹ Both Father Ioann and Tolstoy were puritans who attacked social inequality, excessive materialism and moral depravity, and both were the subject of a cult of personality - the Russian Post Office had to make special provision to deal with the huge volume of letters Father Ioann received from adoring parishioners.¹³² Father Ioann also inspired the birth of a kind of sectarian religion, which was reported with alarm by Pobedonostsev in 1901, the year of Tolstoy's excommunication. His followers, who were called 'Ioannity', saw him variously as God, Jesus, or John the Baptist, and treated his photograph as an icon (he was particularly popular with women).¹³³ Control over its clergy was a priority for the Holy Synod, and there was some alarm when Father Ioann seemed to be becoming dangerously independent. Like Tolstoy, he enjoyed greater popularity at court than in the offices of state, but even some of his congregation found his tone a little too strident at times. One person wrote to him after becoming acquainted with his 'words of denunciation directed against Count Lev Tolstoy', and now could not find 'inner calm', nor knew how to reconcile his 'diatribes, so alien to the spirit of Christian gentleness, tolerance and forgiveness for all', with his earlier writing on spirituality.¹³⁴

Tolstoy and Father Ioann were part of an extraordinary religious renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century which affected all classes of Russian society, with huge numbers of pilgrims making visits to monasteries and taking part in processions such as the one immortalised in Repin's famous painting of the Kursk procession. There was also a religious revival amongst the intelligentsia which first began around the time of the publication of Dostoyevsky's last novel, The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, which was inspired by the writer's meetings with the elders of Optina Pustyn. It is noteworthy that this was the book Tolstoy was reading when he finally left Yasnaya Polyana at the end of his life and went on the last of his many visits to the monastery, which seems to have been a place which both repelled and drew him. Even before he was excommunicated Tolstoy was widely seen as 'the elder of Yasnaya Polyana', and in the last decades of his life received not only scores of visitors who came to seek his guidance, but thousands of letters from people who asked for his help. He tried diligently to respond to them with the help of secretaries, who functioned like the lay brothers who traditionally assisted the elders.¹³⁵ A further sign of the religious revival came in November 1901 with the launch of a series of historic meetings held in the hall of the Imperial Geographic Society in St Petersburg. These meetings brought about the first constructive contact between the intelligentsia and the clergy in Russia. Initiated by modernist writers like Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who wished to bridge the gulf separating the educated classes from the Church, the aim was to try to find some common ground, and a possible religious solution to the socio-political crisis in Russia. The name of Tolstoy loomed large and, not surprisingly, his conflict with the Church was the topic of the third of the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings held in early 1902.¹³⁶ Amongst the issues hotly debated was whether it had been the Church or the state which had been the driving force behind Tolstoy's excommunication.

Tolstoy remained a problem for the Church hierarchy even after he was excommunicated, as in June 1901 he fell seriously ill with malaria, necessitating the drawing up of a new strategy: governors and police chiefs were ordered not to allow any speeches or demonstrations in the event of his death.¹³⁷ Sergey was mortified to find out his brother was in a critical condition from the newspapers, whose editors regarded Tolstoy's state of health as a matter of public interest. Sergey now wrote his brother a heartfelt letter in which he told him how much he meant to him, and how there was no other person in the world to whom he could talk in the same way. Underneath his signature he added sadly: 'Apart from our closeness from childhood, I just need you, but you don't need me. You have a legion apart from me.'¹³⁸ Not for the first time, Tolstoy's strong constitution helped him recover, and Alexandrine's friend Countess Panina kindly offered her dacha outside Yalta for his convalescence. In September 1901, the family decamped to the Crimea. Contrary to his usual habit of travelling fourth class with fleas and cockroaches, as Sergey put it, this time the family was allotted a private compartment, which had been arranged with the help of a Tolstoyan who worked for the railways. Despite the ban on press coverage of his movements, there was a huge crowd of 3,000 supporters waiting at Kharkov station to cheer him. The Tolstoys would remain in the Crimea for the best part of ten months, during which time Sonya tended to her husband with her usual devotion.

Countess Panina's 'dacha' was in fact a gothic palace - a fairy-tale castle with two towers. Tolstoy had never lived in such luxury in all his life, and wrote to tell Sergey about the profusion of exotic flowers, the marble fountain in a pond with fish swimming in it, the manicured lawns, the luxuriant view of the sea past the cypress trees, and even the lavatories, a convenience he was not used to. Back in 1887 Tolstoy had written a long letter to the future pacifist writer Romain Rolland in which he declared that the first test of the sincerity of those who professed to live by Christian principles was to put an end to living parasitically off the manual work done by the poor and take care of one's own needs, which included emptying one's own chamber pot.¹³⁹ Tolstoy told his brother that the grand dukes and millionaires who lived nearby were surrounded by even greater luxury.¹⁴⁰

As usual Tolstoy was thronged with visitors, but there were also pleasant meetings with Chekhov, who was a local telephone call away in Yalta, and with the young writer Gorky. Tolstoy also developed a friendship with the urbane and scholarly Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich, an old friend of Chertkov who sought him out. Not only was he unflustered by Tolstoy's pariah-status in official circles, it turned out he was an avid reader of his virulently anti-government writings. His lofty position as a member of the Romanov family enabled him to receive uncensored all the editions Chertkov published in England.¹⁴¹ Fearing this might be his last chance, Tolstoy seized the opportunity of this serendipitous acquaintance to write another lengthy letter to Nicholas II, which the Grand Duke gamely offered to deliver. Addressing the Tsar as 'Dear brother', Tolstoy dispensed with the niceties of protocol. After admonishing Nicholas II for increasing police surveillance, censorship and religious persecution to unacceptable levels, Tolstoy disputed the notion that Orthodoxy and autocracy were inherently Russian. First of all he pointed to the ever increasing numbers of those 'defecting' to other faiths, despite the dangers of persecution entailed. Next he declared that autocracy was outmoded and bankrupt as a form of government. Tsarist power might still have had prestige under Nicholas I, he admitted, but in the nearly fifty years since his death, it had completely disintegrated, to the point that people from all classes of society now openly criticised and ridiculed the Tsar himself (that is, Nicholas II, the person he was addressing):

The fact that crowds of people run after you with shouts of 'Hurrah!' in Moscow and other cities has probably misled you about the people's love for autocracy and its representative, the Tsar. Don't believe that this is an expression of devotion to you - they are just a crowd of curious people who will go after any unusual spectacle.¹⁴²

Only someone with the authority of a tsar would have the temerity to speak in such terms to a crowned head of state. The fact that Nicholas II pledged not to show this letter to anyone (as attested by Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich's mistress, Princess Elena Baryatinskaya, who happened to be Chertkov's cousin) lends credence to the view that Tolstoy and Chertkov still enjoyed a certain amount of favour and protection at court.¹⁴³

When Tolstoy fell seriously ill again in January 1902 there was a new flurry of despatches from the Holy Synod, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Censorship Committee, its officials all terrified of outbreaks of civil disobedience, or worse. Pobedonostsev hatched a plan to despatch a priest to the Tolstoy household and thus be able to announce a last-minute recantation, the Head of Censorship stipulated that pictures of Tolstoy in the press were only permissible after his death, and Metropolitan Antony sent a letter in which he implored Tolstoy to return to the Church.¹⁴⁴ Needless to say, Tolstoy was not interested. Under the care of numerous doctors and his wife and daughters, with constant visits from other family members and friends (who had all converged on Gaspra thinking they were coming to pay their last respects), Tolstoy slowly recovered. He returned home in June, cheered by an even bigger crowd at Kharkov station, and he and Sonya now took up permanent residence in Yasnaya Polyana. On the advice of doctors, and much to Tolstoy's own relief, there would be no more winters in Moscow. Also on the advice of doctors, he moved his study upstairs to the large, well-lit room with the balcony next to his bedroom, which caught the morning sun.

Tolstoy did not exactly mellow in old age. In the autumn of 1902 he wrote a fierce attack on Christian clergymen of all denominations, in the hope of showing them the harm they caused, as he put it in a letter to his brother. To the Clergy, which was sent to Chertkov and published by the Free Word Press in 1903, was another example of Tolstoy talking 'man to man' with clerics, regardless of their rank. It was a vintage Tolstoyan harangue:

You know that what you teach about the creation of the world, about the inspiration of the Bible by God, and much else is not true. How then can you teach it to little children and to ignorant adults, who look to you for true enlightenment?...Whoever you may be - popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, superintendents, priests, or pastors - think of this. If you belong to those of the clergy (of whom there are unfortunately very many, and continually more and more in our days) who see clearly how obsolete, irrational, and immoral the Church teaching is, but who, without believing in it, still continue to preach it from personal motives (for their salaries as priests or bishops), do not console yourselves with the supposition that your activity is justified by any utility it has for the masses of the people, who do not yet understand what you understand.¹⁴⁵

Father Ioann of Kronstadt immediately fought back with a famous riposte. Journalists often likened Tolstoy to Ilya Muromets, the greatest of Russia's mythical medieval warriors (bogatyrs), who was famous for performing Herculean feats. To Father Ioann, however, Leo Tolstoy was a predatory lion akin to the devil (1 Peter, 5: 8), and since few of the Orthodox faithful would have been able to read Tolstoy's contraband article, he provided a summary of its contents for them:

For Tolstoy there is no supreme spiritual perfection in the sense of the achievements of Christian virtues - simplicity, humility, purity of heart, chastity, repentance, faith, hope, love in the Christian sense; he does not recognise Christian endeavours; he laughs at holiness and sacred things - it is he himself he adores, and he bows down before himself, like an idol, like a superman; I, and no one else but me, muses Tolstoy. You are all wrong; I have revealed the truth and am teaching everyone the truth! The Gospel according to Tolstoy is an invention and a fairy tale. So, Orthodox people, who is Lev Tolstoy? He is a lion roaring [Lev rykayushchy], looking for someone to devour. And how many he has devoured with his flattering pages! Watch out for him.¹⁴⁶

Tolstoy was certainly aware of Father Ioann, but he never paid him any attention.

It is perhaps indicative that the year in which Tolstoy published To the Clergy, was also the year of the canonisation of Serafim of Sarov (1759–1833), the first and greatest of Russia's elders. The celebrations were attended by Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, and half a million pilgrims.¹⁴⁷ The fact that there were suddenly many more canonisations in the reign of Nicholas II lends credence to the theory that there was an agenda afoot to inspire patriotism and loyalty to the monarchy. This was also the year in which the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings were shut down, for the same reason. The Church and government were finding it difficult to unite the population amidst a growing discontent that was spreading throughout the country, and the philosophers, poets, literary critics and public figures who attended the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings had been entering into debates with members of the clergy that the authorities felt were too heated in such tense times.

The political situation in Russia had indeed become very volatile by 1904. In the 1890s radical Marxist groups committed to revolution had changed their tactics from spreading propaganda amongst the new population of oppressed factory workers to mass agitation, causing a wave of strikes, and then had united to form the Social Democratic Labour Party, which the police endeavoured but failed to destroy. When he reached the end of his term of Siberian exile in 1900, Vladimir Ulyanov had gone abroad. As well as founding a newspaper and adopting the name of Lenin, he had proposed the creation of a disciplined party of hard-line professional revolutionaries in his tract What Is to Be Done? (not to be confused with eponymous works by Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky). Publication of this tract contributed in 1903 to the Social Democratic Labour Party splitting into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Apart from the clamour for reform from liberal parties, in 1904 the Russian government found itself dealing with the constant threat of terrorist activities from the various revolutionary groups, as well as increasing peasant unrest and a rising number of mass strikes in urban factories. Discontent was only exacerbated by the government's brutal pogroms against the Jews (Tolstoy spoke out against them too), its continued persecution of religious minorities and its obvious support for employers rather than employees. With the domestic situation so fraught, the sudden outbreak of war with Japan in January 1904 took everyone by surprise.

It was the disastrous Russo-Japanese War which finally brought an end to imperial hubris. The Foreign Ministry and the armed forces had stagnated under Nicholas II: the British ambassador to Russia knew he could safely go on leave from September to December, and ministry officials would habitually arrive for work at midday and leave again at four. The stagnation was born of an unmerited complacency. So great had been Russia's sense of superiority towards Japan that when it acquired a lease from China to expand into its north-eastern provinces in 1898, Foreign Minister Nikolay Muravyov declared that one flag and a sentry was all that was required to secure Port Arthur: Russian prestige would do the rest. But the ill-founded perception of Russian might was about to be challenged. Within weeks of Admiral Makarov arriving in Port Arthur, he perished with all his crew when the Russian flagship Petropavlovsk hit a Japanese mine. When war broke out, Tolstoy was distressed by feelings of patriotism which he did not feel able to suppress, and he started riding over to Tula several times a week to read the latest telegrams.¹⁴⁸ Naturally he soon put pen to paper.¹⁴⁹ In his article 'Bethink Yourselves!', Tolstoy exhorted his fellow-Russians to remember biblical texts like Luke 13: 5 ('If you do not bethink yourselves, you will all perish').¹⁵⁰ Insisting that the war contravened the teachings of both Christ and the Buddha, he deplored its wanton violence:

We say that wars of today are not as those of yesterday, and that we are very far removed from that ancient cannibalism in Nation struggles, but it exists still under other forms. What other can be said of the destruction of the fleet and of the siege of Port Arthur? When did Humanity witness such horrors? What comparison can be found equal to those caused by this frightful carnage? More than 200,000 lives have been lost now in this insensate struggle...¹⁵¹

Chertkov translated this article into English, and arranged for its publication in newspapers throughout Europe, which provoked some people to write to Tolstoy in protest at his lack of patriotism, but expressions of sympathy were more common.¹⁵²

Altogether, 1904 was a fairly bleak year for Tolstoy. Although he had little tolerance for those who espoused the Orthodox faith, he was nonetheless greatly saddened to receive the news of the death of his old relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in March 1904. After their frosty meeting back in 1897 there had been little contact between them, but they were reconciled the year before she died at the age of eighty-seven. In his last letter, in which he addressed her as 'Dear, kind, old friend Alexandrine', he thanked her for half a century's friendship.¹⁵³ In July Chekhov lost his fight against tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, and in August, a couple of weeks after Tolstoy's wayward son Andrey was posted to the front (it was already bad enough that he was serving in the army), his elder brother Sergey died of cancer. Sergey had led a secluded and quite unhappy life, disappointed by his four surviving children, and by his marriage to someone from such a different background, and he spent his last days in agony. Tolstoy went out to Pirogovo three times in the summer of 1904, and was instrumental in relaying his sister and sister-in-law's wish that Sergey receive communion before he died.

13. Tolstoy photographed with his brother Sergey's widow, Maria Mikhailovna, the former gypsy singer, in 1906

To their surprise he agreed, despite his well-known religious indifference.¹⁵⁴

When Port Arthur finally fell to the Japanese in December 1904, Tolstoy became very despondent. Meanwhile, the 18,000-mile voyage halfway round the world of the imperial Baltic Fleet under Admiral Rozhdestvensky was dogged by incompetence. Soon after leaving St Petersburg in October, one inebriated captain opened fire on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea, mistaking them for Japanese torpedo boats, while another frigate in what came to be known as the 'Russian mad-dog fleet' was eventually discovered to be travelling up the Thames due to a navigation error. The day after the fleet finally arrived in the Pacific in May 1905, Japanese forces summarily destroyed it in the Battle of Tsushima. This was the final humiliating defeat which brought the war to a close.¹⁵⁵ Tolstoy followed all these events with horror from Yasnaya Polyana, and was aghast when there was further violence closer to home. The extent of Russia's domestic problems meant that the war with Japan enjoyed no popular support, as expressed by the assassination in July 1904 of the Minister of Internal Affairs. Nicholas II's halfhearted response to calls for reform led to the outbreak of revolution on the infamous 'Bloody Sunday' of 9 January 1905, when tsarist troops fired on an unarmed procession of workers bringing a petition to the Winter Palace. The public outcry was followed by mass strikes all over Russia and the assassination on 22 January of the governor general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, who had received Sonya during the famine in 1892. Tolstoy was stunned, and confessed that the news had made him physically suffer.¹⁵⁶ Amongst the disturbances and uprisings which followed was a mutiny in June 1905 on the battleship Potemkin in Odessa. Perhaps regretting that he had not heeded Tolstoy's brazen personal appeal back in 1902, Nicholas II was forced now to retreat from autocratic rule. In October he issued the historic manifesto which promised civil rights, the creation of a national legislative assembly (the 'Duma'), the abolition of censorship, religious tolerance and permission to found political parties. There was also a general amnesty.

The 1905 Revolution directly affected Tolstoy, since it meant that all his banned writings could now suddenly be published, although it took a while for the reforms to take effect. His new article, 'Appeal to the Russian People', in which he predictably condemned both the government and the revolutionaries, was seized by the police before it could be distributed in March 1906, but it went on sale freely in St Petersburg at the end of the year when it was published by the Free Word Press, which Chertkov had just moved to St Petersburg.¹⁵⁷ Scores of Tolstoy's other previously banned writings followed, while he moved on to his next article: 'The Meaning of the Russian Revolution'. In March 1906 Chertkov received official notification that he could return to Russia, but he had already made one visit back home. In the midst of all the disturbances in 1905, Chertkov's influential mother had obtained permission from the Tsar for her son to make a three-week visit, not only to St Petersburg to see her, but also to Yasnaya Polyana. It was a joyous reunion, and even Sonya was glad to see Chertkov.¹⁵⁸ Moving back to Russia permanently was inhibited for Chertkov by his sick wife, the comfort of his surroundings in England and the extent of his publishing operations, and so it was a gradual process which took place over the next few years.

Since his illness in 1902, the situation at Yasnaya Polyana had been more or less peaceful. Tolstoy still hated having to live in the luxurious environment of his ancestral home. He still hated being served dinner by servants in white gloves, and he wanted to leave, but somehow he had stayed put. Despite his professed desire for a secluded life, there was little chance of that. Biryukov returned from exile in December 1904. He had been completing the first authorised biography of Tolstoy, and his subject now had the chance to read the manuscript and answer his questions before preparing it for publication.¹⁵⁹ The quiet Slovak doctor Dusan Makovicky also arrived in December 1904, and settled at Yasnaya Polyana as Tolstoy's personal physician. Makovicky's salary was paid by Chertkov, who now acquired a useful channel of communication about his friend's state of health, and much more besides.¹⁶⁰ A fervent Tolstoyan who had made his first visit to Yasnaya Polyana in 1894, Makovicky worshipped the ground Tolstoy walked on, and took to keeping a pencil and notebook in his trouser pocket so he could surreptitiously scribble down everything he said. The gathering of Tolstoy's utterances was a project Chertkov was also fanatic about. He had started it in 1889, and continued with it until 1923, when his appointed compiler died, by which time there were about 25,000 diverse and sometimes very trivial thoughts recorded in an enormous file.¹⁶¹

With an eye to posterity, Sonya had meanwhile started writing what would prove to be an extremely long account of her own life as the spouse of an impossible genius. She also put together an inventory of the enormous library at Yasnaya Polyana, and started putting her husband's archive in order. In 1904 she was obliged to move everything from the Rumyantsev Library (where she had placed his manuscripts initially) to the History Museum next to Red Square, and so now on her trips to Moscow to take care of publishing business, she also spent her mornings copying out the material she needed.¹⁶² Sonya was renowned for being short sighted (a photograph of her attending a photography lecture shows her sitting almost underneath the speaker), for lacking a sense of humour (a lot of Chekhov's early stories left her cold), and for being busy. Like her husband, she also never 'retired', and as well as becoming an accomplished photographer, she acquired skill in painting.¹⁶³ She also enjoyed being a grandmother. In 1905, after many miscarriages, Tanya gave birth to a daughter, also named Tatyana, who was affectionately given a 'matronymic' rather than the usual patronymic in deference to Tanya's heroic achievement in becoming a mother. 'Tatyana Tatyanovna' became the Tolstoys' fifteenth grandchild, and was particularly beloved.

The precarious harmony established after the Tolstoys returned home from the Crimea had disappeared by the end of 1906. A wonderful snapshot of life at Yasnaya Polyana just before everything began to disintegrate is provided by the Japanese writer Tokutomi Roka, who spent five days at the estate in June, and duly wrote an account of his visit. He arrived just before Sergey (now forty-three) married for the second time. Tokutomi had been Meiji Japan's most fervent Tolstoy devotee since the age of twenty-three, and having been brought up as a Protestant, was drawn as much to his religious philosophy as he was to his fiction. He took life just as seriously as Tolstoy, with whom he conversed in English. Apart from his hero, who was just as he expected, but 'looked all of his seventy-eight years', Tokutomi met most of the family: Sonya ('the look in her eyes was a little lacking in charm'), Masha ('sickly and thin'), her husband Nikolay ('gentle of voice and manner and typifies the effeminate Slavic male'), the 'fun-loving student' Sasha ('and her weight would be about 170 pounds'), as well as Lev and his Swedish wife Dora, plus Andrey, now estranged from his first wife, and Misha. Amongst the Tolstoy children, it was Sasha whom Tokutomi got to know best, and whom he obviously found a little overwhelming. He once encountered her 'zooming up on her bicycle, travelling like a cyclone' ('and with her physique I was sure she was certain to smash the machine'). Tokutomi also took care to describe the family's four dogs who were a presence at the outside dining table under the maple tree: a white Siberian, a brown pointer, a black setter and a black and white spaniel.

Tokutomi was accompanied on swims and walks by Tolstoy, and he noticed that he never forgot to attach the chain of his silver watch to his belt, and take with him a notebook with pencil thrust in it. During one walk in the woods, Tolstoy shared his thoughts on Russian writers such as Turgenev, whose works he described as 'remarkably beautiful, but not very deep'. Gorky, on the other hand, he declared had 'genius but no learning', while Merezhkovsky had 'learning and no genius, and Chekhov has a great genius, a great genius'. Towards the end of a sometimes rather awestruck account of his pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana, Tokutomi describes being taken to Tolstoy's study, and watching him breathe heavily as he wrote letters of reference for him with his goose-quill pen, his thick brows arched together: 'He is a prophet in his final years, his frame weakening day by day, but within him a raging fire burns ever brighter. Just to see him inspires you with a feeling of awe and makes you weep bitterly.' Tokutomi touches here on Tolstoy's extraordinary charisma, which affected even those immune to his religious message. Many were the sceptical Anglo-Saxon visitors to Yasnaya Polyana who found themselves in awe of Tolstoy's physical presence, and surprised by his deep sincerity. After replacing the quill in the rack, Tolstoy picked up a lamp to show Tokutomi the pictures on the wall of Henry George, his brother Sergey, William Lloyd Garrison, Syutayev, and a reproduction of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, divided into five panels, which had been given to him by his sister Maria.¹⁶⁴ Before they parted, Tolstoy showed Tokutomi his beloved Circle of Reading - an immense compendium of the thoughts of wise people he had compiled for every day of the year taken from an equally huge array of sources, including his own works.

The problems at Yasnaya Polyana began shortly after Tokutomi's departure. First Andrey and Lev told their father in no uncertain terms that they approved of capital punishment, which led to a dreadful row, with much slamming of doors. Tolstoy was upset for two days, and then became worked up again a few weeks later when Sonya insisted on taking to court the peasants who had chopped down some oak trees in their forest. Once again, Tolstoy threatened to leave home.¹⁶⁵ Then in August, having just turned sixty-two, Sonya fell seriously ill and almost died. On 2 September, attended by at least four doctors, she underwent an operation to remove the fibroid which had caused her to contract peritonitis. Remarkably, her constitution was as strong as that of her husband, and she recovered, but thirty-five-year-old Masha was not so fortunate. After catching a chill that November, she died in her father's arms.¹⁶⁶ Of all his children, it had been Masha who had been closest to him, and her death was a terrible loss.

14. Tolstoy and Chertkov in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, 1907

Chertkov had spent several weeks near Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1906, and he returned with his family for the whole of the summer in 1907. This time Sonya was not as thrilled by the prospect as her husband was, and showed it. She caused further friction by insisting on employing guards for Yasnaya Polyana after some peasants had raided the vegetable garden one night and stolen some cabbages.¹⁶⁷ The armed Circassian hired to provide security proved to be very unpopular with the villagers, and Tolstoy was greatly pained. The autumn of 1907 was thus no happier than the autumn of 1906, and Sonya's estrangement from her husband increased still further when the businesslike Chertkov found an obliging twenty-five-year-old called Nikolay Gusev to become Tolstoy's secretary. Chertkov paid Gusev fifty roubles a month to help Tolstoy deal with his enormous correspondence, but for Sonya that meant another non-family member at Yasnaya Polyana who was privy to her husband's thoughts. Gusev arrived in September 1907, and took up residence in the upstairs room nicknamed the 'Remingtonnaya' for the Remington typewriter that had recently been installed there. A month later, he was arrested for spreading revolutionary propaganda, and spent two months in the Tula prison. The Russian government had resumed its previous tactics of targeting Tolstoy's followers, despite the fact it was Tolstoy himself authoring the anti-tsarist tracts.¹⁶⁸

Another source of depression for Tolstoy that autumn was his son Andrey's second marriage. Andrey's first marriage, to Olga Diterikhs, the sister of Chertkov's wife, had broken down soon after the birth of their two children, but to his father's horror, he had then taken up with the wife of the Tula governor. Ekaterina Artsimovich abandoned six children as well as her husband to pursue her passion with Andrey, and was six months pregnant with his child when they married in November. They had difficulty enough in finding a priest who was prepared to marry them when Andrey's divorce finally came through, and then they had to rush through the night to an obscure rural parish so the ceremony could be conducted at the crack of dawn, before the start of the forty-day Christmas fast.¹⁶⁹ Andrey, who had not seen much of his father when he was growing up, was a serial philanderer, and was soon unfaithful to his second wife.

The cause of the greatest happiness in Tolstoy's last years - the return of Chertkov - was also the cause of great unhappiness for his wife. Chertkov had worked indefatigably during his time in England. In 1900 he had moved from Essex to Christchurch in Hampshire (now Dorset), a pleasant town on the River Stour. His mother owned a plush residence at nearby Southbourne (where she would die, penniless, in 1922, at the age of ninety),¹⁷⁰ and she now bought her son a spacious three-storey detached house with a large garden, together with a building on Iford Lane for his printing press. The Purleigh colony had fallen apart, partly due to Chertkov's autocratic ways (he fell out with Kenworthy, Maude and Khilkov). A few Tolstoyans moved to the Cotswolds to set up a new colony at Whiteway (which uniquely survives to this day),¹⁷¹ but the main centre for Tolstoyanism in Britain now became Tuckton House, Chertkov's residence in Christchurch. Russian-language publication continued under the Free Word Press imprint, but Chertkov now also set up the Free Age Press to publish English translations of Tolstoy's writings. In the first three years, before he fell out with his manager, Arthur Fifield (who had been secretary at the Brotherhood Church), the Press produced forty-three publications, with a combined print run of over 200,000.¹⁷² Russian-language productivity was also impressive: in 1902 Chertkov started publishing the first Russian edition of Tolstoy's Complete Collected Works Banned in Russia under the imprint of the Free Word Press.

Chertkov also built a state-of-the-art, temperature-controlled vault to store all the manuscripts Tolstoy had been sending him, which now included his precious diaries. One of its custodians was Ludwig Perno, an exiled Estonian revolutionary who lived in nearby Boscombe, and he was made to promise that he would never leave the house without a guard.¹⁷³ Unlike so many other political exiles who were followed by swarms of spies, Chertkov led a life which was remarkably untrammelled by interference from the Russian government. He kept up an intense correspondence with Tolstoy during his years of exile, and was able to travel round England unhindered, giving lectures on Tolstoy and attending weekly 'Progress Meetings for the Consideration of the Problems of Life' in Bournemouth. He even played football for local teams in Christchurch.¹⁷⁴

Before Chertkov moved back to Russia in 1908 he coordinated the publication, both in Russia and abroad, of one of Tolstoy's most important and influential articles. 'I Cannot Be Silent' was written immediately after Tolstoy heard the news that twenty peasants had been hanged for attempted robbery and is one of his most finely articulated and heartfelt pleas for the government to end its systematic programme of organised violence, which he defined as worse than revolutionary terrorism. When the article was published in July, Tolstoy immediately received sixty letters of support - it was still a novelty for people in Russia to be able to read his broadsides. Many newspapers were fined for printing it, however. The liberal Russian Gazette had to pay a penalty of 3,000 roubles and the editor of a Sebastopol newspaper was arrested for pasting it up all over the city.¹⁷⁵ Thoughts of capital punishment now led Tolstoy back to the events of 1866, when he had failed to prevent Private Shabunin from being executed. In the late 1880s, a former cadet in the regiment who had witnessed the events had come to see Tolstoy. He wanted to discuss an account he had written and hoped to publish.¹⁷⁶ Tolstoy had refused, which seems only to have served to increase his feeling of guilt. In 1908 he finally resolved to speak out when questioned by Biryukov in connection with his biography. Bursting into tears three times while dictating an account of what had happened in 1866 to his secretary Gusev, Tolstoy now declared that Shabunin's execution had exerted far more influence on his life than all those events conventionally regarded as significant, such as bereavement, impoverishment, career setbacks and so forth. He confessed to being ashamed of his defence of Shabunin, which in retrospect he felt had been perfunctory and more concerned with legal details than with moral imperatives. It certainly stands in marked contrast to the impassioned stand taken in court by his fictional alter ego Nekhlyudov in Resurrection, which was conceivably written in part to assuage his guilt over the Shabunin affair.¹⁷⁷

15. Employees of the Free Word Press in the vault at Chertkov's house in Christchurch, 1906. Evgeny Popov is seated second from left; Ludwig Perno, custodian of the Tolstoy archive, is seated at the typewriter on the right; and Chertkov's wife is seated in the foreground. Chertkov is standing behind the door.

A quarter of a century on from their first meeting, Chertkov's life was still characterised by his unswerving devotion to Tolstoy, and in 1908 he and his family took up permanent residence in a new house they built on land inherited by Tolstoy's youngest daughter Sasha at Telyatinki, three miles from Yasnaya Polyana. Shortly after Chertkov's return Tolstoy turned eighty. Such was the groundswell of support for him across the country that the Church felt compelled to issue a plea to all true believers to refrain from celebrating the occasion. It also tried to take Tolstoy to court for blasphemy against the holy personality of Jesus Christ, and arranged for icons to be painted which depicted him as a sinner burning in hell. Father Ioann, Tolstoy's implacable foe, even wrote a prayer requesting that he die soon, but it was Father Ioann who died in 1908, not Tolstoy.¹⁷⁸ The few dissenting voices were anyway drowned out by the well-wishers who far outnumbered them. Two thousand telegrams wishing Tolstoy many happy returns were delivered to Yasnaya Polyana on 28 August, and Charles Wright, librarian at the British Museum, arrived at Yasnaya Polyana with birthday greetings signed by 800 English writers, artists and public figures, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Edmund Gosse.¹⁷⁹

Tolstoy had halted the activities of a special celebratory committee established in January 1908, just as he received his first birthday present: a phonograph sent to him by Thomas Edison. There were thus no official undertakings, but that did not stop a flood of ecstatic articles appearing in the press. Journalists gushed that there had never been a cultural celebration in Russia like it ever before, and that while the Pushkin Statue festivities had captured the national imagination back in 1880, this was an event on an international scale. Merezhkovsky proclaimed the Tolstoy celebration as a 'celebration of the Russian revolution', and declared that Tolstoy had against his will 'turned out to be the radiant focal point of Russian freedom'.¹⁸⁰

'Lev Nikolayevich' had long been a household name in Russia, and it had become quite common to overhear passengers on a train discussing him as if he were a close acquaintance. The labels accompanying the photographic chronology in the special supplement published by the newspaper Russian Word to mark Tolstoy's eightieth birthday said it all - from the earliest photographs, labelled 'Count L. N. Tolstoy' when he was an unknown author, to 'Lev Tolstoy', and finally the familiar 'Lev Nikolayevich'. There were only a few notes of criticism amongst the scores of birthday tributes published, and one of them was by Lenin, whose first and most famous article about Tolstoy, 'Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution' appeared in The Proletarian. While praising his attacks on the tsarist regime, Lenin not surprisingly condemned Tolstoy's philosophy of non-violence which he held responsible for the failure of the 1905 Revolution.

In addition to all the greetings cards and telegrams, Tolstoy received gifts, some of which were rather ill-judged, such as the several thousand cigars in boxes with his picture on the front.¹⁸¹ Having Chertkov living so near to him was undoubtedly the best birthday present as far as Tolstoy was concerned. The Chertkovs and all the local Tolstoyans, such as Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt and Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, were invited to a festive dinner at Yasnaya Polyana along with family members, friends and relatives. It was the first and last such occasion, as in 1909 Sonya started to become increasingly paranoid, and also increasingly hostile to Chertkov. The battle with him revolved around Tolstoy's will and his late diaries. She was as obsessive as Chertkov about her husband's legacy, but not as powerful as he was. Much as it was rewarding to enter into correspondence with figures like Gandhi in 1909, and exciting to be filmed by some of Edison's colleagues, Tolstoy's desire to become a homeless wanderer became more and more intense.

In March 1909 Chertkov was ordered to leave Tula province. Politics and personnel had changed in St Petersburg, and suddenly he no longer had so many friends at court. Tolstoy was mortified, and even Sonya wrote to protest, but the Chertkovs were obliged to move from their new home. They took up residence at Vasily Pashkov's old estate Krekshino, about twenty miles outside Moscow. As the year went by, relations between Tolstoy and Sonya now sharply deteriorated. First she found the manuscript of Tolstoy's unpublished story 'The Devil', about a young nobleman's passion for a peasant girl, which opened up a lot of old wounds. Then, in July, she discovered that the power of attorney Tolstoy had given her to manage his property in 1883 did not give her any legal rights to them.¹⁸² She was livid. During Tolstoy's illness in the Crimea, Masha had managed to procure her father's signature on a will which relinquished the copyright on all his works. Sonya had managed to reinstate her name as a beneficiary back then, wanting to ensure that her children and not publishers would benefit from royalties after her husband's death. Tolstoy, however, had other ideas, of course, and Chertkov fully supported his desire to waive all rights over his works. Sonya also faced a new problem as there was a new Tolstoyan in the midst of her family: her daughter Sasha, who had long resented her mother. Sasha turned twenty-five in 1909, and she now devoted herself to working for her father, and with Chertkov.

She was determined to thwart her mother, and make sure a will was drawn up which denied her any rights to her father's works.

Tolstoy had been tipped for one of the recently introduced Nobel Prizes several times, and had published a letter in the Stockholm Tageblatt in 1897 suggesting the Dukhobors were more deserving recipients of the prize money, but the Swedish Academy had been repeatedly frightened off by his 'anarchism'.¹⁸³ In 1909, through the agency of Chertkov, he was invited to the Stockholm Peace Congress. Sonya suspected her husband was going to meet Chertkov behind her back and threatened to poison herself.¹⁸⁴Tolstoy finally agreed not to go, and then in August the Congress was cancelled anyway. It was just at this time that Gusev was arrested for a second time, which was a further blow.¹⁸⁵ This time he was exiled to the Urals for two years. Chertkov began the search for a new secretary.

In September, Tolstoy went to visit Chertkov, stopping off on the way in Moscow, where he had not been for eight years. Before he left Krekshino towards the end of the month, he drew up a will handing over all his works written after 1881 into the public domain, and the manuscripts to Chertkov. A huge crowd gave him an ovation at the Kursk station as he set off back home to Yasnaya Polyana. He would never see Moscow again. In January Valentin Bulgakov, a young philosophy student originally from Siberia, arrived to become Tolstoy's new secretary. Like Gusev, he was instructed by Chertkov to take copious notes on Tolstoy's day-to-day life. He thus became witness to the worst few months in the Tolstoys' marriage, and after her husband's death it was to Bulgakov that Sonya confirmed what the root cause of all the problems had been. In a letter of June 1911 she told him that she could not tolerate being supplanted in her husband's affections by Chertkov. She had spent forty-eight years being married to Tolstoy, as the most important person in his life, and now to have her husband tell her that Chertkov was the closest person to him was unbearable.¹⁸⁶ Sonya did not behave well in the last few months of Tolstoy's life, and numerous doctors correctly diagnosed paranoia and hysteria, but she was not mentally ill. She just felt out of control, usurped and desperate. She feared poverty, and she feared her name being blackened.

In June 1910, Tolstoy made another trip to visit Chertkov, and at the end of the month Chertkov was allowed to return to Telyatinki. Sonya now tried to stop her husband from seeing him, and when she discovered that Chertkov had his diaries from the last ten years, she demanded they be given to her, fearing they would expose her in a bad light. She felt she should have them, as her husband's rightful executor, but Tolstoy refused to accede to her demands. Finally, after bitter conflict, Tolstoy agreed to take back his latest diaries from Chertkov, in order to hand them to their daughter Tanya, who would deposit them in the Tula bank. Sonya and her husband had always read each other's diaries, but now Tolstoy began to keep a secret private journal. And in June he wrote another secret will, bequeathing the rights to his works to Sasha or, in the event of her death, to Tanya. Sonya was not made privy to its contents, but Tolstoy came to regret not having been open about it all.

Tolstoy was compelled to conduct his friendship with Chertkov by letter again, to avoid further hostilities with Sonya. In September she invited a priest to Yasnaya Polyana to conduct an exorcism to expel Chertkov's evil spirit. In late October, after discovering her rifling through his study, Tolstoy decided finally to leave. He had long yearned to leave home and set off on foot with nothing but the clothes on his back as a wanderer. In 1910 he finally did, leaving superstitiously at the age of 82 on 28 October in the middle of the night with Dr Makovicky, so he would not be pursued by Sonya. Despite his antagonistic relations with the Orthodox Church, it is entirely in keeping with Tolstoy's contradictory character that his first destination was the Optina Pustyn Monastery. Finding he was unable to receive spiritual guidance from the elders at Optina Pustyn, he visited his sister at her convent, then boarded a train heading south towards the Caucasus. As soon as she found out her husband had left, Sonya tried to drown herself in the pond.

Tolstoy never reached his destination. On 31 October he boarded a train heading south to Rostov-on-Don with Dr Makovicky and Sasha (who had joined them by this time), but had to get off at Astapovo when he fell ill. Tolstoy was put to bed in the station master's house. Sasha summoned Chertkov, who arrived with his secretary on 2 November, followed by Sergey, and then Sonya who had chartered a train with Tanya, Andrey and Misha. The next day Ilya arrived, as well as Gorbunov-Posadov and Goldenweiser, and on 5 November sixty army officers swelled the ranks of the secret police officers already stationed there. Once the news reached the press, the story made front page headlines. Soon the whole world knew what was happening at the remote railway station in Ryazan province. On 7 November 1910, amidst a frenzy of international publicity, which included regular headlines in The Times, and the whirr of Pathé cameras, Tolstoy finally passed away. Sonya was allowed to see her husband only after he had lost consciousness. There was no reconciliation with the Church. By this time it was only too aware of the public relations disaster it had brought upon itself through the excommunication, but its increasingly frantic attempts to effect a deathbed recantation were an abject failure. Father Varsonofy came down from Optina Pustyn, but Sasha refused him access to her father, which she later felt bitter remorse about when she herself later came back to the Church. Tolstoy was not given Extreme Unction, and was buried very quickly, on 9 November.

There was only one place Tolstoy could be buried, and that was in the grounds of his ancestral home Yasnaya Polyana, where he had spent some seventy of his eighty years. He was interred exactly where he had wished, at the spot in the woods a short walk from his house where the little green stick was buried - the little green stick on which his brother Nikolay had told him the secret to human happiness was written. Aware that mourners from all over Russia would want to attend the funeral, and that the quicker the burial, the fewer would have time to make the journey, the Russian government made haste with the arrangements. There were so many students attending the meetings organised at Moscow University the day following Tolstoy's death that even the corridors were full, and the 800 reserved seats on the train that their representatives managed to negotiate with the management of the Kursk station could have been filled many times over. Thousands besieged the station, but the government forbade the running of any extra trains. Nevertheless, thousands did manage to pay their last respects, having sat all night on a freezing train which brought them to Zaseka station (as Yasenki had been renamed) in the early hours of the morning. It was a clear November night, bonfires were burning, and students had to struggle to restrain the enormous crowd awaiting the arrival of the special train bearing Tolstoy's coffin. But as soon as the train's yellow lights emerged out of the fog on that cold morning, the crowd fell completely silent.

When it was removed from the carriage, which prompted the immediate doffing of hats, the wooden coffin containing Tolstoy's body seemed somehow small and too short. The writer's sons passed the coffin over to peasants from Yasnaya Polyana, who would carry it on its final journey. With the exception of the police in attendance, the entire crowd started softly singing 'Eternal Memory', the sombre song which concludes every Orthodox funeral.

Still singing, the crowd set off behind Sofya Andreyevna and her sons, to walk for three hours to reach Tolstoy's ancestral home - first down the slope and across the little wooden bridge over the stream, then through the birch and alder forest underneath frosted branches, and then along bare, frozen fields, lightly covered in snow, which were the same pale-white colour as the sky.

Ahead of the coffin village carts carried wreaths and fir-twigs, which were strewn along the path by students and old women. As many noted with amazement, the whole of Russian society had come together on that day to pay their last respects - peasants, aristocrats, intellectuals and factory workers, old and young, male and female - and this was something quite unprecedented. Two local peasants carried a banner as they walked on which they had painted 'Lev Nikolayevich! The Memory of Your Goodness Will not Die Amongst the Orphaned Peasants of Yasnaya Polyana'. No one in the village surrounding Tolstoy's estate had been to bed, and their houses remained lit throughout the night. One local peasant was heard to remark that it was just like at Easter, when everyone stayed up for the midnight service, before going home to break the long fast in the early hours and start celebrating.

When the procession arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's coffin was brought into the house, so that the 5,000 mourners could file past and pay their last respects. Many people were shocked by the discrepancy between the Tolstoy they knew from all the portraits and photographs and the wax-like, wizened face of his corpse, and some fainted or had hysterics. Three and a half hours later the coffin was lifted up again and taken on its final journey into the wood, a short walk from the main house. At ten minutes to three in the afternoon, it was quietly lowered into the simple unmarked grave that had been prepared. Speeches had been banned, but everyone fell to their knees (even the policeman who had been despatched to monitor the proceedings). 'Eternal Memory' was sung softly again, but there was nothing Orthodox about this funeral rite, which was the first civil burial to take place in Russia. There were no priests, no icons, and no prayers, and no cross was erected at the head of the grave. Mourners continued to flock to Tolstoy's bare burial mound in the days and weeks following his funeral. Only the following spring did grass begin to grow over it. As the attention finally receded from Astapovo, where over 1,000 telegrams had been sent and received during the last week of Tolstoy's life, Yasnaya Polyana became once again a place of pilgrimage.

'Eternal Memory' was sung at memorial services held throughout Russia after the funeral, and also at demonstrations that had nothing ostensibly to do with Tolstoy. Tolstoy's death, in fact, acted as a catalyst for political action: there were widespread strikes in Moscow on the day of the funeral, as well as student demonstrations, marches and processions, and vociferous calls were made for the death penalty to be abolished. The Russian government faced a dilemma. Unable to join in the eulogies flooding the media, having demonised Tolstoy for so long, and equally unable to denounce him now that his great significance as a writer and thinker was being celebrated around the world, it found itself in an intractable position, for it could not remain silent. Ministers debated how they should honour the memory of a writer who had condemned governments, monarchs and state authority, but they had already become irrelevant and impotent, and their efforts to contain public manifestations were ineffectual. The Russian population at large had seized the initiative and was now beginning to write the script: it was a defining moment. Schools and universities closed, and factories, offices and theatres shut their doors while Russians from all backgrounds united in grieving publicly for a great writer and mighty hero who had defiantly spoken up on behalf of a nation that had been maimed and muzzled for so long. The import of these unprecedented events was not lost on one exiled revolutionary in Switzerland - Vladimir Lenin, who wrote three new articles on Tolstoy in November 1910. Tolstoy was still just a mirror of diverse and contradictory impulses in Russia in his view, but the nation had moved on since 1905. Tolstoy had taken giant steps during his lifetime, and his death was one last giant step - on the road to Revolution.¹⁸⁷