Note on Conventions

A simplified transliteration system has been used in the body of the text (e.g. 'Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy'), but a more accurate one in the notes and bibliography (e.g. 'Petr Andreevich Tolstoi'). Exceptions are made in the case of accepted spellings such as 'Potemkin' (pronounced 'Potyomkin'), 'Tchaikovsky' and 'Bolshoi Theatre'.

Russian dates before 1918 are given according to the Julian calendar, which was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth century, and thirteen days behind in the twentieth century.

Introduction

IN JANUARY 1895, deep in the heart of the Russian winter, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy left Moscow to go and spend a few days with some old friends at their country estate. He had just experienced another fracas with his wife over the publication of a new story, he felt suffocated in the city, and he wanted to clear his head by putting on his old leather coat and fur hat and going for some long walks in the clear, frosty air, far away from people and buildings. His hosts had taken care to clear the paths on their property, but Tolstoy did not like walking on well-ordered paths. Even in his late sixties he preferred tramping in the wilds, so he invariably ventured out past the garden fence and strode off into the deep snow, in whichever direction his gaze took him. Some of the younger members of the household had the idea of following in his footsteps one evening, but they soon had to give up when they saw how great was the distance between the holes left in the soft snow by his felt boots.¹

The sensation of not being able to keep up was one commonly felt by Tolstoy's contemporaries, as he left giant footprints in every area of his life. After racking up enormous gambling debts as a young man, during which time he conceived and failed to live up to wildly ambitious ideals, he turned to writing extremely long novels and fathering a large number of children. When he went out riding with his sons, he habitually went at such a fast pace they could barely keep up with him. Then he became moral leader to the nation, and one of the world's most famous and influential men. A tendency towards the grand scale has been a markedly Russian characteristic ever since the times of Ivan the Terrible, who created an enormous multi-ethnic empire by conquering three Mongol Khanates in the sixteenth century. Peter the Great cemented the tradition by making space the defining feature of his new capital of St Petersburg which arose in record time out of the Finnish marshes. By the time Catherine the Great died at the end of the eighteenth century, Russia had also become immensely wealthy. Its aristocrats were able to build lavish palaces and assemble extravagant art collections far grander than their Western counterparts, with lifestyles to match. But Russia's poverty was also on a grand scale, perpetuated by an inhumane caste system in which a tiny minority of Westernised nobility ruled over a fettered serf population made to live in degrading conditions. Tolstoy was both a product of this culture and perhaps its most vivid expression.

Many people who knew Tolstoy noticed his hyper-sensitivity. He was like litmus paper in his acute receptivity to minute gradations of physical and emotional experience, and it was his unparalleled ability to observe and articulate these ever-changing details of human behaviour in his creative works that makes his prose so thrilling to read. The consciousness of his characters is at once particular and universal. Tolstoy was also hyper-sensitive in another way, for he embodied at different times of his life a myriad Russian archetypes, from the 'repentant nobleman' to the 'holy fool'. Only Russia could have produced a writer like Tolstoy, but only Tolstoy could be likened in almost the same breath to both a tsar and a peasant. From the time that he was born into the aristocratic Tolstoy family in the idyllic surroundings of his ancestral home at Yasnaya Polyana to the day that he left it for the last time at the age of eighty-two, Tolstoy lived a profoundly Russian life. He began to be identified with his country soon after he published his national epic War and Peace when he was in still his thirties. Later on, he was equated with Ilya Muromets, the most famous Russian bogatyr - a semi-mythical medieval warrior who lay at home on the brick stove until he was thirty-three — then went on to perform great feats defending the realm. Ilya Muromets is Russia's traditional symbol of physical and spiritual strength. Tolstoy was also synonymous with Russia in the eyes of many of his foreign admirers. 'He is as much part of Russia, as significant of Russian character, as prophetic of Russian development, as the Kremlin itself,' wrote the liberal British politician Sir Henry Norman soon after visiting Tolstoy in 1901.² For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, meanwhile, Tolstoy had 'no face of his own; he possesses the face of the Russian people, because in him the whole of Russia lives and breathes'.³

Tolstoy lived a Russian life, and he lived many more lives than most other Russians, exhibiting both the 'natural dionysism' and 'Christian asceticism' which the philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev defines as characteristic of the Russian people.⁴ First of all he lived the life of his privileged class, educated by private foreign tutors and waited on by serfs. He became a wealthy landowner at the age of nineteen, and immediately began exhibiting Russian 'maximalist' tendencies by squandering his inheritance on gypsy singers and gambling. Whole villages were sold off to pay his debts, followed by his house. Tolstoy also lived up to the reputation of the depraved Russian landowner by taking advantage of his serf girls, then assumed another classic identity of the Russian noble: he became an army officer. For most of his comrades-in-arms the next step was retirement to the country estate, but Tolstoy became a writer — the most promising young writer of his generation. It was at this point that he started showing signs of latent anarchism: he did not want to belong to any particular literary fraternity, and soon alienated most of his fellow writers with his eccentric views and combative nature. Turgenev disappointed him by failing to take writing as seriously as he did, and for being too enslaved to western Europe. Turgenev's creative work was as deeply bound up with Russia as Tolstoy's was, but he lived in Paris. Tolstoy made two visits abroad during his lifetime, but he was tied to Russia body and soul.

As he matured under the influence of the writers and philosophers who shaped his ideas, Tolstoy inevitably became a member of the intelligentsia, the peculiarly Russian class of people united by their education and usually critical stance towards their government. The deep guilt he now felt before the Russian peasantry, furthermore, made him a repentant nobleman, ashamed at his complicity in the immoral institution of serfdom. Like the Populists, Tolstoy began to see the peasants as Russia's best class, and her future, and around the time that serfdom was finally abolished he threw himself into teaching village children how to read and write. But he was mercurial, and a year later abandoned his growing network of unconventional schools to get married and start a family. The emotional stability provided by his devoted wife Sofya ('Sonya') Bers enabled him next to become Russia's Homer: War and Peace was written at the happiest time in his life.

Tolstoy's overactive conscience would not allow him to continue along the path of great novelist, and in the first half of the 1870s he went back to education. This time he devised his own system for teaching Russian children from all backgrounds how to read and write, by putting together an ABC and several reading primers. He taught himself Greek, then produced his own simplified translations of Aesop's fables, as well as stories of his own, a compilation of tales about Russian bogatyrs and extracts from sacred readings. The Yasnaya Polyana school was reopened, with some of the elder Tolstoy children as teachers. Tolstoy was more of a father during these years than at any other time, and he took his family off to his newly acquired estate on the Samaran steppe for an unorthodox summer holiday amongst Bashkirs and horses. He revelled in the raw, primitive lifestyle, even if his wife did not.

In the second half of the 1870s everything began to unravel. In 1873, the year in which he began Anna Karenina, Tolstoy first spoke out on behalf of the impoverished peasantry by appealing nationwide for help in the face of impending famine. Anna Karenina,set in contemporary Russia, reflects Tolstoy's own search for meaning in the face of depression and thoughts of death. Initially, he found meaning in religious faith and became one of the millions of pilgrims criss-crossing the Russian land on their way to visit its hallowed monasteries. Like many fellow intellectuals, Tolstoy was drawn to the Elders of the Optina Pustyn Monastery — monks who had distanced themselves from the official ecclesiastical hierarchy by resurrecting the ascetic traditions of the early Church Fathers, and who were revered for their spiritual wisdom. He found it was the peasants who had more wisdom to impart, however, and the next time he went to Optina Pustyn, he walked there, dressed in peasant clothes and bast shoes like a Strannik('wanderer'). The Stranniks were a sect who spent their lives walking in pilgrimage from one monastery to another, living on alms. The nomadic spirit runs deep in Russia, and Tolstoy increasingly hankered as time went on to join their ranks. He had long ago started dressing like a peasant, but he soon wanted to dispense with money and private property altogether.

From extreme piety Tolstoy went to extreme nihilism. At the end of the 1870s he began to see the light, and he set down his spiritual journey in a work which came to be known as his Confession. He also undertook a critical investigation of Russian Orthodox theology, and produced a 'new, improved' translation of the Gospels. Over the course of the 1880s he became an apostle for the Christian teaching which emerged from his root-and-branch review of the original sources, and at the same time his newfound faith compelled him to speak out against the immorality he now saw in all state institutions, from the monarchy downwards. Home life now became very strained, particularly after Tolstoy renounced the copyright on all his new writings and gave away all his property to his family. He discovered kindred spirits amongst the unofficial sectarian faiths which proliferated across Russia, whose followers were mostly peasants, and gradually became the leader of a new sectarian faith, although his followers were mostly conscience-stricken gentry like himself. These 'Tolstoyans' sometimes vied with each other to lead the most morally pure life, giving up money and property, living by the sweat of their brow and treating everyone as their 'brother'. Thus one zealous Tolstoyan even gave up his kaftan, hat and bast shoes one summer, glad to be no longer a slave to his personal possessions.⁵

By the 1890s Tolstoy had become the most famous man in Russia, celebrated for a number of compellingly written and explosive tracts setting out his views on Christianity, the Orthodox Church and the Russian government, which were read all the more avidly for having been banned: they circulated very successfully in samizdat. It was when Tolstoy spearheaded the relief effort during the widespread famine of 1892 that his position as Russia's greatest moral authority became unassailable. The result was a constant stream of visitors at his front door in Moscow, many of whom simply wanted to shake his hand. One of them was the twenty-three-year-old Sergey Diaghilev, who with characteristic chutzpah turned up one day with his cousin, and immediately noticed the incongruity ofTolstoy's peasant dress and 'gentlemanly way of behaving and speaking'. Tolstoy had come for a rest from the famine-relief work he had been doing in Ryazan province, and talked to the sophisticated young aesthetes from St Petersburg about soup kitchens. Diaghilev shared his impressions with his stepmother:

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

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

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

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

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

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

While Tolstoy is universally regarded as one of the world's great writers, he remains a controversial and contradictory figure. His marriage had already gone into a steep decline by the time he met Vladimir Chertkov, but it was his submission to his devoted friend which caused a bad situation to disintegrate entirely in the last year of his life. Chertkov's influence over Tolstoy's estate meant that his version of events initially prevailed over dissenting voices, chiefly that of the writer's grieving widow, whom he had displaced in her husband's affections. The publication in 2006 of a collection of scholarly articles dedicated to her memory, and in 2010 of the first Russian biography of Sofya Tolstaya, is witness to the sea-change in attitudes that swiftly took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union.¹⁰

Sonya can be forgiven for becoming paranoid and hysterical in the last year of her husband's life. She can be forgiven a lot, as her husband treated her very badly, by any account. His strengths were also his weaknesses, and his attitude towards the female gender is in general not admirable. Sonya did not, like him and their daughters, become vegetarian, nor did she want to dispense with money and private property; she just wanted to maintain the comfortable lifestyle she was used to. Sonya was a talented woman who selflessly put aside whatever interests she might have developed in order to go on bearing the children her husband wanted, and help him as his copyist. For long years she supported a man whose ego often blinded him to the needs of his family, and it was unfair of him to expect her to follow him meekly on his quest to lead a more spiritually enlightened, ascetic life just because he decided it was time to change. She also had her faults, however, and her rigidity stopped her from seeing that she could be just as controlling as Chertkov.

Tolstoy has had his share of detractors. One of the most eloquent and witty is Alexander Boot, an admirer of Tolstoy the artist, but also the author of an effective hatchet job on Tolstoy the thinker:

He wished to be more than a novelist, even one of genius. He wished to be more than a seer or a soothsayer, although that would have been a good start. He wished to be God ... He wanted to correct God's mistakes in having allowed the world to become imperfect and sinful. He, Count Tolstoy ... set out to usurp God's job. But the job was already taken, and the deity stubbornly hung on to it. Therefore Tolstoy declared war on God and fought it with every means at his disposal. Alas, though he tried many lines of attack, each disguised by the camouflage of pseudo-Christian verbiage, Tolstoy came off a poor second. By way of revenge, he came, in effect, to deny God the Father, ignore God the Son and dismiss God the Holy Spirit. No one was allowed to defeat Tolstoy and get away with it.¹¹

Boot concedes Tolstoy's enormous impact on many of the movements of the modern age, such as vegetarianism, anti-capitalism and animal rights, and his arguments are persuasive, yet they need to be squared with the fact that Tolstoy's philosophy of non-violence was revered by Gandhi, Wittgenstein and Martin Luther King. To see Tolstoy principally in terms of artist versus thinker, moreover, is to overlook his important humanitarian work.

It is perhaps Tolstoy's impact on Russian life while he was still alive which is his greatest legacy beyond his great fictional works. If for nothing else, Tolstoy should be hailed for trying to improve literacy in a country where only a tiny percentage of the population could read and write at the end of the nineteenth century, for doing something about the national disaster threatened by famine, and for having the courage to speak some home truths to a complacent and corrupt regime which was indifferent to the poverty of its subjects. Numerous people approached Tolstoy with scepticism, but came away, like Diaghilev, convinced of his sincerity. Even if some of his sons did their best to practise the opposite of what he preached, his daughters were devoted to him. And there is something touching about his untiring zest for life, however wrong-headed his ideas were.

The greatest task facing the biographer of Tolstoy is the challenge of making sense of a man who was truly larger than life. It was a task he himself took on the moment he started writing a diary in his late adolescence, and one he never abandoned, particularly in his last years. Tolstoy never stopped trying to make sense of himself in his writing, whether it was through the public medium of his fictional characters or the quasi-private one of his diary entries. Indeed, as the scholar Irina Paperno has suggested, he even seems to have wanted to extend the extraordinary feat he achieved in his fiction of articulating latent as well as overt psychological processes by 'turning himself into a book' in his diaries.¹² If encompassing and describing his consciousness as it evolved was a project doomed to failure, like so many Russian utopian dreams, its very lack of finitude nevertheless reassures us of Tolstoy's humanity.

The task of charting his artistic and intellectual journey has also proved a daunting one for Russia's great Tolstoy scholars. It is indicative that the mammoth multi-volume biography which Tolstoy's former secretary Nikolay Gusev embarked on in the 1950s is modestly titled Materials for a Biography. It remained unfinished at his death at the age of eighty-five in 1967, when his pupil Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya took up the baton. Although she added a further two volumes to Gusev's four, she also died before the project could be completed, leaving the last eighteen years of Tolstoy's life still to be covered (before this distinguished scholar's death in 2003 she launched the new definitive hundred-volume edition of Tolstoy's Complete Collected Works).¹³ While there is a paucity of sources concerning Tolstoy's early life, necessitating reliance on the sometimes erratic and incomplete memoirs the writer compiled in old age, the sheer abundance of sources on his last years create problems for the biographer of a different kind. Such was his fame that many episodes in the 'hagiography' of Lev Tolstoy were set down while he was not just still alive, but comparatively young: the first biography was published when he was in his early sixties, in German moreover. The innumerable cliches which cling to Tolstoy's vita — 'great writer of the Russian land', 'the Elder of Yasnaya Polyana' — can also be inhibiting, as can be the many contradictions with which his personality bristles. Tolstoy's life is rich and fascinating but also deeply mythologised, and he himself contributed to the process of mythologisation.

In the early years of his marriage, while he was writing War and Peace, Tolstoy would insist that his young wife was present, and so Sonya would usually curl up by his feet on the bearskin rug next to his desk — a trophy from one of his hunting expeditions.¹⁴Later on he worked in seclusion, but all through their married life, the Tolstoys read each other's diaries, which meant their confessions could never really be private. In Sonya's case, it was in the letters she wrote to her sister Tanya that she wrote most frankly; her diary was often written with a high degree of self-consciousness. For Tolstoy, however, who was always deeply connected to the land and those who worked it, there was from the beginning that very Russian yearning for oneness, to the extent that the borders between public and private eventually became blurred. His was a Russian life.