Leo Tolstoy

Like The Kreutzer Sonata, The Power of Darkness and Resurrection, The Living Corpse was based on a real court case. Stories of crime and punishment fascinated Tolstoy no less than Dostoevsky, especially after the death of the latter. However, the plot of this play suspiciously resembled that of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, in which one of the characters performs the same trick and is rewarded with complete success. Having always regarded divorce as being tantamount to adultery, Tolstoy found Chernyshevsky’s novel deeply immoral. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s sympathy with Protasov’s desire to free himself from family bonds is evident and Liza is portrayed as a kind and loving woman who is reasonably happy in her second marriage.

In his diary, Tolstoy referred to The Living Corpse as a ‘small drama’. The moral conclusions of his ‘big drama’, The Light Shines in the Darkness, are even more controversial. This is the only major work by Tolstoy, in any genre, in which the main character is the conscious embodiment of his own religious and philosophical views. To the dismay of his family, Nikolai Saryntsev renounces military service, the Orthodox Church, landownership and money and tries to engage in manual labour. Most of the people around him regard his behaviour as madness, but the local priest, Vasily, and his daughter’s fiancé, Prince Boris Cheremshanov, happen to be receptive to his teachings. The priest is evicted from the parish and forced to repent. Boris heroically refuses to renounce his views, rejects military service, is arrested and sent to a mental asylum and then a military prison. Lyuba, Saryntsev’s daughter, despite her sincere love for Boris, agrees to marry another young man.

Tolstoy did not finish the play. From his plan, we know that in the final act Saryntsev was to be killed by Cheremshanov’s mother, take the blame upon himself and die peacefully. However, the written text concludes with Saryntsev’s desperate prayer: ‘Vasily Nikanorovich has returned. I destroyed Boris. Lyuba is getting married. Am I wrong, wrong to believe in Thee? No. Father, help me’ (CW, XXXI, p. 184). His spiritual anguish remains unresolved.

Dramatic form does not allow the author to claim omniscience. Tolstoy was deprived here of one of his main narrative tools – insight into the hidden depths of the human soul, revealing subtle motives and impulses that are unclear even to the person himself. Possibly these limitations, inherent in the genre, prevented Tolstoy from becoming a real rival to Shakespeare or Chekhov. At the same time, for the very same reason, Tolstoy could allow himself to be more intimate in his plays than in his prose, letters and even diaries, and to give voice to inner doubts for which he could not find an outlet elsewhere.

Saryntsev and Tolstoy suffered because of the contrast between their own safety and comfort and the plight of their followers. The government and the Church were keen to exploit this contrast by ignoring the leader and persecuting his flock. When some officials proposed to silence the dangerous writer, Alexander III adamantly refused, allegedly saying that he ‘had no intention of making a martyr out of him and thus earning for myself universal indignation’.¹² Nicholas II, who inherited the throne in 1894, was not such a great admirer of Tolstoy’s talent as his father, but continued the same policy. Protected by his fame, Tolstoy longed for the martyrdom of a real prophet and continued to provoke the authorities.

Tolstoy included in the text of Resurrection two passages describing a service in the prison church. The first was a merciless parody of the Eucharist. Tolstoy portrayed this ritual, familiar to every Christian, and a most sacred mystery of the Orthodox Church, as a weird and senseless piece of pagan magic. In the second passage he accused the Church of blasphemy and profanation of the letter and spirit of Christ’s word. The real goal of established religions, Tolstoy suggested, was to switch off the personal conscience of believers, to allow them to continue their unjust ways of life and support a cruel and inhuman social order. Even submitting these fragments to the censors was unimaginable, but Chertkov, authorized by Tolstoy, included them in the foreign editions of the novel. Immediately thousands of copies of the full text appeared in Russia. Readers would hectograph the missing parts and stick them in the censored editions they bought.