Leo Tolstoy

Sofia, who was copying the manuscripts of Resurrection, wrote in her diary that she was ‘disgusted by the intentional cynicism in the description of the Orthodox service’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 444). For the official Church this was too much to stomach. After more than a year of discussion and deliberation, and, as recent historians argue, contrary to the will of Pobedonostsev, the Holy Synod issued an edict condemning Tolstoy in February 1901. The document was crafted with deliberate ambiguity. In its content it amounted to excommunication, but the word itself was not used. Instead the edict expressed sorrow that Tolstoy had severed his relations with the Church and hope that he would repent and return to its bosom. In any case, it was a consequential decision, making the writer an outlaw in his own country and, at the same time, enhancing his reputation especially among the younger generation that mostly detested the throne and the Church.

Tolstoy was unsure about the meaning of the edict. He asked his friends whether he had been officially anathematized, and looked disappointed having received a negative answer. In his reply to the Synod, he accused his opponents of hypocrisy and of inciting hatred and violence. He wrote that, walking in Moscow on the day of the publication of the edict, he had been called ‘The Devil in human shape’. He chose not to mention the reaction of the crowd of several thousand people who, according to Sofia’s diary, started shouting ‘Hurray, L[ev].N[icolayevich]., hello L[ev].N[icolayevich]., glory to the great man! Hurray!’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 15). As Chekhov wrote, ‘the public reacted to the excommunication with laughter’ (Ch-Ls, IX, p. 213).

In his letter to the Synod, Tolstoy confirmed that he had rejected the dogmas of the ruling Church and declared that repentance was impossible:

I must myself live my own life, and I must myself alone meet death (and that very soon), and therefore I cannot believe otherwise than as I – preparing to go to that God from whom I came – do believe . . . But I can no more return to that from which with such suffering I have escaped, than a flying bird can re-enter the eggshell from which it has emerged . . . I began by loving my Orthodox faith more than my peace, then I loved Christianity more than my Church, and now I love truth more than anything in the world. And up to now, truth, for me, corresponds with Christianity as I understand it. And I hold to this Christianity; and to the degree in which I hold to it, I live peacefully and happily, and peacefully and happily approach death.(CW, XXXIV, pp. 247, 252–3)

Tolstoy may have desecrated the sanctuaries of the official religion, but he had his own sense of what was holy and deserving of reverence. The moment of transition from an individual and temporal life to an eternal and universal one was for him sacred, as he wrote in his diary in 1894: ‘Love is the essence of life, and death removing the cover lays the essence bare’ (CW, LII, p. 119). His niece Elizaveta Obolenskaya recalled how he once asked the art critic Vasily Stasov about his thoughts on death. Stasov replied that he never thinks ‘about that bitch’. According to Obolenskaya, Tolstoy took these words as blasphemy. She wrote that he often spoke about death as a ‘blessing . . . a liberation, but thoughts about it worried him’, and once he remarked that ‘only frivolous people could not be afraid of death.’¹³ It was not the fear of physical annihilation. Tolstoy was afraid he would not be able to prove himself worthy of this most solemn moment. At the end of his life, he confessed that while an unconscious death would be ‘agreeable’, he would prefer to die fully conscious.¹⁴

In the summer of 1901 Tolstoy fell gravely ill. The chief doctor of the Tula hospital where he was taken declared his state to be terminal. In the morning, when Sofia was putting a warm compress on his belly, he said, ‘Thank you, Sonya. Don’t think I am not grateful to you and don’t love you.’ Both wept. The next day, when he started feeling better he told her that he was at a crossroads: ‘forward (to death) is good, and back (to life) is good. If I recover now it is only a delay.’ After a pause, he added, ‘I still have something that I want to say to people’ (SAT-Ds, II, pp. 22–3).