Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s enemies and followers alike accused him of hypocrisy. He was pained by these reproaches, but able to withstand them because he knew them to be false. The pleasures derived from everyday comforts would never be able to influence his decisions. He was less sure about the temptations of lust and earthly fame. His struggle with both of these is evident in Father Sergius, a piece in which the intensity of contained passion is breathtaking even by the standards of Tolstoy’s prose. Tolstoy spent most of the 1890s devising and writing this story before it was completed in 1898. It was never published in his lifetime. The story starts with a description of the sensational disappearance of a highly successful person:

In Petersburg in the eighteen-forties a surprising event occurred. An officer of the Cuirassier Life Guards, a handsome prince who everyone predicted would become aide-de-camp to Emperor Nicholas I and have a brilliant career, left the service, broke off his engagement to a beautiful maid of honour, a favourite of the Empress’s, gave his small estate to his sister and retired to a monastery to become a monk. (TSF, p. 235)

Prince Stepan Kasatsky changes his life so dramatically because his bride confesses to him that, before their engagement, she had been a mistress of the emperor. This discovery turns Kasatsky’s love into a sham and exposes the futility of his ambitious aspirations. Religious beliefs he has preserved from his childhood save him and guide him to a monastery where he takes holy orders as Father Sergius. From there he retires to a remote cell where he leads an ascetic life of prayer and abstinence. His solitude is, however, marred by recurrent doubts about his choice and by carnal desires. In one of his worst moments he is tempted by an eccentric aristocratic beauty, who comes to his cell specially intending to seduce the handsome hermit. Father Sergius manages to resist the temptation only by cutting off one of his fingers.

This incident, which soon becomes public knowledge, makes the recluse immensely popular and gives rise to rumours about his healing powers.

More and more people flocked to him and less and less time was left him for prayer and for renewing his spiritual strength . . . He knew he would hear nothing new from these folk, that they would arouse no religious emotion in him, but he liked to see the crowd to which his blessing and advice was necessary and precious, so while that crowd oppressed him, it also pleased him. (TSF, pp. 256–7)

Tolstoy was thinking of himself, his newly acquired status as a prophet and of the crowds of people who came to seek his advice. His son remembers that, after the departure of a particularly annoying guest, Leo would start jumping wildly through the rooms of his house followed by a line of hilarious children. They used to call this silent ritual of liberation ‘Numidian cavalry’. His daughter Tatiana once asked him about a strangely clad man in his room. ‘He is a young member of what’s to me the world’s most strange and incomprehensible sect,’ responded her father, ‘the tolstoyans.’²

In May 1893 he noted in his diary that ‘as soon as a person is able to free himself a little from the sin of lust, he immediately stumbles and falls into the worse pit of human fame’. Thus it was necessary not ‘to destroy existing bad reputation, but to value it as a means to avoid the greatest temptation . . . I need to elaborate on this topic in “Father Sergius”. It is worth it’ (CW, LII, p. 82).

The limits of Father Sergius’s pretended saintliness are laid bare by a plump, imbecilic and sexually voracious merchant’s daughter, who makes him succumb to the desires of the flesh. The world of the hermit and his faith are ruined. ‘As usual at moments of despair, he felt a need of prayer. But there was no one to pray to. There was no God’ (TSF, p. 263). Tolstoy initially planned to make the hermit kill the girl, but that would have made the story a second version of his earlier novella, The Devil. Instead Tolstoy transformed the story of sex and murder into one of escape. In a trademark paradox, ugly sin liberates Father Sergius from the slavery of earthly fame and enables him to serve God by serving people. The hermit leaves his cell and is saved from utter destitution by a hapless old childhood friend, who lives a life of self-sacrifice supporting her desperate daughter, sickly and useless son-in-law and two grandchildren, without ever thinking that she is doing anything good or moral. Father Sergius becomes a wandering beggar, is arrested and exiled to Siberia. There he settles down, working in the kitchen garden of a well-to-do peasant, teaching his children and attending to the sick.