Leo Tolstoy

This ending seems to have been borrowed from another escape story Tolstoy considered writing in the 1890s. Posthumous Notes of the Elder Fyodor Kuzmich were based on a popular legend about Alexander I, according to which the emperor, known as a mystic and visionary, did not die in 1825, as had been officially announced, but escaped and lived under the assumed name of Fyodor Kuzmich. Fyodor was a real person. Like Father Sergius, he had wandered around Russia and been arrested for vagrancy and exiled. In his old age he lived in Siberia working in the kitchen garden of a merchant and teaching peasant children in return for meals – the old man never took money. Fyodor died in 1864, leaving behind some encoded papers. His identity was never revealed.

Tolstoy was inclined to believe the legend, but he did not write the story. He had too many other commitments in the 1890s to be able to bury himself in the documents and achieve the historical accuracy and sense of truthfulness he required. The themes of sudden escape, downturn in lifestyle, arrest and manual labour in a Siberian kitchen garden were transferred to Father Sergius. In 1901 the Russian historian Nikolai Schilder published a four-volume comprehensive biography of Alexander I. Schilder did not fully subscribe to the tale of the emperor’s escape, but also he did not refute it and seemed to be cautiously sympathetic to the legend. The biography, with its wealth of material, gave a boost to Tolstoy’s design. In 1902 he met Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, also a court historian, in Gaspra and talked with him about his relative. According to the grand duke, Tolstoy thought that if Alexander ‘really ended his life as a hermit, his redemption would be complete’ (CW, XXXVI, p. 585). In the writer’s mind such a transformation would redeem Alexander from the sin of having been complicit in the murder of his father, and the no less horrendous crime of ruling over other human beings for nearly a quarter of a century.

In 1905 Tolstoy started drafting the story narrated as an autobiography by the eponymous Fyodor Kuzmich. He had made little progress by 1907 when Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich published a monograph disproving the legend beyond reasonable doubt. It was likely, he concluded, that Fyodor was a fugitive nobleman, but definitely not the emperor. Thanking the grand duke for the book, Tolstoy wrote:

Tolstoy at work, drawing by Ilya Repin, 1891.

Let the impossibility of identifying Alexander and Kuzmich as the same person be proven historically, the legend still remains alive in all its beauty and truthfulness. I started writing about it; but shall probably not go on. No time, I have to pack for the forthcoming transition. It is a pity. What a charming image. (CW, LXXVII, p. 185)

He was charmed by the sudden and mysterious disappearance of a tsar and could not stop dreaming about it. In the midst of the revolutionary turmoil, Tolstoy felt an almost regal sense of mission weighing down upon him and the responsibility this entailed. These provoked, in turn, an irresistible urge to escape. He could not yet allow himself to withdraw from the public stage, but he had all but withdrawn from the world of literature.

Tolstoy, 28 August 1903.

Since the publication of Resurrection he had almost stopped publishing original artistic works. When the first posthumous edition of his complete works appeared in 1911, the reading public was stunned by Father Sergius, Hadji Murat, The Living Corpse and many other hidden treasures. The impact was similar to that achieved earlier with the publication of his great novels. ‘Tolstoy’s Alyosha the Pot. Never read anything greater,’³ wrote the leading Russian Modernist poet Alexander Blok about a four-page story about the life, love and death of a hard-working and selfless village boy considered a fool by some, for his kindness and readiness to oblige others.

There were many reasons for Tolstoy’s reluctance to publish. He wanted to avoid family rows about copyright; he also felt compelled to mortify his authorial vanity. Still he was physically unable to stop writing fiction. In 1909 he was working on a big story that was tellingly entitled There Are No Guilty People in the World. He confessed in his diary that he still had ‘an urge to do artistic work, not real desire of the kind I had before with a clear goal, but without any goal or rather with a hidden and unattainable goal of peering into the human soul. And I want it very much’ (CW, LVII, p. 52). On 2 October 1910, a month before his death, he had a new creative idea and exclaimed, ‘What a great thing that could be!’ (CW, LVIII, pp. 110–11).