Tolstoy

It was perhaps inevitable that a man who did nothing by half-measures would experience something beyond the typical mid-life crisis. The decade following Tolstoy’s forty-ninth birthday would indeed turn out to be the most tumultuous in his life thus far. Moving to Moscow was the event which loomed largest for the rest of his family during this period (it was a life-changing experience for all the children and certainly for Sonya, after the long years of being sequestered at Yasnaya Polyana). But that was not what Tolstoy was referring to when he defined these years as a time of tempestuous inner struggle and change. He became a devout Orthodox communicant, then a trenchant critic of the Church. He undertook a root-and-branch study of all the major world religions and wrote a searing work of spiritual autobiography about his quest for the meaning of life. He produced a new translation of the Gospels, and set out to follow Christ’s teaching. And then he began protesting loudly in the name of that teaching against the Orthodox Church. At the end of the 1880s Alexander III would brand Tolstoy as a godless nihilist, and a dangerous figure who needed to be stopped.³

There was a journey to be undertaken before Tolstoy reached the point of formulating and articulating his new ideas, however, and it began with a period of intense religious searching, as reflected in the chapters at the end of Anna Karenina where Levin questions the meaning of life. The spiritual crisis that Dostoyevsky underwent during his years of Siberian exile in the early 1850s resulted in him jettisoning atheism and socialism and embracing Christianity, specifically Russian Orthodox Christianity, with ever greater fervour. Tolstoy did more or less the opposite, the spiritual crisis he underwent at the end of the 1870s resulting in him jettisoning not just Russian Orthodoxy but a large part of Christianity too. But he began his spiritual crisis by first becoming devout – the most devout he had ever been in his life.

Up until this point, Tolstoy had only notionally been a member of the Orthodox faith he was baptised into, like most members of his class. He had given up praying at sixteen and lost his belief at eighteen, but in his late forties he began to yearn for the guidance provided by strong religious beliefs. Writing to Alexandrine at the beginning of February 1877, Tolstoy confessed that for the past two years he had been like a drowning man, desperate to find something to hold on to. He told her he had been pinning his hopes on finding salvation in religion, that he and his friend Strakhov were both agreed that philosophy could not provide the answers, and that they could not live without religion. At the same time, he wrote, they just could not believe in God.⁴ A month later, however, Tolstoy had changed course totally, and almost on a whim, after conversations with his ‘materialist’ doctor Grigory zakharin and Sergey Levitsky, the celebrated ‘patriarch’ of Russian photography who had taken the group portrait of The Contemporary’s writers in Paris back in 1856.⁵ He started reading the theological writings of the Slavophile thinker Alexey khomyakov, just like his character Levin at the end of Anna Karenina.⁶ Like Levin, he found them wanting. Even so, he was soon saying his prayers every day as he had in childhood, going to church on Sundays and fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Tolstoy’s newfound religious fervour did not stop him from going off hunting with his friends for wolves and elk, or seeking to publish his fiction profitably – yet. He had come back to his old publisher Theodor Ries to arrange for the separate publication of ‘The Eighth and Last Part’ of Anna Karenina after the Russian Messenger debacle, and soon after it appeared in print in July 1877 he handed over a slightly revised version of the complete novel for its first publication in book form the following year. The 1878 edition was never reprinted. By subsequently including the novel as part of his collected works, Tolstoy cunningly obliged all those who wanted their own copy to splash out on the complete set. In May 1878 he ascertained from his Moscow distributor that there were 2,700 copies left of the original print run of 4,800, and 800 unsold copies of his nine-volume collected works. The new, fourth edition of his collected works, planned for 1880, would be swelled by the addition of two final volumes incorporating Anna Karenina, and would go on sale for sixteen and a half roubles. If 5,000 copies were printed, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov, that meant a total revenue of 82,500 roubles, of which 20,000 would go on printing costs, but he would sell the distribution rights for 30,000 roubles, so he stood to do extremely well out of the deal.⁷