Tolstoy

Tolstoy was not best pleased that his cover was blown when he arrived at the monastery in May 1877, but it did mean that he was granted an audience with Ambrosy straight away. So many people came to see the elder that the vast majority would have to wait days or even weeks before being granted access (women were not allowed into the hermitage itself, but thronged round a specially built extension to Ambrosy’s cell).¹² The spiritual assistance people requested was extremely varied. Mothers sought his advice on how to bring up their children, merchants wanted to know whether to make a particular purchase or not, uncles consulted him about whom their nieces should marry, while innumerable others sought prayers which might effect a cure for a grave illness, or merely some comfort in their afflictions.¹³ Tolstoy came to Elder Ambrosy with no particular agenda, other than a hope that he might find answers to the spiritual questions which tormented him. After heeding Ambrosy’s suggestion that he go to confession and take communion, Tolstoy stood through the four hours of the monastery’s vespers service. He also spent time during his pilgrimage talking to the monastery’s archimandrite (a Guards officer in his previous life), but his heart was most deeply touched most by the ingenuous humility of Father Pimen, a former decorator whose kind and down-to-earth ways had made him very popular with female supplicants. At one point in Tolstoy’s conversation with the archimandrite, Pimen quietly nodded off on his chair,¹⁴ but he was not as sleepy as he seemed. He later commented that Tolstoy had said a lot of eloquent but empty things, and should think about his soul. Ambrosy, meanwhile, later recounted to a friend of Strakhov, after a long sigh, that he had found Tolstoy challenging. In 1907 this friend published what the Elder had told him about Tolstoy:

5. Father Ambrosy, the Elder at Optina Pustyn Monastery, whom Tolstoy visited for the first time in 1877

His heart seeks God, but there is muddle and a lack of belief in his thoughts. He suffers from a great deal of pride, spiritual pride. He will cause a lot of harm with his arbitrary and empty interpretation of the Gospels, which in his opinion no one has understood before him, but everything is God’s will.¹⁵

This same acquaintance told Strakhov privately at the time, however, that the Holy Fathers had thought Tolstoy had a ‘wonderful soul’, and were particularly pleased that he did not suffer from intellectual pride, unlike Gogol, who had visited the monastery in 1850. Wherever the truth lies, Tolstoy was buoyed by his first pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn – he was genuinely impressed by the wisdom of the monastery’s elders, and by Father Ambrosy’s spiritual powers in particular.¹⁶ Meanwhile, his own faith was strengthened. When he returned to Yasnaya Polyana at the end of July, he started having long conversations with the local priest and getting up at dawn to go to early matins, saddling his horse himself so as not to wake his servant.¹⁷