Tolstoy

Russia had finally declared war on Turkey in April 1877, just as Tolstoy was finishing Anna Karenina. In the middle of August, accompanied by Sonya and various other members of their family, Tolstoy went to visit the Turkish prisoners of war who were being held at an old sugar factory on the road to Tula. He had hoped to start a new historical novel that summer, but news from the front kept preventing him from being able to concentrate, regardless of whether he was in a good or a bad mood, he wrote to Strakhov.¹⁸ Tolstoy naturally could not help remembering being stationed himself on the Danube, before being transferred to the disastrous Sebastopol campaign during the Crimean War, and for a while he pondered writing Alexander II a letter about the state of Russia, and the reasons for the army’s failures in the most recent hostilities with Turkey. But it was religion that was uppermost in his mind, and so it was faith that he wanted to talk about to the Turkish prisoners of war, not politics. He wanted to know whether they each had their own copy of the koran, and who their mullah was.¹⁹ Tolstoy’s religious quest took him well beyond Russia’s borders. The books which he asked Strakhov to send him later in the year included the Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauss’s Old and New Faith, a work which had caused almost as much scandal in Germany in 1872 as his ‘historical’ Life of Jesus, in which he had denied Christ’s divinity some thirty years earlier. Tolstoy also asked Strakhov to procure for him Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, an equally notorious volume with the same title which had provoked a storm of controversy in the Catholic world, and which had been banned in Russia ever since its first publication in France in 1863. Other authors who interested Tolstoy at this time were the orientalists Eugène Burnouf, who had published a history of Indian Buddhism in 1844, and his student Max Müller, later regarded as the father of Religionswissenschaft. Müller had become Oxford’s first Professor of Comparative Theology in 1868, and wrote extensively on Indian philosophy and Vedic religion.²⁰

Strakhov continued to be a sounding-board for Tolstoy’s ideas, but he was not thirsting for faith in the same way, and so did not accompany his friend on the next leg of his spiritual journey. As Elder Ambrosy had noted during their visit to Optina Pustyn, Strakhov’s lack of belief was deeply entrenched; faith for him was ‘merely poetry’, despite an attraction to the monastic way of life which inspired him to travel to Mount Athos in 1881.²¹ At Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s newfound religious fervour was greeted with slight bemusement, particularly by Sonya, for whom Orthodox belief had always been an unobtrusive but integral part of her life. She was glad her husband had ‘calmed down’ after the violent mood swings of the previous years (particularly the periods of deep depression), and she could only rejoice that his character seemed to be changing for the better. In her diary, she was optimistic that Tolstoy had somehow reached the end of his spiritual journey:

Although he has always been modest and undemanding in all his habits, he is now becoming even more modest, meek and patient. And this eternal struggle that he began in his youth, aimed at achieving moral perfection, is being crowned with complete success.²²

She must have winced later at her naïvety. Tolstoy’s religious strivings certainly brought some peace and harmony to Yasnaya Polyana, but he had begun to walk alone, for none of his family felt inclined to take Christianity as seriously as he did.