Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s greatest inspiration at this time came from an unlikely source. Vasily Alexeyev, a thin, rather frail young man with a wispy ginger beard and candid blue eyes, was the latest tutor engaged to teach his eldest children, and he would have a surprisingly powerful influence on Tolstoy’s evolving religious philosophy during the next few years.²³ In many ways, he was a Tolstoyan avant le lettre. He arrived at Yasnaya Polyana in October 1877 after being recommended by the Tolstoys’ midwife Maria Abramovich (Sonya was at this point two months off giving birth to Andrey, her ninth child), and he was to stay with the Tolstoys for four years.²⁴ Given his background in radical politics, the surprising thing is not that Sonya eventually asked him to leave, but that he stayed as long as he did.²⁵ Alexeyev was openly socialist and atheist, and yet he was a model of Christian ethics in his personal conduct. He provided Tolstoy with much-needed moral support at this critical time in his life, and Tolstoy defended him to the hilt whenever his pious friend Sergey Urusov tried to attack Alexeyev as a ‘nihilist’ and ‘the son of the devil’. ‘I know few people other than him who are not only good, but kind and religious in feeling,’ Tolstoy assured Urusov, another time stressing his meekness, and devotion to serving others.²⁶

Vasily Alexeyev was the son of a retired officer and minor landowner who had married one of his serfs, whom he was known to beat. He grew up in the far western province of Pskov, hundreds of miles from Moscow.²⁷ One of eight brothers and sisters, Alexeyev had excelled academically at an early age and won a place to study mathematics at St Petersburg University, where he became increasingly involved in left-wing politics. This was at the height of the Populist movement in the early 1870s and Alexeyev had got to know the revolutionary Nikolay Chaikovsky, leader of a circle involved in spreading socialist propaganda amongst the peasantry. It was Chaikovsky who introduced Alexeyev to Alexander Malikov, who was more of a religious idealist than a revolutionary and who came from a peasant background. Malikov had already spent time in prison and in exile because of his political beliefs, and now set his hopes on a mystical doctrine he had founded called Godman-hood, which combined socialist theory with Christian ethics. Seduced by his passionate oratory, Alexeyev became one of Malikov’s followers, but the Russian government inevitably viewed attempts to disseminate the teaching of Godmanhood as revolutionary propaganda and promptly arrested him. Although Alexeyev was soon released due to the lack of incriminating evidence, his father disowned him.

Malikov and Alexeyev realised it was going to be impossible to put their ideas into practice in Russia, where they were seen as subversive. Along with about a dozen others, they decided to emigrate to America in 1875, hoping to fulfil their dreams of living a morally pure life in the Land of the Free. Chaikovsky was already there, having fled Russia to avoid arrest, and so was the positivist Vladimir Geins, another disillusioned revolutionary who had re-christened himself William Frey (the closest possible transliteration in Cyrillic of the English word ‘free’). The group decided to settle in the Midwest. The southern part of kansas had been acquired from the Native Americans only five years earlier, and land was extremely cheap. By pooling their resources, the group were able to buy 160 acres of land in Cedarville, near Wichita, for the total sum of twenty-five dollars. Crowding into the two rooms of the small farmhouse on their holding, the young Russian pioneers attempted to set up a utopian agricultural commune.²⁸ Although they augmented the two horses and a cow already on the land with more livestock, and sowed corn and wheat, there were immediate problems. No one knew how to milk a cow, for example. The community started out with noble ascetic ideals, and was happy to give up alcohol, meat, coffee, tea and sugar, but the fanatical and dogmatic Frey also banned bread, arguing that only food in its ‘natural’ state was acceptable. Medicines were also banned by him. But what finally undid the commune were the weekly meetings of ‘mutual criticism’ and ‘public confession’ which only exacerbated the numerous personal tensions that arose. The experiment was a disaster and the commune barely survived two years.