Tolstoy

There was, however, one time that Ilya also gave a bravura performance of some Chopin during Alexeyev’s time as tutor. Tolstoy loved Chopin, and hearing one of his opuses played at an insane tempo with a torrent of mistakes prompted him to come out of his study and put his head round the door to see what was going on. Tolstoy realised that Ilya was playing to an audience. Ilya’s fortissimo dynamics, with his foot hard down on the pedal, were for the benefit of Prokhor, the family carpenter, who was in the drawing room putting in secondary-glazing panes for the winter. The phrase ‘for Prokhor’ entered Tolstoy family lore, and was ever afterwards affectionately trotted out whenever any member of the family seemed to be showing off.³³

Tolstoy’s fondness for Vasily Alexeyev stemmed from the fact that he shared with him the same basic philanthropic impulse to improve the life of the peasantry. This very Russian priority was well summarised by the English positivist Edward Spencer Beesly when characterising Alexeyev’s former partner William Frey after his death in 1888:

He was filled with that extraordinary enthusiasm which prompts so many Russians of the well-born and wealthy class to strip themselves of all advantages and cast in their lot with the poorest, humblest and most miserable. I do not know where we are to find anything like it, except in the spirit which so often led persons of rank in the Middle Ages to fly from the world and embrace the privations and humility of monastic life. But among them the motive was unsocial – a selfish desire to save their own souls. These Russians are animated by a burning desire for social improvement. To some of them inequality is in itself shocking – the root and sum of all social evil. They plunge into the humblest life to escape in their own persons from this taint. They cannot be happy till they have freed themselves from it. Others perhaps embrace a life of poverty and manual labour for a somewhat different reason. They desire to spread their political and social aspirations among the mass of their poorer countrymen. They find that they are impeded in doing this by the barriers of rank and wealth. Such is their propagandist ardour, such their faith in their principles, that wealth, comfort, and material advantages of every kind seem to them cheap, if by sacrificing them they can gain the opportunity they desire of approaching and getting the ear of the people. Whatever we may think of the principles and reasoning which lead to this conduct, it is impossible not to admire the sincerity and enthusiasm of those who practise it. They have subdued some of the strongest and most selfish of human impulses, whether they are turning the victory to the best account or not.³⁴

Frey settled in England after the American escapade, but he would find his way to Yasnaya Polyana during the one brief trip he made to Russia before his untimely death, and make a deep impression on Tolstoy.

Alexeyev was convinced Tolstoy would dismiss him once he knew he was a socialist, but his employer was unperturbed.³⁵ Christianity was really the only sticking point in their long and frank conversations. Tolstoy was still a fully paid-up member of the Orthodox Church in 1878, and Alexeyev could not understand this. In an oft-quoted passage in his memoirs, he describes Tolstoy pointing one winter morning to the frosty patterns made on the window pane by the sun, which he compared to popular religious belief. The people see the patterns, he explained, whereas he wanted to look beyond them towards the source of the light. But Tolstoy’s faith was intimately linked to popular religious belief, and Alexeyev observed that he went to church not simply to perform the rites alongside peasants, but to study exactly what it was the peasants believed in, because their faith was so strong. Tolstoy also wanted to learn how to make himself more comprehensible in the exposition of his religious beliefs, and over time he grew impatient with the impenetrable and high-flown Church Slavonic of the liturgy. If he himself could barely understand it, what hope was there that the peasants could glean its message? Tolstoy relayed to Alexeyev how in church he would hear the men discussing farming matters, and the women whispering the latest gossip to each other at the most solemn moments of the service, as if it had nothing to do with them. He would stand there hearing the constant thud of fingers on sheepskin as peasants crossed themselves unthinkingly beside him while the lofty language of the liturgy went far above the heads. It began to bother Tolstoy that the Church made so little effort to meet the spiritual needs of the peasants and he started to understand why so many of them were drawn to sectarian religions, which did at least attempt to explain Christ’s teaching in plain Russian.