Tolstoy

Tolstoy had gone to Petersburg during Great Lent, the traditional time for penitence, and he wrote to Turgenev on the penultimate day of the forty-day fast. Filling two pages with his imperious, aristocratic handwriting, he apologised to his old friend and proposed that they bury their differences. It is tempting to think that Tolstoy’s recent trip to St Petersburg had played a part in prompting this peace-offering. The last time he had been in the capital was 1861, and his return to the city must have brought back a flood of memories – of first meeting and becoming friends with Turgenev there in 1855, of arguing with him over the way he had treated his sister during his visit to Petersburg in 1859,⁴⁴ and of no doubt feeling still angry with him when he returned the following year with Masha and her children Varya, Liza and Nikolay, when they had walked together through the city to visit St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Bronze Horseman. It is likely Turgenev came into Tolstoy’s mind again on this visit seventeen years later when he walked across St Isaac’s Square to visit Alexandrine in her apartment in the Mariinsky Palace. Now that he was nearly fifty years old, and his outlook and ambitions quite different, perhaps he suddenly realised the absurdity of his feud with Turgenev. It was with surprise and delight that Turgenev received Tolstoy’s letter at home in France. Responding at once with a page and a half of his own neat, diffident handwriting, he enthusiastically agreed that they should renew their friendship, and promised to visit during his trip to Russia later that summer.⁴⁵

During Holy Week in 1878, shortly after writing his letter to Turgenev, Tolstoy prepared to take communion. He had been reading the Gospels and Renan’s Life of Jesus, and he decided to start keeping a regular diary again for the first time in thirteen years. After Easter he made another trip to Moscow for further meetings with Decembrists, and to talk to publishers about the next edition of his writings, but he also wanted to attend the annual Easter debates about faith between the Orthodox faithful and Old Believers which had been taking place in the square in front of the kremlin Cathedrals since the seventeenth century. Tolstoy had never taken any noticeable interest in sectarians before, but now he became increasingly drawn to them. In March he had asked Stasov to send him the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum and other Old Believer ‘raw materials’,⁴⁶ and began educating himself about this powerful underground current of Russian society. During his six-week koumiss cure in Samara later that summer, Tolstoy pursued his new interest further: he went to talk to the ‘Molokans’ – sectarians who lived amongst the Bashkirs and Russian peasant colonists. They were on the fringes of society and on the fringes of the empire for a good reason.

Religious dissent had a long and eventful history in Russia which the government had done its best to suppress over the centuries. Orthodoxy was the official religion, and the state made vigorous efforts to try to ensure the population conformed to it, seeing the Church as a useful tool in promoting and maintaining civil obedience in the face of the potentially dangerous political threat of dissent. The ecclesiastical authorities had little choice but to acquiesce with state policy, since they was actually subordinate to it. In 1721 Peter the Great had abolished the once-powerful Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a secular institution headed by a lay person, the better to consolidate the power of the autocracy. Yet this fatal undermining of the Church’s moral authority, combined with an influx of Protestantism from German settlers, had only led to sectarian religions becoming more popular. The government systematically understated their numbers, but by the nineteenth century there were millions of Russians who had turned away from Orthodoxy, and who were at best discriminated against, or actively persecuted. It has been estimated that as many as a quarter of the Russian Empire’s population were sectarians by the time of the 1917 Revolution.⁴⁷