Tolstoy

The first draft of Tolstoy’s own weighty Investigation of Dogmatic Theology was finally finished in 1882.⁹⁶ He does not pull any punches in it, at one point calling Makary an outright liar, dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a ‘vile, criminal, blasphemous lie’ and subjecting it to ridicule by describing biblical mysteries in his own words (as in ‘God had a three-way conversation with his son and the Holy Spirit’).⁹⁷ As Tolstoy goes on, his tone becomes more aggressive. He does not just refute the notion that Christ redeemed all of mankind by dying on the cross, since people afterwards were ‘just the same’, but goes on to accuse the Church of inventing the sacraments and the idea that Christ was divine sometime back in the third century. Pointing out that he is probably the only person to have read Makary from cover to cover apart from seminarists studying for exams, Tolstoy ends his obloquy with the allegation that the Orthodox Church no longer enjoyed any moral authority amongst either the educated classes or the common people in Russia. Tolstoy toned down his criticisms for publication in 1891, but only a little.⁹⁸

Aware that readers of his novels might be a little taken aback to be confronted suddenly by a tendentious theological monograph in which the minutiae of Orthodox doctrine were submitted to rational scrutiny, Tolstoy felt he should preface it with a personal account of how he had come to embark on his critique of the Church.⁹⁹ The much briefer, and frankly far more readable, Confession was thus initially entitled ‘Introduction to an Unpublished Work’, and was completed in 1880. Bearing obvious comparison with the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, Tolstoy’s interrogation of the meaning of life begins in his childhood, and charts his spiritual evolution with a painful and engaging honesty which Sonya summarised in notes made in her 1881 diary. She writes that her husband saw the ‘light’, as he put it, when he realised the source of ‘goodness, forbearance and love’ amongst the people was the Gospels, not the Church. It was the Church which had, in fact, obscured this message by insisting that salvation was only possible through the sacraments of christening, communion, fasting and so on. Tolstoy’s ‘whole outlook was illuminated by this light’, she wrote, leading him to see millions of people as his brothers, his conscience greatly troubled by the poverty and injustice he saw around him.¹⁰⁰

Fundamental to Tolstoy’s repudiation of Orthodox doctrine was his own new ‘unified’ translation of the Gospels, which he worked on intensely in the second half of 1880 and ‘finished’ in July 1881. He was aware that he needed to work further on it, but at that point wanted to move on to other things. Tolstoy now considered his Union and Translation of the Four Gospels to be the most important thing he had done in his life.¹⁰¹ With the assistance of Ivan Ivakin, the new family tutor who arrived in September 1880, he methodically worked his way through the New Testament in the original Greek, using academic editions supplied by the ever-helpful Strakhov. These included the authoritative edition produced in the 1770s by Johann Griesbach, Professor of Theology at the University of Jena, whose philological rigour had launched a new era in biblical scholarship, and the heavily annotated new French translation produced by another Protestant theologian, Professor Edouard Reuss, based at the University of Strasbourg.¹⁰² Tolstoy’s aim was to make sense of the morass of contradictions and obscurities he found in the Scriptures, clarify their central message, and extract some practical moral guidance which could be applied to daily living.

The experience of going back to the original texts was a revelation to Tolstoy. Drawing from each of the four Gospels to produce one unified text (‘since they set out the same events and the same teaching, although in conflicting ways’), and accompanying it with his commentary, Tolstoy produced twelve titled chapters which follow Christ’s life from birth to death. Each biblical excerpt in his version is given firstly in the original Greek, secondly in a modern Russian translation of the Church Slavonic biblical text (which would have been as archaic to a nineteenth-century Russian ear as the English of the Wycliffe Bible would have seemed to a nineteenth-century British ear), and thirdly in his own more accessible version. For the latter, he deliberately used colloquial words wherever possible, with a peasant readership in mind.