Tolstoy

By the time Alexander II was finally assassinated by revolutionaries on 1 March 1881, Tolstoy was ready to become, if not quite a Protestant, certainly a protestant in terms of the Orthodox Church, and his boldness was compared on more than one occasion with that of Luther, Jan Hus and Calvin.¹⁰⁸ Horrified by the thought of the conspirators being executed, Tolstoy sat down and wrote a letter to the new tsar, Alexander III, pleading for clemency in the name of Christian forgiveness. He then wrote a letter to the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, konstantin Pobedonostsev, asking him to pass his letter on to the Tsar, and another to Strakhov, asking him to hand both letters over to Pobedonostsev. Sonya reacted with equanimity to having to go into national mourning by dressing in black crêpe from head to foot,¹⁰⁹ but she was aghast at her husband’s latest action. It had been bad enough while he had been devout, and had insisted on observing the fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays. To retaliate, she had insisted on providing non-Lenten food for Vasily Alexeyev and Jules Montels, neither of whom were Orthodox, despite their readiness to eat what was offered, and she had then enforced the family’s Lenten diet even more strictly when she noticed Tolstoy’s faith wavering. On Good Friday, the strictest day of fasting, temptation had got the better of Tolstoy and he gave up eating Lenten food for ever after tucking into some of the meat that had been prepared for the two tutors. Sonya also stopped copying her husband’s new manuscripts. She had found the pedagogical materials turgid, but the theological writing was far worse, and she confided in a letter to her sister Tanya that she had thought of leaving Tolstoy that spring. She reckoned that life at Yasnaya Polyana had been a lot better without Christianity.¹¹⁰ She was also pregnant again.

The friction between the Tolstoys was now coming out into the open more and more frequently. When Sonya overheard Vasily Alexeyev supporting her husband’s plea for clemency for the Tsar’s assassins one morning over coffee, she exploded, terrified at the repercussions that Tolstoy’s letter might cause. Alexeyev realised it was time for him to leave Yasnaya Polyana, and he asked Tolstoy for permission to make a personal copy of his Gospel translations to take away with him, knowing they could never be published in Russia. Since time was not on his side, he restricted himself to copying Tolstoy’s Gospel excerpts and the general summaries in each chapter. This text was later prefaced by Tolstoy’s introduction and entitled Gospel in Brief. It would be the first of his religious works to be published abroad. During World War I, Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief made a profound impression on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who chanced to find it in a bookshop in Galicia. He later claimed it had virtually kept him alive.¹¹¹

Friends and relatives who came to visit Yasnaya Polyana in the spring of 1881 were drawn into vituperative arguments about capital punishment and the Church, and Sonya started to worry that her husband’s Christian charity was going to result in him giving away all they had to the poverty-stricken peasants who were coming to Yasnaya Polyana in ever increasing numbers, knowing they would not leave empty-handed. To begin with, Tolstoy wrote a thumbnail sketch of each petitioner down in his diary, noting, for example, one old woman’s tears dropping on to the dust and another peasant’s toothless smile (Tolstoy himself was toothless by this time).¹¹² Needless to say, Pobedonostsev refused to pass on Tolstoy’s letter to the Tsar, and the conspirators were hanged in early April. ‘Our Christ is not your Christ,’ wrote Pobedonostsev crisply in the letter he finally sent Tolstoy in June.¹¹³ Tolstoy brought his work on the Gospels to a halt that month, because he wanted to make another pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn. This time, instead of Strakhov, he took along as companion his servant Sergey Arbuzov, and instead of travelling by train he went on foot, dressed like a muzhik, complete with bast shoes specially commissioned from a peasant in the village.