Tolstoy

8. Pencil drawing by Repin of Tolstoy reading in his grandfather’s chair at Yasnaya Polyana, 1887

Tolstoy agreed with ‘everything’ in the treatise, and entered into an enthusiastic correspondence with Bondarev, telling him that he frequently read out his manuscript to his acquaintances, though adding rather tactlessly that most of them usually got up and walked out. He also confided to Bondarev that this had given him the idea of narrating his manuscript whenever he had boring visitors: it was a successful ploy in getting rid of them.⁸⁵ Tolstoy went out of his way to get Bondarev’s manuscript published. After its inclusion in the journal Russian Wealth was censored at the last moment in 1886, he persevered, only to see it being physically cut from Russian Antiquity in 1888. Eventually an edited version of Bondarev’s manuscript, accompanied by an article by Tolstoy, appeared later in the year in The Russian Cause, its editor receiving a caution from the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a result.⁸⁶ Much later it was published by The Intermediary, prefaced by Tolstoy’s introduction.⁸⁷ Both Bondarev and Syutayev were pivotal figures for Tolstoy in his quest to persuade people to live in harmony with the land, as he made clear in a footnote to What Then Must We Do?, which he finally finished revising in 1886:

In the course of my lifetime, there have been two Russian thinking people who have had a deep moral influence on me, enriched my thinking, and clarified my worldview. These people were not Russian poets, scholars or preachers, but are two remarkable men who are alive today, and have both spent their whole lives working on the land – the peasants Syutayev and Bondarev.⁸⁸

Another crucial person in Tolstoy’s campaign to promote a life of non-violence in harmony with the land was William Frey, the gifted son of an army general from the Baltic nobility who had abruptly turned his back on a brilliant military career in St Petersburg in the 1860s in order to seek the truth. In 1868, at the age of twenty-nine, after dabbling with radical left-wing politics, Frey emigrated with his bride to America and changed his name from Vladimir Geins to the symbolic Frey (‘free’). In the mid-1870s he had been part of the disastrous kansas commune along with Vasily Alexeyev and Alexander Malikov, but in 1884 he moved with his family to London, by this time a fervent positivist, and a devotee of Comte and Spencer. The following summer he set off to preach the ‘religion of mankind’ in Russia, where he very quickly came across samizdat copies of Confession and What I Believe, which made a deep impression on him. After sending Tolstoy a sixty-page letter outlining the superiority of the ‘religion of mankind’, he received an invitation to visit Yasnaya Polyana, and he arrived in October 1885.⁸⁹ Tolstoy was enchanted by Frey, whom he described as a serious, clever and sincere person with a pure heart. He was not persuaded by Frey’s arguments about religion, but he was encouraged by his example to persevere with his efforts to give up meat, alcohol and tobacco. And he was captivated by Frey’s stories of life in the Wild West, and his experiences of living in communes where there was no private property, and where everyone worked with their hands rather than with their heads.

Frey was interesting, Tolstoy wrote teasingly to his sister-in-law Tanya, because of his absolute refusal to recognise ‘Anke Cake’, which was his ultimate symbol of bourgeois self-satisfaction and unearned privilege. Anke Cake was served on special occasions at Yasnaya Polyana, and was named after a friend and medical colleague of Sonya’s father, also of German descent. In her recipe book, Sonya does not provide instructions, merely a list of ingredients:

Anke Cake

1 pound of flour

½ pound of butter

¼ pound of caster sugar

3 egg yolks

1 glass of water

The butter should come straight from the cellar, it needs to be on the cold side.

Filling

Melt a quarter of a pound of butter, then mix in two eggs, half a pound of caster sugar, the grated rind of two lemons and the juice of three lemons. Heat until it is as thick as honey.⁹⁰