Tolstoy

Russia’s holy fools deliberately challenged social conventions to mock the falsehood of the temporal world, unafraid of speaking the truth to all classes, including rulers. Relinquishing all material comforts, they dressed in rags and led ascetic lives like the vagabond Stranniks, voluntarily accepting humiliation and insults in order to conquer their pride and thus achieve greater humility and meekness. Since they lived amongst people, unlike hermits in monasteries, and so were in the public eye, they went out of their way to avoid being accorded any respect for their piety, and welcomed censure. Tolstoy had known and revered holy fools from the days of his childhood, thanks to his pious aunts who welcomed them to Yasnaya Polyana. Childhood, his first work of fiction, notably features a holy fool, as does War and Peace, and it can been argued that three other characters in that novel, Pierre, Natasha and kutuzov, are ‘stylised’ holy fools.¹³² Pashenka, the heroine in ‘Father Sergius’, the story Tolstoy worked on between 1890 and 1898, is another version of the holy fool. Back in 1877 Tolstoy had told his friend Strakhov that he most wanted to be a holy fool rather than a monk, and after his religious crisis he expressed the view that the best path to goodness was to be an involuntary holy fool. But projecting oneself as worse than in reality was a conscious act for a holy fool, and was a strategy adopted by Tolstoy from the time he wrote his historic letter to Alexander III in 1881. His merciless self-criticism allowed him to express himself more freely with the Tsar. Tolstoy’s self-flagellation continued until his last days. In August 1910, just a few months before his death, he noted in his diary that he had never encountered anyone else who had the full complement of vices – sensuality, self-interest, spite, vanity and, above all, narcissism.¹³³

As pointed out earlier, Sonya took a dim view of her husband donning the mask of the holy fool. For him, however, it was a fundamental medium for the communication of his message. In this regard, a comment Tolstoy made in his diary when he was writing The Kreutzer Sonata in August 1889 is revealing. ‘I need to be a holy fool in my writing too,’ he noted, realising that perfect execution alone would not make his arguments more convincing.¹³⁴ Sadly, Chekhov for one was unimpressed, to judge from further disparaging comments in his letter to Suvorin of December 1890. Dismissing in withering terms Tolstoy’s afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata as the product of a holy fool, he asserts that his philosophy is ‘not worth even one of the little mares in “Strider”’. (Tolstoy’s superlative story about a horse, which he had begun many years earlier, when he still had ambition as an artist, was finally completed and published for the first time in 1886.¹³⁵)

As much as the holy fool is integral to the Russian Church, the character of ‘Ivan the Fool’, is integral to Russian folklore.¹³⁶ ‘The Tale of Ivan the Fool’, a popular story for The Intermediary which Tolstoy dashed off in an evening in 1885, was one he particularly cherished.¹³⁷ The story was published the following year in Sonya’s first edition of the collected works, and also by The Intermediary, but was eventually banned by the religious censor as a work unsuitable for mass readership. The authorities took exception to the way in which the story promoted the idea of a kingdom which had no need for an army, money or intellectuals, while its tsar should at least be ‘no different from a muzhik’.¹³⁸ In fact, even some of Tolstoy’s closest friends took exception to its bald moralising and its denigration of intellectual endeavour in favour of physical labour.