Tolstoy

There is a grim irony about the fact that Tolstoy’s broadside against needlessly excessive consumption was written just as reports of a major famine started reaching him. The Volga and central ‘black earth’ regions had already suffered two poor harvests in consecutive years, and in 1891 there was a drought which affected about 14 million people in an area stretching across thirteen regions in the European part of Russia, all the way from Tolstoy’s own Tula region in the west to Samara, hundreds of miles to the east. The combination of adverse weather conditions, outdated farming implements, poor transportation and the Russian government’s failure to act in time, compounded by its further failure to provide adequate help for peasants who were already desperately poor and malnourished, was fatal. Half a million people died of cholera alone. The crisis was certainly not helped by Russia’s centralised government with its bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, since officials had little conception of what was actually really going in the provinces, and little autonomous power.

Tolstoy’s ideas had begun to win him increasing numbers of followers by the end of the 1880s, but he also had his share of critics. In 1891, however, when he seized the initiative to help victims of the famine which had begun to rage in Russia, Tolstoy assumed an unassailable position of national moral leadership to the extent that his strident religious views were subsequently indulged more as eccentricities, at least by the people. Despite Chekhov’s impatience with Tolstoy’s retrogressive ideas, he was serious about placing him as the No. 1 most important person in Russia in December 1890 (he categorised himself as No. 877),¹⁴³ and he had nothing but admiration for his famine relief work. As he wrote in another letter exactly a year later, ‘You need the courage and authority of a Tolstoy to swim against the current, defy the prohibitions and the general climate of opinion, and do what your duty calls you to do.’¹⁴⁴ Chekhov did sterling work himself during the famine, but Tolstoy got there first, and he put the Russian government to shame.

Tolstoy soon became intensely irritated that the Russian affluent classes were up in arms about the approaching crisis in the summer of 1891. Dire poverty was an everyday reality for most peasants, so why was it they only wanted to help the peasantry during the extreme conditions of a famine?¹⁴⁵ In September he went off on horseback round Tula province to see for himself what was happening, having already resolved not to spend that winter in Moscow. At the end of the month he returned home and started writing an article, ‘About the Famine’, in which he excoriated the educated classes for their indifference to the plight of all those millions of peasants who barely managed to subsist even in normal circumstances. On 15 October he sent his devastating report to Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, and ten days later Nikolay Grot wrote to give Tolstoy the unsurprising news that the issue in which it was slated to appear had been confiscated by the censor. The next day Tolstoy set off for Ryazan province with his eldest daughters, Tanya and Masha, ready to do what he could to help: the plan was to live at his friend Ivan Rayevsky’s estate and set up soup kitchens and provide practical help to the peasants in the area. Rayevsky had come to visit Tolstoy that summer to tell him about what was going on, and it was his selfless devotion to the cause which inspired Tolstoy himself to act (he tragically died of influenza a month after Tolstoy’s arrival).¹⁴⁶

Tolstoy’s twenty-two-year-old son Lev went off to his newly inherited estate in Samara to help out with the famine there, electing to take a period of leave from his university studies, but the experience was traumatic, and took a great toll on his frail health – the conditions were so extreme in Samara that it was hard just to produce any foodstuffs at all, let alone set up soup kitchens.¹⁴⁷ Sonya still had four children between the ages of three and fourteen to look after at home in Moscow, so was housebound, but she was keen to help as well. On 3 November 1891 she published an appeal for help in the Russian Gazette (it was also printed in many newspapers in Europe and the United States), and she received 9,000 roubles in the first week alone.¹⁴⁸ It was not just the wives of wealthy tea-merchants in kyakhta, on the border with China, who sent Sonya money – donors included Old Believer fishermen in Bessarabia who gave up most of their earnings, a retired lieutenant-colonel in Nizhny Novgorod who donated his pension, as well as postmen, village schoolteachers and even peasants.¹⁴⁹ Sonya was glad to be able to contribute, as she recalls in her autobiography: