Tolstoy

In Russia and out of Russia, I have found people more interested in the personality of Count Leo Tolstoi, the novelist, than in that of any other living Russian. He is the first man of letters in contemporary Russia, but that alone would not account for the widespread interest in his character. He is a great original, an independent thinker, a religious teacher, and the founder of a something that is midway between a Church, a school, and a socio-political organisation. He not only thinks strange things, and says them with rugged force and vivid utterance – he does strange things; and what is more, he induces others to do the same. A man of genius who spends his time in planting potatoes and cobbling shoes, a great literary artist who has founded a propaganda of Christian anarchy, an aristocrat who spends his life as a peasant – such a man in any country would command attention. In Russia he monopolises it, and the fame of his originalities has spread abroad so far until it is probable that there are more people anxious to ‘hear about Tolstoi’ in Boston and San Francisco than there are even in Petersburg and Moscow.⁴

Tolstoy’s major artistic and religious writings had only appeared in translation a couple of years earlier yet he was already a household name throughout the world. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was profoundly affected by Tolstoy’s ideas when he came across them in Paris in 1885:

Tolstoy, whose recently translated novel War and Peace has aroused the admiration of the Parisians, Tolstoy, a Count, a wealthy man, a decorated soldier from the battles at Sebastopol, a brilliant writer, has broken with society, turned his back on literary writing and in the polemical works Confession and What I Believe has taken Rousseau’s side, declared war on culture, and has put his teaching into practice himself by turning himself into a peasant.⁵

Strindberg wrote his book Among French Peasants (which was published in 1889) under the immediate influence of Tolstoy’s ideas. Matthew Arnold had fired the imagination of British readers, while a pioneering study of the Russian novel published in 1886 by the Vicomte Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (who had served at the French Embassy in St Petersburg in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and married a Russian noblewoman) served to fuel the European reading public’s intense interest in Tolstoy on the Continent.⁶ In 1887 an American critic published an article in Harper’s Bazaar about the tumultuous reaction to the sudden arrival of Russian literature in the English-speaking world, describing Tolstoy as the greatest ever writer of fiction, ‘living or dead’.⁷ At the end of the decade a German writer set off to Yasnaya Polyana to do research: the first biography of Tolstoy was published in Berlin in 1892, two years before one even appeared in Russia.⁸ Tolstoy was sixty-four.

9. Cartoon showing ‘Tolstoy at work’, published in 1908

The dynamics of Tolstoy’s life had changed radically while he had been formulating his doctrine of brotherly love and non-resistance to violence in the 1880s. He had become teetotal, a vegetarian, he had given up smoking and hunting animals, and he had also stopped handling money insofar as it was possible. In the 1890s the dynamics of his life were to change again, and not just because he took up bicycling at the age of sixty-five, and soon needed a secretary to help him deal with the voluminous correspondence he found himself conducting with readers from all around the world. When he now went head to head with the Russian government by taking up the cause of persecuted sectarians scattered across the country, its ministers responded by sending his closest followers into exile, and excommunicating him from the Orthodox Church – which only increased his fame. The dynamics of Russian life also changed in the 1890s. Nicholas II, the last Romanov, ascended to the throne in 1894 amidst growing social and political unrest, and the rapid development of new technologies which began to revolutionise daily life. Before he died in 1910, Tolstoy lived to see the movie camera, the motor car, the phonograph and the typewriter, and even talked to Chekhov on the telephone.