Tolstoy

Despite her feelings of distaste, Sonya had to learn to live with tyomnye Tolstoyans in their midst. One devoted early follower of her husband was a woman of her own age, Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt, an unmarried teacher at a prim Moscow girls’ school. In March 1884 Maria Alexandrovna had turned up on Tolstoy’s doorstep with her friend Olga Barsheva and asked him for a copy of his Gospel. When Tolstoy informed her he only had it in manuscript, she responded brightly that they would be happy to copy it. And so the two friends divided the manuscript up, and spent several evenings in Tolstoy’s study becoming acquainted with his ideas. Soon Maria Alexandrovna was taken on as an assistant to Tolstoy’s main copyist at that time, Alexander Ivanov. Her services were soon required, as Alexander Ivanov was an alcoholic former officer who often absconded on drinking bouts. He did very good work on the days that he was sober, but Tolstoy had to rescue him from various slums on a regular basis.¹³ Maria Alexandrovna’s life changed utterly when she was won over to Tolstoy’s Gospel. She had been an ardent Orthodox Christian, but she now took down her icons and replaced them with Tolstoy’s portrait.¹⁴ She also resigned her teaching position, went with her friend Olga to join one of the first Tolstoyan communes down in the Caucasus, then in 1893 came back north when Olga died. By this time she wanted to be near Tolstoy, with whom she had become close friends. After settling into a tiny thatch-covered izba on Tanya Lvovna’s newly inherited land, three miles away from Yasnaya Polyana, she led a model Tolstoyan life until the end of her days. Sometimes she would come up to Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy’s sister was making her annual summer visit from her convent, and her skeletal frame stood in stark contrast to the rotund figure of Maria Nikolayevna, who was famously fond of eating. It was Maria Alexandrovna, with her abstemious diet of cabbage soup and grain, who somehow seemed far more like a nun.¹⁵

Maria Alexandrovna relished living like an anchorite by the sweat of her brow with the help of her vegetable patch and her cow Manechka, but there were other Tolstoyans who wanted the security of feeling they were part of an organisation. In 1893, before The Kingdom of God Is Within You was even finished, let alone copied and distributed, unfounded rumours started flying of an imminent Tolstoyan congress. Tolstoy was both amused and horrified at the idea. ‘That’s wonderful!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’ll turn up to this congress and set up some kind of Salvation Army. We’ll get a uniform – some hats with a cockade. Maybe they will make me a general. Masha can sew me some blue trousers.’¹⁶ Tolstoy was happy to show leadership by setting out and imparting to the world what he believed to be the truth, but he did not want actually to lead anything – the whole point was to get away from organisations. In his ideal world, in fact, there would be no organisations, yet he could not avoid a movement forming amongst those attracted to his ideas, and many of his followers were fanatics. The other unsavoury side of Tolstoyanism for Sonya was the ‘militancy’ with which her husband’s followers clung to the doctrine of non-violence, thereby placing themselves in an openly antagonistic position with regard to the Russian government. There were inevitable unpleasant repercussions, but these only seemed to goad Tolstoy to campaign more vigorously for human rights, at both ends of the social spectrum.