Tolstoy

Khilkov’s Tolstoyan ministry had certainly produced results. The peasant schoolteacher Evdokim drozhzhin was rapidly converted to Tolstoyanism after meeting Khilkov in 1889, and two years later he was jailed after he refused to enlist when called up for military service. There were to be many other conscientious objectors who refused to be conscripted on religious grounds, but Tolstoy took a particular interest in drozhzhin, and was deeply concerned when he was first kept for twelve months in solitary confinement, and then sent to serve in a disciplinary battalion in Voronezh. The conditions were truly brutal, as Chertkov discovered when he visited drozhzhin, and he successfully campaigned to have him transferred to a regular prison, but it was too late. In January 1894, at the age of twenty-eight, drozhzhin died of consumption at the start of his nine-year sentence. Tolstoyanism had claimed its first martyr, but there were chroniclers and hagiographers ready to spring into action, as well as secret police agents watching like hawks. In June, soon after Tolstoy’s follower Evgeny Popov finished a book about drozhzhin, his home in Moscow was searched by the police and the manuscript confiscated. A few months later the Russian press was placed under orders not to publish anything at all about drozhzhin.²³ Popov nevertheless managed to resurrect his book from drafts that had carefully been stored elsewhere, and Tolstoy completed it by writing a foreword. There was, of course, no chance it would pass the censor in Russia, and it was published in Berlin in 1895.²⁴

The son of an impoverished noble from Perm province, Popov had joined Tolstoy’s growing number of followers in 1886 when he was twenty-two. Convinced that Tolstoy could tell him about the meaning of life, he one day got on a train to Yasnaya Polyana to go and talk to him. Before long he had become a vegetarian and was tilling the land. After separating from his wealthy young wife, who did not share his new beliefs, Popov led a rather peripatetic existence, moving from one Tolstoyan colony to another, but then went to work for The Intermediary in Moscow. In 1889 Popov got to know Tolstoy better when he accompanied him on his annual three-day journey by foot from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana at the beginning of the summer. This was the third time Tolstoy had undertaken to walk the full 120 miles home. He would take with him only a small bundle, plus a notebook and pencil, so he could jot down ideas and stories he heard along the way, and would find overnight accommodation with hospitable peasants. It was his way of protesting against the intrusion of the railways into rural Russia, which had brought about mass peasant migration into the cities.

As well as working for The Intermediary, Popov also spent some time at the main headquarters of the Tolstoyan movement at Chertkov’s estate in Voronezh province. In 1892 he was employed for a time as Tolstoy’s copyist at Yasnaya Polyana, and assisted him in the famine relief effort at Begichevka. After next writing the book about drozhzhin, he collaborated with Tolstoy on a Russian version of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching for The Intermediary. This was a project which Tolstoy cared deeply about. Victor von Strauss had produced the first German translation of the Tao Te Ching in 1870, and this was the text which Popov translated into Russian.²⁵ Tolstoy checked over Popov’s translation and wrote an introduction to them, explaining that the basic teaching in the Tao Te Ching was the same as in all great religions. Back in the 1870s he had chiselled away at his translations of Aesop’s already pithy fables in order to distil their essence, and it is not hard to see why Tolstoy was drawn to Lao Tzu’s lapidary insights, which accorded so much with his own hard-won beliefs:

People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes,

carrying weapons,

drinking a lot and eating a lot,

having a lot of things, a lot of money:

shameless thieves.

Surely their way

isn’t the way.²⁶

Tolstoy’s attraction to the religions of the Orient only increased towards the end of his life. Some people even argued that his pared-down belief system had more in common with Buddhism than with Christianity.²⁷