Tolstoy

Sonya’s dependency on music after Vanechka’s death stimulated Tolstoy to reflect further on questions of aesthetics which would be fully articulated a few years later in his treatise What is Art?, but his central mission in the 1890s was as a non-violent Christian soldier fighting for truth and justice. It was extremely gratifying to him that his ideas were now beginning to bear fruit abroad. When a British businessman called John Kenworthy had stumbled across Tolstoy’s writings in America in 1890, for example, they had completely changed his life. He abandoned all desire to settle in America and make money, and returned home to England to live and work amongst the poor in the East End of London. In 1893 he published a book entitled Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics. To the vegetarian pacifist Ernest Crosby, a reforming American lawyer and Tolstoyan, Kenworthy described the day in March 1894 when he received his first letter from Tolstoy as the happiest in his life.⁴⁹ For his part, Tolstoy told Kenworthy that it was a ‘joy’ to be in communication with him, and that he had not only read his book, but had commissioned a Russian translation.⁵⁰

In May 1894 Kenworthy became honorary pastor of the newly established ‘Croydon Brotherhood Church’, a Tolstoy-inspired organisation whose congregation, according to one member of its committee of management, included every possible kind of crank, including ‘Atheists, Spiritualists, Individualists, Communists, Anarchists, ordinary politicians, Vegetarians, Anti-vivisectionists and Anti-vaccinationists’.⁵¹ In October that year Tolstoy acquired another British follower when he received a letter from Arthur St John, a former officer in the Inniskilling Fusiliers in his early thirties. St John wrote to tell Tolstoy that after reading The Kingdom of God Is Within You while returning from Burma on sick leave, he had left the army and joined an agricultural community. He commented later about the power of Tolstoy’s inspiration:

It had so tremendous an effect upon me that within two or three months I had given up my commission and found myself launched out in the world with no job and no capabilities for any work other than soldiering. I was clear about very little but among the little was Tolstoy’s dictum that if you want to work for peace there was no use in preparing for war.⁵²

All across Europe, Tolstoy’s ideas were falling on fertile ground. In February 1895 Tolstoy heard about a twenty-six-year-old Slovak doctor called Albert Škarvan who had been so influenced by his religious writings that he had become a conscientious objector. When Škarvan refused to complete his military service, the Habsburg authorities first had him examined in a Viennese psychiatric ward, and then imprisoned him in a military jail.⁵³ Kenworthy, St John and Škarvan would all soon become actively involved in supporting Tolstoy’s endeavours.

Tolstoy also had an ardent supporter in Russian-occupied Finland, where the nationalist movement was steadily gaining momentum in the face of recent militant Russification. Like his composer brother-in-law Jean Sibelius, Arvid Järnefelt was committed to Finnish independence, but his devotion to Tolstoy was greater. A lawyer who had spent two years studying Russian in Moscow in the late 1880s, Järnefelt first encountered Tolstoy’s writings in 1891 while working in the civil service in Helsinki. Against his family’s wishes, he abandoned his profession to become a full-time farmer, writer and cobbler, and even ceased sexual relations with his wife. Järnefelt translated some of Tolstoy’s works into Finnish, and preached his ideas of land reform through his own writings.⁵⁴ In February 1895 Tolstoy wrote to thank him for sending him his recently completed autobiographical novella My Awakening (Heräämiseni), and in particular the chapter he had helpfully translated into Russian which discusses why he could not become a judge.⁵⁵