Tolstoy

It gladdened Tolstoy’s heart to develop contacts with like-minded Christian thinkers abroad, but his main concern was the plight of fellow-brethren in Russia who were persecuted for their beliefs. In May 1895, a few months after Tolstoy had first met with the dukhobors in Moscow, Chertkov received a letter from the exiled dmitry Khilkov in the Caucasus, who wrote to tell him that eleven dukhobor soldiers had refused to go on Easter parade, and no longer wanted to continue their military service.⁵⁶ In June there was a mass burning of arms by Verigin’s followers in protest against conscription. A ferocious wave of repressions followed. About 200 dukhobors were jailed, while aggressive Cossacks were billeted to their villages and their families dispersed amongst Tatar, Armenian and Georgian communities. Tolstoy decided to take action. On 23 October his letter to John Kenworthy about the dukhobors was published in The Times in London, along with an edited version of an account of what had been going on written by Biryukov, who had travelled down to the Caucasus to investigate.⁵⁷ That autumn Tolstoy wrote his first letter to Pyotr Verigin, and Chertkov began collecting materials documenting government persecution of the dukhobors.

After deciding to relinquish the management of The Intermediary in 1893, Chertkov threw his energies into collecting materials on the persecution of sectarians in Russia. By 1902 he had a file consisting of 4,000 documents.⁵⁸ He also wanted to devote himself to the dissemination and preservation of Tolstoy’s literary legacy; this, in fact, became his life’s work. Since 1889 he had been systematically copying everything Tolstoy wrote and maintaining an archive of Tolstoy’s new manuscripts, which were dutifully sent on from Yasnaya Polyana. Now he wanted to publish all of Tolstoy’s banned works in England. He had been deliberating about whether to move there with his family, but shelved that idea, to Tolstoy’s relief, when he heard that John Kenworthy had decided to relinquish the pastorship of the Brotherhood Church in order to found the Brotherhood Publishing Company. Chertkov invited him to Moscow. At their meeting in december Kenworthy was given the rights to publish Tolstoy’s new work in English, and in February 1896 the members of his community sent Tolstoy a letter of support to the dukhobors in the Caucasus which they asked him to pass on. It was in 1896 that Tolstoy began writing his magnificent short novel Hadji Murat, which he continued to work on until 1904 and which remained unpublished at his death. It is set in the Caucasus, during Russia’s war with the Chechen and daghestani highlanders. Although the story fictionalises an historical event – the capture by the Russians in 1851 of Hadji Murat, one of Imam Shamil’s former henchmen – and draws on Tolstoy’s own experiences fighting in the Caucasus, the story is also coloured philosophically by his new Christian beliefs, and inspired by the dukhobors’ heroic resistance.

The dukhobors continued to prey on Tolstoy’s mind throughout 1896 – a year in which Nicholas II was finally crowned in Moscow, and thousands were crushed to death or injured during the celebrations which followed. The combination of this horrifying spectacle with the magnificent splendour of state pageantry seemed eloquently to sum up the extremes of Russia’s autocratic regime. In december that year Chertkov completed a direct appeal for help for the dukhobors with the assistance of Biryukov and Tregubov. They published it in England in early 1897 together with an afterword by Tolstoy. Chertkov then went on to Petersburg to start active campaigning, but the Russian government intervened. Before Nicholas II’s coronation, Pobedonostsev had despaired of Tolstoy in a letter:

It’s terrible to think of Lev Tolstoy, as he’s spreading a terrible infection of anarchy and atheism throughout the whole of Russia! It’s as if he was possessed by the devil – but what should be done with him? Obviously he is an enemy of the church, an enemy of any government and any civil order. There is a suggestion in the Synod that he be excommunicated from the church to avoid any doubts and confusion amongst the people, who see and hear that the entire intelligentsia worships Tolstoy. Probably, after the coronation the question will arise: what should be done with Tolstoy?⁵⁹