Tolstoy

The Church had historically only anathematised individuals after repeated efforts to bring about repentance. The edict about Tolstoy stressed that he had preached fanatically against Orthodox dogma, so could not be regarded as a member of the Church unless he repented, but it was all very measured. The words ‘anathema’ or ‘excommunication’ were not in fact explicitly mentioned in the edict, which was announced on the front page of the weekly Church News (the official publication of the Holy Synod since 1888), and followed by an explanatory letter.¹²¹ Edict No. 577, dated 20–22 February, was signed by the three metropolitans, an archbishop and three bishops, none of whom was under any illusion that it would frighten Tolstoy, or even bring him to heel. But by having it published on the front page of every major Russian newspaper on 25 February, and issuing a government decree banning its discussion in the press, the Synod hoped it could undermine the public support for Tolstoy which was steadily growing in Russia amongst all sections of the population. The intention was to provoke a backlash of hostility towards him and diminish his authority at a critical time of social and political unrest, while simultaneously enhancing the profile of the Orthodox Church. The reality was the opposite – it was a dismal failure. No one except the ecclesiastical authorities took the excommunication seriously, and yet it proved to be an event whose repercussions would be far-reaching.

Tolstoy was in Moscow at the beginning of 1901. As usual, his preoccupations were intellectual. He had begun the year by reading The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy by Max Müller, and alongside his engagement with Hindu and Nietzschean philosophy, continued his study of dutch. Sonya’s concerns were, as usual, more worldly. She was as busy as ever. She travelled to Yasnaya Polyana to look after their daughter Tanya after she had a stillborn child, then came back to Moscow to help with the preparations for their son Misha’s wedding to Alexandra Glebova on 31 January: she sewed little bags which would later be filled with sweets and given to the guests. The wedding was a high-society event attended by Grand dukes (one of whom came specially from St Petersburg) but pointedly not by her husband. On 12 February she went back to Yasnaya Polyana when she heard that Masha had miscarried, and then came back to take care of the household in Moscow, and a gloomy husband who was expressing his fears of death. The seven weeks of the Great Lent began, and with it fasting, so on 16 February she went to the mushroom market with Semyon Nikolayevich the cook, and on to church. The next day she took herself off to buy toys for the children in the Moscow orphanage of which she had become patron.

On the day the excommunication became public, Tolstoy declared in a letter to his daughter Masha that the only thing he really wanted to write about now was people’s lack of religion, which he believed was the cause of all the horrors in the world.¹²² He was far more serious about living in accordance with Christian principles than the majority of those in his class, and he believed in God more than most, so there was an irony in the Church excommunicating someone with such deeply held, if unorthodox, Christian views. He had been oblivious to all the machinations earlier, and so he just carried on writing outspoken polemical articles and letters of protest attacking the corruption of the Church and the government whose militarist policies it supported. From Sonya’s diary we learn that there was wonderful weather at the time of Tolstoy’s excommunication – clear days and moonlit nights. She records how affectionate and passionate her husband suddenly became when the edict was published, and how his health and state of mind improved in the peculiarly festive atmosphere that prevailed at that time. She immediately wrote an impassioned letter to Pobedonostsev and Metropolitan Antony to protest against the edict, then went back to knitting woolly hats for the orphanage. Unusually, both Sonya’s letter and the response from Metropolitan Antony were printed in Church News.