Tolstoy

The Holy Synod marshalled its minions to send poison-pen letters and death threats to Tolstoy when the excommunication was announced, but there were far more demonstrations, petitions and ovations in his honour. The Tolstoy house in Moscow was immediately besieged with visitors wanting to take action, and mounted police had to intervene when Tolstoy was mobbed by enthusiastic students who spotted him walking in the centre of the city on the day the excommunication was made public. Far from diminishing Tolstoy’s stature, the Holy Synod’s edict only enhanced it, particularly in view of the government’s ban on the publication of all telegrams and expressions of support. The excommunication also intensified interest in Tolstoy’s writings. People who had never read him before started asking for his books in libraries, and Russians abroad were immediately questioned about him as soon as their nationality became known.¹²³ Employees at the Maltsev Glass Factory outside Moscow sent Tolstoy a lump of green glass with their message to him incised in gold:

12. Cartoon showing Tolstoy as a mighty giant next to the tiny figure of Tsar Nicholas II, 1901

You have shared the fate of many great people ahead of their time, esteemed Lev Nikolayevich. They used to be burned at the stake, left to rot in jails and in exile. Let the hypocrite priests excommunicate you however they want. Russian people will always be proud, seeing you as their own great dearly beloved.

Tolstoy was the conscience of the nation, and the excommunication was the most eloquent expression of the abyss separating the Church from educated Russian society. In Moscow, as elsewhere, the intelligentsia saw the excommunication primarily as an act of political vengeance. Alexey Suvorin, editor of New Times, quipped that Russia now had two tsars. While Nicholas II was clearly unable to make Tolstoy’s throne wobble, he observed, Tolstoy was destabilising the entire Romanov dynasty.¹²⁴ Tolstoy finally started drafting an article in response to the Holy Synod’s edict on 24 March, which carried new denunciations. The letter was sent to Chertkov for publication in England. He was still hoping he might be one day be arrested.¹²⁵

Repin had an important new portrait of Tolstoy on show at the 29th Wanderers Exhibition in Petersburg which had opened a week before the excommunication was announced. Ironically it depicted the writer at prayer, barefoot in the woods at Yasnaya Polyana. When the exhibition opened, the portrait was immediately surrounded with flowers, and naturally attracted more attention after the excommunication. Before the exhibition closed on 25 March a student stood on a chair and tied bouquets round the entire frame, as if it was a venerated popular icon, then gave an impromptu speech. A telegram of support signed by the 400 people present was sent to Tolstoy, and even more people festooned Repin’s portrait with flowers.¹²⁶ This led to the painting being taken down, and it was not shown when the exhibition moved to Moscow and the provinces.

The excommunication caused a sensation amongst Russia’s educated classes, but it is worth pointing out that many Russian rural priests had scant knowledge of Tolstoy beyond knowing that he was an aristocrat who wrote society novels. The majority of peasants, meanwhile, knew only that he was a count, and thus representative of the nobility who were hated and distrusted,¹²⁷ but there was nevertheless a significant number who followed Father Ioann of Kronstadt in believing that Tolstoy was the Antichrist. Father Ioann, an even more charismatic figure than Grigory Petrov (who ended up leaving the Church), was not a prominent bishop or theologian, but a parish priest who was seen by many as Russia’s third ‘tsar’ in view of his extraordinary popularity.¹²⁸ Born one year after Tolstoy into an impoverished sacristan’s family in Arkhangelsk province in 1829, he married in 1855 and was ordained that year in St Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt, where his father-in-law was the senior priest. during the fifty years in which Father Ioann served in the port of Kronstadt outside St Petersburg, home to the imperial navy’s Baltic Fleet, he acquired renown for his Populist, informal style, and for the unusual mass confessions which were held at his church. Father Ioann encouraged charity and greater piety, and by the time he administered to Alexander III on his deathbed in 1894, he had become famous throughout Russia. Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra also revered Father Ioann: they had a picture of him on the wall behind their bed at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea.