Tolstoy

In the 1890s Father Ioann began condemning Tolstoy for teaching that Christ was not divine, that Mary was simply an unmarried mother, and that the Orthodox Church was pagan and idolatrous. ‘You ought to have a stone hung round your neck and be lowered with it into the depths of the sea; you ought not to have any place on earth’ – it was in these terms that Father Ioann denounced Tolstoy, and a collection of his diatribes against Tolstoy was published in 1902.¹²⁹ Father Ioann was perhaps Tolstoy’s most famous public opponent, and his polar opposite. Indeed, for the writer Nikolay Leskov, Tolstoy and Father Ioann represented the opposing forces struggling for Russia’s future.¹³⁰ Father Ioann was seen as the pastor of the people, whereas Tolstoy was worshipped more by the intelligentsia, and yet there were some striking similarities between them. Like Tolstoy, Father Ioann also aspired to an ascetic ideal. In maintaining a celibate marriage (his wife Elizaveta would have liked children), he was rather more successful in curbing his libido than Tolstoy. Father Ioann was also strict about food consumption, which, like Tolstoy, he linked to sensuality: ‘Buckwheat kasha is good, cream bad’; ‘No horseradish with vinegar!’; ‘NEVER EAT SUPPER!’ Father Ioann saw his wife’s cooking as a threat to his spirituality.¹³¹ Both Father Ioann and Tolstoy were puritans who attacked social inequality, excessive materialism and moral depravity, and both were the subject of a cult of personality – the Russian Post Office had to make special provision to deal with the huge volume of letters Father Ioann received from adoring parishioners.¹³² Father Ioann also inspired the birth of a kind of sectarian religion, which was reported with alarm by Pobedonostsev in 1901, the year of Tolstoy’s excommunication. His followers, who were called ‘Ioannity’, saw him variously as God, Jesus, or John the Baptist, and treated his photograph as an icon (he was particularly popular with women).¹³³ Control over its clergy was a priority for the Holy Synod, and there was some alarm when Father Ioann seemed to be becoming dangerously independent. Like Tolstoy, he enjoyed greater popularity at court than in the offices of state, but even some of his congregation found his tone a little too strident at times. One person wrote to him after becoming acquainted with his ‘words of denunciation directed against Count Lev Tolstoy’, and now could not find ‘inner calm’, nor knew how to reconcile his ‘diatribes, so alien to the spirit of Christian gentleness, tolerance and forgiveness for all’, with his earlier writing on spirituality.¹³⁴

Tolstoy and Father Ioann were part of an extraordinary religious renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century which affected all classes of Russian society, with huge numbers of pilgrims making visits to monasteries and taking part in processions such as the one immortalised in Repin’s famous painting of the Kursk procession. There was also a religious revival amongst the intelligentsia which first began at around the time of the publication of dostoyevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, which was inspired by the writer’s meetings with the elders of Optina Pustyn. It is noteworthy that this was the book Tolstoy was reading when he finally left Yasnaya Polyana at the end of his life and went on the last of his many visits to the monastery, which seems to have been a place which both repelled and drew him. Even before he was excommunicated Tolstoy was widely seen as ‘the elder of Yasnaya Polyana’, and in the last decades of his life received not only scores of visitors who came to seek his guidance, but thousands of letters from people who asked for his help. He tried diligently to respond to them with the help of secretaries, who functioned like the lay brothers who traditionally assisted the elders.¹³⁵ A further sign of the religious revival came in November 1901 with the launch of a series of historic meetings held in the hall of the Imperial Geographic Society in St Petersburg. These meetings brought about the first constructive contact between the intelligentsia and the clergy in Russia. Initiated by modernist writers like dmitry Merezhkovsky, who wished to bridge the gulf separating the educated classes from the Church, the aim was to try to find some common ground, and a possible religious solution to the socio-political crisis in Russia. The name of Tolstoy loomed large and, not surprisingly, his conflict with the Church was the topic of the third of the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings held in early 1902.¹³⁶ Amongst the issues hotly debated was whether it had been the Church or the state which had been the driving force behind Tolstoy’s excommunication.