Tolstoy

Before Chertkov moved back to Russia in 1908 he coordinated the publication, both in Russia and abroad, of one of Tolstoy’s most important and influential articles. ‘I Cannot Be Silent’ was written immediately after Tolstoy heard the news that twenty peasants had been hanged for attempted robbery and is one of his most finely articulated and heartfelt pleas for the government to end its systematic programme of organised violence, which he defined as worse than revolutionary terrorism. When the article was published in July, Tolstoy immediately received sixty letters of support – it was still a novelty for people in Russia to be able to read his broadsides. Many newspapers were fined for printing it, however. The liberal Russian Gazette had to pay a penalty of 3,000 roubles and the editor of a Sebastopol newspaper was arrested for pasting it up all over the city.¹⁷⁵ Thoughts of capital punishment now led Tolstoy back to the events of 1866, when he had failed to prevent Private Shabunin from being executed. In the late 1880s, a former cadet in the regiment who had witnessed the events had come to see Tolstoy. He wanted to discuss an account he had written and hoped to publish.¹⁷⁶ Tolstoy had refused, which seems only to have served to increase his feeling of guilt. In 1908 he finally resolved to speak out when questioned by Biryukov in connection with his biography. Bursting into tears three times while dictating an account of what had happened in 1866 to his secretary Gusev, Tolstoy now declared that Shabunin’s execution had exerted far more influence on his life than all those events conventionally regarded as significant, such as bereavement, impoverishment, career setbacks and so forth. He confessed to being ashamed of his defence of Shabunin, which in retrospect he felt had been perfunctory and more concerned with legal details than with moral imperatives. It certainly stands in marked contrast to the impassioned stand taken in court by his fictional alter ego Nekhlyudov in Resurrection, which was conceivably written in part to assuage his guilt over the Shabunin affair.¹⁷⁷

15. Employees of the Free Word Press in the vault at Chertkov’s house in Christchurch, 1906. Evgeny Popov is seated second from left, Ludwig Perno, custodian of the Tolstoy archive, is seated at the typewriter on the right, and Chertkov’s wife is seated in the foreground. Chertkov is standing behind the door.

A quarter of a century on from their first meeting, Chertkov’s life was still characterised by his unswerving devotion to Tolstoy, and in 1908 he and his family took up permanent residence in a new house they built on land inherited by Tolstoy’s youngest daughter Sasha at Telyatinki, three miles from Yasnaya Polyana. Shortly after Chertkov’s return Tolstoy turned eighty. Such was the groundswell of support for him across the country that the Church felt compelled to issue a plea to all true believers to refrain from celebrating the occasion. It also tried to take Tolstoy to court for blasphemy against the holy personality of Jesus Christ, and arranged for icons to be painted which depicted him as a sinner burning in hell. Father Ioann, Tolstoy’s implacable foe, even wrote a prayer requesting that he die soon, but it was Father Ioann who died in 1908, not Tolstoy.¹⁷⁸ The few dissenting voices were anyway drowned out by the well-wishers who far outnumbered them. Two thousand telegrams wishing Tolstoy many happy returns were delivered to Yasnaya Polyana on 28 August, and Charles Wright, librarian at the British Museum, arrived at Yasnaya Polyana with birthday greetings signed by 800 English writers, artists and public figures, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Edmund Gosse.¹⁷⁹

Tolstoy had halted the activities of a special celebratory committee established in January 1908, just as he received his first birthday present: a phonograph sent to him by Thomas Edison. There were thus no official undertakings, but that did not stop a flood of ecstatic articles appearing in the press. Journalists gushed that there had never been a cultural celebration in Russia like it ever before, and that while the Pushkin Statue festivities had captured the national imagination back in 1880, this was an event on an international scale. Merezhkovsky proclaimed the Tolstoy celebration as a ‘celebration of the Russian revolution’, and declared that Tolstoy had against his will ‘turned out to be the radiant focal point of Russian freedom’.¹⁸⁰