Tolstoy

When the procession arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s coffin was brought into the house, so that the 5,000 mourners could file past and pay their last respects. Many people were shocked by the discrepancy between the Tolstoy they knew from all the portraits and photographs and the wax-like, wizened face of his corpse, and some fainted or had hysterics. Three and a half hours later the coffin was lifted up again and taken on its final journey into the wood, a short walk from the main house. At ten minutes to three in the afternoon, it was quietly lowered into the simple unmarked grave that had been prepared. Speeches had been banned, but everyone fell to their knees (even the policeman who had been despatched to monitor the proceedings). ‘Eternal Memory’ was sung softly again, but there was nothing Orthodox about this funeral rite, which was the first civil burial to take place in Russia. There were no priests, no icons, and no prayers, and no cross was erected at the head of the grave. Mourners continued to flock to Tolstoy’s bare burial mound in the days and weeks following his funeral. Only the following spring did grass begin to grow over it. As the attention finally receded from Astapovo, where over 1,000 telegrams had been sent and received during the last week of Tolstoy’s life, Yasnaya Polyana became once again a place of pilgrimage.

‘Eternal Memory’ was sung at memorial services held throughout Russia after the funeral, and also at demonstrations that had nothing ostensibly to do with Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s death, in fact, acted as a catalyst for political action: there were widespread strikes in Moscow on the day of the funeral, as well as student demonstrations, marches and processions, and vociferous calls were made for the death penalty to be abolished. The Russian government was caught on the back foot. Unable to join in the eulogies flooding the media, having demonised Tolstoy for so long, and equally unable to denounce him now that his great significance as a writer and thinker was being celebrated around the world, it found itself in an intractable position, for it could not remain silent. Ministers debated how they should honour the memory of a writer who had condemned governments, monarchs and state authority, but they had already become irrelevant and impotent, and their efforts to contain public manifestations were ineffectual. The Russian population at large had seized the initiative and was now beginning to write the script: it was a defining moment. Schools and universities closed, and factories, offices and theatres shut their doors while Russians from all backgrounds united in grieving publicly for a great writer and mighty hero who had defiantly spoken up on behalf of a nation that had been maimed and muzzled for so long. The import of these unprecedented events was not lost on one exiled revolutionary in Switzerland – Vladimir Lenin, who wrote three new articles on Tolstoy in November 1910. Tolstoy was still just a mirror of diverse and contradictory impulses in Russia in his view, but the nation had moved on since 1905. Tolstoy had taken giant steps during his lifetime, and his death was one last giant step – on the road to Revolution.¹⁸⁷

Epilogue

PATRIARCH OF THE BOLSHEVIKS

I believe their example and their lives give an answer to the question which I have asked myself and my readers in my previous books: is it possible to withstand, and to preserve one’s integrity intact while living in a Totalitarian regime? The Tolstoyans answered this question with their lives, both tragically and heroically.

Mark Popovsky, 1983 ¹

THE NATION’S ATTENTION was focused on Yasnaya Polyana at the time of Tolstoy’s burial, and initially his widow was kept busy. On 17 december, forty days after her husband’s death, Sonya walked to his grave in order to commemorate his memory according to Orthodox custom, and was joined by the entire population of the village – men, women and children. The grave was tidied up, fresh fir branches laid on it, and those present took off their hats and sank to their knees three times to sing ‘Eternal Memory’.² There were frequent visitors in the first weeks after Tolstoy’s death. In her now brief diary entries Sonya recorded the arrival of various journalists, a group of fifty-two female students from St Petersburg, a Muslim visitor from the Caucasus bearing a wreath, and her sister Tanya, who stayed on for a month. But as family and friends departed, Sonya was left alone to mourn. Yasnaya Polyana suddenly felt very empty.