Tolstoy

When the committee for the anniversary celebrations was formed in 1926, Alexandra submitted proposals for extensive renovation work at Yasnaya Polyana, including new buildings for the school and hospital there. She also proposed the reorganisation of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. Her sister Tanya had taken over the management of the Moscow museum from Bulgakov when he was sent into exile in 1923, but she herself had emigrated in 1925. Since Ilya, Lev and Mikhail were all already abroad, and Sergey had a job teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire, the seemingly indefatigable Alexandra now became director of the Tolstoy Museum as well. Lunacharsky, Chertkov, Gusev and the other members of the committee were receptive to Alexandra’s proposals, but were powerless to do anything, owing to the simple fact that there was no money: the Commissariat of People’s Enlightenment was always the poorest of all the Soviet ministries. Alexandra showed her mettle at this point, and decided to go to the top, and after making several visits to Moscow from Yasnaya Polyana she eventually obtained an audience with Stalin, who had assumed power after Lenin’s death in January 1924. The brief interview was chastening. Stalin flatly refused to pay the million roubles requested by the Jubilee Committee for its construction and renovation programme, and it quickly became apparent to Alexandra that he did not care about Tolstoy and the Tolstoy Jubilee at all. What he did care about was exploiting it as a felicitous opportunity for international propaganda, and doing so as cheaply as possible.⁷⁵

The situation with the Tolstoy Collected Works was also bleak. In 1926, with just two years to go, there was still no contract signed for what was now pegged to the centenary year as the Jubilee Edition. Chertkov had also been having high-level meetings with the Soviet leadership. He had been forced to accept the idea of a ‘temporary’ state monopoly on Tolstoy’s manuscripts, which would at least be lifted with publication, but found himself constantly lobbying for funds to pay the editorial team. His first meeting with Stalin, which took place in the autumn of 1924, had produced results. In November 1925 the Soviet government finally approved the release of a million roubles to pay for the cost of the project. The money was very slow in materialising, however, and in June 1926 Chertkov was forced to write to Stalin to tell him he could no longer afford to pay the forty-three members of the editorial staff working on the project (most of their wages were still coming from his own pocket). Alexandra was still very much involved with the project, but she and Chertkov did not see eye to eye. Finally, in 1925, they reached an agreement: her group would prepare Tolstoy’s manuscripts written before 1880, and his team would work on the later writings. In december 1925 the two groups were united under Chertkov’s leadership.⁷⁶

The Central Committee now decided it should form a special commission to investigate and monitor the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition, and in September 1926 a ‘troika’ was appointed, headed by Stalin’s deputy Vyacheslav Molotov. In March 1927 the state bank finally paid out a miserly 15,000 roubles, but meanwhile the contract had got lost in a morass of bureaucracy and ever-changing personnel at Gosizdat, the state publishing house. Chertkov wrote to Stalin again in March 1928 to protest that Gosizdat was refusing to sign the contract, despite the special commission having approved it. The contract was finally signed on 2 April 1928, but by then it was too late for even the first volume to appear in time for Tolstoy’s centenary.⁷⁷ By this point, Alexandra had lost interest in an edition which was clearly going to be limited and expensive. There had been further disagreements with Chertkov over payment for editorial work, and Chertkov now took over as editor-in-chief.

The Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works was to set the standard for Soviet scholarly editions. Artistic works were designated for the first forty-five volumes, with separate volumes for the different versions of major works (War and Peace takes up four volumes, for example). Editors had to work painstakingly through thousands and thousands of pages of Tolstoy’s often illegible handwriting before presenting their volume for discussion at one of the 156 committee meetings which were held over the course of edition’s publication. More than 900 corrections were made to produce a definitive edition of Anna Karenina (although even that version was later superseded by the Academy of Sciences edition published in 1970). Tolstoy’s artistic works were to be followed by thirteen volumes of diaries and notebooks. Finally there would be thirty-one volumes of letters. Tolstoy had written at least 8,500 letters during his lifetime, with Chertkov by far and away his most frequent correspondent.⁷⁸