Tolstoy

There was a good deal of press coverage of the Tolstoy Jubilee. An unsigned editorial in Pravda published on 9 September may well have been written by Stalin himself. After questioning whether the Bolsheviks, who had ‘chosen revolutionary violence’, and regarded religion as the ‘opium of the people’, should honour a writer who ‘did not understand’ the proletarian movement, and to whom the revolution was alien, the conclusion was that they should.⁸⁶ Nevertheless, a list of twenty acceptable works of fiction by Tolstoy was now drawn up, Lenin’s articles criticising Tolstoy were continually cited, and the writer’s philosophical views were roundly condemned. Some important advances in Tolstoy scholarship had been made in the 1920s by literary scholars (such as the Formalists Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Shklovsky), but the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers played safe by basing their interpretation of Tolstoy on Lenin’s literary criticism, namely his famous 1908 characterisation of Tolstoy’s method as the ‘tearing off of masks’, which was proffered as a good model for budding Soviet writers to follow. It was, in fact, political figures like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg who dominated publications on Tolstoy around the time of the centenary. One volume published in 1929 may have included the very last Russian publication by Trotsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union that year.⁸⁷ The chapter headings for one of the many centenary volumes about Tolstoy published in 1928 reflect the efforts that were made by the Soviet government to render the great writer acceptable to the regime:

Part 1: The Jubilee and Our Tasks

Part 2: Tolstoy as a Thinker

Tolstoy and his Epoch The Lack of Synthesis; The Social Reasons for This

Dialectical Materialism and Religious Idealism

Class war/Struggle and Non-Resistance to Evil

Tolstoy’s Criticism of Capitalism

Tolstoy’s Criticism of Patriotism and Militarism

Part 3: Tolstoy as Artist

Part 4: Tolstoy and the Soviet Public ⁸⁸

In the face of this ideological onslaught, Alexandra’s work at Yasnaya Polyana became more and more difficult. Once the Jubilee was over, she was once again subject to harassment by local Party officials when she refused to comply with their demands. Eventually she was forced to accept as her deputy at the estate-museum an anonymous Soviet writer who proposed using Tolstoy’s teachings as a weapon in the anti-religious campaign. The requirement by the ‘League of the Godless’ that pupils at the Yasnaya Polyana school were to have lessons on Easter Sunday, in keeping with Stalin’s calendar ‘reforms’, was the last straw. In the autumn of 1929 Alexandra got on a train for Vladivostok, en route for Japan, where she had been invited to lecture. She never returned to Russia.⁸⁹

By 1930, only two volumes of the Jubilee Edition had appeared, and there were still problems with obtaining funds to keep going. Chertkov was seventy-six and very ill by this time, but this was his life’s work and he plodded resolutely on, despite having exhausted all his savings to fund the enterprise. In February 1934 he wrote about the lack of funds to Molotov, who had been head of Sovnarkom (Council of Ministers) since 1930, but he received no answer. On 27 May he wrote to Stalin:

The situation of our editorial team is now completely hopeless as a result of the lack of funds to complete our work, the release of which, to the tune of 75,000 roubles, I requested from Sovnarkom. Meanwhile, my requests to accelerate the publication and fund the editing work to the end, as I have been informed by Sovnarkom, have not met with any objections in principle, and the entire delay is to do with the paperwork, which has been going on for four months already. I am not writing again to Comrade Molotov, because I have already written to him twice, and having not received a reply, I am not sure that he has the time to turn his personal attention to my appeal to him amongst many complex governmental affairs. But I am being so bold as to appeal to you, esteemed Iosif Vissarionovich, as the comrade on whose initiative this project was essentially launched following the lead of the late V. I. Lenin. I think that just one word from you would be enough to bring an immediate conclusion to the formal side of the protracted satisfaction of my requests, as set out in my letter of 23 February 1934 to Comrade Molotov …⁹⁰

There was again no response, nor to a letter Chertkov wrote in July 1934, by which time he was so ill he was no longer in full control of his faculties, but in August that year the money started to trickle through at last.