Tolstoy

The Jubilee Edition was only properly resuscitated after Stalin’s death in 1953. The last volumes were eventually all published by 1958, by which time the heroic scholars of the original editorial team had been relegated to assistant status by Goslitizdat, and the names of Chertkov and Alexandra Tolstaya were no longer mentioned on the masthead. It had taken thirty years. The scholarship in the volumes published later inevitably suffered, and fresh rounds of ‘editing’ were so drastic that some volumes had to double up with others. The much-touted total of ninety volumes, in fact, comprises only seventy-eight separate books.⁹⁴ Once Tolstoy’s religious works had appeared in the Jubilee Edition, they were banned from future publication. Nevertheless, in the ‘official’ history of the publication of the Jubilee Edition which Rodionov published in 1961, he could with justification point to it being compared to the 143 volumes of the benchmark Weimar Goethe edition, despite the necessary political accommodation with the regime.⁹⁵ Forty years later, in a very different political climate, Osterman’s book Srazhenie za Tolstogo (The Battle for Tolstoy) would reveal the true story behind the publication of this extraordinary edition.

Over the course of the first few decades of Soviet power, Tolstoy was successfully transformed by the Bolsheviks from a ‘socially alien’ writer into one whose name was ‘synonymous with Russia herself ’, as has been pointed out by Alexander Fodor in a valuable book which explores the history of Russia’s relationship with Tolstoy.⁹⁶ A key role in this process of transformation was played by World War II. during the celebrations to mark the October Revolution in besieged Leningrad in 1941, Tolstoy’s stories about the defence of Sebastopol were broadcast via loudspeaker in Palace Square. War and Peace also became a vitally important work while Russians fought to defend their country from the Nazi invasion. By this time, twenty-five trunks from the archive at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow had been evacuated to Tomsk in Siberia, with other precious items directed to Tashkent. Tomsk was also the destination for the most valuable exhibits at Yasnaya Polyana, which was invaded by the Nazis on 30 October 1941, two days after the last party of tourists had been shown round its empty rooms.⁹⁷

By the time the war was over, Tolstoy’s entire corpus of anti-war writings had quietly been forgotten. In the 1950s Tolstoy was firmly entrenched in the Soviet imagination as a symbol of Russia, and as her most ardent patriot. Generations of Russian schoolchildren now grew up with the officially approved novels and stories that had become a fixture on the national curriculum, completely unaware of Tolstoy’s enormous legacy of religious and political writings. Tolstoy’s ‘official’ status was cemented by the number of new streets named after him in cities across the country, from Penza to Vladivostok, and in time his legacy was also tainted by the exigencies of the command economy which bred corruption and cynicism. Like all major Soviet literary museums, the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow was founded to be a centre for cutting-edge scholarship as much as a tourist destination, and it had been initially placed under the jurisdiction of the Academy of Sciences, along with the Tolstoy estate-museum. In 1953, however, that jurisdiction passed to the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and three years later there was a further ‘demotion’ to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, which placed more emphasis on meeting targets for visitor numbers. Scholars battled on valiantly, already hampered by the Soviet censorship, but standards inevitably slipped in some areas.⁹⁸