Tolstoy

Today it is fifty years since the death of L. N. Tolstoy, my dear father and teacher of life. He helped me purify Christ’s teaching from superstitions accreted over the centuries, he helped me find dear friends, a spiritual family if not related by blood, which is better, stronger, and more genuine. Thanks to Tolstoy I moved from the city to the country, to be amongst those working the earth, and I started manual labour myself in the vegetable plot and in the garden, and learned to love it. Tolstoy helped me find true goodness in life. He showed the true way in love and unity for the whole world. He showed the shortcomings which divide people, and even sometimes destroy human life altogether. The great, still underrated Tolstoy!¹⁰⁷

The Soviet Tolstoyans had a great attachment to the written word: without it their stories would have never come to light. From the 1950s onwards they tried to donate their memoirs and correspondence to the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, but archivists refused to accept them, through understandable fear of political reprisals.¹⁰⁸ The Tolstoyans also zealously defended Tolstoy from what they regarded as slander by Orthodox Soviet literary critics. Boris Mazurin followed publications on Tolstoy particularly closely, even from the remote Siberian village where he lived, and made it a point of principle to pen carefully written and robustly argued letters whenever he felt something needed to be corrected. He tackled Party member Boris Meilakh, for example, after the publication in 1961 of his book about Tolstoy’s departure and death. ‘You often talk in your book about the “weak” places in Tolstoy’s worldview, calling them weak in view of their incompatibility with Marxist views, particularly as regards the possibility of changing life for the better through violence …’, he wrote in his letter to Meilakh. To his credit, Meilakh replied, but Mazurin was still not satisfied, and wrote again to take issue with him about the idea that Tolstoy had been involved in any kind of political struggle to acquire power over people: ‘It’s impossible to imagine Tolstoy as a government figure leading and organising people by means of the necessary instruments of state power. And it is equally impossible to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent in such awful years as 1937 and 1938.’ ¹⁰⁹ It is indeed hard to imagine Tolstoy remaining silent, but it is harder still to imagine that he would have survived the Purges. It is more likely that he would simply have been shot at the first opportunity.

The Tolstoyans were disappointed to see Chertkov’s name now blackened, both in Meilakh’s book, and also in the new edition of Valentin Bulgakov’s memoir of Tolstoy, which was published in 1964. But most painful of all to them was the speech given by the establishment writer Leonid Leonov to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death at the Bolshoi Theatre on 19 November 1960. It was reprinted in all the major Soviet newspapers, and issued as a separate publication the following year. Leonov, recipient of Stalin and Lenin prizes, a Hero of Socialist Labour and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, parroted the standard view on Tolstoy, implying it was shortcomings in his philosophical and religious views which explained why there were no longer any apostles or ardent acolytes around to continue his ideas except for a few sectarians scattered about the globe. After much discussion with fellow Tolstoyans, who were understandably indignant, Mazurin wrote Leonov a lengthy riposte in February 1962, then travelled all the way to Moscow with it, only to be rebuffed by officials when seeking to find his address. Eventually he got his letter to Leonov, however, and in September 1962 he actually received a reply. Rather predictably, Leonov failed to answer any of Mazurin’s criticisms.¹¹⁰ Many other Tolstoyans vigorously proclaimed their existence, and challenged untruths. In 1975 dmitry Morgachev sent an open letter to Alexander Klibanov, with copies to leading newspapers, after the latter published a book about religious sectarianism in which he alleged, for example, that the Tolstoyans had refused to join collective farms because they were essentially kulaks.¹¹¹