Tolstoy

Tolstoy is published and re-published in our country with print runs running into the millions. The 90-volume Complete Collected Works, published between 1928 and 1958, is so significant and monumental a publication that we continue to be proud of it. Nevertheless, Russian textual scholarship has not completely fulfilled its duty. The texts of many of the works of this great world writer remain unverified, manuscripts have been published incomplete and unsystematically. These are the main tasks in the new, probably 100-volume, genuinely academic edition on which work has now begun.¹²⁰

While Tolstoy scholarship may no longer be hostage to political mandates, the harsh realities of the market economy in contemporary Russia dictate that the progress of the new edition may well be slow.

It seems the only institution in Russia still refusing to open its doors as far as Tolstoy is concerned is the Orthodox Church. In 1994 Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy was appointed as the new director of Yasnaya Polyana, which is still one of the most famous museums in Russia. In early January 2001 he wrote to the Moscow Patriarch with a suggestion that the Church reflect on the significance of the excommunication which had taken place 100 years earlier. Patriarch Alexy’s refusal to discuss the issue created a stir. Vladimir Tolstoy certainly never doubted the importance of the excommunication. ‘I am deeply convinced,’ he declared in an interview at the time, ‘that it was one of the most important historical events in the history of the Russian state, which either obliquely or directly affected future developments, and divided Russian society along both vertical and horizontal axes.’

Just how great the reverberations of Tolstoy’s excommunication were with regards to Russian national life is perhaps most eloquently expressed by the fact that the first official meeting between the Orthodox Church and the Tolstoy estate took place in 2006 – 105 years after the event. The occasion was a special conference held in March 2006 at Yasnaya Polyana, when scholars met representatives from the Orthodox Church to debate the significance of the excommunication. As well as re-examining the sources of the original conflict and the legal aspects of the Holy Synod’s decree, delegates discussed its moral, spiritual and social dimensions and consequences, including its continuing public resonance today. The conference was widely reported in the Russian press, which noted that the unprecedented debate between the Church and literary community was ‘heated, to say the least’. As the writer Alexey Varlamov remarked in one paper, the conflict between Tolstoy and the church was one of the most painful points of the twentieth century, and crucial to the cause of the Russian Revolution. Another delegate, Father Georgy Orekhanov, who spoke on the spiritual aspect of Tolstoy’s death, defended the Church’s actions in 1901, but acknowledged that it was important to understand why so many people had immediately supported the writer at this ‘significant moment’ in Russian history. In the light of the collapse of communism and the subsequent resurgence of Christianity, he added, the question of the relationship between the Russian people and the Orthodox Church was just as topical now.¹²¹ Father Orekhanov gave another conference paper on Tolstoy in January 2009 at a panel devoted to topical problems in the history of the Orthodox Church,¹²² but it is unlikely that discussion will move beyond the academic sphere. To a church and state once again forging close bonds in today’s authoritarian Russia, Tolstoy’s teachings must seem as problematic and as dangerous as ever.

NOTES

Abbreviations Used in Notes

References to V. G. Chertkov’s ‘Jubilee Edition’ of Tolstoy’s complete collected works are indicated by ‘JE’, followed by volume number and page reference (e.g. JE 68, 49). The six volumes of L. N. Tolstoi: materialy k biografii are distinguished by author and volume (e.g. ‘Gusev 1’, ‘Opul’skaya 2’). The two volumes of the Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva are indicated as ‘Letopis’ 1’ and ‘Letopis’ 2’.

Introduction

1. R. M. Meiendorf, ‘Stranichka vospominanii o L’ve Nikolaeviche Tolstom’, in Letopisi Gosudarstvennogo literaturnogo muzeya, vol. 12: L. N. Tolstoi: K 120-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya (1828–1848), ed. N. N. Gusev, Moscow, 1948, 369.

2. Henry Norman, All the Russias, London, 1902, 47; cited in Alexander Fodor, Tolstoy and the Russians: Reflections on a Relationship, Ann Arbor, 1984, 15.