Tolstoy (71 page)

The other main challenge to the Russian Orthodox Church came from religious dissenters. In order to dissuade the peasantry from being drawn to the Old Believers, who had been identified with popular rebellion by the authorities ever since the schism of the 1660s, clergy were exhorted in the 1880s to make their services as sumptuous as possible.
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Most threatening of all to the Church and government, however, were the many newer sects which grew rapidly in popularity in the nineteenth century. The Old Believers, and to a lesser extent sects such as the Khlysty and the Skoptsy at least subscribed essentially to the same faith - their differences were over details of ritual. The so-called 'rational' sectarian faiths, however, dispensed fundamentally with religious ritual, along with priests, churches, icons and all other paraphernalia. Their adherents preached a Christian doctrine of love, equality and freedom which did not recognise governmental authority. On the one hand there were the descendants of German colonists known as 'Stundists', whose economic enterprise, teetotalism and devotion to personal Bible reading in the vernacular began to attract large numbers of Russian peasants in the nineteenth century, while on the other there were the indigenous Dukhobors and the Molokans.

Tolstoy's spiritual rebellion, then, did not arise in a vacuum, and should be seen in this important socio-religious context. Unceasing expansion had made Russia an enormous multi-ethnic empire, and by the time of the 1897 Missionary Congress thirty per cent of its population were Muslim, Jewish or belonged to other faiths. Nevertheless, only the Orthodox Church was allowed to engage in missionary activities within the borders of the empire. The first two Missionary Congresses, held in Moscow in 1887 and 1891, had mostly focused on ways to corral the Old Believers into coming back into the fold of Orthodoxy, but the third, held in Kazan, had focused on countering the influence in Russia of sects and Bible-based Protestant and Evangelist denominations. These, it found, were on the increase, despite missionary work and government initiatives. Metropolitan Melety of Ryazan won support at the Congress with his proposal that sectarians should be deported to special camps in the Siberian tundra. He also proposed that their property should be confiscated, and their children removed.
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Only fear of widespread protests from Baptists abroad apparently prevented Nicholas II from making this official policy. Confident that the peasantry would never follow political revolutionaries, he was far more worried about evangelical Christians and figures like Tolstoy. The liberal newspaper
Russian Gazette
reported that the 200 bishops, priests and ecclesiastical figures at the 1897 Missionary Congress had classified Tolstoyanism as a sect like any other:

The Congress placed the religious-moral views of Count Lev Tolstoy amongst the new sectarian faiths, asserting that his followers made up a 'fully formed sect'. Asserting also that this sect fully conformed to the definition of sects which were 'particularly dangerous to the Church and the state', the Congress resolved to ask the Holy Synod to propose to the government that the law established with regard to 'particularly dangerous' sects be applied to its adherents.
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Tolstoyanism was seen as all the more pernicious for its potential to appeal simultaneously to the educated elite and the peasantry, and the influence of Tolstoy's ideas on Pyotr Verigin and the Dukhobors shows the reality of this threat.

Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who had become Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod in 1880, a post which he held for twenty-five years, regarded Tolstoy as his arch-enemy. Tolstoy had first antagonised him by asking him to pass on the letter he wrote in 1881 to Alexander III, in which he asked for clemency for his father's assassins. Convinced from the time of reading that letter (which he had refused to pass on), that Tolstoy was intent on bringing down the government, Pobedonostsev had led a vigorous campaign to silence his opponent. This had resulted in Tolstoy's religious teachings being regularly denounced by Church figures, and the constant, and often intrusive, surveillance of his private life (even the Yasnaya Polyana priest was obliged to send reports to the Bishop of Tula).
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The ambitious son of a Moscow priest, who rose to become a professor of law before occupying the post of Procurator, Pobedonostsev was devoted to his duty. The wonderfully named Hermann von Samson-Himmelstierna provides a vivid thumbnail portrait of him in the history of Alexander III's reign which he published in 1893:

There are two classes of fanatics, the cold and the hot - that is, fanatics from reflection and fanatics by temperament. It is easy to know to which Pobedonostsev belongs. His looks betray him. He is old and of a spare build, his nose is pointed, his eyes are keen and penetrating, he wears spectacles, his forehead is fringed with a few grey hairs, his face is clean-shaven, and his expression is keen.
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Both Pobedonostsev and Tolstoy, who were almost exact contemporaries, felt Russian society needed to be healed, but they certainly differed in their diagnosis of its ailments.

When Tolstoy fell ill at the end of 1899, while he was completing
Resurrection,
the Holy Synod decided first to ban all prayers in his memory after his death, anticipating that he might not have much longer to live. When he regained his health it then pressed on with its ill-conceived excommunication plan. In his zeal to shore up the foundations of the Orthodox Church, Pobedonostsev had long ago clamoured for Tolstoy to be excommunicated, but it was Metropolitan Antony of St Petersburg who now took the initiative, motivated by fears that even the clergy might succumb to Tolstoyanism. There was some justification for this. In 1898 Grigory Petrov, a charismatic young priest in St Petersburg, had published a book called
The Gospel as the Foundation of Life
which focused on the Tolstoyan idea of the practical application of Christianity in everyday living; it went into twenty editions. In early February 1901 Petrov was reprimanded by Metropolitan Antony for discussing Tolstoy in a positive light at a meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society: he had declared that Tolstoy was doing for Russian society what Virgil had done for Dante, by leading people who had lost their way spiritually out of purgatory.
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The process to excommunicate Tolstoy was initiated the next day, and was announced ten days later. Nicholas II was apparently angry not to have been asked for his approval beforehand, and Pobedonostsev was forced to apologise.
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Metropolitan Antony had actually been keen to act earlier, so that the Synod's edict could be announced on 18 February, which was the first Sunday of Great Lent. Until 1869 it had been traditional to pronounce an annual anathema in church against enemies of the state on the first Sunday of Lent, just before the 'Victory of Orthodoxy' week, and no doubt the Church would have liked to include Tolstoy in its roster of heretics at least in memory of the traditional proclamation:

To those who do not believe that the Orthodox monarchs have been raised to the throne by virtue of a special grace of God - and that, at the moment the sacred oil is laid on them, the gifts of the Holy Ghost are infused into them anent the accomplishment of their exalted mission; and to those who dare to rise and rebel against them, such as Grisha Otrepev, Ivan Mazeppa, and others like them: Anathema! Anathema! Anathema!
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Back in 1837 the German travel writer J. G. Kohl had the chance to witness the 'cursing of the heretics' first-hand at the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, and so many believers wanted to attend, he claimed, that police had to be called to keep order. He described it as 'the most extraordinary, incomprehensible, and terrible service of the Eastern Church', the only one where cursing could be heard in a country where the people were generally more inclined to bless nearly everything:

The anathematizing began with a long service, with singing, reading, opening and shutting of doors; lighting of tapers, and burning of incense; coming and going, &c...[The Venerable Metropolitan] stepped forward and called down anathemas upon a number of people; on the false Demetrius, on Boris Godunoff, Mazeppa, Stenka Razin and Pugatsheff; and after these political heretics followed the religious ones, but they were only mentioned in general terms. Each person or class was first characterized by a few introductory words, their names pronounced, and then followed two or three times, like thunder after lightning, the word:
anafema, anafema
...
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Tolstoy was in lofty company. In 1901, clergy in Russian churches had to make do with an anathema on Tolstoy's
Resurrection,
rather than on his person. Nonetheless it was an event of huge social and political significance.

The Church had historically only anathematised individuals after repeated efforts to bring about repentance. The edict about Tolstoy stressed that he had preached fanatically against Orthodox dogma, so could not be regarded as a member of the Church unless he repented, but it was all very measured. The words 'anathema' or 'excommunication' were not in fact explicitly mentioned in the edict, which was announced on the front page of the weekly
Church News
(the official publication of the Holy Synod since 1888), and followed by an explanatory letter.
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Edict No. 577, dated 20-22 February, was signed by the three metropolitans, an archbishop and three bishops, none of whom was under any illusion that it would frighten Tolstoy, or even bring him to heel. But by having it published on the front page of every major Russian newspaper on 25 February, and issuing a government decree banning its discussion in the press, the Synod hoped it could undermine the public support for Tolstoy which was steadily growing in Russia amongst all sections of the population. The intention was to provoke a backlash of hostility towards him and diminish his authority at a critical time of social and political unrest, while simultaneously enhancing the profile of the Orthodox Church. The reality was the opposite - it was a dismal failure. No one except the ecclesiastical authorities took the excommunication seriously, and yet it proved to be an event whose repercussions would be far-reaching.

Tolstoy was in Moscow at the beginning of 1901. As usual, his preoccupations were intellectual. He had begun the year by reading
The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy
by Max Müller, and alongside his engagement with Hindu and Nietzschean philosophy, continued his study of Dutch. Sonya's concerns were, as usual, more worldly. She was as busy as ever. She travelled to Yasnaya Polyana to look after their daughter Tanya after she had a stillborn child, then came back to Moscow to help with the preparations for their son Misha's wedding to Alexandra Glebova on 31 January: she sewed little bags which would later be filled with sweets and given to the guests. The wedding was a high-society event attended by Grand Dukes (one of whom came specially from St Petersburg) but pointedly not by her husband. On 12 February she went back to Yasnaya Polyana when she heard that Masha had miscarried, and then came back to take care of the household in Moscow, and a gloomy husband who was expressing his fears of death. The seven weeks of the Great Lent began, and with it fasting, so on 16 February she went to the mushroom market with Semyon Nikolayevich the cook, and on to church. The next day she took herself off to buy toys for the children in the Moscow orphanage of which she had become patron.

On the day the excommunication became public, Tolstoy declared in a letter to his daughter Masha that the only thing he really wanted to write about now was people's lack of religion, which he believed was the cause of all the horrors in the world.
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He was far more serious about living in accordance with Christian principles than the majority of those in his class, and he believed in God more than most, so there was an irony in the Church excommunicating someone with such deeply held, if unorthodox, Christian views. He had been oblivious to all the machinations earlier, and so he just carried on writing outspoken polemical articles and letters of protest attacking the corruption of the Church and the government whose militarist policies it supported. From Sonya's diary we learn that there was wonderful weather at the time ofTolstoy's excommunication - clear days and moonlit nights. She records how affectionate and passionate her husband suddenly became when the edict was published, and how his health and state of mind improved in the peculiarly festive atmosphere that prevailed at that time. She immediately wrote an impassioned letter to Pobedonostsev and Metropolitan Antony to protest against the edict, then went back to knitting woolly hats for the orphanage. Unusually, both Sonya's letter and the response from Metropolitan Antony were printed in
Church News.

The Holy Synod marshalled its minions to send poison-pen letters and death threats to Tolstoy when the excommunication was announced, but there were far more demonstrations, petitions and ovations in his honour. The Tolstoy house in Moscow was immediately besieged with visitors wanting to take action, and mounted police had to intervene when Tolstoy was mobbed by enthusiastic students who spotted him walking in the centre of the city on the day the excommunication was made public. Far from diminishing Tolstoy's stature, the Holy Synod's edict only enhanced it, particularly in view of the government's ban on the publication of all telegrams and expressions of support. The excommunication also intensified interest in Tolstoy's writings. People who had never read him before started asking for his books in libraries, and Russians abroad were immediately questioned about him as soon as their nationality became known.
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Employees at the Maltsev Glass Factory outside Moscow sent Tolstoy a lump of green glass with their message to him incised in gold: