Tolstoy (72 page)

12. Cartoon showing Tolstoy as a mighty giant next to the tiny figure of Tsar Nicholas II, 1901

You have shared the fate of many great people ahead of their time, esteemed Lev Nikolayevich. They used to be burned at the stake, left to rot in jails and in exile. Let the hypocrite priests excommunicate you however they want. Russian people will always be proud, seeing you as their own great dearly beloved.

Tolstoy was the conscience of the nation, and the excommunication was the most eloquent expression of the abyss separating the Church from educated Russian society. In Moscow, as elsewhere, the intelligentsia saw the excommunication primarily as an act of political vengeance. Alexey Suvorin, editor of
New Times,
quipped that Russia now had two tsars. While Nicholas II was clearly unable to make Tolstoy's throne wobble, he observed, Tolstoy was destabilising the entire Romanov dynasty.
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Tolstoy finally started drafting an article in response to the Holy Synod's edict on 24 March, which carried new denunciations. The letter was sent to Chertkov for publication in England. He was still hoping he might one day be arrested.
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Repin had an important new portrait of Tolstoy on show at the 29th Wanderers Exhibition in Petersburg which had opened a week before the excommunication was announced. Ironically it depicted the writer at prayer, barefoot in the woods at Yasnaya Polyana. When the exhibition opened, the portrait was immediately surrounded with flowers, and naturally attracted more attention after the excommunication. Before the exhibition closed on 25 March a student stood on a chair and tied bouquets round the entire frame, as if it was a venerated popular icon, then gave an impromptu speech. A telegram of support signed by the 400 people present was sent to Tolstoy, and even more people festooned Repin's portrait with flowers.
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This led to the painting being taken down, and it was not shown when the exhibition moved to Moscow and the provinces.

The excommunication caused a sensation amongst Russia's educated classes, but it is worth pointing out that many Russian rural priests had scant knowledge of Tolstoy beyond knowing that he was an aristocrat who wrote society novels. The majority of peasants, meanwhile, knew only that he was a count, and thus representative of the nobility who were hated and distrusted,
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but there was nevertheless a significant number who followed Father Ioann of Kronstadt in believing that Tolstoy was the Antichrist. Father Ioann, an even more charismatic figure than Grigory Petrov (who ended up leaving the Church), was not a prominent bishop or theologian, but a parish priest who was seen by many as Russia's third 'tsar' in view of his extraordinary popularity.
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Born one year after Tolstoy into an impoverished sacristan's family in Arkhangelsk province in 1829, he married in 1855 and was ordained that year in St Andrew's Cathedral in Kronstadt, where his father-in-law was the senior priest. During the fifty years in which Father Ioann served in the port of Kronstadt outside St Petersburg, home to the imperial navy's Baltic Fleet, he acquired renown for his Populist, informal style, and for the unusual mass confessions which were held at his church. Father Ioann encouraged charity and greater piety, and by the time he administered to Alexander III on his deathbed in 1894, he had become famous throughout Russia. Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra also revered Father Ioann: they had a picture of him on the wall behind their bed at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea.

In the 1890s Father Ioann began condemning Tolstoy for teaching that Christ was not divine, that Mary was simply an unmarried mother, and that the Orthodox Church was pagan and idolatrous. 'You ought to have a stone hung round your neck and be lowered with it into the depths of the sea; you ought not to have any place on earth' - it was in these terms that Father Ioann denounced Tolstoy, and a collection of his diatribes against Tolstoy was published in 1902.
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Father Ioann was perhaps Tolstoy's most famous public opponent, and his polar opposite. Indeed, for the writer Nikolay Leskov, Tolstoy and Father Ioann represented the opposing forces struggling for Russia's future.
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Father Ioann was seen as the pastor of the people, whereas Tolstoy was worshipped more by the intelligentsia, and yet there were some striking similarities between them. Like Tolstoy, Father Ioann also aspired to an ascetic ideal. In maintaining a celibate marriage (his wife Elizaveta would have liked children), he was rather more successful in curbing his libido than Tolstoy. Father Ioann was also strict about food consumption, which, like Tolstoy, he linked to sensuality: 'Buckwheat kasha is good, cream bad'; 'No horseradish with vinegar!'; 'NEVER EAT SUPPER!' Father Ioann saw his wife's cooking as a threat to his spirituality.
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Both Father Ioann and Tolstoy were puritans who attacked social inequality, excessive materialism and moral depravity, and both were the subject of a cult of personality - the Russian Post Office had to make special provision to deal with the huge volume of letters Father Ioann received from adoring parishioners.
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Father Ioann also inspired the birth of a kind of sectarian religion, which was reported with alarm by Pobedonostsev in 1901, the year of Tolstoy's excommunication. His followers, who were called 'Ioannity', saw him variously as God, Jesus, or John the Baptist, and treated his photograph as an icon (he was particularly popular with women).
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Control over its clergy was a priority for the Holy Synod, and there was some alarm when Father Ioann seemed to be becoming dangerously independent. Like Tolstoy, he enjoyed greater popularity at court than in the offices of state, but even some of his congregation found his tone a little too strident at times. One person wrote to him after becoming acquainted with his 'words of denunciation directed against Count Lev Tolstoy', and now could not find 'inner calm', nor knew how to reconcile his 'diatribes, so alien to the spirit of Christian gentleness, tolerance and forgiveness for all', with his earlier writing on spirituality.
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Tolstoy and Father Ioann were part of an extraordinary religious renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century which affected all classes of Russian society, with huge numbers of pilgrims making visits to monasteries and taking part in processions such as the one immortalised in Repin's famous painting of the Kursk procession. There was also a religious revival amongst the intelligentsia which first began around the time of the publication of Dostoyevsky's last novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
in 1880, which was inspired by the writer's meetings with the elders of Optina Pustyn. It is noteworthy that this was the book Tolstoy was reading when he finally left Yasnaya Polyana at the end of his life and went on the last of his many visits to the monastery, which seems to have been a place which both repelled and drew him. Even before he was excommunicated Tolstoy was widely seen as 'the elder of Yasnaya Polyana', and in the last decades of his life received not only scores of visitors who came to seek his guidance, but thousands of letters from people who asked for his help. He tried diligently to respond to them with the help of secretaries, who functioned like the lay brothers who traditionally assisted the elders.
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A further sign of the religious revival came in November 1901 with the launch of a series of historic meetings held in the hall of the Imperial Geographic Society in St Petersburg. These meetings brought about the first constructive contact between the intelligentsia and the clergy in Russia. Initiated by modernist writers like Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who wished to bridge the gulf separating the educated classes from the Church, the aim was to try to find some common ground, and a possible religious solution to the socio-political crisis in Russia. The name of Tolstoy loomed large and, not surprisingly, his conflict with the Church was the topic of the third of the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings held in early 1902.
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Amongst the issues hotly debated was whether it had been the Church or the state which had been the driving force behind Tolstoy's excommunication.

Tolstoy remained a problem for the Church hierarchy even after he was excommunicated, as in June 1901 he fell seriously ill with malaria, necessitating the drawing up of a new strategy: governors and police chiefs were ordered not to allow any speeches or demonstrations in the event of his death.
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Sergey was mortified to find out his brother was in a critical condition from the newspapers, whose editors regarded Tolstoy's state of health as a matter of public interest. Sergey now wrote his brother a heartfelt letter in which he told him how much he meant to him, and how there was no other person in the world to whom he could talk in the same way. Underneath his signature he added sadly: 'Apart from our closeness from childhood, I just need you, but you don't need me. You have a legion apart from me.'
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Not for the first time, Tolstoy's strong constitution helped him recover, and Alexandrine's friend Countess Panina kindly offered her dacha outside Yalta for his convalescence. In September 1901, the family decamped to the Crimea. Contrary to his usual habit of travelling fourth class with fleas and cockroaches, as Sergey put it, this time the family was allotted a private compartment, which had been arranged with the help of a Tolstoyan who worked for the railways. Despite the ban on press coverage of his movements, there was a huge crowd of 3,000 supporters waiting at Kharkov station to cheer him. The Tolstoys would remain in the Crimea for the best part of ten months, during which time Sonya tended to her husband with her usual devotion.

Countess Panina's 'dacha' was in fact a gothic palace - a fairy-tale castle with two towers. Tolstoy had never lived in such luxury in all his life, and wrote to tell Sergey about the profusion of exotic flowers, the marble fountain in a pond with fish swimming in it, the manicured lawns, the luxuriant view of the sea past the cypress trees, and even the lavatories, a convenience he was not used to. Back in 1887 Tolstoy had written a long letter to the future pacifist writer Romain Rolland in which he declared that the first test of the sincerity of those who professed to live by Christian principles was to put an end to living parasitically off the manual work done by the poor and take care of one's own needs, which included emptying one's own chamber pot.
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Tolstoy told his brother that the grand dukes and millionaires who lived nearby were surrounded by even greater luxury.
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As usual Tolstoy was thronged with visitors, but there were also pleasant meetings with Chekhov, who was a local telephone call away in Yalta, and with the young writer Gorky. Tolstoy also developed a friendship with the urbane and scholarly Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich, an old friend of Chertkov who sought him out. Not only was he unflustered by Tolstoy's pariah-status in official circles, it turned out he was an avid reader of his virulently anti-government writings. His lofty position as a member of the Romanov family enabled him to receive uncensored all the editions Chertkov published in England.
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Fearing this might be his last chance, Tolstoy seized the opportunity of this serendipitous acquaintance to write another lengthy letter to Nicholas II, which the Grand Duke gamely offered to deliver. Addressing the Tsar as 'Dear brother', Tolstoy dispensed with the niceties of protocol. After admonishing Nicholas II for increasing police surveillance, censorship and religious persecution to unacceptable levels, Tolstoy disputed the notion that Orthodoxy and autocracy were inherently Russian. First of all he pointed to the ever increasing numbers of those 'defecting' to other faiths, despite the dangers of persecution entailed. Next he declared that autocracy was outmoded and bankrupt as a form of government. Tsarist power might still have had prestige under Nicholas I, he admitted, but in the nearly fifty years since his death, it had completely disintegrated, to the point that people from all classes of society now openly criticised and ridiculed the Tsar himself (that is, Nicholas II, the person he was addressing):

The fact that crowds of people run after you with shouts of 'Hurrah!' in Moscow and other cities has probably misled you about the people's love for autocracy and its representative, the Tsar. Don't believe that this is an expression of devotion to you - they are just a crowd of curious people who will go after any unusual spectacle.
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