Tolstoy (73 page)

Only someone with the authority of a tsar would have the temerity to speak in such terms to a crowned head of state. The fact that Nicholas II pledged not to show this letter to anyone (as attested by Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich's mistress, Princess Elena Baryatinskaya, who happened to be Chertkov's cousin) lends credence to the view that Tolstoy and Chertkov still enjoyed a certain amount of favour and protection at court.
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When Tolstoy fell seriously ill again in January 1902 there was a new flurry of despatches from the Holy Synod, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Censorship Committee, its officials all terrified of outbreaks of civil disobedience, or worse. Pobedonostsev hatched a plan to despatch a priest to the Tolstoy household and thus be able to announce a last-minute recantation, the Head of Censorship stipulated that pictures of Tolstoy in the press were only permissible after his death, and Metropolitan Antony sent a letter in which he implored Tolstoy to return to the Church.
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Needless to say, Tolstoy was not interested. Under the care of numerous doctors and his wife and daughters, with constant visits from other family members and friends (who had all converged on Gaspra thinking they were coming to pay their last respects), Tolstoy slowly recovered. He returned home in June, cheered by an even bigger crowd at Kharkov station, and he and Sonya now took up permanent residence in Yasnaya Polyana. On the advice of doctors, and much to Tolstoy's own relief, there would be no more winters in Moscow. Also on the advice of doctors, he moved his study upstairs to the large, well-lit room with the balcony next to his bedroom, which caught the morning sun.

Tolstoy did not exactly mellow in old age. In the autumn of 1902 he wrote a fierce attack on Christian clergymen of all denominations, in the hope of showing them the harm they caused, as he put it in a letter to his brother.
To the Clergy,
which was sent to Chertkov and published by the Free Word Press in 1903, was another example of Tolstoy talking 'man to man' with clerics, regardless of their rank. It was a vintage Tolstoyan harangue:

You know that what you teach about the creation of the world, about the inspiration of the Bible by God, and much else is not true. How then can you teach it to little children and to ignorant adults, who look to you for true enlightenment?...Whoever you may be - popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, superintendents, priests, or pastors - think of this. If you belong to those of the clergy (of whom there are unfortunately very many, and continually more and more in our days) who see clearly how obsolete, irrational, and immoral the Church teaching is, but who, without believing in it, still continue to preach it from personal motives (for their salaries as priests or bishops), do not console yourselves with the supposition that your activity is justified by any utility it has for the masses of the people, who do not yet understand what you understand.
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Father Ioann of Kronstadt immediately fought back with a famous riposte. Journalists often likened Tolstoy to Ilya Muromets, the greatest of Russia's mythical medieval warriors (bogatyrs), who was famous for performing Herculean feats. To Father Ioann, however, Leo Tolstoy was a predatory lion akin to the devil (1 Peter, 5: 8), and since few of the Orthodox faithful would have been able to read Tolstoy's contraband article, he provided a summary of its contents for them:

For Tolstoy there is no supreme spiritual perfection in the sense of the achievements of Christian virtues - simplicity, humility, purity of heart, chastity, repentance, faith, hope, love in the Christian sense; he does not recognise Christian endeavours; he laughs at holiness and sacred things - it is he himself he adores, and he bows down before himself, like an idol, like a superman; I, and no one else but me, muses Tolstoy. You are all wrong; I have revealed the truth and am teaching everyone the truth! The Gospel according to Tolstoy is an invention and a fairy tale. So, Orthodox people, who is Lev Tolstoy? He is a lion roaring
[Lev rykayushchy
], looking for someone to devour. And how many he has devoured with his flattering pages! Watch out for him.
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Tolstoy was certainly aware of Father Ioann, but he never paid him any attention.

It is perhaps indicative that the year in which Tolstoy published
To the Clergy,
was also the year of the canonisation of Serafim of Sarov (1759–1833), the first and greatest of Russia's elders. The celebrations were attended by Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, and half a million pilgrims.
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The fact that there were suddenly many more canonisations in the reign of Nicholas II lends credence to the theory that there was an agenda afoot to inspire patriotism and loyalty to the monarchy. This was also the year in which the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings were shut down, for the same reason. The Church and government were finding it difficult to unite the population amidst a growing discontent that was spreading throughout the country, and the philosophers, poets, literary critics and public figures who attended the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings had been entering into debates with members of the clergy that the authorities felt were too heated in such tense times.

The political situation in Russia had indeed become very volatile by 1904. In the 1890s radical Marxist groups committed to revolution had changed their tactics from spreading propaganda amongst the new population of oppressed factory workers to mass agitation, causing a wave of strikes, and then had united to form the Social Democratic Labour Party, which the police endeavoured but failed to destroy. When he reached the end of his term of Siberian exile in 1900, Vladimir Ulyanov had gone abroad. As well as founding a newspaper and adopting the name of Lenin, he had proposed the creation of a disciplined party of hard-line professional revolutionaries in his tract
What Is to Be Done?
(not to be confused with eponymous works by Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky). Publication of this tract contributed in 1903 to the Social Democratic Labour Party splitting into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Apart from the clamour for reform from liberal parties, in 1904 the Russian government found itself dealing with the constant threat of terrorist activities from the various revolutionary groups, as well as increasing peasant unrest and a rising number of mass strikes in urban factories. Discontent was only exacerbated by the government's brutal pogroms against the Jews (Tolstoy spoke out against them too), its continued persecution of religious minorities and its obvious support for employers rather than employees. With the domestic situation so fraught, the sudden outbreak of war with Japan in January 1904 took everyone by surprise.

It was the disastrous Russo-Japanese War which finally brought an end to imperial hubris. The Foreign Ministry and the armed forces had stagnated under Nicholas II: the British ambassador to Russia knew he could safely go on leave from September to December, and ministry officials would habitually arrive for work at midday and leave again at four. The stagnation was born of an unmerited complacency. So great had been Russia's sense of superiority towards Japan that when it acquired a lease from China to expand into its north-eastern provinces in 1898, Foreign Minister Nikolay Muravyov declared that one flag and a sentry was all that was required to secure Port Arthur: Russian prestige would do the rest. But the ill-founded perception of Russian might was about to be challenged. Within weeks of Admiral Makarov arriving in Port Arthur, he perished with all his crew when the Russian flagship
Petropavlovsk
hit a Japanese mine. When war broke out, Tolstoy was distressed by feelings of patriotism which he did not feel able to suppress, and he started riding over to Tula several times a week to read the latest telegrams.
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Naturally he soon put pen to paper.
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In his article 'Bethink Yourselves!', Tolstoy exhorted his fellow-Russians to remember biblical texts like Luke 13: 5 ('If you do not bethink yourselves, you will all perish').
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Insisting that the war contravened the teachings of both Christ and the Buddha, he deplored its wanton violence:

We say that wars of today are not as those of yesterday, and that we are very far removed from that ancient cannibalism in Nation struggles, but it exists still under other forms. What other can be said of the destruction of the fleet and of the siege of Port Arthur? When did Humanity witness such horrors? What comparison can be found equal to those caused by this frightful carnage? More than 200,000 lives have been lost now in this insensate struggle...
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Chertkov translated this article into English, and arranged for its publication in newspapers throughout Europe, which provoked some people to write to Tolstoy in protest at his lack of patriotism, but expressions of sympathy were more common.
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Altogether, 1904 was a fairly bleak year for Tolstoy. Although he had little tolerance for those who espoused the Orthodox faith, he was nonetheless greatly saddened to receive the news of the death of his old relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in March 1904. After their frosty meeting back in 1897 there had been little contact between them, but they were reconciled the year before she died at the age of eighty-seven. In his last letter, in which he addressed her as 'Dear, kind, old friend Alexandrine', he thanked her for half a century's friendship.
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In July Chekhov lost his fight against tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, and in August, a couple of weeks after Tolstoy's wayward son Andrey was posted to the front (it was already bad enough that he was serving in the army), his elder brother Sergey died of cancer. Sergey had led a secluded and quite unhappy life, disappointed by his four surviving children, and by his marriage to someone from such a different background, and he spent his last days in agony. Tolstoy went out to Pirogovo three times in the summer of 1904, and was instrumental in relaying his sister and sister-in-law's wish that Sergey receive communion before he died.

13. Tolstoy photographed with his brother Sergey's widow, Maria Mikhailovna, the former gypsy singer, in 1906

To their surprise he agreed, despite his well-known religious indifference.
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When Port Arthur finally fell to the Japanese in December 1904, Tolstoy became very despondent. Meanwhile, the 18,000-mile voyage halfway round the world of the imperial Baltic Fleet under Admiral Rozhdestvensky was dogged by incompetence. Soon after leaving St Petersburg in October, one inebriated captain opened fire on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea, mistaking them for Japanese torpedo boats, while another frigate in what came to be known as the 'Russian mad-dog fleet' was eventually discovered to be travelling up the Thames due to a navigation error. The day after the fleet finally arrived in the Pacific in May 1905, Japanese forces summarily destroyed it in the Battle of Tsushima. This was the final humiliating defeat which brought the war to a close.
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Tolstoy followed all these events with horror from Yasnaya Polyana, and was aghast when there was further violence closer to home. The extent of Russia's domestic problems meant that the war with Japan enjoyed no popular support, as expressed by the assassination in July 1904 of the Minister of Internal Affairs. Nicholas II's halfhearted response to calls for reform led to the outbreak of revolution on the infamous 'Bloody Sunday' of 9 January 1905, when tsarist troops fired on an unarmed procession of workers bringing a petition to the Winter Palace. The public outcry was followed by mass strikes all over Russia and the assassination on 22 January of the governor general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, who had received Sonya during the famine in 1892. Tolstoy was stunned, and confessed that the news had made him physically suffer.
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Amongst the disturbances and uprisings which followed was a mutiny in June 1905 on the battleship
Potemkin
in Odessa. Perhaps regretting that he had not heeded Tolstoy's brazen personal appeal back in 1902, Nicholas II was forced now to retreat from autocratic rule. In October he issued the historic manifesto which promised civil rights, the creation of a national legislative assembly (the 'Duma'), the abolition of censorship, religious tolerance and permission to found political parties. There was also a general amnesty.

The 1905 Revolution directly affected Tolstoy, since it meant that all his banned writings could now suddenly be published, although it took a while for the reforms to take effect. His new article, 'Appeal to the Russian People', in which he predictably condemned both the government and the revolutionaries, was seized by the police before it could be distributed in March 1906, but it went on sale freely in St Petersburg at the end of the year when it was published by the Free Word Press, which Chertkov had just moved to St Petersburg.
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Scores of Tolstoy's other previously banned writings followed, while he moved on to his next article: 'The Meaning of the Russian Revolution'. In March 1906 Chertkov received official notification that he could return to Russia, but he had already made one visit back home. In the midst of all the disturbances in 1905, Chertkov's influential mother had obtained permission from the Tsar for her son to make a three-week visit, not only to St Petersburg to see her, but also to Yasnaya Polyana. It was a joyous reunion, and even Sonya was glad to see Chertkov.
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Moving back to Russia permanently was inhibited for Chertkov by his sick wife, the comfort of his surroundings in England and the extent of his publishing operations, and so it was a gradual process which took place over the next few years.