In War and Peace Tolstoy glorified popular resistance to invasion; now he regarded military service as one of the worst abominations in human history. Native government was no more legitimate than any foreign one; living under the rule of the French, the Turks or whoever else would be a lesser evil for his compatriots than going to war and killing people. Equally, no crime could ever justify violent punishment. Robbers and murderers acting at their own risk deserved more compassion than executioners or judges who send people to the gallows protected by the law and the repressive apparatus of the state. In general, mortals were not entitled to make laws, all they had to do was to obey the eternal rules of God, but even those should not be enforced, as the Church hierarchy and coercion in the sphere of religious beliefs were especially repulsive.
A. N. Wilson, the author of a perceptive biography of Tolstoy, called this anarchist credo ‘the silliest’ and ‘the least Russian’ thing Tolstoy ever said.2 The question of ‘silliness’ of Tolstoy’s worldview is, of course, fully dependent upon the perspective of the biographer, but the claim of its ‘un-Russianness’ is plainly wrong.
Tolstoy was a contemporary and a compatriot of such leading figures in the history of European anarchism as Mikhail Bakunin and Piotr Kropotkin. All three of them were aristocratic intellectuals who looked for ideals in the life of Russian peasant communes, in the stubborn resistance of sectarians and Old Believers to the official Church and central authorities, in Cossack settlements providing military support to the crown, but defying state bureaucracy in their way of life. No less important for Tolstoy were the numberless wanderers, pilgrims and beggars who left their homes and villages to search for God. The utopian vision of life without a state, masters or an official Church is no less important for Russian intellectual tradition and popular aspirations than its antithesis: unswerving trust in the secular and spiritual authorities. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky represented the two trends.
In 1881 Dostoevsky met Tolstoy’s cousin Alexandra and asked her to explain to him ‘the new direction taken by Lev Nikolaevich’. Fervently Orthodox, Alexandra regarded Dostoevsky as a prophet. She prepared for him copies of several of Tolstoy’s letters and, at his request, read them out to him. Dostoevsky listened, ‘his hands on his head repeating in a desperate voice: “It’s all wrong”.’ According to Alexandra Tolstoy, ‘he did not sympathize with a single thought of Lev Nikolaevich’ (LNT & AAT, p. 32). Intending to write a refutation, he took home with him both the copies and the originals.
Given Tolstoy’s taste for heated debates, a letter from Dostoevsky could have provoked one of the most fascinating dialogues in literary history. As it happened, Dostoevsky died five days later and his polemical answer to Tolstoy remained unwritten. The letters he borrowed from Alexandra Tolstoy disappeared forever.
Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov shortly afterwards:
I never saw the man and never had any direct relations with him, and suddenly when he died, I realized that he was the closest, dearest and most necessary man for me. I was a writer and all writers are vain and envious – I at least was that sort of writer. But it never occurred to me to measure myself against him, never. Everything that he did (every good and real thing that he did) was such, that the more he did it, the happier I was. Art arouses envy in me and so does intelligence, but the things of the heart arouse only joy. I always considered him my friend, and I never thought otherwise than that we should meet, and that it was my fault that we hadn’t managed to do so yet. And suddenly during dinner – I was late and dining alone – I read that he was dead. Some support gave way under me. I was overcome; but then it became clear how precious he was to me, and I cried and am still crying. (Ls, II, p. 340)
He was fully aware of the differences between his and Dostoevsky’s views, but he also knew that they both understood that the world around them was crumbling and believed that their duty was to prevent it. Now he felt that he had to shoulder the burden and the responsibility alone.
For twenty years Tolstoy’s main preoccupations were novels and family life. In 1881 the need to educate his eldest children compelled him to buy a house in Moscow. In the meantime, his country changed beyond recognition. The abolition of serfdom, rapid industrialization and a demographic boom had unleashed a flood of migrants from the villages to the cities. Railroads enabled massive grain exports that had the effect of pushing up bread prices. The peasants, though liberated from serfdom, could not benefit from this increasing demand because most agricultural land remained in the hands of their former landlords, and the rents rose more steeply than profits from harvests. The land owned by peasants belonged to rural communes and was regularly redistributed between households according to the size of their families. This meant that individual peasants could not sell their land before moving to the city and had little incentive to invest in it to increase productivity. Social changes and the generational imbalance caused by the demographic boom were destroying traditional ways of life and family structures. Crime, drunkenness and prostitution were on the rise both in villages and cities. Tolstoy could now witness the new urban poverty at first hand. The poorest could not rely on the kind of social network provided by rural communes. Their extreme misery and moral degradation was made even more abject and manifest by the stunning economic growth that had belatedly begun in the 1880s.
View from the garden of Tolstoy’s house in Moscow, 1898.
Social crisis brought political unrest. The Great Reforms had boosted the expectations of the growing number of young, active and eager graduates churned out by a proliferating number of universities. A highly stratified society could barely accommodate them or enable them to improve their social status, leading to frustration. Radical groups began a campaign of revolutionary propaganda among the peasants. When this strategy failed they turned to outright terror. The second half of the 1870s was marked by several unsuccessful attempts on the life of Alexander II before the assassins finally succeeded on 1 March 1881, the day before a decree establishing a proto-parliamentary representative body with consultative functions was due to be signed by the reforming tsar. The assassination ushered in a backlash led by the new emperor Alexander III and Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an arch-reactionary whose influence expanded beyond his original role of supervising Church policy and came to define the spirit of the new reign.
Tolstoy had some sympathy for the revolutionaries. He appreciated the power of their convictions, their readiness for martyrdom and sincere compassion for the poor, qualities that, in his view, were entirely wanting in the kind of educated society in which he lived. At the same time, he was appalled by their narrow-mindedness, atheism and positivism, and most of all by their willingness to resort to violence, based on the obstinate belief that they knew the needs of the people they intended to liberate better than those people themselves. From the early 1880s Tolstoy was certain that revolution was approaching and had no doubt that the regime that would emerge from the ruins would be even more tyrannical than the existing one.
He wrote a letter to Pobedonostsev petitioning the new tsar to pardon his father’s assassins. Tolstoy argued that such a pardon would demonstrate moral greatness and Christian feelings and engender a process of reconciliation in society. Both Pobedonostsev and Alexander III refused to consider such an act of clemency that, in their eyes, would be tantamount to encouraging political terror. The new emperor admired Tolstoy as a writer, but began to view his activities as subversive.