In his diary, Tolstoy referred to The Living Corpse as a ‘small drama’. The moral conclusions of his ‘big drama’, The Light Shines in the Darkness, are even more controversial. This is the only major work by Tolstoy, in any genre, in which the main character is the conscious embodiment of his own religious and philosophical views. To the dismay of his family, Nikolai Saryntsev renounces military service, the Orthodox Church, landownership and money and tries to engage in manual labour. Most of the people around him regard his behaviour as madness, but the local priest, Vasily, and his daughter’s fiancé, Prince Boris Cheremshanov, happen to be receptive to his teachings. The priest is evicted from the parish and forced to repent. Boris heroically refuses to renounce his views, rejects military service, is arrested and sent to a mental asylum and then a military prison. Lyuba, Saryntsev’s daughter, despite her sincere love for Boris, agrees to marry another young man.
Tolstoy did not finish the play. From his plan, we know that in the final act Saryntsev was to be killed by Cheremshanov’s mother, take the blame upon himself and die peacefully. However, the written text concludes with Saryntsev’s desperate prayer: ‘Vasily Nikanorovich has returned. I destroyed Boris. Lyuba is getting married. Am I wrong, wrong to believe in Thee? No. Father, help me’ (CW, XXXI, p. 184). His spiritual anguish remains unresolved.
Dramatic form does not allow the author to claim omniscience. Tolstoy was deprived here of one of his main narrative tools – insight into the hidden depths of the human soul, revealing subtle motives and impulses that are unclear even to the person himself. Possibly these limitations, inherent in the genre, prevented Tolstoy from becoming a real rival to Shakespeare or Chekhov. At the same time, for the very same reason, Tolstoy could allow himself to be more intimate in his plays than in his prose, letters and even diaries, and to give voice to inner doubts for which he could not find an outlet elsewhere.
Saryntsev and Tolstoy suffered because of the contrast between their own safety and comfort and the plight of their followers. The government and the Church were keen to exploit this contrast by ignoring the leader and persecuting his flock. When some officials proposed to silence the dangerous writer, Alexander III adamantly refused, allegedly saying that he ‘had no intention of making a martyr out of him and thus earning for myself universal indignation’.12 Nicholas II, who inherited the throne in 1894, was not such a great admirer of Tolstoy’s talent as his father, but continued the same policy. Protected by his fame, Tolstoy longed for the martyrdom of a real prophet and continued to provoke the authorities.
Tolstoy included in the text of Resurrection two passages describing a service in the prison church. The first was a merciless parody of the Eucharist. Tolstoy portrayed this ritual, familiar to every Christian, and a most sacred mystery of the Orthodox Church, as a weird and senseless piece of pagan magic. In the second passage he accused the Church of blasphemy and profanation of the letter and spirit of Christ’s word. The real goal of established religions, Tolstoy suggested, was to switch off the personal conscience of believers, to allow them to continue their unjust ways of life and support a cruel and inhuman social order. Even submitting these fragments to the censors was unimaginable, but Chertkov, authorized by Tolstoy, included them in the foreign editions of the novel. Immediately thousands of copies of the full text appeared in Russia. Readers would hectograph the missing parts and stick them in the censored editions they bought.
Sofia, who was copying the manuscripts of Resurrection, wrote in her diary that she was ‘disgusted by the intentional cynicism in the description of the Orthodox service’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 444). For the official Church this was too much to stomach. After more than a year of discussion and deliberation, and, as recent historians argue, contrary to the will of Pobedonostsev, the Holy Synod issued an edict condemning Tolstoy in February 1901. The document was crafted with deliberate ambiguity. In its content it amounted to excommunication, but the word itself was not used. Instead the edict expressed sorrow that Tolstoy had severed his relations with the Church and hope that he would repent and return to its bosom. In any case, it was a consequential decision, making the writer an outlaw in his own country and, at the same time, enhancing his reputation especially among the younger generation that mostly detested the throne and the Church.
Tolstoy was unsure about the meaning of the edict. He asked his friends whether he had been officially anathematized, and looked disappointed having received a negative answer. In his reply to the Synod, he accused his opponents of hypocrisy and of inciting hatred and violence. He wrote that, walking in Moscow on the day of the publication of the edict, he had been called ‘The Devil in human shape’. He chose not to mention the reaction of the crowd of several thousand people who, according to Sofia’s diary, started shouting ‘Hurray, L[ev].N[icolayevich]., hello L[ev].N[icolayevich]., glory to the great man! Hurray!’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 15). As Chekhov wrote, ‘the public reacted to the excommunication with laughter’ (Ch-Ls, IX, p. 213).
In his letter to the Synod, Tolstoy confirmed that he had rejected the dogmas of the ruling Church and declared that repentance was impossible:
I must myself live my own life, and I must myself alone meet death (and that very soon), and therefore I cannot believe otherwise than as I – preparing to go to that God from whom I came – do believe . . . But I can no more return to that from which with such suffering I have escaped, than a flying bird can re-enter the eggshell from which it has emerged . . . I began by loving my Orthodox faith more than my peace, then I loved Christianity more than my Church, and now I love truth more than anything in the world. And up to now, truth, for me, corresponds with Christianity as I understand it. And I hold to this Christianity; and to the degree in which I hold to it, I live peacefully and happily, and peacefully and happily approach death.(CW, XXXIV, pp. 247, 252–3)
Tolstoy may have desecrated the sanctuaries of the official religion, but he had his own sense of what was holy and deserving of reverence. The moment of transition from an individual and temporal life to an eternal and universal one was for him sacred, as he wrote in his diary in 1894: ‘Love is the essence of life, and death removing the cover lays the essence bare’ (CW, LII, p. 119). His niece Elizaveta Obolenskaya recalled how he once asked the art critic Vasily Stasov about his thoughts on death. Stasov replied that he never thinks ‘about that bitch’. According to Obolenskaya, Tolstoy took these words as blasphemy. She wrote that he often spoke about death as a ‘blessing . . . a liberation, but thoughts about it worried him’, and once he remarked that ‘only frivolous people could not be afraid of death.’13 It was not the fear of physical annihilation. Tolstoy was afraid he would not be able to prove himself worthy of this most solemn moment. At the end of his life, he confessed that while an unconscious death would be ‘agreeable’, he would prefer to die fully conscious.14
In the summer of 1901 Tolstoy fell gravely ill. The chief doctor of the Tula hospital where he was taken declared his state to be terminal. In the morning, when Sofia was putting a warm compress on his belly, he said, ‘Thank you, Sonya. Don’t think I am not grateful to you and don’t love you.’ Both wept. The next day, when he started feeling better he told her that he was at a crossroads: ‘forward (to death) is good, and back (to life) is good. If I recover now it is only a delay.’ After a pause, he added, ‘I still have something that I want to say to people’ (SAT-Ds, II, pp. 22–3).