In May 1893 he noted in his diary that ‘as soon as a person is able to free himself a little from the sin of lust, he immediately stumbles and falls into the worse pit of human fame’. Thus it was necessary not ‘to destroy existing bad reputation, but to value it as a means to avoid the greatest temptation . . . I need to elaborate on this topic in “Father Sergius”. It is worth it’ (CW, LII, p. 82).
The limits of Father Sergius’s pretended saintliness are laid bare by a plump, imbecilic and sexually voracious merchant’s daughter, who makes him succumb to the desires of the flesh. The world of the hermit and his faith are ruined. ‘As usual at moments of despair, he felt a need of prayer. But there was no one to pray to. There was no God’ (TSF, p. 263). Tolstoy initially planned to make the hermit kill the girl, but that would have made the story a second version of his earlier novella, The Devil. Instead Tolstoy transformed the story of sex and murder into one of escape. In a trademark paradox, ugly sin liberates Father Sergius from the slavery of earthly fame and enables him to serve God by serving people. The hermit leaves his cell and is saved from utter destitution by a hapless old childhood friend, who lives a life of self-sacrifice supporting her desperate daughter, sickly and useless son-in-law and two grandchildren, without ever thinking that she is doing anything good or moral. Father Sergius becomes a wandering beggar, is arrested and exiled to Siberia. There he settles down, working in the kitchen garden of a well-to-do peasant, teaching his children and attending to the sick.
This ending seems to have been borrowed from another escape story Tolstoy considered writing in the 1890s. Posthumous Notes of the Elder Fyodor Kuzmich were based on a popular legend about Alexander I, according to which the emperor, known as a mystic and visionary, did not die in 1825, as had been officially announced, but escaped and lived under the assumed name of Fyodor Kuzmich. Fyodor was a real person. Like Father Sergius, he had wandered around Russia and been arrested for vagrancy and exiled. In his old age he lived in Siberia working in the kitchen garden of a merchant and teaching peasant children in return for meals – the old man never took money. Fyodor died in 1864, leaving behind some encoded papers. His identity was never revealed.
Tolstoy was inclined to believe the legend, but he did not write the story. He had too many other commitments in the 1890s to be able to bury himself in the documents and achieve the historical accuracy and sense of truthfulness he required. The themes of sudden escape, downturn in lifestyle, arrest and manual labour in a Siberian kitchen garden were transferred to Father Sergius. In 1901 the Russian historian Nikolai Schilder published a four-volume comprehensive biography of Alexander I. Schilder did not fully subscribe to the tale of the emperor’s escape, but also he did not refute it and seemed to be cautiously sympathetic to the legend. The biography, with its wealth of material, gave a boost to Tolstoy’s design. In 1902 he met Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, also a court historian, in Gaspra and talked with him about his relative. According to the grand duke, Tolstoy thought that if Alexander ‘really ended his life as a hermit, his redemption would be complete’ (CW, XXXVI, p. 585). In the writer’s mind such a transformation would redeem Alexander from the sin of having been complicit in the murder of his father, and the no less horrendous crime of ruling over other human beings for nearly a quarter of a century.
In 1905 Tolstoy started drafting the story narrated as an autobiography by the eponymous Fyodor Kuzmich. He had made little progress by 1907 when Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich published a monograph disproving the legend beyond reasonable doubt. It was likely, he concluded, that Fyodor was a fugitive nobleman, but definitely not the emperor. Thanking the grand duke for the book, Tolstoy wrote:
Tolstoy at work, drawing by Ilya Repin, 1891.
Let the impossibility of identifying Alexander and Kuzmich as the same person be proven historically, the legend still remains alive in all its beauty and truthfulness. I started writing about it; but shall probably not go on. No time, I have to pack for the forthcoming transition. It is a pity. What a charming image. (CW, LXXVII, p. 185)
He was charmed by the sudden and mysterious disappearance of a tsar and could not stop dreaming about it. In the midst of the revolutionary turmoil, Tolstoy felt an almost regal sense of mission weighing down upon him and the responsibility this entailed. These provoked, in turn, an irresistible urge to escape. He could not yet allow himself to withdraw from the public stage, but he had all but withdrawn from the world of literature.
Tolstoy, 28 August 1903.
Since the publication of Resurrection he had almost stopped publishing original artistic works. When the first posthumous edition of his complete works appeared in 1911, the reading public was stunned by Father Sergius, Hadji Murat, The Living Corpse and many other hidden treasures. The impact was similar to that achieved earlier with the publication of his great novels. ‘Tolstoy’s Alyosha the Pot. Never read anything greater,’3 wrote the leading Russian Modernist poet Alexander Blok about a four-page story about the life, love and death of a hard-working and selfless village boy considered a fool by some, for his kindness and readiness to oblige others.
There were many reasons for Tolstoy’s reluctance to publish. He wanted to avoid family rows about copyright; he also felt compelled to mortify his authorial vanity. Still he was physically unable to stop writing fiction. In 1909 he was working on a big story that was tellingly entitled There Are No Guilty People in the World. He confessed in his diary that he still had ‘an urge to do artistic work, not real desire of the kind I had before with a clear goal, but without any goal or rather with a hidden and unattainable goal of peering into the human soul. And I want it very much’ (CW, LVII, p. 52). On 2 October 1910, a month before his death, he had a new creative idea and exclaimed, ‘What a great thing that could be!’ (CW, LVIII, pp. 110–11).
Tolstoy needed to build himself ‘a scaffolding’ to write, but at the same time he was consciously trying to turn his literary pursuits into an innocent eccentric pastime for an old man, like playing cards for no money, horseriding or listening to Mozart on the gramophone. When rumours began to spread that he was about to be awarded the Nobel Prize, he wrote a letter to one of his Swedish friends asking him to plead with the Academy to avoid ‘putting him in the very unpleasant position of refusing it’ (Ls, II, p. 660). He did his best to prevent major celebrations for his eightieth birthday in 1908.
Tolstoy on horseback at the age of eighty, 1909.
His main literary preoccupation at that time, however, was to find a form of self-effacement not only in the world of publishers and readers, but within the text itself. For several years he had been working on A Cycle of Readings. The purpose of this commonplace book of quotes and selected passages was to serve the needs of labouring people who did not have enough leisure time to spare on books. Arranged as a calendar, it collated quotations from major religious and moral teachers of all ages and nations from Lao Tzu and Confucius to Tolstoy himself. These were the fruits of Tolstoy’s years of digging through piles of books searching for pearls of wisdom that were both profound and digestible. He even found a valuable thought in Nietzsche, a philosopher he detested. Daily entries were accompanied by longer ‘weekly readings’ designed for Sundays and consisting of short stories and essays. For this purpose Tolstoy edited folk stories, religious parables and the works of dozens of writers including Turgenev, Maupassant, Anatole France and others. Some he inevitably wrote himself. The longest of these was his story The Divine and the Human, in which he set out to demonstrate the vanity and futility of revolutionary activity.