One need not read very far into the text to see just how inflammatory Tolstoy’s translation would have been to the leadership of Orthodox Christianity. Not only was it a drastic rewording of sacred text, and therefore sacrilegious, but it went so far as to draw very direct parallels between the Orthodox leaders of the nineteenth century and the Pharisees of the Gospels by referring in many places to the Pharisees as “the orthodox” (pravoslavnye). The preface also made it clear that the translation is a challenge to those against whom he polemicizes, and that reading his new version of the Gospel would leave them two choices—either to choose the path of “humble repentance and renunciation” of the lies they use to hide the true Christian teaching or to persecute him for exposing these deceptions. At a time when state power was tied so closely to church power, Tolstoy could not have hoped to have such subversive writing pass censorship review, and made no effort himself to have the work published in Russia.
Accordingly, the text’s first publication was in a French translation by Tolstoy’s friend L. D. Urusov. This was an abridged version that appeared in the Paris journal La Nouvelle Vague in July 1883. Tolstoy was not satisfied by this version, considering it to be a perversion of his writing. This was followed in 1885 by an English translation in a collection called Christ’s Christianity, which also included What I Believe and A Confession. This version was also heavily edited and included only the introduction and the chapter summaries, without the text from the Gospel verses themselves.
The first Russian-language edition was published in Geneva in 1890, but this was also abundant with mistakes, as it was printed from an uncorrected copy of the manuscript. As with most unpublishable works, many different manuscripts and lithographs of the text were in circulation in Russia, sometimes under the title “The New Gospel.” The first publication in Russia of A Brief Account of the Gospel did not occur until after the 1905 revolution, following a slight relaxation in censorship. It appeared in various editions in 1906, 1911, 1913 and 1918.
Vladimir Chertkov, a devoted follower and publisher of Tolstoy, had established Free Age Press (Svobodnoe slovo) in Christchurch, England, where, in 1905, he published a more authoritative Russian-language edition of Tolstoy’s Gospel. It contained an updated preface that Chertkov had requested from Tolstoy. The text was reorganized by Chertkov, who, in addition to making many editorial changes, placed the chapter summaries into one section at the end of the book, a major departure from the manuscript version. This edition was also missing the conclusion, which Tolstoy had based on the First Epistle of John.
The two main English-language translations still in publication today were completed by Isabel Hapgood and Aylmer Maude, both of whom seem to have based their translations on the Chertkov version of the Russian text, and thus have their translations structured similarly. These translations, done quite early in the twentieth century, feature a preface, twelve chapters without summaries, no conclusion, and an appendix with all of the chapter summaries combined at the end.
In this current translation, I have referred only to the text as it appears in the Soviet-era academic edition of Tolstoy’s complete works in ninety volumes, published by the state publishing house Khudozhestvennaia literatura (GIKhL) and edited by N. N. Gusev. The twenty-fourth volume of this collection, published in 1957, contains the larger, unfinished work (A Synthesis and Translation of the Four Gospels) as well as the condensed A Brief Account of the Gospel. The version produced in that volume was printed from the only existing manuscript to have been edited and approved by the author himself, and avoids the errors that appear in the Chertkov edition and those translations based on it.
I have maintained the original structure of the text, with the preface, an introduction, twelve chapters containing both Tolstoy’s summary and the main text based on the Gospel verses, and the conclusion based on the First Epistle of John. The only structural change I have made is to remove the verse structure, following the precedent of previous translations, in order to allow the text a more cohesive, informal and episodic style. This decision was made in keeping with Tolstoy’s stated desire to depolarize the text and retell the verses with the simplest popular language, which is the broad goal of this new translation. (A “Verse Index” is included at the end of this edition, for those readers who wish to refer to the traditional verse numbers.) In agreement with Gusev’s observation in his notes to the 1881 text that “Tolstoy apparently tried to write his new work so that it was above all else understandable to the working Russian people,” I have made every attempt to present a translation that is both light enough to appeal to a general public but strong enough to transport the profound truths that Tolstoy encountered in his reading of the Gospel.
—Dustin Condren
PREFACE
This short account of the Gospel is my own synthesis of the four Gospels, organized according to the meaning of the teaching. While making this synthesis, it was mostly unnecessary for me to depart from the order in which the Gospels have already been laid out, so that in my synthesis one should not expect more but actually considerably fewer transpositions of Gospel verses than are found in the majority of concordances of which I am aware.
In the Gospel of John, as it appears in my synthesis, there are no transpositions whatsoever; it is all laid out in the exact order as the original.
The division of the Gospel into twelve or six chapters (if we were to count each thematic pair of two chapters as one) came about naturally from the meaning of the teaching.
This is the meaning behind these chapters:
Man is the son of an infinite source, the son of this father not by the flesh, but by the spirit.
And therefore man should serve this source in spirit.
The life of all people has a divine source. It alone is holy.
And therefore man should serve this source in the life of all people. That is the father’s will.
Only serving the father’s will can bring truth, i.e., a life of reason.
And therefore the satisfaction of one’s own will is not necessary for true life.
Temporal, mortal life is the food of the true life—it is the material for a life of reason.
And therefore the true life is outside of time, it exists only in the present.
Life’s deception with time: the life of the past or the future hides the true life of the present from people.
And therefore man should strive to destroy the deception of the temporal life of the past and the future.