Russia’s holy fools deliberately challenged social conventions to mock the falsehood of the temporal world, unafraid of speaking the truth to all classes, including rulers. Relinquishing all material comforts, they dressed in rags and led ascetic lives like the vagabond Stranniks, voluntarily accepting humiliation and insults in order to conquer their pride and thus achieve greater humility and meekness. Since they lived amongst people, unlike hermits in monasteries, and so were in the public eye, they went out of their way to avoid being accorded any respect for their piety, and welcomed censure. Tolstoy had known and revered holy fools from the days of his childhood, thanks to his pious aunts who welcomed them to Yasnaya Polyana. Childhood, his first work of fiction, notably features a holy fool, as does War and Peace, and it can been argued that three other characters in that novel, Pierre, Natasha and kutuzov, are ‘stylised’ holy fools.132 Pashenka, the heroine in ‘Father Sergius’, the story Tolstoy worked on between 1890 and 1898, is another version of the holy fool. Back in 1877 Tolstoy had told his friend Strakhov that he most wanted to be a holy fool rather than a monk, and after his religious crisis he expressed the view that the best path to goodness was to be an involuntary holy fool. But projecting oneself as worse than in reality was a conscious act for a holy fool, and was a strategy adopted by Tolstoy from the time he wrote his historic letter to Alexander III in 1881. His merciless self-criticism allowed him to express himself more freely with the Tsar. Tolstoy’s self-flagellation continued until his last days. In August 1910, just a few months before his death, he noted in his diary that he had never encountered anyone else who had the full complement of vices – sensuality, self-interest, spite, vanity and, above all, narcissism.133
As pointed out earlier, Sonya took a dim view of her husband donning the mask of the holy fool. For him, however, it was a fundamental medium for the communication of his message. In this regard, a comment Tolstoy made in his diary when he was writing The Kreutzer Sonata in August 1889 is revealing. ‘I need to be a holy fool in my writing too,’ he noted, realising that perfect execution alone would not make his arguments more convincing.134 Sadly, Chekhov for one was unimpressed, to judge from further disparaging comments in his letter to Suvorin of December 1890. Dismissing in withering terms Tolstoy’s afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata as the product of a holy fool, he asserts that his philosophy is ‘not worth even one of the little mares in “Strider”’. (Tolstoy’s superlative story about a horse, which he had begun many years earlier, when he still had ambition as an artist, was finally completed and published for the first time in 1886.135)
As much as the holy fool is integral to the Russian Church, the character of ‘Ivan the Fool’, is integral to Russian folklore.136 ‘The Tale of Ivan the Fool’, a popular story for The Intermediary which Tolstoy dashed off in an evening in 1885, was one he particularly cherished.137 The story was published the following year in Sonya’s first edition of the collected works, and also by The Intermediary, but was eventually banned by the religious censor as a work unsuitable for mass readership. The authorities took exception to the way in which the story promoted the idea of a kingdom which had no need for an army, money or intellectuals, while its tsar should at least be ‘no different from a muzhik’.138 In fact, even some of Tolstoy’s closest friends took exception to its bald moralising and its denigration of intellectual endeavour in favour of physical labour.
By the summer of 1891, after the controversy surrounding The Kreutzer Sonata had died down, Tolstoy found himself struggling to concentrate on the new treatise he had begun the previous summer about non-violence. He had ideas for new fictional works which he wanted to develop (the future novel Resurrection and the story ‘Father Sergius’), and he also wanted to complete an article about gluttony. He had been greatly impressed with Howard Williams’s history of vegetarianism, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating, which had been published in London in 1883, after serial publication in The Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (the monthly journal of the Vegetarian Society), and he wanted to write a preface for its Russian translation. His article, ‘The First Step’, was completed in July, after a sobering visit to the abattoir in Tula, and published the following year in the journal Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, which was edited by his friend Nikolay Grot, a professor at Moscow University.139 If the article came hard on the heels of The Kreutzer Sonata, it was because Tolstoy drew a direct link between gastronomic and sexual indulgence, arguing that carnal consumption stimulated carnal desire. Like chastity, vegetarianism was a precondition of the Christian ascetic life to which he aspired.140 Tolstoy was bound to become a hero of the animal rights movement, for he did not, as it were, mince his words when graphically describing the cruelties involved in the slaughter of animals:
Through the door opposite the one at which I was standing, a big, red, well-fed ox was led in. Two men were dragging it, and hardly had it entered when I saw a butcher raise a knife above its neck and stab it. The ox, as if all four legs had suddenly given way, fell heavily upon its belly, immediately turned over on one side, and began to work its legs and all its hind-quarters. Another butcher at once threw himself upon the ox from the side opposite to the twitching legs, caught its horns and twisted its head down to the ground, while another butcher cut its throat with a knife. From beneath the head there flowed a stream of blackish-red blood, which a besmeared boy caught in a tin basin. All the time this was going on the ox kept incessantly twitching its head as if trying to get up, and waved its four legs in the air. The basin was quickly filling, but the ox still lived, and, its stomach heaving heavily, both hind and fore legs worked so violently that the butchers held aloof. When one basin was full, the boy carried it away on his head to the albumen factory, while another boy placed a fresh basin, which also soon began to fill up. But still the ox heaved its body and worked its hind legs …
… [W]e cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat. If it were really indispensable, or, if not indispensable, at least in some way useful! But it is quite unnecessary, and only serves to develop animal feelings, to excite desire, and to promote fornication and drunkenness. And this is continually being confirmed by the fact that young, kind, undepraved people – especially women and girls – without knowing how it logically follows, feel that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and, as soon as they wish to be good, give up eating flesh.141
Contemporary writers may not be following the same spiritual path as Tolstoy, but the fact that revelations of animal cruelty in the twenty-first century still have the capacity to shock shows that we still behave like ostriches. Over a century after Tolstoy’s ‘First Step’ was published, many abattoirs are only a little more humane.142
There is a grim irony about the fact that Tolstoy’s broadside against needlessly excessive consumption was written just as reports of a major famine started reaching him. The Volga and central ‘black earth’ regions had already suffered two poor harvests in consecutive years, and in 1891 there was a drought which affected about 14 million people in an area stretching across thirteen regions in the European part of Russia, all the way from Tolstoy’s own Tula region in the west to Samara, hundreds of miles to the east. The combination of adverse weather conditions, outdated farming implements, poor transportation and the Russian government’s failure to act in time, compounded by its further failure to provide adequate help for peasants who were already desperately poor and malnourished, was fatal. Half a million people died of cholera alone. The crisis was certainly not helped by Russia’s centralised government with its bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, since officials had little conception of what was actually really going in the provinces, and little autonomous power.