In the years to come Tolstoy would write dozens more articles in which he set out his religious and ethical views. Some of them, such as ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ (written in response to the assassination of King Umberto I in 1900), and ‘I Cannot Be Silent’ (prompted by the news that twenty peasants had been hanged in 1908 for attempted robbery), were occasioned by specific events. Others, such as ‘Religion and Morality’, ‘The Law of Violence and the Law of Love’ and ‘The Essence of Christian Teaching’ expressed his thinking as it continued to evolve in the last decade and a half of his life. They were all essentially variations on a theme, and mostly quite a lot shorter, but also quite a lot more abrasive.
Tolstoy had already proved to be a remarkably effective apostle. Capitalising on the fame he had already acquired as a writer, he began winning converts to his version of Christianity almost immediately he started disseminating his new beliefs in the 1880s. When he had first set out on his crusade, he had complained of loneliness, and had actively sought out kindred spirits. A decade later it was the kindred spirits who came to him – in droves, from all over the world, more often than not conceiving their journey as a ‘pilgrimage’. Where Tolstoy previously used to have two or three visitors a week at most in the early 1880s, there were sometimes as many as thirty-five people a day wanting to see him during the last years of his life.3 There were those who approached him with reverence as an elder (starets), hoping he would provide spiritual guidance and give them answers to diverse problems, and then there were others who wanted to see him in the flesh simply because he was such a celebrity.
Just how famous Tolstoy became can be ascertained from the way in which the British journalist William Stead prefaced his account of the week he spent at Yasnaya Polyana in 1888:
In Russia and out of Russia, I have found people more interested in the personality of Count Leo Tolstoi, the novelist, than in that of any other living Russian. He is the first man of letters in contemporary Russia, but that alone would not account for the widespread interest in his character. He is a great original, an independent thinker, a religious teacher, and the founder of a something that is midway between a Church, a school, and a socio-political organisation. He not only thinks strange things, and says them with rugged force and vivid utterance – he does strange things; and what is more, he induces others to do the same. A man of genius who spends his time in planting potatoes and cobbling shoes, a great literary artist who has founded a propaganda of Christian anarchy, an aristocrat who spends his life as a peasant – such a man in any country would command attention. In Russia he monopolises it, and the fame of his originalities has spread abroad so far until it is probable that there are more people anxious to ‘hear about Tolstoi’ in Boston and San Francisco than there are even in Petersburg and Moscow.4
Tolstoy’s major artistic and religious writings had only appeared in translation a couple of years earlier yet he was already a household name throughout the world. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was profoundly affected by Tolstoy’s ideas when he came across them in Paris in 1885:
Tolstoy, whose recently translated novel War and Peace has aroused the admiration of the Parisians, Tolstoy, a Count, a wealthy man, a decorated soldier from the battles at Sebastopol, a brilliant writer, has broken with society, turned his back on literary writing and in the polemical works Confession and What I Believe has taken Rousseau’s side, declared war on culture, and has put his teaching into practice himself by turning himself into a peasant.5
Strindberg wrote his book Among French Peasants (which was published in 1889) under the immediate influence of Tolstoy’s ideas. Matthew Arnold had fired the imagination of British readers, while a pioneering study of the Russian novel published in 1886 by the Vicomte Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (who had served at the French Embassy in St Petersburg in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and married a Russian noblewoman) served to fuel the European reading public’s intense interest in Tolstoy on the Continent.6 In 1887 an American critic published an article in Harper’s Bazaar about the tumultuous reaction to the sudden arrival of Russian literature in the English-speaking world, describing Tolstoy as the greatest ever writer of fiction, ‘living or dead’.7 At the end of the decade a German writer set off to Yasnaya Polyana to do research: the first biography of Tolstoy was published in Berlin in 1892, two years before one even appeared in Russia.8 Tolstoy was sixty-four.
9. Cartoon showing ‘Tolstoy at work’, published in 1908
The dynamics of Tolstoy’s life had changed radically while he had been formulating his doctrine of brotherly love and non-resistance to violence in the 1880s. He had become teetotal, a vegetarian, he had given up smoking and hunting animals, and he had also stopped handling money insofar as it was possible. In the 1890s the dynamics of his life were to change again, and not just because he took up bicycling at the age of sixty-five, and soon needed a secretary to help him deal with the voluminous correspondence he found himself conducting with readers from all around the world. When he now went head to head with the Russian government by taking up the cause of persecuted sectarians scattered across the country, its ministers responded by sending his closest followers into exile, and excommunicating him from the Orthodox Church – which only increased his fame. The dynamics of Russian life also changed in the 1890s. Nicholas II, the last Romanov, ascended to the throne in 1894 amidst growing social and political unrest, and the rapid development of new technologies which began to revolutionise daily life. Before he died in 1910, Tolstoy lived to see the movie camera, the motor car, the phonograph and the typewriter, and even talked to Chekhov on the telephone.
Remarkably, Tolstoy found time to write fiction during the hectic last period of his life, when he was also sometimes extremely unwell. Apart from his novel Resurrection, completed in 1899, he worked on a handful of superlative stories, and also composed a substantial treatise on the meaning of art. These works were written alongside all the religious articles and diatribes against the immoral practices of the tsarist regime, which remained as reactionary as it had been under Alexander III. But Tolstoy’s main writing project at the end of his life was the compilation of several exhaustive volumes of daily sayings and maxims from his favourite writers and philosophers. He was in need of their solace, as he was unhappy for much of the last fifteen years of his life. He still felt obligations to his family, but found it endlessly painful having to put up with the trappings of his once seigneurial lifestyle when he was longing to take to the road as a penniless and penitent Strannik. And as his friend Vladimir Chertkov assumed ever more influence over his affairs, Tolstoy’s relationship with his wife steadily deteriorated.
Sonya had grown up in fairly humble surroundings despite her parents’ flat being located in the Kremlin, so when she married Tolstoy she had adapted quickly to Yasnaya Polyana, but its spartan furnishings invariably took foreign visitors by surprise. The intrepid American traveller George Kennan, for example, who came to Yasnaya Polyana in June 1886 after travelling across Siberia, was clearly expecting Tolstoy’s study to be a bit grander:
The floor was bare; the furniture was old-fashioned in form, with two or three plain chairs, a deep sofa, or settle, upholstered with worn green morocco, and a small cheap table without a cover. There was a marble bust [of Tolstoy’s brother Nikolay] in a niche behind the settle, and the only pictures which the room contained were a small engraved portrait of dickens and another of Schopenhauer. It would be impossible to imagine anything plainer or simpler than the room and its contents. More evidences of wealth and luxury might be found in many a peasant’s cabin in Eastern Siberia.9