Anna Armfeldt had asked Kennan to smuggle out a manuscript copy of Confession to her daughter Natalya in the convict mine at Kara, and he had been so shocked by what he had seen of the Russian penal system in Siberia that it turned him into a vociferous opponent of the tsarist regime. Tolstoy was consequently extremely interested to hear what he had to say. Kennan’s book Siberia and the Exile System was banned from Russia along with its author as soon as it was published in 1891.
Sonya did not need to live in luxury, and she even did not mind the additional burden of having to prepare special dishes at mealtimes for her husband and the growing number of vegetarians at Yasnaya Polyana. Tanya and Masha became vegetarians like their father, and all the Tolstoyans, beginning with Chertkov, refused to eat meat. Then there were other loyal friends of Tolstoy who were vegetarians, like the painter Repin, whose colourful companion Natalya Nordman at one point promoted a diet of grass and hay.10 All of that the conventional Sonya could just about tolerate, but she did not warm to her husband’s followers. ‘These people who are adherents of Lev Nikolayevich’s teaching are all so unlikeable! Not one normal person,’ she exclaimed in her diary in August 1890.11 In general, she viewed the Tolstoyans as the opposite of the svetskie (polite society) people from her own milieu, and by playing on the word svet, which means ‘light’ as well as ‘society’ and ‘world’, Sonya took to calling them tyomnye (dark). She noticed tyomnye Tolstoyans coming out of the woodwork as soon as illegal copies of The Gospel in Brief and Confession started circulating. Sonya made an exception initially for the highborn Chertkov, who had exquisite manners, and also the artist Nikolay Ge, who became a friend of the whole family (he died in 1894). She also tolerated Pavel Biryukov (‘Posha’), who was meek and intelligent, but she found the sectarians and peasants hard to deal with, and positively recoiled from the social misfits who seemed to be drawn to her husband like magnets, and became fanatical followers, having failed to carve conventionally successful careers for themselves. Sonya recorded in her diary the knock on the door that woke them all up at four in the morning one icy January day in 1895, for example: the visitor turned out to be a ‘bedraggled, flea-bitten, tyomny’ who was desperate to marry their daughter Tanya.12
Despite her feelings of distaste, Sonya had to learn to live with tyomnye Tolstoyans in their midst. One devoted early follower of her husband was a woman of her own age, Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt, an unmarried teacher at a prim Moscow girls’ school. In March 1884 Maria Alexandrovna had turned up on Tolstoy’s doorstep with her friend Olga Barsheva and asked him for a copy of his Gospel. When Tolstoy informed her he only had it in manuscript, she responded brightly that they would be happy to copy it. And so the two friends divided the manuscript up, and spent several evenings in Tolstoy’s study becoming acquainted with his ideas. Soon Maria Alexandrovna was taken on as an assistant to Tolstoy’s main copyist at that time, Alexander Ivanov. Her services were soon required, as Alexander Ivanov was an alcoholic former officer who often absconded on drinking bouts. He did very good work on the days that he was sober, but Tolstoy had to rescue him from various slums on a regular basis.13 Maria Alexandrovna’s life changed utterly when she was won over to Tolstoy’s Gospel. She had been an ardent Orthodox Christian, but she now took down her icons and replaced them with Tolstoy’s portrait.14 She also resigned her teaching position, went with her friend Olga to join one of the first Tolstoyan communes down in the Caucasus, then in 1893 came back north when Olga died. By this time she wanted to be near Tolstoy, with whom she had become close friends. After settling into a tiny thatch-covered izba on Tanya Lvovna’s newly inherited land, three miles away from Yasnaya Polyana, she led a model Tolstoyan life until the end of her days. Sometimes she would come up to Yasnaya Polyana when Tolstoy’s sister was making her annual summer visit from her convent, and her skeletal frame stood in stark contrast to the rotund figure of Maria Nikolayevna, who was famously fond of eating. It was Maria Alexandrovna, with her abstemious diet of cabbage soup and grain, who somehow seemed far more like a nun.15
Maria Alexandrovna relished living like an anchorite by the sweat of her brow with the help of her vegetable patch and her cow Manechka, but there were other Tolstoyans who wanted the security of feeling they were part of an organisation. In 1893, before The Kingdom of God Is Within You was even finished, let alone copied and distributed, unfounded rumours started flying of an imminent Tolstoyan congress. Tolstoy was both amused and horrified at the idea. ‘That’s wonderful!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’ll turn up to this congress and set up some kind of Salvation Army. We’ll get a uniform – some hats with a cockade. Maybe they will make me a general. Masha can sew me some blue trousers.’16 Tolstoy was happy to show leadership by setting out and imparting to the world what he believed to be the truth, but he did not want actually to lead anything – the whole point was to get away from organisations. In his ideal world, in fact, there would be no organisations, yet he could not avoid a movement forming amongst those attracted to his ideas, and many of his followers were fanatics. The other unsavoury side of Tolstoyanism for Sonya was the ‘militancy’ with which her husband’s followers clung to the doctrine of non-violence, thereby placing themselves in an openly antagonistic position with regard to the Russian government. There were inevitable unpleasant repercussions, but these only seemed to goad Tolstoy to campaign more vigorously for human rights, at both ends of the social spectrum.
One person who received Tolstoy’s direct support was Prince dmitry Khilkov, who became a key figure amongst the Tolstoyans (before he went over to the other side and became a revolutionary).17 Khilkov was a graduate of the prestigious Corps des Pages in St Petersburg, and the youngest officer to be appointed a colonel in the Russian army.18 Like Chertkov, who was four years older than him, Khilkov turned his back on a brilliant military career. By the time he resigned from the army in 1884, the experience of killing a Turkish soldier in the Russo-Turkish War while serving in a Cossack regiment, and contacts with sectarians while stationed in the Caucasus, had turned him into a pronounced pacifist, and a Christian after Tolstoy’s heart. Inspired by reading Tolstoy’s What I Believe, he, went back to his estate in Kharkov province, sold the land to his peasants for a fraction of its real value, built himself a simple farmhouse to live in, threw away his Western-style clothing and started leading a simplified, agricultural life. In 1887, when he was twenty-nine, Khilkov came to Moscow to meet Tolstoy, with whom he established an instant rapport.19 The concern Khilkov had shown for sectarians, ethnic minorities and rank and file soldiers (whose conditions had barely improved since the Crimean War) had already attracted the attention of the secret police, and their surveillance activities only intensified after he became friends with Tolstoy.