Khilkov turned his small thatched farmhouse into a local centre of Tolstoyan Christianity, and opened a library so that peasants could read the central texts in the Tolstoyan canon, which aroused hostility among landowners and clergy. Things came to a head in 1891. In March, following Khilkov’s successful missionary activity in the area, Tolstoy was anathematised in Kharkov cathedral, and then in August Khilkov wrote to tell Tolstoy about his frosty encounter with Father Ioann (John) of Kronstadt, with whom he had argued about baptism.20 He had been curious to set eyes on this charismatic priest when he came on a visit to Kharkov as he had attracted a large following amongst the populace, and so had acceded to his mother’s request that he go and meet him, but it had not gone well. Khilkov’s mother was outraged that her son had not consecrated his recent marriage in a church, or baptised his one-year-old child, thus depriving him by law of his title. In November Chief Procurator Pobedonostsev wrote to Alexander III to warn him of the dangers of the impact of Tolstoyanism on the peasantry in an area where there was already unrest. Out of the 6,000 parishioners in Khilkov’s district, he wrote, only five old women were now going to church, and large numbers were refusing to enlist in the army.21 The authorities now moved quickly. In January 1892 Khilkov was exiled to the Caucasus, causing Tolstoy to express envy, but those feelings were tempered in October the following year. With the blessing of Father Ioann of Kronstadt, his mother arrived in the Caucasus accompanied by police officers. Princess Khilkova proceeded to remove her three-and-a-half-year-old grandson and two-year-old granddaughter from their horrified parents and take them back to St Petersburg, where she christened them without their parents’ consent.22 Tolstoy wrote a letter to Alexander III to protest, and Khilkov’s wife travelled to St Petersburg to petition the Tsar personally, but to no avail, despite the public outcry.
Khilkov’s Tolstoyan ministry had certainly produced results. The peasant schoolteacher Evdokim drozhzhin was rapidly converted to Tolstoyanism after meeting Khilkov in 1889, and two years later he was jailed after he refused to enlist when called up for military service. There were to be many other conscientious objectors who refused to be conscripted on religious grounds, but Tolstoy took a particular interest in drozhzhin, and was deeply concerned when he was first kept for twelve months in solitary confinement, and then sent to serve in a disciplinary battalion in Voronezh. The conditions were truly brutal, as Chertkov discovered when he visited drozhzhin, and he successfully campaigned to have him transferred to a regular prison, but it was too late. In January 1894, at the age of twenty-eight, drozhzhin died of consumption at the start of his nine-year sentence. Tolstoyanism had claimed its first martyr, but there were chroniclers and hagiographers ready to spring into action, as well as secret police agents watching like hawks. In June, soon after Tolstoy’s follower Evgeny Popov finished a book about drozhzhin, his home in Moscow was searched by the police and the manuscript confiscated. A few months later the Russian press was placed under orders not to publish anything at all about drozhzhin.23 Popov nevertheless managed to resurrect his book from drafts that had carefully been stored elsewhere, and Tolstoy completed it by writing a foreword. There was, of course, no chance it would pass the censor in Russia, and it was published in Berlin in 1895.24
The son of an impoverished noble from Perm province, Popov had joined Tolstoy’s growing number of followers in 1886 when he was twenty-two. Convinced that Tolstoy could tell him about the meaning of life, he one day got on a train to Yasnaya Polyana to go and talk to him. Before long he had become a vegetarian and was tilling the land. After separating from his wealthy young wife, who did not share his new beliefs, Popov led a rather peripatetic existence, moving from one Tolstoyan colony to another, but then went to work for The Intermediary in Moscow. In 1889 Popov got to know Tolstoy better when he accompanied him on his annual three-day journey by foot from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana at the beginning of the summer. This was the third time Tolstoy had undertaken to walk the full 120 miles home. He would take with him only a small bundle, plus a notebook and pencil, so he could jot down ideas and stories he heard along the way, and would find overnight accommodation with hospitable peasants. It was his way of protesting against the intrusion of the railways into rural Russia, which had brought about mass peasant migration into the cities.
As well as working for The Intermediary, Popov also spent some time at the main headquarters of the Tolstoyan movement at Chertkov’s estate in Voronezh province. In 1892 he was employed for a time as Tolstoy’s copyist at Yasnaya Polyana, and assisted him in the famine relief effort at Begichevka. After next writing the book about drozhzhin, he collaborated with Tolstoy on a Russian version of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching for The Intermediary. This was a project which Tolstoy cared deeply about. Victor von Strauss had produced the first German translation of the Tao Te Ching in 1870, and this was the text which Popov translated into Russian.25 Tolstoy checked over Popov’s translation and wrote an introduction to them, explaining that the basic teaching in the Tao Te Ching was the same as in all great religions. Back in the 1870s he had chiselled away at his translations of Aesop’s already pithy fables in order to distil their essence, and it is not hard to see why Tolstoy was drawn to Lao Tzu’s lapidary insights, which accorded so much with his own hard-won beliefs:
People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes,
carrying weapons,
drinking a lot and eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money:
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
isn’t the way.26
Tolstoy’s attraction to the religions of the Orient only increased towards the end of his life. Some people even argued that his pared-down belief system had more in common with Buddhism than with Christianity.27
After translating Lao Tzu, Popov took up the cause of another Tolstoyan conscientious objector, who was about to be exiled to Siberia after serving his term in a disciplinary battalion. While visiting him at the central transit prison in Moscow in december 1894, Popov was intrigued by three men dressed half like peasants, half like Cossacks.28 They were dukhobors – ‘wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit’ – and they had come up from their home in the Caucasus to meet with Pyotr Verigin, who was their leader. Verigin had already spent seven years in exile in the northern province of Arkhangelsk, following disputes with other dukhobors over his leadership, and he was now about to be sent to Berezov, in the Siberian province of Tobolsk, where he faced another seven years of exile. Popov introduced himself to the three dukhobors, swiftly arranged another meeting to which he could bring Tolstoy when he heard their story. It was to be a fateful encounter.
The lack of historical records makes tracing their origins difficult, but the dukhobors seem to have emerged from disparate groups of like-minded religious dissenters in the Ukraine who were forced to settle along Russia’s southern borders at some point in the eighteenth century. It was only under Nicholas I that they formed a distinct community, however, when in the 1830s they were again forcibly resettled by imperial decree in the more remote reaches of the Russian Empire’s new Caucasian territories, close to the border with the Ottoman Empire. Like many peasant sectarians, the dukhobors acquired a reputation for their abstemious, hard-working and humble way of life. Believing, like Tolstoy, that ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’, they revered the sanctity of all human life, thus were opposed not only to taking up arms, but to almost every aspect of the Russian Orthodox Church, since it supported the state during warfare. This meant rejecting all rituals, sacraments, icons, clergy, sacred buildings, and also the Scriptures themselves, in favour of seeking guidance from the voice of individual conscience. The dukhobors first came into serious conflict with the Russian government in 1887, when military conscription was introduced in the Caucasus, and the situation worsened in 1894, when all Russian citizens were required to swear allegiance to the Tsar.29