Tolstoy was in lofty company. In 1901, clergy in Russian churches had to make do with an anathema on Tolstoy’s Resurrection, rather than on his person. Nonetheless it was a huge event of huge social and political significance.
The Church had historically only anathematised individuals after repeated efforts to bring about repentance. The edict about Tolstoy stressed that he had preached fanatically against Orthodox dogma, so could not be regarded as a member of the Church unless he repented, but it was all very measured. The words ‘anathema’ or ‘excommunication’ were not in fact explicitly mentioned in the edict, which was announced on the front page of the weekly Church News (the official publication of the Holy Synod since 1888), and followed by an explanatory letter.121 Edict No. 577, dated 20–22 February, was signed by the three metropolitans, an archbishop and three bishops, none of whom was under any illusion that it would frighten Tolstoy, or even bring him to heel. But by having it published on the front page of every major Russian newspaper on 25 February, and issuing a government decree banning its discussion in the press, the Synod hoped it could undermine the public support for Tolstoy which was steadily growing in Russia amongst all sections of the population. The intention was to provoke a backlash of hostility towards him and diminish his authority at a critical time of social and political unrest, while simultaneously enhancing the profile of the Orthodox Church. The reality was the opposite – it was a dismal failure. No one except the ecclesiastical authorities took the excommunication seriously, and yet it proved to be an event whose repercussions would be far-reaching.
Tolstoy was in Moscow at the beginning of 1901. As usual, his preoccupations were intellectual. He had begun the year by reading The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy by Max Müller, and alongside his engagement with Hindu and Nietzschean philosophy, continued his study of dutch. Sonya’s concerns were, as usual, more worldly. She was as busy as ever. She travelled to Yasnaya Polyana to look after their daughter Tanya after she had a stillborn child, then came back to Moscow to help with the preparations for their son Misha’s wedding to Alexandra Glebova on 31 January: she sewed little bags which would later be filled with sweets and given to the guests. The wedding was a high-society event attended by Grand dukes (one of whom came specially from St Petersburg) but pointedly not by her husband. On 12 February she went back to Yasnaya Polyana when she heard that Masha had miscarried, and then came back to take care of the household in Moscow, and a gloomy husband who was expressing his fears of death. The seven weeks of the Great Lent began, and with it fasting, so on 16 February she went to the mushroom market with Semyon Nikolayevich the cook, and on to church. The next day she took herself off to buy toys for the children in the Moscow orphanage of which she had become patron.
On the day the excommunication became public, Tolstoy declared in a letter to his daughter Masha that the only thing he really wanted to write about now was people’s lack of religion, which he believed was the cause of all the horrors in the world.122 He was far more serious about living in accordance with Christian principles than the majority of those in his class, and he believed in God more than most, so there was an irony in the Church excommunicating someone with such deeply held, if unorthodox, Christian views. He had been oblivious to all the machinations earlier, and so he just carried on writing outspoken polemical articles and letters of protest attacking the corruption of the Church and the government whose militarist policies it supported. From Sonya’s diary we learn that there was wonderful weather at the time of Tolstoy’s excommunication – clear days and moonlit nights. She records how affectionate and passionate her husband suddenly became when the edict was published, and how his health and state of mind improved in the peculiarly festive atmosphere that prevailed at that time. She immediately wrote an impassioned letter to Pobedonostsev and Metropolitan Antony to protest against the edict, then went back to knitting woolly hats for the orphanage. Unusually, both Sonya’s letter and the response from Metropolitan Antony were printed in Church News.
The Holy Synod marshalled its minions to send poison-pen letters and death threats to Tolstoy when the excommunication was announced, but there were far more demonstrations, petitions and ovations in his honour. The Tolstoy house in Moscow was immediately besieged with visitors wanting to take action, and mounted police had to intervene when Tolstoy was mobbed by enthusiastic students who spotted him walking in the centre of the city on the day the excommunication was made public. Far from diminishing Tolstoy’s stature, the Holy Synod’s edict only enhanced it, particularly in view of the government’s ban on the publication of all telegrams and expressions of support. The excommunication also intensified interest in Tolstoy’s writings. People who had never read him before started asking for his books in libraries, and Russians abroad were immediately questioned about him as soon as their nationality became known.123 Employees at the Maltsev Glass Factory outside Moscow sent Tolstoy a lump of green glass with their message to him incised in gold:
12. Cartoon showing Tolstoy as a mighty giant next to the tiny figure of Tsar Nicholas II, 1901
You have shared the fate of many great people ahead of their time, esteemed Lev Nikolayevich. They used to be burned at the stake, left to rot in jails and in exile. Let the hypocrite priests excommunicate you however they want. Russian people will always be proud, seeing you as their own great dearly beloved.
Tolstoy was the conscience of the nation, and the excommunication was the most eloquent expression of the abyss separating the Church from educated Russian society. In Moscow, as elsewhere, the intelligentsia saw the excommunication primarily as an act of political vengeance. Alexey Suvorin, editor of New Times, quipped that Russia now had two tsars. While Nicholas II was clearly unable to make Tolstoy’s throne wobble, he observed, Tolstoy was destabilising the entire Romanov dynasty.124 Tolstoy finally started drafting an article in response to the Holy Synod’s edict on 24 March, which carried new denunciations. The letter was sent to Chertkov for publication in England. He was still hoping he might be one day be arrested.125
Repin had an important new portrait of Tolstoy on show at the 29th Wanderers Exhibition in Petersburg which had opened a week before the excommunication was announced. Ironically it depicted the writer at prayer, barefoot in the woods at Yasnaya Polyana. When the exhibition opened, the portrait was immediately surrounded with flowers, and naturally attracted more attention after the excommunication. Before the exhibition closed on 25 March a student stood on a chair and tied bouquets round the entire frame, as if it was a venerated popular icon, then gave an impromptu speech. A telegram of support signed by the 400 people present was sent to Tolstoy, and even more people festooned Repin’s portrait with flowers.126 This led to the painting being taken down, and it was not shown when the exhibition moved to Moscow and the provinces.
The excommunication caused a sensation amongst Russia’s educated classes, but it is worth pointing out that many Russian rural priests had scant knowledge of Tolstoy beyond knowing that he was an aristocrat who wrote society novels. The majority of peasants, meanwhile, knew only that he was a count, and thus representative of the nobility who were hated and distrusted,127 but there was nevertheless a significant number who followed Father Ioann of Kronstadt in believing that Tolstoy was the Antichrist. Father Ioann, an even more charismatic figure than Grigory Petrov (who ended up leaving the Church), was not a prominent bishop or theologian, but a parish priest who was seen by many as Russia’s third ‘tsar’ in view of his extraordinary popularity.128 Born one year after Tolstoy into an impoverished sacristan’s family in Arkhangelsk province in 1829, he married in 1855 and was ordained that year in St Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt, where his father-in-law was the senior priest. during the fifty years in which Father Ioann served in the port of Kronstadt outside St Petersburg, home to the imperial navy’s Baltic Fleet, he acquired renown for his Populist, informal style, and for the unusual mass confessions which were held at his church. Father Ioann encouraged charity and greater piety, and by the time he administered to Alexander III on his deathbed in 1894, he had become famous throughout Russia. Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra also revered Father Ioann: they had a picture of him on the wall behind their bed at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea.