In the 1890s Father Ioann began condemning Tolstoy for teaching that Christ was not divine, that Mary was simply an unmarried mother, and that the Orthodox Church was pagan and idolatrous. ‘You ought to have a stone hung round your neck and be lowered with it into the depths of the sea; you ought not to have any place on earth’ – it was in these terms that Father Ioann denounced Tolstoy, and a collection of his diatribes against Tolstoy was published in 1902.129 Father Ioann was perhaps Tolstoy’s most famous public opponent, and his polar opposite. Indeed, for the writer Nikolay Leskov, Tolstoy and Father Ioann represented the opposing forces struggling for Russia’s future.130 Father Ioann was seen as the pastor of the people, whereas Tolstoy was worshipped more by the intelligentsia, and yet there were some striking similarities between them. Like Tolstoy, Father Ioann also aspired to an ascetic ideal. In maintaining a celibate marriage (his wife Elizaveta would have liked children), he was rather more successful in curbing his libido than Tolstoy. Father Ioann was also strict about food consumption, which, like Tolstoy, he linked to sensuality: ‘Buckwheat kasha is good, cream bad’; ‘No horseradish with vinegar!’; ‘NEVER EAT SUPPER!’ Father Ioann saw his wife’s cooking as a threat to his spirituality.131 Both Father Ioann and Tolstoy were puritans who attacked social inequality, excessive materialism and moral depravity, and both were the subject of a cult of personality – the Russian Post Office had to make special provision to deal with the huge volume of letters Father Ioann received from adoring parishioners.132 Father Ioann also inspired the birth of a kind of sectarian religion, which was reported with alarm by Pobedonostsev in 1901, the year of Tolstoy’s excommunication. His followers, who were called ‘Ioannity’, saw him variously as God, Jesus, or John the Baptist, and treated his photograph as an icon (he was particularly popular with women).133 Control over its clergy was a priority for the Holy Synod, and there was some alarm when Father Ioann seemed to be becoming dangerously independent. Like Tolstoy, he enjoyed greater popularity at court than in the offices of state, but even some of his congregation found his tone a little too strident at times. One person wrote to him after becoming acquainted with his ‘words of denunciation directed against Count Lev Tolstoy’, and now could not find ‘inner calm’, nor knew how to reconcile his ‘diatribes, so alien to the spirit of Christian gentleness, tolerance and forgiveness for all’, with his earlier writing on spirituality.134
Tolstoy and Father Ioann were part of an extraordinary religious renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century which affected all classes of Russian society, with huge numbers of pilgrims making visits to monasteries and taking part in processions such as the one immortalised in Repin’s famous painting of the Kursk procession. There was also a religious revival amongst the intelligentsia which first began at around the time of the publication of dostoyevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, which was inspired by the writer’s meetings with the elders of Optina Pustyn. It is noteworthy that this was the book Tolstoy was reading when he finally left Yasnaya Polyana at the end of his life and went on the last of his many visits to the monastery, which seems to have been a place which both repelled and drew him. Even before he was excommunicated Tolstoy was widely seen as ‘the elder of Yasnaya Polyana’, and in the last decades of his life received not only scores of visitors who came to seek his guidance, but thousands of letters from people who asked for his help. He tried diligently to respond to them with the help of secretaries, who functioned like the lay brothers who traditionally assisted the elders.135 A further sign of the religious revival came in November 1901 with the launch of a series of historic meetings held in the hall of the Imperial Geographic Society in St Petersburg. These meetings brought about the first constructive contact between the intelligentsia and the clergy in Russia. Initiated by modernist writers like dmitry Merezhkovsky, who wished to bridge the gulf separating the educated classes from the Church, the aim was to try to find some common ground, and a possible religious solution to the socio-political crisis in Russia. The name of Tolstoy loomed large and, not surprisingly, his conflict with the Church was the topic of the third of the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings held in early 1902.136 Amongst the issues hotly debated was whether it had been the Church or the state which had been the driving force behind Tolstoy’s excommunication.
Tolstoy remained a problem for the Church hierarchy even after he was excommunicated, as in June 1901 he fell seriously ill with malaria, necessitating the drawing up of a new strategy: governors and police chiefs were ordered not to allow any speeches or demonstrations in the event of his death.137 Sergey was mortified to find out his brother was in a critical condition from the newspapers, whose editors regarded Tolstoy’s state of health as a matter of public interest. Sergey now wrote his brother a heartfelt letter in which he told him how much he meant to him, and how there was no other person in the world to whom he could talk in the same way. Underneath his signature he added sadly: ‘Apart from our closeness from childhood, I just need you, but you don’t need me. You have a legion apart from me.’138 Not for the first time, Tolstoy’s strong constitution helped him recover, and Alexandrine’s friend Countess Panina kindly offered her dacha outside Yalta for his convalescence. In September 1901, the family decamped to the Crimea. Contrary to his usual habit of travelling fourth class with fleas and cockroaches, as Sergey put it, this time the family was allotted a private compartment, which had been arranged with the help of a Tolstoyan who worked for the railways. despite the ban on press coverage of his movements, there was a huge crowd of 3,000 supporters waiting at Kharkov station to cheer him. The Tolstoys would remain in the Crimea for the best part of ten months, during which time Sonya tended to her husband with her usual devotion.
Countess Panina’s ‘dacha’ was in fact a gothic palace – a fairy-tale castle with two towers. Tolstoy had never lived in such luxury in all his life, and wrote to tell Sergey about the profusion of exotic flowers, the marble fountain in a pond with fish swimming in it, the manicured lawns, the luxuriant view of the sea past the cypress trees, and even the lavatories, a convenience he was not used to. Back in 1887 Tolstoy had written a long letter to the future pacifist writer Romain Rolland in which he declared that the first test of the sincerity of those who professed to live by Christian principles was to put an end to living parasitically off the manual work done by the poor and take care of one’s own needs, which included emptying one’s own chamber pot.139 Tolstoy told his brother that the grand dukes and millionaires who lived nearby were surrounded by even greater luxury.140