As usual Tolstoy was thronged with visitors, but there were also pleasant meetings with Chekhov, who was a local telephone call away in Yalta, and with the young writer Gorky. Tolstoy also developed a friendship with the urbane and scholarly Grand duke Nikolay Mikhailovich, an old friend of Chertkov who sought him out. Not only was he unflustered by Tolstoy’s pariah-status in official circles, it turned out he was an avid reader of his virulently anti-government writings. His lofty position as a member of the Romanov family enabled him to receive uncensored all the editions Chertkov published in England.141 Fearing this might be his last chance, Tolstoy seized the opportunity of this serendipitous acquaintance to write another lengthy letter to Nicholas II, which the Grand duke gamely offered to deliver. Addressing the Tsar as ‘dear brother’, Tolstoy dispensed with the niceties of protocol. After admonishing Nicholas II for increasing police surveillance, censorship and religious persecution to unacceptable levels, Tolstoy disputed the notion that Orthodoxy and autocracy were inherently Russian. First of all he pointed to the ever increasing numbers of those ‘defecting’ to other faiths, despite the dangers of persecution entailed. Next he declared that autocracy was outmoded and bankrupt as a form of government. Tsarist power might still have had prestige under Nicholas I, he admitted, but in the nearly fifty years since his death, it had completely disintegrated, to the point that people from all classes of society now openly criticised and ridiculed the Tsar himself (that is, Nicholas II, the person he was addressing):
The fact that crowds of people run after you with shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ in Moscow and other cities has probably misled you about the people’s love for autocracy and its representative, the Tsar. don’t believe that this is an expression of devotion to you – they are just a crowd of curious people who will go after any unusual spectacle.142
Only someone with the authority of a tsar would have the temerity to speak in such terms to a crowned head of state. The fact that Nicholas II pledged not to show this letter to anyone (as attested by Grand duke Nikolay Mikhailovich’s mistress, Princess Elena Baryatinskaya, who happened to be Chertkov’s cousin) lends credence to the view that Tolstoy and Chertkov still enjoyed a certain amount of favour and protection at court.143
When Tolstoy fell seriously ill again in January 1902 there was a new flurry of despatches from the Holy Synod, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Censorship Committee, its officials all terrified of outbreaks of civil disobedience, or worse. Pobedonostsev hatched a plan to despatch a priest to the Tolstoy household and thus be able to announce a last-minute recantation, the Head of Censorship stipulated that pictures of Tolstoy in the press were only permissible after his death, and Metropolitan Antony sent a letter in which he implored Tolstoy to return to the Church.144 Needless to say, Tolstoy was not interested. Under the care of numerous doctors and his wife and daughters, with constant visits from other family members and friends (who had all converged on Gaspra thinking they were coming to pay their last respects), Tolstoy slowly recovered. He returned home in June, cheered by an even bigger crowd at Kharkov station, and he and Sonya now took up permanent residence in Yasnaya Polyana. On the advice of doctors, and much to Tolstoy’s own relief, there would be no more winters in Moscow. Also on the advice of doctors, he moved his study upstairs to the large, well-lit room with the balcony next to his bedroom, which caught the morning sun.
Tolstoy did not exactly mellow in old age. In the autumn of 1902 he wrote a fierce attack on Christian clergymen of all denominations, in the hope of showing them the harm they caused, as he put it in a letter to his brother. To the Clergy, which was sent to Chertkov and published by the Free Word Press in 1903, was another example of Tolstoy talking ‘man to man’ with clerics, regardless of their rank. It was a vintage Tolstoyan harangue:
You know that what you teach about the creation of the world, about the inspiration of the Bible by God, and much else is not true. How then can you teach it to little children and to ignorant adults, who look to you for true enlightenment? … Whoever you may be – popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, superintendents, priests, or pastors – think of this. If you belong to those of the clergy (of whom there are unfortunately very many, and continually more and more in our days) who see clearly how obsolete, irrational, and immoral the Church teaching is, but who, without believing in it, still continue to preach it from personal motives (for their salaries as priests or bishops), do not console yourselves with the supposition that your activity is justified by any utility it has for the masses of the people, who do not yet understand what you understand.145
Father Ioann of Kronstadt immediately fought back with a famous riposte. Journalists often likened Tolstoy to Ilya Muromets, the greatest of Russia’s mythical medieval warriors (bogatyrs), who was famous for performing Herculean feats. To Father Ioann, however, Leo Tolstoy was a predatory lion akin to the devil (1 Peter, 5: 8), and since few of the Orthodox faithful would have been able to read Tolstoy’s contraband article, he provided a summary of its contents for them:
For Tolstoy there is no supreme spiritual perfection in the sense of the achievements of Christian virtues – simplicity, humility, purity of heart, chastity, repentance, faith, hope, love in the Christian sense; he does not recognise Christian endeavours; he laughs at holiness and sacred things – it is he himself he adores, and he bows down before himself, like an idol, like a superman; I, and no one else but me, muses Tolstoy. You are all wrong; I have revealed the truth and am teaching everyone the truth! The Gospel according to Tolstoy is an invention and a fairy tale. So, Orthodox people, who is Lev Tolstoy? He is a lion roaring [Lev rykayushchy], looking for someone to devour. And how many he has devoured with his flattering pages! Watch out for him.146
Tolstoy was certainly aware of Father Ioann, but he never paid him any attention.
It is perhaps indicative that the year in which Tolstoy published To the Clergy, was also the year of the canonisation of Serafim of Sarov (1759–1833), the first and greatest of Russia’s elders. The celebrations were attended by Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, and half a million pilgrims.147 The fact that there were suddenly many more canonisations in the reign of Nicholas II lends credence to the theory that there was an agenda afoot to inspire patriotism and loyalty to the monarchy. This was also the year in which the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings were shut down, for the same reason. The Church and government were finding it difficult to unite the population amidst a growing discontent that was spreading throughout the country, and the philosophers, poets, literary critics and public figures who attended the Religious-Philosophical Society meetings had been entering into debates with members of the clergy that the authorities felt were too heated in such tense times.
The political situation in Russia had indeed become very volatile by 1904. In the 1890s radical Marxist groups committed to revolution had changed their tactics from spreading propaganda amongst the new population of oppressed factory workers to mass agitation, causing a wave of strikes, and then had united to form the Social democratic Labour Party, which the police endeavoured but failed to destroy. When he reached the end of his term of Siberian exile in 1900, Vladimir Ulyanov had gone abroad. As well as founding a newspaper and adopting the name of Lenin, he had proposed the creation of a disciplined party of hard-line professional revolutionaries in his tract What Is to Be Done? (not to be confused with eponymous works by Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky). Publication of this tract contributed in 1903 to the Social democratic Labour Party splitting into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Apart from the clamour for reform from liberal parties, in 1904 the Russian government found itself dealing with the constant threat of terrorist activities from the various revolutionary groups, as well as increasing peasant unrest and a rising number of mass strikes in urban factories. discontent was only exacerbated by the government’s heavy-handed pogroms against the Jews (Tolstoy spoke out against them too), its continued persecution of religious minorities and its obvious support for employers rather than employees. With the domestic situation so fraught, the sudden outbreak of war with Japan in January 1904 took everyone by surprise.