The hundreds of events marking the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth in 1928 were the first to be undertaken by the Soviet government in honour of a pre-revolutionary writer on a nationwide scale. Because of the ambivalence surrounding the Jubilee, the Bolsheviks were concerned to use the occasion to educate Soviet citizens on how to approach Tolstoy. Thus, along with the issue of commemorative stamps, there were guides providing instructions on how the Tolstoy centenary should be celebrated. Pride of place in all writing on Tolstoy, from now until the end of the Soviet regime, was taken by Lenin’s 1908 article.79 The main centenary celebrations began on Tolstoy’s birthday on 9 September (as 28 August had become according to the new calendar), and they lasted a week. According to Lunacharsky in the speech he made, such was the ‘gigantic interest’ in Tolstoy in the new Soviet state that the writer was not dead at all.80 Tolstoy was, in fact, the most widely read author in Russia at this point according to data compiled by the Bolshevik journal Red Librarian, and the only writer to have maintained his pre-revolutionary popularity. Even in the countryside, readers often had to queue up for months to read the one copy of War and Peace held by their local library.81
As a fervent admirer of Tolstoy, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was one of the distinguished foreign visitors invited to Russia to take part in the centenary celebrations in 1928. The celebrations were launched with a commemorative evening at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 9 September. Like everything else at that time, it was held up by Soviet bureaucrats who fussed over memoranda and permits. ‘The principal event which was announced for six o’clock began at 9.30,’ Zweig later recollected. ‘When I left the opera house exhausted at three in the morning, the speakers were still hard at it.’82 The festivities then transferred to Yasnaya Polyana. At 7.00 a.m. on 12 September, in pouring rain, Alexandra made her way to the Yasnaya Polyana railway station (as Zaseka was now called) along with journalists, photographers and curious locals. There they greeted the official delegation of eighty guests who had travelled down from Moscow, and included the actress Olga Knipper (Chekhov’s widow), esteemed professors and foreign guests, who were easy to spot because they were not shabbily dressed.83 On the train down, Zweig had chatted to Lunacharsky about whether Tolstoy was a revolutionary or a reactionary, and whether the great writer had even known himself. Lunacharsky suggested that in his eagerness to change the whole world ‘in a flick of the wrist’, Tolstoy was an ingrained Russian, just like the Bolsheviks who wanted to modernise their country overnight.84
As the minister responsible for Soviet culture in the 1920s, Lunacharsky played a key role in orchestrating the assimilation of Tolstoy into Bolshevik ideology in the early Stalinist years, and he published a volume of his writings on Tolstoy in 1928. A cultured and educated man, he did not always find his task easy, and since there was no place for even Lunacharsky’s comparatively moderate views in the Soviet regime, he lost his job the following year. Both sides of his personality were on show on 12 September at Yasnaya Polyana. First he produced the standard official peroration, cutting off attempts by a Slovak guest and Alexandra to speak out about their harassment by Communist Party militants, but then gave an impassioned, personal and sincere speech about how much Tolstoy meant to him. After a day of speeches, a choir of 250 Yasnaya Polyana schoolchildren sang the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (later condemned by a Pravda correspondent, who thought they had been singing a psalm), and village women dug out old embroidered blouses and coloured sarafans from their trunks and sang folksongs.85
There was a good deal of press coverage of the Tolstoy Jubilee. An unsigned editorial in Pravda published on 9 September may well have been written by Stalin himself. After questioning whether the Bolsheviks, who had ‘chosen revolutionary violence’, and regarded religion as the ‘opium of the people’, should honour a writer who ‘did not understand’ the proletarian movement, and to whom the revolution was alien, the conclusion was that they should.86 Nevertheless, a list of twenty acceptable works of fiction by Tolstoy was now drawn up, Lenin’s articles criticising Tolstoy were continually cited, and the writer’s philosophical views were roundly condemned. Some important advances in Tolstoy scholarship had been made in the 1920s by literary scholars (such as the Formalists Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Shklovsky), but the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers played safe by basing their interpretation of Tolstoy on Lenin’s literary criticism, namely his famous 1908 characterisation of Tolstoy’s method as the ‘tearing off of masks’, which was proffered as a good model for budding Soviet writers to follow. It was, in fact, political figures like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg who dominated publications on Tolstoy around the time of the centenary. One volume published in 1929 may have included the very last Russian publication by Trotsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union that year.87 The chapter headings for one of the many centenary volumes about Tolstoy published in 1928 reflect the efforts that were made by the Soviet government to render the great writer acceptable to the regime:
Part 1: The Jubilee and Our Tasks
Part 2: Tolstoy as a Thinker
Tolstoy and his Epoch The Lack of Synthesis; The Social Reasons for This
Dialectical Materialism and Religious Idealism
Class war/Struggle and Non-Resistance to Evil
Tolstoy’s Criticism of Capitalism
Tolstoy’s Criticism of Patriotism and Militarism
Part 3: Tolstoy as Artist
Part 4: Tolstoy and the Soviet Public 88
In the face of this ideological onslaught, Alexandra’s work at Yasnaya Polyana became more and more difficult. Once the Jubilee was over, she was once again subject to harassment by local Party officials when she refused to comply with their demands. Eventually she was forced to accept as her deputy at the estate-museum an anonymous Soviet writer who proposed using Tolstoy’s teachings as a weapon in the anti-religious campaign. The requirement by the ‘League of the Godless’ that pupils at the Yasnaya Polyana school were to have lessons on Easter Sunday, in keeping with Stalin’s calendar ‘reforms’, was the last straw. In the autumn of 1929 Alexandra got on a train for Vladivostok, en route for Japan, where she had been invited to lecture. She never returned to Russia.89
By 1930, only two volumes of the Jubilee Edition had appeared, and there were still problems with obtaining funds to keep going. Chertkov was seventy-six and very ill by this time, but this was his life’s work and he plodded resolutely on, despite having exhausted all his savings to fund the enterprise. In February 1934 he wrote about the lack of funds to Molotov, who had been head of Sovnarkom (Council of Ministers) since 1930, but he received no answer. On 27 May he wrote to Stalin:
The situation of our editorial team is now completely hopeless as a result of the lack of funds to complete our work, the release of which, to the tune of 75,000 roubles, I requested from Sovnarkom. Meanwhile, my requests to accelerate the publication and fund the editing work to the end, as I have been informed by Sovnarkom, have not met with any objections in principle, and the entire delay is to do with the paperwork, which has been going on for four months already. I am not writing again to Comrade Molotov, because I have already written to him twice, and having not received a reply, I am not sure that he has the time to turn his personal attention to my appeal to him amongst many complex governmental affairs. But I am being so bold as to appeal to you, esteemed Iosif Vissarionovich, as the comrade on whose initiative this project was essentially launched following the lead of the late V. I. Lenin. I think that just one word from you would be enough to bring an immediate conclusion to the formal side of the protracted satisfaction of my requests, as set out in my letter of 23 February 1934 to Comrade Molotov …90