When James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, asked Mark Popovsky in the early eighties why he had chosen to research the history of a small group whose influence had been negligible, he answered that he had been impressed with the intelligent way the Tolstoyans had protested against the status quo, by simply living individual lives in accordance with their moral principles.112 Their patience and determination to bear witness was finally rewarded a few years later. Russian scholarship on Tolstoy entered a new phase with the publication in May 1988 of Vladimir Lakshin’s article ‘The Return of Tolstoy the Thinker’. It was obvious that Tolstoy could no longer be seen as just a mirror reflecting the contradictions of the 1905 Revolution, he wrote, since Tolstoy was a laser – a laser of humanity.113 With the onset of perestroika and glasnost, the story of the Tolstoyans’ tenacious struggle to establish communes and till the land in the communist Eden of the Soviet Union could finally be told in Russia as well as in the West. Everything changed in Russia in the late 1980s with the arrival of Gorbachev’s reforms and the lifting of censorship. Mazurin, at the age of eighty-seven years, lived to witness the sensation produced by the publication of his memoirs in Russia’s most prestigious literary magazine Novy mir, which in 1988 had a subscription of well over a million.114 Many other articles and books followed.
Tolstoy did not believe in the idea of an afterlife in the Christian sense; indeed, the prospect of death summarily curtailing his existence, at a time which he had no control over, was the biggest problem he ever wrestled with. He did not believe his works would be remembered for very long after his death, nor did he believe he had all that many followers. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the final liberation of literary and cultural historians from the shackles of ideology, an important position in the wealth of new publications about Tolstoy’s legacy in Russia has been occupied by materials shedding light on the lives of those who sought to put his ideas into practice after his death. Not only have they made it possible to piece together the complex and fascinating story of Tolstoy’s ‘afterlife’, but they have shown how just how deeply Tolstoy’s ideas continued to resonate well into the twentieth century.
In April 1990 an application was made by a group of scholars to the Tula educational authorities to found an L. N. Tolstoy School research institute, with the aim of reintroducing Tolstoy’s pedagogical ideas into teaching and learning in contemporary Russian education.115 In 1998 its achievements in developing a three-stage educational programme from kindergarten to university entrance were recognised when the Russian government awarded it the status of a ‘Federal Experimental Platform’, and by 2010 there were already hundreds in Russia and abroad using Tolstoy’s methods.116 The revival of Tolstoyan schools was the brainchild of Vitaly Remizov, who became director of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow in 2001. In an interview in 2005 he explained that the schools aimed to nurture independence in their pupils above all, in an atmosphere of freedom, using at the primary level the texts developed by Tolstoy in the 1870s.117
In November 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the religious association ‘Spiritual Unity (the Church of Lev Tolstoy)’ was registered in Moscow with the Russian Ministry of Justice, a step that would have been unthinkable in the Soviet era. Its statutes proclaimed its goal to be the dissemination of a Tolstoyan understanding of religion and spiritual life.118 Its umbrella organisation was named as the Unity Church, which was initially founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City in 1889 under the inspiration of Tolstoy’s teachings. The Unity Church describes itself as ‘a positive, practical, progressive approach to Christianity based on the teachings of Jesus and the power of prayer’ which honours ‘the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual’s right to choose a spiritual path’.119 In 1996 a new department of Tolstoy’s Spiritual Heritage with eight faculty members opened its doors at the L. N. Tolstoy Tula State Pedagogical Institute.
In 2000, three years before she died at the age of seventy-eight, the distinguished Tolstoy scholar Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya published the first volume in the new Academy of Sciences edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works. drawing on the many new materials which have come to light since the publication of the Jubilee Edition, this edition will run to 100 volumes, and, as the editors take pains to note, will be the first to be truly complete; it will not be marred by ‘omissions or constraints’, unlike the Jubilee Edition. When the project was first conceived in the late 1980s, Gromova-Opulskaya commented on its aims:
Tolstoy is published and re-published in our country with print runs running into the millions. The 90-volume Complete Collected Works, published between 1928 and 1958, is so significant and monumental a publication that we continue to be proud of it. Nevertheless, Russian textual scholarship has not completely fulfilled its duty. The texts of many of the works of this great world writer remain unverified, manuscripts have been published incomplete and unsystematically. These are the main tasks in the new, probably 100-volume, genuinely academic edition on which work has now begun.120
While Tolstoy scholarship may no longer be hostage to political mandates, the harsh realities of the market economy in contemporary Russia dictate that the progress of the new edition may well be slow.
It seems the only institution in Russia still refusing to open its doors as far as Tolstoy is concerned is the Orthodox Church. In 1994 Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy was appointed as the new director of Yasnaya Polyana, which is still one of the most famous museums in Russia. In early January 2001 he wrote to the Moscow Patriarch with a suggestion that the Church reflect on the significance of the excommunication which had taken place 100 years earlier. Patriarch Alexy’s refusal to discuss the issue created a stir. Vladimir Tolstoy certainly never doubted the importance of the excommunication. ‘I am deeply convinced,’ he declared in an interview at the time, ‘that it was one of the most important historical events in the history of the Russian state, which either obliquely or directly affected future developments, and divided Russian society along both vertical and horizontal axes.’
Just how great the reverberations of Tolstoy’s excommunication were with regards to Russian national life is perhaps most eloquently expressed by the fact that the first official meeting between the Orthodox Church and the Tolstoy estate took place in 2006 – 105 years after the event. The occasion was a special conference held in March 2006 at Yasnaya Polyana, when scholars met representatives from the Orthodox Church to debate the significance of the excommunication. As well as re-examining the sources of the original conflict and the legal aspects of the Holy Synod’s decree, delegates discussed its moral, spiritual and social dimensions and consequences, including its continuing public resonance today. The conference was widely reported in the Russian press, which noted that the unprecedented debate between the Church and literary community was ‘heated, to say the least’. As the writer Alexey Varlamov remarked in one paper, the conflict between Tolstoy and the church was one of the most painful points of the twentieth century, and crucial to the cause of the Russian Revolution. Another delegate, Father Georgy Orekhanov, who spoke on the spiritual aspect of Tolstoy’s death, defended the Church’s actions in 1901, but acknowledged that it was important to understand why so many people had immediately supported the writer at this ‘significant moment’ in Russian history. In the light of the collapse of communism and the subsequent resurgence of Christianity, he added, the question of the relationship between the Russian people and the Orthodox Church was just as topical now.121 Father Orekhanov gave another conference paper on Tolstoy in January 2009 at a panel devoted to topical problems in the history of the Orthodox Church,122 but it is unlikely that discussion will move beyond the academic sphere. To a church and state once again forging close bonds in today’s authoritarian Russia, Tolstoy’s teachings must seem as problematic and as dangerous as ever.