The Chechens admire Tolstoy for making friends with them during his time in the Caucasus (this was indeed highly unusual for Russian officers, who tended to treat the natives with contempt), and for writing about them in a positive light. According to Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson Vladimir Ilych, who became director at the Yasnaya Polyana Museum in 1994, ‘The Chechen people think that Tolstoy wrote most truthfully of the events that happened then and the character of the mountain peoples, their striving to be independent, for freedom, and their religious, ethnic and other particularities’. Salavdi Zagibov, who succeeded his father as director of the Starogladkovskaya Tolstoy Museum in 2008, has also noted the similarities between the pacifist teachings of Tolstoy and the nineteenth-century Sufi leader Sheikh Kunta Khadji, a Chechen shepherd.9 The Starogladkovskaya Museum was reopened in December 2009 after renovation, which was funded by the personal foundation of Ramzan Kadyrov, President of Chechnya.
While Tolstoy is universally regarded as one of the world’s great writers, he remains a controversial and contradictory figure. His marriage had already gone into a steep decline by the time he met Vladimir Chertkov, but it was his submission to his devoted friend which caused a bad situation to disintegrate entirely in the last year of his life. Chertkov’s influence over Tolstoy’s estate meant that his version of events initially prevailed over dissenting voices, chiefly that of the writer’s grieving widow, whom he had displaced in her husband’s affections. The publication in 2006 of a collection of scholarly articles dedicated to her memory, and in 2010 of the first Russian biography of Sofya Tolstaya, is witness to the sea-change in attitudes that swiftly took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union.10
Sonya can be forgiven for becoming paranoid and hysterical in the last year of her husband’s life. She can be forgiven a lot, as her husband treated her very badly, by any account. His strengths were also his weaknesses, and his attitude towards the female gender is in general not admirable. Sonya did not, like him and their daughters, become vegetarian, nor did she want to dispense with money and private property; she just wanted to maintain the comfortable lifestyle she was used to. Sonya was a talented woman who selflessly put aside whatever interests she might have developed in order to go on bearing the children her husband wanted, and help him as his copyist. For long years she supported a man whose ego often blinded him to the needs of his family, and it was unfair of him to expect her to follow him meekly on his quest to lead a more spiritually enlightened, ascetic life just because he decided it was time to change. She also had her faults, however, and her rigidity stopped her from seeing that she could be just as controlling as Chertkov.
Tolstoy has had his share of detractors. One of the most eloquent and witty is Alexander Boot, an admirer of Tolstoy the artist, but also the author of an effective hatchet job on Tolstoy the thinker:
He wished to be more than a novelist, even one of genius. He wished to be more than a seer or a soothsayer, although that would have been a good start. He wished to be God … He wanted to correct God’s mistakes in having allowed the world to become imperfect and sinful. He, Count Tolstoy … set out to usurp God’s job. But the job was already taken, and the deity stubbornly hung on to it. Therefore Tolstoy declared war on God and fought it with every means at his disposal. Alas, though he tried many lines of attack, each disguised by the camouflage of pseudo-Christian verbiage, Tolstoy came off a poor second. By way of revenge, he came, in effect, to deny God the Father, ignore God the Son and dismiss God the Holy Spirit. No one was allowed to defeat Tolstoy and get away with it.11
Boot concedes Tolstoy’s enormous impact on many of the movements of the modern age, such as vegetarianism, anti-capitalism and animal rights, and his arguments are persuasive, yet they need to be squared with the fact that Tolstoy’s philosophy of non-violence was revered by Gandhi, Wittgenstein and Martin Luther King. To see Tolstoy principally in terms of artist versus thinker, moreover, is to overlook his important humanitarian work.
It is perhaps Tolstoy’s impact on Russian life while he was still alive which is his greatest legacy beyond his great fictional works. If for nothing else, Tolstoy should be hailed for trying to improve literacy in a country where only a tiny percentage of the population could read and write at the end of the nineteenth century, for doing something about the national disaster threatened by famine, and for having the courage to speak some home truths to a complacent and corrupt regime which was indifferent to the poverty of its subjects. Numerous people approached Tolstoy with scepticism, but came away, like Diaghilev, convinced of his sincerity. Even if some of his sons did their best to practise the opposite of what he preached, his daughters were devoted to him. And there is something touching about his untiring zest for life, however wrong-headed his ideas were.
The greatest task facing the biographer of Tolstoy is the challenge of making sense of a man who was truly larger than life. It was a task he himself took on the moment he started writing a diary in his late adolescence, and one he never abandoned, particularly in his last years. Tolstoy never stopped trying to make sense of himself in his writing, whether it was through the public medium of his fictional characters or the quasi-private one of his diary entries. Indeed, as the scholar Irina Paperno has suggested, he even seems to have wanted to extend the extraordinary feat he achieved in his fiction of articulating latent as well as overt psychological processes by ‘turning himself into a book’ in his diaries.12 If encompassing and describing his consciousness as it evolved was a project doomed to failure, like so many Russian utopian dreams, its very lack of finitude nevertheless reassures us of Tolstoy’s humanity.
The task of charting his artistic and intellectual journey has also proved a daunting one for Russia’s great Tolstoy scholars. It is indicative that the mammoth multi-volume biography which Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev embarked on in the 1950s is modestly titled Materials for a Biography. It remained unfinished at his death at the age of eighty-five in 1967, when his pupil Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya took up the baton. Although she added a further two volumes to Gusev’s four, she also died before the project could be completed, leaving the last eighteen years of Tolstoy’s life still to be covered (before this distinguished scholar’s death in 2003 she launched the new definitive hundred-volume edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works).13 While there is a paucity of sources concerning Tolstoy’s early life, necessitating reliance on the sometimes erratic and incomplete memoirs the writer compiled in old age, the sheer abundance of sources on his last years create problems for the biographer of a different kind. Such was his fame that many episodes in the ‘hagiography’ of Lev Tolstoy were set down while he was not just still alive, but comparatively young: the first biography was published when he was in his early sixties, in German moreover. The innumerable cliches which cling to Tolstoy’s vita – ‘great writer of the Russian land’, ‘the Elder of Yasnaya Polyana’ – can also be inhibiting, as can be the many contradictions with which his personality bristles. Tolstoy’s life is rich and fascinating but also deeply mythologised, and he himself contributed to the process of mythologisation.
In the early years of his marriage, while he was writing War and Peace, Tolstoy would insist that his young wife was present, and so Sonya would usually curl up by his feet on the bearskin rug next to his desk – a trophy from one of his hunting expeditions.14 Later on he worked in seclusion, but all through their married life, the Tolstoys read each other’s diaries, which meant their confessions could never really be private. In Sonya’s case, it was in the letters she wrote to her sister Tanya that she wrote most frankly; her diary was often written with a high degree of self-consciousness. For Tolstoy, however, who was always deeply connected to the land and those who worked it, there was from the beginning that very Russian yearning for oneness, to the extent that the borders between public and private eventually became blurred. His was a Russian life.