One spring day when he was walking in the forest, his mind suddenly- felt lighter and his whole body began to move more freely through the light-spattered dimness. Intrigued, he observed that he was always sad when he rejected God with his reason and always cheerful when he accepted him like a child.
"At the thought of God, happy waves of life welled up inside me," he wrote. "Everything came alive, took on meaning. The moment I thought I knew God, I lived. But the moment I forgot him, the mo-
mcnt I stopped believing, I also stopped living. ... To know God and to live are the same thing. God is life."5
He had found faith. A faith within reach of all. Like a shipwrecked man at the end of his strength, Tolstoy clung to this raft.
First, he saw that he could only remain in his state of grace by accepting it unconditionally. Even if certain rituals seemed silly and unjustifiable to him, even if the behavior of the faithful resembled blind superstition, he must obey the law of the flock or be lost. God, as creator of the entire world, could only have revealed his truth to all men, united by love. To pray to God by oneself was an absurdity. It was necessary to pray to him among the masses, through the masses.
With the same energy he had formerly applied to reviling the dogma of the Orthodox Church, Tolstoy now threw himself into piety. He who had even refused to attend the services in the house organized by Sonya for feast days now began to say his prayers morning and night without any prompting from anyone; he got up early for mass on Sunday, confessed and took communion, fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays.
"I know that what I am doing is right," he said, "if only because, in order to mortify the pride of the spirit, be united with my ancestors and fellow men and continue my search for the meaning of life, I am sacrificing my physical comfort."
To tell the truth, his mortification of the spirit was greatly attenuated by the feeling that he was being united, not only with the people, but with his own youth. lie was not prospecting new ground, he was turning back into an old familiar path. The appeal of religion was heightened by the appeal of his childhood memories. The trembling flame of the vigil light in front of the icon was the same one that had fascinated him as a child. And when he made the sign of the cross, it was not a bearded fifty-year-old his protective gesture was shielding, but a nervous, sensitive boy, dreaming of the kingdom of the Ant Brothers.
"It was a strange thing," he admitted, "but the life force I rediscovered then was not new to me; it was the oldest of all, that of the very beginning of my life."
Was there a shade of ostentation in his repeated genuflections in the little country church? Did he think it rather admirable of himself to return to this simplicity after studying the philosophers? In any ease, he made no secret of his reconversion. He spoke of it at the dinner table with his wife and children, as though it were something that concerned them all. Sonya, who had so often bewailed his skepticism, was overjoyed at his new devoutness. Following his example, even-one
in the family became possessed of renewed zeal. For Lent, they fasted not only in the first and last weeks, but for seven consecutive weeks.
When a guest arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy invariably led him to state his position on the problem of religion. Count Bobrinsky, founder of the "Society for the Promotion of Religious and Moral Reading" and partisan of Lord Radstock's theories, pleased him immensely by the intensity of his faith. "He cannot be contradicted," Tolstoy wrote to Alexandra, "because he is not trying to prove anything. He simply says he believes and, listening to him, one feels that he is happier than those who do not believe, one feels above all that belief such as his cannot be achieved by an effort of the mind, but that it must be received as a miraculous gift. And that is what I desire."6
lie read passages from his philosophical meditations to his friend Urusov. lie had weighty discussions on materialism with Ushakov, the governor of Tula, and with Dr. Sakharin. Alexcyev, the Russian teacher, affirmed that in the United States, where he had spent some time in a Russian communist colony, the pioneers had been forced to abandon their social reform until they had established their "religious foundations." 'lliis convinced Tolstoy that a society without God was inconceivable. His letters to Fet, Strakhov and Alexandra began to sound like metaphysical dissertations; he read nothing but religious works; he abhorred Rcnan's Life of Jesus, which Strakhov had sent to him, and said everything in it was false, dry and ridiculous; he was in seventh heaven, on the other hand, over Pascal's Pensees. How had this seventeenth-century Frenchman managed to understand his torment so completely, and even point the way to a remedy? "Their method is to do everything as though they believed, to sprinkle holy water and hear masses said. . . . Quite naturally, simply by going through the motions, you will come to believe and cease to reason." There was an admirable piece of advice! The way it gave preference to feeling over reason, it might almost have been written by a Russian! Pascal approved of the faith of the muzhik. On the map of Christian thought, Port-Royal was next door to Yasnaya Polyana. Hurry, hurry, run to the people, down into oblivion, down into ignorance!
The highway to Kiev passed not far from the estate. In the springtime the pilgrims filed through the dust, pack on back and staff in hand, some going to the sanctuaries in the south, some to the north. It was like a river of folk-faith flooding his land. Every day, drawn by this flow of fresh water, Tolstoy donned his peasant blouse, pulled on his boots and stationed himself by the roadside. "I am going out to the Nevsky Prospect," he would say, taking up his walking stick. He ad-
mired and envied these simple folk, who had left their villages weeks before with a few kopecks in their pockets and begun walking, never swerving from their course, with sunburned faces and bleeding feet, sleeping out under the open sky, living on whatever sustenance charitable souls provided as they passed, praying in every church, borne up in their weariness by the desire to kiss some icon or drink some holy water or touch the tomb of some miraculous monk.
Now and then the count would stop one of these visionaries and sit down in the grass with him, to question him about the goal of his journey and the nature of his faith. One day Strakhov, who was visiting at Yasnaya Polyana, accompanied him to a pilgrims' inn. There were a dozen people inside, men and women in rags, dirty and exhausted. Some slept, others were praying, and others were eating black bread and cucumbers. Tolstoy eagerly began to question one of them. "It was most curious to listen to them," Strakhov wrote to his friend Danilevsky. "Tolstoy is very interested in the language of the people. He finds new words every day."
Indeed, it was not only the naive piety of the pilgrims' tales that delighted him, but the tellers' quaint turns of speech as well. He came for a lesson in faith and went away having learned a lesson in style. An incorrigible professional, he would have jotted down his impressions under the very nose of God. The pages of his notebook were soon covered with strange words, rhymes, adages and proverbs, the age-old lore of the common people. He brought tale-tellers to the house, chief among them Shchegolenok, whose corkscrcw beard fascinated the children; he used some of the old man's tales as a basis for lovely stories, such as that of Michael the cobbler (What Men Live By) and the men who find salvation on an island (Three Old Men).
In July 1877 lie made a pilgrimage with his friend Strakhov to the monastery of Optina-Pustyn in the province of Kaluga, deep in the heart of Russia. Nicholas Gogol, the publicist Kireyevsky, the author Konstantin Leontycv, the philosopher Solovyev, even Dostoyevsky himself, had been there before him. The place was famous throughout the country for the devoutness of its monks and the authority of its starets, the spiritual leader of the brotherhood.