Durnovo, minister of the interior, investigated the matter and submitted a report to Alexander III. Rumor in the palace had it that the tsar was very annoyed by Tolstoy's attitude, and had even said in public, "To think that I received his wife! A thing I have done for nobody else!" In a panic, Sonya wrote to Lyovochka on February 6, 1892: "You'll be the death of us all with your provocations. Where are your sacred love ancl 'non-resistance'? You have nine children; you have no right to ruin their lives and mine."
With her customary courage, she fought back. All her connections in St. Petersburg were alerted. She asked for an audience with Grand Duke Sergey, the governor general of Moscow, who advised her to publish a letter from Tolstoy in the Official Herald disclaiming the distorted version of his article on the famine. Tolstoy grumblingly consented to write it, but the director of the Official Herald refused to publish the letter on the ground that he was responsible for a government organ and did not have the right to Income involved in journalistic quarrels. Sonya then had hundreds of copies of the letter lithographed and distributed in Russia and abroad. Too busy giving relief to the muzhiks to be concerned about intrigues going on behind his back, Tolstoy ingenuously wrote to his wife, on February 28, 1892:
"For the love of God, do not trouble your head over such things, my dear. ... I write what I think—things that could not conceivably be acceptable to the government and upper classes—and have been doing so for the last twelve years; I do not write that way by accident, but on purpose; and not only do I have no intention of justifying myself, but I trust those who believe I should will, if not justify their own conduct, then at least clear themselves of the crimes they have committed; it is not 1 who am accusing them of these crimes, but life itself. . . . Please don't you begin to take the defensive: that would be reversing the roles."
In the meantime, State and Church continued their attacks upon Tolstoy. Informers watched his even' move. One of them reported: "He arrived here with a secretary and a confidential agent. . . . None of them eat meat, and when they sit down to table they do not say grace. This has caused the peasants to think that Tolstoy must be working for the devil, not God. . . . Surveillance has been carefully organized, so that every move he makes will be brought to my attention." Obeying orders from their sujjeriors, some of the popes in the disaster area preached a similar message to their parishioners and ordered the muzhiks to refuse relief under pain of damnation. One day a peasant woman flung herself at Tolstoy's feet and entreated him to give her back her child, who was being fed in one of the kitchens.
"Be it on my head only," she whimpered. "There is nothing to cat at home, but I do not want to send my child to perdition!"
In Moscow and St. Petersburg people were saying that the "thirteenth apostle" would soon be confined to his estate or sent abroad or even locked up in the Suzdal Monastery, reserved for disobedient clergy.
Seeing danger so near at hand, the pious Alexandra Tolstoy forgot her differences with her renegade nephew and decided, without telling him, to plead his cause to the tsar. Having obtained an audience with Alexander III, the old maid of honor said, in a trembling voice:
"Sire, they are preparing to ask you to imprison the greatest genius in all Russia in a monastery."
"Tolstoy?" asked the tsar.
"Yes, Sire."
"Would he be plotting an attempt on my life?" murmured the sovereign with a smile.
Alexandra left reassured. A little while later, receiving his minister of the interior, the tsar said, "I will ask you not to touch Tolstoy. I have no desire to make a martyr of him and provoke a general uprising. If he is guilty, so much the worse for him!"
And the storm blew over, without a moment's pause for thankfulness from Tolstoy. Perhaps, at heart, he was sorry for his state of comfortable impunity. The blows were always for others; but there are people for whom the worst punishment is no punishment at all.
A second year without rain forced him to continue his work among the underfed peasants. His mind was at peace there, as at Sevastopol years before, when the proximity of death had kept him from thinking about himself. Also, it made him happy to feel that he had Sonya's support in his crusade. He was almost prepared to treat her as a fellow believer. "Yesterday," he wrote her, "reading over your letters, I wanted with all my heart—the heart you say I don't have—not only to see you, but to be with you." Between tours of the kitchens, he continued writing The Kingdom of God 1$ Within You, which was to be the keystone of his entire ethical structure. "No book has ever given me so much trouble," lie confided to Chertkov.
Naturally, the book, which was completed in April 1893 after three years of work, was prohibited by the censor, but typed copies sped across Russia, leaped the frontiers and were immediately translated in Germany, France, England and the United States. In this essay Tolstoy claimed that the kingdom of God was within reach of every man and that to enter it he need only consent to dominate his animal nature. But, he added, "the doctrine of Christ could only be interpreted as a negation of life by mistaking for an absolute rule what is merely a guide to an ideal. It is in this sense that Christ's precepts seem irreconcilable with the necessities of life, whereas, in fact, they are the only means of living a just life." Having dealt with the critics who rcproached him for not having sufficiently liberated himself from his own instincts, he moved on to define spiritual perfection, which was, for him, "the asymptote of human life." "Mankind is always reaching toward it and can approach it, but can rcach it only in infinity." lie held that the teachings of the Church had deformed the simplicity of the Sermon on the Mount. As the ally of the State, it had become the chief obstacle to human happiness on earth. Therefore any fundamentally Christian mind should refuse all laws, both religious and secular, and adhere to the following precept: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." Inspired by the American Adin Bal- lou's books on non-resistance, Tolstoy now produced his famous theory of non-resistance to evil.
However, although he refused to resist evil by violence, he believed it his duty to denounce it whenever he encountered it in the world. His campaign against famine had given him a taste for public action. Now that he was certain of his convictions at last, he made up his mind to speak out every time the government overstepped its prerogatives. He had protested against the persecution of the Jews in 1890. In 1893 he wrote to Alexander III because Prince Khilkov, a disciple of his who had been exiled to the Caucasus, had been deprived of legal custody of his children.0 Other "cases" were in the offing, over which he was prepared to do battle with his wife at his side.