While Tolstoy was busy writing stories for the masses, his wife was learning the ropes in a different area of the publishing sector. Her very real anxieties about the family’s loss of income had led Tolstoy to suggest that she produce the next editions of his collected works and his ABC books. Previously the sales of Tolstoy’s collected works had been handled by the husband of his niece Varya (Masha’s daughter). Sonya now decided to retain the rights to the publication of her husband’s works, and to convert the outbuilding at their Moscow house into a warehouse. In January 1885 Sonya got down to business, and the proofs for the new, fifth edition started arriving the following month. New works by Tolstoy completed since 1881 which were earmarked for the new twelfth volume of this edition included his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, ‘Strider’, and a couple of the stories Tolstoy had just written for The Intermediary, including ‘The Tale of Ivan the Fool’.76 In February Sonya set off to St Petersburg to obtain permission for this volume to be published, and also to consult Dostoyevsky’s widow about the most profitable way to go about her new publishing venture. One of the most valuable pieces of advice from Anna Grigorievna was to give booksellers only five per cent discount.77 She also recommended that Sonya should not insist on each volume being published in chronological order. Sonya proved to be an accomplished businesswoman. The twelfth volume was banned, but in November 1885 she was already making her second visit to St Petersburg to lobby for the ban to be lifted (it was eventually published in 1886), and to initiate the process of publishing the sixth edition of Tolstoy’s works.78 By 1889 she was already releasing the eighth edition.79
Letting Sonya publish everything he had written before his spiritual crisis (plus the occasional new work of fiction) was Tolstoy’s concession to her, and he helped her with the proofs, but he was much more interested in proselytising. Since 1882 he had been working on and off on a major new treatise, What Then Must We Do?, which drew on his experiences in the Moscow slums while working for the census. Its topics were poverty, exploitation and the evils of money and private property, but the solution to these perennial problems was not technology or modernisation, but physical labour, humility and personal endeavour:
So these are the replies I found to my question: What must we do?
First: not to lie to myself; and – however far my path of life may be from the true path disclosed by my reason – not to fear the truth.
Secondly: to reject the belief in my own righteousness and in privileges and peculiarities distinguishing me from others, and to acknowledge myself as being to blame.
Thirdly: to fulfil the eternal, indubitable law of man, and with the labour of my whole being to struggle with nature for the maintenance of my own and other people’s lives.80
At the end of 1884 Tolstoy handed over the first chapters for publication in Russian Thought. Despite the eternal optimism of his editors, the censor vetoed their publication, but copies were naturally made from the proofs for informal distribution.
Tolstoy’s religious works were now also beginning to reach a wide audience abroad: in 1884 Mikhail Elpidin had published Confession as a separate book for the first time in Geneva, and in 1885 French, German and English translations of What I Believe were published. In the volume Christ’s Christianity, published in London, Chertkov included his translations of Confession and The Gospel in Brief along with What I Believe. Readers outside Russia thus became acquainted with Tolstoy’s religious writings and his major fiction simultaneously, as if his entire career to date had been telescoped: while the first French translation of War and Peace appeared in 1879, it was not until 1885 that Anna Karenina was also published in French translation. The first English translations (completed by the American Nathan Haskell Dole) of both novels appeared in 1886.81
While Tolstoy was keen to disseminate his ideas abroad, it was in Russia that he wanted to make an impact, and the first concrete sign that he was succeeding came in the spring of 1885, when it became known that a young man had refused to serve in the army on the grounds of his Tolstoy-inspired religious convictions.82 A number of writers and thinkers now started to make an impact on Tolstoy’s thought, as it continued to evolve. Although he had by now articulated the major tenets of his new worldview, he remained very receptive to currents of thought which seemed to echo or amplify his own ideas, and there were three important people who shaped his thinking in 1885: an American political economist in New York, a self-educated peasant in Siberia, and an émigré religious positivist based in London.
Henry George, who rose from humble origins in Philadelphia to stand against Theodore Roosevelt for Mayor of New York in 1886, was an evangelical Protestant who wrote a best-selling book in 1879 about social inequality called Progress and Poverty.83 Articles about this book began appearing in the Russian press in 1883, and in February 1885 Tolstoy started reading the book itself. He was riveted by George’s central idea that all land should become common property. Regarding it as a major turning point, he predicted that the emancipation from private ownership would be as momentous as the emancipation of the serfs.84 George’s philosophy was inspired by the observations he had made during his extensive international travels. He had noticed that poverty was greater in populated areas than in those which were less developed. In his book he argued for a single tax, so that private property, and ultimately poverty, could be eliminated. Tolstoy was all for the abolition of private property, but at this point he was quite hostile to the idea of a tax applied by a government, due to the element of coercion inherent in such an action. Nevertheless, he would come to change his mind a decade later, and wholeheartedly embrace George’s proposals.
In July 1885 Tolstoy found himself being stimulated by another thinker in whom he recognised a kindred spirit when a political exile in Siberia sent him a manuscript by Timofey Bondarev. He had first read about The Triumph of the Farmer or Industry and Parasitism a few months earlier in a journal article, and was curious to read it. Taking his inspiration from Genesis 3: 19 (‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food …’), Bondarev argued that it was each person’s moral and religious duty to earn their bread through physical labour, regardless of their social station. Tolstoy was electrified by the ideas contained in this manuscript, and by the author’s passionate diatribe against the wealthy ruling classes. He was also struck by the rich mixture of biblical and colloquial language the treatise was written in, and he read it aloud to everyone at Yasnaya Polyana on the day he received it. He then set about writing to the author, and finding out more about him. Timofey Bondarev, it turned out, was a former serf from southern Russia. In the 1850s, at the age of thirty-seven, he had been forced to abandon his wife and four children when his owner recruited him into the army, where he faced the standard period of conscription of twenty-five years. In 1867, after serving for ten years, Bondarev was arrested for renouncing his Orthodox beliefs and becoming a Subbotnik (‘Sabbatarian’ – a splinter group of the Molokans). He was exiled for life to a remote village on the Yenisey river, not far from Mongolia, along with other sectarian ‘apostates’. As he was the only person who could read and write in the village, he set up a school, in which he taught for thirty years. He devoted the rest of his time to tilling the land and writing his treatise.