Tolstoy’s ideas had begun to win him increasing numbers of followers by the end of the 1880s, but he also had his share of critics. In 1891, however, when he seized the initiative to help victims of the famine which had begun to rage in Russia, Tolstoy assumed an unassailable position of national moral leadership to the extent that his strident religious views were subsequently indulged more as eccentricities, at least by the people. Despite Chekhov’s impatience with Tolstoy’s retrogressive ideas, he was serious about placing him as the No. 1 most important person in Russia in December 1890 (he categorised himself as No. 877),143 and he had nothing but admiration for his famine relief work. As he wrote in another letter exactly a year later, ‘You need the courage and authority of a Tolstoy to swim against the current, defy the prohibitions and the general climate of opinion, and do what your duty calls you to do.’144 Chekhov did sterling work himself during the famine, but Tolstoy got there first, and he put the Russian government to shame.
Tolstoy soon became intensely irritated that the Russian affluent classes were up in arms about the approaching crisis in the summer of 1891. Dire poverty was an everyday reality for most peasants, so why was it they only wanted to help the peasantry during the extreme conditions of a famine?145 In September he went off on horseback round Tula province to see for himself what was happening, having already resolved not to spend that winter in Moscow. At the end of the month he returned home and started writing an article, ‘About the Famine’, in which he excoriated the educated classes for their indifference to the plight of all those millions of peasants who barely managed to subsist even in normal circumstances. On 15 October he sent his devastating report to Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, and ten days later Nikolay Grot wrote to give Tolstoy the unsurprising news that the issue in which it was slated to appear had been confiscated by the censor. The next day Tolstoy set off for Ryazan province with his eldest daughters, Tanya and Masha, ready to do what he could to help: the plan was to live at his friend Ivan Rayevsky’s estate and set up soup kitchens and provide practical help to the peasants in the area. Rayevsky had come to visit Tolstoy that summer to tell him about what was going on, and it was his selfless devotion to the cause which inspired Tolstoy himself to act (he tragically died of influenza a month after Tolstoy’s arrival).146
Tolstoy’s twenty-two-year-old son Lev went off to his newly inherited estate in Samara to help out with the famine there, electing to take a period of leave from his university studies, but the experience was traumatic, and took a great toll on his frail health – the conditions were so extreme in Samara that it was hard just to produce any foodstuffs at all, let alone set up soup kitchens.147 Sonya still had four children between the ages of three and fourteen to look after at home in Moscow, so was housebound, but she was keen to help as well. On 3 November 1891 she published an appeal for help in the Russian Gazette (it was also printed in many newspapers in Europe and the United States), and she received 9,000 roubles in the first week alone.148 It was not just the wives of wealthy tea-merchants in kyakhta, on the border with China, who sent Sonya money – donors included Old Believer fishermen in Bessarabia who gave up most of their earnings, a retired lieutenant-colonel in Nizhny Novgorod who donated his pension, as well as postmen, village schoolteachers and even peasants.149 Sonya was glad to be able to contribute, as she recalls in her autobiography:
I bought trucks of corn, beans, onions, cabbage, everything needed for the feeding centres where the famine-stricken poor from the villages were fed. To pay for this, I received money which was sent to me in considerable sums. From the material sent to me by textile manufacturers I had [bed linen] made by poor women for small wages, and I sent it to the places where it was needed most, chiefly for those suffering from typhoid.150
From her Moscow base, Sonya coordinated donations, and published regular bulletins over the next few months detailing the contributions received. She also spent days sewing shirts from the fabric supplied by the great textile magnate Savva Morozov, together with Dunyasha Popova, the family housekeeper, the nanny and the English governess.151
Tolstoy’s mind was naturally taken back to the events of 1873 in Samara, when he first had seen the effects of famine in Russia. Ever since writing his article about the Moscow census back in 1882, Tolstoy was adamant that just throwing money at such a deep-rooted problem was no remedy: what was needed above all was practical action. After settling in at Rayevsky’s estate in the village of Begichevka, Tolstoy wrote another article on the famine. ‘A Terrible Question’ (the question being whether could Russia feed itself) was duly published in the Russian Gazette on 6 November. Thus began months of getting up early every day, setting up and operating free soup kitchens, supervising volunteers and buying provisions with the donations received (Tolstoy himself took 600 roubles of his own money with him). By the end of November there were thirty soup kitchens up and running, and by the end of December there were seventy. They were vitally needed. Tolstoy wrote to tell Sonya that he had been to a village where there was only one cow for every nine households, and to another where nearly all the inhabitants were destitute. By January 4,000 peasants were receiving free food every day.152
The government had initially discouraged ordinary Russians from becoming involved in famine relief, but they were obliged to change policy in the face of their own helplessness. Nevertheless they were alarmed by Tolstoy’s activities, and sent out a circular to all Russian newspapers forbidding them to publish any articles by him. The editor of the Russian Gazette had received a reprimand for publishing ‘A Terrible Question’, but on 10 December he went ahead and published its sequeclass="underline" ‘About Ways to Help the Population Suffering from the Failed Harvest’. Chekhov exclaimed the next day in a letter to Suvorin that Tolstoy was no longer just a man, but a ‘giant, a Jupiter’, and immediately contributed an article of his own to the collection of essays put together by the newspaper. Tolstoy’s friend Nikolay Grot, meanwhile, called him a ‘spiritual tsar’ on whom all of Russia’s hopes were pinned at this difficult time.153 But an enormous scandal was brewing. ‘About the Famine’ had now finally been approved for publication after drastic editing, and it was published in The Week in early January 1892. Tolstoy also wanted his uncensored text to be known abroad, and he now got in touch with various foreign acquaintances to ask them to translate it. Isabel Hapgood produced a translation for publication in America, and she printed an announcement in the New York Evening Post that she was setting up a campaign to raise funds to help those starving in Russia (contributions had already started arriving from England, France and Germany).154 Emile Dillon, an English academic who had been teaching at the University of kharkov, placed his translation of Tolstoy’s article in the Daily Telegraph on 14 (26) January. It was given the inflammatory title ‘Why Are Russian Peasants Starving?’. As Tolstoy had hoped, extracts were then translated back into Russian for the press at home, but his words were twisted by right-wing publications, and immediately denounced by the more reactionary journalists as the most dangerous revolutionary propaganda. Tolstoy found himself being branded as the Antichrist, and as someone inciting the peasants to revolt.155