It was perhaps inevitable that a man who did nothing by half-measures would experience something beyond the typical mid-life crisis. The decade following Tolstoy’s forty-ninth birthday would indeed turn out to be the most tumultuous in his life thus far. Moving to Moscow was the event which loomed largest for the rest of his family during this period (it was a life-changing experience for all the children and certainly for Sonya, after the long years of being sequestered at Yasnaya Polyana). But that was not what Tolstoy was referring to when he defined these years as a time of tempestuous inner struggle and change. He became a devout Orthodox communicant, then a trenchant critic of the Church. He undertook a root-and-branch study of all the major world religions and wrote a searing work of spiritual autobiography about his quest for the meaning of life. He produced a new translation of the Gospels, and set out to follow Christ’s teaching. And then he began protesting loudly in the name of that teaching against the Orthodox Church. At the end of the 1880s Alexander III would brand Tolstoy as a godless nihilist, and a dangerous figure who needed to be stopped.3
There was a journey to be undertaken before Tolstoy reached the point of formulating and articulating his new ideas, however, and it began with a period of intense religious searching, as reflected in the chapters at the end of Anna Karenina where Levin questions the meaning of life. The spiritual crisis that Dostoyevsky underwent during his years of Siberian exile in the early 1850s resulted in him jettisoning atheism and socialism and embracing Christianity, specifically Russian Orthodox Christianity, with ever greater fervour. Tolstoy did more or less the opposite, the spiritual crisis he underwent at the end of the 1870s resulting in him jettisoning not just Russian Orthodoxy but a large part of Christianity too. But he began his spiritual crisis by first becoming devout – the most devout he had ever been in his life.
Up until this point, Tolstoy had only notionally been a member of the Orthodox faith he was baptised into, like most members of his class. He had given up praying at sixteen and lost his belief at eighteen, but in his late forties he began to yearn for the guidance provided by strong religious beliefs. Writing to Alexandrine at the beginning of February 1877, Tolstoy confessed that for the past two years he had been like a drowning man, desperate to find something to hold on to. He told her he had been pinning his hopes on finding salvation in religion, that he and his friend Strakhov were both agreed that philosophy could not provide the answers, and that they could not live without religion. At the same time, he wrote, they just could not believe in God.4 A month later, however, Tolstoy had changed course totally, and almost on a whim, after conversations with his ‘materialist’ doctor Grigory zakharin and Sergey Levitsky, the celebrated ‘patriarch’ of Russian photography who had taken the group portrait of The Contemporary’s writers in Paris back in 1856.5 He started reading the theological writings of the Slavophile thinker Alexey khomyakov, just like his character Levin at the end of Anna Karenina.6 Like Levin, he found them wanting. Even so, he was soon saying his prayers every day as he had in childhood, going to church on Sundays and fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Tolstoy’s newfound religious fervour did not stop him from going off hunting with his friends for wolves and elk, or seeking to publish his fiction profitably – yet. He had come back to his old publisher Theodor Ries to arrange for the separate publication of ‘The Eighth and Last Part’ of Anna Karenina after the Russian Messenger debacle, and soon after it appeared in print in July 1877 he handed over a slightly revised version of the complete novel for its first publication in book form the following year. The 1878 edition was never reprinted. By subsequently including the novel as part of his collected works, Tolstoy cunningly obliged all those who wanted their own copy to splash out on the complete set. In May 1878 he ascertained from his Moscow distributor that there were 2,700 copies left of the original print run of 4,800, and 800 unsold copies of his nine-volume collected works. The new, fourth edition of his collected works, planned for 1880, would be swelled by the addition of two final volumes incorporating Anna Karenina, and would go on sale for sixteen and a half roubles. If 5,000 copies were printed, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov, that meant a total revenue of 82,500 roubles, of which 20,000 would go on printing costs, but he would sell the distribution rights for 30,000 roubles, so he stood to do extremely well out of the deal.7
Tolstoy remained, as ever, a shrewd businessman when it came to financial negotiations. Nevertheless, there were also clear signs of his new piety. In the summer of 1877, accompanied by Strakhov, Tolstoy made the first of several visits to the famed Optina Pustyn Monastery in kaluga province, some 135 miles west of Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy hoped to be granted an audience with Elder Ambrosy. He had heard about Ambrosy from his aunts, who had instilled in him and his siblings a reverence for Optina Pustyn from an early age.8 His devout aunt Aline was even buried there, having made annual pilgrimages from Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy also knew about Ambrosy from his peasants. After a full day’s travel, he and Strakhov arrived at three in the morning in their tarantass. Tolstoy did not want to be accorded special treatment because of who he was, and so they put up in the monastery’s spartan and crowded hostel. It turned out that Father Feoktist, the monk running the monastery hostel, was one of his family’s former serfs, however, and as soon as Count Tolstoy’s identity was known, there was pressure on him to move to the more luxurious quarters available, which he resisted.
There were reasons why Tolstoy chose to come to Optina Pustyn rather than any other monastery. Despite its sixteenth-century foundations, the anti-clerical reforms launched by Peter the Great and continued by Catherine the Great had almost forced it to close at the end of the eighteenth century, by which time there were only three monks left, and one of them was blind.9 From this moribund state, however, Optina Pustyn recovered to become the centre of an extraordinary religious revival in the nineteenth century. This was due to its charismatic ‘elders’. An elder (starets) was a monk who through long ascetic practice, constant prayer and solitude had become an unofficial leader of the spiritual life of his monastery.10 Believing they possessed powers of healing and clairvoyance in addition to unusual wisdom, thousands of lay visitors would come annually from all over Russia to seek guidance from Elders on a wide array of problems in their lives. Many petitioners were peasants, but Optina Pustyn also attracted large numbers of the Russian intelligentsia, including many noted writers.11
The ancient tradition of eldership was brought to Russia by disciples of the eighteenth-century spiritual leader Paisy Velichkovsky. At the age of seventeen, after taking his monastic vows, Paisy moved from his native Poltava to Mount Athos, where he established a hermitage and immersed himself in the Eastern Christian practice of Hesychasm (‘inner stillness’). In 1764, after two and a half decades of attempting to reach a state of perpetual prayer and reconnect with the traditions of the early Church Fathers, he was invited to revive spiritual life in Moldavia. By the time of his death in 1794, the monastery he founded at Neamt had around 700 monks. As well as introducing eldership to the Slavonic world, Paisy Velichkovsky left an important legacy of published writings on prayer which were very influential on the monks who revived Optina Pustyn in the dark days of the early nineteenth century. The mystical texts he compiled for his Slavonic Philokalia (‘love of the beautiful’), in particular, cemented the vital link he had forged with the Hesychast traditions of Mount Athos and the early Christians who had lived in the desert. The nineteenth-century Russian elders who followed Velichkovsky’s example were monks who emulated the Church Fathers by living in a remote hermitage, which was the nearest equivalent in Russia to retreating to the desert, and it is no coincidence that the word pustyn’ (hermitage) is related to the word pustynya, which means desert as well as wilderness. To ensure a stricter and more solitary existence than that of regular monks, however, the elders also lived in a skete – a kind of monastery within a monastery. At the time of Tolstoy’s visit, the elder in charge of Optina Pustyn was Ambrosy, who was by then sixty-five, and one of the most famous men in Russia. It was Ambrosy upon whom Dostoyevsky would model his character of zosima in The Brothers Karamazov following three meetings with him during his pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn in 1878.