Tolstoy was not best pleased that his cover was blown when he arrived at the monastery in May 1877, but it did mean that he was granted an audience with Ambrosy straight away. So many people came to see the elder that the vast majority would have to wait days or even weeks before being granted access (women were not allowed into the hermitage itself, but thronged round a specially built extension to Ambrosy’s cell).12 The spiritual assistance people requested was extremely varied. Mothers sought his advice on how to bring up their children, merchants wanted to know whether to make a particular purchase or not, uncles consulted him about whom their nieces should marry, while innumerable others sought prayers which might effect a cure for a grave illness, or merely some comfort in their afflictions.13 Tolstoy came to Elder Ambrosy with no particular agenda, other than a hope that he might find answers to the spiritual questions which tormented him. After heeding Ambrosy’s suggestion that he go to confession and take communion, Tolstoy stood through the four hours of the monastery’s vespers service. He also spent time during his pilgrimage talking to the monastery’s archimandrite (a Guards officer in his previous life), but his heart was most deeply touched most by the ingenuous humility of Father Pimen, a former decorator whose kind and down-to-earth ways had made him very popular with female supplicants. At one point in Tolstoy’s conversation with the archimandrite, Pimen quietly nodded off on his chair,14 but he was not as sleepy as he seemed. He later commented that Tolstoy had said a lot of eloquent but empty things, and should think about his soul. Ambrosy, meanwhile, later recounted to a friend of Strakhov, after a long sigh, that he had found Tolstoy challenging. In 1907 this friend published what the Elder had told him about Tolstoy:
5. Father Ambrosy, the Elder at Optina Pustyn Monastery, whom Tolstoy visited for the first time in 1877
His heart seeks God, but there is muddle and a lack of belief in his thoughts. He suffers from a great deal of pride, spiritual pride. He will cause a lot of harm with his arbitrary and empty interpretation of the Gospels, which in his opinion no one has understood before him, but everything is God’s will.15
This same acquaintance told Strakhov privately at the time, however, that the Holy Fathers had thought Tolstoy had a ‘wonderful soul’, and were particularly pleased that he did not suffer from intellectual pride, unlike Gogol, who had visited the monastery in 1850. Wherever the truth lies, Tolstoy was buoyed by his first pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn – he was genuinely impressed by the wisdom of the monastery’s elders, and by Father Ambrosy’s spiritual powers in particular.16 Meanwhile, his own faith was strengthened. When he returned to Yasnaya Polyana at the end of July, he started having long conversations with the local priest and getting up at dawn to go to early matins, saddling his horse himself so as not to wake his servant.17
Russia had finally declared war on Turkey in April 1877, just as Tolstoy was finishing Anna Karenina. In the middle of August, accompanied by Sonya and various other members of their family, Tolstoy went to visit the Turkish prisoners of war who were being held at an old sugar factory on the road to Tula. He had hoped to start a new historical novel that summer, but news from the front kept preventing him from being able to concentrate, regardless of whether he was in a good or a bad mood, he wrote to Strakhov.18 Tolstoy naturally could not help remembering being stationed himself on the Danube, before being transferred to the disastrous Sebastopol campaign during the Crimean War, and for a while he pondered writing Alexander II a letter about the state of Russia, and the reasons for the army’s failures in the most recent hostilities with Turkey. But it was religion that was uppermost in his mind, and so it was faith that he wanted to talk about to the Turkish prisoners of war, not politics. He wanted to know whether they each had their own copy of the koran, and who their mullah was.19 Tolstoy’s religious quest took him well beyond Russia’s borders. The books which he asked Strakhov to send him later in the year included the Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauss’s Old and New Faith, a work which had caused almost as much scandal in Germany in 1872 as his ‘historical’ Life of Jesus, in which he had denied Christ’s divinity some thirty years earlier. Tolstoy also asked Strakhov to procure for him Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, an equally notorious volume with the same title which had provoked a storm of controversy in the Catholic world, and which had been banned in Russia ever since its first publication in France in 1863. Other authors who interested Tolstoy at this time were the orientalists Eugène Burnouf, who had published a history of Indian Buddhism in 1844, and his student Max Müller, later regarded as the father of Religionswissenschaft. Müller had become Oxford’s first Professor of Comparative Theology in 1868, and wrote extensively on Indian philosophy and Vedic religion.20
Strakhov continued to be a sounding-board for Tolstoy’s ideas, but he was not thirsting for faith in the same way, and so did not accompany his friend on the next leg of his spiritual journey. As Elder Ambrosy had noted during their visit to Optina Pustyn, Strakhov’s lack of belief was deeply entrenched; faith for him was ‘merely poetry’, despite an attraction to the monastic way of life which inspired him to travel to Mount Athos in 1881.21 At Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s newfound religious fervour was greeted with slight bemusement, particularly by Sonya, for whom Orthodox belief had always been an unobtrusive but integral part of her life. She was glad her husband had ‘calmed down’ after the violent mood swings of the previous years (particularly the periods of deep depression), and she could only rejoice that his character seemed to be changing for the better. In her diary, she was optimistic that Tolstoy had somehow reached the end of his spiritual journey:
Although he has always been modest and undemanding in all his habits, he is now becoming even more modest, meek and patient. And this eternal struggle that he began in his youth, aimed at achieving moral perfection, is being crowned with complete success.22