She must have winced later at her naïvety. Tolstoy’s religious strivings certainly brought some peace and harmony to Yasnaya Polyana, but he had begun to walk alone, for none of his family felt inclined to take Christianity as seriously as he did.
Tolstoy’s greatest inspiration at this time came from an unlikely source. Vasily Alexeyev, a thin, rather frail young man with a wispy ginger beard and candid blue eyes, was the latest tutor engaged to teach his eldest children, and he would have a surprisingly powerful influence on Tolstoy’s evolving religious philosophy during the next few years.23 In many ways, he was a Tolstoyan avant le lettre. He arrived at Yasnaya Polyana in October 1877 after being recommended by the Tolstoys’ midwife Maria Abramovich (Sonya was at this point two months off giving birth to Andrey, her ninth child), and he was to stay with the Tolstoys for four years.24 Given his background in radical politics, the surprising thing is not that Sonya eventually asked him to leave, but that he stayed as long as he did.25 Alexeyev was openly socialist and atheist, and yet he was a model of Christian ethics in his personal conduct. He provided Tolstoy with much-needed moral support at this critical time in his life, and Tolstoy defended him to the hilt whenever his pious friend Sergey Urusov tried to attack Alexeyev as a ‘nihilist’ and ‘the son of the devil’. ‘I know few people other than him who are not only good, but kind and religious in feeling,’ Tolstoy assured Urusov, another time stressing his meekness, and devotion to serving others.26
Vasily Alexeyev was the son of a retired officer and minor landowner who had married one of his serfs, whom he was known to beat. He grew up in the far western province of Pskov, hundreds of miles from Moscow.27 One of eight brothers and sisters, Alexeyev had excelled academically at an early age and won a place to study mathematics at St Petersburg University, where he became increasingly involved in left-wing politics. This was at the height of the Populist movement in the early 1870s and Alexeyev had got to know the revolutionary Nikolay Chaikovsky, leader of a circle involved in spreading socialist propaganda amongst the peasantry. It was Chaikovsky who introduced Alexeyev to Alexander Malikov, who was more of a religious idealist than a revolutionary and who came from a peasant background. Malikov had already spent time in prison and in exile because of his political beliefs, and now set his hopes on a mystical doctrine he had founded called Godman-hood, which combined socialist theory with Christian ethics. Seduced by his passionate oratory, Alexeyev became one of Malikov’s followers, but the Russian government inevitably viewed attempts to disseminate the teaching of Godmanhood as revolutionary propaganda and promptly arrested him. Although Alexeyev was soon released due to the lack of incriminating evidence, his father disowned him.
Malikov and Alexeyev realised it was going to be impossible to put their ideas into practice in Russia, where they were seen as subversive. Along with about a dozen others, they decided to emigrate to America in 1875, hoping to fulfil their dreams of living a morally pure life in the Land of the Free. Chaikovsky was already there, having fled Russia to avoid arrest, and so was the positivist Vladimir Geins, another disillusioned revolutionary who had re-christened himself William Frey (the closest possible transliteration in Cyrillic of the English word ‘free’). The group decided to settle in the Midwest. The southern part of kansas had been acquired from the Native Americans only five years earlier, and land was extremely cheap. By pooling their resources, the group were able to buy 160 acres of land in Cedarville, near Wichita, for the total sum of twenty-five dollars. Crowding into the two rooms of the small farmhouse on their holding, the young Russian pioneers attempted to set up a utopian agricultural commune.28 Although they augmented the two horses and a cow already on the land with more livestock, and sowed corn and wheat, there were immediate problems. No one knew how to milk a cow, for example. The community started out with noble ascetic ideals, and was happy to give up alcohol, meat, coffee, tea and sugar, but the fanatical and dogmatic Frey also banned bread, arguing that only food in its ‘natural’ state was acceptable. Medicines were also banned by him. But what finally undid the commune were the weekly meetings of ‘mutual criticism’ and ‘public confession’ which only exacerbated the numerous personal tensions that arose. The experiment was a disaster and the commune barely survived two years.
In late May 1877 Alexeyev returned to Russia, now with Malikov’s peasant wife Elizaveta and her two children in tow, one of whom was his. They had been dreadfully homesick in the American plains, and crossed the border on Trinity Sunday (Troitsa) to see young people dancing in the fields through the train window. In pre-revolutionary times, Russians traditionally celebrated Troitsa as the day on which the Holy Spirit descended on all of nature, not just the apostles. ‘Green Yuletide’, as it was also called in reference to the pagan traditions which accompanied all the major Christian holy days, was a particularly fertile and joyous time, when everything was in full bloom. It was also a date in the calendar particularly associated with youth, so it was a poignant day for Alexeyev to return to Russia – at twenty-nine he was four years younger than his future employer Countess Tolstoy. Trinity Sunday was celebrated at Yasnaya Polyana like everywhere else29 – the Tolstoy children would go to church in their Sunday best bearing armfuls of flowers, then take part in the dancing. Sonya would plant flowers and the local village girls would ask the cuckoos how many years awaited them before they married, calculating their answer from the number of calls they heard.30 Homes and village streets would be decorated with greenery, with bunches of carnations placed behind icons, and a profusion of periwinkles, peonies, cornflowers, violets and lilies placed on window-ledges. When Tolstoy went to worship that morning in May 1877 he would have encountered birch saplings and freshly cut grass and fragrant thyme strewn on the floor of the church. Along with other parishioners he would also have held a birch twig or flowers during the service as symbols of the Holy Spirit coming down to bring renewal.31 As well as the ritual songs and dances that came after church on Trinity Sunday in Russia, village girls at Yasnaya Polyana would weave garlands which they would throw on to ponds and lakes, in the hope they would float – a sign of long life.
Given his moral convictions and his past experiences, Alexeyev was understandably reluctant at first to become tutor to the Tolstoy children. Despite being desperately poor and in need of a job, he recoiled at the idea of coming to live in the house of a count, where meals were served by white-gloved servants. When Tolstoy heard this, however, he took an immediate interest in Alexeyev, and persuaded him to come just for a visit. Alexeyev’s doubts vanished as soon as they set off for a walk, during which he was closely questioned about his outlook on life. Tolstoy was a good listener, and Alexeyev was soon unbuttoning himself completely. He felt so uninhibited he even went into propaganda mode and showed Tolstoy the calloused hands he had acquired from all the manual labour he had done in America, imagining he was talking to an upper-class writer who had never picked up a tool. To his surprise, Tolstoy declared they were worth far more than the huge salaries earned by civil servants, and opened up to Alexeyev about his own ideals, sharing with him his despair at not being able to find answers to the questions that tormented him. He even showed Alexeyev the bough in the garden he had considered hanging himself from to escape from his afflictions. Tolstoy carried on talking to Alexeyev in his study for the rest of that day, and by evening Alexeyev had agreed to take the job, accepting Tolstoy’s suggestion that he rent the cottage just outside the Yasnaya Polyana gates for his family. Soon he was coming to the house every morning at eight to have coffee with the children before starting lessons in Russian and mathematics with Sergey, Tanya and Ilya. Within a year he felt so at home in the Tolstoy household that he moved with his family into the guest wing which Sonya’s sister stayed in during the summer months. The fact that he and Elizaveta were not actually married (which Sonya would not have approved of) was somehow glossed over.