Tolstoy began to feel it was time he too went on another pilgrimage. While researching his latest project he had become very interested in the fate of his ancestors Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy and his son Ivan Petrovich who had both died in exile at the prison-monastery on the remote Solovetsky islands in the 1720s. Naturally, Alexandrine received another letter asking if she could help him provide any information about the first Count Tolstoy, who had been one of Peter the Great’s most trusted statesmen.67 Meanwhile, Pyotr Andreyevich’s descendant conceived the idea of travelling up to the Arctic waters of the White Sea himself that summer, and in May he wrote to Strakhov to ask if would like to accompany him.68 Thousands of pilgrims undertook the long journey north during the brief summer months to the fifteenth-century monastery, which was one of the holiest places in Russia, but it turned out that Strakhov did not want to be one of their number.
In the end, Tolstoy went to kiev, the cradle of Russian civilisation, to visit the famed Caves Monastery which dated back to the early eleventh century. He had high expectations, having been inspired by his conversations with all the wanderers he had talked to, who had told him that the monks in kiev lived as ascetically as the early Church Fathers.69 He was to be bitterly disappointed: as far as he could see, the holy relics on show were fakes, and the monk he went to talk to about faith turned him away, saying he was too busy. Tolstoy presumed it was because he had dressed as an ordinary pilgrim, and did not reveal his true identity, which would have commanded greater respect.70 What he did not take into account, however, was that he was one of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who arrived in kiev every year, and the monastery had difficulty coping. There were some who arrived on foot, but large numbers, including Tolstoy, were able to use the new railway network to travel comfortably by train, and the huge increase in visitors posed a very real threat to the spiritual integrity of sacred institutions which were traditionally used to silence and contemplation.71 Be that as it may, Tolstoy’s pilgrimage to the Caves Monastery in kiev was a turning point on his religious journey.
In the autumn of 1879 Tolstoy’s thoughts returned yet again to his historical novel. He went to Moscow in September to do some more foraging in the archives. All year, the archivist of the Ministry of Justice had been sending him materials relating to Russian criminal cases in early-eighteenth-century Russia. In October he would send further documents which shed light on how the people had related to Peter the Great’s reforms, but by this time Tolstoy had lost interest. It was religious questions which were at the fore-front of his mind during that visit to Moscow, and he now urgently wanted some answers. Tolstoy wanted to know, for example, why the Church had prayed for the imperial army to prevail in the recent Russo-Turkish War, when killing people went against one of the most basic tenets of the Christian faith. He wanted to know why the Orthodox Church was intolerant of people who practised other faiths, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, Old Believers or sectarians. And at a time when increasing numbers of revolutionaries were being executed, he wanted to know why the Church in Russia supported capital punishment.72 In order to try to find some answers to these pressing questions, Tolstoy went straight to the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had meetings with Moscow’s august Metropolitan Makary, and with the Bishop of Mozhaysk, and then travelled out to Sergiev Posad, to visit the most important monastery in Russia. Named after St Sergius of Radonezh, who founded it in the fourteenth century, the Trinity St Sergius Monastery was by the time of Tolstoy’s visit a vast and wealthy institution with some 400 monks and roughly half a million annual pilgrims. That year, Tolstoy was one of them.73
Father Nikon was deputed to show Tolstoy round the monastery’s cathedrals, and also the sacristy, where some of the chains worn by ascetic monks in the past were on display. Tolstoy was not impressed to learn that the tradition had not been maintained by the monastery’s monks. After attending a meeting of the Moscow Spiritual Academy, which was based there, one of its eminent faculty innocently asked him when his next novel was coming out. Quoting a verse from the second book of Peter, Tolstoy spat back that he did not want to be like a dog returning to his own vomit. Those present were probably too shocked to be impressed by his close familiarity with the Gospels, but they were certainly left in no doubt as to how he now related to his artistic works. Tolstoy submitted the monastery’s archimandrite to the same volley of questions he had posed to the representatives of the Church in Moscow. He was not satisfied by any of the answers he received. The archimandrite was rather shocked to encounter such pride, and produced the verdict: ‘I fear it will end badly.’74
After returning home to Yasnaya Polyana in early October, Tolstoy made a note in his diary: ‘The Church, from the present day all the way back to the third century, is one long series of lies, cruelty and deception.’ By its very nature, he went on to observe, religious faith cannot submit to political power.75 The tide had turned. In December Tolstoy went to talk to the Bishop of Tula about the faith of the common people, about pilgrimage and asceticism, and evidently scared the living daylights out of him by pinning him to the wall with his ‘burning questions’ and allowing no compromises.76 The bishop advised the count to talk to Father Alexander, another priest in Tula, and Tolstoy typically acted on his suggestion immediately. It was Father Alexander who recommended that he study Metropolitan Makary’s Dogmatic Theology. Metropolitan Makary was a high-ranking church figure, but also a prolific scholar renowned for his thirty-volume History of the Russian Church. His authoritative Orthodox Dogmatic Theology was an award-winning five-volume work which went into many editions. Tolstoy wasted no time in obtaining a copy, and then sat down to study it very carefully.77 He now had a project: he would put Orthodox theology to the test. He also began to write down the story of his spiritual journey, and embark on his own translation of the Gospels.
While Tolstoy’s soul was in ferment, family life went on around him at Yasnaya Polyana. Lessons, birthday parties, weddings, musical evenings, picnics, housework, and visits from family and friends all continued as usual. Sonya was always busy. When she was not teaching the children she was running the household, and she had very little time to herself. She had also been pregnant for most of 1879, and on 18 December, just after Tolstoy started getting to grips with Orthodox dogma, she gave birth to their seventh son, Mikhail (Misha). Another small baby meant postponing again any time for herself. That spring she had enjoyed doing some gardening, with the help of Jules Montels (who was also very deft at producing omelettes and cups of hot chocolate for their summer picnics). The window boxes and flower-beds she had sown with stocks, asters, verbena and phlox brought wonderful colour and heavenly scent. Sewing clothes, which also occupied her that spring, was not nearly as enjoyable as sowing seeds. She had to sew summer clothes for all her six children and it became very arduous. ‘I’ve been sewing away and I’m now sick to death of it and totally desperate,’ she wrote to her sister Tanya in March 1879. ‘I’ve got throat spasms, my head hurts… but I’ve still got to keep sewing. Sometimes I want to break down these walls and escape to freedom.’78 Tolstoy had been to Moscow twice that autumn, but Sonya had not even gone beyond the gates of Yasnaya Polyana. In January 1880 she wrote a particularly plaintive letter to her sister Tanya:
My captive life is sometimes so hard! Just think, Tanya, I haven’t been out of the house since September. The same prison, even if it’s quite bright in the moral and material sense. But sometimes there is still the feeling that someone has locked me up, keeping me here, and I want to push everything away, break everything around me and break out no matter where – as soon as I can!79