Tolstoy’s conspicuous absence from the celebrations in Moscow was certainly much commented on. Rumour had it that he was ill, going mad, or already mad. Dostoyevsky was tempted to travel to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Tolstoy finally, but decided against it. In little over half a year he would be dead, and only then, sitting alone at dinner one cold, dark February evening, having arrived home late, and crying into his plate, did Tolstoy realise quite how dear Dostoyevsky was to him.89 When he had been ill the previous September, Tolstoy had re-read Notes from the House of the Dead, the book which allegorises Dostoyevsky’s spiritual rebirth during his years of hard labour in a Siberian prison, and he had marvelled at its ‘sincere, natural and Christian point of view’. He had asked Strakhov to pass on affectionate greetings to Dostoyevsky,90 who was terribly pleased by this, but less so by Tolstoy’s lack of reverence for Pushkin. Strakhov tried to mollify Dostoyevsky by saying that Tolstoy had become even more of a ‘free-thinker’ than he had been before.91 Tolstoy’s belated appreciation of Dostoyevsky is revealing of his sentimentality, for the truth is that he was utterly repelled by the mixture of piety and patriotism in Dostoyevsky’s later worldview. The feeling was mutual. Alexandrine had become close to Dostoyevsky shortly before he died, and the writer had bristled with indignation when she showed him some of Tolstoy’s recent letters about religion.92
Sonya reported to Strakhov in March 1880 that her husband was working to exhaustion and getting terrible headaches, but could not be torn from his desk.93 Tolstoy was, in fact, so excited by the challenge of confronting the Orthodox Church that he carried on working through the spring and into the summer, contrary to his usual routine.94 There was no rest cure in Samara in 1880, but just three short trips to Moscow in late autumn to find new teachers for the children. One by one, the eleven volumes of the latest edition of his writings went on sale, but another year passed without Tolstoy venturing into print with anything new. He was aware that he would face difficulties with publishing all three of the projects he was working on now, but bringing them to completion was a matter of life importance to him. Their eventual publication abroad would set the seal on the antagonistic position he had taken up in relation to the Orthodox Church, and from that point on there would be no going back.
Once Tolstoy had worked through the 1,000-plus pages of Makary’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, as well as other key expositions of the Eastern Christian doctrine by authors ranging from St John of Damascus to other recent Moscow metropolitans, he began his critical exegesis, setting out in painstaking detail its major flaws, as he saw them. The Tula priest who had originally recommended that Tolstoy read Makary was startled to receive a second visit from the count a year later. Tolstoy declared that he had read Orthodox Dogmatic Theology from cover to cover, and furthermore, he informed Father Alexander with evident satisfaction, his year of study had not only not convinced him of the truth of Orthodox dogma, but in fact the opposite. He now realised that the apostles had actually distorted Christ’s teaching. Indeed, when he had come to see that Orthodox doctrine was just an artificial confection of often opaque and contradictory expressions of faith, he said, he began to understand why Russian seminaries produced so many atheists. Here Tolstoy was alluding to the many graduates of seminaries who had become revolutionaries. Chernyshevsky, who was still languishing in Siberian exile, was one, and in the 1890s Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) would become another.95
The first draft of Tolstoy’s own weighty Investigation of Dogmatic Theology was finally finished in 1882.96 He does not pull any punches in it, at one point calling Makary an outright liar, dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a ‘vile, criminal, blasphemous lie’ and subjecting it to ridicule by describing biblical mysteries in his own words (as in ‘God had a three-way conversation with his son and the Holy Spirit’).97 As Tolstoy goes on, his tone becomes more aggressive. He does not just refute the notion that Christ redeemed all of mankind by dying on the cross, since people afterwards were ‘just the same’, but goes on to accuse the Church of inventing the sacraments and the idea that Christ was divine sometime back in the third century. Pointing out that he is probably the only person to have read Makary from cover to cover apart from seminarists studying for exams, Tolstoy ends his obloquy with the allegation that the Orthodox Church no longer enjoyed any moral authority amongst either the educated classes or the common people in Russia. Tolstoy toned down his criticisms for publication in 1891, but only a little.98
Aware that readers of his novels might be a little taken aback to be confronted suddenly by a tendentious theological monograph in which the minutiae of Orthodox doctrine were submitted to rational scrutiny, Tolstoy felt he should preface it with a personal account of how he had come to embark on his critique of the Church.99 The much briefer, and frankly far more readable, Confession was thus initially entitled ‘Introduction to an Unpublished Work’, and was completed in 1880. Bearing obvious comparison with the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, Tolstoy’s interrogation of the meaning of life begins in his childhood, and charts his spiritual evolution with a painful and engaging honesty which Sonya summarised in notes made in her 1881 diary. She writes that her husband saw the ‘light’, as he put it, when he realised the source of ‘goodness, forbearance and love’ amongst the people was the Gospels, not the Church. It was the Church which had, in fact, obscured this message by insisting that salvation was only possible through the sacraments of christening, communion, fasting and so on. Tolstoy’s ‘whole outlook was illuminated by this light’, she wrote, leading him to see millions of people as his brothers, his conscience greatly troubled by the poverty and injustice he saw around him.100
Fundamental to Tolstoy’s repudiation of Orthodox doctrine was his own new ‘unified’ translation of the Gospels, which he worked on intensely in the second half of 1880 and ‘finished’ in July 1881. He was aware that he needed to work further on it, but at that point wanted to move on to other things. Tolstoy now considered his Union and Translation of the Four Gospels to be the most important thing he had done in his life.101 With the assistance of Ivan Ivakin, the new family tutor who arrived in September 1880, he methodically worked his way through the New Testament in the original Greek, using academic editions supplied by the ever-helpful Strakhov. These included the authoritative edition produced in the 1770s by Johann Griesbach, Professor of Theology at the University of Jena, whose philological rigour had launched a new era in biblical scholarship, and the heavily annotated new French translation produced by another Protestant theologian, Professor Edouard Reuss, based at the University of Strasbourg.102 Tolstoy’s aim was to make sense of the morass of contradictions and obscurities he found in the Scriptures, clarify their central message, and extract some practical moral guidance which could be applied to daily living.
The experience of going back to the original texts was a revelation to Tolstoy. Drawing from each of the four Gospels to produce one unified text (‘since they set out the same events and the same teaching, although in conflicting ways’), and accompanying it with his commentary, Tolstoy produced twelve titled chapters which follow Christ’s life from birth to death. Each biblical excerpt in his version is given firstly in the original Greek, secondly in a modern Russian translation of the Church Slavonic biblical text (which would have been as archaic to a nineteenth-century Russian ear as the English of the Wycliffe Bible would have seemed to a nineteenth-century British ear), and thirdly in his own more accessible version. For the latter, he deliberately used colloquial words wherever possible, with a peasant readership in mind.