This is no ordinary summary of the New Testament, for the Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to Lev is a Christian after Tolstoy’s own heart: an ordinary man who is critical of organised religion, and unafraid to speak out against attempts to obstruct his ethical message. The Jesus projected by Tolstoy is a lone crusader swimming against the current of public opinion, a ‘humble sectarian’ with whom he could identify, as well as look up to morally.103 This was paramount, and one is reminded of his practice as a novelist. It is striking that what he had most admired about Peter the Great when he had sought to write a novel about him, for example, was his huge energy and productivity – qualities he himself possessed in abundance. Tolstoy essentially stripped the Gospels down to their moral message. By discarding accounts of Christ’s baptism and early childhood, all miracles, the story of the Resurrection, anything referring to Jesus as a divine or historical figure, and passages highlighting the special mission of anointed apostles, Tolstoy ended up with about half of the original texts from the New Testament. He did, however, retain all direct quotations of Jesus’ speech, which means the Gospel according to St John features far more than the Gospel according to St Mark, which includes many miracles. The key importance of St Matthew’s Gospel for Tolstoy was due to the Sermon on the Mount, which was to become the cornerstone of his teaching.104
Ivan Ivakin, the new tutor at Yasnaya Polyana, was a Moscow University graduate, and at first he could not understand why Tolstoy wanted to talk about the finer details of New Testament wording, since the gossip columns in Russian newspapers at the time were still talking about him writing a novel about the Decembrists. Ivakin was soon initiated into Tolstoy’s work in progress, and when it became clear that his knowledge of Greek was far superior to that of his employer, he was immediately inveigled into helping out. The pale-faced young man with exceptionally slender fingers left some vivid memoirs of his time at Yasnaya Polyana. It has to be said, he was not very impressed with Tolstoy’s command of Greek, and took a rather wry view of his selective and distinctly unacademic approach, which jettisoned concrete details: ‘“Why should we be interested to know that Christ went out into the courtyard?” he would say. “Why do I need to know that he was resurrected? Good for him if he was! For me what is important is knowing what to do, and how I should live.”’105
Ivakin clearly found it sometimes a little challenging to work with Tolstoy, since the ‘inimitable’ author was even parti pris when it came to translating the New Testament passages dealing with ethics which survived his ruthless editing. In War and Peace, Tolstoy had manipulated events and people to suit the particular view of history he was proposing. Now he wanted Christ’s apostles to confirm views he had already formed:
Sometimes he would come running to me from his study with the Greek Gospel and ask me to translate some extract or other. I would do the translation, and usually it came out the same as the accepted Church translation. ‘But couldn’t you give this such and such a meaning?’ he would ask, and he would say how much he hoped that would be possible.106
Tolstoy spent a particularly long time mulling over the opening paragraph in the Gospel of St John (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…’). He fairly swiftly decided to interpret the Greek logos as ‘reasoning’ rather than ‘the word’ (the Russian word razumenie implying both rational enquiry and understanding), but he then came up against the problem of translating pros ton theon (‘with God’), which the first Church Slavonic Bible renders as ‘from God’. Dismissing the literal meaning of ‘towards God’ as meaningless, and condemning the Vulgate ‘apud Deum’ and Luther’s ‘bei Gott’ as meaningless and also inaccurate, Tolstoy’s far more radical version, on the basis of a lengthy discussion of the preposition pros was ‘and reasoning replaced God’.107
6. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905
By the time Alexander II was finally assassinated by revolutionaries on 1 March 1881, Tolstoy was ready to become, if not quite a Protestant, certainly a protestant in terms of the Orthodox Church, and his boldness was compared on more than one occasion with that of Luther, Jan Hus and Calvin.108 Horrified by the thought of the conspirators being executed, Tolstoy sat down and wrote a letter to the new tsar, Alexander III, pleading for clemency in the name of Christian forgiveness. He then wrote a letter to the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, konstantin Pobedonostsev, asking him to pass his letter on to the Tsar, and another to Strakhov, asking him to hand both letters over to Pobedonostsev. Sonya reacted with equanimity to having to go into national mourning by dressing in black crêpe from head to foot,109 but she was aghast at her husband’s latest action. It had been bad enough while he had been devout, and had insisted on observing the fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays. To retaliate, she had insisted on providing non-Lenten food for Vasily Alexeyev and Jules Montels, neither of whom were Orthodox, despite their readiness to eat what was offered, and she had then enforced the family’s Lenten diet even more strictly when she noticed Tolstoy’s faith wavering. On Good Friday, the strictest day of fasting, temptation had got the better of Tolstoy and he gave up eating Lenten food for ever after tucking into some of the meat that had been prepared for the two tutors. Sonya also stopped copying her husband’s new manuscripts. She had found the pedagogical materials turgid, but the theological writing was far worse, and she confided in a letter to her sister Tanya that she had thought of leaving Tolstoy that spring. She reckoned that life at Yasnaya Polyana had been a lot better without Christianity.110 She was also pregnant again.
The friction between the Tolstoys was now coming out into the open more and more frequently. When Sonya overheard Vasily Alexeyev supporting her husband’s plea for clemency for the Tsar’s assassins one morning over coffee, she exploded, terrified at the repercussions that Tolstoy’s letter might cause. Alexeyev realised it was time for him to leave Yasnaya Polyana, and he asked Tolstoy for permission to make a personal copy of his Gospel translations to take away with him, knowing they could never be published in Russia. Since time was not on his side, he restricted himself to copying Tolstoy’s Gospel excerpts and the general summaries in each chapter. This text was later prefaced by Tolstoy’s introduction and entitled Gospel in Brief. It would be the first of his religious works to be published abroad. During World War I, Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief made a profound impression on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who chanced to find it in a bookshop in Galicia. He later claimed it had virtually kept him alive.111
Friends and relatives who came to visit Yasnaya Polyana in the spring of 1881 were drawn into vituperative arguments about capital punishment and the Church, and Sonya started to worry that her husband’s Christian charity was going to result in him giving away all they had to the poverty-stricken peasants who were coming to Yasnaya Polyana in ever increasing numbers, knowing they would not leave empty-handed. To begin with, Tolstoy wrote a thumbnail sketch of each petitioner down in his diary, noting, for example, one old woman’s tears dropping on to the dust and another peasant’s toothless smile (Tolstoy himself was toothless by this time).112 Needless to say, Pobedonostsev refused to pass on Tolstoy’s letter to the Tsar, and the conspirators were hanged in early April. ‘Our Christ is not your Christ,’ wrote Pobedonostsev crisply in the letter he finally sent Tolstoy in June.113 Tolstoy brought his work on the Gospels to a halt that month, because he wanted to make another pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn. This time, instead of Strakhov, he took along as companion his servant Sergey Arbuzov, and instead of travelling by train he went on foot, dressed like a muzhik, complete with bast shoes specially commissioned from a peasant in the village.