At this point, Confession was still entitled ‘Introduction to an Unpublished Work’ – the work in question being An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology, his response to Metropolitan Makary’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. All secular writing which touched on questions of faith, or was related to the Church in some way, had to be submitted for approval by the religious censor committee. Its members were based at the Trinity St Sergius Monastery outside Moscow, but were beholden to the Holy Synod, the secular governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had its headquarters in St Petersburg. On 21 June the committee finally gave its verdict. On the basis of a close examination of Tolstoy’s text, Archpriest Filaret, Rector of the Moscow Theological Seminary, came to the conclusion that Tolstoy’s attitude to Orthodoxy was disrespectful and so his article was therefore inadmissible. The committee demanded that it be cut from each printed copy of the journal and destroyed by the police. Despite this edict, which made headline news in the press, Confession was soon widely read. Such was the interest aroused by any new work by Tolstoy that several senior figures in the government demanded to be sent copies before they were destroyed, and these soon circulated. Multiple copies were also made from the few offprints of the final proofs which had remained in the Russian Thought editorial office. These were then hectographed or lithographed and distributed throughout Russia with the help of a student organisation in Petersburg which specialised in this kind of samizdat (and whose main warehouse was ironically a Petersburg apartment whose owner had an indirect connection to the Minister for Internal Affairs – head of the Russian police). Confession became available for purchase at three roubles a copy, and thus reached a far wider readership than it would have done through the legitimate means of the 3,000-circulation Russian Thought.15 Turgenev even heard about it in Paris, and wrote to ask Tolstoy for a copy. Despite finding it rather depressing to read (its argument was based on false principles in his opinion, which led to a kind of nihilistic negation of all forms of human life), he nevertheless still regarded Tolstoy as the most remarkable individual in Russia.16
Tolstoy viewed Confession as the first part of a tetralogy, of which the second and third parts, his Investigation of Dogmatic Theology and Union and Translation of the Four Gospels remained unpublished. Completing a first draft of the fourth part, What I Believe, became his task for the summer of 1882. If the first three parts of this major new project were designed to expose the falsity of the Church’s doctrine, the goal of What I Believe was to reveal the true meaning of Christianity, as set out in the Gospels. For Tolstoy, that meaning was essentially contained in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, 5–7), which alone offered the possibility of creating heaven on earth in his opinion. He was also convinced that it was the Church’s teachings which actually made it impossible to follow the prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount to the letter.17
Completing the first draft of What I Believe produced a state of spiritual euphoria in Tolstoy, and reawakened a desire which had lain dormant ever since he had set out on his quest to live a life consonant with the religious and moral principles he had painfully been hammering out for himself. He wanted to leave his family and make a complete break with his former life, but voicing this desire aloud to his wife resulted in the first serious rift between them. The violent row on a hot August night which led to them sleeping apart was not easily forgotten. Sonya had devoted her life to her husband and his writings, and to bringing up their children. She was already angry that he had been neglecting them ever since they had moved to Moscow, and the thought of him leaving altogether was devastating. Tolstoy was, in fact, deeply conflicted. He was repelled by his family’s patrician lifestyle, but he still loved Sonya deeply – they would have two more children during the next few difficult years – and he had a keen sense of his obligations. In the spring of 1882, after resigning himself to the fact that his family was going to live in Moscow whether he liked it or not, Tolstoy went house-hunting. Days after delivering the proofs of Confession to the editorial office of Russian Thought, he finally decided to buy an old wooden house for them in a quiet back street on the outskirts of the city centre. He had been to visit it several times and negotiated a price of 36,000 roubles. He then spent part of the summer carrying out improvements and repairs so the family could move in at the beginning of autumn.
The house, which dated back to 1808, had belonged to a merchant couple who had bred large numbers of dogs, and was not in a fashionable residential area.18 Sonya was crestfallen when she first came to Dolgo-khamovnichesky Lane and set eyes on the rather shabby and nondescript house, which had a lunatic asylum and a brewery for neighbours and stood opposite a textile factory. But it had a lush, tranquil garden which made it seem more like a country estate than an inner-city house, and Tolstoy’s mind was made up by the profusion of roses, gooseberry bushes and fruit trees it contained.19 Tolstoy worked conscientiously that summer: as well as whitewashing, wall-papering and plastering, there were stoves to repair, parquet floors to lay and pieces of furniture to buy. The family moved in on 8 October, happy to be settled at last in what would be their home for the winter months. While Sonya became caught up in a hectic whirl of activities, as she sought to keep all the children under control as well as entertain them, Tolstoy consoled himself that autumn by studying Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi, who was rather taken aback to find his pupil arguing with him about the meaning of certain passages of the Old Testament after only a few lessons.20
As time went on, Tolstoy sought to bring more aspects of his life into line with his religious ideals, and 1883 was a pivotal year in this regard. He now wore peasant clothes in the city as well as at home in the country, dispensed with his title wherever possible and tried to avoid having to be waited upon, but he was conscious that there was a lot more he could do. While visiting Yasnaya Polyana that May, after doing what he could to help put out a fire in the village which destroyed twenty-two peasant homes, he took the first steps in divesting himself of his property, including his literary works, by handing to Sonya power of attorney. Immediately afterwards he travelled for the last time to Samara, where he sold his horses and cattle. He also divided up his land there into five plots to let to peasants.21 During his month on the steppe, Tolstoy engaged in heated discussions with a peasant revolutionary living under police surveillance, and endeavoured to show him and his comrades that the use of violence was both immoral and futile.22 He also wrote to Sonya to tell her he had renewed his contact with the local Molokans, with whom he had further long conversations about Christianity. He knew full well that this contact would come to the attention of the police, but despite Sonya’s qualms, his response was ‘Let them report it’.23