Fearless as Tolstoy was, he was probably unaware of the extent of the police operation which had been mounted to follow his every move. At the same time, the police probably had no idea quite how much trouble Tolstoy was going to cause them in the coming years. His meetings with Prugavin and the Molokans out on the steppe had been immediately reported to the Bishop of Samara by a local priest back in the summer of 1881, and since then, the matter had then been transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg, which now began to monitor his ‘harmful activities’. In September, for the first time since 1862 (when his peasant school activities had resulted in Yasnaya Polyana being searched for seditious material), Tolstoy was placed under permanent covert surveillance.24 In December that year Tolstoy was improbably nominated to be the next Marshal of the Nobility in his district by the Tula local government, which had not yet been informed about the surveillance activities. Unaware that Tolstoy had immediately turned down the appointment, konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, wrote to warn the new Minister of Internal Affairs, Count Dmitry Tolstoy (the distant relative who in the 1870s had been Minister of Education):
In recent years Count Tolstoy’s fantasies have suddenly changed once again, and he has succumbed to religious mania. This has resulted in his complete estrangement from Christianity – in the sense of belief. He has put together a retelling of the Gospels in his own words with a commentary, full of cynicism, in which he preaches Christian morality in the rational sense, rejecting the teaching of a personal God and the divinity of Christ the saviour. He had intended to publish this work abroad, but refrained after earnest pleading from his wife (his last child has not been christened, despite his wife’s entreaties), and it is now circulating in manuscript. He is in contact with all the rational sects, the Molokans, the [Syutayevites] and so on …25
Tolstoy’s movements during his trip to Samara in the summer of 1883 were indeed watched closely. A local police agent reported that Tolstoy had tried to preach the principle of equality to a group of peasants, whom he had exhorted to renounce private property, and reject the government. A few days later it was reported that he had been persuading peasants that they were wasting their time decorating churches and going to services.26 From now on, the police would sedulously follow Tolstoy’s every move, noting in its regular bulletins his arrivals and departures from Moscow.27
Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana that July to find a brief letter from Turgenev, with whom he had been in affectionate correspondence. Turgenev informed him he was now on his deathbed, but that was not the main reason for writing:
I’m actually writing to you in order to tell you how glad I was to be your contemporary, and to put to you my last, sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! This gift has come to you from where everything else comes from. Oh, how happy I would be if I could think that my request makes an impact on you!! I am a finished man – the doctors do not even know what to call my malady, Névralgie stomacale goutteuse. I can’t walk, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, but so what! It’s even boring to repeat all this! My friend, great writer of the Russian land – heed my request! Let me know that you have received this note, and let me once again embrace you, and your family very, very warmly, can’t write more, too tired.28
Tolstoy was deeply touched by this letter (although he was later probably rather annoyed when Turgenev’s phrase ‘great writer of the Russian land’ became a cliché regularly fixed to his name). Turgenev died the following month, unaware that his friend had in fact partially returned to literature. In 1881 Tolstoy had started work on a new novella which would in time receive the title The Death of Ivan Ilych. He had put it aside in 1883, but would return to work on it the following year, placating Sonya, who also longed for her husband to return to fiction so that she could once again be part of his creative life as his copyist.
Although Tolstoy did not return to literature in the way Turgenev would have liked (fiction would never claim his attention again in the way it had earlier), he was nevertheless keen to honour his friend. He therefore readily agreed to speak at the commemorative meeting of Moscow’s venerable Russian Literature Society that was planned for late October 1883, perhaps prompted by his conscience, having rather arrogantly refused to take part in the Pushkin celebrations in 1880. When it became known that Tolstoy was going to give a public lecture, the news spread rapidly throughout the city and was considered sufficiently important to be reported in the press. The head of press censorship wrote at once to inform the Minister of Internal Affairs: ‘Tolstoy is a lunatic, you can expect anything from him; he may say incredible things and there will be a huge scandal’. Dmitry Tolstoy took action by informing the Moscow governor, Prince Dolgorukov, who promptly banned the commemorative meeting from taking place. There was bitter disappointment amongst the Moscow intelligentsia.29
Count Dmitry Tolstoy was forced to deal with his anarchic relative about another matter that autumn. Tolstoy was appointed to be a juror for the Tula regional court, and his refusal to serve on religious grounds was again reported in Russia’s main newspapers. Fearing that the authority of the courts might be undermined if others followed his example, this time Dmitry Tolstoy expressed his concerns to the Tsar.30 But Tolstoy was now unstoppable. In 1883, instalments of Confession began to appear in the revolutionary émigré journal The Common Cause, which was based in Geneva.31 The first separate edition of Confession, as it was now called, was produced by the journal’s publisher Mikhail Elpidin the following year. Elpidin was another former seminary student turned revolutionary who had escaped from prison and fled abroad, where he also published the first edition of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? in 1867. The émigré edition of Confession was reprinted many times. In June 1883 a French translation of Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief was also published in a Paris journal. Its translator, Leonid Urusov, the vice-governor of Tula, and a friend sympathetic to Tolstoy’s views, had already started working on a French translation of What I Believe.32 Tolstoy had planned to ‘publish’ What I Believe in Russian Thought, anticipating that hectographed copies of the proofs would circulate, following certain prohibition by the censor, as had been the case with Confession. It was now too voluminous to be submitted as an article, however, and Tolstoy resolved to publish it as a book instead.33 The work on What I Believe had been intense, but in early October, exhausted but jubilant, he was ready to hand the manuscript over for typesetting. He made an interesting new acquaintance when he stopped off in Tula on his way to Moscow. The Sanskrit scholar Ivan Minaev, Professor of Comparative Philology at St Petersburg University, was Russia’s greatest expert on Buddhism, and had travelled extensively in India. Tolstoy’s interest in the Eastern religions was to grow exponentially in the last decades of his life, and he grilled Minaev for over five hours on the precise aspects of Buddhism on which he wanted clarification.34
Although Tolstoy felt extremely lonely in the midst of his uncomprehending family, he was beginning to find more people from an educated background with whom he could have meaningful conversations, either in person or by letter. The first had been his children’s teacher Vasily Alexeyev, who had moved out to work on his Samara estate in 1881, and with whom he was still in regular contact. People were also beginning to make their way to him. At the end of 1882 Tolstoy had embarked on an intense, brief correspondence with a former university student exiled on his father’s estate in Smolensk province.35 But it was in Vladimir Chertkov, who came to visit Tolstoy in Moscow in October 1883, that he found his greatest kindred spirit and most devoted disciple. From this point until Tolstoy’s death Chertkov would occupy an ever more important role in his life as his closest friend and partner in their shared mission to disseminate what they saw as true Christianity.