1. Live in peace with all men (‘anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgement’).
2. Do not lust (‘anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart’) and do not divorce (‘anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery’).
3. Do not swear (‘Do not swear at alclass="underline" either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great king’).
4. Do not resist evil (‘If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’).
5. Do not hate (‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’).
If everyone followed these commandments, there would be no more wars and no need for armies. Indeed, living a Tolstoyan Christian life would eradicate the need for courts, police officers, personal property and any form of government. Morality was the cornerstone of Christianity for Tolstoy, and he now saw life in simple black-and-white terms. As he writes in What I Believe:
Everything which used to seem good and noble to me – ambition, fame, education, wealth, a complex and sophisticated lifestyle, environment, food, clothes, and formal manners – has become bad and sordid. Everything which seemed bad and sordid – the peasant lifestyle, obscurity, poverty, crudity, simple surroundings, food, clothes, manners – has become good and noble.49
It was not surprising that Nikolay Berdyaev later defined as one of Tolstoy’s many paradoxes the fact that this man who was Russian to the core of his being started preaching ‘Anglo-Saxon religiosity’,50 for there were striking parallels with the reformist views that Matthew Arnold had been promoting in Victorian England in the 1870s.
Like Tolstoy, Arnold had increasingly turned to religious questions later in his career, although in his case he was impelled by a desire to navigate the crisis caused by the resistance of the Church of England’s conservative theologians to the onslaught of scientific, rational thought (Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published in 1859). Tolstoy, of course, had met Arnold briefly in London in 1861, and when in 1885 he read Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible, the controversial book Arnold published in 1873, he exclaimed excitedly in a letter to a friend that he had found half of his own ideas in it.51 Tolstoy ensured that Arnold was sent a copy of What I Believe as soon as it appeared in translation. It was, incidentally, Matthew Arnold who first awakened a serious interest in Tolstoy in England, where he was largely unknown until the middle of the 1880s. In the essay he published in 1887, a few months before he died, Arnold introduced British readers to Tolstoy’s fiction. As well as presenting a strong case for the superiority of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary, it is interesting to note that he also presented a summary of Tolstoy’s religious philosophy to date. While sympathetic to its general thrust, Arnold had some judicious comments to make. Even without having the opportunity to read any of Tolstoy’s later religious writings, Arnold’s main exposure of the basic flaw in Tolstoy’s thinking, based on a reading of What I Believe, is in many ways unsurpassed in its lucidity and concision:
Christianity cannot be packed into any set of commandments. As I have somewhere or other said, ‘Christianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon of the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up.’52
Tolstoy was not a man to make concessions, however. In the spring of 1884, as he recovered from the exhaustion of completing the initial writing of What I Believe and then the various stages of proofreading (the number of changes he introduced at the first stage cost him about the same as the sum he was charged for the typesetting), he learned how to cobble shoes, and read Confucius and Lao Tzu.53
Family life in the Tolstoy home in Moscow was rather surreal in the early part of 1884. In one part of the house, Tolstoy was paring his footprint on the earth down to a minimum and castigating such depraved activities as physical adornment and dancing at balls, closely watched by the governor general.54 In another part of the house, Sonya and Tanya were dressing up in tulle and velvet to go to society balls where they fraternised with the governor general, who went out of his way to be friendly and curry favour with them.55 Sonya was still breast-feeding their two-year old son Alyosha, and she was pregnant again, but she was determined to enjoy herself. Tolstoy deplored the money his wife was spending on Tanya’s coming-out that season. Each dress alone cost up to 250 roubles, and he was well aware that twenty-five horses could have been bought with that money. He was also pained to think of the old coachmen shivering in the cold outside grand mansions while their employers partied, and so he absconded back to Yasnaya Polyana for a while to rest his frayed nerves. Sonya was also pained to think of her husband sitting in his dirty woollen socks at home, sewing misshapen boots for their old servant Agafya Mikhailovna, while their teenage sons Ilya and Lev were being delinquent and neglecting their schoolwork. She was fed up with him being a ‘holy fool’, she complained to her sister, reneging on his duties as a father, and no longer even interested in being part of family life.56 While Sonya wrote complaining letters to her sister Tanya, Tolstoy recorded in his diary, and in letters to Chertkov, the discord with his wife which prevented him from aligning their family’s life with his convictions. He felt he was the only sane person living in a madhouse run by madmen. But it was Tolstoy who was the madman according to his brother Sergey, who had as little sympathy for his suffering as Sonya.57
Relations continued to be strained that summer when the family moved back to Yasnaya Polyana, and Tanya arrived as usual to take up her summer residence in the other house, along with her children (as a rule, her husband, Alexander kuzminsky, did not join them). The summer days which Sonya spent with her sister were still the happiest time of year for her, but she was increasingly living apart from her husband. He had now started getting up even earlier, so he could do more physical work, and spent long days mowing with the peasants. He now also gave up eating meat, stopped drinking wine and tried to give up smoking.58 His personal self-discipline was not sufficient to maintain a cool head in his altercations with Sonya, however, and by early June he was longing to leave Yasnaya Polyana and move away from his family. There was a particularly bitter argument with Sonya about money on 17 June, just before she gave birth. Late that afternoon Tolstoy decided to leave, and he got halfway to Tula before feelings of guilt made him turn back. When the two bearded young men playing cards in the house (two of his sons) told him the rest of the family were outside playing croquet he retreated to his study, to be woken at three in the morning by Sonya, who had gone into labour.
The birth of Alexandra (Sasha) was not a happy occasion – Sonya had not wanted another child, she had dreaded giving birth, and she hired a wet-nurse this time in a fit of pique. Later she explained in her autobiography that Tolstoy was perennially so cold and unpleasant with her during this time, and so unhelpful around the house, that she felt no compunction about defying him in this matter.59 That July she was so unhappy that she could not refrain from unburdening herself in a letter to her husband’s former confidante Alexandrine. ‘Lyovochka has never been before in such an extreme frame of mind,’ she wrote, describing how difficult it was to find any common ground between them where they could both make compromises. She also found it hard that Tolstoy was complaining about her in letters, and telling his correspondents how lonely he was.60 Alexandrine was no doubt sympathetic. Her irascible relative had barely been in touch since they had fallen out over their divergent views on Christianity, and then suddenly that spring she had been bombarded with four letters from him in quick succession. Tolstoy wanted her to intercede on behalf of Anna Armfeldt, the widow of a Moscow University professor. Her daughter Natalya was a revolutionary who had been sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labour in kara, a particularly harsh prison in eastern Siberia, just north of the border with China (where convicts worked the gold mines). Natalya had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and her mother wanted to be able to settle near her.61