SECTARIAN, ANARCHIST, HOLY FOOL - Tolstoy: A Russian Life

On February 18, 1884, the police seized all copies of Tolstoy's "What I Believe In". Here is an excerpt from Tolstoy: A Russian Life Chapter 11:

"Tolstoy's strategy for getting What I Believe past the censor was to write from a deliberately subjective point of view, print only fifty copies and set the price at an eye-watering twenty-five roubles, but he was deluding himself if he thought his unequivocal rejection of both secular and ecclesiastical power would be condoned.46 On 18 February 1884 the thirty-nine copies remaining at the printer were confiscated, but to Tolstoy's delight they were not destroyed. Instead they were sent to Petersburg, where, along with the eight copies which Tolstoy had been required to submit for inspection, they were delivered to the many high-ranking figures in the government and the imperial court who were anxious to read Tolstoy's latest work. They then passed the book on to others. In no time, What I Believe was also being lithographed and sold for four roubles a copy.47 Tolstoy himself was a willing accomplice in the illegal samizdat operation, and paid scribes fifteen roubles to make copies of his manuscript for distribution.48French, German and English translations were soon underway.

What I Believe was an important work for Tolstoy, and one he had been building up to in his previous religious writings. He took particular care with its exposition as it was the first systematic explanation of his religious and ethical views, his 'creed'. Tolstoy wanted a religion which would stand up to rational scrutiny. He wanted a clear, straightforward set of rules to follow in his daily life, and he found them in Christ's five commandments in his Sermon on the Mount, which can be briefly summarised as follows:

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 all: 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"