Natasha's Dance

understand why the peasants are so poor, why the mother cannot feed her baby, which continually cries. He wakes up from the dream transformed, ‘his face radiant with joy’, having at last felt a ‘change of heart’, and expressing his compassion for his fellow men.92 He knows that he is not guilty of his father’s murder, but is, he feels, to blame for the suffering of the peasants, his own serfs. Nobody can understand why Dmitry keeps muttering about the ‘poor baby’ or that it is the reason he ‘must go to Siberia!’93 But all is revealed at his trial:

    And what does it matter if I spend twenty years in the mines hacking out ore with a hammer? I’m not afraid of that at all. It’s something else that I fear now - that the new man that has arisen within me may depart. One can find a human heart there also, in the mines, under the ground, next to you, in another convict and murderer, and make friends with him. For there too one can live and love and suffer! One can breathe new light into the frozen heart of such a convict. One can wait on him for years and years and at last bring up from the thieves’ kitchen to the light of day a lofty soul, a soul that has suffered and has become conscious of its humanity, to restore life to an angel, bring back a hero! And there are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all responsible for them! Why did I dream of that ‘baby’ just then? ‘Why is the baby poor?’ That was a sign to me at that moment! It’s for the ‘baby’ that I’m going. For we are all responsible for all. For all the ‘babies’, for there are little children and big children. All of us are ‘babies’. And I’ll go there for all, for someone has to go for all.94

    Dostoevsky believed in a Church of social action and responsibility. He was critical of the official Church, which had allowed itself to become shackled by the Petrine state since the eighteenth century and, as a consequence, had lost its spiritual authority. He called on the

    Church to become more active in society. It had, he said, lost sight of its pastoral role and had shown itself to be indifferent to Russia’s major problem, the suffering of the poor. Such views were widely shared by lay theologians, like the Slavophile Khomiakov, and even by some priests in the Church hierarchy, whose writings were an influence on Dostoevsky.95 There was a common feeling that the Church was losing ground to the socialist intelligentsia and to the various sectarians and mystics who were searching for a more meaningful and socially responsible spiritual community.

    Dostoevsky’s writings must be seen in this context. He, too, was searching for such a Church, a Christian brotherhood like the Slavophiles’ sobornost’, that would transcend the walls of the monastery and unite all the Russians in a living community of believers. His Utopia, a socio-mystical ideal, was nothing less than a theocracy. Dostoevsky advanced this idea in The Brothers Karamazov - in the scene where Ivan gains the approbation of the elder Zosima for his article proposing the radical expansion of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. This was a subject of considerable topical importance at the time of the novel’s publication. Ivan argues that, contrary to the pattern of Western history, where the Roman Church was absorbed by the state, the idea of Holy Russia was to raise the state to the level of a Church. Ivan’s reforms of the courts would substitute the moral sanction of the Church for the coercive power of the state: instead of punishing its criminals, society should seek to reform their souls. Zosima rejoices at this argument. No criminal can be deterred, he argues, let alone reformed, by ‘all these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons’. But unlike the foreign criminal, Zosima maintains, even the most hardened Russian murderer retains sufficient faith to recognize and repent of his crime; and through this spiritual reformation, the elder predicts, not only would a member of the living Church be saved but ‘perhaps also the number of crimes themselves would diminish to a quite unbelievable extent’.96 From Dostoevsky’s Notebooks it is clear that he shared the elder’s theocratic vision (which was closely based on the writings of Optina’s Father Zedergolm) of a ‘single universal and sovereign Church’ that was destined to appear on the Russian land. ‘The star will shine in the East!’97

    According to Dostoevsky’s friend and fellow writer Vladimir Solov-

    iev, The Brothers Karamazov was planned as the first of a series of novels in which the writer would expound his ideal of the Church as a social union of Christian love.98 One can see this vision unfolding in the final scene of The Brothers Karamazov, where Alyosha (who has left the monastery and gone into the world) attends the funeral of the poor child Ilyusha, struck down by tuberculosis. After the service, he gathers around him a group of boys who had followed him in caring for the dying boy. There are twelve of these apostles. They gather at the stone where Ilyusha’s father had wanted to bury his son. In a farewell speech of remembrance, Alyosha tells the children that the spirit of the dead boy will live on for ever in their hearts. It will be a source of kindness in their lives and it will remind them, as Alyosha tells them, ‘How good life is when you do something that is good and just!’99 Here was a vision of a Church that lived outside the walls of any monastery, a Church that reached out to the heart of every child; a Church in which, as Alyosha had once dreamed, ‘ “there will be no more rich or poor, exalted nor humbled, but all men will be as the children of God and the real Kingdom of Christ will arrive”’.100

    The censors banned large parts of Dostoevsky’s novel, claiming that such passages had more to do with socialism than with Christ.101 It is perhaps ironic for a writer who is best known as an anti-socialist, but Dostoevsky’s vision of a democratic Church remained close to the socialist ideals which he espoused in his youth. The emphasis had changed - as a socialist he had believed in the moral need for the transformation of society, whereas as a Christian he had come to see that spiritual reform was the only way to effect social change - but essentially his quest for Truth had always been the same. Dostoevsky’s whole life can be seen as a struggle to combine the teaching of the Gospels with the need for social justice on this earth, and he thought he found his answer in the ‘Russian soul’. In one of his final writings Dostoevsky summarized his vision of the Russian Church:

    I am speaking now not about church buildings and not about sermons: I am speaking about our Russian ‘socialism’ (and, however strange it may seem, I am taking this word, which is quite the opposite of all that the Church represents, to explain my idea), whose purpose and final outcome is the

    establishment of the universal church on earth, insofar as the earth is capable of containing it. I am speaking of the ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great, general, universal union of brotherhood in the name of Christ. And if this union does not yet exist, if the Church has not yet been fully established - not merely in prayers alone, but in fact - then the instinct for this Church and the ceaseless longing for it… is still to be found in the hearts of the millions of our people. It is not in Communism, not in mechanical forms that we find the socialism of the Russian people: they believe that salvation is ultimately to be found in worldwide union in the name of Christ. That is our Russian socialism!102

5

    At 4 a.m. on 28 October 1910 Tolstoy crept out of his house at Yasnaya Polyana, took a carriage to the nearby station, and bought a third-class railway ticket to Kozelsk, the station for the monastery at Optina Pustyn. At the age of eighty-two, with just ten days to live, Tolstoy was renouncing everything - his wife and children, his family home in which he had lived for nearly fifty years, his peasants and his literary career - to take refuge in the monastery. He had felt the urge to flee many times before. Since the 1880s he had got into the habit of setting out at night to walk with the pilgrims on the Kiev road that passed by his estate - often not returning until breakfast time. But now his urge was to leave for good. The endless arguments with his wife Sonya, largely over the inheritance of his estate, had made life at home unbearable. He wanted peace and quiet in his final days.

    Tolstoy did not know where he was going. He left in a hurry, without plans. But something drew him to Optina. Perhaps it was The Brothers Karamazov, which Tolstoy had just read for the first time; or perhaps it was the presence of his sister Marya, the last survivor of his happy childhood, who was living out her last days at the nearby Shamordino convent under the direction of Optina’s monks. The monastery was not far from his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and on several occasions over the previous thirty years he had walked there like a peasant to calm his troubled mind by talking about God with the elder Amvrosy. The ascetic life of the Optina hermits was an

    inspiration to Tolstoy: so much so that Father Sergius (1890-98) - his story of an aide-de-camp-turned-hermit from Optina who struggles to find God through prayer and contemplation and at last finds peace as a humble pilgrim on the road - can be read as a monologue on Tolstoy’s own religious longing to renounce the world. Some say that Tolstoy was searching at Optina for a final reconciliation with the Church -that he did not want to die before his excommunication (imposed by the Church in 1901) had been rescinded. Certainly, if there was a site where such a reconciliation could have taken place, it was Optina, whose mystical approach to Christianity, uncluttered as it was by the rituals and institutions of the Church, was very close to Tolstoy’s own religious faith. But it seems more likely that Tolstoy was driven by the need to ‘go away’. He wanted to escape from the affairs of this world to prepare his soul for the journey to the next.

    To judge from A Confession,