NATASHA

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, Tolstoy's turn to God was a sudden one - the result of a moral crisis in the latter half of the 1870s. This, too, is the view of most scholars, who draw a sharp distinction between the literary Tolstoy of the pre-crisis decades and the religious thinker of the post-crisis years. But in fact the search for faith was a constant element of Tolstoy's life and art.¹⁰³ His whole identity was bound up in the quest for spiritual meaning and perfection, and he took his inspiration from the life of Christ. Tolstoy thought of God in terms of love and unity. He wanted to belong, to feel himself a part of a community. This was the ideal he sought in marriage and in his communion with the peasantry. For Tolstoy, God is love: where there is love, there is God. The divine core of every human being is in their compassion and ability to love. Sin is loss of love - a punishment itself - and the only way to find redemption is through love itself. This theme runs through all Tolstoy's fiction, from his first published story, 'Family Happiness' (1859) to his final novel, Resurrection (1899). It is misleading to see these literary works as somehow separate from his religious views. Rather, as with Gogol, they are allegories - icons - of these views. All Tolstoy's characters are searching for a form of Christian love, a sense of relatedness to other human beings that alone can give a meaning and a purpose to their lives. That is why Anna Karenina -isolated and thrown back completely on herself - is destined to perish in Tolstoy's universe; or why his most exalted figures, such as Princess

Maria or the peasant Karataev in War and Peace, show their love by suffering for other human beings.

Tolstoy had a mystical approach to God. He thought that God could not be comprehended by the human mind, but only felt through love and prayer. For Tolstoy, prayer is a moment of awareness of divinity, a moment of ecstasy and freedom, when the spirit is released from the personality and merges with the universe.¹⁰⁴ Not a few Orthodox theologians have compared Tolstoy's religion to Buddhism and other oriental faiths.¹⁰⁵ But in fact his mystical approach had more in common with the hermits' way of prayer at Optina. Tolstoy's division from the Russian Church, however, was a fundamental one, and not even Optina could satisfy his spiritual requirements. Tolstoy came to reject the doctrines of the Church - the Trinity, the Resurrection, the whole notion of a divine Christ - and instead began to preach a practical religion based on Christ's example as a living human being. His was a form of Christianity that could not be contained by any Church. It went beyond the walls of the monastery to engage directly with the major social issues - of poverty and inequality, cruelty and oppression - which no Christian in a country such as Russia could ignore. Here was the religious basis of Tolstoy's moral crisis and renunciation of society from the end of the 1870s. Increasingly persuaded that the truly Christian person had to live as Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy vowed to sell his property, to give away his money to the poor, and to live with them in Christian brotherhood. Essentially his beliefs amounted to a kind of Christian socialism - or rather anarchism, insofar as he rejected all forms of Church and state authority. But Tolstoy was not a revolutionary. He rejected the violence of the socialists. He was a pacifist. In his view, the only way to fight injustice and oppression was by obeying Christ's teachings.

The Revolution of 1917 has obscured from our view the threat which Tolstoy's simple reading of the Gospels posed to Church and state. By the time of his excommunication in the 1900s, Tolstoy had a truly national following. His Christian anarchism was hugely appealing to the peasantry, and as such it was perceived as a major threat to the established Church, even to the Tsar. Any social revolution in Russia was bound to have a spiritual base, and even the most atheistic

socialists were conscious of the need to give religious connotations to their stated goals.* 'There are two Tsars in Russia', wrote A. S. Suvorin, editor of the conservative newspaper Novoevremia, in 1901: 'Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy. Which one is stronger? Nicholas II can do nothing about Tolstoy; he cannot shake his throne. But Tolstoy, undoubtedly, is shaking his.'¹⁰⁶ It would not have come to this, if the tsarist authorities had left Tolstoy alone. Few people read his religious writings of the 1880s, and it was only in the 1890s, when the Church began to denounce him for trying to bring down the government, that mass illegal printings of these works began to circulate in the provinces.¹⁰⁷ By 1899, when Tolstoy published Resurrection, he was better known as a social critic and religious dissident than as a writer of fiction. It was the novel's religious attack on the institutions of the tsarist state -the Church, the