NATASHA

government, the judicial and penal systems, private property and the social conventions of the aristocracy - that made it, by a long way, his best selling novel in his own lifetime.¹⁰⁸ 'All of Russia is feeding on this book', an ecstatic Stasov wrote to congratulate Tolstoy. 'You cannot imagine the conversations and debates it is provoking… This event has had no equal in all the literature of the nineteenth century.'¹⁰⁹ The more the Church and the state attacked Tolstoy, the greater was the writer's following, until he was finally excommunicated in 1901. The intention of the excommunication had been to provoke a wave of popular hatred against Tolstoy, and there were reactionaries and Orthodox fanatics who responded to the call. Tolstoy received death threats and abusive letters, and the Bishop of Kronstadt, who was notorious for his support of the extreme national-

* The Bolsheviks made the most political capital out of socialism's religious resonance. S. G. Strumilin, in a pamphlet for the rural poor in 1917, compared socialism to the work of Christ and claimed that it would create a 'terrestrial kingdom of fraternity, equality and freedom' (S. Petrashkevich [Strumilin], Pro zemliu i sotsializm: slovo sotsialdemokrata k derevenskoi bednote (Petrograd, 1917), pp. 1-2). The cult of Lenin, which took off in August 1918, after he had been wounded in an assassination attempt, carried explicit religious overtones. Lenin was depicted as a Christ-like figure, ready to die for the people's cause, and, because the bullets had not killed him, blessed by miraculous powers. Pravda (meaning Truth and Justice), the title of the Party's news-paper, had an obvious religious meaning in the peasant consciousness - as did the Red Star, for, according to folklore, the maiden Pravda wore a burning star on her forehead which list up the whole world and brought it truth and happiness.

ists, even wrote a prayer for the writer's death which was circulated widely in the right-wing press.¹¹⁰ Yet for every threatening message, Tolstoy received a hundred letters of support from villages across the land. People wrote to tell him of abuses in their local government, or to thank him for his condemnation of the Tsar in his famous article 'I Cannot Remain Silent', written in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre which sparked the Revolution of 1905. Millions of people who had never read a novel suddenly began to read Tolstoy's. And everywhere the writer went, huge crowds of well-wishers would appear - many more, it was remarked by the police amidst the celebrations for Tolstoy's eightieth birthday in 1908, than turned out to greet the Tsar.

Tolstoy gave all the money he had made from Resurrection to the Dukhobors. The Dukhobors were Tolstoyans before Tolstoy. The religious sect went back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier, when its first communities of Christian brotherhood were established. As pacifists who rejected the authority of Church and state, they had suffered persecution from the very start of their existence in Russia, and in the 1840s they had been forced to settle in the Caucasus. Tolstoy first became interested in the Dukhobors in the early 1880s. The influence of their ideas on his writings is palpable. All the core elements of 'Tolstoyism' - the idea that the Kingdom of God is within oneself, the rejection of the doctrines and rituals of the established Church, the Christian principles of the (imagined) peasant way of life and community - were also part of Dukhobor belief. In 1895 the sect staged a series of mass demonstrations against military conscription. Thousands of Tolstoyans (or pacifists who called themselves by that name) flocked to join their protest in the Caucasus, many of them merging with the Dukhobors. Tolstoy himself publicized their cause, writing several hundred letters to the press and eventually securing and largely paying for their resettlement in Canada (where their dissent proved just as troublesome to the government).¹¹¹

Tolstoy was in close contact with many other sects. There was a natural affinity between his living Christianity and the sects' searching for a True Church in the Russian land: both came from social visions of Utopia. 'Tolstoyism' was itself a kind of sect - or at least its enemies thought so. There were prolonged discussions between Tolstoy's fol-

lowers and the main religious sects about organizing a united movement under Tolstoy's leadership.¹¹² This was a major challenge to the Church. The number of sectarians had grown dramatically, from somewhere in the region of 3 million members in the eighteenth century to perhaps 30 million in the first decade of the twentieth century, although some scholars thought that fully one-third of the Russian population (about 120 million) was sectarian.¹¹³ New sects were formed, or discovered, every year, as the Populist intelligentsia began to study them in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Then, in the 1900s, the theosophists, the anthroposophists, the Symbolists, Rasputinites and mystics of all types started to see in these sects an answer to their yearning for a new and more 'essential' kind of Russian faith. The established Church was in danger of imploding. Politically shackled to the state, its parish life inert, if not spiritually dead, the Church could not prevent its peasant flock from running off to join sects, or fleeing to the city and the socialists, in their search for truth and justice on this earth.

If Tolstoy's Christian anarchism was motivated by the yearning to belong to a free community of Christian love and brotherhood, the personal root of his religion was a fear of death which became more intense with every passing year. Death was an obsession throughout his life and art. He was a child when his parents died; and then as a young man he lost his elder brother Nikolai as well - a haunting episode he pictured in the death scene of another Nikolai, Prince Levin's brother, in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy desperately tried to rationalize death as a part of life. 'People who fear death, fear it because it appears to them as emptiness and blackness', he wrote in 'On Life' (1887), 'but they see emptiness and blackness because they do not see life.'¹¹⁴ Then, under Schopenhauer's influence perhaps, he came to regard death as the dissolution of one's personality in some abstract essence of the universe.¹¹⁵ But none of it was convincing to those who knew him well. As Chekhov put it in a letter to Gorky, Tolstoy was terrified of his own death, but he did not want to admit it, so he calmed himself by reading the Scriptures.¹¹⁶

In 1897 Tolstoy paid a visit to Chekhov. The playwright was gravely ill. His long illness from tuberculosis had taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse, with a massive haemorrhaging of the lungs, and

Chekhov, who had hitherto ignored his condition, was finally obliged to call for the doctors. When Tolstoy arrived at the clinic, six days after the haemorrhage, he found Chekhov sitting up in bed in a cheerful mood, laughing and joking, and coughing blood into a large beer glass. Chekhov was aware of the danger he was in - he was a doctor, after all - but he kept his spirits up, and even talked of plans for the future. Tolstoy, Chekhov noted with his usual cutting wit, was 'almost disappointed' not to find his friend at the point of death. It was clear that Tolstoy had come with the intention of talking about death. He was fascinated by the way that Chekhov seemed to accept death and just get on with life, and, envious of this calm attitude perhaps, he wanted to know more. Soon Tolstoy touched on the topic which is generally taboo around the bed of someone who is gravely ill. As Chekhov lay there spitting blood, he harangued him with a lecture about death and the afterlife. Chekhov listened attentively, but in the end he lost patience and started arguing. He viewed the mysterious force, in which Tolstoy thought the dead would be dissolved, as a 'formless frozen mass', and told Tolstoy that he did not really want that kind of eternal life. In fact, Chekhov said, he did not understand life after death. He saw no point in thinking about it, or in comforting oneself, as he put it, with 'delusions of immortality'.¹¹⁷ Here was the crucial difference between the two men. When Tolstoy thought of death his mind turned to another world, while Chekhov's always returned to this one. 'It is frightening to become nothing,' he told his friend and publisher A. S. Suvorin in the clinic after Tolstoy left. 'They take you to the cemetery, return home, begin drinking tea, and say hypocritical things about you. It's ghastly to think about it!'¹¹⁸

It was not that Chekhov was an atheist - although in the last years of his life he claimed to have no faith.¹¹⁹ His religious attitudes were in fact very complex and ambivalent. Chekhov had grown up in a religious family and throughout his life he retained a strong attachment to the rituals of the Church. He collected icons. At his house in Yalta there was a crucifix on his bedroom wall.¹²⁰ He liked reading about the Russian monasteries and the lives of saints.¹²¹ From his correspondence we learn that Chekhov loved to hear church bells, that he often went to church and enjoyed the services, that he stayed at monasteries, and that on more than one occasion he even thought of becoming a

monk himself.¹²² Chekhov saw the Church as an ally of the artist, and the artist's mission as a spiritual one. As he once said to his friend Gruzinsky, 'the village church is the only place where the peasant can experience something beautiful'.¹²³

Chekhov's literary works are filled with religious characters and themes. No other Russian writer, with the possible exception of Les-kov, wrote so often or with so much tender feeling about people worshipping, or about the rituals of the Church. Many of Chekhov's major stories (such as 'The Bishop', 'The Student', 'On the Road' and 'Ward No. 6') are profoundly concerned with the search for faith. Chekhov himself had religious doubts - he once wrote