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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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!’
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It was not that Chekhov was an atheist - although in the last years of his life he claimed to have no faith.
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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.
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He liked reading about the Russian monasteries and the lives of saints.
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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.
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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’.
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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 that he would become a monk if the monasteries took people who were not religious and he did not have to pray.
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But he clearly sympathized with people who had faith or spiritual ideals. Perhaps Chekhov’s view is best expressed by Masha, when she says in
Three Sisters,
‘It seems to me that a man must have faith, or be seeking it, otherwise his life is empty, quite empty.’
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Chekhov was not overly concerned with the abstract question about the existence of a God. As he told Suvorin, a writer should know better than to ask such things.
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But he did embrace the concept of religion as a way of life - a basic moral code - which is what it was for him and what he thought it was for the simple Russian
man.
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In his early story ‘On the Road’ (1886) Chekhov discusses this Russian need for faith. The scene is a highway inn where some travellers are sheltering from bad weather. A young noblewoman gets into a conversation with a gentleman called Likharev. She wants to know why famous Russian writers all find faith before they die. ‘As I understand it,’ replies Likharev, ‘faith is a gift of the spirit. It is a talent: you have to be born with it.’
’As far as I can judge, speaking for myself, and from all that I have seen, this talent is present in the Russian people to the highest degree. Russian life represents an endless series of beliefs and enthusiasms, but it has not, if you ask my advice, it has not yet gone anywhere near not believing or rejecting belief. If a Russian person does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.’
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This was close to Chekhov’s view - and he himself was very Russian in this sense. Chekhov might have had his own doubts about the existence of a God. But he never once lost sight of the need for Russians to believe. For without faith in a better world to come, life in Chekhov’s Russia would be unendurable.
The need to believe was as central to his art as it was to the Russian way of life. Chekhov’s plays abound in characters (Dr Astrov in
Uncle Vanya,
Vershinin in
Three Sisters,
Trofimov in
The Cherry Orchard)
who place their faith, as Chekhov himself did, in the ability of work and science to improve life for humanity. They are filled with characters who reconcile themselves to suffer and endure in the Christian hope of a better life to come. As Sonya puts it in those famous (and already cited) closing lines of
Uncle Vanya:
‘When our time comes we shall die submissively, and over there, in the other world, we shall say that we have suffered, that we’ve wept, that we’ve had a bitter life, and God will take pity on us.’
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Chekhov saw the artist as a fellow sufferer - as somebody who worked for a spiritual end. In 1902 he wrote to Diaghilev:
Modern culture is but the beginning of a work for a great future, a work which will go on, perhaps, for ten thousand years, in order that mankind may, even in the remote future, come to know the truth of a real God - that is, not by guessing, not by seeking in Dostoevsky, but by perceiving clearly, as one perceives that twice two is four.
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Death is felt in all of Chekhov’s works, and in many of his later stories the approach of death is the major theme. Chekhov had confronted death throughout his life - first as a doctor and then as a dying man - and perhaps because he was so close to it he wrote about the subject with a fearless honesty. Chekhov understood that people die in a very ordinary way - for the most part they die thinking about life. He saw that death is simply part of the natural process - and when death came to him, he met it with the dignity and courage, and the same love of life, he had always shown. In June 1904 he booked into a hotel at Badenweiler, Germany, with his wife Olga. ‘I am going away to die,’ Chekhov told a friend on the eve of their departure. ‘Everything is finished.”
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On the night of 2 July he woke in a fever, called for a
doctor and told him loudly, ‘
Ich sterbe’
(‘I am dying’). The doctor tried to calm him and went away. Chekhov ordered a bottle of champagne, drank a glass, lay down on his bed, and passed away.
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For Tolstoy, death was no such easy thing. Terrified of his own mortality, he attached his religion to a mystical conception of death as a spiritual release, the dissolution of the personality into a ‘universal soul’; yet this never quite removed his fear. No other writer wrote so often, or so imaginatively, about the actual moment of dying - his depictions of the deaths of Ivan Ilich and of Prince Andrei in
War and Peace
are among the best in literature. But these are not just deaths. They are final reckonings - moments when the dying re-evaluate the meaning of their lives and find salvation, or some resolution, in a spiritual truth.
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In
The Death of Ivan Ilich (1886)
Tolstoy shows a man, a senior judge, who comes to realize the truth about himself as he lies on his deathbed looking back on his life. Ivan Ilich sees that he has existed entirely for himself and that his life has therefore been a waste. He has lived for his career as a judge, but he cared no more for the people who appeared before him than the doctor treating him cares for him now. He has organized his life around his family, but he does not love them, and nor does it appear that they love him, for none of them will recognize the fact that he is dying and try to comfort him. The only real relationship which Ivan Ilich has is with his servant Gerasim, a ‘fresh young peasant lad’ who looks after him, sits with him at night and brings him comfort by holding up his legs. Gerasim does all of this as a simple act of kindness for a man who, he knows, is about to die, and his recognition of this fact is itself of immense comfort to the dying man. ‘The awful, terrible act of his dying was’, Ivan Ilich sees,
reduced by those about him to the level of a fortuitous, disagreeable and rather indecent incident (much in the same way as people behave with someone who goes into a drawing-room smelling unpleasantly) - and this was being done in the name of the very decorum he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one was willing even to appreciate his situation. Gerasim was the only person who recognized the position and was sorry for him. And that was why Ivan Ilich was at ease only when Gerasim was with him… Gerasim alone told no lies; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case, and did not consider it necessary to disguise
them, and simply felt sorry for the sick, expiring master. On one occasion when Ivan Ilich was for sending him away to bed he even said straight out:
’We shall all of us die, so what’s a little trouble?’ meaning by this that he did not mind the extra work because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.
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A simple peasant has given to this judge a moral lesson about truth and compassion. He has shown him how to live and how to die - for the peasant’s acceptance of the fact of death enables Ivan Ilich, at the final conscious moment of his life, to overcome his fear.
The Death of Ivan Ilich
was based upon the death of Tolstoy’s friend, Ivan Ilich Mechnikov, an official in the judicial service, whose brother furnished Tolstoy with a detailed account of his final days.
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It was not uncommon for the Russian upper classes to draw comfort from their servants’ presence at the moment of their death. From diaries and memoirs it would seem that, far more than the priest who came to take confession and administer last rites, the servants helped the dying overcome their fears with their simple peasant faith which ‘enabled them to look death in the face’.
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The fearless attitude of the peasant towards death was a commonplace of nineteenth-century Russian literature. ‘What an astonishing thing is the death of a Russian peasant!’ wrote Turgenev in
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album.
‘His state of mind before death could be called neither one of indifference, nor one of stupidity; he dies as if he is performing a ritual act, coldly and simply.’
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Turgenev’s hunter encounters several peasants at the point of death. One, a woodcutter called Maxim who is crushed by a falling tree, asks his team-mates to forgive him, and then, just before he breathes his last, asks them to make sure that his wife receives a horse for which he has put down money. Another is informed in a country hospital that he has only a few days to live. The peasant thinks about this for a bit, scratches the nape of his neck and puts his cap on, as if to depart. The doctor asks him where he is going.