In the years before the Russian Revolution exploded in 1917,
political opposition was stamped on.
Outspoken radicals were either shot, imprisoned or exiled.
But there was one voice in Russia, a furious critic of the evil
and injustice of the Tsarist state who was never silenced.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
Why did Tolstoy, a hugely successful novelist,
assume this provocative role?
Why did he become such a thorn in the side of Imperial Russia?
Perhaps there's a clue in his childhood...
"It was my brother Nicolenka who announced to us that he
"possessed a secret by means of which when it was disclosed,
"all men would become happy. There'd be no diseases, no troubles,
"no-one would be angry with anyone, all would love each other."
"This secret, as he told us, was written by him on a green stick
"which he buried by the road on the edge of a certain ravine."
This utopian story captivated Tolstoy as a child
and haunted him for the rest of his life.
By the time he was 40, Tolstoy had written one of the greatest novels of all time.
But during his next 40 years, it wasn't literature that
preoccupied him, but a relentless, ruthless, all-consuming desire
to discover what was written on the little green stick.
By the beginning of the 1870s, thanks to War And Peace,
Tolstoy was established as Russia's greatest living writer.
He was fast becoming a wealthy man. Life was good.
He was in love with his wife. He already had four children and there was another on the way.
Yet strangely, he was ill at ease with himself,
with who he was and the way he lived.
This land-owning aristocrat was beginning to ask fundamental
questions about the stark inequality of Russian society, the poverty of
the vast peasant underclass, and the iron rule of the Imperial regime.
In 1871, he decided to make the long journey across Russia
and down the great Volga River to the eastern region of Samara
and the empty wilderness of the Russian Steppe beyond.
Why did Tolstoy come here?
TRANSLATION: Tolstoy loved the Steppe.
This enormous expanse, and the people who had not been spoilt by serfdom.
There were no serfs here.
All the peasants were tenants in their own right.
Tolstoy grew up in a rural village.
He knew peasants and he sympathised with them.
He was always concerned for them.
Tolstoy fell in love with the land and with the people of Samara,
and despite Sofia's reservations, he decided to buy a large plot,
and in the summer of 1873,
he insisted on bringing the whole of his family
with an entourage of servants here for their annual summer holiday.
This bedstead memorial marks the place
where their simple farmhouse stood.
This place became his retreat, his inspiration,
and you can see just why he was so captivated by it.
This country, he said, is beautiful.
It is just emerging from its virginity.
Just below the site of the farm, Victor, our guide,
arranged a typical Bashkiri feast of lamb and fermented horse milk.
This is the famous Kumis.
This is the mare's milk that was drunk by Tolstoy.
In fact, he came here in pursuit of this particular beverage, actually.
Cheers. Cheers.
I really have. Look, I've really drunk it.
This is not pretending.
This is like something in the Arab world, they call it loveat.
That's yoghurt which is fermented yoghurt.
This is really like milk, but it is fermented.
It tastes very fizzy and rather sour.
I don't know if it's to everyone's tastes,
but I've got this in common with Tolstoy. I like this.
The first summer Tolstoy brought the family here
was especially hot and dry.
In fact, the region was in the grip of a terrible drought and famine.
TRANSLATION: Lev Tolstoy wrote a letter from his farm here
to his publishers about the famine in Samara which was
published in the main Moscow newspaper.
Because of that letter, all of Russia
and the entire world was alerted to the famine in the Samara region.
He was single-handedly responsible for famine relief.
The state realised it should do something, but it was so inefficient,
and apart from anything else it was so inefficient, the Tsarist regime.
Tolstoy, who was a good landowner, good army officer,
he went to Samara.
He actually made sure that food got to the actual people who needed it.
He raised money. He wrote letters to the English papers
and alerted the world to the famine in Russia.
This simple wooden cross on this remote highway, is a modest
memorial to the thousands who died in the terrible
famines of the 1870s and '80s.
For Tolstoy, the Steppe of Samara was both a refuge and a revelation.
An escape from his formal life, his life as a writer
and as a landowner, into a world in which the authority of church,
government and social hierarchy were just words in the wind.
At first glance, it might seem hard to see the link between the moral,
political and religious tumult bubbling in Tolstoy's mind
and the romantic novel that he was beginning to compose that summer in Samara.
As much as anything he wrote, Tolstoy's masterpiece,
Anna Karenina, is a profoundly autobiographical work,
and even the introspective, tragic heroine
shares a great deal with her creator.
At the beginning of Anna Karenina, Anna, the wife of a St Petersburg
civil servant, travels to Moscow to visit her brother and his family.
Unexpectedly, she encounters a young cavalry officer,
called Vronski, first at the train station and then at a ball.
On the way home on the train, she tries to read a novel, a romantic English novel,
to distract herself from the growing sense of guilt that in some way
she has behaved improperly with this man.
Anna read attentively, but there was no pleasure in reading.
No pleasure in entering into other people's lives and adventures.
She was too eager to live herself.
Tolstoy was like Anna.
He was reluctant to commit to fantasy.
He was too involved with real life.
As he began to write this story, the characters
and events that emerged began to bear a striking resemblance
to the people, events and conflicts in his own life.
If War And Peace was a book about who Tolstoy was,
perhaps Anna Karenina was a book about who Tolstoy had become.
I've always believed there is a bigger difference between
War And Peace and Anna Karenina than has generally been acknowledged.
Think of the beginning of Anna Karenina, the epigraph...
"Vengeance is mine, said the Lord, I will repay."
Vengeance is there at the beginning. Suicide is there at the end.
And we know in biographical terms, that Tolstoy got the idea
from the sad fate of a poor woman who threw herself under a train
not too far from Yasnaya Polyana, and he was taken in as the local JP,
and he had to view the mangled corpse there in the mortuary
and be there while they carried out the post-mortem,
and it stuck in his mind.
There is a darker tone about Anna Karenina. There is more violence.
There is more pessimism.
It's not the sunny uplands that happened at the end of War And Peace.
Anna Karenina intertwines the unfolding tragedy of Anna
and her lover Vronski with a second troubled romance,
between Kitty Scherbatsky and the landowner called Dimitri Levin.
Levin is an awkward, tormented country-loving nobleman
who agonises over his duty to his peasants
and insists on labouring in the fields
alongside them, which is exactly what Tolstoy had begun to do.
How far would you say Levin is a sort of surrogate,
how far does Levin embody the ideas that Tolstoy had?
There's a pretty strong hint there in the name itself... Levin, Lev Tolstoy.
We also know that there are many scenes in Anna Karenina
which are lifted straight out of his life,
like all the hay-making scenes and this kind of thing.
There is no doubt at all that Dimitri Levin is Tolstoy,
and here's another example, by the way, of how the autobiographical
element shines through.
It's the moment when Kitty and Levin have their first baby,
and it's given to the father, to Levin,
and do you know what his reaction is?
His attitude says, "I looked at this writhing little infant
"and I thought, how vulnerable,
"oh, the awful things that are going to happen to you in your life."
How could anyone take such a pessimistic attitude?
The book is autobiographical,
not only in the way it describes Tolstoy.
Kitty's sister, Dolly, is an impressively honest
portrait of Sofia at the time of writing.
Sofia's diaries from the period are largely silent, and not surprisingly.
She'd already given birth to eight babies on this very sofa,
and three of these children died while Anna Karenina was being written.
For all his failings as a husband and a father,
Tolstoy in Anna Karenina
manages with extraordinary sensitivity to give Sofia a voice.
"Yes, it comes to this, she thought,
"looking back at her 15 years of married life.
"Nothing but pregnancy, sickness, mind dulled
"and indifferent to everything, and most of all, the disfigurement.
"The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last moment,
"then nursing the baby, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains.
"Dolly shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain she had endured from sore nipples,
"which she'd suffered with almost every baby.
"Then the childrens' illnesses and the everlasting anxiety.
"And on top of it all, the death of these children
"and the cruel memory that never ceased to tear
"her mother's heart at the death of her last born who died of croup.
"She recalled the funeral
"and the general indifference around the little pink coffin
"and her own heart-rending,
"lonely anguish as she gazed at the pale little
"forehead, part fringed with curls,
"and the half-open wondering little mouth.
"The last thing she'd seen as the pink lid with the embroidered cross was closed over him."
After an early flurry of writing, Tolstoy found the completion
of Anna Karenina increasingly onerous, and developed a love/hate
relationship with a story that had become too close for comfort.
He wrote to a friend...
"How I long to clear this sordid tale away from my desk."
Where Anna Karenina's story ends is now
a commuter suburb about 40 minutes out of Moscow.
A typically anonymous Soviet-style town -
functional, concrete and unprepossessing.
It's changed its name since Anna Karenina was written,
but it had an equally dour reputation in Tolstoy's day
as a remote stopping-off point on what was called the road of tears.
Natalia Sopfikova runs a small museum in the town.
TRANSLATION: Tolstoy on several, maybe eight, occasions passed through on the railway.
when he travelled to the Samara Steppe for his Kumis treatment.
Of course, he knew this place. The road through the town was famous in Russia as the road
of woe and tears, because this was the route along which prisoners
were taken to Siberia.
The prisoners were brought to this station, where they could say
farewell to their relatives who saw them off on their journey.
It was the last station
to which the relatives were allowed to travel.
I remember that when I studied it at school,
I read this novel from cover to cover without stopping.
War And Peace is of course an epic...a more voluminous work.
Anna Karenina was closer to us
because it was more true to life, let's put it that way.
And of course, as a woman, I can understand Anna, who lived with a husband
who was much older than she, and for that matter, a husband she did not love.
It was a marriage of convenience.
But as a mother, I do not understand Anna,
because she gave up her son for the sake of the man she loved.
It's a very difficult situation.
"She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first
"carriage as it reached her, but the red bag which she tried
"to drop out of her hand delayed her and she was too late.
"She missed the moment.
"She had to wait for the next carriage.
"A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first
"plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself.
"That familiar gesture brought back into her soul
"a whole series of girlish and childish memories.
"Suddenly, the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart.
"A life rose up before her for an instant,
"with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second
"carriage, and exactly at the moment where the space between
"the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing
"her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage,
"and likely, as though she would rise up again at once, dropped to her knees.
"At the same instant, she was terror stricken at what she was doing.
"'Where am I? What am I doing? What for?
"She tried to get up to drop backwards, but something huge
"and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back.
"'Lord, forgive me all,' she said, feeling it impossible to struggle."
Very often when writers are finishing a book,
they are visited by depressions and fears.
Virginia Wolf famously killed herself having finished a book.
She just couldn't stand the idea of finishing,
and I think that's one of the reasons that Tolstoy's holding off.
He knows that when he finishes this book, something is going
to happen in his life, so he can't really finish it.
On the one hand, he's becoming utterly disillusioned with the whole art of fiction.
On the other hand, he's asking himself,
he's now deep into a middle-age crisis,
"What am I going to do with myself when this book's finished?"
By the time Tolstoy completed Anna Karenina, he was 50
and increasingly preoccupied with the meaning of his own existence.
That summer, he and his friend
and editor Nikolai Strakhov made a pilgrimage here to
the monastery of Optina Pustin, about 140 miles from Yasnaya Polyana.
Optina Pustin today is a compelling place to visit.
In the 19th century, it was one of the most important and influential
Russian monasteries, but then it was closed and vandalised by
the communists who deported or executed the entire religious community.
By the middle of the 20th century, Optina Pustin is a derelict ruin.
However, today, the church - and, indeed, the whole monastery -
is being rebuilt by a new generation of fiercely devout monks
in a striking demonstration of modern Russia's
Orthodox Christian revival.
When Tolstoy first came here to Optina back in the summer of 1877,
there was a similar atmosphere of religious enthusiasm under way.
At the time of his first visit, he was incredibly devout,
and coming to the end of Anna Karenina,
he was in this state of profound depression, and he wanted answers.
He desperately wanted to find an answer to the meaning of life.
He didn't like the idea that it was meaningless.
He wanted there to be meaning, particularly to his own life,
and so he was someone who at that point was
observing all the fasts and going regularly to church.
So I think his quest was very sincere on that first occasion.
Like many thousands of Russians from all over the country,
Tolstoy came to Optina to meet an extraordinary starex,
or religious elder, by the name of Amvrosi.
Pilgrims came specially to consult Amvrosi,
who was treated as a cross between a clairvoyant and a saint.
The monastery nominated Father Selaphil to talk to me
about the still-delicate subject of Lev Tolstoy.
TRANSLATION: Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was an incredibly complex,
tragic man. Many people found him hard to understand.
This was a man who was unsettled throughout his life,
forever in torment.
His childhood and his youth had passed in a moral and sinful decline.
His soul was in pain. He was seeking answers to many questions.
He was looking for a more spiritual life.
So the monks saw him as a sick person, a weary,
languishing person, with a scorched heart.
A man you could say who has clotted blood on his lips.
It's not clear exactly what occurred in the conversation
between Tolstoy and Amvrosi,
but certainly this visit to Optina monastery marks the beginning
of a profound religious journey and the unflinching soul-searching
that was to turn Tolstoy's - and his family's - life upside down.
"26th August, 1882.
"It was 20 years ago when I was young and happy that I started
"writing the story of my love for Leovoytchka in these diaries.
"There is virtually nothing but love in them, in fact.
"20 years later, here I am, sitting up all night on my own, reading
"and mourning its loss. For the first time in my life,
"he has run off to sleep alone in the study.
"We were quarrelling about such silly things.
"I accused him of taking no interest in the children
"and not helping me look after Illya, who is sick.
"Today, he shouted at the top of his voice that his dearest wish
"was to leave his family.
"I shall carry the memory of that heartfelt,
"heart-rending cry to my grave.
"I pray for death, for without his love, I cannot survive.
"I knew this the moment his love for me died."
Was there a moment in their relationship
when it began to go bad?
To understand their relationship, you have to understand
the change in Tolstoy's mood.
It was not she or the family that changed. It was Tolstoy who changed.
Tolstoy walked away from their family.
The family, instead of being an ideal, became an obstacle.
An obstacle for a man who viewed himself
not as a writer anymore.
TRANSLATION: Tolstoy wrote in the last years of his life
that it was shameful to write in an artistic manner.
He was ashamed of his literary work.
When he was asked about Anna Karenina, he pretended not to remember
what work he was being asked about.
"What is that? Is it some tale about a lady who loved an officer?"
He abandoned his literary past. He abandoned his ideal as a family man.
That's how depression and spiritual conversion affect.
Sofia was saying he became a very different person.
"I did not marry this man."
She was someone who we have to have a lot of sympathy for.
It was very difficult living with him,
but she also had her own shortcomings.
They were both people with flaws. She was dogmatic in her own way too.
She was a famously humourless person, but her whole life had been
bound up with her husband's, so it was understandably extremely painful
for her that everything that had given her happiness, which was having
a part in copying his works and being part of his creative life,
that had all been sort of thrown out, and it meant nothing to him anymore.
In the early 1880s, Tolstoy began pouring his energies
into a series of soul-searching, religious and philosophical tracts.
He turned his back on the dogma of the Russian Orthodox Church
and even went so far as to produce his own version of the gospels.
He decided to start translating the gospels himself, and what he did
actually was just to merge the four gospels into one, and this was
his own kind of Tolstoyan gospel,
and he jettisoned everything that didn't really meet
his approval, which was most of it, actually.
All the miracles, for example,
everything that was vaguely metaphysical had no place.
The only thing that really survived was everything
that Jesus actually said.
He thought that was all right, and his religious philosophy,
it actually boiled down to the sermon on the mount.
This was no abstract philosophy.
Tolstoy was determined to live by the gospels. He'd always admired the peasants,
but increasingly he aspired to be like them.
He laboured in the fields, he dressed like them, he even learnt
to make his own boots, and what's more,
he attempted to give them land.
However, his acts of charity only provoked distrust
among the peasants and infuriated his wife.
In 1881, the Tolstoy family moved to Moscow,
at least for the winter months.
Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana reluctantly, for the sake of
the children's education, and was utterly miserable.
Witnessing the poverty in the city only intensified
his aspirations for a simpler life.
"5th October, 1881.
"Keep only as many servants as are necessary to help us
"change things and to instruct us,
"and then only while we train ourselves to do without them."
"Live all together, the men in one room, the women and the girls in another.
"Sell or give away anything superfluous -
"the piano, furniture, carriages. The one aim is happiness.
"One's own and that of one's family.
"This happiness consists of being content with little
"and doing good to others."
Despite these high ideals, this is still the same Tolstoy who wrote
those self-improving diary entries as a student back in Kazan,
promising to study but ending up in the brothel.
The more Tolstoy became obsessed with religion and morality
and living an aesthetic life, the more he found himself at odds
with the world, and, increasingly, with his family.
It's not a happy story.
He retreated bit by bit into the interior until he's left
on a small island of, I don't know, self-righteousness
and unrealistic expectations and disappointments.
It's a very sad story, but you know what he couldn't do?
He couldn't love anyone. That's the great tragedy of Tolstoy.
The only conclusion he comes to in the whole of his work
is that the only answer for humanity is love.
We must love each other,
and that will eventually solve all our problems. And yet there
wasn't anyone in Russian culture less capable of loving than Tolstoy.
And yet it's at this very moment that Tolstoy forms the closest friendship of his life.
In 1883 he received an unexpected visit from a young man
by the name of Vladimir Chertkov.
Chertkov was a handsome, wealthy cavalry officer rumoured to be
an illegitimate half-brother of the Tsar, who gave up
his military career and society position
after converting to evangelical Christianity.
It was as if the two men almost instantly fell in love.
Tolstoy and Chertkov remained intensely close until Tolstoy's
death, exchanging over 1,000 letters over the next 27 years.
"November, 1884.
"I would like to live with you, and if we are still alive,
"I shall live with you.
"Never cease to love me as I love you."
Chertkov worked relentlessly to preserve,
print and promote the work and ideas of Tolstoy.
In particular, he enabled the translation
and circulation of his writing outside Russia.
In 1897, Chertkov became heavily involved in campaigning
alongside Tolstoy for a pacifist sect called the Doukhobors.
A Christian group that Tolstoy had first
encountered in the wilderness of Samara.
It was a dangerous high-profile campaign that earned Chertkov ten years of exile
and turned Tolstoy into an enemy of the state.
The campaign also propelled Tolstoy into writing his final least-known full-length novel, Resurrection.
Resurrection is a novel that needs to be resurrected.
It has been submerged
and nearly forgotten about, and I'd recommend anyone to read this.
It's a very powerful novel indeed.
It did begin badly in the artistic sense because he's writing for the wrong reasons.
This story he wrote for peculiar motives.
Tolstoy wrote Resurrection in order to raise a large sum of money to save the Doukhobors.
They were threatened with imprisonment and execution
because of their refusal to fight in the Imperial Army.
Tolstoy funded their escape to Canada.
It was a lovely compromise arrived at by the Tsar.
You know, I cannot excuse these people from military service,
I will let them go abroad, but I'm not paying for it, so Tolstoy paid for it.
Elaine Podovnokov, a modern day member of the Doukhobor community,
has moved back to Russia to work as a teacher,
and she and her family are now building a log house
in Yasnaya Polyana village, not far from the Tolstoy estate.
Then my mum and dad are the fourth...
Looking back, what did the Doukhobors represent?
What was it about them that made them so appealing to Tolstoy?
There were two main issues, I think,
and that is that they would not kill another human being even in warfare.
They felt that every human being was a temple of the living god,
that a piece of God lived inside each human being.
That was one, and the other one was that God did not only live within the confines of a church
and that there were godly people because the ultimate church
was the body that housed the spirit of the living god.
Is there a community in Canada
who know that they owe their lives to Leo Tolstoy?
Yes. Yes.
When we study, we have our Sunday schools or Sunday classes,
while we're studying the Doukhobor history in Russia,
we always studied Leo Tolstoy as someone, as a benefactor,
and he was considered like... semi-god, because everybody knew that in his young years
he lived differently, and that was another lesson for us.
That you could at any time in your life get a new awareness
of what life was all about and change your way of living.
Spiritual evolution is the central theme of Resurrection.
An aristocratic juror is confronted in the dock with a woman he once seduced and ruined.
The woman has now been wrongfully charged with murder.
Guilt forces him to offer to marry her and campaign for her release.
When he fails, he follows her and her fellow convicts as they're exiled to Siberia.
The book was a furious attack on the penal system, the government
and, most pointedly, the Orthodox Church.
So what was it that he did in Resurrection which so offended the church that he was excommunicated?
What did he not do?! Everything he wrote in Resurrection would have found the disapproval of the church.
It's shown to be utterly useless in all these things
and just a tool of government completely incapable of any reform
and just as guilty as anyone else in allowing the system to go ahead
whereby people can be sent to prison,
can be punished savagely and so on.
Whenever the church comes up, it's satirised.
"The priest carefully took a spoonful from the chalice
"and put a piece of bread soaked in wine
"deep into the mouths of all the children in turn,
"and then the deacon wiped their mouths
"whilst singing a cheerful song about children eating God's body and drinking his blood.
"After this the priest took the chalice behind the screen,
"drank all the blood that was left over and ate up all the bits of God's body.
"Scrupulously sucked his moustaches dry, wiped his mouth
"and the chalice, and then he walked out briskly through the screen.
"To the creaking of his calfskin boots
"and their thin souls. He was a picture of contentment."
The church is condemned. The church is shown to be useless.
Everything else is condemned.
The judiciary and the army and the government,
cos Tolstoy's well into the stage where he rejects all forms of organisation and government.
Tolstoy's ideas are very relevant now. The more we read him,
the more we study him or reread him,
the more totally we feel that
we need to look at our life now through the eyes of Tolstoy.
We should read and reread the Resurrection now
because the novel seems very contemporary.
The problems which Tolstoy addressed there are our problems.
What is meaningful? What is moral? What is worthless?
The impossible contrast between the rich and the poor.
All that was the problem at the turn of the 19th/20th century,
and the problems remain today.
Tolstoy's mockery and contempt for the Orthodox Church
eventually forced a reaction.
In February 1901, Metropolitan Anthony,
the senior cleric in St Petersburg,
mounted the pulpit and declared:
Count Tolstoy, under the seduction of his intellectual pride,
has devoted his literary activity and the talent given to him by God
to disseminate in teachings repugnant to Christ and the church,
and destroying in the minds and hearts of men their national faith.
But if the church thought that Tolstoy's excommunication
would undermine his growing popularity in Russia,
the effect was absolutely the opposite.
On the day in which the edict was published, Tolstoy was walking here
in the centre of Moscow, in Lubyanka Square,
a place now dominated by that infamous building
which used to be the home of the KGB.
February 1901 was a period of student protests,
and a large crowd of demonstrators filled the square.
Apparently, someone in the crowd spotted Tolstoy,
who was out walking with a friend, and called out ironically,
"Look, there goes the devil in human form."
At which point the whole crowd started cheering and shouting.
"Long Live Lev Nikolaivic!"
In the end the situation became so passionate that mounted police had to rescue Tolstoy from the crush.
Unfortunately for the church,
Tolstoy's excommunication only served to galvanise public support
for him, and to draw attention to his ideals and beliefs.
TRANSLATION: Tolstoy was saying terrible things about the church
and in so doing
was perverting a very large number of his contemporaries,
and so the church, represented by its higher body, The Synod,
said that in his deeds,
Tolstoy was demonstrating he was not at one with the church.
This rejection of Tolstoy by the church
was a rare and extraordinary act
to take against such an eminent Russian figure,
and his excommunication is still very much a live issue today.
Once again, church and state are closely, even intimately aligned,
and Tolstoy's descendants have failed in their attempt to get
the church to reconsider its position.
TRANSLATION: In 2001, the church did not respond to my letter.
It was not that I had written to some anonymous clergyman.
I wrote to the then Patriarch, Alexei, and I didn't get a reply from him.
Well, that in itself was a response.
A lack of response is an admission of a lack of desire to speak on the subject.
The church does not wish to admit its mistakes or weaknesses.
Yes, the conflict has not yet runs its course.
The culmination of Tolstoy's religious writing
was a book entitled The Kingdom Of God Is Within You,
which laid out his philosophy of non-resistance to violence.
Of course, Gandhi was one of the millions of people who read
The Kingdom Of God Is Within You, and it had an electrifying impact on him.
He was living in South Africa and it made him want to set up a Tolstoy farm, for example, there.
He did that and that was for the Indians there,
and he'd himself been a victim of the racism there
and seen the coercive ways of the government,
and it became a cornerstone of his own philosophy.
It was a very, very important moment.
Did Tolstoy absorb all this? Did he realise the impact of these ideas and his views?
Yeah, and he was absolutely thrilled by this, of course,
because as much as he wanted to run away and be an ascetic
and live like a wanderer with nothing but the clothes on his back,
he also wanted his ideas to be disseminated.
He actually wanted people to come round to his way of thinking.
He wanted governments to dissolve.
He didn't want there to be any more private property
and as this incredible narcissist,
he was very convinced that he did know the truth.
At the point at which Tolstoy
had achieved something very like sainthood
on the public and international stage,
his personal life was in crisis,
thanks largely to his relationship with Chertkov.
A man who Sofia Tolstoy now described as the devil himself.
It's at this moment that a final and tragic act
of Tolstoy's life begins to unfold.
"Lev Nikolaivic becomes more intolerable each day
"because of his heartlessness and his cruelty to me,
"and it is Chertkov who has brought all this about gradually and consistently.
"He has done everything in his power to take control of this unfortunate old man.
"He has separated us.
"He has killed the creative spark in Lev Nikolaivic
"and has kindled all the protest, castigation and hatred
"that one sees in these recent articles
"which his stupid evil genius has reduced him to writing.
"Yes, if one believes in the devil,
"he has been embodied in Chertkov, and he has destroyed our life."
Chertkov had this gift, I would say, to antagonise people.
To charge them with this negative emotion
and when he would appear on the scene, there would be conflicts.
There would be some conspiracies.
There would be something else. He was evil genius.
The story of their marriage
has been described as probably the most unsuccessful
and vicious and horrible marriage
in the entire history of literary marriages that we know about.
It was as bad as that, all the biographers will tell you.
And those declining years at the end
when Chertkov gets on the inside of this and excludes her
right up to the bitter end, really,
they make terrible reading.
Sonia seemed to believe that as an old man,
he was actually having a homoerotic affair with this man Chertkov.
Nonsense, but it shows their closeness.
"20th August.
"Went riding and the sight of the senorial domain so torments me
"that I'm thinking of running away and hiding.
"Today, I thought as I record my marriage,
"that there was something fateful about it.
"I was never even in love, but I couldn't help getting married."
In the late summer of 1910, the Tolstoy marriage hit a new low.
Chertkov had moved into a house near to Yasnaya Polyana,
and a furious row developed
over who should have possession of Tolstoy's diaries.
"9th September 1910.
"I wrote a letter to Chertkov but haven't posted it yet.
"This man is the cause of all my suffering
"and I cannot reconcile myself to him."
"11th September.
"Towards evening, she began making scenes.
"Running into the garden... "tears, screams.
"It's even got to the stage that when I went after out into the garden,
"she screamed, 'He's a beast! A murderer! I can't bear to see him!'"
"24th September.
"After dinner she began to reproach me and say that I shouted at her and that I ought to pity her.
"I remained silent. She went to her room and now it's after ten o' clock
"and she hasn't come out, and I'm depressed."
"A letter from Chertkov with reproaches and accusations.
"They are tearing me to pieces.
"I sometimes think I should go away from them all."
Finally, at the end of October, one night he was trying to sleep.
He heard his wife going through his papers on his desk in the next room.
He woke up. He couldn't go back to sleep,
and somewhat spontaneously decided to go,
although we know that during the week before he was really talking about it
very actively with those around him.
So there was definitely a build-up.
You feel like it's really...almost when you read all of the accounts,
it almost feels it's inevitable he's going to leave.
Do we know what happened on that night,
before she fell asleep, what happened?
Tolstoy was in bed, so she entered his bedroom,
just looked at Tolstoy, and then she went to his study,
and Tolstoy, he couldn't sleep that night, so he didn't sleep well,
and so he heard she was in his study
looking through the papers.
Then she came back to her bedroom and so she fell asleep,
and Tolstoy...all of a sudden he understood
he couldn't stay any longer here in this house and decided to go away.
This flight is so often depicted as spontaneous and it was not.
Tolstoy already for years
received letters from his followers
urging him to flee.
They expected a full concurrence of Tolstoy's words and deeds.
If he renounced luxury, and there was no luxury in Tolstoy's household...
if you visited Yasnaya Polyana you know, they lived like English middle class.
So but if he renounced property he has to separate himself
from his property and family.
So this was expected from him, and she lived under the pressure
for many years and in fear of their final separation and flight.
She knew it would take place and Tolstoy in his diaries says that
he wants her to give him an excuse to go away,
and finally maybe she did give this excuse
because of her fear and because of her spying on him.
"October 28th.
"Went to bed at 11.30.
"Slept till after two.
"Woke up. I heard the opening of doors and footsteps.
"I saw through the crack a bright light in the study
"and heard rustling.
"It was Sofia Andreevna looking for something and probably reading.
"I wanted to go back to sleep, but couldn't.
"I gasped for breath, counted my pulse...
"97...
"I couldn't go on lying there, and suddenly I took the final decision to leave."
So he came to the stables, he brought the doctor with him,
he went to the coachman's house first and then came here?
Yeah, and came here with the coachman.
He was waiting in the special part of the stables where the carriages were.
But on the way to the stables,
walking through the apple tree orchards, he lost his hat,
and he was going back to the house,
but fortunately he met his doctor, who had in his pocket another hat.
So what was his mood here at this time?
He was very nervous. He was very tense.
He worried about his wife, Sofie Andreevna.
He was thinking was she awake or not.
He wanted to go away as soon as possible.
TRANSLATION: In the end this was a King Lear moment,
the departure of Tolstoy. It was a genuine Shakespearean drama.
When during that cold night in October he left on his own,
lost his hat, tripped and fell, then he had to cross a ravine.
They are all terrifying details, but by this time, he was clearly ill.
Speaking from a kind of elevated perspective,
this was an artist finding a way to complete a great life.
Having left the house in the dead of night you'd imagine
that Tolstoy would have tried to travel discreetly, but not at all.
He boarded a train and proceeded to lecture the entire carriage
on pacifism and non-violence.
His destination was back here.
Back at the monastery of Optina Pustyn,
where he'd begun his spiritual quest over 30 years earlier.
He arrived at the monastery guest house
and announced to the monk on duty,
"I am Lev Nikolaivic Tolstoy, excommunicated by the church.
"I have come to talk to your elders."
The following day Tolstoy left Optina Pustyn
to visit a nearby convent,
where his sister Maria now lived as a nun.
When he met her in the cell, he burst into tears.
All that he wanted now was a chance to live in solitude.
Apparently, they even discussed how he could rent one of the small lodges in the monastery grounds.
But clearly, Tolstoy had not made he mind up what to do.
At four o' clock the next morning,
he once again disappeared into the night.
One of the most extraordinary aspects
of Tolstoy's journey of escape
was the mass of detail in which it was recorded and commented on,
both in the diaries of Tolstoy
and of the doctor Macaviski, who accompanied him.
As well as in the correspondence of his children and friends.
However, amazingly, one thing that no-one is clear about
is exactly where this 82-year-old man thought he was going.
There are a number of theories,
but perhaps the truth was that there was no plan.
As he embarked on yet another arduous journey
in cramped smoky railway carriages,
it's hardly surprising that he was taken ill.
He appears to have caught a chill and developed a fever.
Eventually, Dr Macaviski decided they should leave the train
at the next station, wherever it was,
as Count Tolstoy was no longer well enough to continue.
Here at Astapovo, a tiny rural station in the middle of nowhere,
Tolstoy was helped up the platform to the station master's house,
where he was offered first a room
and eventually the whole house by the awestruck railwaymen.
Astonishingly, events that unfolded at Astapovo over the next few days
were captured on film.
"3rd November. Astapovo.
"Had a bad night.
"Lay for two days in a fever.
"Chertkov came on the second.
"They say that Sofia Andreevna has, too.
"So much for my plan."
"2nd November 1910.
"I received a telegram at 7.30 this morning.
"Lev Nikolaivic ill in Astapovo.
"Tanya, the nurse and I all left for Astapovo for a special train."
Sofia only asked and begged everyone who was walking into the house
to let Tolstoy know that she was there.
Her greatest fear was that he would die in her absence,
and that they would not be able to say farewell to each other.
"3rd November. Astapovo.
"Lev Nikolaivic has pneumonia in the left lung.
"They won't let me see him."
"4th November.
"Lev Nikolaivic is worse.
"I wait in agony outside the little house where he is lying.
"We are sleeping in the train."
"5th November.
"There is evidently little hope.
"I am tormented by remorse.
"The painful anticipation of his end and the impossibility of seeing my beloved husband."
"6th November.
"Dreadful atmosphere of anticipation.
"I can't remember anything clearly."
"7th November.
"At six o'clock in the morning, Lev Nikolaivic died.
"I was allowed in only as he drew his last breath.
"They wouldn't let me take leave of my husband.
"Cruel people."
Thousands of people went on strike the day of the funeral.
There were actually some mass demonstrations
that spilled out into the streets.
Real concern on the part of the government
that this could be an opening up of that revolutionary energy
that they had kind of pressed down
after the 1905 Revolution.
This is really his most famous story.
This is the one that everyone followed,
everyone literally, everyone in Russia
and people all over the world were talking about this.
It was based on this very enigmatic gesture of just trying
to figure out what he was doing, where he was going,
what he would do when he got there, why he had left?
All of these questions provoked people to create this story,
and because it's an unfinished one
because he died without reaching his destination,
it created that opening for people to imagine what it all meant.
It's hard to find another story like it.
It was a huge demonstration of public opinion.
Most of those crowds weren't clutching the equivalent
of the Times Literary Supplement.
They weren't literary people.
They weren't going there because they so admired War And Peace,
they were going there because they saw him as their saviour.
As the one man who could stand up
and say that the government of Russia was intolerable.
It's not surprising that revolution was in the air,
and there'd already been one minor revolution.
There was going to be another revolution.
People thought it would be a Tolstoyan revolution.
TRANSLATION: Tolstoy was not a comfortable figure
for the Tsarist authority in Russia.
Nor was he acceptable to the Bolshevik communist authorities,
and he is still an inconvenience
for the so-called democratic authorities today.
He always said exactly what he thought,
and this would never have been appreciated by any form of authority.
When the 5,000 mourners arrived at the grave
there was no ceremony, no priest, no cross.
Everyone knelt, including the armed police
after they were shouted at by the crowd.
The place Tolstoy had chosen for his burial
was not the churchyard where the rest of his family were buried,
but here just by the path at the edge of the ravine.
The spot where his brother had told him a little green stick was buried.
The stick on which was written the secret of universal happiness.
I wonder, did Tolstoy ever get to read
what was on that little green stick?
I suspect not. At least not for himself.
This great Russian writer
always seems to have been at odds with the world,
always in trouble, and always a trouble maker.
100 years on from those extraordinary scenes
and the riots and demonstrations that followed Tolstoy's death,
it's unsurprising that Tolstoy, the uncompromising critic of church,
state corruption, social inequality and militarism,
still seems difficult and problematic, and not just in Russia.
It's easier to applaud Tolstoy the greatest of novelists,
and dismiss Tolstoy the idealist as a crank.
An artist out of his depth.
But the real trouble with Tolstoy is that so much of what he advocated...
that love is all that matters, that violence begets violence,
that no man has the right to take control over the life of another...
is uncomfortably but unavoidably true.
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