Abstract
Controversial Russian author
Alexei Tolstoy (right) out for a walk with Maxim Gorky in January 1934
CREDIT: akg-images/Sputnik
Born into a prosperous and literary family in 1882, Alexei was a remote relative of the more famous Leo Tolstoy (and a descendant of Peter Andreyevich Tolstoy, who appears in the story overleaf). He published his first story in 1908, and soon developed a reputation both as a gifted craftsman of prose and an essentially apolitical bon vivant. During the civil war in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution, Tolstoy sided with the monarchist White Russians. In 1919, Tolstoy escaped the advancing Bolshevik army via Odessa, winding up, along with hundreds of thousands of other Russian refugees, in Paris. He later realised he wanted to return home. After proving his bona fides by writing for a number of Bolshevik-friendly publications, he returned to Soviet Russia in 1923.
Although he started his Soviet career with experimental works in a number of popular genres, including the science fiction classic, Aelita, published the year he returned, he found his true métier in historical fiction. Peter the Great, his three-volume novel chronicling the emperor’s life, won the acclaim of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tolstoy’s portrait of a fearless Russian moderniser appealed to a man then implementing his own radical policies of industrialisation and collectivisation. As the historian Robert C. Tucker puts it, Tolstoy’s “Peter became the would-be Stalin of yesteryear, and his revolution from above the partial piatiletka [five-year plan] of early eighteenth century Russia”.
But Peter the Great wasn’t Tolstoy’s first work about the monarch. In 1918, in the midst of the civil war, Tolstoy wrote a very different story tracing a single day in Peter’s life, never before published in English. This Peter is a somewhat different type – a self-indulgent, drunken fanatic and sadist. In the scene below, which is based on an actual historical incident, he tortures Varlaam, one of the “Old Believers”, a sect that split off from the Russian Orthodox Church, for preaching that he, Peter, is the Antichrist.
What Tolstoy’s story dramatises is the personal interest – the downright pleasure – Peter took in crushing opposition and those who spoke against him, as well as the foolhardiness of his mission. This image of Peter as bloodthirsty tyrant, clearly inspired by the bloodshed of the civil war, is an uncensored moment of truth. It is a message in a bottle from 1918, which profoundly alters our impression of the glorified Peter in Tolstoy’s later work. This is not the image of Peter that Stalin authorised, precisely because it is far closer to the leader Stalin actually was. Needless to say, this powerful story was not widely circulated in the Soviet Union at the time.
Peter’s Day
Varlaam had been hanging on the rack for 40 minutes. His arms – bound over his head and wrenched out at the shoulders – were strapped to a crossbar; his head was lowered and the matted strands of his hair obscured his face and tangled with his long beard; his naked, dirty, outstretched body, its ribs protruding, was stained with blotches of soot and drying blood trickled down his side: Varlaam had just received 35 lashes of the knout, and the front of his body had been burnt with birch brooms. His dirty feet, their toes seized with spasm, were yoked together and fastened to a log. The executioner – a burly man in a short sheepskin coat – was standing on the log, stretching Varlaam’s entire body.
At a table opposite the rack, seated before two candles that cast their light up at the brick vaults, was Tsar Peter – sprawled out, his head thrown back, the veins on his neck bulging; Peter Andreyevich Tolstoy in the middle; and, to the right of Tolstoy was a huge, sullen man with a red face like a lion’s – Ushakov – who wore a fox fur hat with no wig and a velvet coat with a shaggy collar.
“Time to take him down? Might croak,” Tolstoy said, looking over the testimony he had just recorded. Ushakov gazed at the hanging man without moving a muscle and wheezed through his throat, which was sore and choked with tobacco: “Give ‘im a little vodka, he’ll come to.”
Tolstoy looked up at the tsar. Peter nodded. The executioner whispered into the darkness behind the pillars: “Vasya, Vasya, fetch that there bottle from the corner.”
A round-faced, curly-haired fellow with a womanly mouth came out of the darkness, carefully carrying a four-sided bottle of vodka. He and the executioner pulled back the hanging man’s head, bustled about for a while and stepped away. Varlaam groaned softly, then turned his head… Once again, as before, his black eyes glistened through the strands of his hair and fixed squarely on Peter. Tolstoy began to read out the record of the inquest. Suddenly Varlaam spoke in a voice that was weak but clear: “Beat me, torment me, I am prepared to answer for our Lord Jesus Christ before my torturers…”
“Shut your…” Ushakov tried to silence the man, but Peter grabbed him by the arm and leaned forward on the table, listening.
“I answer for all the Orthodox people. Tsar, there have been tsars more fierce than you. I am not afraid of fierceness!” Varlaam continued, taking breaks between words, as if he were reading from a difficult book. “You may take my body, Tsar, but I will get away. You may force me to crawl on all fours, put a bit in my mouth, take my tongue from me, say that my land is not my land, but I will get away. You sit on high and your crown is like the sun, but you will not seduce me with vain charms. I know you. Your time is short. I will tear the crown from your head and all your charms will be seen for what they are – foul smoke.”
Peter parted his lips and spoke: “Your comrades, name your comrades.”
“I have no comrades, no helpmates – all the people of Rus’, they’re my comrades.”
The tsar’s head bent forward, his mouth twisted violently and his cheek began to twitch; breathing loudly and clenching his teeth, he held the seizure back and overcame it. Ushakov and Tolstoy sat perfectly still in their armchairs. The executioner jumped on the log with all his might and Varlaam’s head shot back. The candles crackled. At last Peter rose from his armchair, approached the hanging man and stood before him for a long time, as though deep in thought.
“Varlaam!” he pronounced and everyone trembled. The fellow with the womanly mouth stretched his neck from behind the pillar and gazed at the tsar with his gentle blue eyes.
“Varlaam!” Peter repeated.
The hanging man did not move. The tsar placed a palm on Varlaam’s chest, over his heart. “Take him down,” he said. “Fix his arms. Prepare the needles for tomorrow.”
[…]
Varlaam was led in and left alone with the sovereign. A little flame flickered in a saucer on the edge of the table. The logs on the hearth hissed, struggling to catch fire. Peter wore a fur coat and hat. He sat deep in his chair, leaning his elbows on its arms and propping his head up with both hands, as if he had suddenly grown mortally tired. Varlaam stuck out his beard and gazed at the tsar.
“Who ordered you to speak about me?” Peter asked quietly, almost calmly.
Varlaam sighed and shuffled his bare feet. The tsar held out his palm: “Here, take my hand, feel it. I’m a man, not some devil.”
Varlaam moved closer, but did not touch the hand.
“Can’t lift my arms. They’re tied,” he said.
“Are there many like you, Varlaam? Tell me. I won’t torture you now, tell me.”
“Many.”
Peter fell silent again.
“You read the old books, cross yourselves with two fingers? So, what does it say in those books of yours? Tell me.”
Varlaam moved even closer. The chapped lips beneath his matted mustache parted several times, like those of a fish. But he didn’t speak. Peter urged him again: “What’s the matter? Tell me.”
Varlaam lowered his inflamed eyelids, cleared his throat as though he were about to start reading and began to speak. Kirill’s book warns, he said, that there shall be a proud prince in this world under the name of Simon-Peter and he shall be the Antichrist, and that the saviour’s hand was not drawn in blessing at the general hall, and that the Blessed Virgin was drawn without an infant, and that the priests no longer had to serve over five prosphora, and that those priests were tearing up and trampling the new prayer books, which were written in shorthand and left out the words: “and the holy spirit”; and that there was great discord and much vanity among the lay folk, and that Count Golovkin’s son had a red cheek, and that Fyodor Chemodanov’s son, he had a black spot on his cheek and there was hair growing out of that spot, and it was said that such people would come in the time of the Antichrist.
Peter sat with his cheeks propped on his fists and seemed not to be listening. When Varlaam finished and fell silent, Peter, who was deep in thought, repeated several times: “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Terrible mess. Drivel… Can’t sort it out.”
For a long time he stared at the burning logs. Then he got up and stood before Varlaam, looking huge and kind. Varlaam suddenly began to whisper and it looked as if his whole wizened face were laughing: “Oh, you, little father, little father of mine…”
Then, suddenly, the tsar bent down and clasped Varlaam by the ears, as if he wanted to kiss him. His hot breath, soaked through with wine and tobacco, poured over the prisoner’s face. He looked deeply into Varlaam’s eyes, muttered something, turned, pulled his hat down on his head and coughed: “Well, Varlaam, looks like we haven’t settled on anything. I’ll be back to torture you tomorrow. Farewell.”
“Farewell, little father!”
Varlaam stretched towards him – as if Peter were his newfound father, as if he were a brother doomed to even greater torment – but Peter didn’t turn around. He kept walking towards the door, which his broad back almost blocked from view.
Outside the gates, grasping the rail of his gig and stopping for a moment before getting in, he reflected that his day had ended, a day of work, grueling and drunken. And the weight of this day, as well as of all the days that preceded it and of all the days still to come, descended like lead onto his shoulders, the shoulders of a man who had assumed a burden beyond human strength: one for all.
Footnotes
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