Editor’s Introduction

This is not a public letter to Tolstoy, like Father John’s formal ‘Reply… on the Appeal to the Clergy’. It is a set of entries drawn straight from his private diary, written to himself and to God about the same controversy: Leo Tolstoy’s late-life religious writings and his 1901 excommunication by the Most Holy Synod. The private form changes the register. Where the open letter argues point by point, these diary pages return again and again, almost obsessively, to the same handful of charges: that Tolstoy has rejected the Trinity, the Creed, the Eucharist, the whole structure of Christian doctrine, and has led a generation of educated Russians into unbelief with him.

The language is severe even by the standards of nineteenth-century religious polemic: Tolstoy is named an antichrist, a serpent, a vessel of Satan, a beast risen from the abyss. Readers expecting the gentler, more pastoral Kronstadt of the devotional writings will find something else here: a churchman convinced that one of the most famous men in the world is actively leading souls to ruin, writing in the one place he did not expect to be read by the man himself.