Tolstoy's False Disciple
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
On the snowy morning of February 8, 1897, the Petersburg secret police were following Tolstoy's every move, and he was always in the company of a man named Certkov. At sixty-nine, Russia's most celebrated writer was being treated like a major criminal, and had abandoned his literary pursuits and become a spiritual mystic, angering the Orthodox church and earning both the admination and ire of his countrymen. Tolstoy was recognizable enough, with his peasant garb and beard, but who was the man who towered over Tolstoy, twenty years younger, with a cold, impenetrable look on his face?This man, Chertkov, was a relative to the Tsars and nephew to the chief of the secret police and represented the very things Tolstoy had renounced—class privilege, unlimited power, and wealth—and yet Chertkov fascinated and attracted Tolstoy. He would become the writer's closest confidant, reading even his diary, and at the end of Tolstoy's life, Chertkov had him in his complete control, preventing him from even seeing his own wife on his deathbed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vladimir Chertkov, a heretofore shadowy confidant of Leo Tolstoy, is brought to light in Popoff's well-researched work. Chertkov's letters to Tolstoy, which span their 30-year friendship, have long been suppressed by Russian authorities embarrassed by the great writer's unlikely devotion to an abrasive, domineering aristocrat. Popoff gained special access to their correspondence for her biography of Tolstoy's wife, Sophia, and now offers a deft portrait of the shadowy figure of Chertkov as a "Machiavellian" manipulator gifted at ingratiating himself to powerful men of all ideological stripes first with the Tsars and later with Lenin and Stalin. Chertkov appealed to Tolstoy by playing the role of dutiful prot g , avowing Tolstoyan principles (poverty, humility, nonresistance) more dogmatically than Tolstoy himself. Popoff proposes that Chertkov exercised a kind of "mind control" over his ostensible master by creating a "compendium" of Tolstoy's written thoughts and insisting the writer remain consistent with them. Tolstoy was opposed on principle to dealing with commercial practicalities, to the point of renouncing his copyright; Chertkov was thus left, following Tolstoy's death, to contend (victoriously) with Sophia for executive authority over Tolstoy's literary properties. Popoff's account is unavoidably heavy on publishing intrigue, which can be tiring. Otherwise, the book is fascinating and it fills a gap, providing the first full account of the bizarre relationship between a great man and his "moral antipode."
