Gary L. Browning and Dr. Melvin K. Richardson, Germanic and Slavic Languages
When Leo Tolstoy was a young boy, his older brother told him that the secret of life was written on a green stick, buried under an oak tree in the woods of Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy family estate in the beautiful rolling hills of tsarist Russia. All his life, Tolstoy, the great Russian author and humanist, searched for the green stick and its contents. He sought answers to the perplexing puzzles of life that ultimate truth, contained upon the green stick, would provide. In his works and in his spiritual strivings, Tolstoy always remained committed to this ideal, that ultimate truth indeed existed and that for fulfillment in life, one must find and embrace it.
This search for truth was a defining motif of Tolstoy’s life. Though he was a world-renowned author, he often felt that his life lacked purpose and meaning, and he thus searched even further for life’s answers. In the course of these pursuits, Tolstoy turned to faith and religion, including a survey of various world religions. In the course of this study, Count Tolstoy encountered Mormonism, a unique young American religion. The purpose of my ORCA research project was to further investigate Leo Tolstoy’s attitude towards Mormonism. Though this subject had been researched in depth by Leland Fetzer over thirty years ago, I hoped to find any evidence that had been uncovered in the past thirty years with the fall of the Soviet Union and so forth that might offer more glimpses into Tolstoy and Mormonism.
In investigating these views, I adopted a three-pronged approach to this interesting question. First of all, I undertook further research into Tolstoy’s attitude towards faith and religion in general, analyzing and comparing his books Anna Karenina and Confession in my BYU Honors Thesis, “Tolstoy and Levin: Fellow Travelers on the Road to Life and Truth,” available in the Harold B. Lee Library. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the main hero, the semi-autobiographical Konstatin Levin, languishes in despairing malaise, unable to find a purpose in life until he ultimately discovers religion and faith in God. An almost identical path is told in Tolstoy’s autobiographical essay Confession, in which he recounts his journey through darkness and a similar despairing malaise until he, like Levin, finds faith in God. Like Levin, this faith is initially oriented toward the Russian Orthodox Church, but as Confession concludes, he begins to doubt the rituals and ultimate authority of the Russian Orthodox Church. Though Tolstoy is secure in his faith, he is unsure about whether to direct it.
After an ultimate fall out with and self-imposed excommunication from Russian Orthodoxy, Tolstoy turned to world religions, hoping to find truth in other arenas, and thus beginning his investigation into Mormonism. As part of this study, Tolstoy participated in a correspondence in the late 1880’s with Susa Young Gates, the daughter of Brigham Young and an important Mormon figure of national stature in her own right. Sister Gates wrote Tolstoy three letters and apparently received an answer to at least two of these letters, including one letter probably from Tolstoy himself and another by Tolstoy’s daughter.
The main goal of my ORCA research project was to do everything possible to try and locate these letters sent from Tolstoy to Gates, wherein would be located his definite views on Mormonism. The search for these letters included contact with descendants of Susa Young Gates, research at the Utah State Historical Society and the LDS Church Archives, and correspondence with the Historical Department at BYU-Hawaii (Sis. Gates was on a mission with her husband in Hawaii (“the Sandwich Islands”) during part of this correspondence). Unfortunately, no sign of these letters ever turned up and it is questionable if these letters even exist anymore. If found, these letters would be invaluable in answering numerous questions about Tolstoy’s views on Mormonism.
What is known, however, is that as part of this correspondence, Susa Young Gates sent Tolstoy both The Book of Mormon and Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet. In search of the whereabouts of these books and in hopes of finding further leads about or copies of these missing letters, I traveled to Russia, planning to visit both Yasnaya Polyana and the Leo Tolstoy State Museum and Library in Moscow.
At the State Museum in Moscow, I was able to visit the archives and granted permission to view two of the letters that Sis. Gates had written Leo Tolstoy. On the first letter is Tolstoy’s own scribbling, noting to himself to answer the letter. Unfortunately, the State Museum, like much of Russia, is experiencing chaotic times, and while I had hoped to obtain copies of the letters, I was not allowed. I had also hoped that perhaps more research on their end had been done regarding Tolstoy’s views on Mormonism, but the economic climate has not allowed any research at all to be done into Tolstoy’s life in the past decade.
I also traveled to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s home and the primary setting for such works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. After touring the home, I visited the research center and after much prodding and pleading, was finally allowed to locate and view two books, The Book of Mormon and Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet, sitting on Tolstoy’s bookcase in his home. Both of the books were printed in the 1880’s in Salt Lake City and sent to Tolstoy with the inscription “Count Leo Tolstoy, Presented by Susa Young Gates.”
In the end, it is clear that Tolstoy had exposure to Mormonism, and though numerous folk tales exist in the church about how Tolstoy envisioned Mormonism to become “the next great world religion,” there is simply no evidence to support such claims. While he believed in God, Tolstoy was suspicious of organized religion in general and never made any documented endorsement of the church. Thirty years ago, Leland Fetzer researched the subject and ultimately found the evidence to be inconclusive. The aim of this ORCA project was to see if anything new could be uncovered regarding Tolstoy and Mormonism. Unfortunately, the past thirty years have not opened up any new leads regarding the whereabouts of the Tolstoy letters or about his views.
Before Tolstoy’s death, he asked to be buried at his beloved Yasnaya Polyana under the same oak tree as the green stick of his childhood, with its answers to life and truth. While at Yasnaya Polyana, I went to Tolstoy’s grave and reflected on the Russian author and spiritualist. While it is unclear whether Tolstoy ever found the truth that is in Mormonism and The Book of Mormon, Tolstoy should still be remembered for his quest, for throughout his life he remained committed, always willing to sacrifice everything he had in the name of truth.