Excommunication by the church

As soon as Leo Tolstoy starts criticising the authority of the Church with a series of essays in the early 1880s, including Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and Confession, various dignitaries accuse him of heresy and discuss how he might be silenced. This comes to nothing until 1901 when the Holy Synod posts a notice on the door of every church signed by, among others, one archbishop and three bishops.

If the government pulled strings to have him excommunicated it had the opposite effect of what they wished because it causes open indignation. It is a time when many are agitating for freedom of speech, rights for workers, a revolution. Tolstoy happens to cross paths with a demonstration of about 1,000 workers and students who, in response to his excommunication, admiringly hail him as “the devil in human form”. He is both thrilled and frightened. People flock to his house in protest at the excommunication and the newspapers are banned from carrying notices of support.

More than a month after the excommunication he condemns the actions of the Church, again accusing it of ignoring the word of Christ and reiterating his own religious believes. He suffers a bout of malaria soon after and there is a flurry of instructions to governors and the police about not allowing demonstrations to be held in the event of his death. Such is the level of paranoia that his death will prompt an uprising and this becomes the pattern for the next decade. An outburst of revolt is quashed in 1905; the revolution occurs in earnest in 1917.

Many men of the church try to woo him back to the Orthodox Church including the bishop of Tula in 1909.

Clashes over his inheritance
Death