Father Sergius, and Other Stories is Sadly not Magical

This book isn’t exactly haunted, but it possesses a mystical and bewitching rarity. It isn’t on Goodreads, and I had to manually upload it to The Storygraph. I encountered it while reshelving my school library, and was surprised to find that anyone had checked out such an obscure and cheap-looking book in the first place. The photo on the cover was a bland landscape and the title font wouldn’t have been out of place on a Wattpad mystery/romance. Even more puzzling was the attribution: “Tolstoy, Leo, graf, Wright, Hagberg.” Opening the strange book to its frontispiece, I learned that it was initially published in English in 1912 by Dr. Hagberg Wright, the late secretary of the London library. The author was Count Leo Tolstoy, famous today for books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

While the frontispiece had cleared some things up, the lowercase “graf,” remained puzzling: did it refer to Tolstoy’s title (the Russian and German terms are linguistically unrelated) or was it an abbreviation for some kind of editorial process? As I contemplated this, I turned to the first page:

“There happened in St. Petersburg during the forties an event which startled society.

A handsome youth, a prince, an officer in the Cuirassiers for whom every one had predicted the rank of aide-de-camp and a brilliant career attached to the person of Emperor Nicholas I, quitted the service. He broke with his beautiful fiancée, a lady-in-waiting, and a favorite of the empress, just a fortnight before the wedding day, and giving his small estate to his sister, retired to a monastery to become a monk.

To those who were ignorant of the hidden motives, this was an extraordinary and unaccountable step; but as regards Prince Stephen Kasatsky himself, it was such a natural move that he could not conceive an alternative” (1)

The type was thick and antiquated, and the margins were huge. But something about the mysterious vocation of Stephen Kasatsky intrigued me. Was this really the work of the great Leo Tolstoy? And what was such a shabby, obscure print doing in a moderately-stocked high school library?

I checked the book out. I had to.

Father Sergius, and Other Stories is composed of short stories and fragments from Tolstoy’s most radical, religious period. Common topics include the hollowness of aristocratic society and the wisdom of supposedly “simple” people like children and peasants. The title story features an aristocrat whose pursuit of godliness is marred by worldly temptations. Tolstoy liked that premise so much that he reused it in “The Posthumous Papers of the Hermit, Fedor Kusmich.” Both Father Sergius and the hermit (whose identity is a spoiler) abandon lives of fame and outward virtue to wander around Russia and live off the kindness of strangers, usually women.

Tolstoy treats his female characters, from aristocratic debutantes to peasant grandmothers, with a distance and respect peculiar to nineteenth-century fiction: unlike the tortured male characters, they have little trouble sticking to the righteous path prescribed to them, and the one sinner in attendance is quickly set right. Similarly, children are precocious angels able to see through the hypocrisies of bourgeois society. Particularly saccharine is a set of short scenes entitled “The Wisdom of Children,” in which charmingly-named innocents express their opinions on social prolems. For example, in “On Remuneration of Labor” an aristocratic boy asks his father:

“FEDYA: I wonder why we are unable to do any work, and [servants] do it all for us. Ought it to be like that?… Are we not to learn how to prepare food and to harness horses?” (116)

Messages like this one were certainly relevant to anterevolutionary Russia and perhaps to England, where this copy of Father Sergius, and Other Stories was first published. But surely they could have been delivered in a less obnoxious way!

While all of the stories had morals, some were subtler than others. My favorite of the collection was “Memoirs of a Lunatic.” Its narrator, a nobleman in his 50s, has recently been examined due to streak of strange behavior. As he recounts his experiences, it becomes clear that society, not him, is absurd. The story was quite philosophically suffocating (in a good way) and might appeal to fans of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Sadly, it was the only story in the collection to pull off its message with any subtlety.

I expected more from Father Sergius, and Other Stories. The (anonymous) translation is decent if you like Victorian novels, but it’s definitely not top-shelf Tolstoy. I am content to put down this sliver of apocrypha, and let its lingering mysteries linger.

“There is no God for the man who lives for the praise of the world. I must now seek Him” (88)