Chapter 34 - Tolstoy’s Complete Works

Summary

A dozen editions of Tolstoy’s collected works were published while he was alive (the twelfth was being prepared when he died). His wife, Sophia Andreevna, prepared seven of these; his disciples – most notably, V.G. Chertkov – arranged for the publication of his banned writings abroad. In 1918, Chertkov secured Lenin’s affidavit for the publication of “everything that Tolstoy ever wrote.” After Lenin’s death, and especially after the 1928 centennial of Tolstoy’s birth, the corpus of the Jubilee Edition was shaped by Stalin’s state decree. First projected to exceed 100 volumes, the Jubilee Edition funneled down to 90 volumes. This chapter signposts the difficult history of the distinguished edition during the three decades of Stalinism (1928–58) that it took to publish it, while explaining its structure and key principles. Despite its ideologically marred editorial format, the Jubilee Edition – which remains the most complete and professionally executed extant edition of Tolstoy – is an extraordinary achievement. The chapter concludes by discussing the tasks of the newest 100-volume edition, started in 2000 under the auspices of the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, its ultimate purpose being to restore and expertly annotate all of the texts from Tolstoy’s pen.