Vasily Sutaev

Василий Кириллович Сютаев was a peasant whom Tolstoy visited at Torzhok in the autumn of 1881, in the years he was writing A Confession (1879–82). He appears in the diary and letters of the move to Moscow, beside Nikolai Fyodorov, as one of the few people Tolstoy found living by the teaching he was then working out.

The 1881 visit

The diary entry of 5 October 1881 (OS), which opens on the move to Moscow as the most painful month of his life, ends: “Was at Torzhok at Sutaev’s, a consolation.”¹

In a letter of mid to late November 1881 to Vasily Alekseev, Tolstoy names the people he has found in Moscow, Fyodorov first among them, and then adds: “I also went to see Sutaev. Also a Christian, and in deed.” Of his gospel synthesis (the Short Exposition of the Gospel) he writes that Orlov and Fyodorov had read it and that they were of one mind; “with Sutaev, in everything, down to the smallest details.”²

Later mention

In a long letter to Mikhail Engelhardt of late 1882 or early 1883, arguing that education adds nothing to a person, Tolstoy points to Sutaev: “an illiterate peasant”, whose influence on people and on the intelligentsia was “greater and more significant than that of all Russian scholars and writers”.³

Open questions

• The PSS notes to both letters (note 8 in the Alekseev letter, note 20 in the Engelhardt letter) are not in the dive’s extracts. Sutaev’s dates, his home village, and what his own teaching was are not documented in these sources.
• The dossier lists a photograph (Y. Steinberg, 1885, Wikimedia Commons) and gives his death as 1892 in a rights note. Both are from Commons, not from the PSS — check.

Dive provenance

• 1879-1882-a-confession — the 1881 diary entry and the letters to V. I. Alekseev (1881) and M. A. Engelhardt (1882–83), 2026-10-02.