Life at One of England’s Last Tolstoyan Communes

These days, the Brotherhood Church of Stapleton, one of Britain’s two remaining Tolstoyan communes, has just four residents, plus a friendly deaf cat, some chickens, and a large, lumbering cow. The commune can trace its history back more than a hundred years. In 1894, when Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was at the height of his fame, a group of acolytes known as the Croydon Brotherhood founded Purleigh, the first community in the United Kingdom governed by the principles laid out by the Russian novelist—who, following a mid-life moral crisis, had begun writing philosophical works in which he outlined his belief in Jesus Christ as a human prophet who preached pacifism, communal living, and a general distrust of governing bodies. Tolstoy quickly gained a cult-like following both at home and abroad—which he somewhat disapproved of, on the grounds that to follow a human leader was to ignore one’s own conscience. “To speak of ‘Tolstoyism,’ ” he wrote in a letter, “to seek guidance, to inquire about my solution of questions, is a great and gross error.” Still, people insisted on seeking guidance from him.

His most fervent followers were in England, where his fawning devotee and erstwhile editor Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov lived during a period of exile. Chertkov visited Purleigh, but he chose to set up a press dedicated to Tolstoy’s work at a large defunct waterworks nearby rather than subsume his rather robust ego to the will of a fraternity of equals. The most influential member of the Purleigh Community was John Coleman Kenworthy, a former businessman whose economic treatise “Anatomy of Misery” was praised by Tolstoy, who had the book translated into Russian. “It is impossible to fight the System with its own weapons; one cannot touch pitch without being defiled,” Kenworthy declares, before concluding that personal transformation is the only way out of the bureaucratic hell of our own making. But despite Tolstoy’s early stamp of approval, Purleigh struggled—a lack of “common discipline and common sense” was to blame, according to Tolstoy’s biographer A. N. Wilson—and, by 1904, its few remaining citizens had abandoned the site. Kenworthy later had a nervous breakdown and spent time in an asylum.

Soon after, though, a Tolstoyan coterie from Leeds came to settle on the vacant plot of Purleigh. They later went back to Leeds for a bit, then finally settled in Stapleton, a bucolic, hedge-dotted place about an hour south of the Yorkshire moors. With money that one of the members had inherited from an aunt, plus what they made from selling knitwear, they were able to purchase a turnip field of about ten acres. Tolstoy wasn’t enthusiastic about Stapleton perhaps because he was, by this point, too embroiled in the drama of his marriage—or perhaps because, in 1903, two of the future founders of Stapleton had travelled from northern England to Russia to convince him of the merits of spiritualism, of which he disapproved. “I am too old to receive new truth,” a beleaguered Tolstoy told the would-be medium.

In the century that has passed since, up to two dozen people have lived in Stapleton’s three small buildings—all constructed out of repurposed wood—and, later, in the R.V.s that, since the nineteen-eighties, have dotted the property. Up through 1960, when National Service ended, Stapleton sheltered a steady stream of people fleeing mandatory conscription. But in recent years the population has dwindled to a handful. When I arrived there recently, one of them, Bracken Gibson, a third-generation Stapleton resident, was cooking an enormous Pyrex of vegetarian lasagna. As a child, Gibson accompanied his dad to agricultural shows, where livestock and farming equipment were sold. At these events, his father would screen anti-violence films out of the back of his van, movies like the classic French-Canadian short “Voisins,” in which a dispute over who owns a wildflower leads a pair of neighbors to beat each other to death with fence posts. Gibson felt innately sympathetic to his father’s cause, though he was unmoved by its underlying religious doctrine. (When I asked if he considers himself a Christian, he smirked and said, “Well, I don’t believe in God.”) As a teenager, he was an ardent protester and was arrested, he told me, more times than he could count.

In addition to maintaining the property, Gibson keeps bees at sites throughout Yorkshire (the bees at Stapleton he described as “quite friendly”) and cares for his elderly mother, Hilda, who lives in a house on the property and suffers from Alzheimer’s. Once, Hilda could have waxed eloquent about Christianity, the others at Stapleton assured me, but her orating days have passed. Years ago, Hilda bought herself an eco-friendly cardboard coffin, and it sits in the loft of her hobbit-hole-like home, awaiting the inevitable. When a member of the Brotherhood dies, the group buries the body by the hedges on the outskirts of the property and holds a Quaker-style service.

Another community resident, Jo, wearing knee-high Wellingtons and a flashlight on her head, showed me the outhouses and taught me how to sprinkle wood shavings into the bucket to compost the bodily waste. (The shavings were from pine trees that they grow on their land and sell at Christmas.) I thought of how Tolstoy asked a young Desmond MacCarthy, the Eton and Cambridge-educated literary critic and journalist, to empty his own chamber pot while visiting Tolstoy’s grand house at Yasnaya Polyana, because the Count thought it degrading to ask the servants to do it. Tolstoy’s wife, Sofiya, immediately insisted MacCarthy leave it to the help; the poor confused man peed on the lawn for the duration of his stay. I steeled myself to tell Jo that I’m a hearty sort who is happy to clean out buckets of urine, but she didn’t ask.

Jo and Bracken met when they were studying at university. There they found that they shared a belief in pacifism, and, after they graduated, the couple squatted in a large abandoned house in London, where they threw raucous parties in the basement. The fourth Stapleton resident is a young man who moved in after reading about the commune in Diggers and Dreamers, an annually published directory of intentional communities in Britain. Though the theological aspect of Tolstoyism doesn’t move any of them as much as it did their forbears, the socialist values that the author espoused remain, along with environmentalism, the guiding forces of their lives. In this way, Stapleton differs greatly from Whiteway Colony, the other remaining Tolstoyan settlement in the United Kingdom, where many residents live lives virtually indistinguishable from those in their neighboring Cotswold hamlets. At Stapleton, all water is sourced on the property, as is much of the food they eat. Though the group isn’t entirely self-sufficient, they will only buy ethical trade products or secondhand goods if they absolutely need something. Out in the consumerist Gomorrah, Jo said, no one even tries to fix broken objects—things are just tossed when they exhibit a flaw. “It seems like spitting in the face of the people who made them,” she told me. At Stapleton, the residents believe in taking care of what they have, which is one reason they’ve chosen to care for Hilda themselves instead of moving her into a home. I suggested to Jo—who, like Bracken, is an atheist—that they had something in common with the deeply religious. But she didn’t see it that way. “I don’t know if I’d say it’s a ‘calling,’ ” she said, “just seems logical.”

Later, braving the chilly night air on the way to the nearest outhouse, which was outfitted with a single light bulb, I wondered why, barring some kind of radical faith, anyone would stay in this place. I looked up at the reddish moon and, just at that moment, a shooting star fell. “Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another,” Tolstoy writes in “A Confession,” recalling his early years as a writer. Tolstoy had come to find something broken and ineffectual in the world of the prattling intelligentsia.

“Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another. At times we would indulge and praise each other on the condition that we be indulged and praised in return; at other times we would irritate and shout at each other exactly as in a madhouse.”

After using the facilities, and fretting for a good five minutes over how to dispose of the toilet paper, I returned to my caravan and settled back into my bed to read “War and Peace,” which I had brought with me. I was far away from the elegant drawing rooms of Moscow, where Pierre Bezukhov sips dry Madeira wine and dines on hazel grouse. It felt almost illicit, reading of such luxury in such Spartan surroundings.