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The Demonized Double: The Image of Lev Tolstoi in Russian Orthodox Polemics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2017

Pål Kolstø
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Abstract

As Pål Kolstø explores in this article, attitudes towards Lev Tolstoi's religious teaching differed wildly among Russian Orthodox believers at the turn of the last century. Some felt that his philosophical notions were remarkably congenial to church doctrine, while others saw Tolstoianism as the radical negation of everything the church stood for. An image often conjured up was Tolstoi as the Antichrist. To some, it was precisely the features that made others see Tolstoi as an Orthodox double that led them to this conclusion: The Antichrist will manage to lead the faithful astray precisely because he will seem to imitate Christ himself. This was the point where the most extreme positions in the Orthodox debate on Tolstoi and Tolstoianism converged. All told, some 85 books and booklets and 260 articles on Tolstoi were published by professed Orthodox authors, many of them laymen. Taken together, they bear witness to the breadth and vitality of Orthodox public opinion.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 304 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2006

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References

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22. Some critics feel that Richard Gustafson goes too far in this direction in his major work, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, 1986). See, e.g., Helle, Lillian J., “Tolstoj's Resurrection and Orthodox Rhetoric,” in Kjetsaa, Geir, Lönngren, Lennart, and Opeide, Gunnar, eds., Translating Culture: Essays in Honour of Erik Egeberg (Oslo, 2001), 116 Google Scholar.

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26. Ostroumov, “Religioznoe i nravstvennoe uchenie,” 1916, no. 1:116.

27. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society was an important meeting place for liberal clergy and religiously minded intelligentsia. See Jutta Scherrer, Die Petersburger religiös-philosophischen Vereinigungen: Die Enlwicklung des religiösen Selbstverständnisses ihrer Intelligencija-Mitglieder (1901–1917) (Wiesbaden, 1973).

28. Kolstø, “A Mass for a Heretic?” 70–80.

29. Vasilii Ekzempliarskii, “Gr. L. N. Tolstoi i sv. Ioann Zlatoust v ikh vzgliade na zhiznennoe znachenie zapovedei Khristovykh,” in O religii Tolstogo, 109.

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35. Ibid., 14:256.

36. Ostroumov, “Religioznoe i nravstvennoe uchenie,” 1916, no. 5–6:148.

37. Antonii (Khrapovitskii), Besedy o prevoskhodstve pravoslavnago ponimaniia Evangeliia sravnitel'no s ucheniem L. Tolstago (St. Petersburg, 1891), 47.

38. Bishop Antonii's assessment of Tolstoianism was in many ways so similar to Petrov's and Ekzempliarskii's positions that one may wonder why the two latter priests were censured while Antonii was not. (On the contrary, his career continued to flourish, and at the Russian Church Council of 1917 he was only one step away from being elected Russian patriarch.) One possible reason might be that Antonii was simply better connected, but more important, while Petrov and Ekzempliarskii used Tolstoi as a whip with which to lash out against social injustice in Russia, Antonii's criticism was directed against the lax moral standards of his fellow Orthodox Christians only. Finally, Antonii did not attack theologians or the church as an institution, only the practice of individual Orthodox believers.

39. Ivan Aivazov, “Kto takoi L. N. Tolstoi? (Po povodu postanovleniia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy chestvovat’ 80-letie Tolstogo),” Tserkovnye vedomosti, 1908, no. 34, appendix: 1624.

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41. Cfr. Revelation 13:2. Iz dnevnika o. Ioanna Kronshtadtskago, 26; and see, e.g., Griniakin, N., “Utverdi, Gospodi, tserkov'!” (St. Petersburg, 1904), 552 and 565Google Scholar.

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43. For instance, P. Kraniev, “Otpevanie” grafa L. N. Tolstogo s evangel'skoi i tserkovnoi tochki zreniia (Po povodu sovremennoi gazetnoi shumikhi (Riazan', 1913), 15 and 20; Bronzov, Aleksandr, “Drug ili vrag Khristov—Tolstoi?” Khristianskoe chtenie, 1912, no. 4:463-82Google Scholar.

44. In German, der Antichrist may refer to both the eschatological persona and to each and every opponent of Christendom. Friedrich Nietzsche plays upon this duality in the title of his book Der Antichrist (1888).

45. Mikhail Sopots'ko, “Po povodu iubileia ‘grafa L. N. Tolstogo,’” Student-khristianin, 1908, no.11–12:29.

46. See, e.g., Mitr. Muretov, “Khristianin bez Khrista,” Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1893, no. 3:370–85.

47. Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1899, no. 5:142–48. Such numerology had a long pedigree in Russian apocalyptic speculations. See, e.g., Ryan, W. F., “Magic and Divination: Old Russian Sources,” in Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, 1997), 35–58 Google Scholar.

48. Even if one should be inclined to accept this line of reasoning, it is not self-evident why the patronymic also had to go. This middle name is, after all, given to a person to signify not that he is a spiritual son of the church, but to tell who his worldly father is. Moreover, the anonymous reader allowed himself certain other liberties in order to be able to arrive at his conclusion. These were based on an oral, phonetic rendering of Tolstoi's patronymic rather than the correct orthographic spelling, which would have been Nikolaevich.

49. Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1899, no. 5:142, and Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1901, no. 9:143.

50. Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1901, no. 9:38.

51. Dushepoleinoe chtenie, 1901, no. 9:143–45. The same calculation was later reprinted in another anti-Tolstoian Orthodox publication, Golubtsev, A. and Alekseev, I., Polnoe razoblachenie iasnopolianskogo erelika (St. Petersburg, 1909)Google Scholar.

52. See, e.g., Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1901, no. 7:488.

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55. Ioann, Iz dnevnika, 47.

56. Quoted in Dushepoleznoe chtenie, 1901, no. 7:488.

57. Ioann, Iz dnevnika, 6.

58. See James 2: 19.

59. Ioann, Iz dnevnika, 34. See also Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint, 257–59.

60. Konstantin, Archimandrite, “Tolstoi: K piatidesiatiletiiu ego konchiny,” in Kpiatidesiatiktiiu konchiny L'va Tolstogo. Sbornik statei (Jordanville, N.Y., 1960), 16 Google Scholar.

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63. See, e.g., Konstantin Mochul'skii, Vladimir Solov'ev: Zhizri i uchenie (Paris, 1951), 808–13; Evgenii Trubetskoi, “Spor Tolstogo i Solov'eva o gosudarstve,” in O religii Tolslogo, 59–75; Aleksandr Nikol'skii, “L. N. Tolstoi pred sudom pokoinago filosofa VI. S. Solov'eva,” Missionerskii sbornik, 1910, no. 2:109–18.

64. Vladimir Solov'ev, “Rossiia i Vselenskaia Tserkov”’ in his O khristianskom edinstve (Brussels, 1967), 249–383.

65. Waage, Peter Normann, Der unsichtbare Kontinent: Wladimir Solowjow, der Denker Europas (Stuttgart, 1988)Google Scholar.

66. See, e.g., Trubetskoi, “Spor Tolstogo i Solov'eva,” 62; Billington, James H., The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, 1970), 469 and 492Google Scholar; Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch, “Soloviev on Salvation: The Story of the ‘Short Story of the Antichrist,’” in Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch and Gustafson, Richard F., eds, Russian Religious Thought (Madison, 1996), 68–87 Google Scholar.

67. Vladimir Solov'ev, “Tri razgovora,” Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1903), 8:453–586, on p. 453. Here and in other quotations below I follow Alexander Bakshy's translation in War, Progress, and the End of History (London, 1915). Emphasis in the original.

68. Mochul'skii, Vladimir Solov'ev, 250.

69. Solov'ev, “Tri razgovora,” 469–70.

70. Ibid., 524–25.

71. Ibid., 526.

72. Ibid., 552.

73. Ibid., 554.

74. Ibid., 553.

75. Ibid., 562.

76. Ibid., 554.

77. Mochul'skii, Vladimir Solov'ev, 259.

78. Valliere, Paul, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov. Orthodox Theology in a Nexu Key (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2000), 221 Google Scholar.

79. Sergei Il'menskii, Graf L. Tolstoi kak odin iz samykh iarkikh vyrazitelei dukha griadushchiago anlikhrista (Saratov, 1911), 1.

80. As a young man Tolstoi wrote about such an aspiration in an isolated note in his diary in 1855 but never returned to it. See Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 47:37–38. He would most likely have been highly surprised if anyone had suggested to him that his religious teachings after 1884 sprang from the same aspiration.

81. Il'menskii, GrafL. Tolstoi, 3.

82. Arsenii [Zadinovskii], Graf Tolstoi i nashe neverie (Moscow, 1911), 74.

83. Rozanov, Vasilii, Temnyi lik: Metafizika khristianstva (St. Petersburg, 1911; reprint, Wurzburg, 1975), esp. 99–127 Google Scholar. Laura Engelstein makes the same point in “Old and New, High and Low: Straw Horsemen of Russian Orthodoxy,” in Kivelson and Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia, 23–32. Engelstein describes the Skoptsy's relation to Orthodoxy as “an extreme variation on a common theme” (31).

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85. Archimandrite Ioann (Shakhovskoi), Tolstoi i tserkov’ (Berlin, 1939), 101.

86. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 23:53.

87. Ibid., 23:437 and 448.

88. Ibid., 63:92.

89. Nikolai Gusev, Dva goda s L. N. Tolstym (Moscow, 1973), 77.