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On Tolstoi, Prophet and Teacher

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

E. Lampert
E. Lampert*
Affiliation:
Department of Russian Studies, University of Keele, Staffordshire
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Extract

It is difficult to decide what is of the greatest Importance in all the vast mass of diaries, reminiscences, biographies, and other books about Tolstoi—the fantastic drama of his life, his extraordinary character, the effect of this character upon his magnificent art, or the projection of his prodigious mind on his philosophy and belief. The fact that Tolstoi himself was a living contradiction of the separateness of experiences and ideas is a sufficient reason for not attempting to isolate any one of them from all the rest. But, whether because his understanding of himself fell short of that of other human beings or because he was forced by the very power of his understanding to turn about and attend to his other task—that of understanding how to live with himself and with his fellow men—Tolstoi chose to divide his life into independent periods. The fourth and last one, in which, he said, he “hoped to die,” enlarged (or, as some would have it, narrowed) his understanding until it became prophecy, or religion, or a huge moral ax which he leveled against himself and the surrounding world.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1966 , pp. 604 - 614
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1966

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References

1 There are a number of works specifically concerned with Tolstoi's moral and religious teaching. The earlier ones published in Russia, such as Gusev, A.'s Osnovnye “religioznye“ nachala grafa L. Tolstogo (Kazan, 1893)Google Scholar or the more sophisticated Religiia grafa L. N. Tolstogo i ego uchenie o zhizni i liubvi (2d ed.; St. Petersburg, 1895) by A. Kozlov, are more or less crude attempts to denigrate Tolstoi from positions of impeccable religious orthodoxy and political conformity. But there are some illuminating comments in Strakhov, N. N.'s Kriticheskie stat'i ob I. S. Turgeneve i L. N. Tolstom, Vol. I (4th ed.; Kiev, 1901)Google Scholar. Merezhkovskii, D. S.'s classic Tolstoi i Dostoevskii (4th ed.; St. Petersburg, 1909)Google Scholar is interesting for those who can cope with the author's Lycophrontic tenebrosities and his contrived, pervasive contraposition of “the great pagan” or “mystagogue of the flesh,” Tolstoi, and “the great Christian” or “spirit-bearer,” Dostoevski. Shestov, L. (Dobro v uchenii Tolstogo i Nitsshe [3d ed.; Berlin, 1922]Google Scholar) is a forceful critique of Tolstoi's “rationalism” based on the real or imaginary conflict between the good or reason and God. Tolstoi i tserkov’ (Berlin, 1939) by Archimandrite Ioann Shakhovskoi is remarkable mainly for its sustained irrelevancies. There are some excellent and thoughtful sections on Tolstoi's religious and moral experience in V. Maklakov's O L. Tolstom (Paris, 1929). A more recent account in Istoriia russkoi filosofii (Paris, 1948) by V. Zenkovskii does not advance understanding and represents, like most of the rest of the work, a mass of suet with a few—rather small—plums. Much light on Tolstoi the man and the thinker is thrown by Isaiah Berlin in his fascinating study The Hedgehog and the Fox (London, 1953), although it deals mainly with Tolstoi's historical views. L'Evolution religieuse de L. Tolstoi (Paris, 1963) by N. Weisbein is the only work dealing with Tolstoi's religious ideas au fond, and its abundant documentation and comprehensiveness, if not its imaginativeness, make it indispensable for the student of “Tolstoianism.“ Of the many biographies of Tolstoi, in which accounts of his “post-conversion” period play a more or less important part, the latest biography by V., Shklovskii, Lev Tolstoi (Moscow, 1963)Google Scholar, is probably the most important and perceptive of all, in this as in all other respects. In addition, mention must be made of the two-volume edition of memoirs of Tolstoi, (L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniakh sovremennikov [Moscow, 1960]Google Scholar), among which those by Gorki (English translation by S. Kotelianski and L. Woolf, London and New York, 1920) are the most remarkable.

2 Unless otherwise specified, all quotations are from Ispoved', in Vol. XXIII of the 90- volume Jubilee edition of Tolstoi, 's works (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1929–58 Google Scholar). This edition is provided with a mass of valuable notes and commentaries.

3 Ibid., XXXIX, 7; XLIX, 7.

4 See, for example, ibid., XXIII, 324, 440-41.

5 See also ibid., pp. 447-48.

6 Ibid., p. 63. It should be noted that all the religious writings by Tolstoi and most of the important fictional works of the “post-conversion” period were forbidden in Russia before 1905. Publication was impossible because they represented a direct or indirect challenge to the established order and its ideological foundations. Permission to publish A Confession was given, provided Tolstoi wrote a postscript and recanted everything he had said in the Confession itself. Needless to say, Tolstoi refused, and so did the editor of the review Russkaia mysl', in which it was supposed to have been published. Those writings which were allowed publication after 1905 appeared in a more or less heavily censored form. (On the earlier period, see N. B v, “L. N. Tolstoi i tsenzura v 80-kh godakh,” Novoe vremia, Oct. 1, 1908.) Kritika dogmaticheskogo bogosloviia (An Examination of Dogmatic Theology), first published in Geneva in 1891, greatly contributed to Tolstoi's excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901, although it was more directly occasioned by the novel Resurrection. The excommunication—meaningless at it seems to have been in view of Tolstoi's avowed repudiation of the Church—marked the climax of the growing resentment of church a.nd state at the disturbance caused by Tolstoi's ideas. It was the nearest thing to his elimination, inconceivable because of his world-wide fame. Tolstoi concluded his answer to the excommunication by the Holy Synod in the following words: “Whether or not these beliefs of mine offend, grieve, or prove a stumbling block to anyone, or hinder anything, or give displeasure to anybody, I can as little change them as I can change my body. I must live my own life, and must meet my death (and that very soon); I cannot, therefore, believe otherwise than I—preparing to go to the God from whom I came—do believe. I do not believe my faith to be the one indubitable truth for all time, but I see no other that is simpler, clearer, or answers better all the demands of my reason and my heart. Should I find such a one, I shall at once accept it, for God requires nothing but the truth. But I cannot any more return to that form which I have escaped with such suffering than a flying bird can reenter the eggshell from which it has emerged” (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XXXIV, 252). Lenin commented on the excommunication in a Herzen vein: “The Holy Synod has excommunicated Tolstoi. All the better. This deed will be taken into account by the people at the hour of reckoning with the bureaucrats in cassocks, the constables in Christ, the black inquisitors, who supported Jewish pogroms and all the other feats of the anti-Semitic tsarist gang” ( Lenin, , Sochineniia [4th ed.; Moscow, 1948], XVI, 296 Google Scholar).

7 “The thought which noticeably gnaws at him more than any other,” wrote Gorki, “is the thought of God. At times, it seems not even a thought, but an intense resistance to something whose presence he feels, which overshadows him. He is more reticent about it than he would like to be, but he never stops thinking about it. It is hardly a sign of old age, a presentiment of death. No, it comes from his magnificent human pride. And a little from hurt, for it is outrageous that he, Lev Tolstoi, should submit to some streptococcus” (L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniakh sovremennikov, II, 413).

8 Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XXIII, 304.

9 Ibid., p. 455.

10 Ibid., p. 423.

11 Ibid., p. 332. 12 See also ibid., pp. 410-12, and throughout V chem moia vera? 13 Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XXIII, 418 ff. 14 For Tolstoi's change of attitude in all these respects, see ibid., XXXVI, 315 ff., 365; XXXVII, 83 ff.; LVII, 82, 206; LVIII, 65; also the Diary for 1905-7. Once Tolstoi admitted even that “to carry out the eternal law of nonresistance may contribute to slavery” (LVIII, 7). He also wrote to the revolutionaries and the political convicts that “nonresistance is an idea … To obey it as a rule of conduct is a great mistake or self-delusion” (LXXVIII, 218)!