The Icon and the Axe

Organization and bribery are the two mighty instruments used with such success for the manipulation of the masses. … In our time a new means has been found of working the masses for political ends .. . this is the art of rapid and dexterous generalization of ideas disseminated with the confidence of burning conviction as the last word of science.9

In a sense Pobedonostsev foresaw the program of revolution that would prevail in Russia even before the revolutionaries themselves. He sought to combat it with his own forms of organization, indoctrination, and forced conformity.

The most consistent opponent of his policies was Tolstoy, who after completing Anna Karenina in 1876 had given up his brilliant career as a novelist to preach his own form of Christian living to the Russian masses. The extraordinary spectacle of a magnificent writer and exuberant aristocrat wandering in peasant garb among the peasants of his estate and writing elementary primers on Christian morality attracted world-wide attention and deprived Tsarist absolutism of its moral authority among many thinking people. By the end of his long life many Russians spoke of their "two Tsars": the crowned Tsar in St. Petersburg and the uncrowned Tsar in Yasnaya Polyana.

Tolstoy was such a formidable figure that he transcends the environment in which he lived, yet he was deeply rooted in it. His greatest novel,

War and Peace, is a panoramic, epic tale of Russian history. His other monumental work, Anna Karenina, is an effort to solve the problem of family happiness and social adjustment that had plagued Russian aristocratic literature from Pushkin through Turgenev. In the character of Platon Karataev in the first work and Levin in the second, Tolstoy begins to develop his new ethical philosophy of returning to the harmony of the natural world. In contrast to the Karamazovs' love of the elemental and sensuous, of "life more than the meaning of life," Tolstoy's Levin insists that life without meaning is unbearable, that life "has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it." The last thirty years of Tolstoy's own life were spent in trying to define "the meaning of goodness" and to saddle his own earthy personality to the task of bringing good into the corrupted life of late Imperial Russia.

During this long and baffling period of religious teaching, Tolstoy develops a number of concepts that had become important in the Russian intellectual tradition. His moral puritanism and rejection of sexual lust and artistic creativity are in the tradition of the sixties; his personal passion for identity with the peasants and the unspoiled natural world is a reflection of the populist ethos of the seventies. His belief in human perfectibility puts him in the main stream of Russian radical thought, as does his anarchistic rejection of institutional coercion and constitutional processes. Most important of all, Tolstoy avidly defended and was deeply influenced by the Russian sectarians. He viewed his own ethical teaching as the "true Christianity" of morals rather than metaphysics, a rational syncretic religion that required no church or dogma.

What is unique in Tolstoy is the relentlessness with which he developed lines of thought that his predecessors had never carried to their logical conclusions. Implicitly throughout War and Peace and explicitly in the second epilogue he extends belief in the power of the people to the point where he denies any significance to the individual. In his religious writings he develops the populist faith in the power of moral ideals to the point where he renounces all use of coercion in support of such ideals. The populist belief that the search for justice must be accompanied by the search for truth led him to renounce his art and finally his family: to go off like Stepan Trofimovich at the end of The Possessed on a last pathetic pilgrimage into the countryside, which led to death in 1910 in a lonely provincial railroad station.

The contrast is frequently made between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, two of Russia's greatest thinkers and of the world's greatest novelists. The epic, pastoral world of Tolstoy, the high aristocrat and rationalistic "seer of the flesh" is in many ways the very antithesis of the dramatic, urban world of

Dostoevsky, the low aristocrat and often irrational "seer of the spirit."10 One image perhaps goes to the heart of the difference. In contrast to Dostoevsky's early love of Schiller and final apotheosis of the play instinct in The Brothers stands Tolstoy's early statement that "life is not a game but a serious matter"-which is repeated almost verbatim in his last letter to his wife. As he put it in his What Is To Be Done? of the mid-eighties:

Human life . . . has no other object than to elucidate moral truths . . . and this elucidation is not only the chief but ought to be the sole business of man.