The Icon and the Axe

Life was a serious matter for Tolstoy because it was the arena in which man's quest for moral perfection and universal happiness had to be realized. Unlike Dostoevsky, for whom evil and death were part of the greater drama of suffering and redemption, they were for Tolstoy unaccountable intrusions into his world of Promethean perfectibility.

Tolstoy was terrified by death-an event which he portrayed in his works with the vividness and psychological insight of one who had obviously dwelt deeply on the problem. He was fascinated in his late years by Nicholas Fedorov, the librarian of the Rumiantsev museum (now Lenin Library) in Moscow, who taught that the advance of science would make possible the perpetuation of life and even the resurrection of those already dead. He also returned periodically to the idea that the assertive, artificial world of men contains less wisdom than that of animals, and that of animals less than that of the composed and earth-bound vegetable world.

In all these interests, the naturalistic mind of Tolstoy seems to be pointing toward the areas in which Russian scientists of the 1880's and 1890's were to make some of their most distinctive theoretical innovations. The idea of prolonging life through dietary means and the establishment of new moral and biological harmonies within the body was an idee fixe of Russia's greatest biologist of the period, Elie Mechnikov. He subsequently became Pasteur's assistant in Paris and Nobel Prize winner in 1908. But his predominant interest in his later years lay in the science of geriatrics, or the prolongation of life-a field that was to continue to fascinate scientists of the Soviet period.

The idea that many secrets of the universe are contained in the natural harmonies that exist between the earth and the vegetable world was the point of departure for Russia's greatest geologist of this period, Vladimir Dokuchaev. This imaginative figure from Nizhny Novgorod believed that all of Russia was divided into five "natural historical zones," each of which determined the forms of life and activity that developed on it. He was the founder of the untranslatable Russian science of "soil learning" (pochvove-

denie), which is a kind of combination of soil genetics and soil mechanics. Like Mechnikov in biology, Dokuchaev in geology tended to be progressively more interested in the philosophic implications of his work, though Soviet hagiographers prefer to concentrate exclusively on the detailed investigations and practical discoveries of their earlier periods. Dokuchaev sought to study

those eternal, genetic, and invariably regular links which exist between forces, bodies, and events; between living and dead nature; between the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms on the one side and man, his life, and even the spiritual world on the other.11

Dokuchaev was extremely critical of Western geology, which studied the soil only for utilitarian reasons. Pochvovedenie, in contrast, sought to gain an inner understanding not just of the soil but of the life that comes from it. Dokuchaev believed that there were "extremely close and everlasting interrelationships between water, air, land, plant and animal organisms" as well as the growth and changes in human society.12 Dokuchaev's science -together with the idealistic polemics of a former populist writer on village life for The Annals of the Fatherland, Alexander Engel'gardt-began the first serious interest in forest conservation in Russia as well as a vast reorganization and improvement in higher agricultural education. He compared water in the soil to blood in the body and inspired his followers to establish a science of "phyto-sociology," the study of forests as "social organisms."13 Raised in a clerical family and partly educated in a seminary, Dokuchaev freely acknowledged his debt to Schellingian Naturphilosophie. Most Western geologists still consider him an eccentric. But Dokuchaev's combination of detailed regional investigations and general idealistic enthusiasm was largely responsible for placing Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century at the forefront of scientific discovery in many fields of soil mechanics, permafrost research, and so on.