The Icon and the Axe

Dokuchaev and Fedorov died a few years before Tolstoy and Mechnikov. None of these idealistic naturalists found the secrets of the tangible, physical world for which they all searched. Tolstoy lived longest, dying at the age of eighty-two. In accordance with the decrees of Pobedonostsev (who had preceded him to the grave by three years) Tolstoy was denied any religious rites at his burial. He was laid to rest on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana by the green stick on which, he had thought as a youth, could be found the secret by which all men could live in happiness and brotherhood. It was primarily this secret-the secret of a rational moral society- that Tolstoy had sought in vain to find. The passionate sincerity of his quest had kept alive, however, the populist tradition of moral dedication and

Utopian hope. In contrast to the traditionalism and coerciveness of Pobedonostsev, Tolstoy presented the ideal of a non-violent moral revolution. In his religious teachings there is a curious blend of sectarian Protestant puritanism and Oriental resignation before the mysteries of nature. He has always been admired (and was to some extent influenced by) the more syncretic and anti-traditional forms of Protestantism.14 As a student at Kazan he had originally studied Oriental languages; he had a life-long admiration for Buddhism; and his own religious search brought him to admire Confucianism as the model for a religion of morality rather than metaphysics. It seems appropriate that his religious ideas were to have by far their greatest impact in the Orient-above all through Gandhi's adoption of Tolstoy's doctrine of non-violent resistance.15 Whereas Europeans have tended to view his later religious writings as a marked decline from the glories of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, non-Europeans often tend to view the latter as the minor youthful works of a man on the path toward rediscovering in the fullness of years the abiding truths of the agrarian East.

Within Russia Tolstoy had only a handful of real followers. Neither he nor his foe Pobedonostsev was able to address himself to new problems and concerns. They were old men defending established traditions of the imperial bureaucracy and the truth-seeking aristocratic intelligentsia respectively. The power exercised by Pobedonostsev and the spell cast by Tolstoy helped weaken the effectiveness of more moderate reformers. Yet neither Pobedonostsev nor Tolstoy was able to dispel the prevailing melancholia of the eighties, let alone point the way to any new approaches to the problems of the day.

Both looked on the major new trends in the surrounding world with fear and antagonism. The intellectual and political agitation of contemporary Europe seemed to them irrelevant, corrupting, and self-serving. In exasperation more than exultation, they both fled to a Christianity of their own devising: linked in Pobedonostsev's case to Oriental despotism and in Tolstoy's to Oriental mysticism.

Yet it would be unjust to link the protean Tolstoy with the narrow Pobedonostsev. Tolstoy was, in many ways, the last true giant of the reformist aristocratic intelligentsia. He sought to find both their lost links with the soil and, at the same time, the answers to "the cursed questions" about the meaning of art, history, and life itself. The greatest novelist of his age, Tolstoy died wandering far from home muttering the words: "Truth . .. I love much . . . how they."16

Here, truly, was a case of Gulliver held down by the Lilliputians: that fallen giant in one of Goya's last drawings over whose body an antlike army of little people swarms, planting their banner atop his sleeping head. Yet

Tolstoy, like so much of the aristocratic intelligentsia, volunteered for his bondage to the people. Indeed, he identified the people with Gulliver in a characteristic entry in the diary of his later years:

I went through the village and looked into windows. Poverty and ignorance were everywhere, and I reflected on the slavery of earlier days. Formely, the cause was visible, and the chain which bound the peasants easily perceived. Now there is no chain. In Europe there are threads -as many as bound Gulliver. With us one can still see ropes, or at least strings; there, threads-but they all still hold down that giant, the people, so firmly that it cannot move. There is only one salvation: not to lie down, not to fall asleep.17