Tolstoy's Message

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is well-known as a novelist and short-story writer. But the philosophical writings that occupied his life after 1880 are much less well-known. Likewise, few know of the depth and scope of his political, social and religious ostracism as a result of these writings. On the 170th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth Russian Life asked noted Tolstoy expert Vitaly Remizov to contribute some reflections on these themes, which Tolstoy himself considered much more important than novels “which divert some members of the wealthy classes for a short time.”

In Russia, we are reviving the names of Russia's best thinkers. We are finally publishing the works of philosophers and thinkers like Soloviev, Berdyaev, Bulgakov and Florensky. Yet Lev Tolstoy's name is still surrounded by a wall of silence or, worse, overt verbal abuse. For both the left and right, both orthodox and reformers, he is still deemed a mentally sick heretic punished by God.

In the summer of 1989, I met with the abbot of Optina Pustyn monastery, archimandrite Yevlogy. As we were chatting in a small room, I spotted a painting of little artistic value yet quite siginificant in terms of its contents. The center featured the aged Metropolitan Makary [from the 16th century]. On his right hand were all those who believed in the infallibility and sanctity of the Orthodox Church -- Gogol, Dostoevsky, Aksakov, and many others. On his left hand, at a distance, in a somewhat crippled pose, sat a lonely Lev Tolstoy, with a withered branch overhead, evoking the image of Job. "This is what pride is all about," Father Yevlogy said, pointing to the painting. He meant Tolstoy. While it would have been more proper of me to have kept silent, I could not help replying: “Is the Church really always infallible ?"

Another painting -- A Hundred Centuries, by Ilya Glazunov -- also comes to mind. In this paiting, Tolstoy is also positioned to Satan's left. Tolstoy is standing there, as if between two epochs: the Christian epoch of Russia and its Godless epoch, the communist era. There are masonic signs and symbols on his chest, along with the words "non-resistance" and "truth." He looks like someone sentenced to death, in full height, lonely again. Yet the gesture of his left hand is somewhat puzzling. Is he urging us to come to our senses, or is he blessing us to accept violence without complaining? There is no pride on his face; it is more like the realization of his own fault.

Tolstoy’s views on the church and Christianity got him excommunicated and won him undeserved allies and enemies both in his lifetime and after. As he wrote “...There has been some strange misunderstanding among the public at large with regard to my activities. Some consider me a godless revolutionary and approve of me on this merit, which is a product of their imaginations; others, also considering me an inveterate godless revolutionary, not only don't approve of me, but rather damn me for things for which I cannot be blamed altogether."

Tolstoy did not understand the invective of those who wrote against him and explained his passion simply. "... For more than 30 years, I have done nothing but tried, for as much as I could, by all strength of soul, to persuade myself and other people that, without God, there can be no other life other than unhappy animal-like existence, and that our life is a mere fraction of the endless Life. I have been also trying to show that I discovered this great truth through Christ's teachings. One may well say I interpret God and Christ differently from those who condemn me do. But to say that I am Godless, that I am an Antichrist, a scoundrel, etc., is no good, useless and painful for those who say so ... Whatever Faith we belong to, whatever God we believe, we all ... can't help recognizing the God’s Supreme Law of Love and we cannot understand God himself other than as Universal Love."

To ignore Tolstoy is no big deal. Philosophers, politicians, writers, shepherds and rulers, dictators and their victims have done it so easily. People have suffered, thrown themselves into the arms of despair, cursed their fate, their times, their political systems, suffered under the wheel of class hatred, tortured each other, waged fratricide and other wars. Yet, as soon as the issue of non-resistance to evil comes up, these people find thousands of arguments against this great Christian idea. Only spiritual confrontation is beyond vanity. It is the lot of the strong and the wise. Violence is much easier: you were hit, so hit back. Or, better yet, hit first.

Even more apocalyptically, Tolstoy said of his times, on the eve of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution that would follow: “As a result of the lowering of social morals, the most immoral societies make it to the top. Thus, an immoral public opinion gains the upper hand, a public opinion which permits and even approves of crimes, robbery, debauchery and even murder ... and the most immoral people become the heroes of our times..."

The reason for all this depravity, according to Tolstoy, was "the absence of supreme understanding of meaning of life."

But we could have also chosen a different path. "From ancient times,” Tolstoy wrote, “and up until today, the Christian perception of life has been shown and is still shown in the Russian people in a large variety of traits which are typical only of the Russian people. It is shown in the recognition of brotherhood and egality of all people -- of any race and ethnic group, in full tolerance for other faiths, and in the lack of condemnation of criminals, in recognition of them as unhappy people, and also in the custom of begging pardon from one another on given dates ... and when parting, in the wide-spread respect for beggars and respect to them, in the often crude readiness to fully sacrifice oneself for the sake of what is believed to be the religious truth. The same Christian attitude was also seen in the attitude of the Russian people with respect to authority. Our people have always preferred to remain humbly submissive toward authority, rather than be part of it, having always considered -- in the past and now -- that the position of rulers is not desirable but rather is a thin. [????what is missing on the endign of this???]

And yet, this true Russian faith was broken at the turn of the century. Its genuine carriers -- Tolstoy and Dostoevsky -- were ostracized. The apostle of New Soviet Times,  and patron of Soviet souls, Maxim Gorky, called these two writers "petty-bourgeois" and suggested kicking “the dead crow from the roof." Still not knowing what the Soviet regime had in store for him, Gorky, convinced of his righteousness, went about destroying the century-old values embodied in the teachings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky about the unifying force of love. According to Gorky, there were no worse or more evil enemies than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: "They want to reconcile the torturer and the martyr, they want to justify themselves for their being close to the torturers ... A petty bourgeois likes to feel comfortable deep down in his soul. When everything is in place in his soul -- then the petty-bourgeois' soul is appeased."

Little did Gorky know. Having betrayed the humanistic ideals of his youth, he sealed his fate. He returned to Russia from emigration and served Stalin's regime faithfully, and was liquidated.

As a contemporary of the tumultuous historical events of the early 20th century, Tolstoy had to endure the first strike. For the Church he was the Antichrist; for the government, he was a slightly mad old man; for liberals he was a dreamer; for the petty bourgeois he was an ascetic. To still others, he was a lousy thinker, a repentant nobleman, a pagan who intended to become Christian. Finally, for Lenin, he was "The Mirror of the Russian Revolution.” But perhaps the most painful assessment came from the philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev. To him, Tolstoy was "the man who filled the pure sources of Russian life with filth." Did he deserve all this? Why were so many stones thrown at one single person?

Tolstoy’s "guilt" was to have seen the meaning of human life in "an evergrowing union with people -- by virtue of Love and God ..." For the sake of this, he was building schools in and around Yasnaya Polyana. And he walked the roads of war to tell people that war is alien to the man's mind and his nature. He spent two years travelling on the bad roads of Russia, setting up canteens for the poor. He was the first to raise his voice in protest against capital punishment, when it began to become a common phenomenon. If one compares these goals with Russia's challenges of today -- unprecedented low levels of education, fratricidal wars, the same bad roads, millions below the poverty level -- then there is little ground to call the writer a slighty mad or naive heretic.

Although he was the author of gargantuan novels, Tolstoy considered the Alphabet primer the most important of books. This Alphabet was not published in the Soviet times the way Tolstoy had conceived it. Soviet censors unflinchingly cut Tolstoy's moral and religious parables for children from the 1978 fascimile edition his Alphabet. Time and again, we emasculate our wisest thinkers.

Tolstoy dedicated the last decade of his life to the conception of a universal religion. As part of this process, he sought to collect “the wisdom of the centuries in one book.” The first edition of this book appeared in 1904, under the title Thoughts of Wise Men: The Way of Life. Later revisions carried the subtitles Circle of Reading and A Wise Thought for Every Day. He called this book [now available in English as A Calendar of Wisdom] “incomparably more important and fruitful” than his fiction works, such as War and Peace.

When Tolstoy was dying in Astapovo, the proofs of his last book, his Gospel "Path of Life," were brought to him. In Soviet times, this book was published only once, with a print run of 5,000 copies, at a time when even books printed in 200,000 copies became rarieties overnight. The same fate awaited many of his religious writings, his diaries, his philosophical letters. Could this not be called a sort of intellectual and spiritual genocide against Tolstoy? We cast from our memory one of the pillars of Russian moral philosophy. And this after so many cynical statements about Tolstoy's grandeur, his "value for the next generations." One can't think of a worse execution.

This execution began long before his death, however, as soon as he dared to tell the truth to the strong of this world. Many of his works were vetoed. He was excommunicated.  They sent murderers and fanatics to Yasnaya Polyana. They were not shy to insult Tolstoy and his relatives in public. They shamelessly interfered with his private life. Poor Mother Russia: she has never been short of geniuses and their hangmen.

There has been no shortage of explanations of the way he departed his seemingly ideal life at Yasnaya Polyana, ending up dying at an Astapovo train station. Some cited family problems, financial problems (the fight for his legacy), purely psychological and physiological reasons (because of the beginning of pneumonia, Tolstoy allegedly lacked air and space). Even social reasons were cited (he was ashamed of his "base, idle luxury"), as were philosophical and religious ones (a renouncement of his body and entering into the realm of the spirit, or renouncement to life and preparation for death and subsequent existence in a different form). Yes, all these explanations have a point. And yet, it seems that the main reason of his departure (and not flight!) was to escape from people's insanity.

In Tolstoy’s philosophy, each individual was the reflection of the Immortal Love. And life without love made no sense to him: "Why do we need faith, God, Christ, his Teachings about the Truth, if we don't love? To hell with it ... with all my earthly life, if I have to part with love."

His words addressed to youth are similarly unyielding: “Life is given for the good, as long as you enjoy it the way you need to. If only you could live not by hating each other, but by loving each other ... Now we hear from all sides only one thing: our life, they say, is evil and unhappy because it is ill-organized. So let's turn this evil organization into a good one and we will live well. Dear brothers, don't believe it -- that your life could be worse or better because of such and such organization of life ... there is only one means: to become better ourselves."

"Love" was reportedly one of Tolstoy’s last words. Prior to leaving Yasnaya Polyana, feeling in himself and his relatives a shortage of love, involved at his advanced age in intrigues alien to him, he was suffering mainly from an inability to love the way his soul wanted to. Reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in the days before his departure, Tolstoy underlined the following words from the teachings of the old man Zosima: “I ask myself, fathers and teachers, ‘What is hell?’ I reckon: ‘This is suffering from the inability to love any more’”... and further, “... I am, so I love."

Tolstoy' departure from Yasnaya Polyana reminds us of this love. His route -- from Yasnaya Polyana to Optina Pustyn and on to Astapovo was not in fact perilous but salvatory, even though his death was hard and painful. Russia and the whole world lay next to the dying Tolstoy, stunned and in sorrow. As if all were stupefied in this expectation of death and yet none believed that death had any power over him.

Today, more than 100 schools in Russia work according to Tolstoy's ideas. These ideas offer a new content to education, based on non-violent communication between human beings. The students study new disciplines. They read many of Tolstoy's works, like The Bowl of Life, Study Yourself, The Circle of Reading, Nature and Work, and The History of Humanity. They also read new textbooks.

When I enter such a classroom to meet the children and the teachers I feel the living breath of Yasnaya Polyana's dweller, Lev Tolstoy, his invisible presence in everything which is done for the sake of Good and Love. I discover new sides to the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina -- as a teacher whose name is next to the wise of this world. When you reread his lesser known books (because of they were banned in tsarist Russia and then in Soviet times) -- About Life, God's Kingdom Inside Us, What I Believe, you realize that there is indeed freedom and truth in this world which can make your life full of meaning.

Time will pass and Tolstoy the wise man, little known to readers, will take a place next to such thinkers as Socrates, Confucious and Pascal. No, Tolstoy is not a God, but God is very strong in him. The sooner each of us understand this, the better we will all become, the more good we will bring to Earth. Lev Tolstoy, to use this image, is our recollection of the future, of the golden age of a moral existence for humanity.