as any scholar of Tolstoy might, and from the inside, as Tolstoy’s much younger and much less renowned friend. Maklakov never hides either his profound analytical disagreement with Tolstoy’s views on political economy, or his reverence for Tolstoy as a man of conscience.
Postcard from Vasily Maklakov on vacation with friends in Vichy, France, to his sister Mariia. Vasily is on the extreme left; Fyodor Chaliapin, the opera star, is third from left. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
The pivotal lecture is the one on Tolstoy’s “Teaching and Life,” delivered in 1928 at a celebration of the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth.6 It tackles the origins of the philosophic outlook that Tolstoy had embraced by the mid-1880s, expressed in What I Believe (published in 1884) and summarized in the idea that evil must never be resisted with force. Maklakov himself appears to have been an agnostic. Letters he wrote near the end of his life reveal that he was at one time a believer and found his belief comforting; at some point he lost that belief and recognized that only genuine belief could provide consolation.7
Maklakov starts with the obvious truth that Tolstoy enjoyed all the rewards that the world can offer—nature gave him bodily strength, health, strong passions, ardor for life, and extraordinary literary gifts. Fate brought him wealth and allowed him not to worry about what the next day would bring or to bother with anything not fitting his taste or spirit. It gave him exceptional ties to the world and rewarded him with glory not only in Russia but throughout the world. It gave him, “as a crown,” exceptional family happiness. Yet, as Tolstoy made clear in his philosophical writings, the prospect of death led him to believe that life was meaningless, to the point of tempting him to suicide.8
After some false starts toward a solution, Tolstoy found one in the core message of the Sermon on the Mount—not to resist evil with force, but to turn the other cheek. For Tolstoy, this rule of nonresistance to evil was not part of a system involving life after death, and it was not a rule whose force depended on Christ’s being God. Indeed, Tolstoy often said (here Maklakov is presumably giving an eyewitness account), “If I thought of Christ as God, and not human, Christ would lose all appeal for me.” He read the gospels as not promising eternal life, as not contrasting a temporary individual life with an immortal individual life. Rather, the contrast he saw was between an individual life and a life lived entirely for others. When our personal life truly turns into a common life, he reasoned, the meaninglessness of life disappears, and a new meaning appears that no individual death can destroy.9 In his memoirs Maklakov tells a story reflecting the intensity of Tolstoy’s belief. In a conversation about not resisting evil, the wife of Tolstoy’s oldest son (Sergei) asked Tolstoy whether, if he saw some attempt to violate his wife before his very eyes, he wouldn’t intervene to protect her and feel sorry for her. Tolstoy answered that he would feel even more sorry for the rapist. Everyone laughed, and Tolstoy was quite angry, as he had not intended it as a joke, but really meant that someone who acted that way must be doing so from a very deep unhappiness.10
Maklakov’s speech, though mentioning a theological critique of Tolstoy by biblical scholars, presses a practical argument—that if neither individuals nor the state are to resist evil with force (where forceless resistance would fail), evil will triumph. He points out as an example the vandalization of a Tolstoyan settlement that he experienced during his university years.11 He then turns around and defends Tolstoy’s perspective. He asks rhetorically: If you think that property prevents us from turning individual life into a common life, and regard individual life as meaningless under conventional worldly conditions, then is there anything strange in nonresistance to evil, in “voluntarily giving away that odious private property to anyone who might want it?” Thus, Maklakov reasons, any refutation of Tolstoy must be directed not at his conclusions but at his original starting point. If you accept Tolstoy’s premises, a renunciation of force seems to follow.12
As the lecture and Maklakov’s memoirs underscore, Tolstoy’s basic kindness and common sense seem to have prevented him from following his own views with any consistency. In his memoirs Maklakov recounts how, on his return from his first trip to England, he gave Tolstoy an enthusiastic account of English government. Tolstoy was dismissive, saying that in principle there was no difference between English government and Russian autocracy. The conversation occurred at a time when the Dukhobors in Russia, members of a religious sect that rejected military service (on rather Tolstoyan grounds), had been subjected to ruthless oppression, including dispersal from their villages and forced resettlement, with the predictable result of widespread deaths from starvation and exposure. Tolstoy had responded actively, moving heaven and earth to help them migrate to Canada, raising funds, trying to stir public opinion, and giving them the proceeds from his novel Resurrection. Maklakov posed the obvious question: how could Tolstoy reconcile his indifference to the advantages of British government over Russia’s autocracy with his making all these efforts? Tolstoy said, “Ah, lawyer, you’ve caught me.” But then he added that the difference between the two was like that between the guillotine and hanging. In fact, from his perspective the guillotine was worse, because its evil was better concealed.13
The inconsistencies go on and on. Tolstoy energetically promoted the “single tax” ideas of Henry George, pressing the case in a letter to Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and urging Maklakov to introduce George-type legislation in the Duma. Such legislation would tax away the entire value of unimproved real estate (and the value of improved real estate not directly attributable to improvements). The state would thus confiscate that value and wipe out the real estate market as a source of information about development prospects (through the signals given by market prices). The foe of all state power advocates a monumental exercise of state power!14
But Maklakov stressed Tolstoy’s efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Russians, however inconsistent some of the efforts might have been with his philosophy: writing Russia’s first alphabet books; writing the first works for children that rose above dreary, implausible celebrations of contemporary Russian life (a leading “reader” was a book called “Milord,” with about zero resonance for a peasant child); actually operating schools in the vicinity of Yasnaya Polyana and teaching in them; and, of course, relieving the 1891 famine and rescuing the Dukhobors. Maklakov observes, “His activity for his country was such that if ten people had done it, rather than Tolstoy, one could say of each that they had not lived on earth in vain.”15
Beyond these direct practical benefits, Maklakov pointed to a subtler, perhaps more far-reaching one—the way Tolstoy’s teachings reminded people of the independent force of good. If his readers were skeptical on practical grounds, if they “held back from following his conclusions, like the rich young man in the Gospels, all the same they started to look on the problems of life with different eyes.”16
And by raising questions about the meaning of life, Maklakov argues, Tolstoy—though excommunicated and buried without a funeral service—did more for the revival of religious interest than anyone. The danger to religion, he suggests, is not from those who deny it or even those who persecute believers, nor from the slogan that it’s an opiate, nor from the propaganda of the godless. Rather, the danger comes from indifference, from lack of interest in the questions with which religion deals. And Tolstoy couldn’t live without answers to those questions.17
The intellectual divide between the two was most acute in their views of the law, discussed by Maklakov in a lecture on “Tolstoy and the Courts.” After laying out Tolstoy’s belief that the state’s exercise of force was itself evil (regardless of the net effect on evil), Maklakov points to the radical character of Tolstoy’s objections. Tolstoy did not especially condemn the courts’ form, their incompleteness, the inadequacies of their procedures, the cruelty of punishments, or judicial mistakes; rather he condemned the very principle of their existence. He saw Christ’s famous instruction “judge not, that ye be not judged” as forbidding the very institution.18 That attitude toward law, and even the rule of law, was very much aligned with the views of Russia’s literary elite discussed in the Introduction.
Tolstoy not