Their paths first crossed in 1881, when Pobedonostsev withheld from Alexander III Tolstoy's letter urging clemency for the assassins of the Tsar's father. "As wax before the fire, every revolutionary struggle will melt away before the man-tsar who fulfills the law of Christ," Tolstoy wrote; but Pobedonostsev correctly retorted that "our Christ is not your Christ."4 They met again in 1899, when Tolstoy included in his last novel Resurrection a thinly veiled caricature of Pobedonostsev. The latter responded in 1902 by excommunicating Tolstoy, whose followers countered with the defiant statement that "your anathemas will far more surely open to us the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven than could your prayers."
Like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Pobedonostsev favored theocratic rule through mystery and authority. He was opposed to all freedom of expression and favored the systematic subordination of sectarian and minority cultures to a monolithic Russian Orthodox culture. Access to pernicious foreign ideas was to be confined to an intellectual elite; but otherwise education was to be limited to catechistic indoctrination in Russian traditions and moral values.
In some respects Pobedonostsev's social doctrine resembles the theory of "freezing up Russia to avoid rotting" contemporaneously being advanced by Constantine Leont'ev. He detested the tendency toward uniformity in "the Europe of railroads and banks … of increasing material indulgence, and prosaic dreams about the common good."5 Reminiscent of Nietzsche is his aesthetic antagonism to bourgeois mediocrity, which amplifies a sentiment already found in Herzen as well as Pisemsky and other anti-nihilist novelists of the populist era:
Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up upon Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic Wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments-only that some French, German or Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life "individually" or "collectively" on the ruins of all this vanished splendor?0
There will be no beauty in life without inequality and violence. To pluck the rose, man must be willing to pierce his fingers on the thorns. Even before the outbreak of the first Balkan War in the mid-seventies Leont'ev insisted that "liberal nihilism" has produced such "decrepitude of mind and heart" that what is needed for rejuvenation may well be "a whole period of external wars analogous to the Thirty Years' War or at least to the epoch of Napoleon I."7
For aristocratic and aesthetic reasons, Leont'ev rebelled at all reforms, proposing a total return to the ritual and discipline of Byzantine rale. He died as a monk in the monastery of the Holy Trinity, bemoaning the end of the age of poetry and human variety. Pobedonostsev, on the contrary, was a thoroughly prosaic lay figure, whose ideal was the gray efficiency and uniformity of the modern organization man. He was the prophet of duty, work, and order-shifting his bishops around periodically to prevent any distracting local attachments from impeding the smooth functioning of the ecclesiastical machine. He was unemotional, even cynical, about his methods. But they were generally effective and earn him a deserved place as one of the builders of the centralized bureaucratic state. Like the modern totalitarian regimes which his own rule often seems to anticipate, he has a low view of human nature and insists that regimes based on a more optimistic reading of the masses will collapse. "The state must show in itself a living faith. The popular mind is suspicious and may not be seduced … by compromise,"8 he insists in criticizing advocates of constitutional processes for Russia. Any efforts to transplant democratic institutions to Russia will merely lead to revolution.
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.