The contrast is frequently made between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, two of Russia's greatest thinkers and of the world's greatest novelists. The epic, pastoral world of Tolstoy, the high aristocrat and rationalistic "seer of the flesh" is in many ways the very antithesis of the dramatic, urban world of
Dostoevsky, the low aristocrat and often irrational "seer of the spirit."10 One image perhaps goes to the heart of the difference. In contrast to Dostoevsky's early love of Schiller and final apotheosis of the play instinct in The Brothers stands Tolstoy's early statement that "life is not a game but a serious matter"-which is repeated almost verbatim in his last letter to his wife. As he put it in his What Is To Be Done? of the mid-eighties:
Human life . . . has no other object than to elucidate moral truths . . . and this elucidation is not only the chief but ought to be the sole business of man.
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.
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.