behavior. Strange to think that such heavy diplomatic artillery was needed to address the Russian state’s paranoia! Besides this, what may have been the standard remedy was applied: vouching by Kapnist as tutor (resting, in part, on somewhat unreliable assurances from Maklakov). But by the time Dobronravov’s exclusion was canceled, he had unfortunately died of a blood infection.46
Before leaving Maklakov’s time in the natural sciences faculty, we should have a look at his initial acquaintance with Tolstoy. An indirect acquaintance began very early, as he had been given—and very much liked—a copy of Tolstoy’s account of his childhood. Later, in the second grade at the gymnasium, Maklakov had been sent with his brothers, because of diphtheria in the family, to the house of a friend of his father, V. S. Perfilev, the prototype of Stiva Oblonsky (of Anna Karenina). A man came in wearing a blouse and high boots, and Maklakov discovered that it was Tolstoy. Having already read the account of Tolstoy’s childhood, Maklakov had hoped he would show him a little attention, but he became much more interested in the dog that Tolstoy had brought with him. He remembered Tolstoy’s broad thick beard, not yet gray, just as in the photographs. The wife of Maklakov’s host explained that in his clothing Tolstoy was imitating the simple people, and that this was all right for a brilliant writer, but that children were not to copy him.47
Later, as a student, he had another sighting of Tolstoy, seeing him walking along Nikitskaia Street, looking exactly the way he looked in a photo at the beginning of a volume of collected works. Maklakov followed him, and even ran ahead so as to have a chance to meet him, deeply envying the person Tolstoy was talking with. But he didn’t dare approach and was content to contemplate him from afar.
After he’d gotten to know Tolstoy, Maklakov had an experience showing him how the writer’s mere presence inspired a similar awe in others. Maklakov and a fellow student named Singer were at the Tolstoys’ on the evening before Singer’s father, a professor of mathematics, was to deliver a lecture on Darwinism at the university. Singer told Tolstoy that his father would use the occasion to attack Darwinism, of which Tolstoy was no fan. Maklakov and his fellow student had the bright idea of taking Tolstoy to the talk, naively thinking that he could come without anyone’s noticing. Tolstoy agreed to come. Singer and Maklakov awaited him at the entrance and spirited him up a special staircase. Only a handful of people accidently spotted him as he entered. He sat in the hall behind a column, where no one could see him, but somehow word of his presence spread through the hall. People asked where he was and wouldn’t accept Singer’s and Maklakov’s assurances that he wasn’t there. The crowd’s whispering, and some members’ departures, made it impossible for the lecturer to proceed. Representatives of the event’s organizers persuaded Tolstoy to come up onto the platform, in the hopes that this would quiet people. But no: members of the audience jumped from their seats, waved handkerchiefs, applauded, and shouted. Professor Singer brought his lecture to a close, and Tolstoy disappeared. Maklakov caught up with him on the street; Tolstoy, “normally so delicate and disinclined to show dissatisfaction, said with irritation, ‘It’s you and Singer who arranged all this.’”48
The famine of 1891 appears to have occasioned Maklakov’s first actual meeting with the great writer.49 Even before that, the famine triggered a kind of anonymous encounter. At the end of the 1880s Tolstoy had published an article criticizing the custom of student carousing on Tatiana Day. On the eve of the day in 1891, Russkie Vedomosti published a letter, signed only “Student,” saying that if in the past one might not have heeded Tolstoy on this, it was indecent to ignore his point now. Evidently, the restaurants were empty the night of Tatiana Day; the “Student” was Maklakov.50
After efforts to ban discussion of the famine, the government retreated and allowed the public freedom to help the hungry. Tolstoy normally scorned charitable activity by the rich, seeing it as a way for them to justify themselves: “If a rider sees that his horse is being tortured,” he said, “he should not try to buoy it up but should just get off.” Seeing the popularity of attempts to provide food, he prepared an article criticizing the efforts. But his friend I. I. Raevski invited him to see the peasants and the volunteers’ special cafeterias. Tolstoy came for two days and ended up staying two years, working tirelessly and becoming head of the social aid scheme.
Many came to help, often losing their positions and health to do so. Of course, all the so-called Tolstoyans came. In one of his appeals, Tolstoy endorsed a proposal that landowners offer to take in peasants’ horses to feed them through the winter. He especially liked this kind of help, as it would connect a peasant with a particular helper. Maklakov responded to the appeal, and through his acquaintances and luck he arranged more than 300 such adoptions. After Tolstoy returned to Moscow, the Tolstoyans came to report to him what they had done and brought Maklakov along. This was the first time Maklakov saw him close-up and talked with him.51
In the course of famine work, Tolstoy often told an Indian story that nicely reflected his self-effacement and sense of irony. Some sort of rich person, wanting to serve God, found a poor, sick hungry person under a fence. Obedient to God, he brought the poor man to his home, washed him, fed him, was kind to him, and showed him respect, and then rejoiced that he was able to do God’s will. After a few days, the poor man, feeling that all this had been done not for him but for the other’s soul, told the rich man, “Let me go back under my fence; it’ll be easier for me there.”52
In a later chapter we’ll return to Maklakov’s relations with Tolstoy, his analysis of Tolstoy’s thought and life, and the ways they may have influenced him. For now, we need see only a snippet of their relationship in Maklakov’s student years. Maklakov observed that Tolstoy, who jokingly called him an “old young person,” didn’t try to reeducate him. At some point in Maklakov’s Moscow university life, Tolstoy asked him to join him for a walk, and in time that turned into a habit. While they walked, Tolstoy asked him about student life. It was flattering to chat with him, though Maklakov never understood why his stories might interest the writer. Later a conversation with Tolstoy about bicycling offered him a possible answer. Maklakov knew that Tolstoy bicycled a good deal around his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana; he asked Tolstoy why he didn’t make these tours on horseback. Tolstoy explained that he needed an occasional complete rest for his mind. If he walked or rode, it didn’t prevent him from thinking, so his mind got no rest. If he went by bicycle, he needed to keep an eye on the road and watch for stones, ruts, and holes, and then he wouldn’t think. “I understood why my stories were necessary for him during our walks. He could avoid listening, but they prevented him from thinking and gave his mind a rest.”53
We have seen how Maklakov ultimately abandoned history for law, and a word is in order on his history studies. Vinogradov took him under his wing and, responding to a failed effort by Maklakov to develop a students’ circle for digging more deeply into Vinogradov’s work, started a special seminar. Maklakov’s seminar paper was based on a recently found fragment of parchment by Aristotle and tried to explain when and why ancient Athenians chose leaders by lot. To this day the question excites scholarly debate, but how Maklakov’s answer stacks up against current learning need not detain us. For our purposes, his answer is most interesting in prefiguring his later advocacy of reconciliation and a spirit of compromise between the Russian government and its adversaries, or, more broadly, among the social forces at war in early twentieth-century Russia. He advanced the theory that in an Athens in which four clans of about equal weight contended for power, the strategy of having government chosen by lot did not manifest any particular political theory but simply provided a way out of what might otherwise have been a hopeless logjam.54
Maklakov’s 92-page essay was published in “Scholarly Notes of Moscow University,” with a preface by Vinogradov. As Maklakov later observed, “Of course no one read the Scholarly Notes.” But he acquired over 100 copies and, at Vinogradov’s suggestion, sent them to professors and other scholars. This didn’t pass unnoticed in the scholarly world—a Professor Buzeskul, of Kharbovskii University, cited it several times in his two-volume history of Greece.55 In his memoirs, Maklakov goes on about this
