that you’re expressing public opinion. The authorities’ long policy of preventing the organization of society yielded its fruit. Through the decree of February 18 [1905], they turned the intelligentsia leaders into spokesmen of the people’s will.44
In May 1899 Maklakov played a role at the Moscow Juridical Society’s celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Alexander Pushkin’s birth. Unlike many ceremonial occasions, this one became famous in its own right. Sergei Muromtsev, a very distinguished older lawyer, later to be chairman of the First Duma, gave the main speech and used it to celebrate Pushkin as a seeker of freedom and independence. “Together with the memory of the poet we celebrate the victory won by Russian individuality over routine life and government tutelage.” This brought the wrath of God down on the society, or, more precisely, the wrath of Maklakov’s old foe N. P. Bogolepov, then minister of education, who closed the society, which was institutionally part of Moscow University. Before Muromtsev’s fateful speech, there had been a preliminary round of brief welcoming talks, including one by Maklakov. One of the preceding welcomers had argued that the society should not involve itself in politics. Maklakov used his time by responding to this, arguing that law always posed the question of its relationship to right. In recognizing that law doesn’t necessarily correspond to right, members of the society would have to discuss political values.45
It would be convenient to argue that Maklakov’s life as a practicing lawyer gave him a good understanding of the thinking of Russia’s people and of their true needs. Indeed, I think that is so. But we must be cautious: many of the other liberals were lawyers by trade but nevertheless prone to a doctrinaire utopianism quite alien to Maklakov.
MAKLAKOV WAS GENERALLY gregarious—obvious exceptions being the forced march to his law degree and his fateful neglect of his friend Nicholas Cherniaev. His friends included some relatively well-known Russians, of whom Tolstoy is by all odds the best known; and the archives include records of his romantic interests, some of whom were prolific letter writers.
He knew Anton Chekhov, and although he saw him at least once at the Tolstoys’, had known him before then. Among their bonds was the Zvenigorod area, where Maklakov owned hunting and fishing land and where Chekhov had lived as young man. Chekhov in fact looked for a country property near Maklakov’s, but, as he reported to Maklakov, the place he visited proved overpriced.1 When Chekhov came to meet Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoys’ country estate, Maklakov happened to be on hand. Chekhov arrived on a morning train, and Tolstoy, who usually wrote in the morning, excused himself and asked Maklakov to show Chekhov around. After the tour, the two writers began to chat. Chekhov gave Tolstoy an account of his trip to Sakhalin to study the penal colony there. He had traveled through Siberia to reach Sakhalin, and Tolstoy somewhat oddly responded to Chekhov’s Sakhalin account by rhapsodizing about the miraculous grandeur of Siberia’s mountains, rivers, forests, and animals. Chekhov agreed, and then Tolstoy asked, with surprise and some reproach, “Then why didn’t you show it?” After breakfast, Chekhov shook his head and said to Maklakov, “What a person!”2
Maklakov and Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s wife. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Maklakov also knew Maxim Gorky, presumably through his (Maklakov’s) stepmother; Maklakov was evidently a prototype for one Klim Samgin, the main figure in a four-volume Gorky novel that is now largely forgotten.3 Maklakov was also a friend of the great opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin. The origins of their meeting are unknown, but it may have stemmed from Maklakov’s defense of Nikolai and Savva Mamontov in a securities trial,4 Savva being a wealthy backer of Chaliapin. When Chaliapin was dying in Paris in the 1930s, Maklakov was a frequent visitor, entertaining him with the latest political gossip.5
Chapters 1 and 2 mentioned Maklakov’s first meeting and early contacts with Tolstoy. Their friendship, together with Maklakov’s reading of his literary and philosophical works, provided the background for several lectures Maklakov gave after Tolstoy’s death devoted to Tolstoy’s thinking and life and their role in Russia and the world. All the lectures look at Tolstoy both from the outside, 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
