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 only condemned the courts as organs of state violence but also saw them as worse than more generally suspect institutions. The evil perpetrated by an executioner is obvious. But everything conspires to mask the evil of the judge. The judge who condemns someone to death doesn’t carry out the sentence; it is not he who deprives the person of life, but the law; if the law is bad and unjust, that is not his concern—or so Tolstoy assumed!19 Maklakov cites Tolstoy’s story, “Let the fire burn—don’t put it out,” observing that he could confidently quote passages of it from memory “because it was under the scrutiny of the censor so many times.” The cause of the censor’s hostile gaze was the story’s seeming exaltation of criminal acts: one character’s unlawful concealment of another’s crime is depicted as fulfilling God’s law.20
In his literary treatment of the courts, Tolstoy sometimes spoke not as a prophet inveighing against any state application of force but as a political figure and revolutionary. In Resurrection the law serves only to advance the interests of the ruling elite. This of course is a much more worldly message; as Maklakov observes, he is “speaking our language, addressing our concerns.”21
Lawyers fare even worse than courts under Tolstoy’s gaze. As the judge is worse than the hangman, because he can hide his guilt behind his role, so the lawyer is even worse than the judge, because he can even more persuasively distance himself from the evils wrought by the courts and the state. In his memoirs Maklakov recounts three occasions on which Tolstoy received lawyers at Yasnaya Polyana. The three lawyers (Oscar Gruzenberg, N. P. Karabchevskii, and Fyodor Plevako) were all very distinguished and often active for the defense in political trials; at the Beilis trial they and Maklakov constituted the defense team (with the exception of Plevako, who had died by then). Yet, except for Maklakov’s special friend Plevako, they irritated Tolstoy with their thinking process and attitudes.22
Maklakov, of course, had dedicated his life to law and politics, activities that he believed would advance the welfare of Russians. He exalted the courts as guardians of the law. He concludes with another mention of Tolstoy’s many actual efforts at improving life in this world, calling the relation between his beliefs and his life “an inconsistency, a touching, miraculous inconsistency.”23
Through his work on the 1891 famine, Maklakov met Tolstoy at his home in Moscow and talked with him for the first time.24 Tolstoy read his guests an article, and “everything seemed so natural and simple that I had to force myself to understand my good fortune and grasp where I was sitting. His wife, Sofia Andreevna, . . . called us all to the dining table.” After that he was often at the Tolstoys’ home, until Tolstoy’s death.25 “It was great luck for me. The whole world knows Tolstoy’s literary work. Some know his religious thinking, often only in part and not fully understanding it. To know the living Tolstoy, to experience his charm oneself, was given to very few.”26 Most of what follows as to Tolstoy’s character is drawn from Maklakov’s direct knowledge. Here is his overview:
For those who knew Tolstoy, there was no personal pride; on the contrary, no one could miss his dissatisfaction with himself, eternal doubt in himself, his touching shyness, his reluctance to dazzle, even his inability to play a leading role. . . . In Tolstoy everything was ordinary and simple. He never imposed on others the innermost
