knowing who he was should by chance find himself in his presence, he would not guess who was before him; he could not believe that this simple and kind old man, listening with such interest to the general conversation, was the very Tolstoy whom the whole world knew.27
Despite Maklakov’s own conviction that Tolstoy’s self-effacement was genuine, he recognized that it might seem a contrivance. As he notes, it put Tchaikovsky off when he met Tolstoy—simply, argues Maklakov, because of the mismatch between the real Tolstoy and the grand image held by the world at large.28
Maklakov was present at Tolstoy’s last departure from Moscow for Yasnaya Polyana, from which he then started on the journey that took him to his deathbed at the railway station in Astapovo. The newspapers had carried word of the departure, and the square in front of the railway station was packed. Everyone rushed toward the carriage that was bearing Tolstoy and his wife and daughters to the station, and the Tolstoys were able to make it inside only by using a special entrance. The crowd rushed to the train, and the wave of people carried Maklakov to the railway car with Tolstoy. Through the open window, Maklakov saw Tolstoy thrust his head forward, and, mumbling with an old man’s voice, with tears flowing down his pale cheeks, he thanked the people for their sympathy, which he said he “hadn’t expected.” He didn’t know what more to say, and, noticing Maklakov, turned to him with relief; no longer able to comfortably appear before the public, he was content to see a familiar face.
Countess Sofia Tolstoy, with a dedicatory inscription to Maklakov, July 2, 1896. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Maklakov closes the 1928 “Teaching and Life” speech with these words:
At Astapovo, a few months [after the departure from Moscow], he said to those nearest him, “You’ve come here for Lev alone, but in Russia there are millions.” He could talk that way and think that way. And the world loved him all the more that he thought that way. The world appreciated that Tolstoy, having received all the blessings that the world can offer, was not tempted by them. The world could not but be touched that, with access to all that, Tolstoy preferred a life according to God. And it was all the more striking that Tolstoy came to the precepts of Christ not because he was ordered by God but because he found them a sensible basis for human life. . . . To not consider Christ God, to not believe in life after death, to not believe in requital, and all the same to preach those precepts, to consider that joy consists for a human in renunciation of individual happiness, in life for the good of others, meant to reveal a faith in good and the goodness of man that no one in the world had ever had.
The world did not follow Tolstoy, and it was right. His teaching was not of this world. But listening to Tolstoy’s message, the world opened in itself those good feelings which the trivia of life had long since drowned; the world itself became better than it ordinarily was. Tolstoy did not flatter it, but stirred its conscience and lifted it to his level. And while Tolstoy lived, the world saw in him a living bearer of faith in goodness and in man. Thus the life of Tolstoy was so dear to the world that on November 7, [1910], when Tolstoy died, the world was no longer what it had been. Something in it died forever. But Russia, in which Tolstoy lived, and which he would not have traded away for anything, Russia, which he loved most of all—Russia, humble, poor and backward, which did not know what misfortunes lay before it, did not foresee that it would soon come to know by its own experience the whole depth of human vileness and cold-blooded indifference, Russia instinctively felt that on the day of his death it lost its protector.29
Did Maklakov’s association with Tolstoy affect his own behavior as a public figure? If you look for specific impacts, you will find few. One of Maklakov’s favorite words is the untranslatable gosudarstvennost, which has some overtones of “rule of law” but tends perhaps even more to connote the simple value of having a working state, standing athwart chaos. He often observed that even a bad state was generally better than no state at all; Tolstoy, of course, engaged in no such pragmatic comparisons. While Maklakov obviously did not like war, he was no pacifist: he believed there were circumstances where the consequences of refusing to fight were worse than those of fighting. But Maklakov’s reasoning was almost invariably pragmatic and consequentialist.
One issue escaped Maklakov’s general rejection of Tolstoy’s political positions—the death penalty. (Even here Maklakov’s position is qualified by pragmatism—he regarded it as essential in wartime.) Perhaps his most famous speech was his attack on a system of virtual kangaroo courts created by the tsar and Stolypin in the summer of 1906. The aim of this system, the so-called field courts martial, was to stamp out an ongoing wave of assassinations. Maklakov’s prime target was the procedures of the courts: their extreme speed, the absence of any right of appeal, and a virtual presumption of guilt once the defendant was charged. We’ll come to the speech in the discussion of Maklakov’s role in the Second Duma. For now, the interesting feature is that his argument against the death penalty takes a Tolstoyan form. Rather than marshaling policy arguments (the uncorrectability of errors, the questionable deterrent effects, the consequences for Russia’s reputation in Europe, etc.), he tells a story: Characterizing the procedure as “a legal rite of death,” he invites the listener to observe the scene when the death penalty is applied:
They lead a person, captured, disarmed and tied up, and tell him that in a few hours he will be killed. They allow his relatives to bid farewell to him—near and dear to them, young and healthy—who by the will of other humans will die. They lead him to the scaffold, like cattle to the slaughter, tie him to the spot where the coffin is ready, and in the presence of the doctor, procurator and priest, who have been blasphemously called to watch the business, they quietly and solemnly kill him. The horror of this legal assassination exceeds all the excesses of revolutionary terror.30
Of course Maklakov might have come to such a viewpoint, and to such a rhetoric, on his own. But the reliance entirely on description and the complete avoidance of policy arguments and consequences, smacks of Tolstoy.
Yet Tolstoy’s influence on Maklakov seems most powerful at a broader level—in Maklakov’s capacity to see alternative viewpoints, his practice of fairly discussing contrary claims even while advocating whatever approach he had come to regard as best. Earlier we saw his recognition of the contradictions between Tolstoy’s theories and his life. What could give a man more readiness to see the other side of an issue than to enjoy the friendship of a man whose life was a world of contradictions; to admire—indeed to worship and even love—a man whose mental processes and convictions were virtually the opposite of his own; and to recognize this man, whose political judgments must have seemed almost crazy, as a beacon for Russia and the world?
Of course the child who responded to his classmate’s proposition about the origin of the universe by asking where the red-hot sphere had come from was not likely to buy simplistic positions, to disregard the vulnerabilities of any contention. But Maklakov’s long relationship with Tolstoy seems likely to have fostered his sense of truth’s complexity.
Maklakov’s extensive memoirs never discuss his romantic life. The Moscow archives of his papers contain a record of his divorce from Evgenia Pavlovna Maklakova in 1899,31 but so far as I can tell have nothing else about the marriage. The archives also contain a good deal of correspondence of an “intimate character,”32 but I’ll address just two relationships of special interest (overlapping in time): with Lucy Bresser (whose stage name was Vera Tchaikovsky), a voluminous correspondent,33 and Alexandra Kollontai, a major political figure in her own right.34 Despite the silence of his memoirs on the subject, Maklakov seems to have been not at all secretive about his loves. Rosa Vinaver, wife of his Kadet colleague Maxim Vinaver, tells of a train trip from St. Petersburg to Paris, during which she conversed with him all the way until they were
