The last of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Brothers Karamazov, again brought him success, with its family intrigue and philosophical ruminations, and finally established his position among Russian writers. His last important public appearance took place in 1880, as a speaker for the celebrations surrounding the erection of a statue of Pushkin in Moscow. Here he surprised his audience by praising Pushkin not as just a Russian writer, but one who embraced all of humanity. The speech went a long way to repairing his reputation with the intelligentsia, but did him little good with his conservative friends like Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev was by now the head of the Holy Synod, and as guardian of Orthodoxy he had begun to think Dostoevsky’s view of Christ much too vague and not sufficiently in accord with church teaching. Dostoevsky’s Christ had indeed come to resemble his Pushkin, a figure for humanity, not just for Russia. This was to be Dostoevsky’s ultimate fate as well.
The religious theme that was central to Dostoevsky’s work and thought also came to preoccupy the other of Russia’s greatest writers, Tolstoy. Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 into a family of well-off landowners with lands in the rich provinces south of Moscow. Tolstoy was born in Iasnaia Poliana, the primary family estate, and it remained his principal home until his death. The family was not part of the great aristocracy that frequented the court and Petersburg salons, but was certainly of ancient date and with a distinguished record of service in the army and the civil service of the Russian empire. He grew up on the family estate under the guidance of various tutors and then spent some time as a student in the University of Kazan,’ all described in unforgettable detail in his autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. At the university he also participated in the normal life of the young nobleman, drinking, playing cards, and pursuing women far removed from polite society. He never took a degree at the university and so, restless at home, he took off for the Caucasus where he enlisted as a volunteer in an artillery unit. The outbreak of the Crimean War brought him a commission, and he saw serious fighting, not least at the siege of Sevastopol. His stories of that siege were published while it was still continuing and brought him instant fame as a writer. At war’s end he spent several years in Petersburg and Moscow, quarrelling with nearly all the important and unimportant literary figures of the time. Fundamentally he was not in sympathy with their ideas, neither with the progressivism and fascination with science and progress of the liberals nor the subservience to autocracy of the conservatives. The Slavophiles seemed to him nice people but hopelessly doctrinaire. Personally he remained a nobleman and country gentleman (not a courtier) and found most of the literati crude or self-serving or both.
In these years he made his first trip to Western Europe. Europe as a whole left him with much the same critical view as that of Dostoevsky, that Europe’s vaunted progress was just materialism, greed, and spiritual emptiness. The difference was that Tolstoy lacked Dostoevsky’s chauvinism, and had no great respect for Russian autocracy or Orthodoxy. He did not see any “Russian” answers to Europe’s dilemmas. His next project was a school for the peasant children on his estate, which he determined to run on lines derived from Rousseau’s pedagogical theories. That meant no compulsion, no punishments, work projects, and a determined attempt to engage the pupils in the subject matter. The school was eventually successful, though perhaps more due to Tolstoy’s charisma than to the efficacy of his theories. Tolstoy founded a magazine to propagate his views, in the process annoying most of the educational establishment. The school gave him considerable notoriety, and also inspired a second trip to Europe to meet famous pedagogues and inspect schools. He found European schools, especially the famous Prussian schools, to be depressing, regimented, and heavily dependent on memorization, all of which merely substantiated his prejudices. Returning from abroad early in 1861, just after the emancipation of the serfs, he found himself with a new occupation: Intermediary of the Peace for one of the districts of his home province of Tula. These were the men the assembled gentry were supposed to elect to deal with disputes between peasants and landlords over the implementation of the emancipation. The Tula gentry rejected Tolstoy as too sympathetic to the peasants, but the provincial governor, a general, overruled them and appointed Tolstoy. He served for nearly a year, most of the time in battles with his fellow intermediaries. The rumors of his unusual views caused him even more trouble, for the spreading revolutionary movement in the spring of 1862 led to a police raid on the estate. The police were looking for underground printing presses and revolutionary manifestoes, and found nothing of the sort. Tolstoy wrote to the tsar to complain of the insult to his honor and reputation, and received assurances from the ministers that there would be no consequences. Neither his neighbors in the gentry nor the government knew quite what to make of him.
The same year he married Sofya Bers, the daughter of one of his neighbors, and for the next twenty years devoted himself to his family, his school, his duties as Intermediary of the Peace, and to writing. The fruit of those years would be War and Peace, which appeared in 1865–1869, like many of Dostoevsky’s works, in Katkov’s Russian Messenger.
Tolstoy’s immense epic was devoted to Russia’s wars with Napoleon, and mainly to the French invasion of 1812. Though certainly patriotic in a general sense, Tolstoy was no nationalist. He hated Napoleon, not the French, and his view of Russia was far from rosy. He portrayed the tsar, the court, and the government as inept and removed from the realities of life and warfare. The many Germans in Russian service came in for contemptuous treatment, and only his hero Kutuzov stands above the crowd of cold and formalistic commanders. Though the book concluded with long reflections on the meaning of history (Tolstoy was particularly incensed by notions that “great men” determine the course of history), the book is not really about the events of 1812, it is about man and his fate, as Tolstoy understood it.
Figure 14. Lev Tolstoy Plowing a Field, drawing by Ilya Repin. Tretyakov Museum.
For Tolstoy the real issues of life were not political, they were moral. Pierre Bezukhov and his spiritual pilgrimage in particular incarnated the desire to act in a moral manner and to find what meaning might be hidden behind the rush of everyday life and the mindless acceptance of inherited values and institutions. Prince Andrei Bolkonskii is his opposite, the rational analyst of warfare, events, and human beings. Ultimately it is Pierre who finds happiness, first learning from the peasant Platon Karataev and his humility and faith in God, and then in family life with Natasha Rostova. Much of Tolstoy was in Pierre, not only his experiments with schemes to benefit the peasants on his estate but also in his spiritual search.