III.

Russian Literature

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS the golden age of the Russian novel,
its giants Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy towering above all. Less celebrated
but still an important Russian writer of the day was Ivan Turgenev
(1818–1883). His best known and politically most interesting novel is
Fathers and Sons (1862), in which is portrayed the conflict between
the older generation and the radical “new man” Turgenev saw as
emerging. Indeed the original, but later discarded epigraph to the novel
was taken from what Turgenev identified as “a contemporary
conversation”:

Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: “You had content but no force.”

Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: “And you have force but no content.”

The novel’s main character, the brilliant, nihilistic, young medical

researcher Bazarov, may be seen as one of the first in a long literary
line of angry young men. Invited by a fellow student and disciple,
Arkady, to stay at his father’s country house, Bazarov immediately
comes into conflict with Arkady’s uncle, a former army officer, now a
pompous, touchy old-fashioned dandy, living out his life in decorous
retirement. Irritated by the old man’s conventional attitudes, Bazarov
provocatively describes himself and his allies as “nihilists”, by which he
means that he, and those who think like him, reject everything that
cannot be established by the positivistic methods of natural science.
Truth alone matters: what cannot be established empirically is
“romantic rubbish” which an intelligent man will extirpate without
compunction. Bazarov is sweeping in his condemnation of such
irrational nonsense, which, in his view, includes all that cannot be
reduced to quantitative measurement—literature and philosophy, the
beauty of art and of nature, tradition and authority, religion and
intuition, conservatism and liberalism, populism and socialism.
Bazarov would replace all these delusions with strength, willpower,
energy, utility, work, and unremitting criticism of all that exists. For the
revolutionary Bazarov, the first job is one of demolition; only after the
whole rotten structure of the old world has been razed to the ground
can something new be built upon it. His position is essentially that
attributed to Marx: “Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is
a reactionary”.
Bazarov has been called the first Bolshevik: he wants radical change
and would not shrink from the use of brute force in its pursuit. But in
the end Bazarov’s principles fall victim to his human nature: he falls in
love with a cold, clever, well-born society beauty, is rejected by her,
suffers deeply, and not long after succumbs to an infection caught
2 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

while dissecting a cadaver in a village autopsy. He dies stoically,

wondering whether his country had any real need of him and men like
him, whether he might not be, in fact, “superfluous to requirement”.
Bazarov falls not through failure of will or intellect, but through blind
fate. Turgenev later wrote of Bazarov in a letter:

I conceived him as a sombre figure, wild, huge, half-grown out of the

soil, powerful, nasty, honest, but doomed to destruction because he
still stands only in the gateway to the future…”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is the master of the psychological

novel—indeed Nietszsche acknowledged Dostoevsky as “the only
psychologist from whom I learned anything.” He was arrested in 1849
as a member of a socialist group, condemned to death, and taken to
execution which was commuted at the last minute. Sentenced instead
to five years’ hard labour, he began to suffer from epilepsy, perhaps as
a result. His The House of the Dead (1862) is a restrained but moving
account of his experiences in prison.
Dostoevsky’s great works Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot
(1869), The Devils (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) are
widely regarded as pinnacles of the novelist's art. They are, in the
words of a Russian critic, “philosophy in action”. Dostoevsky wrote with
compelling power about social injustices, the mystery of life, and the
thrall of the irrational. His handling of these themes is, above all,
moral. In the character Prince Myshkin of The Idiot Dostoevsky
attempts to portray a truly good man, a saint whose simplicity of
character is incapable of grasping the destructiveness of passions in
the world. The influence of German idealist philosophy can also be
detected in Dostoevsky’s work. The character Raskolnikov in Crime
and Punishment—with his notions of superior and inferior human
beings, the superior ones having the right to commit breaches of
morality, while the inferior ones are obliged to adhere to the rules—has
often been regarded as an embodiment of the Nietzschean concept of
the superman. But a more likely source is the looming influence of
Hegel’s Philosophy of History with its concept of the world-historical
individual transcending moral categories in pursuit of the tasks set by
the Weltgeist.
Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground (literally: "Notes
from beneath the floorboards", or “Memoirs from a mousehole”, 1864)
may be taken as a kind of prelude to his last great novels. It is by any
reckoning is a remarkable work, an inspired polemic against the whole
tradition of social philosophy from Plato and Aristotle, through Locke to
Rousseau and John Stuart Mill, which holds that the perverseness of
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 3

human beings is attributable to the corrupting influence of society,

rather than to human nature itself. The unnamed narrator of this book,
an irascible government clerk, is the forerunner of all the alienated
antiheroes of 20th century literature. He begins by claiming that he is a
wicked man, but then, as if to demonstrate his perverseness, admits
that this is a lie told out of wickedness. He goes on to say, that in truth
he "never succeeded in becoming anything, neither wicked nor good,
neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect."
In some of the most striking passages of the book, he defends the right
of the individual human being to be perverse against all rational
calculation:

You see: reason...is a fine thing... but reason is only reason and
satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a
manifestation of the whole of life...

...there is one case, one only, when man may purposely,

consciously wish what is stupidest of all: namely, to have the right
to wish for himself what is stupidest of all and not be bound by an
obligation to wish for himself what is intelligent.

It is precisely his fantastic dreams, his most banal stupidity, that

he will wish to keep hold of, with the sole purpose of confirming to
himself (as if that were so very necessary) that human beings are
still human beings and not piano keys, which, though played
upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are
in danger of being played so much that it will be impossible to
want anything except when it is decreed by the calendar. And
more than that: even if it should indeed turn out that he is a piano
key, if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural
science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something
contrary on purpose, out of ingratitude alone, essentially to have
his own way!

Rambling, occasionally incoherent, and yet defiant, the narrator's

monologue in Notes from Underground is a defense of the primacy of
the individual human consciousness against constituted authority. In
this novel, Dostoevsky anticipates the 20th century existentialist
movement in philosophy and literature, with its emphasis on our free
choice to make ourselves what we are.
The philosophical novel found fertile soil in the Russian character. It
has been observed that the Russian has always had difficulty in
distinguishing between life and thought, the practical and the abstract.
For the true Russian, ethical and metaphysical problems form life’s
core, and such problems are accordingly vital elements in any fiction
4 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

seriously intended to put up a mirror to life. In this respect Dostoevsky

was indeed a true Russian. “Send me Hegel,” he wrote to his brother
from Siberia on his release from prison, “my life depends on it.”
The central figure of Crime and Punishment is Raskolnikov, a
young student who commits a murder out of principle. From complex,
motives which remain obscure to him, he murders an old woman
moneylender, together with her sister who unexpectedly comes on the
scene while the act is being committed. No evidence connects him with
the crime, but he becomes mentally disturbed by the commission of the
murder and his odd behaviour excites the detective in charge of the
case. In true Russian style, he confesses to the crime before his guilt is
actually established, and is sentenced to 8 years in Siberia. He is
followed there by the girl Sonya who has been living as a prostitute to
support her family. At first Raskolnikov regrets less his having
committed a murder than what he recognizes as his own weakness in
confessing to it; but after suffering an illness in the prison he comes,
through Sonya’s influence, to repent his crime
After committing the murder Raskolnikov reflects on death:

Where was it I read about a man sentenced to death who, one

hour before his execution, says or thinks that if he had to live on
some high rock, on a cliff, on a ledge so narrow that there was
only room enough to stand there, and if there were bottomless
chasms all round, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude,
and eternal gales, and if he had to spend all his life on that
square yard of space—a thousand years, an eternity—he’d rather
live like that than die at once! Oh, only to live, live, live! Live under
any circumstances,—only to live! How true it is! Good Lord, how
true it is! Man’s a scoundrel! But anyone who calls man a
scoundrel is an even bigger scoundrel himself!

At the core of Crime and Punishment is the analysis of the motives

underlying the murder and of its impact on the murderer, a theme
which serves to embody the wider problem of the relationship of the ego
to the surrounding world, of the individual to society, the basic problem
of ethics and metaphysics alike. The fundamental moral question of
Crime and Punishment is: does Raskolnikov fail to “stand firm”, and
confess to the murder merely out of his own weakness, or because of
the presence of a spiritual essence indwelling in all of us which, in the
end, causes him to reject the role of amoral superman? For indeed,
according to Raskolnikov’s own testimony, his intention in committing
the murder was to prove himself a superman, to assert his right to
transgress moral conventions. As he declares,
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 5

I wanted to kill without casuistry, to kill for its own sake, for
myself alone. I did not want in this matter to lie even to myself. I
did not kill to help my mother—that’s nonsense. I did not kill, in
order, having got money and power, to become a benefactor to
humanity. Nonsense! I just killed; killed for my own sake, for
myself alone. …Money was not the chief thing I needed when I
killed her but something else…I wanted to know, and to know
quickly, whether I was a worm like everyone else , or a man. Shall
I be able to transgress, or shall I not? Shall I be able to stoop down
and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or have I the right?

This declaration, close in spirit to certain of Nietzsche’s utterances,

shows the impact that German post-Kantian idealism had made on
Dostoevsky. He seems to have grasped that the later idealists provided
nothing on which to base a durable morality. For if, as they
maintained, phenomena have no source other than human
consciousness, if the seat of all reality lies in the human ego, if, in
short, all object is subject, how in that case can there exist any external
standard or sanction of conduct? Does it not then follow that one’s
supreme obligation is to oneself, and one’s highest calling the
elaboration and assertion of one’s own personality?
In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky demonstrates, with great art,
the essential bankruptcy of such a philosophy of self-assertion. But the
concluding sentences of the book show that he recognizes that he has
fallen short of a real solution to the problems he raises:

Here begins a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a

man, the story of his rebirth, of the gradual transition from one
world to another, and of the revelation to him of a new, hitherto
quite unknown reality. This might form the subject of a new story,
but our present tale is ended.

Dostoevsky never wrote his “new story” which was to tell of the
regeneration of Raskolnikov. Instead he created The Idiot—his vision
of the ethical ideal. In a letter to his niece he set out the scope and
purpose of the novel:

The idea of the story is my old favourite idea, but so difficult that I
for long did not dare to attempt it, and if I have attempted it now, it
is certainly because I found myself in a desperate situation. The
principal conception of the novel is to depict the positively good
man. There is nothing in the world more difficult, particularly
nowadays. Of all writers (not merely our own, but European
writers too), those who have attempted to depict the positively
good have always missed the mark. For it is an infinite task. The
6 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

good is an ideal, and both our ideal and that of civilized Europe is
still far from having been worked out. In the whole world there is
only one positively good man, Christ… Of the good types in
Christian literature, the most perfect is Don Quixote. But he is
good only because at the same time he is ridiculous. The Pickwick
of Dickens (an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote but
still immense) is also ridiculous and succeeds in virtue of this. A
feeling of compassion is produced for the much ridiculed good
man who does not know his own worth, and thus perhaps
sympathy is evoked in the reader. This rousing of compassion is
the secret of humour. Jean Valjean [of Hugo’s Les Miserables] is
also a powerful attempt; but he arouses sympathy by the
immensity of his misfortune and the injustice of society to him. In
my novel there is nothing of the kind, and I am terribly afraid that
it will be a complete failure.

There is in fact hardly a great work of literature more elusive of

description than The Idiot. The hero, Prince Myshkin, a scion of an
ancient Russian house, suffers from epileptic fits which, from early
youth, have impaired his health and his mental faculties. (As we have
observed, Dostoevsky himself suffered from the same malady.) He
returns to Russia half-cured in order to take up an inheritance. Two
women fall in love with him, the young daughter of a general and the
discarded mistress of a rich merchant. Half-loving both, pity inclines
him to marry the latter; but she, in an effort to forestall his attempt at
self-sacrifice, escapes at the last moment to another suitor, who,
goaded beyond endurance by jealousy, murders her. The prince and
the murderer spend a night together in vigil by the putrefying corpse.
The murderer is sent to Siberia (as so often in Dostoevsky’s novels),
while the general’s daughter marries a rogue who soon deserts her. At
the last the prince returns to Switzerland in a state of physical
exhaustion and renewed mental derangement.
The Idiot is the most tragic and yet also the most serene of
Dostoevsky’s works, its theme the clash between Myshkin’s strange,
visionary world and the quotidian umwelt occupied by the rest of us,
the opposition between the real and the ideal.
In Myshkin we have the most fully realized embodiment in literature
of the Russian ethical ideal. His holiness, his ignorance, his epilepsy,
his episodes of insanity, all of which are masterfully fashioned by
Dostoevsky (in particular the description of Myshkin’s burgeoning
mania, culminating in an epileptic fit, is a literary tour-de-force) make
his character the greatest incarnation in Russian literature of the Pure
Fool—the simple man whose seeming folly confounds the wisdom of
established authority. Coleridge said of Don Quixote that in him is
realized “the personification of the reason and the moral sense,
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 7

divested of the judgment and the understanding”. This characterization

is equally applicable to Prince Myshkin.
But Myshkin personifies a passive, as opposed to an active, ethical
ideal. The supreme Christian virtue he possesses is the essentially
passive virtue of humility. Nevertheless, while this humility is achieved
through self-abasement and suffering, in Dostoevsky’s hands it leads
ultimately to a form of salvation. Myshkin represents the moral
superiority of suffering over action.
The realm of transfigured values into which Dostoevsky leads us in
The Idiot is a realm free of the exigencies of the self. In presenting his
readers with the ideal of pure self-sacrifice embodied in Prince Myshkin
Dostoevsky continues to prosecute the war—begun in Crime and
Punishment—against the rationalist advocates of “enlightened self-
interest”, a doctrine which, as a moralist, he saw as no better than pure
selfishness. In a spiritual sense, The Idiot is the sequel projected by
Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. Myshkin is Raskolnikov
purified, now “seraphically free of taint of personality”.

Dostoevsky had come to conceive an interest in “socialists” and

“nihilists” as the result of a visit to the Geneva Congress of the League
of Peace and Freedom in September 1867. In nihilism—the anarchic
revolutionary movement advocating the rejection of all established
beliefs and institutions—Dostoevsky discerned a political form of
Raskolnikov’s “enlightened self-interest”. In Dostoevsky’s eyes the
nihilist is the public, political manifestation of the Raskolnikov of
private life; so, equally, the ethical theory which, on an individual level,
led to Raskolnikov’s crime, leads socially to revolution. In The Devils
Dostoevsky projects the purely ethical problem of Crime and
Punishment onto a political canvas.
The Devils centres on the activities of a small provincial group of
Russian political extremists bent on overthrowing the Tsarist
government, by violent means if necessary. The group’s prime mover,
Peter Verkhovensky, was modelled on an actual revolutionary named
Nechaev, who in 1869, along with a number of his co-conspirators,
murdered one of their comrades whose cooling ardour for the
revolutionary cause had led them to fear betrayal at his hands. This
episode, which horrified all Russia, is portrayed in Dostoevsky’s novel
by the murder of the character Shatov. In the end the conspiracy is
broken by the authorities, and several of the characters have
committed suicide.
The Devils has been taken as a demonstration of Dostoevsky’s
profound prophetic insight into revolutionary mentality; indeed, after
the revolution of 1905, Dostoevsky was called “the prophet of
revolution”. The novel certainly contains a number of passages which
8 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

would seem to bear this out: witness, for example, the character
Shigalev’s declaration that

My starting point is unlimited freedom, my conclusion unlimited

despotism.

To this may be added Verkhovensky’s words:

A generation or two of debauchery is now indispensable—

unparalleled, vulgar debauch, when man turns into a filthy,
cowardly, cruel, selfish reptile, that’s what we need; and a nice
fresh drop of blood just to accustom people… Well, then the
turmoil will begin. It will be such a tossing as the world has never
seen. The face of Russia will be darkened, and the land will
mourn for its old gods.

But alongside quotations such as these must be placed one of the

novel’s most moving passages, which links up with the biblical
quotation serving as its epigraph, and from which its title derives. This
is the scene at the deathbed of Stepan Trofimovich, Verkhovensky’s
father. During his last moments he is read the story of the unclean
devils who entered into the swine. The dying man’s eyes are opened,
and he perceives, as in a vision, that Russia is the man afflicted of
devils, that he himself, his son Peter, and the other radicals and
nihilists, are the swine into which the devils have entered and who are
rushing headlong down a steep place into the sea. He sees that on their
ignominious passing Russia will sit purified and transfigured at the
“feet of Jesus”. This was indeed Dostoevsky’s vision for the future of
Russia.
The Devils is a curious mixture of satire and moral seriousness. The
novel contains a number of caricatures of actual people of Dostoevsky’s
acquaintance, including his famous contemporary Turgenev. But the
nihilists themselves are portrayed with deadly earnestness. Peter
Verkhovensky, the novel’s counterpart of the real nihilist Nechaev, is
presented by Dostoevsky as the literal embodiment of a theory.
Stavrogin, another of the novel’s central characters, is a kind of evolved
Raskolnikov, one who has lost his faith in the glorification of self as the
acme of morality but continues, in a blasé manner, to follow the
dictates of self-interest, at the same time ridiculing both himself and
his lost faith. A disillusioned antihero burdened with romantic ennui,
he is a familiar figure in literature. The character Kirillov, a kind of
logical fanatic, uses an interesting argument to justify his resolution to
kill himself. For the Christian, Death is the last enemy to be
vanquished; for the superman, the final enemy is the fear of death. In
overcoming this fear, he achieves complete mastery over himself and
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 9

his will becomes supreme. He becomes the man-god, the antithesis to

the God-man of Christianity. But there is just one way for man to
overcome the fear of death, namely, to defy it—by killing himself. So it
is through death alone he can achieve godhead. It follows that suicide
is the crowning achievement in the religion of the superman. Kirillov’s
suicide is, in Dostoevsky’s eyes, the logical conclusion of Raskolnikov’s
ethical theory. It is with Kirillov that Doestoevsky’s treatment of the
ethical issue of the superman first begins to acquire religious
overtones. Indeed henceforth religion came to dominate Dostoevsky’s
thought and work.
Some of the ideas adumbrated in The Devils appear in Dostoevsky’s
last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. This monumental work was
described by the author as “the culminating point of my literary
activity” and praised by Freud as “the most magnificent novel ever
written”. By the time it was written, Dostoevsky had come to adopt a
religious outlook close in its essentials to the tenets of the Russian
Orthodox church: in The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky sets out to
proclaim his long-delayed faith to the world.
Dostoevsky had long before envisaged writing a novel which was to
have been entitled The Life of a Great Sinner. So far as can be inferred
from the vague hints in Dostoevsky’s letters and notebooks, the hero of
the Great Sinner was to have been a passionate, but unscrupulous
man, an unbeliever, indeed, an atheist; he was to reside for a number
of years in a monastery from which he was finally to emerge
transformed. In The Brothers Karamazov the protagonist of
Dostoevsky’s unrealized conception has refracted into the three
eponymous brothers: Dmitri Karamazov is the man of sinful passions,
Ivan an intellectual sceptic; it is Alyosha, the youngest brother (and the
novel’s nominal hero), who has been brought up in the monastery and
returns to the world bringing the light of the Christian ideal, as
Dostoevsky saw it, into the quotidian world. Two main themes animate
the novel, of which the second gradually comes to loom the larger: the
debate between Ivan, representing the principle of evil—the dark—and
Alyosha, the type of the Christian ideal—the light; and the redemption
of Dmitri through sin and suffering.
The central elements of the plot of The Brothers Karamazov (which
Dostoevsky seems to have provided almost as an afterthought to its
original conception) is the murder of Karamazov père, a revolting but
nevertheless impressive monster of lust and debauchery. He and Dmitri
have been rivals for the same woman. Words and blows have been
exchanged, and threats uttered in the hearing of all, so that, when the
old man is found murdered, suspicion naturally falls on Dmitri. But the
murderer is in fact the old man’s illegitimate son Smerdyakov, who is
led to commit the crime under the malign influence of Ivan’s cynical
unbelief. A cruder version of Ivan, Smerdyakov is unrestrained by
10 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

conscience and puts Ivan’s principles into practice: while Smerdyakov

actually killed old Karamazov, in principle Ivan was the true murderer.
Smerdyakov hangs himself; Dmitri is condemned, as with so many of
Dostoevsky’s principals, to Siberia, for the murder of which he is
entirely innocent. And Ivan is driven to insanity by awareness of his
own essential guilt.
Dostoevsky intended the core of his novel to be the long debate,
spoken and unspoken, between Ivan and Alyosha. This begins in one of
the early chapters where they respond to their father’s half-mocking
question “Is there a God?” with opposite and equally emphatic answers.
In support of his rejection of religious belief, Ivan quotes from the
Russian press of the day heart-rending stories of cruelty to innocent
children, and goes on:

Listen to me: I took only children to make my case clearer. I don’t

say anything about the other human tears with which the earth is
saturated from its crust to its centre—I have narrowed my subject
on purpose. I am a bug and I acknowledge in all humility that I
can’t understand why everything has been arranged as it is. I
suppose men themselves are to blame: they were given paradise,
they wanted freedom and they stole the fire from heaven,
knowing perfectly well that they would become unhappy, so why
should we pity them? Oh, all that my pitiful earthly Euclidean
mind can grasp is that suffering exists, that no one is to blame,
that effect follows cause., simply and directly, that everything
floes and finds its level—but then this is only Euclidean nonsense.
I know that and I refuse to live by it! What do I care that no one is
to blame, that effect follows cause simply and directly and that I
know it—I must have retribution or I shall destroy myself. And
retribution not somewhere in the infinity of space and time, but
here on earth, and so that I could see it myself. I was a believer,
and I want to see for myself. And if I’m dead by that time, let them
resurrect me, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair.
Surely the reason for my suffering was not that I as well as my
evil deeds and sufferings may serve as manure for some future
harmony of somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the
lion lie down with the lamb and the murdered man rise up and
embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone
suddenly finds out what it has all been for. All religions on earth
are based on this desire, and I am a believer. But then there are
the children, and what am I to do with them?... Listen: if all have
to suffer as to buy eternal harmony by their suffering, what have
the children to do with it?... If the sufferings of children go to make
up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of
truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 11

a price. And, finally, I do not want a mother to embrace the

torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs! She has no
right to forgive him for the sufferings of her tortured child. ..She
has no right to forgive him for that, even if her child were to
forgive him! And if that is so, if they have no right to forgive him,
what becomes of the harmony? Is there in the whole world a being
who could or would have the right to forgive? I don’t want
harmony. I don’t want it, out of the love I bear to mankind. I want
to remain with my suffering unavenged and my religion
unappeased, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price has
been placed on harmony. We cannot afford to pay so much for
admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket of
admission. And indeed, if I’m an honest man, I’m bound to hand it
back as soon as possible. This I am doing. It is not God that I do
not accept. I merely most respectfully return him the ticket.

In this indictment Dostoevsky’s own voice can be heard, and he

seems to have accepted its validity as far as it goes. No answer is
supplied to Ivan’s objections. Indeed his objections are unanswerable,
at least in rational terms. In Notes from Underground Dostoevsky had
already insisted that humanity was fundamentally non-rational, and in
Crime and Punishment he had disposed of the attempt to find a
rational basis for ethics. The fruitless struggles of Ivan Karamazov to
find a rational solution to the problem of suffering are, on his own
admission, mere “Euclidean nonsense”, the product of Ivan’s “poor
earthly Euclidean mind”1. The basis of life is something quite different.
“I live,” confesses Ivan, “because I want to live, even in despite of logic.”
In response all Alyosha can say is that we must love life, since it is only
by loving life that we can attain any understanding of its meaning.
The pinnacle of The Brothers Karamazov is attained in Ivan's tale
of The Grand Inquisitor. Jesus returns to earth during the heyday of the
Inquisition to visit the common people. Just as he resurrects a little girl
from her coffin, the aged Cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor himself,
appears, attended by his guards. He orders that Jesus be seized and
cast into prison. In the ensuing examination the Inquisitor declares
that the Church, recognizing that Jesus's ethical standards are too lofty
for the masses, has replaced ethics and self-sacrifice by miracle,
mystery, and authority. So in returning to walk among the people
Jesus is in fact meddling with the established order of his own Church.
The Inquisitor accordingly has no choice but to decree that he be burnt

1 Doestoevsky here shows his acquaintance with the idea of a geometry obeying laws
other than Euclid’s, a possibility which had been put forward by the Russian
mathematician Lobachevsky early in the 19th century, and which was well known to
Russian intellectuals by the 1880s.
12 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

upon the morrow. The prisoner, who has remained silent throughout
the Inquisitor's discourse, kisses him gently on the lips as if in
acquiescence. The Inquisitor, startled, opens the door and tells the
prisoner to go and never to return. The prisoner thereupon departs.
In making Ivan accept what he considered to be the ultimate policies
of the Catholic Church, Dostoevsky actually intended The Grand
Inquisitor to be an indirect attack on socialism. In the course of his
disquisition the Interrogator contrasts Jesus' refusal to turn stones into
loaves—on the grounds that the people would come to be dependent on
such miracles and thereby lose their freedom—with the Church's
position: "Feed them first and then demand virtue of them!"
Dostoyevsky himself commented:

By the stones and loaves of bread, I meant our present social

problems. Present-day socialism in Europe and in our country as
well sets Christ aside and is first of all concerned about bread. It
appeals to science and maintains that the cause of all human
misfortune is poverty, the struggle for existence and the wrong
kind of environment.

Despite his somewhat reactionary intentions, in The Grand Inquisitor

Dostoevsky transcends political divisions and gives us a parable of
universal significance.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the giants of European

literature. His great novel War and Peace (1863-9) is a masterpiece of
subtle character analysis combined with a panoramic view of Russian
upper-class society during the period of the Napoleonic wars. It is also
a major novel of ideas, in which Tolstoy sets forth his views on the
philosophy of history, and the nature of human freewill.
At the time of writing War and Peace Tolstoy was much preoccupied
with the problem of historical causation. He had come to reject the
"great man" theory of history, according to which the cause of any
historical event may be traced to the volitions of a small number (often
just one) of powerful individuals. He argues, for example, that the
ultimate retreat of Napoleon's army from Russia was not, as usually
claimed by historians, the result of a brilliant manoeuvre devised by
Russian generals of genius, but rather

the manoeuvre was, in reality, never conceived of as a whole but

came about step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment,
as the result of an infinite number of the most diverse conditions,
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 13

and was only seen in its entirety when it was a fait accompli and
belonged to the past.

To counteract what Tolstoy saw as the simplistic and tendentious

analysis of history in terms of the effect of the wills of “great men”, he
advocates the use of the methods of the infinitesimal calculus, as
presented in the following remarkable passage immediately following
the description of the Battle of Borodino:

Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human

mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man
only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of the
motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error
comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into
discontinuous elements. There is a well known, so -called sophism
of the ancients consisting in this, that Achilles could never catch
up with a tortoise he was following, in spite of the fact that he
traveled ten times as fast as the tortoise. By the time Achilles has
covered the distance that separated him from the tortoise, the
tortoise has covered one tenth of the distance ahead of him: when
Achilles has covered that tenth, the tortoise has covered another
hundredth, and so on forever. This problem seemed to the
ancients insoluble. The absurd answer (that Achilles could never
overtake the tortoise) resulted from this: that motion was divided
into discontinuous elements, whereas the motion both of Achilles
and of the tortoise was continuous. By adopting smaller and
smaller elements of motion we only approach a solution of the
problem, but never reach it. Only when we have admitted the
conception of the infinitely small, and the resulting geometrical
progression with a common ratio of one tenth, and have found the
sum of this progression to infinity, do we reach a solution of the
problem.

A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of

dealing with the infinitely small can now yield solutions in other
more complex problems of motion which used to appear insoluble.

This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients,

when dealing with problems of motion admits the conception of the
infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion
(absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error
which the human mind cannot avoid when it deals with separate
elements of motion instead of examining continuous motion.
14 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing

happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from
innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous.

To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of

history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all
those human wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and
disconnected units. The first method of history is to take an
arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it
apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any
event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.

The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a

king or a commander—as equivalent to the sum of many
individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never
expressed by the actions of a single historic personage. Historical
science in its endeavour to draw nearer to truth continually takes
smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the
units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from
others, or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say
that the will of many men is expressed by the actions of any one
historic personage, is in itself false.

It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any

deductions drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select
some larger or smaller unit as the subject of history—as criticism
has every right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes
must always be arbitrarily selected.

Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the

differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men)
and attaining the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum
of these infinitesimals) can we hope at arriving at the laws of
history.

The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present

an extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their
customary pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other,
plunder and slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in
despair, and for some years the whole course of life is altered and
presents an intensive movement which first increases and then
slackens. What was the cause of this movement, by what laws
was it governed? asks the mind of man. The historians, replying
to this question, lay before us the sayings and doings of a few
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 15

dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, calling these sayings

and doings “the Revolution”; then they give a detailed biography
of Napoleon and of certain people favourable or hostile to him; tell
of the influence some of these people had on others, and say: that
is why this movement took place and those are its laws.

But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation,
but plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious,
because in it a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a
stronger. The sum of human wills produced the Revolution and
Napoleon, and only the sum of those wills first tolerated and then
destroyed them.

“But every time there have been conquests there have been
conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state
there have been great men,” says history. “Yes, indeed, in every
case where conquerors appear there have been wars,” human
reason replies, “but this does not prove that the conquerors were
the cause of the wars, or that it is possible to discover the factors
leading to warfare in the personal activity of a single man.”
Whenever I look at my watch and see the hand pointing to ten I
hear the bells beginning to ring in the church close by; but I have
no right to assume that because the bells start ringing when the
watch hand reaches ten the movement of the bells is caused by
the position of the hands on my watch.

When I see a steam-engine move I hear the whistle, I see the

valves opening and the wheels turning; but I have no right to
conclude that the whistle and the turning of wheels cause the
movement of the engine.

Peasants say that a cold wind blows in late spring because the
oaks are budding, and it is a fact that a cold wind does blow
when the oak is coming out. But though I do not know what
causes the cold winds to blow when the oak-buds unfold, I cannot
agree with the peasants that the unfolding of the oak-buds is the
cause of the cold wind, for the force of the wind is altogether
outside the influence of the buds. I see only a coincidence of
occurrences such as happens with all the phenomena of life, and I
see that however long and however carefully I study the hands of
the watch, the valve and the wheels of the engine, and the oak-
bud, I shall never find out what makes the bells ring, the
locomotive move and the wind blow in spring. To do that I must
completely change my point of observation and consider the laws
16 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

regulating steam, bells and the wind. The historians must do

likewise. And experiments in that direction have already been
made.

To elicit the laws of history we must leave aside kings, ministers

and generals, and select for study the homogeneous, infinitesimal
elements which influence the masses. No one can say how far it is
possible for man to advance in this way towards an
understanding of the laws of history; but it is obvious that this is
the only path to that end, and that the human intellect has not, so
far, applied in this direction one-millionth of the energy which
historians have devoted to describing the deeds of various kings,
general, and ministers, and propounding reflections of their own
concerning those deeds.

The Epilogue to War and Peace is a philosophical disquisition in

which Tolstoy sets forth in some detail his views on the nature of
historical causation, human freewill and consciousness. He argues
that an abstract notion such as "power" cannot be taken as causing
historical events on pain of circularity:

What causes historical events? Power.

What is power? Power is the collective will of the masses vested in

one person.

On what condition is the will of the people delegated to one

person? On condition that that person expresses the will of the
whole people.

That is, power is power. That is, power is a word whose meaning
we do not understand.

Rather, Tolstoy suggests, power is just a relation,

the relation that exists between the expression of the will of a

person and the execution of that will by others.

He concludes:

We are able to give a direct and positive reply to those two

essential questions of history: (1) what is power; (2) what force
produces the movement of nations?
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 17

(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other persons, in

which the more this person expresses opinions, theories and
justification of the collective action the less is his participation in
that action.

(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by

intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two, as
historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people who
participate in the event, and who always combine in such a way
that those who take the largest direct share in the event assume
the least responsibility, and vice versa.

Morally, power appears to cause the event; physically, it is those

who are subordinate to that power. But, inasmuch as moral
activity is inconceivable without physical activity, the cause of the
event is found neither in the one nor the other but in the
conjunction of the two.

Or, in other words, the concept of a cause is not applicable to the

phenomenon we are examining.

In the last analysis we reach an endless circle -- that uttermost

limit to which in every domain of thought the human intellect must
come if it is not playing with its subject. Electricity produces heat;
heat produces electricity. Atoms attract and atoms repel one
another.

Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms we

cannot say why this occurs, and we say that such is the nature of
these phenomena, such is their law. The same applies to historical
phenomena. Why do wars or revolutions happen? We do not
know. We know only that to produce the one or the other men
must form themselves into a certain combination in which all take
part; and we say that this is the nature of men, that this is a law.

In the last few sections of Tolstoy's Epilogue he turns from the

problem of historical causation to what he regards as a more
fundamental problem – the problem of problems – that of the individual
human being's freewill, and its relationship to consciousness. He
observes that

If the will of every man were free, that is, if every man could act
as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected
accidents... again, if there is a single law controlling men's
18 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

actions, freewill cannot exist, for man's will would then be subject
to that law.

In this contradiction lies the problem of free will...

The problem lies in the fact that if we regard man as a subject of

observation from whatever point of view - theological, historical,
ethical or philosophical - we find the universal law of necessity to
which he (like everything else that exists) is subject. But looking
upon man from within ourselves - man as the object of our own
inner consciousness of self - we feel ourselves to be free.

The inner consciousness is a source of self-cognition distinct from

and independent of reason. With his reason man observes
himself, but only through self-consciousness does he know
himself. And without self-consciousness no observation or
application of reason is possible.

In this last passage we see the influence on Tolstoy of German idealist

philosophy, especially that of Schopenhauer, in which consciousness is
something primordial, a given. Schopenhauer's influence becomes even
more evident in the passages that follow:

In order to understand, to observe, to draw conclusions, man must

first of all be conscious of himself as living. A man is only
conscious of himself as a living being by the fact that he wills; he
is conscious of his volition. And his own will – which is the very
essence of his life – he is and cannot but be conscious of as being
free.

If on submitting himself to observation man perceives that his will

is directed by a constant law (say he observes the imperative need
of taking food, or the way the brain works, or whatever it may be)
he cannot regard this consistent direction of the will otherwise
than as a limitation of it. But a thing can only be limited if it is free
to begin with. Man sees his will to be limited just because he is
conscious of it in no other way than as being free.

You tell me I am not free. But I have just lifted my arm and let it
fall. Everyone understands that this reply, however illogical, is an
irrefutable demonstration of freedom.

The reply is the expression of a consciousness that is not subject

to reason.
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 19

If the concept of freedom appears to the reason as a senseless

contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one
and the same instant of time, or the possibility of an effect without
a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to
reason.

Like the narrator in Notes from Underground (but in a much more

reasoned manner), Tolstoy ridicules the idea that the mental life of
human beings is reducible to natural science:

Only in our conceited age of the popularization of knowledge –

thanks to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the diffusion of
printed matter – has the question of the freedom of the will been
put on a level on which the question itself cannot exist. In our day
the majority of so-called 'advanced' people – that is, a mob of
ignoramuses – have accepted the result of the researches of
natural science, which is occupied only with one side of the
question, for a solution of the whole problem.

They say and they write and they print that the soul and freedom
do not exist, since the life of man is expressed by muscular
movements and muscular movements are conditioned by the
working of the nervous system...They say this with no inkling that
thousands of years ago that same law of necessity that they are
now so strenuously trying to prove by physiology and comparative
zoology was not merely acknowledged by all religions and all
thinkers but has never been denied. They do not see that the role
of the natural sciences in this matter is merely to illumine one side
of it. For even if, from the point of view of observation, reason and
the will are but secretions of the brain, and if man following the
general law of evolution developed from lower animals at some
unknown period of time, all this will only elucidate from a fresh
angle the truth already admitted thousands of years ago by all
religious and philosophical theories - that from the standpoint of
reason man is subject to the laws of necessity; but it does not
advance by a hair's breadth the solution of the question, which
has another, opposite, side, founded on the consciousness of
freedom.

Tolstoy concludes the Epilogue to War and Peace with a meditation

on the connection between history and human freewill:

History examines the manifestation of man’s freewill in connection

with the external world in time and in dependence on cause; that
20 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

is, it defines this freedom by the laws of reason. And so history is

a science only insofar as this freewill is defined by those laws.

The recognition of man’s freewill as a force capable of influencing

historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same for
history as the recognition of a free force moving the heavenly
bodies would be for astronomy.

Such an assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence

of laws, that is, of any science whatever. If there is even one
heavenly body moving freely then the laws of Kepler and Newton
are negated and no conception of the movement of the heavenly
bodies any longer exists. If there is a single human action due to
freewill then not a single historical law can exist, nor any
conception of historical events.

History is concerned with the lines of movement of human wills,

one extremity of which is hidden in the unknown while at the
other end men’s consciousness of freewill in the present moment
moves on through space and time and causation.

The more this field of movement opens out before our eyes the
more evident do the laws of the movement become. To discover
and define those laws is the problem of history.

From the standpoint from which the science of history now

regards its subject, by the method it now follows—seeking the
causes of phenomena in the freewill of man—a scientific
statement of those laws is impossible, for whatever limits we may
set to man’s freewill, as soon as we recognize it as a force not
subject to law the existence of law becomes impossible.

Only by reducing this element of freewill to the infinitesimal, that

is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince
ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of causes, and then
instead of seeking causes history will adopt as its task the
investigation of historical laws.

Research into those laws was begun long ago and the new
methods of thought which history must adopt are being worked
out simultaneously with the self-destroying process towards
which the old kind of history with its perpetual dividing and
dissecting of the causes of events is tending.
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 21

All human sciences have gone along this path. Reaching the
infinitesimal or infinitely small, mathematics—the most exact of
the sciences—leaves off dividing and sets out upon the new
process of integrating the infinitesimal unknown. Abandoning the
concept of causation, mathematics looks for laws, i.e. the
properties common to all the infinitely small unknown elements.

The other sciences, too, have proceeded along the same path in
their thinking, though it has taken another form. When Newton
formulated the law of gravitation he did not say that the sun or the
earth had a property of attraction. What he said was that all
bodies, from the largest to the smallest, have the property of
attracting one another; that is, leaving on one side the question of
the cause of the movement of bodies, he expressed the property
common to all bodies, from the infinitely large to the infinitely
small. The natural sciences do the same thing: putting aside the
notion of cause, they seek for laws. History, too, is entered on the
same course. And if the subject of history is to be the study of the
movements of nations and humanity, and not descriptions of
episodes in the lives of individuals, it too is bound to lay aside the
notion of cause and seek the laws common to all the equal and
indissolubly interconnected infinitesimal elements of freewill.

In Some Words about War and Peace, published in 1868, Tolstoy

amplifies his remarks on freedom and necessity:

Taking a broad view of history we are in indubitably convinced of

a sempiternal law by which events occur. Looking at it from a
personal point of view we are convinced of the opposite.

A man who kills another, Napoleon who orders the crossing of the
Niemen, you or I handing in a petition to be admitted to the army,
or lifting or lowering our arm, are all indubitably convinced that
our every action is based on reasonable grounds and on our own
freewill, and that it depends on us whether we do this or that.
This conviction is inherent in us and so precious to each of us, that
in spite of the proofs of history and the statistics of crime (which
convince us of absence of freedom in the actions of other people)
we extend the consciousness of our freedom to all our actions.

The contradiction seems insoluble. When committing an act I am

convinced that I do it by my own free will, but considering that
action in its connection with the general life of mankind (in its
22 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

historical significance), I am convinced that this action was

predestined and inevitable. Where is the error?

Psychological observations of man’s capacity for retrospectively

supplying a whole series of supposedly free reasons for
something that has been done…confirm the supposition that
man’s consciousness of freedom in the commission of a certain
kind of action is erroneous. But the same psychological
observations prove that there is another series of actions in which
the consciousness of freedom is not retrospective, but
instantaneous and indubitable. In spite of all that the materialists
may say, I can undoubtedly commit an act or refrain from it if the
act relates to me alone. I have undoubtedly by my own will just
raised and lowered my arm. I can at once stop writing. You can at
once stop reading. I can certainly, by my own will and free from
all obstacles, transfer my thoughts to America, or to any
mathematical problem I choose. Testing my freedom I can raise
and forcibly lower my hand ion the air. I have done so. But near
me stands a child and I raise my hand above him and want to
lower it with the same force onto the child. I cannot do this. A dog
rushes at the child, and I cannot refrain from lifting my hand at
the dog. I am on parade, and cannot help following the movement
of the regiment. In action I cannot refrain from attacking with my
regiment or from running when all around me run—I cannot.
When I appear in court as the defender of an accused person, I
cannot help speaking or knowing what I am going to say. I cannot
help blinking when a blow is directed at my eye.

So there are two kinds of actions: some that do and others that do
not depend on my will. And the mistake causing the contradiction
is due only to the fact that I wrongly transfer the consciousness of
freedom (which properly accompanies ever act relating to my ego,
to the highest abstractions of my existence) to actions performed in
conjunction with others and dependent on the coincidence of other
wills with my own. To define the limits of freedom and
dependence is very difficult and the definition of those limits
forms the sole and essential problem of psychology, but observing
the conditions of the manifestation of our greatest freedom and
greatest dependence, we cannot but see that the more abstract
and therefore the less connected with the activity of others our
activity is, the more free it is; and on the contrary, the more our
activity is connected with other people the less free it is.
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 23

The strongest, most indissoluble, most burdensome, and constant

bond with other men is what is called power over others, which in
its real meaning is only the greatest dependence on them.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which has been acclaimed the greatest

novel ever written, begins with one of the most famous first lines in
literature:

All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy

after its own fashion.

Anna Karenina is a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and

of humanity in general. The tragedy of Anna, who sacrifices her
husband and son for love, and who eventually commits suicide, is
presented in contrast with the spiritual journey of Lyovin, who is a
faithful reflection of Tolstoy himself. Like Tolstoy, Lyovin attacks
contemporary society, fashionable liberalism, drawing-room religion—
he opposes the world which, in his words, “distorts all religious feelings
and inevitably crushes the generous enthusiasm of the mind.”
Lyovin is racked by the conflict between feeling and reason. In
Lyovin’s philosophical anxiety Tolstoy portrays the secret tragedy of a
generation whose fear of death had rendered their very lives
meaningless. Indeed,

Lyovin, a happy father and husband, in near perfect health, was

several times so near suicide that he had to hide a rope lest he be
tempted to hang himself and would not go out with a gun for fear
of shooting himself.

Tolstoy had written in a letter:

Once a man has realized that death is the end of everything, then
there is nothing worse than life either.

In the one chapter of the novel that carries a title, “Death”, Lyovin is
present at his brother Nikolai’s passing, paralleling the death of
Tolstoy’s own brother:

[Nikolai’s] sufferings, growing more and more severe, did their

work and prepared him for death. He could not lie comfortably in
any position, could not for a moment forget himself. There was no
part of his body, no limb, that did not ache and cause him agony.
Even the memories, the impressions, the thoughts within this body
aroused in him the same aversion as the body itself. The sight of
other people, their remarks, his own reminiscences—it was all a
24 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

torture to him… All his life was merged in this one feeling of
suffering and desire to be rid of it.

It was evident that he was undergoing a transformation which

would make him look upon death as the fulfillment of his desires,
as happiness. Hitherto each individual desire aroused by
suffering or privation, such as hunger, fatigue, thirst, had brought
enjoyment when gratified. But now privation and suffering were
not followed by relief, and the effort to obtain relief only caused
fresh suffering. And so all desires were merged in one—the desire
to be rid of all this pain and from its source, the body.

For Lyovin,

the sight of his brother, and the presence of death, revived in [hi}
the sense of horror in the face of the enigma, together with the
nearness and inevitability of death, which had seized him
[before]. Only now the feeling was still stronger…—he felt even
more incapable of apprehending the meaning of death, and its
inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever.

But Lyovin does, in the end, find a kind of salvation—through the

wisdom of an illiterate peasant who tells him that man must love, not
for his needs, but for God and his own soul. Lyovin sees then that
reason has taught him nothing—all that he knows has been revealed to
him by the heart. This religious note echoes the mental processes then
taking place in Tolstoy’s own mind—as he was soon to confess: “I knew
also that the standard of good and evil was not what people said or did,
not progress, but myself and my own heart.” But one cannot help
feeling that Lyovin will soon relapse into doubt, that, as with Tolstoy
himself, Lyovin’s effacement of the intellect is a temporary expedient. At
the end of the novel Lyovin asks himself:

Well, what is it that troubles me? …Yes, the one obvious

unmistakable manifestation of the Deity is the law of good and
evil disclosed to men by revelation which I feel in myself and in
the recognition of which I do not so much unite myself as am
united, whether I will or no, with other men into one body of
believers which is called the Church. But the Jews, the Muslims,
the Confucians, the Buddhists—what of them?... Can those
hundreds of millions of human beings be deprived of that greatest
of blessings without which life has no meaning?... But what is it
that I want to know?... I want to grasp the relation of the Deity of
all the different religions of mankind. I am seeking to fathom the
general manifestation of God to the universe with all its stars and
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 25

planets. What am I about? Knowledge, certain, unattainable by

reason, has been revealed to me, to my heart, and here I am
obstinately trying to express that knowledge in words and by
means of reason. …Do I not know that it is not the stars that are
moving?... But seeing the stars change place and not being able to
picture to myself the revolution of the earth, I am right in saying
the stars move.

And the astronomers—could they have understood and calculated

anything if they had taken into account all the complicated and
varied motions of the earth? All the marvellous conclusions they
have reached about the distances, masses, movements and
disturbances of the celestial bodies are based on the apparent
movements of the stars round a stationary earth—on that very
movement I am witnessing now, that millions have witnessed
during long ages, that has been and always will be the same, and
that can always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of the
astronomers would have been idle and precarious had they not
been founded on observations of the visible heavens in relation to
a single meridian and a single horizon, so all my conclusions
would be idle and precarious if not founded on that
understanding of good and evil which was and always will be
alike for all men, which has been revealed to me by Christianity
and which can always be trusted in my own soul. I have no right
to try to decide the question of other religions and their relations to
the Deity; that must remain unfathomable to me.

He concludes:

This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy
and enlightened all of a sudden as I dreamt it would… But be it
faith or not—I don’t know what it is—through suffering this feeling
has crept…imperceptibly into my heart and has lodged itself
firmly there….

I shall still embark on useless discussions and express my

opinions inopportunely; there will sill be the same wall between
the sanctuary of my inmost soul and other people, even my
wife…I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why
I pray, and I shall still go on praying—but my life now, my whole
life, independently of anything that can happen to me, every
minute is no longer meaningless as it was before but has a true
meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.
26 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

Despite the affirmation of faith in Lyovin’s closing sentence, one

cannot help agreeing with Dostoevsky’s observation:

Lyovin’s mind is over-restless. He will lose his faith again…he will

tear himself on some mental nail of his own making.

In 1899 Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection, appeared. In this work

Tolstoy strove to put into the form of a novel the spiritual “conversion”
he had undergone after finishing Anna Karenina (and which he had
already described in didactic works such as A Confession). In
Resurrection Tolstoy aimed to reproduce in artistic form the
resurrection of fallen man, but, not recognizing the Christian
conception of resurrection, he describes instead a man undergoing a
process of spiritual regeneration. The novel’s central figure, Prince
Nekhlyudov, after Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace and Lyovin in
Anna Karenina Tolstoy’s last great literary self-portrait, serves on the
jury at the trial for murder of a prostitute, whom he recognizes as the
innocent young girl, Maslova, he once loved, and then seduced and
abandoned. Nekhlyudov is conscience-stricken, and when Maslova is
convicted and transported to Siberia, he gives up everything to follow
her there, in the end undergoing a kind of spiritual transformation:

That night [the novel concludes] an entirely new life began for
Nekhlyudov, not so much because he had entered into new
conditions of life, but because everything that had happened to
him from that time on was endowed with an entirely different
meaning for him. How this new chapter of his life will end, the
future will show.

As with Raskolnikov at the end of Crime and Punishment, this hints

at a sequel, and, indeed, six months after he finished the work, Tolstoy
noted in his diary: “I terribly want to write an artistic, not a dramatic
but an epic continuation of Resurrection: the peasant life of
Nekhlyudov.” This sequel was never written.
In Resurrection Tolstoy attacks both the Russian Orthodox Church
and the Russian penal system. After a somewhat sarcastic description
of a prison church service, Tolstoy observes, in a passage deleted by the
government censor:

And to not one of those present, from the priest down…, did it
occur that this Jesus Whose name the priest repeated in wheezy
tones such an endless number of times, praising Him with
outlandish words, had expressly forbidden everything that was
being done there; that He had not only prohibited the senseless
chatter and the blasphemous incantation over the bread and wine
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 27

but had also, in the most emphatic manner, forbidden men to call
other men their master or to pray in temples, and had commanded
each to pray in solitude; had forbidden temples themselves,
saying that He came to destroy them and that one should worship
not in temples but in spirit and in truth; and above everything else
He had forbidden not only sitting in judgement on people and
imprisoning, humiliating, torturing and executing them, as was
done here, but had even prohibited any kind of violence, saying
that He came to set at liberty those who were captive.

It did not occur to any one of those present that everything that
was going on there was the greatest blasphemy, and a mockery of
the same Christ in Whose name it was all being done. No one
seemed to realize that the gilt cross with the enamel medallions at
the ends, which the priest held out to the people to kiss, was
nothing else but the emblem of the gallows on which Christ had
been executed for denouncing the very things now being
performed here in His name. It did not occur to anyone that the
priests, who imagined they were eating the body and drinking the
blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine, were indeed eating
His body and drinking His blood—but not in little bits of bread
and in the wine, but first by misleading “these little ones” with
whom Christ identified Himself and then by depriving them of
their greatest blessing and subjecting them to the most cruel
torments, by concealing from them the good things that He had
brought them.

The priest performed his functions with an easy conscience

because he had been brought up from childhood to believe that
this was the one true faith which had been held by all the saints
that had ever lived and was held now by the spiritual and
temporal authorities. He did not believe that the bread became
flesh, or that it was good for the soul to pronounce a great number
of words, or that he had really devoured a bit of God—no one
could believe that—but he believed that one ought to believe it. But
the main thing that confirmed him in this faith was the fact that, in
return for fulfilling the demands of this faith, for eighteen years
now he had been drawing an income which enabled him to
support his family, and send his son to high-school and his
daughter to the school for the daughters of clergy. The subdeacon
believed in these things even more firmly than the priest, since he
had entirely forgotten the substance of the dogmas of this faith,
and only knew that the warm water for the wine, prayers for the
dead, the Hours, a simple thanksgiving service and a choral
28 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

thanksgiving service—everything had its fixed price which devout

Christians gladly paid, and therefore he called out his “Have
Mercy, Have Mercy”, and sang and read just what he had to sing
and read as a matter of course, just as another man sells wood or
flour or potatoes. The prison superintendent and the warders,
though they had never either known or tried to find out what the
dogmas of the faith consisted in, believed that one must believe in
this faith because the higher authorities and the Tsar himself
believed in it. Besides, they felt dimly (they could never have
explained why) that this creed was a justification of their cruel
duties. But for this creed it would have been harder for them—
impossible, even—to employ all their energies tormenting people,
as they did now with a perfectly easy conscience…

The majority of the prisoners (with the exception of a few who saw
through the deception practised on those who adhered to this
faith, and laughed at it in their hearts)—the majority of them
believed that these gilded ikons, candles, chalices, vestments,
crosses, repetitions of incomprehensible words, “Jesu most sweet”
and “Have mercy”, possessed a mystic power by means of which
a great many comforts might be obtained, in this life and the life to
come. Though most of them had made several attempts—by
means of prayers, special services, candles—to get the goods of
this life, and their prayers had remained unanswered, each of
them was firmly convinced that their lack of success was
accidental and that the establishment, approved by learned men
and by archbishops, must be a thing of the greatest importance,
and indispensable, if not for this life, at any rate for the hereafter.

Passages such as these excited the ire of the Church authorities to

such a degree that, in February 1901, they formally excommunicated
Tolstoy.
Tolstoy is equally vehement in his strictures against the Russian
penal system, and, by implication, the whole idea of legally sanctioned
imprisonment. Towards the novel’s end Nekhlyudov reflects on his
experience of accompanying the convicts on their way to exile or
incarceration in Siberia:

To know that somewhere, far away, one set of people are torturing
another set by subjecting them to every kind of humiliation,
inhuman degradation and suffering; and for three months to have
been a constant eye-witness of that defilement and agony inflicted
on one set of people by another—are two very different things.
And Nekhlyudov was experiencing this. More than once during the
last three months he had asked himself: Am I mad, that I see what
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 29

others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that
I see? Yet the people (and there were so many of them) who did
the things that so bewildered and horrified him behaved with
such calm assurance—not only that what they were doing was
necessary but that it was highly important and valuable work—
that it was difficult to believe them all mad. Nor could he admit
that he was mad himself, for he was conscious of the clearness of
his thoughts. Consequently, he found himself in a continual state
of perplexity.

What he had seen during the past three months had left him with
the impression that from the whole population living in freedom
the government in conjunction with the courts picked out the most
highly strung, mettlesome and excitable individuals, the most
gifted and the strongest—but less crafty and cautious than other
people—and these, who were not one whit more guilty or more
dangerous to society than those who were left at liberty, were
locked up in gaols, halting-stations, hard-labour camps, where
they were confined for months and years in utter idleness,
material security, and exile from nature, from their families and
from useful work. In other words, they were forced outside all the
conditions required for a normal and moral human existence. This
was the first conclusion that Nekhlyudov drew from his
observations.

Secondly, these people were subjected to all sorts of unnecessary

degradations in these establishments—chains, shaven heads and
infamous prison clothing; that is, they were deprived of the main
inducements which encourage weak people to lead good lives:
regard for public opinion, a sense of shame and a consciousness
of human dignity.

Thirdly, with their lives in continual danger from the infectious

diseases common in places of confinement, from physical
exhaustion and from beatings (to say nothing of exceptional
occurrences such as sunstroke, drowning and fire), these people
lived continually in circumstances in which the best and most
moral of men are led by the instinct of self-preservation to commit
(and to condone in others) the most terribly cruel actions.

Fourthly, these people were forced to associate with men

singularly corrupted by life (and by those very institutions,
especially)—with murderers and malefactors who acted like
30 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

leaven in dough on those not yet corrupted by the means

employed.

And fifthly and finally, all the people subject to these influences
were instilled in the most effective manner possible—namely, by
every possible form of inhuman treatment practised upon
themselves, by means of the suffering inflicted on children,
women and old men, by beatings and floggings with rods and
whips, by the offering of rewards for bringing a fugitive back,
dead or alive, by the separation of husbands from wives and
putting them to cohabit with other partners, by shootings and
hangings—it was instilled into them in the most effective manner
possible that all sorts of violence, cruelty and inhumanity were not
only tolerated but even sanctioned by the government when it
suited its purpose, and were therefore all the more permissible to
those who found themselves under duress, in misery and want.

All these institutions seemed to have been devised for the express
purpose of producing a concretion of depravity and vice, such as
could not be achieved in any other conditions, with the ultimate
idea of disseminating this concretion of depravity and vice among
the whole population. “It is just as if the problem had been set: to
find the best and surest means of corrupting the greatest number
of people,” thought Nekhlyudov, as he tried to penetrate to the
heart of what happened in gaols and halting-stations. Every year
hundreds and thousands of people were brought to the utmost
pitch of depravity and, when completely corrupted, they were set
free to spread up and down the country the corruption they had
learned in prison.

In the prisons of Tumen, Ekaterinaburg, Tomsk, and at the

halting-stations along the way, Nekhlyudov saw how successfully
the objects society seemed to have set itself were attained. Simple
ordinary men brought up in the tenets of Russian social,
Christian, peasant morality abandoned these principles and
acquired new prison ideas, founded mainly on the theory that any
outrage to or violation of the human personality, any destruction of
the same, is permissible if profitable. In the light of what was done
to them, people who had been in prison came to see and realize
with every fibre of their being that all the moral laws of respect
and compassion for man preached by religious and moral
teachers were set aside in real life, and that therefore there was
no need for them to adhere to them either... During the journey
Nekhlyudov had discovered that tramps who escaped into the
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 31

marshes would incite comrades to escape with them, and then

murder them and eat their flesh. He saw a live man who had been
accused of this and admitted it. And the most appalling thing was
that these were not isolated instances but cases that recurred
continually.

Only by the special cultivation of vice as was carried out in these

establishments could a Russian be brought to the state of these
tramps who (anticipating Nietzsche’s doctrine) considered
everything permissible and nothing forbidden, and spread this
teaching first among the convicts and then among the people in
general.

The only explanation of all that was done was that it aimed at the
prevention of crime, at inspiring fear, at correcting offenders and
at dealing out to them “natural punishment”, as the books
expressed it. But in reality nothing of the sort was achieved.
Crime, instead of being prevented, was extended. Offenders,
instead of being frightened, were encouraged, and many of
them—the tramps, for example—had gone to gaol of their own
accord. Instead of the correction of the vicious, there was a
systematic dissemination of all the vices, while the need for
punishment, far from being softened by the measures taken by
the government, nurtured a spirit of revenge among the masses
where it did not exist before.

“Then why do they persist in what they are doing?” Nekhlyudov

asked himself, and found no answer..

And what surprised him was that none of all this had happened
accidentally, by mistake once only, but that it had been going on
for centuries, with the single difference that in the old days men
had had their nostrils slit and their ears cut off; then a time came
when they were branded and fastened to iron rods; and now they
were manacled, and transported by steam instead of in carts.

The official argument that the conditions which excited his

indignation arose from the imperfection of the arrangements at the
places of confinement and deportation, and could all be improved
as soon as prisons were built in accordance with modern
methods, did not satisfy Nekhlyudov, because he felt that the
things which aroused his indignation were not caused by more or
less perfect arrangements at the places of detention. He had read
of modern prisons with electric bells, where executions were done
32 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

by electricity…and the perfected system of violence revolted him

all the more.

What revolted Nekhlyudov most of all was that there were men in
the law-courts and in the ministries who received large salaries
taken from the people for referring to books written by other
officials like themselves, actuated by like motives, fitting to this or
that statute actions that infringed the laws which they themselves
had framed, and in accordance with these statutes of theirs went
on sending people to places where they would never see them
again and where those people were completely at the mercy of
cruel, hardened inspectors, gaolers and convoy soldiers, and
where they perished, body and soul, by the million.

Now that he had a close acquaintance with prisons and halting-

stations, Nekhlyudov saw that all the vices which developed
among the convicts—drunkenness, gambling, brutality and all the
dreadful crimes committed by the inmates of the prisons, and
even cannibalism itself—were neither accidents nor signs of
mental or physical degeneration (as certain obtuse scientists have
declared, to the satisfaction of the government) but that they were
the inevitable result of the incredible delusion that one group of
human beings has the right to punish another. Nekhlyudov saw
that cannibalism began, not in the Siberian marshes but in
ministerial offices and government departments: it only found
consummation in the marshes. He saw that…all the lawyers and
functionaries from usher to minister were not in the least
concerned about justice or the good of the people, about which
they talked: all they cared about were the roubles they were paid
for doing the things that caused all this degradation and misery.

Not surprisingly, this savage indictment also fell to the censor’s

scissors.
During the composition of War and Peace Tolstoy had written to an
acquaintance: "The aim of an artist is not to resolve a question
irrefutably, but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations" – an
opinion that Oscar Wilde would likely have endorsed. Judging from the
didactic nature of the Epilogue, however, it seems clear that by the time
the novel was completed Tolstoy’s views in this regard had begun to
change. The mature Tolstoy in fact came to believe that all art has a
moral purpose, namely, to convey in the simplest and most effective
way the doctrine of universal love. (It is of interest to note that as a
young boy his elder brother had told him of a little green stick which he
had buried in the forest on his father's estate; on it was engraved a
secret formula which, once revealed, would inaugurate a golden age of
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 33

universal love.) In his Confession of 1879 he describes the intellectual

crisis which led to his rejection of orthodox religion, and in a number of
subsequent works, for example Religion and Morality (1893), What is
Religion and What is its Essence (1902) and The Law of Love and the
Law of Violence (1908) he outlines his new beliefs. While retaining the
ethical content of (early) Christianity and the conception of a supreme
being, Tolstoy rejects its supernatural elements. He shows how Christ’s
teaching has been perverted by the authorities of Church and State to
justify the use of violence in upholding their own institutions,
themselves based on coercion. His beliefs were presented in a popular
form in parables and stories of remarkable trenchancy: many of these
are collected in Twenty-Three Tales (1906).
Tolstoy’s later views on aesthetics are presented in What is Art? of
1896. Here he puts forward the view that the goal of a genuine artist is
the achieving of emotional communion, so that art itself is a vehicle
through which the artist “infects” other people with the feelings he
himself has experienced. If this “infection” is confined solely to a small
number of persons of the same class as the artist, it is negligible and
inferior art; if the appeal extends to mankind in general, but the
feelings thus communicated are evil, it is genuine but evil art; if the
feelings are good, it is good art. If they are the highest feelings possible,
the religious feelings of love and compassion, it is the highest form of
all, religious art. The application of these standards led Tolstoy to reject
or minimize the greater part of modern art and literature, including his
own earlier work. He came to reject the “superfluous detail” of realism,
not only because it limited the appeal of literature but because it had
ceased to satisfy him aesthetically.