God and Man According To Tolstoy

257 Pages·2009·1.55 MB·English

by  Alexander Boot (auth.)

God and Man According to Tolstoy
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God and Man According to Tolstoy
Alexander Boot
GODANDMANACCORDINGTOTOLSTOY
Copyright©AlexanderBoot,2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61586-1
Allrightsreserved.
Firstpublishedin2009byPALGRAVEMACMILLAN®inthe
UnitedStates-adivisionofSt.Martin’sPressLLC,175FifthAvenue,
NewYork,NY10010.
WherethisbookisdistributedintheUK,Europeandtherestof
theworld,thisisbyPalgraveMacmillan,adivisionofMacmillan
PublishersLimited,registeredinEngland,companynumber785998,
ofHoundmills,Basingstoke,HampshireRG216XS.
PalgraveMacmillanistheglobalacademicimprintoftheabove
companiesandhascompaniesandrepresentativesthroughouttheworld.
Palgrave®andMacmillan®areregisteredtrademarksintheUnited
States,theUnitedKingdom,Europeandothercountries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37948-4 ISBN 978-0-230-62302-6 (eBook)
DOI. 10.1057/9780230623026
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationDataisavailablefromthe
LibraryofCongress.
AcataloguerecordofthebookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary.
DesignbyIntegraSoftwareServices
Firstedition:June2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ForNaumGrubert,whounwittinglyinspiredthisbook.
For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall
shewsignsandwonders,toseduce,ifitwerepossible,even
theelect.
(Mark14:22)
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 UncoveringtheSecret 9
3 WhatKindofManWouldTakeOnGod? 13
4 ReligionWithoutFaith,ChristianityWithoutChrist 41
5 AConfessionThatWasNotQuite 49
6 Tolstoy’sFaith,SuchAsItWas 69
7 TheGospelAccordingtoLeo 89
8 DesperatelySeekingGolgotha 103
9 Sex,Lies,andEthics 111
10 AnImpracticalIdeaofaPracticalLife 135
11 TolstoyasaRussian 179
12 TheLessonsofLeoTolstoy 203
Appendix1:Russians,RealandFictional,
MentionedinThisBook 217
Appendix2:WorksQuotedorReferred
toinThisBook 225
Notes 229
Index 237
C h a p t e r 1
INTRODUCTION
N
ot so long ago I reread Malcolm Muggeridge’s book Jesus
Rediscovered.Thisisamovingaccountofoneman’ssearchforsome-
thing he once had but has since lost: faith. Faith not in an abstract
deity, not in the force behind nature, not in a metaphysical or philo-
sophical concept, not in the Good, not even in the Creator—at least
notjustanyofthose.ItwasfaithinJesusChrist,fullyamanbutalso
fullyGod.
Thebookrangtrue,partlybecausethewriterhadbuiltacapitalof
trustwithme.ForMuggeridge,thenayoungreporterfortheManch-
esterGuardian, was one of many Western writers who visited Stalin’s
Russia during the murderous famine organized by the bolsheviks in
the early 1930s. He also was one of the few to tell the truth about
it. Western coverage of that mass murder was at the time dominated
by the likes of the Webbs, G.B. Shaw, Walter Duranty, and Romain
Rolland, who either denied the famine or saw nothing wrong with
it. Muggeridge went to the Ukraine without authorization, saw the
piled corpses and wrote a three-part report, a watered-down version
of which was published without attribution. As that kind of writing
ran against the grain of both the paper’s policy and its genetic code,
Muggeridgewassoonfiredandhadtotakehischanceswritingnovels.
The way one responds to a personal message largely depends on
how one feels about the person. So, reading JesusRediscovered, I was
predisposed to believe every word. And by and large I did—until the
writerbegantolisthisspiritualinfluences.FirstamongthosewasTol-
stoy, whom Muggeridge believed to be not only one of the greatest
writers of all time, but also one of the greatest Christians of all time.
2 GOD AND MAN ACCORDING TO TOLSTOY
I had no quibble with the first part of the accolade, but the second
jarredinstantly.Theremustbesomemistake,Ithought.Havingread
most of Tolstoy, and much about him, I knew he was not one of
the greatest Christians of all time. He was not a Christian at all. To
say otherwise could only mean to me that a perceptive man who was
not taken in by Stalin was taken in by Tolstoy. Or else Muggeridge’s
definitionofChristianitywasdifferentfrommine.
To be kind to Muggeridge, I do not think he studied Tolstoy’s
non-fictioningreatdetail(AConfessionistheonlysourcehequotes).
Few have—more than half of the 90 volumes Tolstoy left behind are
worksoftheology,philosophy,journalismandpolemic,mostofthem
recondite and barely readable. To be even kinder to Muggeridge, he
is in good company. For many specialists who have studied Tolstoy’s
non-fictioningreatdetailalsohavebeentakenin.Itisthankstothem
that Tolstoy still sports the halo of a kindly, omniscient secular saint
who showed us all, to use the title of his posthumous book, TheWay
ofLife.
The artist of genius speaks in such a thunderous voice that many
otherwise alert people have been rendered deaf to the false notes
Tolstoy strikes all over his non-artistic work. For example, Marcel
Proust described Tolstoy as a “serene God” although he manifestly
wasneither.BernardShaw,VirginiaWoolfandotherFabiansregarded
Tolstoyasaprophet,althoughitishardtoseewhatitwasexactlythat
heprophesied.AlbertCamusgothisideaofanethicwhollybasedon
reason from Tolstoy, and had his portrait hanging above his desk, as
did Sartre. Wittgenstein was hugely influenced by Tolstoy, especially
by TheGospelInBrief and AConfession. And both Mahatma Gandhi
andMartinLutherKingcitedTolstoyastheirinspiration.
That is not to say there have been no critics. There have been,
some quite scathing. Collectively, every contemporaneous Russian
philosopher1 of note tore apart every thought Tolstoy ever uttered.
But the weight of his authority was such that, having mocked his
pet ideas, and shown the paucity of his thinking, most of them
had to add a laudatory afterthought, along the lines of I.S. Tur-
genev’s comment made on A Confession in a letter: “It is built on
wrong premises—and in the end leads to the most macabre nega-
tionofanynormalhumanlife...Thistooisakindofnihilism...And
still Tolstoy is hardly not the most remarkable man in Russia!”
The philosophers too, having brushed Tolstoy’s ideas aside, had
to add an incongruous afterthought “but of course Tolstoy was a
great thinker nonetheless.” (Soloviov, Leontiev, and Merezhkovsky
are exceptions. Though admirers of Tolstoy’s art, they did not rate