Leo Tolstoy

There are numerous biographical, psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations of the roots of Tolstoy’s attitude to sex. However, one cannot fully understand it outside of the general framework of his anarchistic worldview. Tolstoy saw sexual instinct as a coercive force. Unlike the state or the Church, this force was located inside the body, but that only made it more onerous, as it worked not through external repression, but through the manipulation of desires.

The ideal of chastity was not new to Russian culture and not limited to traditional monastic communities. In a much more radical way, a sect of self-castrators that had a widespread following among Russian peasants believed that men should get rid of the organs that lead them into temptation. Tolstoy firmly rejected this idea. The self-castrators were to him akin to revolutionaries ready to resist evil by violence. According to Tolstoy, an individual needed to free himself from the shackles of animal nature, not through a one-time act of enforced purification, but through incessant moral effort that was itself more valuable that any possible outcome. As he wrote to Yevgeny Popov, his collaborator at ‘Intermediary’:

If men were not lustful, there would be no chastity and no conception of it for him. The mistake is to set oneself the task of chastity (the outward state of chastity) and not the striving towards chastity, the inner recognition, at all times and in all circumstances of life, of the advantages of chastity over dissoluteness, the advantages of greater purity over lesser. This mistake is very important. For a man who has set himself the outward state of chastity as his task, a retreat from that outward state, a fall, destroys everything and halts a possibility of work and living. For a man who has set himself the task of striving towards chastity, there is no fall, no halting of his work; and temptations and a fall cannot halt his striving towards chastity, but often actually intensify it. (Ls, II, p. 469)

Lust was the most powerful, but not the only, enemy with which Tolstoy had to struggle. In order to let universal Christian love reign supreme in his soul, he needed to overcome pride, vanity, anger, bad feelings towards others, exclusive preference for his kin, desire for physical comfort, fear of death and other inborn passions. This was a lifetime task, an ideal he did not hope to attain but merely to strive towards. In 1881 and 1884 he had resumed his diary sporadically, but from 1888 onwards he kept it without major interruptions until the end of his life in order to record all the movements of his mind and to measure them against the gauge of perfection he had created for himself.

The exhaustive struggle with his own bestiality and the egotism that Tolstoy had envisaged for himself was seriously complicated by the popularity of his teachings. When Tolstoy first became engaged in theological research, Sofia had expressed her disappointment that her husband was leaving the field that had brought him universal fame for studies that could hardly have a dozen readers. It is difficult to imagine a less accurate prediction. By the end of the 1880s Tolstoy’s fame has grown to outsize proportions.

The Holy Synod of the Russian Church banned Tolstoy’s treatises, but that did not prevent his ideas from reaching the widest possible audience. In 1890 Pobedonostsev wrote to the emperor that it was impossible

to conceal from oneself that in the last few years intellectual stimulation under the influence of the work of Tolstoy has greatly strengthened and threatens to spread perverted notions about faith, the Church, government and society. The direction is entirely negative, alien not only to the Church, but to nationality. A kind of insanity that is epidemic has taken possession of people’s minds.⁵

Tolstoy’s popularity was not confined to Russia. Converted and potential followers were writing to him from all over the world asking questions about the new revelation and seeking advice about ways to live in accordance with it. Hardly any religious prophet ever managed to gather such a flock within a decade from the day of his first sermon.

Tolstoy owed the speed of his success to the very advance of modernity that he loathed so much. Due to new cheaper printing technology and standardized primary education, the works published by ‘Intermediary’ could be sold in millions of copies. Chertkov’s managerial skills and English connections were also instrumental in ensuring that Tolstoy’s essays started to appear in Europe at roughly the time his international fame as a novelist had reached its zenith. Still, by far the most important factors were the magic of Tolstoy’s voice, the existential seriousness of his rhetoric, his charisma and, no less importantly, perfect timing.