Content area
Full text
Quotations are taken from the English translations cited. The Russian original, as found in PSS, the ninety-volume 'Jubilee Edition' of Tolstoy's works, is also provided.
I thank Tony Cross, Robert Whittaker, Bartosz Pawlowski, Maria Stozek, Marcus Braybrooke, Mary Braybrooke, Danila Andreev, Astrid Grue, Anya Wells, Andrey Levitskiy, Ingrid Lunt, Richard Pring, Andrew Breeze, the late Terence Copley, Galina Alexseeva and Sue Killoran for assistance, encouragement or comments during the gestation of this paper. I also thank the Religion and Civil Society Research Group at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, St Deiniol's Library, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and the Spalding Trust.
I
From 1879 until his death in 1910 Leo Tolstoy wrote a series of texts on religious and moral issues that had a far-ranging impact. They were published and promulgated, legally and illegally, by mainstream publishers and radical presses, notably those organised by Tolstoy's secretary and confidant, Vladmir Chertkov.1Tolstoy had always been in some sense a seeker, but the focus of his vigorous energy moved from novel writing in the 1860s and 1870s, to the project of articulating his religious views. This change, crisis or conversion has remained divisive among his biographers and critics.2Scholars of Russian literature have tended to interpret Tolstoy's religious views as unique and in some sense incongruous with those of his time.3Philosophers have been dismissive of the substantive claims of Tolstoy's philosophy, which has been understood as an anomaly that soon perished in the nineteenth century's 'ideological battleground'.4For example, Isaiah Berlin depicts the mature Tolstoy as an original but stubborn thinker doomed to failure - 'a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus'.5
However, like those from Western Europe with whose thought he engaged, such as Coleridge, Arnold, Carlyle, Mill and Comte, Tolstoy can be understood as one of the great pathfinders that characterised his age.6As were his contemporaries, Tolstoy was heavily influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, plagued with doubts about orthodox Christianity, dissatisfied with the philosophy of materialism, and horrified by the social impact of industrialisation. His solution to the problems posed by the times was to give up on both materialism and religious orthodoxy to...