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This article examines the theme of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Vekhi by analyzing textual references to Tolstoy in the Vekhi anthology and by weighing Tolstoy's critical reaction to the anthology. The heart of the analysis is an attempt to understand an apparent paradox-Tolstoy's repudiation of a book ostensibly dedicated to the "Tolstoyan" proposition that "inner" or "spiritual life" must take priority over the pursuit of "external" political and social change. As we shall see, a full explanation of this paradox requires careful reading not only of the anthology's explicit references to Tolstoy but also of ways that Tolstoy decoded the authors' intentions, explicit and hidden. In fact, what the authors laid between the lines may have been more important in triggering Tolstoy's disapproval than was the printed text itself.
In the introduction to Vekhi, dated March 1909, the editor Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon declared the common platform of the volume's contributors to be
recognition of the theoretical and practical priority of spiritual life over external forms of community, in the sense that the inner life of the individual person is the only creative force of human life and that it, not the peculiar fundaments of political order, is the only viable basis for any social structure.
In the name of his fellow contributors, Gershenzon called the ideology of the Russian intelligentsia, which allegedly rested on the primacy of politics over inner life, contradictory to human nature and counterproductive in practice. He also noted that Vekhi's critique of the intelligentsia was nothing new: "The same point has been made endlessly by all our most profound thinkers from Chaadaev to Solov'ev and Tolstoy" (Bexu 4).
Gershenzon's remarks are important to us for two reasons. First, the primacy of inner life over politics was a signature theme of Tolstoy, found in all his great novels (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection) and in his spiritual writings after 1880. In his philosophical treatise On Life (written 1886-1887, published 1888) he demanded that human beings subordinate their "animal nature" to reason-that is, to a "rational consciousness" or principle of personal economy ordering the passions and appetites. In The Kingdom of God Is within You (written 1890-1893, published 1893), he argued that Christ's teaching "will not...