Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy
(1828–1910)

Tolstoy and Fyodorov were personally acquainted: they met in the late 1870s at the Rumyantsev Museum, where Fyodorov served as a librarian, and grew closer from the autumn of 1881. At Fyodorov's suggestion, Tolstoy deposited his manuscripts at the museum for safekeeping. He spoke of him with a respect rare for him: “I am proud to live at the same time as such a man”.

But the respect concerned the man, not the teaching — and Tolstoy says so directly. In a letter to V. I. Alekseyev (November 1881) about Fyodorov's plan for universal resurrection: “I do not share, and have never shared, his views, but I have understood them well enough that I feel able to defend these views against any other belief that has an external aim”. In the same letter he calls Fyodorov himself the purest Christian in life: a beggar who gives everything away, always cheerful and meek.

Tolstoyism

Tolstoy was not only a writer, but also the creator of a religious-moral doctrine that grew out of his own reading of the Gospel. Its main points:

— Non-resistance to evil by force. A central principle, resting on the words of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:39): evil must not be answered with evil; violence in response to violence only perpetuates it.

— Simplification. A renunciation of luxury, class privileges, and intellectual pride in favour of a simple, labouring life close to that of the peasantry. For a count and major landowner, this meant renouncing his own position: in 1891 Tolstoy publicly renounced copyright to everything he had written after 1881, and in 1892 divided his property between his wife and children.

— Criticism of the state and the official Church. Tolstoy regarded the state as an apparatus of violence (the army, the courts, the police), and the official Church as an institution that had distorted Christ's teaching. In February 1901 the Holy Synod published a ruling on Count Leo Tolstoy, stating his falling-away from the Church; the words “excommunication” and “anathema” do not appear in the text, though the act is commonly referred to as excommunication.

Divergence from Fyodorov

For Tolstoy, what matters most is moral transformation, the spiritual “resurrection” of man here and now, in this life: through the renunciation of egoism, property, and power, through service to God and to other people. Death, in this system, is not a problem to be solved by external means; the question is how a person lives, not what he will do with nature.

In Fyodorov, the vector runs the opposite way — outward and backward. The Common Task is directed not at the inner perfection of the individual, but at the joint labour of generations; and not at the future as such, but at the past: it is the duty of the living sons to restore life to their dead fathers. The means, moreover, are fundamentally external: science, the regulation of nature, organised action by the whole of humanity. Fyodorov did not reject the state and the Church, but saw them as possible participants in the Common Task — that is, precisely the institutions that Tolstoy rejected.

The break turned out to be mutual. Over time, Fyodorov came into sharp disagreement with Tolstoy: he was repelled by the anti-Church motifs in Tolstoy's writings and by what he considered a lack of patriotism; Fyodorov's articles contain many attacks on Tolstoy.