The Ethico-Religious Imperatives of Lev Tolstoy’s Life and Work

Abstract

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s departure from this earth took place in 1910, a year that has since become a common touchstone for Russians. The twentieth century came to a symbolic close, beginning a terrible era of changes that saw the Russian author’s humanist ideas and religious inquiries burned and melted down. The terrible age seemed to consume everything that humanity had valued over the centuries: poetry, faith, morality, freedom love; everything man lived by, to use Tolstoy’s own expression. After Auschwitz, the very thought of man as a superior and rational being created in the image and likeness of God was drained of all its blood. But perhaps, thanks to his genius, the world has gradually thawed and returned to man, gazing upon him anew, but with the loving eyes of Tolstoy. The twenty-first century is linked to certain dates in Tolstoy’s life that are important not only for us, but also for world culture. It has been exactly 120 years since the infamous Synodal Act of February 20–22, 1901, which discussed Count Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. This event was not so much religious as sociopolitical, an event with global consequences for the changing consciousness of many thousands of people in Russia and around the world. The intentions of the church hierarchs met with opposite results, as the name Tolstoy became much more attractive to inquiring minds than it had been before. This led to an axiological inversion typical of Russian ideological politics: Tolstoy gained the status of “sacrificial lamb” of the system, which served as additional confirmation that his criticism of the church was just. On June 10, 2021, we celebrated another important event linked by blood and spirit to the life world of Tolstoy, the centenary of the founding of the Yasnaya Polyana State Museum-Estate, which was then and remains now a “Russian Mecca,” a point of spiritual attraction for people all over the world.