The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  It would be convenient to argue that Maklakov’s life as a practicing lawyer gave him a good understanding of the thinking of Russia’s people and of their true needs. Indeed, I think that is so. But we must be cautious: many of the other liberals were lawyers by trade but nevertheless prone to a doctrinaire utopianism quite alien to Maklakov.

  CHAPTER 3

  Friends and Lovers

  MAKLAKOV WAS GENERALLY gregarious—obvious exceptions being the forced march to his law degree and his fateful neglect of his friend Nicholas Cherniaev. His friends included some relatively well-known Russians, of whom Tolstoy is by all odds the best known; and the archives include records of his romantic interests, some of whom were prolific letter writers.

  He knew Anton Chekhov, and although he saw him at least once at the Tolstoys’, had known him before then. Among their bonds was the Zvenigorod area, where Maklakov owned hunting and fishing land and where Chekhov had lived as young man. Chekhov in fact looked for a country property near Maklakov’s, but, as he reported to Maklakov, the place he visited proved overpriced.1 When Chekhov came to meet Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoys’ country estate, Maklakov happened to be on hand. Chekhov arrived on a morning train, and Tolstoy, who usually wrote in the morning, excused himself and asked Maklakov to show Chekhov around. After the tour, the two writers began to chat. Chekhov gave Tolstoy an account of his trip to Sakhalin to study the penal colony there. He had traveled through Siberia to reach Sakhalin, and Tolstoy somewhat oddly responded to Chekhov’s Sakhalin account by rhapsodizing about the miraculous grandeur of Siberia’s mountains, rivers, forests, and animals. Chekhov agreed, and then Tolstoy asked, with surprise and some reproach, “Then why didn’t you show it?” After breakfast, Chekhov shook his head and said to Maklakov, “What a person!”2

  Maklakov and Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s wife. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.

  Maklakov also knew Maxim Gorky, presumably through his (Maklakov’s) stepmother; Maklakov was evidently a prototype for one Klim Samgin, the main figure in a four-volume Gorky novel that is now largely forgotten.3 Maklakov was also a friend of the great opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin. The origins of their meeting are unknown, but it may have stemmed from Maklakov’s defense of Nikolai and Savva Mamontov in a securities trial,4 Savva being a wealthy backer of Chaliapin. When Chaliapin was dying in Paris in the 1930s, Maklakov was a frequent visitor, entertaining him with the latest political gossip.5

  Chapters 1 and 2 mentioned Maklakov’s first meeting and early contacts with Tolstoy. Their friendship, together with Maklakov’s reading of his literary and philosophical works, provided the background for several lectures Maklakov gave after Tolstoy’s death devoted to Tolstoy’s thinking and life and their role in Russia and the world. All the lectures look at Tolstoy both from the outside, as any scholar of Tolstoy might, and from the inside, as Tolstoy’s much younger and much less renowned friend. Maklakov never hides either his profound analytical disagreement with Tolstoy’s views on political economy, or his reverence for Tolstoy as a man of conscience.

  Postcard from Vasily Maklakov on vacation with friends in Vichy, France, to his sister Mariia. Vasily is on the extreme left; Fyodor Chaliapin, the opera star, is third from left. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.

  The pivotal lecture is the one on Tolstoy’s “Teaching and Life,” delivered in 1928 at a celebration of the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth.6 It tackles the origins of the philosophic outlook that Tolstoy had embraced by the mid-1880s, expressed in What I Believe (published in 1884) and summarized in the idea that evil must never be resisted with force. Maklakov himself appears to have been an agnostic. Letters he wrote near the end of his life reveal that he was at one time a believer and found his belief comforting; at some point he lost that belief and recognized that only genuine belief could provide consolation.7

  Maklakov starts with the obvious truth that Tolstoy enjoyed all the rewards that the world can offer—nature gave him bodily strength, health, strong passions, ardor for life, and extraordinary literary gifts. Fate brought him wealth and allowed him not to worry about what the next day would bring or to bother with anything not fitting his taste or spirit. It gave him exceptional ties to the world and rewarded him with glory not only in Russia but throughout the world. It gave him, “as a crown,” exceptional family happiness. Yet, as Tolstoy made clear in his philosophical writings, the prospect of death led him to believe that life was meaningless, to the point of tempting him to suicide.8

  After some false starts toward a solution, Tolstoy found one in the core message of the Sermon on the Mount—not to resist evil with force, but to turn the other cheek. For Tolstoy, this rule of nonresistance to evil was not part of a system involving life after death, and it was not a rule whose force depended on Christ’s being God. Indeed, Tolstoy often said (here Maklakov is presumably giving an eyewitness account), “If I thought of Christ as God, and not human, Christ would lose all appeal for me.” He read the gospels as not promising eternal life, as not contrasting a temporary individual life with an immortal individual life. Rather, the contrast he saw was between an individual life and a life lived entirely for others. When our personal life truly turns into a common life, he reasoned, the meaninglessness of life disappears, and a new meaning appears that no individual death can destroy.9 In his memoirs Maklakov tells a story reflecting the intensity of Tolstoy’s belief. In a conversation about not resisting evil, the wife of Tolstoy’s oldest son (Sergei) asked Tolstoy whether, if he saw some attempt to violate his wife before his very eyes, he wouldn’t intervene to protect her and feel sorry for her. Tolstoy answered that he would feel even more sorry for the rapist. Everyone laughed, and Tolstoy was quite angry, as he had not intended it as a joke, but really meant that someone who acted that way must be doing so from a very deep unhappiness.10

  Maklakov’s speech, though mentioning a theological critique of Tolstoy by biblical scholars, presses a practical argument—that if neither individuals nor the state are to resist evil with force (where forceless resistance would fail), evil will triumph. He points out as an example the vandalization of a Tolstoyan settlement that he experienced during his university years.11 He then turns around and defends Tolstoy’s perspective. He asks rhetorically: If you think that property prevents us from turning individual life into a common life, and regard individual life as meaningless under conventional worldly conditions, then is there anything strange in nonresistance to evil, in “voluntarily giving away that odious private property to anyone who might want it?” Thus, Maklakov reasons, any refutation of Tolstoy must be directed not at his conclusions but at his original starting point. If you accept Tolstoy’s premises, a renunciation of force seems to follow.12

  As the lecture and Maklakov’s memoirs underscore, Tolstoy’s basic kindness and common sense seem to have prevented him from following his own views with any consistency. In his memoirs Maklakov recounts how, on his return from his first trip to England, he gave Tolstoy an enthusiastic account of English government. Tolstoy was dismissive, saying that in principle there was no difference between English government and Russian autocracy. The conversation occurred at a time when the Dukhobors in Russia, members of a religious sect that rejected military service (on rather Tolstoyan grounds), had been subjected to ruthless oppression, including dispersal from their villages and forced resettlement, with the predictable result of widespread deaths from starvation and exposure. Tolstoy had responded actively, moving heaven and earth to help them migrate to Canada, raising funds, trying to stir public opinion, and giving them the proceeds from his novel Resurrection. Maklakov posed the obvious question: how could Tolstoy reconcile his indifference to the advantages of British government over Russia’s autocracy with his making all these efforts? Tolstoy said, “Ah, lawyer, you’ve caught me.” But then he added that the difference between the two was like that between the guillotine and hanging. In fact, from his perspective the guillotine was worse, because its evil was better concealed.
13

  The inconsistencies go on and on. Tolstoy energetically promoted the “single tax” ideas of Henry George, pressing the case in a letter to Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and urging Maklakov to introduce George-type legislation in the Duma. Such legislation would tax away the entire value of unimproved real estate (and the value of improved real estate not directly attributable to improvements). The state would thus confiscate that value and wipe out the real estate market as a source of information about development prospects (through the signals given by market prices). The foe of all state power advocates a monumental exercise of state power!14

  But Maklakov stressed Tolstoy’s efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Russians, however inconsistent some of the efforts might have been with his philosophy: writing Russia’s first alphabet books; writing the first works for children that rose above dreary, implausible celebrations of contemporary Russian life (a leading “reader” was a book called “Milord,” with about zero resonance for a peasant child); actually operating schools in the vicinity of Yasnaya Polyana and teaching in them; and, of course, relieving the 1891 famine and rescuing the Dukhobors. Maklakov observes, “His activity for his country was such that if ten people had done it, rather than Tolstoy, one could say of each that they had not lived on earth in vain.”15

  Beyond these direct practical benefits, Maklakov pointed to a subtler, perhaps more far-reaching one—the way Tolstoy’s teachings reminded people of the independent force of good. If his readers were skeptical on practical grounds, if they “held back from following his conclusions, like the rich young man in the Gospels, all the same they started to look on the problems of life with different eyes.”16

  And by raising questions about the meaning of life, Maklakov argues, Tolstoy—though excommunicated and buried without a funeral service—did more for the revival of religious interest than anyone. The danger to religion, he suggests, is not from those who deny it or even those who persecute believers, nor from the slogan that it’s an opiate, nor from the propaganda of the godless. Rather, the danger comes from indifference, from lack of interest in the questions with which religion deals. And Tolstoy couldn’t live without answers to those questions.17

  The intellectual divide between the two was most acute in their views of the law, discussed by Maklakov in a lecture on “Tolstoy and the Courts.” After laying out Tolstoy’s belief that the state’s exercise of force was itself evil (regardless of the net effect on evil), Maklakov points to the radical character of Tolstoy’s objections. Tolstoy did not especially condemn the courts’ form, their incompleteness, the inadequacies of their procedures, the cruelty of punishments, or judicial mistakes; rather he condemned the very principle of their existence. He saw Christ’s famous instruction “judge not, that ye be not judged” as forbidding the very institution.18 That attitude toward law, and even the rule of law, was very much aligned with the views of Russia’s literary elite discussed in the Introduction.

  Tolstoy not only condemned the courts as organs of state violence but also saw them as worse than more generally suspect institutions. The evil perpetrated by an executioner is obvious. But everything conspires to mask the evil of the judge. The judge who condemns someone to death doesn’t carry out the sentence; it is not he who deprives the person of life, but the law; if the law is bad and unjust, that is not his concern—or so Tolstoy assumed!19 Maklakov cites Tolstoy’s story, “Let the fire burn—don’t put it out,” observing that he could confidently quote passages of it from memory “because it was under the scrutiny of the censor so many times.” The cause of the censor’s hostile gaze was the story’s seeming exaltation of criminal acts: one character’s unlawful concealment of another’s crime is depicted as fulfilling God’s law.20

  In his literary treatment of the courts, Tolstoy sometimes spoke not as a prophet inveighing against any state application of force but as a political figure and revolutionary. In Resurrection the law serves only to advance the interests of the ruling elite. This of course is a much more worldly message; as Maklakov observes, he is “speaking our language, addressing our concerns.”21

  Lawyers fare even worse than courts under Tolstoy’s gaze. As the judge is worse than the hangman, because he can hide his guilt behind his role, so the lawyer is even worse than the judge, because he can even more persuasively distance himself from the evils wrought by the courts and the state. In his memoirs Maklakov recounts three occasions on which Tolstoy received lawyers at Yasnaya Polyana. The three lawyers (Oscar Gruzenberg, N. P. Karabchevskii, and Fyodor Plevako) were all very distinguished and often active for the defense in political trials; at the Beilis trial they and Maklakov constituted the defense team (with the exception of Plevako, who had died by then). Yet, except for Maklakov’s special friend Plevako, they irritated Tolstoy with their thinking process and attitudes.22

  Maklakov, of course, had dedicated his life to law and politics, activities that he believed would advance the welfare of Russians. He exalted the courts as guardians of the law. He concludes with another mention of Tolstoy’s many actual efforts at improving life in this world, calling the relation between his beliefs and his life “an inconsistency, a touching, miraculous inconsistency.”23

  Through his work on the 1891 famine, Maklakov met Tolstoy at his home in Moscow and talked with him for the first time.24 Tolstoy read his guests an article, and “everything seemed so natural and simple that I had to force myself to understand my good fortune and grasp where I was sitting. His wife, Sofia Andreevna, . . . called us all to the dining table.” After that he was often at the Tolstoys’ home, until Tolstoy’s death.25 “It was great luck for me. The whole world knows Tolstoy’s literary work. Some know his religious thinking, often only in part and not fully understanding it. To know the living Tolstoy, to experience his charm oneself, was given to very few.”26 Most of what follows as to Tolstoy’s character is drawn from Maklakov’s direct knowledge. Here is his overview:

  For those who knew Tolstoy, there was no personal pride; on the contrary, no one could miss his dissatisfaction with himself, eternal doubt in himself, his touching shyness, his reluctance to dazzle, even his inability to play a leading role. . . . In Tolstoy everything was ordinary and simple. He never imposed on others the innermost principles by which he lived, never made them the subject of general conversation. If someone not knowing who he was should by chance find himself in his presence, he would not guess who was before him; he could not believe that this simple and kind old man, listening with such interest to the general conversation, was the very Tolstoy whom the whole world knew.27

  Despite Maklakov’s own conviction that Tolstoy’s self-effacement was genuine, he recognized that it might seem a contrivance. As he notes, it put Tchaikovsky off when he met Tolstoy—simply, argues Maklakov, because of the mismatch between the real Tolstoy and the grand image held by the world at large.28

  Maklakov was present at Tolstoy’s last departure from Moscow for Yasnaya Polyana, from which he then started on the journey that took him to his deathbed at the railway station in Astapovo. The newspapers had carried word of the departure, and the square in front of the railway station was packed. Everyone rushed toward the carriage that was bearing Tolstoy and his wife and daughters to the station, and the Tolstoys were able to make it inside only by using a special entrance. The crowd rushed to the train, and the wave of people carried Maklakov to the railway car with Tolstoy. Through the open window, Maklakov saw Tolstoy thrust his head forward, and, mumbling with an old man’s voice, with tears flowing down his pale cheeks, he thanked the people for their sympathy, which he said he “hadn’t expected.” He didn’t know what more to say, and, noticing Maklakov, turned to him with relief; no longer able to comfortably appear before the public, he was content to see a familiar face.

  Countess Sofia Tolstoy, with a dedicatory inscription to Maklakov, July 2, 1896. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.

  Maklakov closes the 1928 “Teaching and Life” speech with these words:<
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  At Astapovo, a few months [after the departure from Moscow], he said to those nearest him, “You’ve come here for Lev alone, but in Russia there are millions.” He could talk that way and think that way. And the world loved him all the more that he thought that way. The world appreciated that Tolstoy, having received all the blessings that the world can offer, was not tempted by them. The world could not but be touched that, with access to all that, Tolstoy preferred a life according to God. And it was all the more striking that Tolstoy came to the precepts of Christ not because he was ordered by God but because he found them a sensible basis for human life. . . . To not consider Christ God, to not believe in life after death, to not believe in requital, and all the same to preach those precepts, to consider that joy consists for a human in renunciation of individual happiness, in life for the good of others, meant to reveal a faith in good and the goodness of man that no one in the world had ever had.

  The world did not follow Tolstoy, and it was right. His teaching was not of this world. But listening to Tolstoy’s message, the world opened in itself those good feelings which the trivia of life had long since drowned; the world itself became better than it ordinarily was. Tolstoy did not flatter it, but stirred its conscience and lifted it to his level. And while Tolstoy lived, the world saw in him a living bearer of faith in goodness and in man. Thus the life of Tolstoy was so dear to the world that on November 7, [1910], when Tolstoy died, the world was no longer what it had been. Something in it died forever. But Russia, in which Tolstoy lived, and which he would not have traded away for anything, Russia, which he loved most of all—Russia, humble, poor and backward, which did not know what misfortunes lay before it, did not foresee that it would soon come to know by its own experience the whole depth of human vileness and cold-blooded indifference, Russia instinctively felt that on the day of his death it lost its protector.29