Russian Literature and the spiritual regeneration of man

 

 

Lately I’ve been on a Russian literature kick, reading in particular Leo Tolstoy. I have always been a big fan of Dostoyevsky, but I have never read Tolstoy.  So I started with a volume of his later short stories in the Everyman library edition. There are a lot of his short stories. Some of his stories are simple folk tales with very clear ethical messages. Some seemed similar to Jewish Hasidic folk tales or Aesop tales. Tolstoy's later writings are imbued with radical Gospel moral themes, such as non-violence and turning the other cheek, as well as stories of moral regeneration and redemption.

 One of his more famous short stories in this collection is the work, the Death of Ivan Illich, which explores the question of how we should die,  and by extension how we should live our life in the knowledge of our own mortality. It is considered one of his masterpieces. After reading some of his short stories the main novel I read by Tolstoy was Resurrection. It is the last book he wrote and much briefer in scope then his other two massive novels. In it he focuses on the moral regeneration of his main character as he accepts responsibility for the fall from grace of a women he got pregnant after he forced himself on her many years ago when they were young. The young girl was then forced into prostitution and ended up accused of a crime. She is tried, sent to jail and ultimately sent to Siberia.The main character serves on a jury that happened to be hearing the case of the young woman whom he had relations with many years ago. As she receives the guilty verdict so does our protagonist. He too must accept responsibility for his part in her downfall.We as audience also see the unjust nature of the judicial system and the collective guilt of the Russian people.  Tolstoy then takes us on a journey through the underbelly of the Russian penal system with the main character, who tries to help the young woman, even offering to marry her in order to rescue her. Tolstoy offers scorching attacks on pretty much all of Russian institutions, the justice and penal system and including the Orthodox Church. Tolstoy was in fact excommunicated for this novel. In it Tolstoy does seem to criticize the church’s cozy relationship to the state in administering justice. He is also particularly critical of the sacramental system and the mystical conceptions of the church, in particular the elaborate Eucharist liturgy which he condemns as imparting superstition to the criminals. 

Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy seem to have very different conceptions of the church and the role it may play in the redemption of the individual and of Russian society in general. Dostoyevsky sees the Orthodox church as offering hope to the individual seeking redemption. In novels like The Brothers Karamazov the church is portrayed as an institution that,though perhaps imperfect, offers a radical hope for the person enslaved in sin and need of help. Only through a regeneration of the heart of sinful man may there be healing for man and society. This requires Gods grace and in particular the healing sacraments of the church. 

Tolstoy in contrast attacks all the fundamental institutions of Russia as corrupt and the cause of much of the fundamental problems of life. He rejects the Orthodox Church.  Tolstoy does seem to see hope coming from the goodness of the peasant class and the simple ethical teachings of the Gospel. Tolstoy was also a severe critic of inequality in land ownership and believed in communal land ownership. This is elaborated in Resurrection. He also supported radical groups like the Doukhabours and the Anabaptists and saw them in a positive light as conveying more simple Gospel purity and rationality compared to the mysticism of the Orthodox church . Tolstoy's own understanding of the Gospels could easily be understood as legalistic, in his belief that particularly by observing the radical ethical precepts of the Sermon of the Mount, man might find salvation.

A couple nights ago, on Theophany,  I attended an Orthodox Vespers service in a traditional Russian Orthodox church in the north end of Winnipeg and felt the tug of Dostoyevsky vs Tolstoy on some of these questions.