Studies in East European Thought

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-019-09320-x

A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path

to ethical anarchism

Lina Steiner1

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
This article discusses Leo Tolstoy’s view of the Russian revolutionary movement.
Taking as a focal point the writer’s lifelong interest in the Decembrist uprising of
1825 and particularly in the personalities of the gentry revolutionaries, the article
argues that Tolstoy’s fascination for these figures was due to their superior moral
qualities, rather than to their political and socioeconomic doctrines. Following Alex-
ander Herzen, Tolstoy came to regard the Decembrists as full-fledged individualities
and “beautiful souls” (in Friedrich von Schiller’s sense of the term). Thus, Tolstoy’s
much debated “conversion” and subsequent attempts to transform literary art into
a medium of religious and moral reform (and thus a peaceful cultural revolution)
can also be viewed as extensions of his project of self-understanding and self-for-
mation according to the model of kalokagathia provided by Russia’s aristocratic
revolutionaries.

Keywords The Decembrist movement · Liberalism · Individuality (lichnost’) ·

Kalokagathia · “Beautiful soul” · Heutonomy · Ethical anarchism · Leo Tolstoy ·
Alexander Herzen · Friedrich von Schiller

In search of a story

Leo Tolstoy came of age during one of the most dramatic periods in modern history.
After Russia’s devastating defeat in the Crimean War, the newly ascended Emperor
Alexander II embarked on a series of liberal reforms, the most important of which
was the abolition of serfdom. Although the projects for these reforms had been in
the works since the 1800s, a fear of popular unrest kept Alexander I from imple-
menting them. The fact that a nation, which triumphed over Napoleon, remained
confined to its backwardness, with the majority of its subjects still denied basic civic

* Lina Steiner
lsteiner@uni-bonn.de
1
International Centre for Philosophy, University of Bonn, Poppelsdorfer Allee 28, 53115 Bonn,
Germany

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 L. Steiner

rights, was a sore spot for intellectuals throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century. But the only organized attempt to change the status quo—the Decembrist
uprising of 1825—ended in a fiasco that caused a severe reaction. Five leaders of
the Decembrist movement were executed, the remaining conspirators, decorated
war heroes and well-known authors, many of whom came from the most illustrious
noble families, were exiled to Siberia. The Decembrists’ works were banned and
their portraits removed from the 1812 Gallery of the Winter Palace. These measures
remained in effect throughout the reign of Nicholas I. The amnesty was signed only
by his son Alexander II shortly upon his ascension in 1856. Following the amnesty,
some of the surviving Decembrists and their families returned from exile and reen-
tered society.1
Excluded from public life for thirty years, the Decembrists were now being redis-
covered. Herzen, who had been living in emigration since 1847, blazed the trail. In
1855, a year before the emancipation was declared, Herzen’s Free Russian Press in
London published the first eight issues of the almanac The Polar Star (Poliarnaia
Zvezda, 1855–1868). The title of Herzen’s almanac was an homage to the Decem-
brist publication of the same name by Kondratii Ryleev and Alexander Bestuzhev-
Marlinsky. The first eight volumes published Hugo, Mazzini, Prouhdon, and other
European and Russian authors (including a number of Decembrists) who opposed
tyranny and favoured Herzen’s broad idea of emancipation.2 After the amnesty, the
Decembrist authors were allowed to publish in Russia as well. The memoirs by the
Decembrists, their wives and contemporaries, as well as various literary tributes to
the Decembrists filled the pages of the so-called “thick journals.”3 Thus it is not sur-
prising that an ambitious young author like Tolstoy (who gained his reputation with
his reportages from the besieged Sevastopol and the autobiographical Childhood)
would conceive a historical novel about the Decembrists. In a draft of the “Fore-
word” that Tolstoy at one point wanted to publish along with his unfinished his-
torical novel “1805” (one of the predecessors of War and Peace), he reveals that the
idea for such a work occurred to him in 1856, when he started drafting a story about
a Decembrist returning together with his family from Siberia to Moscow.4 How-
ever, some scholars believe that an unfinished tale “Distant Field” written between

1
In English there are two helpful summary accounts of the Decembrist movement: Anatole G. Mazour
(1962) and Marc Raeff (1966). For the bibliography of works on the Decembrist movement in Russian
see M.V. Nechkina and R.G. Eimontova (1960).
2
For a detailed account of Herzen’s path as an “intellectual revolutionary,” see Acton (1979).
3
One of the most famous literary tributes to the Decembrists is N.A. Nekrasov’s narrative poem “The
Russian Women” dedicated to Princesses E.I. Trubetskaya and M.N. Volkonskaya, the first two Decem-
brist wives who decided to share their husbands’ exile in Siberia. In 1855, A.I. Herzen began to publish
(in London) an almanac The Polar Star. Named after the almanac published by the Decembrists K.F.
Ryleev and A.A. Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) in 1822–25, Herzen’s Polar Star became a major venue for (re)
publishing works by the Decembrists as well as those about them. For further information, see Anatole
G. Mazour (1962) and Marc Raeff (1966).
4
On the history of Tolstoy’s project see M.A. Tsiavlovskii’s commentary to the fragment The Decem-
brists in Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, 17, 469–585. Tolstoy’s unfinished story (actually three fragments)
entitled Ot’ezzhee Pole is published in the fifth volume of Tolstoy’s Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (The
Jubilee Edition), 214–18.

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

October 1856 and Spring of 1857 also embodies the Decembrist theme.5 This story
juxtaposes two heroes, a rich and well-connected Prince Illarion (or Vassilii Illari-
onovich), who suddenly resigns from a significant administrative position and moves
to the country, and a successful bureaucrat Teloshin, a parvenu married to Prince
Illarion’s rich cousin.6 The story is interrupted at the point when Teloshin decides to
visit Prince Illarion in the country in order to “pull him out of sludge” and convince
him to return to society and government service. The moral and psychological moti-
vations behind Prince Illarion’s decision to quit society remain unexplained and are
evidently incomprehensible to a parvenu like Teloshin. However, readers familiar
with Tolstoy’s mature works would immediately recognise in the Prince’s behaviour
the pattern of a typical Tolstoyan frondeur, a proud, independent-minded hero who
rebels against the hypocritical mores of high society and/or the injustice of the entire
socio-political order embodied in the imperial bureaucratic and military machines.
Abandoning Petersburg or Moscow, characters like Prince Dmitrii Nekhliudov
(from the early works like The Gentleman’s Morning and the Cossacks, as well as
his later incarnation from The Resurrection), Levin from Anna Karenina, or Prince
Stepan Kasatsky from Father Sergius pursue their lonely quests for an authentic and
meaningful life on the periphery of the Empire.
While all of these free-spirited heroes challenge the status quo by refusing to
engage in any official service, only one of them, Pierre Bezukhov from War and
Peace, would engage in political activity by becoming a co-founder of a secret soci-
ety. However, the very refusal to lead an inauthentic life could also count as a form
of rebellion. As Herzen pointed out in On the Development of the Revolutionary
Ideas in Russia, “to ask for nothing, to remain independent, not to seek a position—
under a despotic regime this counts as being in opposition.” (Herzen 2012, 8). Her-
zen’s main goal in this book was to draw attention to the growth of emancipatory
ideas in Russian literature, journalism and criticism from the end of the eighteenth
century until his own day. The leading role in this process was assigned to the inde-
pendent-minded gentry, which even after the Decembrist debacle of 1825 continued
to generate free minds, such as the poet Lermontov and the philosopher Chaadaev.
The extent of Tolstoy’s indebtedness to Herzen remains an open question. While
Soviet critics tended to emphasise the intellectual affinities between the two think-
ers, Western scholars have treated this topic with much more circumspection.7 How-
ever, most scholars agree that Herzen’s political journalism was a major inspiration
for Tolstoy in the mid-1850s, when Tolstoy found himself in disagreement with all
leading artistic and ideological movements and started to look actively for his own
way. While he was irritated by the increasingly dogmatic “nihilism” and utilitarian-
ism of the raznochintzy like Chernyshevsky and Doborliubov and felt politically and

5
See Kathryn B. Feuer, Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, 16.
6
The story (actually three fragments) entitled Ot’eezzhee Pole is published in the fifth volume of Tol-
stoy’s Polnoe sobrane sochinenii (Jubilee Edition), 214–18.
7
Important Soviet sources include books by N.N. Ardens (1962) and A.A. Saburov (1959). See also
N. N. Gusev, “Gerzen i Tolstoy” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 41–42 (1941), 490–525. In Tolstoy and the
Genesis of War and Peace Kathryn B. Feuer provides a helpful overview of some of these Russian and
some Anglophone sources.

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 L. Steiner

aesthetically more at home among those literati who like himself came from the
gentry, very soon he got dissatisfied with the ideology of pure art espoused by most
of his noble-born friends. But unwilling to side with the positivistic “realism” of
the radicals, Tolstoy was nevertheless looking for serious political and philosophical
topics.
In 1856, he read Herzen’s The Bell and possibly other works where Herzen gives
the Decembrists pride of place in the history of Russian emancipatory movement.8
Throughout his works Herzen emphasises the Decembrists’ class consciousness,
interpreting their liberal temper as a byproduct of their aristocratic magnanimity.
Tolstoy was wary of political radicalism. In fact, Isaiah Berlin has demonstrated that
Tolstoy had a deeply conservative streak, which made Joseph de Maistre’s ideas
appealing to him. Nevertheless, he became extremely excited about the Decembrists
and decided to write a novel about them.9 Did he, like Herzen, value them first and
foremost as chivalric individuals who were willing to defend their convictions with a
sword in hand and, if necessary, sacrifice their lives? In the remainder of my article
I will provide a detailed answer to the question of why the Decembrists emerged as
the centripetal theme in Tolstoy’s work in the 1850s and why he never managed to
complete a novel focused on them, although he returned to this project again in the
late 1870s.
As I will explain, for Tolstoy the enigma of the Decembrists was intimately tied
to his search for political and intellectual identity. Like Herzen, he saw the Decem-
brists as his precursors. However, deeply suspicious of their revolutionary tactics, he
tried to deemphasise the overtly political aspect of the Decembrist movement and
instead draw attention to the revolutionaries’ spiritual qualities, which gave them
strength to bear the hardships of Siberian exile. He thus ended up interpreting the
Decembrists as moral heroes whose major feat consisted in the attainment of inner
freedom and integrity.
Tolstoy was not the first scholar of the Decembrist movement to be particu-
larly attracted to its spiritual and even religious dimensions. Among the materials
Tolstoy read while preparing to write his novel was Nikolai Ogaryov’s “Caucasus
Spa,” a fragment from an autobiographical work, which centered on the author’s
encounter with the exiled Decembrists.10 Herzen’s friend and associate was particu-
larly interested in the Decembrists’ religiosity. He wondered whether they had been
devout Christians prior to their arrest or discovered religion as a consolation dur-
ing their ordeals in prison and Siberia. Himself a member of the philosophically-
minded 1840s generation, Ogaryov was so deeply impressed by the Decembrist A.I.
Odoevsky’s genuinely Christian character that he immersed himself in the study
of Saint-Martin, Joseph de Maistre and other French mystics who were known to

8
The extent of Tolstoy’s familiarity with Herzen’s works prior to his visit to London has been much
debated by both Russian and Western scholars. On this issue see especially Gusev, Feuer, as well as
Nicholas Rhzhevsky (1975).
9
For a classic discussion of Tolstoy as a reader of de Maistre see Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the
Fox” (Berlin 1978).
10
N.K. Ogaryov, “Kavkazskie vody (Otryvok iz moei ispovedi).” See Ogaryov (1988, 55–66).

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

have influenced the Decembrists. He concluded that Catholic mysticism was one of
the spiritual sources behind the Decembrists’ resistance to the increasingly brutal
regime of Count Arakcheev. But while some members of the secret societies were
steeped in Saint-Martin, many others were products of the French Enlightenment.
Analysing different intellectual strands and tendencies within the Decembrist move-
ment would have to become one of the main tasks for the future historians, con-
cluded Ogaryov (Ogaryov 57).
Furthermore, during a visit to Florence in 1860, Tolstoy met his distant relative
the Decembrist S.G. Volkonsky who had recently returned from exile. The writer
was deeply impressed by the old man’s dignified appearance and charm. During his
years in Siberia the former Prince managed to retain his impressive conversational
skills in French. At the same time, he also learnt colloquial Russian and simplified
his manners to such an extent that Siberian peasants regarded him as a member of
their community.11 As most scholars agree, Sergei Volkonsky and his wife Maria
became the main prototypes for the images of the Decembrist Pyotr Labazov and his
wife Natalia in a novel that Tolstoy was drafting around the same time.12 This draft,
which featured a loving couple, superseded earlier drafts, where there was no female
character, but only a juxtaposition of the two opposed character types, a spiritual
man (presumably a Decembrist) and a shallow man of the world (who starts out
being a member of a secret society but then extricates himself from the Decembrist
affair and makes a successful career). These heroes would meet very different fates:
a spiritual hero who remains true to his convictions would go to the Senate Square
and thence to prison and exile. His less scrupulous friend would experience success,
but suffer from a deep-seated remorse and anxiety over the meaninglessness of his
life.
This transformation shows not only the deepening of Tolstoy’s historical research,
but also his growing identification with the Decembrists. As is well-known, a search
for family happiness was the leading theme in both Tolstoy’s art and life in the sec-
ond half of the 1850s and throughout the 1860s. His other major themes were popu-
lar education and philosophy of history. The confluence of all these topics in “The
Decembrists” drafts reveals that Tolstoy’s central intellectual preoccupation during
this period was with the historical fate and responsibility of the Russian gentry. Tol-
stoy agreed with Herzen and Ogaryov in their estimation of the Decembrists as the
best people of their generation. Thus, the old Decembrist, in Tolstoy’s fragment,
was richly rewarded for his virtue with family bliss. But how was a Russian gen-
tleman of his own generation to conduct his life? What role should he play in the
process of Russia’s liberalisation and socioeconomic restructuring launched by the

11
Orlando Figes provides helpful biographical glosses on both S.G. Volkonsky and his wife M.N.
Volkonskaya (née Raevskaya) in chapter two, “Children of 1812” of Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural His-
tory of Russia. (Feiges 2002, 72–146).
12
M.A. Tsiavlovsky discusses the hypothesis that S.G. Volkonsky was the main prototype for the
Decembrist in his commentary to Tolstoy’s fragment “The Decembrists” published in volume 17 of Pol-
noe Sobranie Sochinenii (The Jubilee Edition), pp. 469–528.

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 L. Steiner

government?13 These were the questions that preoccupied Tolstoy during his second
trip to Europe in 1860–61.
In March of 1861, Tolstoy visited London and finally met Herzen. According to
all reports, the encounter was amicable and productive. However, during his con-
versations with Herzen, Tolstoy never mentioned his new novelistic project. He first
told Herzen about it two weeks later in a letter from Brussels (where, following Her-
zen’s recommendation, he met with P. J. Proudhon). By this point Tolstoy had read
Book VI of The Polar Star, which contained the materials about the Decembrists, as
well as Herzen’s essay “Robert Owen,” which portrayed the famous social reformer
as an exemplary case of rational maturity and individuality. Much taken by Herzen’s
essay, Tolstoy wrote:
Your article about Owen is, alas! Too close to my heart. Although in our time
this is possible only for a denizen of Saturn who came down to Earth or for a
Russian. There are many people and 99/100 Russians, whom fear will keep
from believing your idea (…) You seem to address yourself only to intelligent
and brave people. Those who are neither clever nor brave will tell you that it
is better to keep silent when you come to such conclusions, namely to the con-
clusion that the entire path of civilisation had been wrong. And you encourage
them to say this by placing life itself, the pattern of life as you call it, historical
laws in place of the old idols. Instead of the old idols of immortality, of infinite
perfectibility, of historical laws etc. this pattern of life is nothing, a little button
in place of a colossus. (Tolstoy 60, 373–4).
This letter sheds light on the Socratic nature of Herzen’s dialogue with Tolstoy.
The older man encouraged his younger fellow-countryman (and fellow aristocrat) to
engage in independent philosophising. Wishing to be taken seriously as one of those
“intelligent and brave” people to whom Herzen addressed his seminal essay, Tolstoy
insists on his intellectual independence and claims that he had found his own prism
through which to look at Russian history and society (Tolstoy, 60, 374). But how
could a still relatively young writer who only recently began to study philosophy and
history produce wholly original conceptions? I would argue that Tolstoy’s debts to
Herzen were more numerous than either he or subsequent scholars were willing to
acknowledge.
Although Herzen and Tolstoy exchanged only a few letters, and the precise con-
tents of their conversations that lasted for many hours remain largely unknown to
us, a close analysis of their works reveals a number of philosophical and politi-
cal similarities. In this essay I will address only one of these similarities, which I
consider to be crucial. As I will demonstrate, while constructing the image of an
aristocratic revolutionary Tolstoy to a considerably degree followed Herzen’s ideal

13
As Katheryn Feuer has justly pointed out, Tolstoy had serious reservations about the reforms. He real-
ised that the liberation of peasants without land threatened to worsen their economic situation and lead
to pauperism. This does not mean, however, that Tolstoy wholeheartedly rejected “the sprit of 1856” and
sided with the conservatives. The main motivation behind his turn to the study of European and Russian
history since the Napoleonic wars is to understand European liberalism and its applicability to Russia.
(Feuer 1996, 135–79).

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

of “individuality.” It was probably in this connection that Tolstoy reread Friedrich

Schiller, who was arguably Herzen’s favorite author.14 By uncovering the “Schil-
lerian subtext” in Tolstoy’s drafts for a novel about the Decembrists and in War and
Peace we can shed new light on the genesis of Tolstoy’s self-understanding as a lib-
erally and philanthropically inclined nobleman and artist, which underlay his ethical
anarchism.

An interlude: Herzen on individuality

Herzen’s emergence as a thinker coincided with the great debate between the so-
called “Slavophiles” and “Westernizers,” which not only stimulated the develop-
ment of genuinely philosophical discourse in Russia, but in fact set the terms for
the entire subsequent history of Russian philosophy. In this seminal debate, Herzen
sided with the Westernizers, the secularist camp which upheld such Enlightenment
values as rational autonomy, freedom of conscience and speech, ethical and politi-
cal self-determination, and legal and political equality of all persons. As has been
frequently pointed out, the issue of “personality” offers the best vantage point for
grasping the differences between the Westernizers and Slavophiles. Westernizers
like Herzen, Granovsky, Chicherin, Turgenev and others measure historical progress
by the degree to which individuals became differentiated from their kin and acquired
self-consciousness. Slavophiles objected to this rationalistic conception, which, they
feared, inevitably lead to rampant individualism, disrespect of religion, social frag-
mentation and, ultimately, a complete moral and social disintegration.15 They main-
tained that the highest form of self-development was to be found not in the doctrines
of Western liberal philosophers, but in Christ’s sacrifice of himself for humanity.
The polemics between these two camps became especially bitter when the crisis of
Hegelianism propelled intellectuals to seek new approaches to the philosophy of his-
tory or else give up the idea of progress altogether. For Herzen, who was then at the
peak of his intellectual power, this crisis gave an impetus to break free from logical
determinism and, applying his knowledge of aesthetics and natural science to phi-
losophy, develop a highly innovative vision of history as a play without a script, “an
improvisation” that depends entirely upon the actors who take part in it.
As Aileen Kelly has demonstrated in her recent book, a former student of the
physiologist Pavlov, Herzen was not only in step with the most progressive develop-
ments in contemporary science and philosophy, but perhaps even ahead of his time

14
On Schiller’s significance for the young Herzen and the idealists of the 1840s (the Stankevich circle)
see chapter three of Martin Malia’s book (1961). Aileen Kelly (1999) has further developed the Schiller-
Herzen connection in her recent book, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander
Herzen. An earlier version of her argument is found in chapter two of her book Views from the Other
Shore. I briefly recapitulate Kelley’s argument below.
15
For a helpful overview of the Slavophiles vs. Westernizers debate see Sergei Horujy’s essay “The
Birth of Russian Philosophical Humanism.” (Horujy 2010) Among the Slavophiles, A.S. Khomiakov was
particularly outspoken in his criticism of the Humboldtian vision of “individuality.” See especially his
essay “Po povodu Gumdbol’dta.” (Khomjakov 2007).

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insofar as he was able to foresee the danger of populism and totalitarianism that
were beginning to emerge in Western bourgeois democracies whose enfranchised
masses lacked political intelligence and were easy prey to self-seeking politicians
and dictators.16 Hence his glorification of self-sufficient and benevolent individuals
like Robert Owen.
Although the ideas that Herzen developed in his mature phase were too idiosyn-
cratic to fit into any of the established schools of thought, his closest counterparts
in the West were Wilhelm von Humboldt and J.S. Mill.17 Both of these thinkers
were reviled by the Slavophiles: Humboldt because of his insistence on the indi-
viduality’s independence from the church and the state, and Mill—because of the
connection he made between a perpetually emerging individuality and its rights to
socioeconomic and political equality.18 These ideas were in principle irreconcilable
with the patriarchal worldview of the Slavophiles. However, as opposed as Herzen
was to the Slavophiles throughout the course of his philosophical apprenticeship,
from “Some Observations on the Historical Development of Honor” (1843) to From
the Other Shore (1847–51), in his arguably most famous work, The Russian Peo-
ple and Socialism: An Open Letter to Jules Michelet (1851), Herzen echoes the
Slavophiles by arguing on behalf of the Russian peasants, whose untapped spiritual
resources could become the source of liberation not only for Russia, but for Europe
as well. This claim, which caused great consternation among Herzen’s old Western-
izer friends like Turgenev, was not entirely out of character, considering Herzen’s
long-term interest in reconciling the rights of the individual personality with love
and friendship. Indeed, notwithstanding his passionate insistence on the rights of the
individual, Herzen always believed that a harmonious individuality was unthinkable
outside of a brotherly (and sisterly) community.19
Herzen’s conception of individuality stemmed from his detailed and profound
engagement with the theoretical works of Schiller, who was arguably the most
decisive influence on his career. The case for Schiller’s crucial role in Herzen’s

16
The Discovery of Chance. See especially chapters five through ten (Kelly 2016).
17
As is well-known, Humboldt was a major influence on Mill. Herzen was personally acquainted and
corresponded with Mill. Although he does not often invoke Humboldt’s name, it is safe to assume that
he was well-read in Humboldt’s works, which enjoyed great popularity in Russia in the 1830 s and 40 (as
evidenced, for example, by Khomiakov’s attack on Humboldt mentioned in footnote). I discuss Herzen’s
connection to the Humboldtian liberal tradition in “A Vital Questions: The Quest for Bildung in Russia,
1860s–80s.”
18
The Slavophiles’ negative attitude toward both thinkers reveals itself very clearly in A.S. Khomiakov’s
essay “Po povodu Gumbol’dta” (Khomiakov 2007).
19
A number of scholars (Malia, Acton, Kelly) have argued that Herzen’s growing bitterness about
Europe in the 1850s, which made him turn hopefully to the Russian peasant commune, was caused not
only by the outcome of the 1848 Revolution, hut also by his family drama. As I have argued elsewhere,
Herzen’s disappointment with Europe and Europeans, even those who professed to be liberals, certainly
had much to do with his disappointment in Georg Herwegh, a friend and fellow revolutionary who car-
ried out a secret affair with Herzen’s wife Nathalie. For Herzen’s friendship (understood as a union of
“beautiful souls”) was an indispensable spiritual medium. Therefore, when separated from his best friend
Ogaryov, who remained in Russia until 1856, he became close to Herwegh to the point of inviting him
and his wife Emma to live in his household. This fatal decision not only ruined his family and his friend-
ship with Herwegh, but also shook his “Westernizer” convictions (Steiner 2007).

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

intellectual development has been recently made by Kelly, whose argument I only
briefly recapitulate in order to highlight the “Schillerian” side of Herzen that might
have influenced Tolstoy.20 As Kelly argues, Schiller as an aesthetic and political
theorist was no less important for Herzen as Schiller- the author of The Robbers
and Wilhelm Tell. In his attempts to envision genuinely free personality as well as
a new form of communality, he drew on Schiller’s aesthetic treatises, such as On
Grace and Dignity and Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, where the
Kantian model of autonomy is reconceived in a way that allows Schiller to over-
come the infamous “rigorism” of Kant’s ethics and reconcile the demands of reason
with those of sensibility. Drawing on a popular Enlightenment topos of “the beauti-
ful soul,” Schiller argued in On Grace and Dignity that the constraint demanded by
Kant’s model of virtue required a sacrifice of both happiness and aesthetic senti-
ment to moral duty. A truly “beautiful soul” ought to be in peace and harmony with
itself and would perform the most heroic sacrifices prompted by instinct alone. But
how does one develop such a fine character? Schiller rejected Rousseau’s idea that a
“beautiful soul” is given by nature. Nor could it be fostered by a purely rationalistic
Enlightenment. Reflecting on the French revolution, Schiller compared its ruthless
leaders to the latter-day barbarians whose overly scientific education has stifled their
sympathy for everything that is gentle, refined and humane. In On the Aesthetic Edu-
cation he offers a new program of public Enlightenment, which emphasizes the role
of theatre and the arts in the education of self-conscious, rationally mature citizenry.
Only those who are capable of enjoying what Schiller calls an “aesthetic state” of
mind can emancipate themselves from the tyranny of natural instincts without fall-
ing prey to an equally unrelenting dictatorship of pure reason. Only a society in
which all citizens have been habituated to value beauty and a special form of free-
dom that beauty grants has a chance to become a genuine republic.
Herzen recognised in Schiller’s sketch for a new Politeia a blueprint for a new
philosophy of history, one freed from the metaphysical assumptions of the Hegelian
school. Although in his reflections on the most recent revolution in France, From the
Other Shore, he never cites Schiller, his work echoes Schiller’s Letters not only in
terms of genre, but also in terms of its Utopian message. Herzen’s text is polyphonic
and pivots around a dialogue between a disenchanted skeptic and what I would call
a Schillerian idealist. This idealistic voice ultimately wins the debate rhetorically, if
not philosophically. His message—that there are always enough brave individuals
around who would always trust only their own minds and hearts and not bend their
knees before any tyrant, whether it is embodied in a government, a set of dogmatic
precepts or public opinion—sounds persuasive enough to outweigh the skeptical
arguments of his opponent. Thus Herzen overcomes a bout of nihilism by drawing in
his imagination the image of a secret society of “beautiful souls” that would rescue
Europe even from the most disastrous crisis into which new Napoleons (including
Napoleon III and other power-hungry imperialists) might thrust it (Herzen 1956).

20
I draw on Kelly’s essay “Herzen, Schiller, and the Aesthetic Education of Man” (chapter two of Views
from the Other Shore) as well as on chapter eleven of The Discovery of Chance.

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 L. Steiner

Tolstoy, who grasped these ideas in a nutshell after reading “Robert Owen,” cer-
tainly took them into consideration as he deepened and broadened the scope of his
research on the history of revolutionary ideas and movements in Russia. Like Her-
zen, he saw the enlightened nobility as the leading force in this process. In trac-
ing the intellectual formation of a group of heroes, one of whom would become a
Decembrist leader, Tolstoy gradually kept pushing the beginning of his story to the
outset of the Napoleonic wars, the time when Schiller’s fame as a spokesman for
Germany as a land of freedom-loving thinkers and poets reached its zenith after the
publication of Wilhelm Tell. In this connection (and possibly upon Herzen’s sugges-
tion) Tolstoy reread some of Schiller’s plays. Thus, there are also a few scattered
references to Schiller’s philosophical works in War and Peace and Tolstoy’s dia-
ries from the period when he was working on it. I will analyze these allusions and
explain their significance for the genesis of Tolstoy’s mature worldview.

The progress of the “beautiful soul” from the Decembrists to War

and Peace

Both the opening scene of War and Peace, which takes place in a Petersburg
salon, and the novel’s “first” epilogue set in a country estate of Nikolai Rostov are
marked by scandals. Both times the person who provokes a scandal is Pierre, the
future Decembrist. At the beginning of the novel Pierre scandalizes the aristocratic
guests of a court lady by praising Napoleon and calling the execution of the Duke
d’Enghien a deed of a great-souled man. At the end of the first epilogue, which takes
place approximately fifteen years later, Pierre once again enters into a political dis-
cussion—this time in a more familiar setting. He has outgrown his youthful infatua-
tion with Napoleon and no longer spouts the slogans of the French revolution. Now
he calls himself a conservative and compares the society he co-founds in Petersburg
to the Prussian Tugendbund. It is in the name of virtue and conservative values that
Pierre justifies the uprising he and his friends are preparing.
That the author does not wholly disapprove of Pierre’s readiness to use force in
order to rebuff the abuses of the tyrannical government can be surmised from the
way he is perceived by an innocent youth, a fifteen year-old Nikolen’ka Bolkonsky.
Excited by the conversation he has overheard, Nikolen’ka dreams of Uncle Pierre
and himself dressed like Romans at the head of an army, which is about to clash
with Arakcheev’s army led by Nikolai Rostov. This dream, which features aristo-
cratic rebels waging a battle against a tyrant, is certainly inspired by Plutarch. How-
ever, as I will argue, Schiller’s historical dramas were also an important, albeit unac-
knowledged, literary prototype for Tolstoy.
The play that resonates with the epilogue of War and Peace is Wilhelm Tell. For-
bidden by Russian censorship until the end of Nicholas I’s reign, this drama was
regarded as a cult work by Herzen, Ogaryov and their Moscow friends in the 1840s.
They associated the rebellion of the Swiss peasants against a tyrannical Austrian
ruler (Reichsvogt Gessler) portrayed in this play with the Decembrist coup. Unlike
the rebels in Schiller’s earlier plays, such as Karl Moor or Marquis Posa, Tell is a
wholly positive character and arguably the only example of a “beautiful soul” in

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

Schiller’s dramatic works. Although Tell’s actions are spontaneous rather than pre-
meditated, the murder he commits is morally justified, because he acts as a defender
of human dignity and virtue which are being trampled upon by a tyrant. The entire
community shares Tell’s rightful indignation and dreams of liberation. However, he
alone has the willpower to act.21
As we know from history, the first political society in Russia was formed in
response to the mutiny in the Semyonovsky Regiment, which occurred after a newly
appointed Colonel Schwarz reintroduced corporal punishment and had a number of
soldiers, who had been decorated with St. George’s cross, flogged.22 In the drafts to
his novel, Tolstoy discussed this incident more openly than he does in the published
text, where Pierre only alludes to certain abuses committed by government officials
without going into detail. Nevertheless, it is clear that Pierre insists on his right to
rebel against a government that oversteps its authority. It is noteworthy that Pierre’s
opponent in this debate, Nikolai Rostov, was at least in part modelled on Tolstoy’s
own father. I think that Count Rostov, who vouches to defend autocracy at any cost,
reflects a more conservative side of Tolstoy’s consciousness. I would like to suggest,
however, that the voice of outraged Humanity represented by Pierre is more resonant
than the voice of prudence and conformism represented by Nikolai Rostov. After all,
it is Uncle Pierre, rather than Uncle Nicholas, whom a pure-hearted young Prince
Bolkonsky admires and wants to follow.
The first indication that Schiller was indeed on Tolstoy’s mind while he was
working on his historical narrative is provided by the 1860 draft of the novel about
the Decembrists, which contains an allusion to Schiller’s poem “Women’s Dignity”
(“Würde der Frauen”). (Tolstoy 68, 15). Here Labazov’s wife is described as an
embodiment of the feminine virtues celebrated by Schiller, such as grace, gentility
and humility. I would argue that in constructing the image of the Decembrist and his
“better half” Tolstoy also drew on On Grace and Dignity, where Schiller describes
both gracefulness or grace (Anmut) and Dignity (Würde) as both aesthetic and ethi-
cal categories (Schiller 1962b). For Schiller’s precursors, including Mendelssohn
and Wieland, charm and gracefulness were primarily feminine characteristics. They
are the attributes of a naïve “beautiful soul.” Dignity, however, was often mixed with
the sublime and regarded as a manly virtue. Taking a cue from these thinkers as
well as from Kant’s discussion of beauty and sublimity in the Critique of Judgment,
Schiller constructs a dialectic between naive or unconscious grace (often exempli-
fied by women) and dignity stemming from reason. What he calls “a beautiful soul”

21
In the penultimate scene of the fifth act (which some reviewers considered redundant from the dra-
matic point of view) Schiller represents a chance encounter between Tell and Johann Parricida, a nephew
and murderer of the Holy Roman Emperor. Tell condemns the Duke for committing a crime motivated
solely by personal enmity. He explains that the murder he committed was justified by his outrage against
a sadistic ruler. On the significance of this scene as an “apology” for Tell see a review in Isis, March
1805 (Schiller 2008, 781–7).
22
In the published text of the novel Denisov refers disapprovingly to the appointment of the “soldier”
Schwartz as a regimental commander at this famous regiment. The mutiny at the Semyonovsky Regiment
was still in the living memory of Tolstoy’s older contemporaries and was well-known enough to all edu-
cated Russians to require elaborate explanations (Tolstoy 12:282).

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 L. Steiner

seems to be a synthesis of both grace and dignity.23 Tolstoy also envisioned the edu-
cation of a “beautiful soul” in dialectical terms. Thus the Decembrist and his wife
emerge in his drafts—and continue to emerge throughout War and Peace—as two
beings who seem teleologically interconnected and who in the course of their lives
grow into a single being.24 Together they form a single “beautiful soul.”
If Natasha is charming and graceful from the first drafts and right from the outset
of the story, Pierre acquires his exceptional moral qualities step by step. At the out-
set of the story he is described as a naïve young man who unexpectedly inherits the
title and the fortune of his natural father, Count Bezukhov. Unprepared for this role,
Pierre lets himself be manipulated by a skilled intriguer Prince Kuragin (a reincar-
nation of the successful careerist Teloshin from “A Distant Field”) into marrying his
daughter. Soon Pierre discovers that he does not love his beautiful but shallow wife.
Moreover, he suspects that she has been unfaithful to him. He challenges Dolokhov,
whom he presumes to be his wife’s lover, to a duel and wounds him. This incident
propels Pierre’s first serious crisis. The voice of conscience awakens in his soul and
starts urging him to change his life. A chance encounter with a leader of a Masonic
lodge, Bazdeev, convinces Pierre that he has been living badly and that he ought to
embark on a quest for self-improvement. Pierre starts reading various books recom-
mended by Bazdeev and keeps a diary, which suggests that he has been converted to
a theosophical worldview. He comes to see the world as an enchanted garden popu-
lated with good spirits who are secretly guiding him toward the light.
Shortly after his induction into the Masonic brotherhood, Pierre visits his friend
Prince Andrei, who has recently returned from the battle of Austerlitz. In an impor-
tant conversation, which takes place on a raft, Pierre enthusiastically expounds his
new worldview, which sounds like a digest of one of the chapters from Herder’s
Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity25 and also calls to mind Schill-
er’s early works, in particular his Philosophical Letters (Schiller 1962a, 107–32).
However, a vision of a well-ordered universe permeated by Love fails to convince
Andrei, who recently lost his wife in childbirth, and came close to losing his own
life in a meaningless war. He counters Pierre’s enthusiastic speech with a Stoical
thesis that happiness consists in the absence of moral and physical suffering.26
As the story continues to unfold, Pierre’s newly acquired belief in the preor-
dained harmony of nature and the soul gets undermined. Thus Schärmerei is only a
phase in Pierre’s education, one that he begins to transcend when he falls in love and

23
For a detailed analysis of Schiller’s view of “the beautiful soul” in comparison both other invocations
of this term in the eighteenth century see Marie Wokalek’s book (Wokalek 2010).
24
Due to space constraints, I leave the figure of Andrei Bolkonsky out of consideration here. However,
as E. Zaidenshnur points out, it was this handsome and noble character who was originally conceived
as an ideal aristocratic character (to be juxtaposed not only to the half-aristocratic Pierre, but also to
the more provincial and down-to-earth Rostov, named “Count Prostoi (Simple)” in some of the drafts).
Andrei, who dies from the wound he receives at Borodino, leaving Natasha free to marry Pierre, serves
as a kind of precursor to the Decembrists, including his surviving friend and his son. (Zaidenschnur
1961, 291–396).
25
I discuss Tolstoy’s debt to Herder in “The Russian Aufäklaerer: Tolstoy in Search of Truth, Freedom
and Immortality.” (Steiner 2011).
26
See chapter 12, part two of volume two of War and Peace.

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

experiences a genuine moral conflict.27 This conflict is due to the fact that Natasha
gets betrothed to Pierre’s best friend Prince Andrei, whereas Pierre himself is still
unhappily married to Helen. And when Natasha gets seduced by Anatole Kuragin
and breaks her engagement to Andrei, the only way Pierre can show his affection is
by playing the role of a magnanimous friend. At this crucial point Napoleon invades
Russia, giving Pierre a chance to assert himself through a heroic action. He starts
looking for an opportunity to assassinate Napoleon. At this juncture, I think we are
being reminded of Don Carlos, whom Marquis Posa encourages to transform his
love for the Queen into the love of humanity and to dedicate himself to the liberation
of the Netherlands.
Pierre never gets a chance to carry out his plan. Nevertheless, he makes two noble
gestures: he saves a girl from a burning house and defends an Armenian woman
harassed by a marauder.28 Yet at the same time, Pierre can never escape from the
pangs of his conscience or self-consciousness, which tells him that he is being ego-
centric and histrionic. He feels that deep down he is not much better than other Mos-
cow nobles who made patriotic speeches and generous donations for the front while
thinking only about their reputations. During the battle of Borodino (which Pierre,
against all verisimilitude, is allowed to visit as a mere observer) it dawns on him
that the only people who are being truly selfless and heroic are simple soldiers. This
insight gets confirmed when Pierre encounters Platon Karataev, an old soldier who
comes to embody Pierre’s moral ideal.29
Only after the war was Pierre able to realize that Karataev saved him from mad-
ness and despair in a POW camp where Pierre ended up after the fire of Moscow.
From the moment he witnessed the execution of the arsonists (a fate from which he
was spared by Davout’s random act of mercy) Pierre started to slip into nihilism.
He could not fathom why people submit to a terrible force of evil that orders them
to kill other people whom they do not hate and who have done them no wrong. The
senseless brutality that he saw around him would have poisoned Pierre’s soul, had
it not been for Karataev’s timely intervention. A former peasant, Platon was sent to
the army as a punishment for a minor theft. But instead of lamenting his fate he was
happy that he had gone to the army instead of his married brother.

27
Like Agathon in Ch. M. Wieland’s pedagogical novel Geschichte des Agathons Pierre outgrows
Schwärmerei and develops a more sober and mature perspective. One of Agathon’s key experiences
occurs at the court of the Tyrant of Syracuse, where he learns the difference between the Platonic politi-
cal ideal and realpolitik. In the image of Platon Karataev Tolstoy likewise presents his hero with a lofty
ideal, which he, unlike Wieland, hesitates to unmask as a sheer dream. Unlike Agathon, who has to expe-
rience multiple disillusionments and give up on Romantic love, Tolstoy’s hero acquires more depth and
discernment without relinquishing his enthusiasm. In the first volume Tolstoy treats his hero with as
much irony as Wieland treats Agathon. However, as the story continues to unfold, it transforms from an
eighteenth century “novel of worldliness” (whose hero is to become mature by recognizing and accepting
the ways of the world) into one resembling a Romantic narrative of infinite quest. As this article argues,
this change might have been due to Tolstoy’s discovery of Schiller’s idealism.
28
See chapter 34 of part three of volume three.
29
Pierre’s encounter with Karataev is described in chapters 11–14 of part two of volume four and chap-
ters 12–15 of part four of volume four.

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 L. Steiner

Equally kind to both fellow prisoners and French guards, Platon represents an
utterly serene being, a sage in harmony with the universe. From him Pierre learns
not only to bear his suffering stoically, but actually to enjoy an ascetic life. Deprived
of luxury and forced to live in a barrack, Pierre discovers inner peace that eluded
him his entire life. Pierre’s quest for Truth reaches a climax in chapter 14 of volume
four, which describes Pierre in the middle of the night walking away from campfire
and sitting alone in the dark. Suddenly he bursts into a loud laughter: “They caught
me, they locked me up. They are holding me prisoner. Who, me? My immortal soul?
Ha, ha, ha…” laughed Pierre with tears brimming in his eyes” (Tolstoy 12:106).30
This Homeric laughter signals a culmination in a long inner struggle. In this scene
Pierre feels blissful and free like a Godman. He no longer needs anyone in order to
be happy. He does not even need his teacher. This is why Pierre does not suffer when
he sees how Platon fades away. And when Karataev gets shot by the guards, Pierre’
consciousness does not even register (or barely registers) this event. He only hears
the howling of the little dog that used to follow Karataev around the camp, but can-
not understand why the dog is upset (Tolstoy 12:158).
The following night Pierre has a dream, in which his old Swiss teacher shows him
a globe whose entire surface consists of drops tightly packed together. The drops
move and shift. “This is life,” says the teacher. “In the center is God, and each drop
tries to expand in order to reflect him in the greatest measure…. Here he is Kara-
taev, see, he spread and vanished” (Tolstoy 12:159). As Inessa Medzhibovskaya has
pointed out, this dream calls to mind one of Tolstoy’s own dreams recorded in his
diary (Medzhibovskaya 2008, 74). Soon after his marriage, on December 27, 1862,
Tolstoy wrote: “Schiller told me in my dream: whatever you are—dust that will turn
into dust or a frame through which the divine expresses one of its parts—I don’t
remember what else he said. But isn’t my latest conviction that happiness consists
in maximal engulfing of the divine breadth-wise and depth-wise.” (Tolstoy 48: 83).
This understanding of “happiness” harkens back to Schiller’s early works, in
which he tried to reconcile the view of happiness as pleasure (derived from Helvé-
tius and La Mettrie whom he had studied as a medical student in Stuttgart) with
the traditional philosophical conception of the highest good.31 Schiller’s next step
as a philosopher was to acquaint himself with Kant’s critical philosophy, which
reinforced his belief in the autonomy of moral reason. Schiller’s discussion of
“heautonomy” in Kallias-Briefe is justly considered as the kernel of his subsequent
aesheticized ethics.32 It is here that Schiller first formulated the ideal of freedom
that he deemed superior to Kant’s “autonomy.” While Kant’s ethics requires that one
ignores feelings and follows only the imperatives of pure practical reason, Schil-
ler suggests that a truly free being does not experience such a disharmony. Such a
being feels naturally inclined to do good. He is both the architect and legislator of
his universe. As Frederick Beiser has argued, it is this essentially Spinozistic view

30
All translations are my own.
31
I have in mind works like Philosophie der Physiologie (Schiller 1962a, 10–29) and especially Phi-
losophische Briefe.
32
For a nuanced discussion of Schiller’s conception of freedom see Beiser (2005, 213–235).

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

of freedom that underlies Schiller’s conception of the self-determined and wholly

natural “beautiful soul.” (Beiser, 222–3).
Platon Karataev, who is wholly at peace with himself and the world, embod-
ies this “beautiful soul” ideal that Pierre wants to imitate. But while Karataev is
described as a wholly mythical androgynous being, Pierre is a Bildungsroman hero
driven by eros and seeking his feminine half. He gets a chance to act on this desire
when his wife dies, leaving him free to marry Natasha. Meanwhile Pierre’s captivity
and then war itself come to an end, setting him free to seek new opportunities to test
his mature character.
The transformation of the “problematic” individual into a hero along the lines of
Wilhelm Tell occurs outside of the novelistic plot, in the first epilogue. The genre of
this epilogue is neither epic nor novelistic: it is an idyll. Tolstoy had been interested
in this genre since the early 1850s. Thus, simultaneously with drafting “The Decem-
brists” he composed several idylls, such as “Tikhon and Malan’ia.” He clearly took
to heart Schiller’s ideas, expressed in his essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,
that a modern poet who seeks to convey moral ideals through his art must do so
through a synthesis of classical form and idealistic moral content, and that the genre
of the idyll is particularly well suited for this synthesis.33 Thus, the first act of Wil-
helm Tell is cast in idyllic terms (Schiller 2008, 388–414). The epilogue to War and
Peace is also idyllic insofar as it describes Pierre’s and Natasha’s happy family life
in a pastoral setting. However, Pierre’s political activity that takes place outside of
this idyllic world, in Petersburg, threatens to ruin this happiness. Having attained
complete fulfillment in his personal life, Pierre is driven to higher goals, and his wife
who may not understand political theory or the meaning of the term Tugendbund is
ready to share his fate wherever it takes him.
But what did the author, as a budding pacifist and champion of non-violent resist-
ance to authority, think about Pierre’s willingness to openly set himself against the
government and, if necessary, use force? It is telling that in response to Natasha’s
question whether Platon Karataev would have approved of Pierre’s and his new
friends’ projects, he answers negatively. Platon would have approved only of their
family life, because he always “wanted to see everywhere beauty, happiness and
peace” (blagoobrazie, schast’e, spokoistvie), says Pierre (Tolstoy 12: 293). Tolstoy,
the philosopher, would have liked to end his narrative on this note. However, as a
historian he had to hint at his heroes’ coming misfortune (although he chose not to
describe Pierre’s humiliating experiences in prison and katorga at greater length).
Furthermore, Tolstoy must have been troubled by a clash between the ideal repre-
sented by Platon and the necessity to engage in violent action to realize this ideal.
He wrapped up his work by adding one more, properly philosophical epilogue,
where he tried to spell his understanding of history as a product of organic forces,
which inevitably entails violence, and as a nexus of freedom and necessity. Much
criticized by Tolstoy’s contemporaries, this epilogue was surely not meant as a guide

33
I discuss Schiller’s and Tolstoy’s experimentations with the modern idyll in another recent article
(Shtainer 2018).

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 L. Steiner

for the interpreters of his novel, but rather a stepping-stone to another phase in Tol-
stoy’s philosophical career.

Revolutionaries in Tolstoy’s late works

Tolstoy’s drafts show that he planned to return to the history of the Decembrists dur-
ing his so-called “conversion” crisis. Interestingly, as demonstrated by M.A. Tsiav-
lovsky’s analysis of Tolstoy’s drafts from 1877, Tolstoy planned to move the begin-
ning of the story to the 1830s. The new novel was to be set in Irkutsk or Samara
where his Decembrist hero would end up after the uprising and trial. Here he was
supposed to encounter some of his former peasants who were also exiled in Siberia
for some petty crime.34 Thus a former master and his peasants would have had a
chance to meet on an equal footing. This plan shows Tolstoy’s continual preoccu-
pation with the theme of cross-class communication and master–slave dialectics in
Russian society.
The writer’s attempts to reform society and simplify his own life in order to
become closer to the people were part and parcel of his ongoing struggle to discover
a proper way to continue the Decembrists plot. The polysemy of the English word
“plot” suits my rhetorical purposes here well, because I want to argue that Tolstoy,
just like Herzen, saw himself as a legatee of the Decembrists, and his life story as
a sequel to their stories (or Vitae). Given that the boundary between “poetry” and
“life” was always porous in Tolstoy’s case, it would not be too far-fetched to assume
that the writer’s own conversion (or, as some more skeptically-minded critics have
argued, a rather histrionic self-dramatisation as a repentant former slaveowner seek-
ing salvation) was also a continuation of the Decembrist story. It was inspired by the
examples of those Decembrists who underwent a conversion and “simplification”
(oproschenie). As I have mentioned earlier, it was the exiled Decembrists’ humil-
ity that made a particularly deep impression on Ogaryov, whose memoir about the
Decembrists was one of the first sources Tolstoy read when he delved into their
history. Then Tolstoy encountered Volkonsky who impressed him with his unique
personal style, which combined the simplicity of a peasant with the dignified ele-
gance of a Rurikovide. These examples, rather than the young populists’ and “real-
ists”’ calls to shed the trappings of higher culture, would have compelled Tolstoy to
reform his way of life.
Critical as he was of the Decembrists’ tactics, he never ceased to admire their
moral and psychological fortitude. In fact, he never seemed to have taken his
research into the history of the Decembrist movement beyond this purely psy-
chological stage. Thus, there is little evidence that Tolstoy ever gave any serious
attention to the political and economic programs developed by the theoreticians

34
Tsiavlovsky also suggests that this new story was to be merged with the earlier draft featuring the
Decembrist Labazov and his wife in 1856, upon their return to Russia (Tolstoy 17: 469–585, 472).

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

of the Decembrist movement.35 This is, however, understandable, given that Tol-
stoy, unlike Herzen, never became a real political philosopher, but remained an art-
ist and a moralist. Despite his attempts to acquaint himself with political economy,
what drew Tolstoy’s attention to the rapidly growing class of revolutionaries was
their energy and enthusiasm. As the Russian revolutionary movement continued
to unfold, what interested Tolstoy the most was spiritual purity and sincerity (or
lack thereof) of those who gave their lives to the fight for social justice. As can be
glimpsed, for example, from The Divine and the Human, Tolstoy, notwithstanding
his pacifism, was ready to understand and forgive those revolutionaries who joined
terrorist groups out of naivety and misguided sentiment for humanity. Only those
who joined such movements out of vanity stood indicted.36
The most sympathetic portrayals of the revolutionaries in Tolstoy’s work are
found in his last major novel, The Resurrection (1899). In fact, the most edifying
images in this novel are those of two revolutionaries, Vladimir Simonson and Maria
Pavlovna, both of whom are depicted as superior individuals who have never com-
mitted any violent deeds. Simonson, an utterly self-controlled, rational man who
lives a philosophical life, gets arrested for his propaganda of non-violence, whereas
Maria Pavlovna goes to prison after she assumes responsibility for a terrorist act
committed by a comrade. Their suffering is an example of martyrdom, which makes
a strong impression on both Katiusha Maslova and her former seducer, Prince Nekh-
liudov. The latter two are the co-protagonists in this sentimental drama, whose plot
echoes eighteenth-century moralist tales and novels.37 Seduced and abandoned
by Nekhliudov, a young Katiusha is thrown out of the house of the two old ladies
(Nekhliudov’s aunts) where she was raised in an awkward role of a semi-ward and
semi-servant. She becomes a prostitute and is one day arrested and charged with a
murder she never committed. Serving as a member of the jury on her trial, Nekh-
liudov recognizes her, experiences unbearable guilt and decides to share Katiusha’s
fate.
However, when he arrives in Siberia, he discovers that Katiusha does not want to
accept his sacrifice. She has now come to know people whose souls are greater than
Nekhliudov’s and is driven by a higher, Platonic eros. Simonson, who claims that his

35
Many of these documents were made available by Herzen. Another major Decembrist document was
a book by Nikolai Turgenev (2001) La Russie et les Russes. Written and published in the West, this work
by a notable political economist and one of the masterminds of the Decembrist movement was a major
source of information about Russia in the West.
36
For an illuminating discussion of this story see Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya, “Poetics of Brother-
hood: Organic and Mechanistic Narrative in Late Tolstoi.” (Kliger and Zakariya 2011).
37
Young Tolstoy’s interest in sentimentalism has been thoroughly discussed by Tolstoy scholars starting
with Eikhenbaum (1968). However, Tolstoy’s return to sentimentalist conventions in The Resurrection is
yet to be explored by the critics. My hypothesis is that this return might have to do with Tolstoy’s return
to the theme of the aristocrat’s search of a more authentic self through recognition of his moral guilt and
self-abasement. That this moral quest takes him to Siberia is a clear give away of Nekhliudov’s affinity
with the earlier guilt-ridden, spiritually active princes in Tolstoy’s fiction, including his Decembrist char-
acters. That these themes were not just a result of Tolstoy’s newly awakened interest in Dostoevsky’s life
and work (in the wake off his arch-rival’s death) but have deep roots in Tolstoy’s own fiction should have
become clear from my essay.

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 L. Steiner

feelings for Katiusha are purely Platonic, offers to marry her so that he could provide
her with companionship during the rest of her exile. Katiusha accepts his proposal,
which helps her free herself from Nekhliudov (to whom she is still attracted). Seek-
ing a new life, Katiusha wants to leave sexual love behind and hopes that Simon-
son’s love is indeed Platonic. The only person who has some doubts about the purity
of Simonson’s feeling is Maria Pavlovna. This beautiful general’s daughter who
despises sexuality as something base and impure and lives solely in order to serve
her lofty altruistic ideals, Maria Pavlovna embodies late Tolstoy’s ascetic vision of
kalokagathia. Unlike the Decembrist, who finds both pleasure and eudaimonia in
his happy family life, Maria Pavlovna has to rise above all sensual urges in order to
emanate a special moral authority that imprints itself even on the hardened souls of
prison guards (Tolstoy 32: 363–70).
Nekhliudov fails to enter the community of these “beautiful souls.” Rejected by
Katiusha and recognizing that he has become superfluous, he feels dejected, but nev-
ertheless lingers on and continues to look for a new path. One day, while crossing
a broad Siberian river on a raft he encounters a mysterious old man who does not
cross himself when he hears church bells ring. When questioned about his beliefs,
he says that he does not know God and believes only in himself. When asked about
his name, he calls himself simply a Man (Chelovek) (Tolstoy 32: 417). Shortly after-
wards Nekhliudov sees this odd person in prison. The old man gets thrown there
after he refuses to identify himself and loudly assaults police calling them servants
of the Antichrist. The drama with Katiusha now being over, Nekhliudov is in search
of a new moral anchor. As he helps an English missionary to distribute the New Tes-
tament among the prisoners, Nekhliudov gets inspired to reread the book he had not
opened since adolescence. The novel ends at the moment when Nekhliudov senses
that he is on the threshold of a new life. But what does this really mean in Tolstoy’s
world? Will Nekhliudov, like the old man he had just encountered (who is certainly
one of Tolstoy’s many literary alter-egos), turn into a vagabond and government
critic? Into a champion of non-resistance? Into a humble worker? Like many stories
by Tolstoy, Nekhliudov’s ends with a moment of illumination that signals an identity
crisis in which old values will be relinquished and a decision to find better, higher
values will be made. This is not a mystical, but a philosophical moment. For having
rejected the external trappings of authority, the writer has also rejected all forms of
foundationalism. Therefore, most of his conversion tales remain open-ended. Tol-
stoy’s spiritual heroes are destined to be eternal questers and seekers after the truth.
Theirs is a non-violent path of non-compliance with all forms of evil—a path that
leads to extreme individualism and anarchism.
We are reminded once again of Herzen’s portrait of Robert Owen, another eccen-
tric old man whose image must have remained imprinted in Tolstoy’s imagination
for many decades. Enthused by Herzen’s glorification of the English anarchist, Tol-
stoy immediately proceeded to assert his intellectual independence: first by claim-
ing that he was brave and smart enough to devise his own philosophy of history,
and then by making good on his word and actually writing an extremely ambitious
and idiosyncratic book, War and Peace. Indeed, Tolstoy’s reply to Herzen was not
confined to a couple of letters he sent from Brussels. His book and, in fact, his entire
career was an answer to Herzen who had openly challenged the gifted 32-year old

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A revolutionary as a “beautiful soul”: Lev Tolstoy’s path to…

count to live up to the heroic legacy of the Decembrists by continuing their project
of emancipating, enlightening and raising the profile of their vast but underdevel-
oped country. But the path Tolstoy took kept him aloof from political societies or
parties and from professional associations. He was brave enough to improvise and
work across different fields and genres in ways that continue to baffle scholars. In
this way he not only asserted his freedom of thought, but also urged his readers to
open their minds and engage in independent thinking and judgment. I would claim
that in the long run this strategy proved to be more far-sighted than the doctrinaire
radicalism of his contemporaries, which managed to bring some social improve-
ment at a dramatically high cost. Far from being merely a mirror which reflected
the revolutionary tide that swept contemporary Russia, Tolstoy was a revolutionary
committed to another model: one of cultural and intellectual subversion and gradual
eradication of tyranny. He was arguably the most autonomous and uncompromising
revolutionary Russia has ever produced—one whose impact can be appreciated only
in longue durée.

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