3 Religious and political views of l Tolstoy. Socio-political views of L.N.

In the early 1960s, Tolstoy threw himself into public work. Welcoming the reform of 1861, he becomes a "world mediator" and defends the interests of the peasants in the course of drawing up "statutory letters" - "amicable" agreements between peasants and landlords on the delimitation of their lands. Tolstoy is fond of pedagogical activity, twice travels abroad to study the development of public education in Western Europe. He starts public schools in Yasnaya Polyana and its environs, publishes a special pedagogical journal. “I feel satisfied and happy as never before,” Tolstoy writes, “and only because I work from morning to evening, and the work is the very one that I love.” However, the consistent defense of peasant interests causes extreme displeasure of the Tula nobility. Tolstoy is threatened with reprisals, they complain about him to the authorities, they demand to be removed from mediation cases. Tolstoy persists, ardently and skillfully defends the truth, sparing no effort and no sparing the vanity of his opponents. Then his enemies scribble a secret denunciation of the Yasnaya Polyana student teachers, attracted by the writer to work at the school. The denunciation speaks of the revolutionary moods of young people and even expresses the idea of ​​the existence of an underground printing house in Yasnaya Polyana. Taking advantage of Tolstoy's temporary absence, the police "raid" his family nest. In search of a printing press and a font, she turns the entire Yasnaya Polyana house and its environs upside down. Outraged Tolstoy addresses a letter to Alexander II. The search caused a deep insult to his personal honor and at once crossed out many years of work in organizing public schools. "There will be no school, the people laugh, the nobles triumph, and we, willy-nilly, at every bell, think that we are going to lead somewhere. I have pistols loaded in my room, and I am waiting for the minute when all this will be resolved by something" - informs Tolstoy to his relative in St. Petersburg. Alexander II did not honor the count with a personal answer, but through the governor of Tula he asked me to tell him that "His Majesty is pleased that the aforementioned measure should not have any consequences for Count Tolstoy proper." However, the “mentioned measure” called into question Tolstoy’s dear convictions about the unity of the nobility with the people in the course of the practical implementation of the reforms of 1861. He dreamed of national peace, of harmony between the people's interests and the interests of the masters. It seemed that this ideal was so close, so understandable, and the ways to achieve it were so obvious and simple to implement. .. And suddenly, instead of the expected peace and harmony, coarse and cruel discord invades Tolstoy's life.

Is such a reconciliation possible at all, are its hopes not utopian? Tolstoy recalled the besieged Sevastopol in December 1854 and convinced himself once again that it was possible: after all, then the Sevastopol garrison really represented a world of officers, sailors and soldiers united into one whole. (*101) And the Decembrists, who gave their lives for the interests of the people, and the Patriotic War of 1812 ...

Creative history of "War and Peace"

This is how the idea of ​​a big novel about a Decembrist returning from exile in 1856 as an old white as a harrier and "trying on his strict and somewhat ideal view of the new Russia" arose. Tolstoy sits down desk and starts writing. Her success is favored by happy family circumstances. After the shock just experienced, fate sends deep and strong love to Tolstoy. In 1862, he marries the daughter of a famous Moscow doctor, Sofya Andreevna Bers. “I am now a writer with all the strength of my soul, and I write and think as I have never written and thought before.” The idea of ​​the novel about the Decembrist grows, moves and changes: “Involuntarily, I moved from the present to 1825, the era of delusions and misfortunes of my hero, and left what I had begun. But even in 1825 my hero was already mature, family man. In order to understand him, I had to go back to his youth, and his youth coincided with the glorious era for Russia in 1812. Another time I gave up what I had begun and began to write from the time of 1812, whose smell and sound are still audible and dear to us... , with equal interest to me, and young and old people, and men and women of that time. The third time I came back out of a feeling that might seem strange... I felt ashamed to write about our triumph in the fight against Bonaparte France without describing our failures and our shame... If the reason for our triumph was not accidental, but lay in the essence of the character of the Russian people and troops, then this character should have been expressed even more clearly in an era of failures and defeats. So, having returned from 1856 to 1805, from now on I intend to lead not one, but many of my heroines and heroes through the historical events of 1805, 1807, 1825 and 1856. "Why, delving more and more into the thickness of time, Tolstoy finally stopped at 1805. The year of Russian failures, the year of the defeat of our troops in the fight against Napoleonic France near Austerlitz echoed in Tolstoy's mind with "our shame" and the defeat in the Crimean War, with the surrender of Sevastopol in August 1855. Plunging into the past , the idea of ​​"War and Peace" was approaching the present. Pondering the reasons for the failures of the peasant reform, Tolstoy was looking for more sure roads leading to the unity of the nobles with the people. The writer was interested not only in the result of a nationwide "peace" in the Patriotic War, but and the complex, dramatic path to it from the failures of 1805 to the triumph and Russian glory of 1812. Tolstoy highlighted the present with history, turning to the past, his artistic thought predicted the future her; in history, national and universal values ​​were revealed, the meaning of which is modern in all epochs and all times. As the work on War and Peace progressed, the time frame of the work was somewhat compressed. The action stopped in 1824, at the first secret societies of the Decembrists.

Work on "War and Peace" lasted six years (1863-1869). Tolstoy did not exaggerate when he wrote: “Wherever historical figures speak and act in my novel, I did not invent, but used materials from which, during my work, a whole library of books was formed, the titles of which I do not find it necessary to write out here, but to which I can always refer. These were the historical works of Russian and French scientists, memoirs of contemporaries, participants in the Patriotic War, biographies of historical figures, documents of that era, historical novels of predecessors. Tolstoy was helped a lot by family memories and legends about the participation in the war of 1812 of the counts Tolstoy, the princes Volkonsky and Gorchakov. The writer talked with veterans, met with the Decembrists who returned from Siberia in 1856, and traveled to the Borodino field.

"War and Peace" as an epic novel

The work, which, according to Tolstoy himself, was the result of a "crazy author's effort," saw the light of day on the pages of the Russky Vestnik magazine in 1868-1869. The success of "War and Peace", according to the memoirs of contemporaries, was extraordinary. The Russian critic N. N. Strakhov wrote: “In such great works as War and Peace, the true essence and importance of art is most clearly revealed. Therefore, War and Peace is also an excellent touchstone of any critical and aesthetic understanding, and together , and a cruel stumbling block for all stupidity and all impudence. It seems easy to understand that not "War and Peace" will be valued by your words and opinions, but you will be judged by what you say about "War and Peace". Soon Tolstoy's book was translated into European languages.

The classic of French literature G. Flaubert, having met her, wrote to Turgenev: "Thank you for making me read Tolstoy's novel. This is first-class. What a painter and what a psychologist! .. It seems to me that sometimes there is something Shakespearean in it." Later, the French writer Romain Rolland in his book "The Life of Tolstoy" saw in "War and Peace" "the most extensive epic of our time, the modern Iliad." "This is really an unheard of phenomenon," N. N. Strakhov noted, "an epic in modern art forms" "Let's note that Russian and Western European masters and connoisseurs of literature unanimously speak about the unusual nature of the War and Peace genre. They feel that Tolstoy's work does not fit into the usual forms and boundaries of the classical European novel. Tolstoy himself understood this. In the afterword to "War and Peace" he wrote: "What is War and Peace? This is not a novel, still less a poem, still less a historical chronicle. "War and Peace" is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed." What distinguishes "War and Peace" from the classic novel? and the world", compared Tolstoy's work with Stendhal's novel "The Parma Monastery". He compared the behavior of Stendhal's hero Fabrizio in the battle of Waterloo with the well-being of Tolstoy's Nikolai Rostov in the battle of Austerlitz: "What a great moral difference between two characters and two concepts of war! Fabrizio has only a fascination with the outward splendor of war, a simple curiosity for glory. After we went through a number of skillfully shown episodes together with him, we involuntarily come to the conclusion: how, is this Waterloo, that's all? Is that Napoleon, that's all? When we follow Rostov near Austerlitz, together with him we experience a poignant feeling of enormous national disappointment, we share his excitement ... For the Western European reader, it was not by chance that War and Peace seemed to be a revival of the ancient heroic epic, the modern Iliad. After all, attempts by the great writers of France Balzac and Zola to implement large-scale epic plans inexorably led them to create a series of novels.Balzac divided the "Human Comedy" into three parts: "Etudes on Morals", "Philosophical Studies", "Analytical Studies". In turn, " Etudes (* 104) on manners" were divided into "Scenes of private, provincial, Parisian, political and rural life." Zola's "Rougon-Macquarts" consist of twenty novels that successively recreate pictures of life from different, isolated from each other spheres of French society: a war novel, a novel about art, a novel about the judicial world, a worker's novel, a novel from high society. Society here resembles a honeycomb, consisting of many cells isolated from each other: and now the writer draws one cell after another. Each of these cells is assigned a separate novel. The connections between these self-contained novels are quite artificial and arbitrary. Both The Human Comedy and Rougon-Macquarts recreate a picture of a world in which the whole has disintegrated into many tiny particles. The heroes of the novels of Balzac and Zola are "private" people: their horizons do not go beyond the narrow circle of life to which they belong.

Otherwise, Tolstoy. Let us pay attention to the state of mind of Pierre, who was leaving the Moscow world to participate in the decisive battle near Moscow: “He now experienced a pleasant feeling of consciousness that everything that makes up the happiness of people, the convenience of life, wealth, even life itself, is nonsense, which it’s nice to throw it away in comparison with something ... "In a tragic hour for Russia, Pierre realizes the class limitations of the life of secular society. This life in his mind suddenly loses its value, and Pierre discards it, peering with a new look at another one - at the life of soldiers, militias. He understands the hidden meaning of the enthusiasm that reigns in the troops, and approvingly nods his head in response to the words of a soldier: "They want to pile on all the people, one word - Moscow." Gradually, Pierre himself enters into this common life "with all the people", with the whole "world", experiencing an acute desire "to be like them", like ordinary soldiers. And then, in captivity, he will become related in soul with the wise Russian peasant, Platon Karataev, and will gladly feel like a man who owns the whole world. "Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the departing, playing stars. "And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! thought Pierre. “And they caught all this and put it in a booth fenced with boards!” He smiled and went to bed with his comrades. "Fences", "cells", "galleries", which in the European novel strictly separate one sphere of life from another, collapse in the mind of Pierre Bezukhov, revealing all their conventionality and relativity. In the same way, a person (*105) in Tolstoy's epic novel is not tightly attached to his estate, to the environment, is not closed in his own inner world, is open to accepting the fullness of being.

The interest of Tolstoy as a writer is focused not only on the depiction of individual human characters, but also on their connections with each other in mobile and interconnected worlds. Tolstoy himself, sensing a certain similarity between "War and Peace" and the heroic epic of the past, at the same time insisted on a fundamental difference: "The ancients left us samples of heroic poems in which heroes constitute the entire interest of history, and we still cannot get used to that that for our human time this kind of history makes no sense." “No matter how we understand the heroic life,” N.N. Strakhov commented on these words of Tolstoy, “it is necessary to determine the attitude of ordinary life to it, and this is even the main thing. What is an ordinary person - in comparison with a hero? What is a private man in relation to history?" In other words, Tolstoy is interested not only in the result of the manifestation of the heroic in the actions and characters of people, but also in the mysterious process of his birth in Everyday life, those deep, hidden from a superficial glance, the roots that feed it. Tolstoy decisively destroys the traditional division of life into "private" and "historical". He has Nikolai Rostov, playing cards with Dolokhov, "praying to God, as he prayed on the battlefield on the Amstetten bridge", and in the battle near Ostrovnaya he gallops "across the disordered ranks of the French dragoons" "with the feeling with which he rushed across the wolf" . So in everyday life, Rostov experiences feelings similar to those that overcame him in the first historical battle, and in the battle near Ostrovnaya, his military spirit nourishes and maintains a hunting instinct born in the amusements of peaceful life. The mortally wounded Prince Andrei in a heroic moment "remembered Natasha the way he saw her for the first time at the ball of 1810, with a thin neck and thin arms, with a frightened, happy face ready for delight, and love and tenderness for her, even more alive and stronger than ever woke up in his soul. All the fullness of the impressions of peaceful life not only does not leave Tolstoy's heroes in historical circumstances, but comes to life with even greater force, resurrects in their souls. (*106) Relying on these peaceful values ​​of life spiritually strengthens Andrei Bolkonsky and Nikolai Rostov, is the source of their courage and strength. Not all of Tolstoy's contemporaries realized the depth of the discovery he made in War and Peace. The habit of a clear division of life into "private" and "historical", the habit of seeing in one of them a "low", "prosaic", and in the other - a "high" and "poetic" genre, had an effect. P. A. Vyazemsky, who himself, like Pierre Bezukhov, was a civilian and participated in the Battle of Borodino, wrote about War and Peace in the article "Memoirs of 1812": "Let's start with the fact that in the mentioned book it is difficult to solve and even guess where the story ends and where the novel begins, and vice versa. This interweaving, or rather confusing history and novel, no doubt harms the first and finally, before the court of sound and impartial criticism, does not elevate the true dignity of the latter, that is, the novel " . P. V. Annenkov believed that the interweaving of private destinies and history in "War and Peace" does not allow the "wheel of the romantic machine" to move properly.

And even Russian democratic writers, represented by D. D. Minaev, parodying this feature of War and Peace, published such verses:

Bonaparte threatened us severely,
And we were exemplary
Fell in love with the young ladies of Rostov,
They drove them crazy...

In the attitude of Tolstoy's contemporaries "the inertia of perceiving the private as something irresistibly different compared to the historical," notes the researcher of "War and Peace" Ya. S. Bilinkis. He showed that historical life is only a part of that vast continent which we call human life. "Life in between real life people with their own essential interests of health, illness, work, recreation, with their own interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, passions, went on, as always, independently and outside of political proximity or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte, and outside all possible transformations," writes Tolstoy.

In essence, he decisively and abruptly changes the usual (*107) angle of view of history. If his contemporaries asserted the primacy of the historical over the private and looked down on private life, then the author of War and Peace looks at history from the bottom up, believing that the peaceful everyday life of people, firstly, is wider and richer than historical life, and secondly, secondly, it is the fundamental principle, the soil from which historical life grows and from which it feeds. A. A. Fet astutely noted that Tolstoy considers a historical event "from a shirt, that is, from a shirt that is closer to the body." And now, under Borodino, at this decisive hour for Russia, on the Raevsky battery, where Pierre ends up, one feels "common to all, as it were, a family revival." When the feeling of "unfriendly bewilderment" towards Pierre was over among the soldiers, "these soldiers immediately mentally accepted Pierre into their family, appropriated and gave him a nickname. "Our master" they called him and affectionately laughed about him among themselves.

Tolstoy infinitely expands the very understanding of the historical, including in it the fullness of the "private" life of people. He achieves, in the words of the French critic Melchior Vogüe, "the only combination of a great epic trend with endless small analysis." History comes alive in Tolstoy everywhere, in any ordinary, "private", "ordinary" person of his time, it manifests itself in the nature of the connection between people. The situation of national disunity and disunity will affect, for example, in 1805 both the defeat of the Russian troops in the battle of Austerlitz, and the unsuccessful marriage of Pierre to the predatory secular beauty Helen, and the feeling of loss, loss of the meaning of life, which the main characters of the novel experience during this period. And vice versa, the year 1812 in the history of Russia will give a vivid sense of national unity, the core of which will be the life of the people. The "peace" that arises during the Patriotic War will bring Natasha and Prince Andrei together again. Necessity makes its way through the seeming chance of this meeting. Russian life in 1812 gave Andrei and Natasha that new level of humanity on which this meeting turned out to be possible. If Natasha had not had a patriotic feeling, if her loving attitude towards people from her family had not spread to the whole Russian world, she would not have committed a decisive act, she would not have convinced her parents to remove household belongings from the cart and give them to the wounded.

Composition "War and Peace"

"War and Peace" is remembered by the reader as a chain of vivid life pictures: hunting and Christmas time, Natasha's first ball, a moonlit night in Otradnoye, Natasha's dance at her uncle's estate, Shengraben, Austerlitz and Borodino battles, the death of Petya Rostov ... These "incomparable pictures of life" certainly emerge in the mind when we try to comprehend "War and Peace". Tolstoy the narrator is not in a hurry, he does not try to reduce the diversity of life to any one result. On the contrary, he wants the readers of his epic novel to learn "to love life in its countless, never exhausted manifestations." But for all their autonomy, the "pictures of life" are linked into a single artistic canvas. Behind them one can feel the breath of the whole, some kind of internal commonality connects them. The nature of this connection is different than in the classic novel, where everything is united through action, in which the characters participate. Tolstoy has romantic connections, but they are secondary, they are assigned a service role. The modern researcher of "War and Peace" S. G. Bocharov notes: "From the point of view of the poetics of the novel, the action in "War and Peace" is very unfocused and uncollected. It diverges in different directions, develops in parallel lines; , lies in the situation, the main situation human life which Tolstoy reveals in its most varied manifestations. Literary critic S. G. Bocharov defines it as a “crisis situation”, “disintegration of the old conditions of life”, during which a person is freed from everything random, superficial, not essential and acquires the ability to keenly feel the fundamental foundations of life, such values ​​\u200b\u200bthat live forever and protect the integrity of national existence. These values, the custodian of which are the people and the part of the Russian nobility close to it, Tolstoy sees in the spirit of "simplicity, goodness and truth." They awaken in the heroes of "War" and peace" whenever their life leaves its usual shores and threatens them with death or spiritual catastrophe. They also appear in the peaceful life of those noble families whose lifestyle is close to the people. They contain the "people's thought" dear to Tolstoy " , which constitutes the soul of his epic novel and reduces to unity the manifestations of being that are far from each other.

Let us recall how Nikolai Rostov, who returned on vacation from his regiment, allowed himself to relax, thoughtlessly surrender to the temptations of secular life and lose a significant part of the family fortune at Dolokhov's cards. He returns home completely lost, "thrown into the abyss" of terrible misfortune. It is strange for him to see the happy, smiling faces of his relatives, to hear the laughter and cheerful voices of young people. "They have everything the same! They don't know anything! Where should I go?" Nikolay thinks. But then Natasha begins to sing, and suddenly, just depressed and confused, Nikolai Rostov experiences an unusual, joyful upsurge of all his spiritual strength: “What is this?” thought Nikolai, hearing her voice and opening his eyes wide. “What happened to her? How does she sing today? he thought. And suddenly the whole world concentrated for him in anticipation of the next note, the next phrase, and everything in the world became divided into three tempos ... "Oh, our stupid life!" thought Nikolai. "All this, and misfortune, and money, and Dolokhov , and malice, and honor - all this is nonsense ... but here it is - the real one ... "Nikolai always had these" Rostov "and" Russian "features of talent, spiritual breadth and generosity, which his sister Natasha is fully endowed with. But Nikolai, as a rule, suppressed them in himself, preferring to live in a regiment and obey the conditional rules of noble honor. However, in a moment of shock, external conventions fell from the soul of Rostov, like an unnecessary husk, and the innermost depth of the Rostov breed was exposed, the ability to live, obeying the inner sense of simplicity, goodness and truth. But after all, the feeling experienced by Nikolai Rostov during this personal upheaval is akin to what Pierre Bezukhoye experienced when setting off for the Borodino field - "a pleasant feeling of consciousness that everything that makes up people's happiness, the conveniences of life, wealth, even life itself , there is nonsense that is pleasant to discard in comparison with something ... "Losing at cards and the Battle of Borodino ... It would seem that there could be something in common between these different spheres of being, incommensurable in scale? But Tolstoy is true to himself, he does not separate history from everyday life. “According to Tolstoy, there is a single life of people, its simple and general content, a situation that is fundamental to it, which can be revealed as deeply in an everyday and family event as in an event that is called historical,” remarks S. G. Bocharov .

And now we see how the fire in Smolensk illuminates "the lively joyful and exhausted faces of the people." The source of this "joy" is clearly seen in the behavior of the merchant Ferapontov. In a moment of crisis for Russia, the merchant forgets about the purpose of his daily life, about wealth, about hoarding. This “nonsense” is now “pleasant to put aside” for him in comparison with that general patriotic feeling that the merchant has in common with all Russian people: “Take everything, guys! Moscow is experiencing the same thing on the eve of its surrender to the enemy: “It was felt that everything should suddenly break and change ... Moscow involuntarily continued its ordinary life, although it knew that the time of death was near, when all those conditional relationships of life that were used to would break submit." The patriotic act of Natasha Rostova, echoing the actions of the merchant Ferapontov in Smolensk, is the affirmation of new relations between people freed from all conditional and estate in the face of a national danger. It is noteworthy that this possibility of spiritual unification on new democratic foundations is preserved by Tolstoy's peaceful life of the Rostov family. The picture of hunting in "War and Peace" as in a drop of water reflects the main conflict situation of the epic novel. It would seem that hunting is just entertainment, a game, an idle occupation of barchuks. But under Tolstoy's pen, this "game" takes on a different meaning. Hunting is also a break with the usual, everyday and established, where people are often divided, where there is no goal that unites and inspires everyone. In everyday life, Count Ilya Andreevich Rostov is always a master, and his serf Danilo is always an obedient servant of his master. But the passion for hunting unites them with each other, and the very ineradicability of this passion in the souls of people makes us look at it seriously. Patriotic war will also shift the values ​​of life. The sovereign, who turned out to be a bad commander, will be forced to leave the army, and Kutuzov, unloved by the king, but pleasing to the people, will replace him. The war will reveal the human and state failure of the top. The real master of the situation in the country will be the people, and the truly creative force of history will be the people's power.

"People" and "crowd", Napoleon and Kutuzov

Tolstoy argues in "War and Peace" with the cult of an outstanding historical personality widespread in Russia and abroad. This cult relied heavily on the teachings German philosopher Hegel. According to Hegel, the closest conductors of the World Reason, which determines the fate of peoples and states, are great people who are the first to guess what is given to understand only to them and is not given to understand the human mass, the passive material of history. Great people according to Hegel are always ahead of their time, and therefore they turn out to be brilliant loners, forced to despotically subjugate the inert and inert majority to themselves. Tolstoy sees in such a teaching something godlessly inhuman, fundamentally contrary to the Russian moral ideal. Tolstoy does not have an exceptional personality, but the life of the people as a whole turns out to be the most sensitive organism that responds to the hidden meaning of the historical movement. The vocation of a great man lies in the ability to listen to the will of the majority, to the "collective subject" of history, to the life of the people. Tolstoy is alien to the Hegelian elevation of "great personalities" above the masses, and Napoleon in his eyes is an individualist and ambitious man, brought to the surface of historical life by dark forces that temporarily took possession of the consciousness of the French people. Napoleon is a toy in the hands of these dark forces, and Tolstoy denies him greatness because "there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth." In the artistic world of the epic novel, two states of common life collide and argue with each other: the people as an integral unity, held together by the moral traditions of life in the "world", and the human crowd, which has half lost its human appearance, possessed by aggressive, animal instincts. Such a crowd in the novel is the secular mob, led by Prince Vasily Kuragin. People from the lower classes also turn into a crowd in the episode of the brutal reprisal against Vereshchagin. In an era of revolutionary upheavals, a significant part of the French people find themselves in the same militant-minded crowd.

The people, according to Tolstoy, turns into a crowd and loses a sense of "simplicity, goodness and truth" when it is deprived of historical memory, and hence all cultural, moral traditions that have been developed over thousands of years of its history. “In order for the peoples of the West to be able to make that militant movement to Moscow, which they made, it was necessary: ​​1) that they should be formed into a militant group of such a size that would be able to endure a clash with the militant group of the East; 2) that they renounce all established traditions and habits, and 3) so that, in making their warlike movement, they should have at their head a man who, both for himself and for them, could justify the deceptions, robberies and murders that accompanied this movement. And as the people decays and a crowd that has lost its moral traditions is formed, "that person is being prepared who must stand at the head of the future movement and bear all the responsibility of those who have to be accomplished." The crowd needs "a man without convictions, without habits, without traditions, without a name, not even a Frenchman." And so he "moves forward between all the parties that are exciting France and, without sticking to any of them, is brought to a conspicuous place." In War and Peace, Tolstoy poeticizes the people as an integral spiritual unity of people, based on strong, age-old cultural traditions, and mercilessly denounces the crowd, whose unity rests on aggressive, individualistic instincts. The man who leads the crowd loses Tolstoy's right to consider himself a hero. The greatness of a person is determined by the depth of his connections with the organic life of the people.

In the epic novel "War and Peace" Tolstoy gives a universal Russian formula for the heroic. He creates two symbolic characters, between which all the rest are located in different proximity to one or another pole. At one extreme is the classically vain Napoleon, and at the other, the classically democratic Kutuzov. These two heroes represent, respectively, the element of individualistic isolation ("war") and the spiritual values ​​of "peace", or the unity of people. The "simple, modest and therefore truly majestic figure" of Kutuzov does not fit "into that deceitful form of a European hero who supposedly controls people that history has come up with." In the literature on "War and Peace" for a long time there was an opinion that Tolstoy made Kutuzov a "wise fatalist", generally denying the role of the individual in history. Such a view is based on the absolutization of individual statements of the writer, extracted from the artistic context of the epic novel and considered outside the connections in which they are found there. Tolstoy writes, for example, about Kutuzov: “With many years of military experience, he knew ... that the fate of the battle is decided not by the orders of the commander in chief, not by the place on which the troops stand, not by the number of guns and killed people, but by that elusive force called the spirit of the army .. ." If these words are interpreted literally, one might really think that the author denies the role of military science and military technology. But is it reasonable to attribute such a denial to an artillery officer, a participant in the defense of Sevastopol? Is this atypical method of paradoxical sharpening of thoughts in a work of art with its own polemical super-task? It is important for Tolstoy to show that the neglect of the generals, and after them of the official historians morale troops, their inattention to the smallest "differentials" of history, to ordinary soldiers, on whose collective efforts the result of the battle depends, gives rise to deadly formalism or adventurism both in the management of military operations and in understanding their outcome by future historians. Tolstoy's work, which absorbed the democratic spirit of the era of the 60s, is polemically sharpened against historical figures who are guided in their decisions by uncontrolled arbitrariness. The pathos of Tolstoy's philosophy of history is democratic to a utopian maximum. “As long as the stories of individuals are written, ... and not the history of all, without a single exception of all people taking part in the event, there is no way to describe the movement of mankind without the concept of the force that makes people direct their activities towards the same goal. This force turns out to be an outstanding historical personality, to whom superhuman abilities are attributed and whose willfulness Tolstoy resolutely denies. In order to study not imaginary, but genuine laws of history, he believes, one must completely change the object of observation, leave alone kings, ministers, generals, and study homogeneous, infinitesimal elements that guide the masses.

It is known that Tolstoy represented a living human character in the form of a fraction, in the numerator of which were the moral qualities of the individual, and in the denominator of her self-esteem. The higher the denominator, the smaller the fraction, and vice versa. In order to become more perfect, morally purer, a person must constantly increase, increase the numerator and shorten the denominator in every possible way. The best heroes of "War and Peace" join the life in the world and "peace", outliving selfish motives in consciousness and behavior. The value of the human personality in Tolstoy's book is determined by the completeness of a person's ties with the outside world, his closeness to the people, the depth of "growing" into common life. It only seems that Kutuzov in Tolstoy's epic novel is a passive person. Yes, Kutuzov dozes off at military councils near Austerlitz and in Fili, and during the battle of Borodino he approves or condemns what is being done without his participation. But in all these cases, Kutuzov's external passivity is a form of manifestation of his wise human activity. Kutuzov's inertia is a challenge to those public figures who imagine themselves to be characters in a heroic (* 114) poem and imagine that their arbitrary considerations determine the course historical events. Kutuzov the commander is indeed great and brilliant, but his greatness and genius lie in his exceptional sensitivity to the collective will of the majority. Kutuzov is wise in his own way and heroic in a special way. More than all the heroes of War and Peace, he is free from actions and deeds dictated by personal considerations, conceited goals, and individualistic arbitrariness. He is all imbued with a sense of common necessity and endowed with the talent of living in "peace" with the many thousands of people entrusted to him. Kutuzov's wisdom lies in the ability to accept "the need for obedience to the general course of affairs", in the talent to listen to the "echo of a common event" and in the willingness to "sacrifice one's personal feelings for the common cause." During the Battle of Borodino, Kutuzov "is inactive" only from the point of view of those ideas about the calling of a brilliant historical personality that are characteristic of the "formula" of a European hero. No, Kutuzov is not idle, but he acts emphatically differently than Napoleon. Kutuzov "did not make any orders, but only agreed or disagreed with what was offered to him," that is, he made a choice and, with his consent or disagreement, directed events in the right direction to the best of those forces and opportunities that are released on earth to mortal man. The spiritual appearance and even the appearance of Kutuzov the commander is a direct protest against vain projecting and personal arbitrariness in any of its forms.

Tolstoy sees the "source of extraordinary strength" and special Russian wisdom of Kutuzov in "that popular feeling that he carries in himself in all its purity and strength." Before the battle of Borodino, as a faithful son of his people, he, along with the soldiers, worships the miraculous icon of Our Lady of Smolensk, heeding the words of the deacons: "Save your servant, Mother of God, from troubles," and bows to the ground, and kisses the people's shrine. In the crowd of militias and soldiers, he is the same as everyone else. It is no coincidence that only the highest ranks pay attention to him, while "militiamen and soldiers, without looking at him," continue to pray. Popular feeling also determines the moral qualities of Kutuzov, "that highest human height from which he, the commander in chief, directed all his forces not to kill and exterminate people, but to save and pity them." He alone confidently asserts that the Russians defeated the French in the Battle of Borodino, and he (*115) gives an order, incomprehensible to his generals, to retreat and surrender Moscow. Where is the logic? There really is no formal logic here, especially since Kutuzov is a resolute opponent of any speculative schemes and correct constructions. In his actions, he is guided not by logical conclusions, but by an unmistakable hunting instinct. This instinct tells him that the French army at Borodino received a terrible blow, an incurable wound. And the mortally wounded animal, having run further ahead and rested in a shelter, by the instinct of self-preservation goes home to die in its lair. Pitying his soldiers, his army bled in the battle of Borodino, Kutuzov decides to cede Moscow. He waits and holds back the young generals: "They must understand that we can only lose by acting offensively. Patience and time, these are my heroic warriors!" "And what skillful maneuvers all these offer me! It seems to them that when they invented two or three accidents (he remembered the general plan from St. Petersburg), they invented them all. And they all have no number!" As an old, highly experienced person and a wise commander, Kutuzov saw such accidents "not two or three, but thousands": "the further he thought, the more they seemed." And understanding the real complexity of life warned him against hasty actions and hasty decisions. He waited and waited for his triumph. After listening to Bolkhovitinov's report on the flight of the French from Moscow, Kutuzov "turned in the opposite direction, towards the red corner of the hut, blackened with images. "Lord, my Creator! You have heeded our prayer... - he said in a trembling voice, folding his hands. - Saved Russia. Thank You Lord! "And he cried."

And now, when the enemy has left Moscow, Kutuzov is making every effort to contain the "military ardor" of his generals, causing universal hatred in the military leaders, who reproach him for senile dementia and almost insanity. However, Kutuzov's offensive passivity reveals his deep humanity and kindness. “Kutuzov knew not with his mind or science, but with his whole Russian being he knew and felt what every Russian soldier felt, that the French were defeated, that the enemies were fleeing and they had to be escorted out, but at the same time he felt, along with the soldiers, the whole burden of this , unheard of in terms of speed and time of the year, campaign. For Russian Napoleons, who dream of ranks and crosses, who at this stage of the war amuse their indefatigable vanity, (* 116) they don’t even care about ordinary soldiers, exhausted and exhausted by long marches, more and more aware of the senselessness of persecuting and destroying a demoralized enemy. The people's war, having done its job, is gradually fading away. It will be replaced by another war, where generals far from the people will compete in ambition. Kutuzov does not want to participate in such a war, and his resignation is a worthy outcome for the people's commander. The triumph of Kutuzov, the commander-in-chief and a man, is his speech, said to the soldiers of the Preobrazhensky regiment in a place with the symbolic name Good: “But what, brothers. I know it’s hard for you, but what can you do! Be patient; not long left. "For your service, the king will not forget you. It's hard for you, but still you are at home; and they - you see what they have come to," he said, pointing to the prisoners. , and now you can feel sorry for them. They are people too. Right, guys?"

And "the heartfelt meaning of this speech was not only understood, but that same, that same feeling of majestic triumph, combined with pity for the enemies and the consciousness of being right ... lay in the soul of every soldier and expressed itself in a joyful cry that did not stop for a long time." Following Dostoevsky, Tolstoy considers "the recognition of greatness immeasurable by the measure of good and bad" to be ugly. Such "greatness" "is only the recognition of one's insignificance and immeasurable smallness." Insignificant and weak in his ridiculous egoistic "greatness" appears before the readers of "War and Peace" Napoleon. “Napoleon himself is not so much preparing himself to fulfill his role as everything around him is preparing him to take on all the responsibility of what is being done and has to be done. There is no deed, no crime or petty deception that he would commit and which is immediately his surroundings would not be reflected in the form of a great deed." The aggressive mob needs the cult of Napoleon to justify their crimes against humanity.

But the Russians, who withstood this invasion and liberated the whole of Europe from the Napoleonic yoke, have no need to support "hypnosis". “For us,” says Tolstoy, “with the measure of good and bad given to us by Christ, there is no immeasurable. And there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.” The complacent West for a long time could not forgive Tolstoy for his impudent denial of Napoleon's personality cult. Even the progressive German writer (*117) Thomas Mann, at the end of the First World War, wrote about "War and Peace" as follows: "In recent weeks I have re-read this grandiose work - shocked and delighted by its creative power and full of hostility towards its ideas, towards the philosophy of history : to this Christian-democratic narrow-mindedness, to this radical and muzhik denial of the hero, the great man. Here is the abyss and alienation between the German and the national Russian spirit, here one who lives in the homeland of Goethe and Nietzsche experiences a feeling of protest. However, the "feeling of protest" with the coming to power of Hitler went in the opposite direction among German and other European writers. At the very beginning of the Second World War, the German anti-fascist writer Bertolt Brecht, through the mouth of Galileo, the hero of the drama of the same name, proclaimed something else: "Unfortunate is the country that needs heroes!" The gloomy years of fascism revealed to the whole world the glaring inferiority of the "formula of the European hero" that Hegel, Stirner and Nietzsche claimed. In the country occupied by the Nazis, the French read "War and Peace" with hope and faith. Philosophical and historical reasoning of Tolstoy, which was once declared unnecessary appendages, became relevant during the years of the struggle against fascism.

He was not a philosopher, a theologian in the full sense of the word. And at first I was not going to devote a whole meeting to his religious and philosophical views. But still I see that it is necessary. And today we will focus on it - in our interesting and difficult journey through the region, which for a long time has been hidden from people interested in Russian religious thought.

When we talk about Tolstoy, we first of all mean a writer, author of novels, short stories, but we forget that he is also a thinker. Can we call him a great thinker? No, he was a big man, he was a great man. And even if we cannot accept his philosophy, almost every one of us is grateful to him for some joyful moments that we experienced when we read his stories, his works of art. There are few people who did not like all his work at all.

In different eras of our own life Tolstoy suddenly opens up to us from some new, unexpected sides.

If this is so, then do we have the right to argue, as some people argue: Tolstoy was a literary genius, and that he wrote something boring about philosophy and religion there, it’s better not to touch on it, and it’s good that this is never included in collections essays other than academic. And the academic one is an inaccessible 90-volume collection, which is mainly used by literary critics and historians. Therefore, it is not surprising that throughout the entire period after the death of Lev Nikolayevich, especially in the Soviet period, few people seriously paid attention to this side of his creative activity.

But, my friends, this is a great ingratitude! I tell you this in all sincerity. As an Orthodox priest, a member of the Church that issued the ruling excommunicating Tolstoy from the Church, I nevertheless emphasize that this does not mean at all that we should be unfair to this person and that we should cross out what worried this deceased giant, perhaps much more than his works of art. This was his inner life, this was what tormented and delighted him throughout his long life.

Those few of you who may have read his diaries can easily see how early he began to analyze his actions, how early he began to think about the meaning of life, how he thought about death, about the ethical properties of human existence and human society. And it turns out that he is not just a writer, but he really is some kind of synthetic powerful personality.

Once, about 90 years ago, Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky wrote a book " Lev Tolstoy and Dostoevsky". He wanted to present Tolstoy (and rightly so) as a full-blooded giant, as a man-rock, as some kind of great pagan; and Dostoevsky - only as a Christian, a fanatical, spiritualized, spiritual preacher of the spirit. The clairvoyant of the spirit and the clairvoyant of the flesh are Dmitri's favorite antitheses Sergeevich Merezhkovsky. There is some grain of truth in them. Usually we say: Dostoevsky's mournful eyes, Dostoevsky's tormenting muse, Dostoevsky's tormenting genius, a suffering life. And Tolstoy is full-blooded and full-blooded.

This is a mistake, my friends. The mistake of children who are indifferent to the suffering of their fathers. For Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a man no less tragic than Dostoyevsky. And I'll tell you straight - more tragic, much more tragic. Contemporaries and many descendants overlooked this. I won't go into details. But you think about the fact that the man who created one of the greatest Russian national epics - "War and Peace", opposed patriotism. The man who wrote passionate, immortal lines about love (and in old age he wrote, remember "Resurrection", the moment Nekhlyudov and Katya met when they were still young. This is written by an old man! And how he writes!), and this man who described love in its various shades and aspects (love-admiration, love-passion), generally considered marriage to be some kind of misunderstanding and crossed it out in the Kreutzer Sonata.

A man who had been a preacher of evangelical ethics for most of his life, and devoted the last 30 years of his life to preaching the Christian doctrine (as he understood it), found himself in conflict with the Christian Church and ultimately excommunicated from it. The man who preached non-resistance was a militant fighter who attacked with bitterness, I would say, Stepan Razin or Pugachev, the whole culture, smashing it to smithereens. A person who stands in culture as a phenomenon (he can only be compared with Goethe in Europe), a universal genius who, no matter what he undertakes - plays, journalism, novels, stories - everywhere is power! - and this man ridiculed art, crossed it out and in the end opposed his fellow Shakespeare, believing that Shakespeare wrote his works in vain. Leo Tolstoy - the greatest phenomenon of culture - was also the greatest enemy of culture.

Finally, let's think about his personal fate. Dostoevsky - yes, a tragedy: in his youth he was sentenced to death, a difficult family life. But he had love and harmony with Anna Grigorievna. And he lived hard, but in the way that corresponded to his spirit, thoughts, style of his life. And Tolstoy was tormented for years by the fact that his style of life was the opposite of what he preaches, for years he rebelled against it - and he was forced to endure until the end of his days, one might say, until his escape and death hour. The man who ran away from home is, of course, a deeply tragic figure. And this is only a few of what could be called. And that is precisely why you and I must approach with respect and care what tormented and tormented and turned Tolstoy's life into a tragedy, into a drama.

Now let us raise the question of his religious and philosophical views. He wrote, repeating this very often in different things, that "I had the traditional faith only in my childhood, and from the age of 14 I completely departed from it and lived in a void, like all my contemporaries." Of course, these words should not be taken literally. He had faith. But it was a vague, vague faith, like deism. You probably know that instead of a cross, young Tolstoy wore a portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau. And this is no coincidence.

Jean Jacques Rousseau is a great historical figure of European and universal scale. He put before people a question that has not yet been resolved, the question of whether civilization is our enemy? Is not the way back to the simplicity of life the natural salvation of humanity? Jean Jacques spoke about this in the 18th century, when there were no nuclear power plants, no poisoned rivers, no that ugly crowding of cities that turns the capitals of the world into some kind of unthinkable murderous anthill. But even then Rousseau, as we usually write in textbooks, brilliantly foresaw all this abracadabra of the 20th century. And Tolstoy felt it. I felt it with every fiber of my soul and absorbed it not only from the French tradition (which was native to him, because he was a European by education), but also from the Russian tradition.

Remember, in whose drama "Gypsy" by Pushkin. The same question of Russoism. But Pushkin solved it wisely and in a different way, because the colossal instinct of the superman allowed him to reveal the truth to us; a man will not run away from himself anywhere, not to any camps, not to any forests. It was on his Aleko that Pushkin did this experiment - an escape from civilization. And you can't run away from sin! Sin will go with you into wildness.

However, Tolstoy (as well as many other writers) still could not part with this dream. It has been and will be the dream of mankind, even if it is fifty percent illusory. When did she appear? Three thousand years ago. Even in ancient times, Chinese philosophers said that it was time to abandon everything artificial and move on to the natural. Already ancient cynics (not cynics, that's what we call them now), cynic philosophers, lived under the motto: "back to nature" - and walked around in anything, thinking that by doing so they were approaching natural life. And the pranksters produced the name "cynics" from the word "kinos" - a dog, because they led a canine lifestyle. And until now, when we break out of the city, we involuntarily experience a feeling of relief. Nostalgia for nature lives in us, it exists in us. But Russoism is not a solution. For Tolstoy, this was the solution.

"Cossacks"... I will not remind you of the plot: you have read, or in extreme cases, remember this thing. Who is Olenin? This is the same Lev Nikolaevich, a young officer. Where is he aiming? Merge with nature, return. Maryana for him is the image of Mother Nature, the Earth. To return to this world, these vineyards, these mountains and wild animals hunted by Uncle Eroshka, as wild as the wild boars that roam the thickets, and to these highlanders who shoot... Moral norms have disappeared somewhere, and morality becomes the law of nature. And then suddenly it turns out for Olenin that it was all an illusion, that he cannot go back, he cannot. And he is bitter, ashamed, sorry. Olenin regrets, as Leo Tolstoy probably regretted, that there is no turning back, that the movement here is one-way.

And then, long before his spiritual crisis, Leo Tolstoy begins to look for a way out. He is looking for it in work, in the family, in what we call happiness. But remember his also early thing - "Family Happiness". Soap bubble! This is a dark thing. He sings, like a real artist, the most precious, sacred, and then it all blurs somewhere, and he buries him.

In War and Peace, carried away by the great immortal picture of the movement of history, Tolstoy does not appear as a man without faith. He believes in fate. He believes in some mysterious force that steadily leads people to where they don't want to go. The ancient Stoics said: "Fate leads the consonant. Fate drags the opposing one." This Fate is at work in his works. No matter how much we love "War and Peace" (I love this thing very much, I have read it dozens of times), but I was always surprised how Tolstoy, such great personality, did not feel the significance of the individual in history. For him, Napoleon is only a pawn, and the mass of people act like ants, according to some mysterious laws. And when Tolstoy tries to explain these laws, I think you will all agree, those digressions, historical insertions, seem much weaker than the very full-blooded, powerful, multifaceted picture of the events taking place - on the battlefield, or in the maid of honor's salon, or in a lonely room, where one of the characters sits.

What other faith is there, except for the mysterious fate. Faith that it is possible to merge with nature? Again olenin's dream. Remember Prince Andrei, when he internally talks with an oak tree. What is this oak, just an old familiar tree? No, it is at the same time a symbol, a symbol of eternal Nature, towards which the hero's soul aspires.

The search for Pierre Bezukhov ... God, everything is pointless. It never occurs to any of Tolstoy's heroes to find the Christian path. Why is it so? Because the best people of the 19th century, after the catastrophes of the 18th century, were somehow cut off from the great Christian tradition. Both the Church and society suffered tragically from this. The consequences of this split came in the 20th century - as a formidable event that almost destroyed the entire civilization of our country.

And where is Pierre Bezukhov looking for a way out? He goes to the Masons. Their rituals (do you remember the blindfold and all sorts of words) - what was it? An attempt to imitate the Church. The general crisis of the Christian Church in the 17th-18th centuries led to a rather disparate, true, but widespread attempt to create an imitation of the Church on the basis of the simplest dogmas: God, soul, immortality. That is, the dogmas of deism, which denies both revelation, and the incarnation of God, and the person of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God on earth, but presents Him only as a teacher and prophet.

Deism has spread with extraordinary force, and we know that prominent people The 18th and early 19th centuries sided with these ideas; Masons were Mozart, and Lessing, and Novikov in Russia, Bazhenov and many others. And the heroes of Tolstoy as well. He is looking not in the Church, but in the pseudo-church, which, instead of the sacred almost two thousand years old symbols of Christianity, leads through a system of these home-grown symbols and rituals invented by intellectuals. And, of course, he very soon got sick of all this, just like Pushkin, who also started with Freemasonry, accepted the rites, and then threw it all away, like Karamzin.

And then - "Anna Karenina". Again tragedy. I think that those of you who read Tolstoy more deeply know that he wanted to expose Anna's moral fall and show how this Fate, this Fate, this mysterious God who reigns over everything, how He dealt with the sinner. And so Leo Tolstoy began his novel with the words of Scripture, the words of God: "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay." These words mean God's call to man not to seek revenge. After all, before Christianity, revenge was a holy duty. And sometimes this "holy duty" exterminated entire tribes, because if one was exterminated, relatives must kill someone from this clan, and so the vendetta went on continuously until other villages became empty, especially in the mountains. Now, God speaks through his prophet: "Vengeance is mine, I repay." But Tolstoy interpreted it differently: Fate, that is, God, takes revenge on a person for sin, punishes.

Tolstoy draws the history of a woman. And a paradox! Who among us did not sympathize with Anna ?! He involuntarily finds himself on her side, and not on the side of, say, her husband, whom he tried to describe objectively. At some moments, we experience together with Karenin, especially when he tried to forgive Anna: how touchingly he suddenly ... makes a reservation: "I am so much pelestladar," he says. This tongue-tied tongue of an arrogant senator, accustomed to minting every word, suddenly shows that behind his cold appearance something is beating there, a living heart is beating. And yet the reader's sympathies always remain with poor Anna! Nothing happened with Tolstoy. Logic, the inner logic of life and the heroine, the thread of life came into contact and clashed with his plan.

But then comes the crisis. I just grabbed a volume here to read to you how he writes about this crisis, but I won't. You are all literate people, read it yourself. He was tired. When he was in Arzamas (and this was the time of his heyday!), he began to feel that he was dying. It was horror! Other psychiatrists will say that he had an attack of acute depression. So why was he? Where?

Other people say: a person discovers God and faith in himself in difficult times. The notorious statement that "faith is for the weak", that people come to the Church only in failure, is refuted by this example. I know hundreds of such examples, but this example is quite vivid and convincing. When did Tolstoy finally start looking for God and faith? When he became a famous writer, when he was already the author of great novels that thundered around the world. When he had a beloved wife, a loving family, a chorus of grateful readers. After all, he was a rich man. He had everything from what today to any modern person seems to be the standard of happiness. And suddenly at that moment he stopped.

Tolstoy writes about this with extraordinary sincerity in his first religious-philosophical book, which is called "Confession". This book was later to serve as a prologue to his tetralogy, that is, to a four-volume work, the title of which Lev Nikolayevich never came up with. This tetralogy was later joined by the fifth part. This "Confession" is like a prelude; "Study of dogmatic theology"; translation and interpretation of the four Gospels; "What is my faith"; an additional book is called The Kingdom of God Within Us. This is the main religious and philosophical book of Tolstoy. It summarizes his worldview, shows it in dynamics, shows how Tolstoy came to these views.

The Confessions is the most moving of these books. I must immediately confess to you that it is difficult to read Tolstoy's religious-philosophical works. And not because, my friends, that it is sublime, complicated metaphysics. And not because, like Florensky's, it is a text equipped with some peculiar words, an abundance of foreign-language inserts, references, and a huge apparatus. But because, oddly enough, this is literature that has infinitely less power than the works of art of Tolstoy. Even then, many noticed that the winged, powerful gift of a real eagle, which soared over souls, destinies, events and faces, suddenly left Tolstoy when he tried to expound his teaching. And do not think that I am saying this biasedly, that I want to ... humiliate philosophical views Tolstoy. A great man cannot be humiliated. But objectively it is necessary to say what is. And you can easily check the correctness of my words by reading these books.

A volume of Tolstoy is currently being prepared for publication, which will include precisely these works. Don't hesitate, read on. At least a part. I tell you this without fear of sowing temptations, because I believe that you have enough intelligence and critical flair to understand and separate the chaff from the real grain.

Some of my Christian friends and colleagues say, why did this need to be published? Let us read his novels, and let this be left for literary critics and historians. Only those who are afraid for the truth can speak like that, and there is no need to be afraid for the truth. She will defend herself. And then, aren't we tired of the censorship of literature, thinking, art, culture, religion? In my opinion, we are fed up with this, we have had enough cuts, distorted the picture. Why continue this vicious practice! Here he is before us - a great man. You may like it or not, but he created it, and if we have even a drop of respect for him, we must accept everything as it is, evaluate, ponder, you can reject - and Tolstoy would never be offended. But censorship scissors - this is an insult to a genius. An insult to human dignity in general. And the humiliation of culture.

So, the most successful thing is "Confession". Why? Because Tolstoy does not indulge in long, abstract, to be honest, boring arguments, but talks about his life. He talks about how she stopped, that one day he just died. He notices, I will have so many horses, I will have so much land. And what's next? What's next? Well, I'll be the most famous writer, I'll be famous like Molière, like Shakespeare. What is it for? And this terrible, soul-chilling question shook him to the core, because it was a fair question.

What is the meaning of our existence? This question must be asked. We tried to silence him. Two or three generations drowned out these eternal questions with piercing fanfare. But as soon as these fanfare ceased to squeal so loudly, this question arises again before everyone. Why and why? Descendants - they are also mortal. The future is completely unknown, for whom is it? And then, why is it better than the real one? Why all this? So, on the crest of success, in that period of life and in that state that the ancient Greeks called "akma", that is, the highest flowering, the highest, so to speak, flowering human being, a relatively young, not some kind of stunted, but a healthy man who rode a horse, loved physical work, walked every day, traveled, a man who embraced the whole culture (after all, he spoke German in such a way that even the Germans did not guess that it was said by a foreigner); This man seemed to have everything! And suddenly it turns out - nothing. Everything burst like a soap bubble. And it stopped abruptly. He said, "And I died." And the greatest merit of the thinker, the philosopher Tolstoy, that he raised this tragic question - what is all this for? - in front of us in all its severity.

As an erudite person, he began to look in literature, in the history of human thought: maybe there is something there? He turns to science - it turns out that science does not know. Science does not know why we live, science deals only with processes, and processes are an indifferent thing, they flow in some direction, and they cannot have any meaning, because science itself does not know such a category as meaning .

He turns to philosophy, reads the ancient sages. But, of course, he reads very selectively - do not forget that this is Leo Tolstoy after all. He seeks what he needs and he finds. He opens the Bible, and opens, of course, on Ecclesiastes, where it is said that there is no benefit to a person who works under the sun, a generation comes and a generation goes, but the earth remains forever, and the wind turns and returns to its place, all rivers flow in the sea, and the sea does not overflow; and all is vanity of vanities and the pursuit of the wind. He opens the scriptures of the Indians and hears the words of the Buddha that everything falls apart: everything that consists of something, decays. The world is passing by like a mirage. He turns to the latest philosophy, that is, to the philosophy 19th century and, of course, discovers Arthur Schopenhauer - the most talented, I would say, brilliant writer, an absolute pessimist who, in his brilliantly written books, claims that the world is garbage and the sooner it ends, the better. And Tolstoy, as it were, shields himself with this pessimistic philosophy. And on every page he notes: "I, Buddha, Solomon and Schopenhauer realized that all this was useless." "I, Buddha, Solomon and Schopenhauer"... (Solomon is the legendary author of Ecclesiastes).

Science does not help... Philosophy says that everything is useless. Maybe faith? But maybe there is still a point, maybe there is a God that all generations talk about? And at the moment when Tolstoy caught this thought in his heart, he suddenly clearly felt that he was living again! Life again returned to his soul, to his consciousness. But then he said to himself: but religion teaches such absurd things, and all this is expressed so crudely, so strangely. And as soon as this thought arose, he again died. Everything became empty and cold. And Tolstoy draws the first important conclusion: faith is life, without faith a person does not live.

I have made several extracts from his writings. Of course, I won't bore you, but some words are very important. I will read an excerpt from his (youthful) diary so that you understand how long this thought hovered over him. In 1855, that is, a quarter of a century before the exodus, the spiritual crisis, when the "Confession" and other books of the tetralogy were written, he writes in his diary dated March 5, 1855: "The conversation about the divine and faith led me to a great, enormous thought, to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life.-(You see, he says he had no faith!) What kind of thought is this?-This thought is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind: the religion of Christ, but purified from faith and mystery; religion practical, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth.

So, faith is life - a completely correct axiom. And the second is Tolstoy's desire to create a new religion that would correspond to the modern (nineteenth century) new popular thinking, popular rationalism, for which reason is the highest judge in all things. Reason, about which Pasternak said that it is needed not for knowing the truth, but so that we are not cheated in a bakery, this reason for Tolstoy becomes the supreme arbiter.

But how to be all the same with this faith-reason? How to combine all this? And he makes an experiment, quite in his spirit. It is not new, this experiment. Let's remember Platon Karataev. I'm even ashamed... When I remember the heroes of Tolstoy, I'm ashamed of my generation, because all these "images" were so spoiled for us at school that now, when you start turning to the novel War and Peace, you start to remember rows of desks and mumbling teachers who labored to instill in us an aversion to Russian fiction and to all culture in general.

So, Platon Karataev. For Tolstoy, he is a true sage, in some ways higher than Pierre and Prince Andrei. How to be here? The people believe! (The people, as Count Lev Nikolayevich represented him, he had his own idea of ​​​​the people. He loved the aristocracy, as Grevs, his wife's brother, recalls, and he loved the people. He did not recognize the average, he did not like merchants, the clergy - all this there were people not of his circle, or aristocrats, or the people - such a huge child.)

Tolstoy begins, as it were, honestly to carry out the following experiment. He outwardly joins the church faith (like others among us now non-Orthodox), begins to go to church, although he does not understand what is happening there; begins to observe fasts; travels to monasteries, churches, talks with archimandrites, bishops; visited Optina Hermitage, talked with Elder Ambrose (now canonized as a saint), was annoyed with him, but still he could not help but admit that this sick old man gives more comfort to the thousands of people who come to him than other healthy . But very soon this game (I use this word, because involuntarily, according to the recollections of contemporaries, one feels that it was a game, that Tolstoy wanted to prove that all this was superfluous, unnecessary) ended in nothing: Tolstoy casts aside church faith in the name of reason. Well, do you think he was an eighteenth-century rationalist philosopher? Yes and yes Not XIX and not XX, namely XVIII, with his most naive faith in the universal power of common sense - to believe that common sense can cover the entire universe.

But could the theology of that time satisfy Lev Nikolaevich's intellectual thirst? Could. The century of Khomyakov and Chaadaev has already passed, Russian religious thinkers have already appeared - the first swallows. Tolstoy was a contemporary of Sergei Trubetskoy, one of the greatest Russian thinkers. But most importantly, he was well acquainted with Vladimir Solovyov. That was really a knight of reason! But his mind did not prevent him from being a Christian! Solovyov was a universal scientist, poet, metaphysician, political scientist, historian, exegete. And it didn't bother him at all.

They meet. Again I must cite one remarkable extract. In the presence of one eyewitness, a conversation took place between Lev Nikolayevich and the young Vladimir Solovyov. This young man, with his iron logic, drove the giant Tolstoy into a dead end. "For the first time," writes an eyewitness, "Lev Nikolayevich could not object. Solovyov was squeezing him with metal rings." And only the modesty of Vladimir Solovyov somehow obscured the awkwardness of the whole situation, when the great unquestioned authority was forced to surrender. True, he did not give up in words, but remained with his own, but by doing so he proved that everything was not in the mind, but in the will. Because he wanted it. He wanted to declare the simplified faith of deism the only truth.

Lev Nikolayevich turns to the Bible. At first he admires Old Testament like a work of art, then discards it. Takes the New Testament - discards. Only the gospel! And then it is revealed to him that the Gospel is true doctrine. But do not think that we are talking about the teachings of Jesus Christ. Tolstoy insists that there is a single universal teaching (which is equally well expressed by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Confucius, Buddha, Olivieri, Kant - anyone). Such a vague, common faith...

How to present it? Man is aware of himself as a part of something that is whole. This whole we call God. He sent us into this world. Immortality does not exist, because a person is something narrow, small. When a person dies, he dissolves into this whole. In some strange way, either God, or someone, or Fate, just like the Stoics, commands a person to act morally. And these recommendations of a higher being are elementary, they have always been given, through all teachers, through everyone, but especially through Christ.

When Tolstoy tries to expound the Gospel, he does not translate it, he reshapes it. God forbid you look for the Gospel in a book called Tolstoy's Translation of the Gospel. Here I am quoting verbatim, I wrote it out on purpose: “The teaching of Christ,” he writes, “has a universal meaning (in a sense it is true). The teaching of Christ has a simple, clear, practical meaning for the life of each individual person. This meaning can be expressed as follows "Christ teaches people not to do stupid things. This is the simplest, accessible meaning of the teachings of Christ. Christ says: do not be angry, do not consider anyone below you - this is stupid." And so on. "If you get angry, if you offend people, it will be worse for you." I will not quote further. He also considers all other points.

If, my friends, the Gospel were reduced to such an elementary, I would say, utilitarian justified morality (it will be worse for you), then it would be no different from other ancient aphorisms. Moreover, if Lev Nikolaevich said that there is the teaching of Confucius, there is the teaching of the Stoics, and there is the teaching of Leo Tolstoy, - well, it would join the system of moral teachings. And no tragedy would have happened. This teaching, indeed, is close in some ways to Buddhism, in some ways (to a greater extent) to Chinese views.

Chinese pantheism, Indian pantheism is also pantheism (I'm simplifying a bit) and, finally, Stoic pantheism is all very close to the teachings of Leo Tolstoy. Of course, it is difficult to say what logic is here: how can a single impersonal beginning command something to a person, say, command to be kind. But Tolstoy thought so. "Master," he called God in a cold, aloof word.

So Christ didn't really bring anything new. Although Tolstoy in the book "The Kingdom of God is within us" says that it was a new teaching, because it spoke of non-resistance to evil by violence. Elements of this teaching were already in India, there was nothing new in it. Tolstoy was not only far from Christianity, but, as Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev says, rarely was anyone as far from the person of Christ as Tolstoy. He had a pre-Christian, extra-Christian consciousness. Even Maxim Gorky, after a conversation with Tolstoy, wrote down: "He spoke a lot about Christ and Buddha. He spoke especially badly about Christ, sentimentally, falsely. He advised reading the Buddhist catechism. He spoke condescendingly about Christ, obviously did not like him."

No matter how you treat Gorky, he was still an observant person, and he correctly noticed this. Because even the vulgar Renan, who describes the life of Jesus Christ, reducing it to the vulgar taste of a French man in the middle of the last century, he always loved Christ. Even Renan! We will not find anything like this in Tolstoy's books; he always writes about Christ in an aloof and cold way. The main thing for him is the teaching of Christ, the teaching, he repeats this word a million times on several pages.

Was there a teaching? A younger contemporary of Lev Nikolayevich, Prince Sergei Nikolayevich Trubetskoy, rector of Moscow University, a great Russian thinker, still not truly appreciated, wrote, as if answering Tolstoy's thesis that the Sermon on the Mount is all Christianity. "The Sermon on the Mount is not a moral sermon at all. The moral teaching of Christ flowed from the consciousness of Christ, unique in history, and His self-consciousness was the only one in the world - the consciousness of the identity of the divine and the human. For when Christ refers to the words of Scripture, He corrects them, like He Who has power and says: "The ancients said (said in the Bible) - so-and-so, so-and-so. And I say to you..." And then he says a new commandment, as He Who has the right to it, the inner, mysterious, mystical right, the metaphysical right, the moral right.

All this passed Tolstoy by. That is why, when we read the first words of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word" - the Logos, that is, the divine thought addressed to the world, the Logos that created everything ... Tolstoy translates: "In the beginning was understanding" - and that's all disappears. "We saw his glory," writes Matthew. Glory is a radiance, a mysterious radiance. Tolstoy puts there: "teaching." It is good that next to his translation he put the traditional translation and the Greek text. Any of you can easily check how far he deviated from the meaning of the text.

However, this was not only the fate of the Gospel. Probably, some of you came across Tolstoy's book "Reading Circle". It contains the sayings of dozens of teachers of all ages, countries and peoples. And when, I remember, I read it for the first time, when I was still a schoolboy, I thought: do they all say something almost the same? There is almost no difference in what Kant or Olivieri or Pascal said. Looks awful. And then, later, many years later, when I was able to check some of the quotes, it turned out that Tolstoy was quietly distorting them. After all, he was the creator! He hacked at the living! He created his own from this material. It has nothing to do with Socrates, or Pascal, or the Gospel, or the Talmud, which he quotes, and this Lev Nikolayevich builds his building from hewn stones of all the teachings that came to his hand. Therefore: is it necessary to read the "Circle of Reading"? Necessary. This is an interesting book. But do not try to look for the thoughts of great people or the sayings of genuine sacred books there. There everything begins with Tolstoy and ends with him.

What happened between Tolstoy and the Church? I repeat that if he had simply said that he had created a new doctrine, then no one would have condemned him. There were millions of Muslims in Russia, not Christians - no one excommunicated them from the Church. There were Jews and Buddhists, but they did not say that they were preaching the Christian doctrine, but Tolstoy did. Moreover, this man, who taught about goodness, tolerance, truth, justice, respect for man, the man who taught that every religion has its own truth, made only one exception, for religion alone - for Christianity, as it was discovered by the Church . Here he was merciless, and his rage knew no bounds! The grossest blasphemy, which offended the feelings of countless people, broke from the lips and pen of this non-resistance. And besides, all this happened under the refrain: this is true Christianity, and the Church distorts it.

Moreover, together with the Church, he attacked the entire modern civilization. He threw everything overboard: not only art, but also legal proceedings, laws. Allegedly, he read it in the Gospel. Christ says: "Do not judge," that is, do not make yourself moral judges of the mistakes and actions of other people. For "who among you is without sin," asks Christ, "let him cast the first stone." This is understandable, this is natural, this is deeply just; but what does this have to do with jurisprudence, with the laws that society must adhere to? Tolstoy throws overboard the army, the court, and the Church. The truth is that he throws out the oath, I completely agree with this, Christ really unambiguously forbade swearing in the name of God. He said: "Yes, yes - yes, no - no." But this is a secondary issue, not essential.

And, finally, non-resistance to evil by violence... What did our Lord want to say? He wanted to say that human evil, which we resist by using also evil, will not be defeated in the end. In the end, only good wins. And when Christ drove the merchants out of the temple with a scourge, He did not mean that by this He enlightened the merchants - no: He simply removed them from there. The Apostle Paul, accurately expressing the thought of Jesus Christ, said: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

This has nothing to do with jurisprudence. Christ speaks about the ability to forgive, and if you have been severely damaged, if (I will give an extreme case) a person close to you was killed, and you, having shown some kind of superhuman nobility, understood what was the matter, and forgave - you are on top. But the law cannot forgive. The law is moral and strong only in that it follows its letter. So far, identity cannot exist between personal ethics, between personal morality and public morality. And in the third millennium, and maybe in the fourth - will not exist. Because we humans are spiritual beings and we have a special life. And society still half lives according to the natural laws of the struggle for existence. And the society is obliged to isolate the killer and fight it mechanically. And to imagine that it can be merged together is to feed on illusions.

If you carefully read the Gospel, you will notice that Christ never said that social, legal means of suppressing evil are not needed. He simply spoke of the fact that so evil can never be eradicated. Indeed, prisons have existed for... thousands of years (I can't tell you when the first prison was built, but in Ancient Egypt, in the third millennium BC, they already were). And what, has the morality of mankind improved from this, over these thousands of years? No. But that doesn't mean the law shouldn't work. Of course, the law should approach humane principles, of course, after all, these are two poles that have not yet converged far.

Well, Tolstoy's anarchic view of society, of the Church, of all the structures of humanity - should we throw all this away and consider it a profound delusion of a genius? A black, ridiculous stain on his beautiful soul and life? And then I'll tell you - no. No and no. The church was obliged to testify that Tolstoy preached not the Christian doctrine, but his own. Hence the decision of the Synod, which you all know about.

Some of you have probably read Kuprin's story "Anathema", how the poor deacon had to shout "anathema!" Leo Tolstoy, but instead the poor man cried out. "Many years!" Even the movie was such a long time ago. These are all inventions! No anathema was proclaimed. There was a definition of the Synod - a small text on two printed pages, where it was said that Count Lev Nikolayevich, in his pride, vilifies the Church, Christian faith, passing it off as true teaching, and the Church no longer considers him a member. In his answer to the Synod, Tolstoy confirms the correctness of the Synod. He says: Yes, indeed, I have renounced the Church, which calls itself Orthodox, indeed, I am not a member of it.

Bishop Sergius of Starogorodsky (who forty years later became the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus') said that there was no need to excommunicate him: he himself, by his teaching, was already outside the Church. This whole scandal was provoked by Pobedonostsev, a very contradictory, complex person. He whispered (so to speak) to Alexander III to act against Tolstoy. Alexander III, having personal good relations with Sophia Andreevna, did not want a scandal, but Nicholas II, being a student of Pobedonostsev (Pobedonostsev lectured him), went for it.

I'm not sure that the form itself and in general all this was very successful. But the Church was obliged to publicly, openly and honestly testify that this teaching is not evangelical, not her teaching, not Christian teaching, as it is understood not only by the Orthodox, but also by Catholics, Lutherans and other Protestants. Ask any Baptist, if he opens the Tolstoy Gospel, he will see that it is not the same Gospel at all. Even those Protestants who considered Christ just a man of genius, a prophet who discovered God, they still treated the person of Christ as a unique phenomenon. For Tolstoy, Christ was not unique.

I'm summarizing. Well, we do not need all this? No, it's necessary. And it was necessary then. Because in his struggle Tolstoy confronted the conscience of a society that considered itself Christian with the most acute problems: hunger, prostitution, poverty, oppression... The man who wrote "After the Ball" - wasn't he a Christian? A man who wrote many pages of "War and Peace" with a deep spiritual insight into the religious life of people; the man who wrote: "I can not be silent!" - was a true Christian. He was the conscience of the country and the conscience of the world. And that is why Russia, regardless of Tolstoy's literary works, should have been proud of such a man, just as it should be proud of Sakharov now. Because he spoke desperately boldly against the established lawlessness, the humiliation of human dignity, against what reigned in society.

Of course, you will say, then it was not what it is now. Oh sure. Of course, there were far fewer lawlessness then than today. But Tolstoy, on the other hand, survived, and he would have tried to speak in 1937! I don't think he would have made it to 1937 at all. If he had been half a century younger, he would not have survived, he would have been expelled from the country or destroyed in the first quarter of our century. I think you can all agree that it would.

The man who challenged the social evils of society, the man who spoke the truth about the state of things (even if he was mistaken in some matters), was a brave man. And always, when I think about Tolstoy, I remember the heartfelt words of Anatoly Koni, publicist, lawyer, who knew many famous people of his time. He wrote like this: the desert seems dead in the evening, but suddenly a lion roars, a lion goes hunting, and the desert comes to life; some nocturnal birds cry, some animals respond to him, and the desert comes to life. So in the desert of a vulgar, monotonous, oppressive life, the voice of Leo Tolstoy was heard, and he woke people up.

In conclusion, I will add: Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (an economist, philosopher, later an archpriest and a famous theologian who died in exile) wrote that although Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Church, there is some church connection with him. Because there was too much truth-seeking in him, there was too much in him that responded to the most big problems humanity. And we believe that not only on earth, but in eternity, he is not completely separated from us.

The brilliant Russian writer L.N. Tolstoy (1828-1910) showed himself not only in the field of artistic creativity, but, in particular, in the field of sociology. The main feature of his socio-political views was the priority of moral values.

Tolstoy gave a devastating critique of the authoritarian regime of pre-revolutionary Russia, the accuracy and depth of assessments of which fully deserve to be called not only a brilliant writer, but also an outstanding scientist. L.N. Tolstoy wrote that there are two classes, which he called the rapist and the raped. Representatives of the ruling class, having a lot of money and property, are forced to work for themselves, using three different methods of violence: personal, land and product seizure, and monetary. These methods do not replace each other in history, just as according to the scheme of K. Marx, feudal society replaces slave society and is itself replaced by capitalist society, but coexist. The method of enslaving the physical operates in the army, and millions of soldiers are in fact slaves of those who control them. Enslavement by the taking of land is also evident. “In our memory,” writes Tolstoy, “we experienced two transitions of slavery from one form to another in Russia: when the serfs were freed and the landowners were left rights to most of the land, the landowners were afraid that their power over their slaves would slip away from them; but experience has shown that they only needed to let go of the old chain of personal slavery and intercept another - landed.

Many then did not understand why the tsar-liberator gave the peasants freedom, and took their land away from them. They even thought that there was some kind of mistake here, and they were waiting for the land to be given away. That did not happen. Why, Tolstoy explains with the help of a very methodologically fruitful figurative representation of three screws. “All three methods can be compared with screws that press down on the board that is placed on the workers and crushes them. The root, main middle screw, without which other screws cannot hold on, the one that is screwed in first and never released, is the screw of personal slavery, the enslavement of some people by others through the threat of murder with a sword; the second screw, screwing in after the first, is the enslavement of people by taking away land and food supplies - taking, supported by the personal threat of murder; and the third screw is the enslavement of people through the demand for banknotes, which they do not have, also supported by the threat of murder.

The ruling class moved from the feudal violence that seemed ineffective to it, to the more promising capitalist one. One screw was loosened, the other was immediately tightened under soporific talk about freedom, publicity, etc., which turned out to be just as successful a bait as the promises of universal happiness, the emancipation of labor, etc.

Everything that happens is described by Tolstoy with all the power of his talent. The state, turning to the monetary form of slavery, says: “Dispose among yourselves as you wish, but know that I will not defend and uphold neither widows, nor orphans, nor the sick, nor the old, nor the burned; I will defend only the correctness of the circulation of these banknotes. Only the one who correctly gives me, according to the requirement, the established number of banknotes will be right in front of me and will be defended by me. And how they are acquired - I don't care.

Money and violence go hand in hand. And that is why the rapist finds it more convenient to declare all his demands for the labor of others in money, and the rapist only needs money for this. The advantage of violence through money “consists for the rapist in the following: 1) the main thing is that he is no longer obliged by efforts to force the workers to fulfill his will, and the workers themselves come and sell themselves to him; 2) that fewer people elude his violence; the only disadvantage for the rapist is that he shares with a large number of people in this way. The advantage for the raped in this method is that the raped are not subjected to more brutal violence, but appear to themselves and can always hope and sometimes really can, under happy conditions, go from the raped to the rapists; their disadvantages are that they can never escape from a certain amount of violence.

For the complete enslavement of the worker, all three screws are needed, but at different periods, one or the other presses harder. They are regulated by the authorities, giving the right to vote, but worsening the material life of the majority of the population.

“The last, monetary - taxation violence - the strongest and most important at the present time, has received the most amazing justification: depriving people of their property, freedom, all their good is done in the name of freedom, the common good. In essence, it is nothing but the same slavery, only impersonal. Tolstoy raises the question of the power of money, and not of economic laws, because plutocracy is carried out not only by economic, but also by direct political means. Money is a systemic indicator that does not fit into the framework of political economy.

The ability to vote does not prevent the fact that power is in the hands of the oligarchy. Ensuring the power of money and using the methods of monetary enslavement, she plunders the country and its inhabitants. “In all human societies where there was money, like money, there has always been violence of the strong and armed over the weak and unarmed ... In all societies known to us where there is money, they receive the value of exchange only because they serve as a means of violence. And their main significance is not to serve as a medium of exchange, but to serve violence.

Speaking out against all forms of social exploitation, Tolstoy also rejected the revolutionary method of reorganizing society. He believed that this would be an evil in itself and would only change the forms of exploitation and the composition of the forcible class. Genuine overcoming of exploitation will come as a result of raising the level of morality of all strata of society, which is possible not by force, but by familiarization with real culture. He wrote about this in his last article "The Real Means" and considered culture as such. Thus, Tolstoy repeated what all the great moral teachers of mankind have said.

Tolstoy also made an outstanding contribution to the sociology of art, which will be discussed in chapter 12.

Lysenkov V.

The object of the study is LN Tolstoy's religious and philosophical treatises "Confession", "What is my faith?", "About life".

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Republic of Tatarstan

Tukaevsky municipal district

MBOU "Betkinskaya secondary school"

Research work on the topic

"Religious and philosophical views of L.N. Tolstoy"

(section: Life and work of Leo Tolstoy)

I've done the work

Lysenkov V.,

10th grade student

Supervisor:

Lysenkova S.L.,

teacher of Russian language

And literature

2015

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..3

Main part

Religious-philosophical sounding of “Confession”, treatises “What is my faith?”, “About life”…………….……………………………………………………..5

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..9

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………… 10

Introduction

How should one live? What is evil, what is good? How to find the truth if you are lost from the abundance of answers, just by voicing the question? And what is there, outside of life? What is the meaning of my life? Why did I come into this world?

Almost every person asks himself such questions at least once in his life. Someone, not finding the right answer, continues to live as he lives, to suffer, rejoice, suffer and wish for the best. Another person cannot live without resolving these issues for himself. And after all, the desire, or rather, the need to solve these philosophical questions not a whim at all. The answers to them form a person’s worldview, which means that they also indicate the direction in which life is built further, and determine a person’s thoughts, words, actions.

One cannot do without philosophical questions in literature, which reflects both an individual person, with all his searches, doubts, aspirations, and all of humanity as a whole. But literature does not reflect an impartially existing reality and is not engaged in a simple statement of facts. It sets itself grandiose philosophical and moral-educational tasks. Literature teaches, forms the worldview of its reader, and therefore touches on the most complex, ambiguous aspects of life and tries to answer those questions that have always interested the seeker.

Leo Tolstoy, "the patriarch of Russian literature", contributed to world philosophy, culture, literature not only as a brilliant writer, but also as a truly great thinker.

Scientific understanding of the philosophical and journalistic heritage of L.N. Tolstoy demands attention for several reasons. On the one hand, many scientists, researchers, politicians, public figures, readers began to actively use the writer's thoughts and statements to confirm their own views, distorting the meaning of Tolstoy's words and ideas. This is explained by the fact that for many years his religious and philosophical writings were not published, the spiritual and moral side of the works of Leo Tolstoy was not studied. The experience of the spiritual life of the writer was not studied either.

On the other hand, the gap between goals and values ​​is becoming more and more obvious. modern society from Tolstoy's understanding of the highest truth of life. Hence the problem of understanding and implementing the religious and philosophical heritage, reflected in the works of L.N. Tolstoy.

So, the relevance The topic is determined by the need of modern society to study the deep resources of human nature, to identify the possibilities for a dialogue between the secular and spiritual principles of culture, both domestic and world.

object studies are the religious and philosophical treatises of LN Tolstoy "Confession", "What is my faith?", "About life".

Subject research - the spiritual life of Leo Tolstoy, his quest, internal contradictions.

Target work - to find out and understand the religious and philosophical theory of Leo Tolstoy. Is it worth popularizing this side of the life and work of the writer? After all, it is unacceptable both for an atheist and for a church-believing person. But, despite this, we should not show indifference to his inner spiritual life, his searches, because the very attitude of Tolstoy to these questions and to the search for answers to them cannot but resonate in our soul.

To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks :

To get acquainted with the treatises of L.N. Tolstoy "Confession", "What is my faith", "About life";

Get to know the work of scientists and researchers;

To prove the significance of the religious and philosophical views of L.N. Tolstoy.

Work structure.This work consists of introduction, main part and conclusion. The main part deals with the philosophical and religious views of L.N. Tolstoy, attention is focused on the main works of Tolstoy of the 1880s of the XIX century, in which the writer's path to a new moral and religious worldview was indicated: "Confession", treatises "What is my faith?", "About life".

Research methods:

Work study LN Tolstoy "Confession", "What is my faith", "About life";

Critical analysis of articles about Leo Tolstoy.

Main part. Religious and philosophical sounding of "Confession", treatises "What is my faith?", "About life"

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828 - 1910) - the great Russian writer and thinker. His work had a significant impact on world culture, he is the author of remarkable works of art, deep socio-political and religious-ethical treatises. Tolstoy was primarily interested in the problems of human life, which he considered from the point of view of humanism, universal moral norms and the natural needs and ideals of man. The artist's philosophical reflections are not abstract judgments, but a certain concept of life and a way of transforming social relations along the path of improvement and creation of goodness.

That is why, I repeat, we should not show indifference to his inner spiritual life, his searches, because the very attitude of Tolstoy to these questions and to the search for answers to them cannot but resonate in our soul.

The man who created the patriotic epic "War and Peace" - he condemned patriotism.

Having written immortal pages about love, about family, he eventually turned away from both.

One of the greatest masters of the word, he caustically ridiculed all forms of art.

A God-seeker who found the justification for life in faith, Tolstoy, in essence, undermined its foundations.

While preaching the gospel of Christ, he found himself in sharp conflict with Christianity and was excommunicated from the Church.

And finally, he, who put non-resistance and meekness at the forefront, was a rebel in his soul. Taking up arms against the Church and culture, he did not stop at the harshest expressions, which sometimes sounded like rude blasphemy.

And these are far from all the contradictions that tormented Tolstoy.

But what has been said is enough to feel what storms raged in his life, consciousness and creativity. Is this not a tragedy of genius?

"Confession" is a priceless human document. In it, the writer shares with readers his attempt to comprehend his own life path, a path to what he believed to be the truth. The initial prerequisites for the creation of the "Confession" refute the popular belief that a person thinks about eternal questions only under the influence of difficulties and hardships.

The crisis overtook Leo Tolstoy at the height of his talent and at the zenith of his success.

A loving and beloved family, wealth, the joy of creative work, a choir of noble readers ... And suddenly the question pops up: “Why? Well, then? The obvious meaninglessness of life in the absence of an inner core in it strikes the fifty-year-old writer like a blow.

Here is how he himself spoke about it: “My life has stopped. I could breathe, eat, drink, sleep, and could not help but breathe, eat, drink, sleep; but there was no life, because there were no such desires, the satisfaction of which I would find reasonable. If I desired something, then I knew in advance that, whether I satisfied or not satisfied my desire, nothing would come of it.

Tolstoy begins his "Confession" with the statement that, having lost his faith in his youth, he has since lived without it for many years. Is he fair to himself? Hardly. Faith was. Let not always conscious, but was. The young Tolstoy believed in the perfection and beauty of Nature, in the happiness and peace that a person finds in unity with her.

But this was not enough. The voice of conscience sounded in him, suggesting that in nature alone you will not find answers to your questions.

“My question,” writes Tolstoy, “the one that led me to suicide at the age of fifty, was the simplest question lying in the soul of every person, from a stupid child to the wisest old man, the question without which life is impossible, as I experienced in practice".

Science did not provide an answer. Pessimistic philosophy led to a dead end. Even less could one count on social ideals, for if one did not know what all this was for, the ideals themselves would go up in smoke.

In Tolstoy's eyes, faith remained something absurd. And yet, looking back at other people, he was forced to admit that it was she who filled their lives with meaning.

Leo Tolstoy renounced the Church, in essence, without recognizing it. He sought to create a new religion, but still wanted it to be called Christian.

A deeper study of religion by Tolstoy is described in the treatise “What is my faith”. In it we read: “The teaching of Christ has a universal meaning; the teaching of Christ has the simplest, clearest, most practical meaning for man. This meaning can be expressed as follows: Christ teaches people not to do stupid things. This is the simplest, accessible meaning of the teachings of Christ. Tolstoy said that the Gospel is true Christianity.

The historian D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky once said that Tolstoy wanted to be a religious reformer, but fate gave him a literary gift instead of a mystical gift.

Nikolai Berdyaev admitted that "every attempt of Tolstoy to express in a word - to logize - his religious element gave rise to only banal gray thoughts."

This is hardly accidental. Tolstoy's failure only proves that religions are not artificially created, not invented.

Is it not for this reason that, contrary to his secret plan, he disavowed “Tolstoyism” and continued to repeat that he was preaching not his own doctrine, but the Gospel.

Here lies the main reason for his conflict with the Church, his excommunication by the Synod. He wrote bitterly, insultingly about the sacraments of the Church, about her teachings, but claimed that he was a Christian, that only his view of the understanding of Christianity was true.

However, Tolstoy does not stop there and continues to write his religious and philosophical teachings. Another book on "the dominant meaning of consciousness", written in 1887, was originally entitled "On Life and Death"; as its general concept developed, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that for a person who knew the meaning of life in the fulfillment of the highest good - serving God, that is, the highest moral truth, death does not exist, he crossed out the word "death" from the title of the treatise.

This book is based on Leo Nikolayevich's tense reflections on life and death, which always occupied Tolstoy and became aggravated during a serious illness in the autumn of 1886. The main idea of ​​the future treatise, consisting of an introduction, thirty-five chapters, a conclusion and threeadditions, is already expressed quite clearly in a letter to A.K. Chertkova: the soul of every person ... This contradiction for a person cannot be resolved in words, since it is the basis of a person’s life, but is resolved for a person only by life - the activity of life, liberating man from this contradiction. Briefly, this contradiction is defined as follows: "I want to live for myself and I want to be reasonable, but to live for myself is unreasonable." It is further said that this contradiction is the “law of life,” like the rotting of a seed that sprouts. Man is freed from the fear of death by spiritual birth.

Tolstoy considered the book "On Life" to be the most important among others that expounded his views. In October 1889, Tolstoy answered a question from the geographer and writer V.V. Mainov: “You asked which of my works I consider more important? Can't tell which of the two: "What is my faith?" or about life.

If we sum up all the teachings of Lev Nikolaevich, then we can say that they turn into historical nihilism, a rejection of creativity in history, a denial of culture. This is the main contradiction of Tolstoy, since the untruth of life is "overcome" by the rejection of all sorts of tasks, of creativity, of progressive historical development.

On February 24, 1901, on the day of excommunication, everyone was waiting for Tolstoy’s answer, and he answered “... The teaching of the church is theoretically an insidious and harmful lie, but in practice a collection of the grossest superstitions and witchcraft ... I really renounced the church, stopped performing its rites and wrote in a will to my relatives, so that when I die, they would not allow church ministers to see me, and my dead body would be removed as soon as possible, without any spells and prayers over it ... "

Extremely interesting is the subsequent evolution of Tolstoy, the immediate causes and consequences of the spiritual crisis that caused the writer's departure from Yasnaya Polyana, his dying visit to Optina Hermitage and the Shamordinsky Monastery. This is seen as an attempt at repentance and reconciliation with the church. But Lev Nikolaevich said that “... I just cannot return to the church, take communion before death, just as I cannot speak obscene words or look obscene pictures before death, and therefore everything that will be said about my dying repentance and communion is a lie ... ".

Conclusion

Tolstoy's contradictions are largely explained by the constant clash of two elements in him: artistic and rational. And here we have the right to say that, having assumed the mission of a preacher of the "new religion", Tolstoy fights against the perversions of Christianity for the teaching of Christ supposedly correctly understood by him, this subjective opinion of his is in conflict with reality.

However, we cannot but agree that Tolstoy truly became the voice of Russia and the world, a living reproach for people who are sure that they live in accordance with Christian principles. His intolerance of violence and lies, his protests against murder and social contrasts, against the indifference of some and the plight of others, are precious in his teaching.

It is important to see this meaning of Leo Tolstoy. After all, even in the mistakes of great people you can find a lesson and a creative element. For Tolstoy, this was a call to moral revival, to the search for faith.

The tragedy of Tolstoy is the tragedy of a man who has not rid himself of the hypnosis of rationality, of rationalism. But, despite this, his religious-philosophical writings can teach us a lot. Tolstoy reminded man that he lives an unworthy, humiliating, perverted, vain life, that peoples and states that call themselves Christian have relegated something exceptionally important in the Gospel to the background.

Let the religion of Tolstoy objectively not be identified with the religion of the Gospel; remains indisputable conclusion to which he came, having experienced an internal crisis. This conclusion says: it is impossible to live without faith, and faith is the true basis of morality.

Bibliography

1. Tolstoy L.N. Confession. What is my faith? - L .: Fiction, Leningrad branch, 1991.

2. Lomunov K.N. Life of Leo Tolstoy. - M .: Fiction, 1981.

3. Opulskaya L.D. Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Materials for a biography from 1886 to 1892. - M .: ed. "Science", 1979.

4. Prometheus: Historical and biographical almanac of the series "The Life of Remarkable People" / Comp. Y. Seleznev. - T.12. - M .: Mol.guard, 1980.

And Tolstoy of our day put the separation of Good and Beauty as the basis of his entire assessment of art.

Another great religious question, another terrible metaphysical riddle, was raised by Tolstoy with his life.

Tolstoy not only rebelled against beauty. We all know that he is not only insensitive to culture, but downright hostile to it. Namely - culture, and not just "civilization", Shakespeare and Goethe and all modern science and technology, and not just cinema and aviation Why does "culture" win and subordinate everything dear to it "simple", "peasant"? Tolstoy understood that it was not a matter of simple external violence, that the root of evil lay deeper. He understood that culture is strength. But Tolstoy, as a religious thinker, does not have the slightest inclination and reverence for the human Strength. He sees nothing divine in her. For him, Strength, just like Beauty, is an evil principle, the devilish Good and God for him are completely exhausted and absorbed by the principle of Love, and the principle of Strength, as a positive principle, has no place in his religion, as well as the principle of Beauty. Strength for him, in the moral sense, completely merges with violence, which is the crude, frank coercion of one person in relation to another. Force, if not identical, is equivalent to violence.

In this respect a whole gulf lies between Tolstoy and the great English moralists of the nineteenth century, Carlyle and Ruskin. Fighters against the "petty-bourgeois" spirit and "petty-bourgeois" morality, both Carlyle and Ruskin passionately loved culture and clearly saw in it the creative work of a religious principle.

The disagreement between Tolstoy and the great English moralists is not only a disagreement in the evaluation of culture. His grip is much wider. Carlyle and Ruskin loved the Force in culture . Hence their preaching of discipline and authority, the defense of state power and war.

This is the deepest moral disagreement, resting against the metaphysical disagreement. Moreover, there are directly different, even antagonistic attitudes, a different religion.

Is Strength, or rather superiority in strength, simply a fact, or does it point to something basic, metaphysical, and therefore of great moral significance? It is quite clear what significance this question has for the moral evaluation of all modern culture, and how a different evaluation of this culture follows from a different attitude towards the Force.

How is good related to strength? Negative or positive? The moral problem of strength is, as it were, that mysterious metaphysical abyss into which, before an inquisitive philosophical eye, all the ultimate problems of modernity expand: socialism (equality of unequal forces!), eternal peace (renunciation of war!), the national question (is there national self-affirmation? moral truth or, conversely, untruth?) and a number of other burning questions that concern modern man. Ultimately, all these questions are fraught with the problem of the Force.

The great religious significance of Tolstoy lies precisely in the fact that with his personality and life he, with the power of genius, confronted modern humanity with two basic problems of world and human existence: problems beauty and Forces.

And no matter how we decide, no matter how humanity in its collective life, which, in the words of Tolstoy himself, is a "clash of innumerable arbitrariness," solves these problems, Tolstoy, in his severity and straightforwardness, gave us great lessons in such consistency and honesty of thought. from which mankind has almost lost the habit.

He subjected to his judgment not particulars and conclusions, but the foundations and premises of all modern culture and culture in general. In this respect, and not only in this respect, Tolstoy is the true restorer of Christianity. Like Christianity, it brought "not peace, but a sword" to the moral and religious consciousness of mankind. And the insult to Tolstoy's memory will not consist in our courageously and consciously rejecting his "sword", but in the fact that out of admiration for his personality, out of moral flabbiness and mental cowardice, we will begin to blunt Tolstoy's "sword" and turn this terrible weapon moral dissection and spiritual clarification into a harmless toy that serves to pitifully reconcile the irreconcilable and, worse, to hypocritically obscure the true sharpness of the mysteries of our moral and social existence.

Tolstoy's morality is so meager because Tolstoy is too much of a moralist, that the whole riddle of the world is resolved for him into the moral problem of complete obedience to the moral command of God.

And precisely because he is too moralistic and a narrow dogmatist in his morality, he cannot rise above the moral world in the same way that richer and deeper religious natures have risen. His morality does not contain that smile of condescension and forgiveness that illuminates the face of Christ. Nor does he have that deep and reconciling insight into the irreducible contradictions and squalor of human nature, which is so characteristic of Pascal's religion born out of skepticism.

Why couldn't Tolstoy become a great reformer? In order to be such, one needs either great personal holiness or a great effect on people.

Was there a personal feat in Tolstoy's rebellion against beauty and art and the struggle of injustice against this beauty and art? Objectively it was the greatest feat, the greatest sacrifice that such a man could make. Only the renunciation of secular science by a scientist like Pascal can be compared with this sacrifice. But subjectively in the coup that took place with Tolstoy, there was no or almost no element of personal achievement or sacrifice. This revolution undoubtedly cost him great efforts of thought, but no effort of will is visible. Tolstoy didn't tear his soul away from art and beauty, but he simply did not have a taste for them. He came to religion, not hating beauty and art, but from a depressing consciousness of the emptiness of life, which was filled with them. Great man, he was never a great sinner and could not become great righteous. BUT born he was never a righteous man; he never had that holiness that is given without struggle and asceticism, which a born saint receives from himself. In general, Tolstoy's moral personality did not stand on the level of his preaching, it was smaller and weaker than hers.

Inaccessible to Tolstoy was that religious action, which, even without personal holiness, can make a person a great religious reformer. For such a religious action, Tolstoy was still too much of a writer and master. For such a role, a different upbringing and a different nature were needed, more effective and at the same time more flexible, more powerful and at the same time more plastic.

Nevertheless, Tolstoy occupies a very special place in the history and psychology of politics. It is precisely the absence of poetry in his reforms, the positive sobriety of his religious spirit, that is something peculiar and remarkable. The penetration of religion, religious "conversions" are very often combined with an ecstatic, "pathological" state of mind. Voltaire considered Pascal's religiosity to be madness; in our time they speak of his hereditary neurasthenia. And in general, a tendency based on well-known indisputable facts is often noticeable - religious direction to consider thoughts and feelings as an expression of mental imbalance, as an essentially abnormal and painful phenomenon in a person who has become at the level of the latest culture. From this point of view, Tolstoy's example is highly instructive. Since he gave himself up to religion, he lives only by it: no motives extraneous to religion are mixed with his religiosity. And at the same time, he gave himself up to religion in a state of complete physical and mental health. His "turning" to God cannot be explained by any "physical" causes, by any "physiology" or "pathology". It is a matter of pure spirit, a moral or "spiritual" fact in the truest and most positive sense of the word. It is this character of Tolstoy's appeal to God that gives it a special and deep political significance, and the people who know the merits and torments of Tolstoy in this regard devoted themselves completely to Tolstoy's thoughts and ideas.

Without being a great religious reformer, is such a thing even possible in our time? - Tolstoy is great power in the cultural and social development of modernity.

Without a doubt, many people under his influence looked back at themselves, subjected themselves to internal judgment, sharpened their conscience and changed their behavior in one way or another. In the sexual question, his influence was especially strong. But such is the fate of every one-sided morality, every preaching imbued with the despotic spirit of absolutism, every unconditional command that their influence, no matter how great, weakens with the passage of time in relation to the same persons. The same thing happened with Tolstoy's morality. Many have passed through it, but very few have remained in it. But the trace it leaves is very deep. The influence of Tolstoy morality on the generation for which it was a new word and which took shape in the 80s. and entered into life in the 90s, it was indelible and very great.

Tolstoy's ideal society

By their own social Tolstoy's ideas in relation to the existing society a great revolutionary. His rejection of all coercive power and at the same time of all violence makes him the only consistent anarchist, faithful to the beginning of an absolutely voluntary relationship and unification of people. For he is the only anarchist who recognizes the denial of violence not only as a principle existence ideal human society, but also the principle of its implementation. There is a whole practical and, above all, moral-religious gulf in this difference between the peaceful anarchism of Tolstoy and the violent anarchism of other anarchists. This abyss is so great that to call Tolstoy an anarchist without reservations or explanations would be to obscure the very essence of his moral and social teaching.

As a preacher of equality, economic and political equality, as a denier of private property. Tolstoy undoubtedly belongs to the socialists. But even here the position he occupies is quite special, drawing a sharp line between him and the majority of socialists. This difference stems from religiosity Tolstoy.

Modern socialism is often called a religion. Since by religion is understood only a particular state of mind, characterized by a passion for a certain task, reaching the point of absorbing the entire spiritual personality of a person, many modern socialists can be called religious. Since religion is understood as the totality of aspirations and ideals that have for a given person or for a given group of people the significance of the highest values, to which all other things and relations are tried, socialism for many people is a religion. But the truth must be told: in this sense, even betting and beagle dogs can be an object of religion, and any sport in a true athlete excites a "religious" attitude.

Obviously, such a purely formal psychological understanding of religion does not explain anything in its ideological essence. Religion cannot be just a hobby, no matter what. Religion is inseparable from the idea of ​​the Divine, and its content is the relation of man to the supernatural, world-powerful Being. But this is not enough for modern man. Once religion has ceased to be the worship of a Being that inspires fear, once the Deity or that idea that replaces the Deity evokes love, the center of religion becomes the free and active service to the Deity, based on a sense of personal responsibility, on the conviction that my realization of the Good and my salvation , no matter how it is conceived, requires the tension of all my strength and above all depends on me. There is no feeling and idea more essential for religion, which has risen above the feelings of dull dependence and dark fear, than the feeling and idea of ​​a person's responsibility for himself and for the world.

What is the attitude of socialism towards this idea?

Socialism grew up on the soil of that mechanical moral-philosophical outlook which was prepared in the 18th century. and reached its highest peak in Bentham. If Bentham himself were not entirely the offspring of all the philosophy that preceded him, if he did not stand on the shoulders of Hume, Helvetius and Holbach, then one could say that Bentham, this bourgeois thinker ridiculed by Marx, is the true philosophical father of socialism. And in order to be convinced to what extent the spirit of Bentham hovers over the latest socialism, it is enough to look into the most remarkable English socialist treatise of the beginning of the 19th century. - in the work of Bentham's student William Thompson "An inquiry into the principles of the distribution of wealth" "(1824). Thompson was not only a student of Bentham, he was also a student of Godwin, the author of Political Justice and Aries. Both Godwin and Aries - both grew up and matured in the same spiritual atmosphere as Bentham.Aries, a man of one idea, perhaps brighter than any other writer and socialist figure, revealed his moral and philosophical essence. "Only with the greatest resistance and after a long spiritual struggle, - he says in his "Autobiography", - I was forced to renounce my original and deeply rooted Christian convictions, but, having renounced faith in the Christian doctrine, I was also forced to reject all other creeds.

Tolstoy's view of public political life and the position of a person in it is diametrically opposed to this cardinal idea of ​​socialism, which is not only its theoretical basis, but - more importantly - its moral and philosophical leitmotif. In the old so-called utopian or rather rationalistic socialism, which believed in the power of reason and reason-based education and legislation, the denial of personal responsibility was paralyzed by the great role attributed to reason in the re-education of man and the transformation of society. Godwin and Aries, denying the personal responsibility of man, assigned an immeasurably enormous task to the human mind. The historical thinking of the 19th century, rooted almost psychologically in a conservative reaction against the revolutionary rationalism of the preceding epoch, advanced against it the view of society and its forms as an organic product of spontaneous, irrational creativity. This direction was philosophically admirably reconciled with the denial of personal responsibility, personal achievement, personal creativity. In Marxism, the mechanical rationalism of the eighteenth century merged with the organic historicism of the 19th century, and in this merger the idea of ​​a person's personal responsibility for himself and for the world was finally drowned. Socialism - in the face of Marxism - has abandoned morality and reason. All of modern socialism is thoroughly imbued with the worldview of Marx, which is an amalgam of the mechanical rationalism of the eighteenth century. and organic historicism of the 19th century. Both elements of this amalgam are essentially equally hostile to the idea of ​​a person's personal responsibility, which underlies the moral teachings of Christianity and Leo Tolstoy in particular.

Now the question is: does socialism need the idea of ​​personal responsibility of man, and what is the general significance of this idea for the improvement of man and society?

What is the philosophical essence of socialism? One thing is certain - the basis of socialism is the idea of ​​complete rationalization of all processes taking place in society. This is the great difficulty of socialism. According to the idea of ​​socialism, the spontaneous economic and social interaction of people should be completely replaced by their planned, rational cooperation and subordination. Socialism requires not a partial rationalization, but one that would fundamentally cover the entire field of social life. This is the main difficulty of socialism, because it is obvious that neither the individual nor the collective mind is able to cover such a vast field and is not capable of subordinating all the processes taking place on it to one plan. This follows from the essence of the matter, and hence it is clear that from a realistic point of view, we can only talk about the partial implementation of the tasks of socialism, and not about the complete solution of the problem of socialism.

Socialism is unthinkable when the feeling and idea of ​​personal responsibility are weakened, and thus this idea and its strength in man is a necessary (although, in all likelihood, insufficient) condition for the realization of socialism. Meanwhile, we already know that philosophically socialism proceeds from the rejection of this idea. In the doctrine of the class struggle, it also completely disappears; it is absolutely alien to the philosophy of syndicalism (if the view of the theoreticians of syndicalism in general deserves the name of philosophy). Thus, socialism has undermined and is undermining one of those ideas, without the strengthening of which its implementation is impossible. This is one of the interesting contradictions of modern socialism, signifying its ideological bankruptcy and foreshadowing its real downfall.

However, the problem we have touched upon has an even broader and more general significance than the question of the fate of socialism and Leo Tolstoy's attitude towards socialism.

And this meaning gives reason to emphasize the philosophical meaning and cultural value of Leo Tolstoy's moral preaching. This sermon vigorously emphasizes the importance of personal improvement, it encourages a person to see in himself, in his own spiritual movements, actions and properties, the most important and decisive for him and for others. Contrasting and comparing the "internal" and "external" reform of man would not, perhaps, be necessary at all, if precisely those views that still enjoy the greatest credit in the "public" both here and in the West, including and socialism, were not set off constantly, consciously or unconsciously, from the understanding of human progress as the improvement of "external" forms of life. If at all it is permissible to divide human life into these two areas, then, it seems to me, the religious point of view, which Tolstoy stands on this issue and which puts forward the “internal” reform of mankind, is practically more fruitful and much more scientific than the opposite anti-religious "positive" view. The development of this thought would lead me too far. I will only say that a positive study of the economy and its development, in my opinion, proves in the clearest way that it is not the mythological "productive forces" that control man, but man and it is its religious nature that is of decisive importance for economic "progress". It often happens that non-scientific minds are on a scientifically more correct path than scientific minds. In his religious view of the course of human development, Tolstoy is much closer to scientific truth than what is recognized, or at least hitherto recognized, as "science".

But even if this is debatable, in any case, the point of view underlying Tolstoy's preaching cannot but be of great benefit to the practical improvement of public opinion. All the great political events and changes we have experienced in recent years have been, as it were, a grandiose psychological experiment on this subject. Many illusions turned out to be dispelled, many buildings collapsed, because under them there was not that foundation on which alone great and small human deeds can firmly hold: the moral education of a person. Let Tolstoy, as a moralist, narrow down human nature, let him believe too much in the power of preaching, and therefore imagine too simply the process of education (or, rather, self-education) of mankind, - he has the great merit that he pushes the thought of mankind in the direction of the true light.

Conclusion

Speaking about the significance of Tolstoy for our time, one should not forget that he is wholly, both as an artist and as a thinker, but more than anything as an individual, stands as if above time. The struggle of such a great artist with art and beauty is an enormous fact in itself, regardless of any practical consequences for public political life, and is of timeless significance.

But Tolstoy's activity connected with this fact undoubtedly had and still has enormous practical consequences. First of all - political. Tolstoy is one of the most powerful destroyers of our old order. Indifferent to politics in the narrow sense, he preached such general ideas and expressed such thoughts on particular issues that were of great political significance, and all the power that genius and the authority of a genius gave was inherent in this sermon. Among the ideological preachers of individual freedom in Russia, Tolstoy was the most powerful and most influential.

Bibliography

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