Tolstoy’s search for truth: ‘The Kingdom of God’

What to make of Tolstoy’s non-fiction? Unparalleled as a novelist, indeed adored across the literary world for the craftsmanship and the insight of his fictional worlds, Tolstoy’s political and philosophical works have become something of a sideshow and a neglected footnote to War and Peace and to Anna Karenina. For Tolstoy’s contemporary Nikolay Mikhailovsky, there were “two things [that are] always said about Count Tolstoy”: “that he is an outstandingly good writer of fiction and a bad thinker.”^[1]

This assumption has largely remained accepted since Tolstoy’s death, marred by personal, philosophical and political torments, in 1910. Readers and critics have continued to pore over the greater novels as the basis for constructing Tolstoy’s “world view” and political identity, while his polemical works of nonfiction, which did only increase his worldwide fame or notoriety in his lifetime, have been passed over as the meandering tracts of an ever more disillusioned thinker, whose spiritual crises led him to the train station where he met his death of pneumonia on the run from his wife.

There is some good reason for this. Tolstoy resolutely abandons much of his famous literary style in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which was first published in 1894 and quickly translated into English, having been banned by the Tsarist authorities in Russia. In her introduction to the translation which popularised Tolstoy’s views throughout the English-speaking world, Constance Garnett admitted that “Tolstoy disdains all attempts to captivate the reader.”^[2]

Tolstoy opens his work with an extended tour round his library of obscure pacifist writers, from the contemporary American campaigners for disarmament to the fifteenth-century writings of the Polish religious reformer Kulchitsky, mixed in with tirades against the militarist statements of his own time in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Tolstoy’s political thought is so simple at times as to provoke ridicule: the insistence on the effects of “accumulation of capital” on the “brutalisation of millions”, which “delude and hypnotise the people” in society, at first present merely the case of an almost deranged anarchist pamphleteer, rather than one of the most serious-minded novelists of the Russian “Golden Age”. Tolstoy’s generalisations derail much of his case: he claims fantastically that “under every government without exception everything is kept back that might emancipate and everything encouraged that tends to corrupt the people”.^[3]

The modern world in Tolstoy’s eyes is a Bruegelesque landscape of state-sanctioned plunder, murder and oppression on an unending scale, based on the ubiquitous corruption of the teachings of the modern Church and the untrammelled march of the capitalist world. His use of catechisms, invented statements and crude analogies in the first part of this book have seemed at best quaint, and at worst banal, for a readership which experienced the political realities of the twentieth century. Tolstoy’s political solution, such as there was one, was for the individual to refuse all connection with any state and to dedicate themselves only to the truth of Christ’s original message and a life of passive resistance.

Yet Tolstoy’s message and his political writing are more than the facile polemics they appear, and The Kingdom of God is more than the simplistic messenger of non-resistance. More than anything, the book takes pride of place in the intellectual project which framed all of Tolstoy’s major output, and drove his self-imposed exile into the life of a reclusive writer. It is in what he sees as the consequences of an unadulterated Christian “truth” in life and the moral values which this has for individuals. In the words of Isaiah Berlin, what Tolstoy desired “more than anything else in the world, was to know the truth”.^[4] This authentic obsession drove him into decades of intense reflection and spiritual crisis, and made him always keen to set down logical, abstract principles for what good he was able to do, and for what light his work could shine upon what he saw as a spiritually darkened world.

This has two consequences for how we read Tolstoy’s work. First, while his fiction is often the perfect place for intense characters such as Levin and Pierre Bezhukov to consider the weighty matters of the purpose of their lives and work which obsessed their literary creator, such philosophical wanderings are in fact more diffuse and harder to follow in his non-fiction work. When Levin sets upon his utopian projects in Anna Karenina, the reader senses his naïvete and sees its consequences; when we are confronted by something approaching the same in Tolstoy’s own polemic, it is harder to treat it like the serious and urgent philosophy which he intended it to be.

Secondly, Tolstoy’s own beliefs truly “cannot be fitted into any of the public movements of his own, or indeed any other, age”, nor did he find a place “either of the great ideological streams which divided educated opinion” in Russia during his lifetime.^[5] His aim was to strip away all the historical fabric of political philosophy of the populist radicals of his own day, the free-thinking intellectuals of the Enlightenment, and the traditional Christian preaching in Russia and Europe: the aim being to base his thought merely on the fundamental precepts of Christian belief and an individual logic of morality. In nineteenth-century Russia, discussion of proklyatye voprosy, the “accursed questions” of social life and morality, was ubiquitous among the growing cast of intellectuals.^[6] Tolstoy answered these questions, but in a way fundamentally different from his contemporaries, marked by its resolutely Christian focus, its dependence on logical principles, and the eternal, entirely original “passion” for the attainment of “truth”.

In The Kingdom of God this desire for a purified morality leads Tolstoy to make targets of the entirety of the social architecture around him. Most fallacious and pernicious of all for him is the Church, and most of all “the error of the Church’s teaching in allowing war and capital punishment”, which he saw as its dissension from the teachings of Christ. At the core of Tolstoy’s Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount, which he sees as complete justification for non-resistance to evil and the “brotherhood of all men”.^[7] Whereas the Church holds the Nicene Creed as the basis of its faith, Tolstoy chastises it for neglecting the sheer simplicity of Christ’s teaching on the Mount.

The Church of the modern age had for him become merely a tool of the grasping state, promoting the doctrines of violence and the necessity of war. Yet he lamented just as much the materialism and atheist thought of the Russian nihilists and political populists: Tolstoy never took any binary side in the struggle of the nineteenth century between the “Slavophiles” and the “Westernisers”, or the traditionalists of the Tsar and orthodox Church against the radicals and anarchists advocating a revolution in the later decades of the century. He eviscerated the motivations and belief systems of both, in his own “annihilating” pursuit of the truths which lay beneath the surface of contemporary thought. The Church, with its ceremonies and catechisms, doctrines and divine favour, represented to him an institution that affronted the true, pure Christianity of abstract values to which he clung.

That desperate attempt to clear his own thought of all that polluted the belief systems of the institutionalised modern world allows us again to relate The Kingdom of God to much else of Tolstoy’s work, rather than seeing it as a radical offshoot. Tolstoy’s obsession with truth was as strong as his hatred of the artificial. When he finished Anna Karenina, his perennial self-hatred scorned the work for its attempt at deep ideas in a story as familiar as the cut-out romances found in the newspapers.

His fictional heroes were all almost childlike in the simplicity of their own outlook on life: Levin and Bezhukov often find their greatest joys in reliving the life of a child. In later life, Tolstoy made this notion of a return to the simplicity of rural life, something unknown to him since childhood, central to his thought; the simplicity of Levin and Bezhukov into a virtue. It was found in the land among the peasantry, unaffected by the accretions of modernity in city life and the middle-class bourgeoisie whom Tolstoy refused to understand. This picture of the purity and simplicity of life was what led Tolstoy out of the deep angst and existential search for purpose he described in the Confession of 1882. As Isaiah Berlin makes clear, Tolstoy took from Rousseau and other eighteenth-century Enlightenment figures the idea that the spiritual and material needs of mankind were always constant, and that the leading of a “harmonious life” would always remain “the goal of their nature”:^[8]

In spite of all external varnish of modernity, learning, and spirituality which the members of Church begin nowadays to assume in their works … the practical work of the Russian Church consists of nothing more than keeping the people in their present conditions of coarse and savage idolatry … suppressing that living understanding of Christianity which exists in the people side by side with idolatry.

Tolstoy’s Christianity was an individual one, marked by an unswerving attachment to the notion of truth and goodness embodied in the preaching of Christ. The message of the Sermon on the Mount — that those who suffer and are persecuted would be rewarded in heaven, that it was the “peacemakers” who were “blessed” rather than those who brought change by force — was the unbending fulcrum of his thought. It may have led him to obscurantism and needless exaggeration in this work, but the spirit of Tolstoy’s penetrating original logic did make a crucial difference to thinkers of the century after his own. Not only that, but the premise of The Kingdom of God is in some ways fully at home in that of Tolstoy’s great novels. His legacy is much more than that of a great novelist and obscure thinker.

The pacifist ideal of non-violent resistance to evil famously made a deep impact on Mohandas Gandhi’s thought during his time in South Africa: indeed, he wrote that it was one of the three greatest modern influences on his life. The two men maintained a correspondence until Tolstoy’s death in 1910, but the lasting impact was the aid Tolstoy gave to Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, the mode of peaceful resistance which came to be espoused by many political movements across the span of the twentieth century.

Tolstoy’s vision of political action was largely divorced from prevailing Western norms of parties, armies and elections; just as in his vision of religious life, the aim of the spiritual individual in politics was to return to those abstract values which determined the path towards a harmonious life. Not for nothing has the writer A.N. Wilson described Tolstoy’s vision as more Buddhist than anything else. Its impact on political life has nevertheless been ambiguous, precisely because Tolstoy disdained the ideological debates of his own time. His legacy is more in the spirit of his writing and the unrelenting moralism and intensity of his religious and political worldview.

In every part of The Kingdom of God does that unrelenting spirit of Tolstoy’s philosophy come through with ever brighter intensity. Yet towards the end of this book he makes it more than an extended polemic. The deep roots of Tolstoy’s religious basis are a clear conception of the words of the Gospel and their universal implications for the people who follow them. Above all, Tolstoy wishes to invoke Jesus’ command to his followers not to seek the kingdom of God in the world around them, in the apparatus of social spirituality or the accruing wealth of prosperity or the festivals and shows of public worship, but in themselves. That kingdom could only be found in the individual, within the spirit which sought goodness and truth above all others.

It is a simple vision, but a coruscating, challenging and relentless one nonetheless, tearing apart as it does so many centuries of development in Western thought and the material sophistication of society. Tolstoy’s philosophy of politics and of his own life was based on this reversion to the things which acknowledged the unchanging nature and needs of mankind, which secured both the meaningless of his life and yet the hope of salvation. His thought was mired in gargantuan contradictions: these were what led into the spiritual crisis of his own mid-life. Yet his way out of them was to return to the world and the land which he remembered from his childhood and in which he imagined his peasants on his estates and around Russia to live.

It was here that he managed to find meaning in his own aristocratic life, and it was with the same spirit of unbending obedience to the words of Christ and, ultimately, to the hope of the kingdom of God which would reward those who had suffered, that Tolstoy allowed himself to live. It was a challenge he issued to the Western world, and indeed to all the readers who encountered his increasingly radical ideas and tried to relate them to the fictions which crowned the Russian literature of his age. Readers may still be trying to do so today.

The greatest link is in Tolstoy’s appreciation of what really does make life worth living, away from material distractions and the sophistications of modernity, and what it is in fact like to try to find truth in one life. That truth was for him a Christian one, and not one that all his readers will follow. Indeed, it seems at once highly authentic and irredeemably out of date to the twenty-first century. Yet it is the spirit of this unending search for truth and for meaning that Tolstoy’s legacy, in all his work, allows us to seek the kingdom of God, or of the soul, or one of our own making. What Tolstoy preached, most of all, was freedom to make out that search for truth in each individual, always against the backdrop of what he saw as the ultimate meaninglessness of life. Tolstoy’s bastion against that admission was his writing, his characters, and his faith.

This is an edited version of the introduction to the new Warbler Classics edition of The Kingdom of God is Within You, translated by Constance Garnett. It is published this week and available from Amazon here.

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^[1] ‘Desnitsa i shuitsa L’va Tolstago’ (1875), in N. Mikhailovsky, Literaturnaya kritka: stat’i o russkoi literature XIX-nachala XX veka (Leningrad, 1989), p.37, as quoted in Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Tolstoy and Enlightenment’, in Russian Thinkers, (ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kenny), London, 1978, p.273.

^[2] P.3 [IN GARNETT TRANSLATION]

^[3] 120 [IN GARNETT TRANSLATION WORD EDITION]

^[4] Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Tolstoy and Enlightenment’, p.274.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Berlin, Isaiah, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, in Russian Thinkers, op.cit., p.33.

^[7] Tolstoy, p.50. [GARNETT TRANSLATION]

^[8] Berlin, ‘Enlightenment’, op.cit., p.283.