“Verbo aspero”. Contemporaries’ perception of Leo Tolstoy’s non-fiction of the 1880s

The article deals with perception of Leo Tolstoy’s religious-philosophical and socio-political works by his contemporaries in the 1880s. Tolstoy started sharing his plans concerning his religious-political work with reporters by correspondence. At the same time in his private discussions, he spoke out some ideas of imperfection of the contemporary social and state system. Thus, Tolstoy helped spread rumors of his creative plans and attracted attention of the society. He consciously triggered the conflict with the ecclesiastic censorship, rightly assuming that the effect of censorship ban would promote the growth of public interest to his writings. The spread of Tolstoy’s articles, bypassing the censorship, made it difficult to discuss his works in legal periodicals. On top of that, Tolstoy’s novels and papers were translated and published abroad. Tolstoy’s sudden international fame, reviews of his works by foreign authors and visits of foreign reporters to his place had no precedents in the history of Russian literature, and greatly affected the public opinion. The contemporaries’ perception of Tolstoy’s writings was ambivalent. Some considered the writer was deliberately creating an atmosphere of scandal in order to draw attention, while others viewed that as example of the genius’ bona fide delusion and hoped for Tolstoy’s return to fiction writing.