Soviet interpretations of contradictions in Leo Tolstoy's consciousness

The article considers two positions from which the contradictions of leo Tolstoy’s consciousness were described in Soviet philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s. On the one hand, Tolstoy is presented within a constant, albeit uneven, discussion between formalists and Marxists. On the other hand, special attention is paid to the opposition of the archaic and the modern, considered in the article «Tolstoy’s worldview» by Soviet philosopher Valentin Asmus who used programmatic works of Vladimir lenin on Tolstoy’s «screaming contradictions» as a methodology. The author also presents Tolstoy’s own position, stating that his thinking is built not on contradictions, but in the form of an antinomy between noumenally understood freedom, immortality, ethics and the phenomenal limitation of historical progress, in the manner of Hegelian evolutionism.