Lev Tolstoy’s non-resistance in the context of the Silver Age, Russian revolution and Russian emigration: part 2

The article is devoted, on the one hand, to the consideration of the genesis of L.N. Tolstoy’s ideas about “non-resistance to evil by violence” in the context of Russian thought of the 19th century, and on the other hand, to retrospective perception of “non-resistance” in the era of the Silver Age, during the years of the revolution and the Civil War, and then in emigration. On the basis of Tolstoy’s religious and philosophical articles, the works and statements of prominent Tolstoyans, as well as the testimonies of contemporaries, the author will try to recreate the cultural background of Tolstoyism and answer the questions: to what extent was “non-resistance” demanded by Russian society at the end of the 19th century? What psychological and cultural-philosophical practices did Tolstoy’s “non-resistance” bring to life? The author comes to the conclusion that Tolstoy’s ideas should be followed in dynamics: from the treatise “What is my faith?” to the article “Non-Doing” and anti-war articles of the beginning of the 20th century. In the situation of the Russian-Japanese War, Tolstoy does not speak as confidently about non-resistance as before. Continuing to use the categories of moral logic, he senses in the events the mysterious logic of war, familiar to him in his youth. The reception of Tolstoy’s journalism is even more revealing. If Vl.S. Soloviev and V.V. Rozanov in the last years of the 19th century still polemicize with Tolstoy traditionally: from the point of view of the inconsistency of “non-resistance” with the foundations of Christianity, then D.S. Merezhkovsky and L. Shestov, who wrote about Tolstoy in the 1900s, are not at all concern his “non-resistance”: they are more interested in the writer’s understanding of God as an emanation of goodness. With the outbreak of the First World War, Tolstoy’s denial of violence continues to exist in society and literature, reviving Tolstoy’s ideas from the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The end of the war gave rise to the idea of Tolstoy’s moral responsibility for defeatism. The new Bolshevik government also perceived “non-resistance” as a false value. The last rereading of “non-resistance” refers to the first years of emigration (I.A. Ilyin). Both in the “red” and in the “white” environment, Tolstoyism was recognized as untenable and by the end of the 1920s it was finally put into the archive.