Chapter 2 - Tolstoi as a Practicing Orthodox

Summary

In his first religious tract, A Confession (1884), Tolstoi claimed that for most of his adult life, until his “conversion,” he had been living as a “nihilist.” Closer reading of his diaries and letters, however, reveals a very different picture: Far more than most of his contemporaries in the Russian upper classes, Tolstoi had been preoccupied with religious questions, and for long periods of time had prayed regularly – also before his quest for meaning led him to embrace Orthodoxy temporarily. However, throughout his life, and also during his stint as a practicing Orthodox Christian, his relationship to the Russian Church was marked by ambivalence. As long as he professed the Orthodox faith, he practiced it with some “mental reservations”; conversely, when he later left the Church, he did not make a clean break with the religion of his forefathers, as virtually all Tolstoi scholars would have us believe. In fact, in A Confession he explicitly wrote that in the Russian Church he had found “truth interwoven with lies with the finest threads,” and he saw it as his task to disentangle these two elements in Orthodoxy from each other. How he went about doing that, I show in Chapter 3.