About 1876 Tolstoy began to feel uneasy about the unreflecting and prosperous life he was leading; the thought of approaching death grew into an invincible obsession; and the passionate craving for a religious justification of his life became the dominating force in him. At first he turned to the orthodox faith of the people, hoping that a religion that made so many millions happy in the midst of their misery would save him, but the proud rationalism of his mind could not accept its rites and fasts, he renounced the Church, and out of his own reading of the Gospels gradually evolved a new Christianity, from which all the metaphysical and non-ethical elements were eliminated. The decisive stage in this conversion, he tells us, was the moment when he realized that the whole message of Christ was contained in the words (Matt. 5, 39) "that ye resist not evil." This doctrine of non-resistance became the foundation of the creed which soon became known as Tolstoyism (tolstovstvo.) It is necessary to distinguish two stages in this conversion : the initial pang of despair, and disgust with unjust and fleshly life, and the subsequent efforts to reduce this essentially mystical and incommunicable experience to a logical and consecutive doctrine. Tolstoy gave a complete account of his conversion in A Confession (written 1879, revised 1882, published 1884). It is a work of great imaginative sincerity and tremendous rhetorical power worthy to rank by the side of the Confessions of St. Augustine. But the initial and more essential stage of despair is recorded with even greater power in a fragment, posthumously published, The Memoirs of a Madman (1884). The same experience is at the base of the two greatest imaginative works of his old age—The Death u) Ivan Ilyich (1884) and Master and Man
At first Tolstoy took no steps to propagate his new faith. It was not till of ter the revelation of social misery he had in a visit to the Moscow slums that his religion assumed a definitely social coloring, and not till his intimacy with V. G. Chertkov that "Tol stoyism" became an organized sect, and began to acquire prose lytes. This happened in
Tolstoy's Teaching.—Tolstoy's religion expounded in What I believe in, and in A Short Exposition of the Gospels, is based on the natural light immanent in the human conscience which reveals to us the God that is the supreme Good and Reason. God is not personal, and there is no personal immortality. Jesus was a great man, whose teaching is true not because he was the Son of God, blit because it coincides with the light of the human conscience. The Buddha and other men were as great, and Jesus holds no monopoly of the truth. Tolstoy advanced no metaphysics and no image of the world order. His religion is purely anthropocentric. God and the Kingdom of God are "inside us." The aim of man is to achieve happiness, which can be done only by doing right, by loving all men, and by freeing oneself from the appetites of greed, lust and anger. All forms of violence are equally wicked. Not only war but all forms of compulsion inherent in the State are criminal. The true Christian must abstain from participating in them ; he must refuse conscription; he must not accept any work under the State; he must not sit on a jury. Opposing the State with violence is also wicked and cannot lead to any better forms of life. Revolutionary activity, though it may be based on the good feeling of love for the oppressed, is evil because it breeds hatred and violence. The social order can become better only when all men have learned to love each other. Still there is a great difference in Tolstoy's attitude to the State and to the Revolu tionaries; he disapproves of the latter, but all the force and bitter ness of his invective is kept for the former. Property, as the gratification of greed and lust and the assertion of a single man's monopoly over things that belong to all, is wicked. It is the chief source of violence and so on. The rich have built up a corrupt and artificial civilization, and created for themselves fictitious values, which must be got rid of. The poor, however demoralized by servitude, have preserved their good nature in greater purity be cause they have not been corrupted by the artificial culture of the rich. Love and compassion must be extended to all living things, and abstention from the flesh of slaughtered animals is a character istic tenet of Tolstoyism. So are abstinence from intoxicants and
drugs (particularly tobacco), the artificial demand for which was created by a corrupt civilization, and which dim the natural con science of man.
Tolstoy can hardly be called a social reformer for he advanced no practical proposal for the improvement of social conditions. He did not believe in the possibility of reform in the accepted sense of the word. The first duty of the true Christian being is to abstain from living by the work of others, and from taking part in the organized violence of the State. The only practical measure he advocated was the solution of the land question by means of the land tax of Henry George. His disapproval extended to the organized violence of Western capitalistic democracy as well as of Russian autocracy.
On the whole, the direct influence of Tolstoy's teaching in Russia was not great. His disciples were never numerous (and seldom of a very high quality). He established relations with many dis senting Russian sects, but most of these (e.g., the Doukhobors, q.v.) were essentially alien to him in spirit. His larger influence, however, was immense, and very soon crossed the frontier. In the last 15 or 20 years of his life he was probably the most venerated man in the world. His fame reached into China and India as well as Europe and America. Visitors from all ends of the world made Yasnaya Polyana a new Mecca.
From the first, the Russian Government viewed Tolstoy's new activity with hostility. But it never attempted to do anything against him. Some of his more anti-Orthodox writings, as well as some of his bitterest attacks on the Romanoff dynasty had to appear abroad. But what appeared in Russia was quite sufficient for a complete acquaintance with his teaching. In 1901 the Synod of the Russian Church excommunicated him,—an act which has been much misinterpreted and which merely registered a fact he had himself proclaimed many years earlier, viz., that he had ceased to belong to the Church. On the other hand many of Tol stoy's followers suffered imprisonment and banishment to Siberia chiefly for refusal of military service.
Tolstoy's conversion changed his attitude to his literary crea tion. He did not abandon it, nor did it deteriorate in quality, but it became different, so did his views of its social and moral f unc tion. They are contained in What is Art (1896), one of the most remarkable books ever written on the subject. Art, according to Tolstoy, is a means of emotional communion, a means by which the artist "infects" other people with feelings he has himself ex perienced. If this "infection" does not take place there is no art.
If it is limited to a small number of persons of the same class, time or nationality as the author, it is negligible and inferior art; if the appeal extends to mankind in general, but the feelings thus communicated are evil feelings it is genuine but evil art ; if the feelings are good, it is good art and if they are the highest feel ings possible, the religious feelings of love and compassion, it is the highest form of all, religious art. The application of these standards led Tolstoy to reject or to minimize by far the greater part of modern art and literature, including his own early work, which had exalted the life of the rich and idle. This change of attitude went hand in hand with a change in his literary taste. He rejected the "superfluous detail" of realism not only because it limited the appeal of literature to those familiar with the society described, but because it ceased to satisfy him aesthetically. Al ready in 1873 he had written some stories for the people, in which everything that was not essential for the narrative development had been rigorously eliminated. From 1884 onwards he wrote a number of new stories of the same kind, masterpieces of chaste and classical narrative technique at the service of one unifying and crystallizing idea, the idea of ethical Christianity.
The same method, on a larger scale, is applied in Father Sergius, in The False Coupon, and in Hadji-Murdd (1896-1904) which was the favourite work of his old age and which he intended as an example of good art appealing to the sense of human brother hood, though not to the highest religious feelings.