The Reformer. Stephen F. Williams
The evil perpetrated by an executioner is obvious. But everything conspires to mask the evil of the judge. The judge who condemns someone to death doesn’t carry out the sentence; it is not he who deprives the person of life, but the law; if the law is bad and unjust, that is not his concern—or so Tolstoy assumed!19 Maklakov cites Tolstoy’s story, “Let the fire burn—don’t put it out,” observing that he could confidently quote passages of it from memory “because it was under the scrutiny of the censor so many times.” The cause of the censor’s hostile gaze was the story’s seeming exaltation of criminal acts: one character’s unlawful concealment of another’s crime is depicted as fulfilling God’s law.20
In his literary treatment of the courts, Tolstoy sometimes spoke not as a prophet inveighing against any state application of force but as a political figure and revolutionary. In Resurrection the law serves only to advance the interests of the ruling elite. This of course is a much more worldly message; as Maklakov observes, he is “speaking our language, addressing our concerns.”21
Lawyers fare even worse than courts under Tolstoy’s gaze. As the judge is worse than the hangman, because he can hide his guilt behind his role, so the lawyer is even worse than the judge, because he can even more persuasively distance himself from the evils wrought by the courts and the state. In his memoirs Maklakov recounts three occasions on which Tolstoy received lawyers at Yasnaya Polyana. The three lawyers (Oscar Gruzenberg, N. P. Karabchevskii, and Fyodor Plevako) were all very distinguished and often active for the defense in political trials; at the Beilis trial they and Maklakov constituted the defense team (with the exception of Plevako, who had died by then). Yet, except for Maklakov’s special friend Plevako, they irritated Tolstoy with their thinking process and attitudes.22
Maklakov, of course, had dedicated his life to law and politics, activities that he believed would advance the welfare of Russians. He exalted the courts as guardians of the law. He concludes with another mention of Tolstoy’s many actual efforts at improving life in this world, calling the relation between his beliefs and his life “an inconsistency, a touching, miraculous inconsistency.”23
Through his work on the 1891 famine, Maklakov met Tolstoy at his home in Moscow and talked with him for the first time.24 Tolstoy read his guests an article, and “everything seemed so natural and simple that I had to force myself to understand my good fortune and grasp where I was sitting. His wife, Sofia Andreevna, . . . called us all to the dining table.” After that he was often at the Tolstoys’ home, until Tolstoy’s death.25 “It was great luck for me. The whole world knows Tolstoy’s literary work. Some know his religious thinking, often only in part and not fully understanding it. To know the living Tolstoy, to experience his charm oneself, was given to very few.”26 Most of what follows as to Tolstoy’s character is drawn from Maklakov’s direct knowledge. Here is his overview:
For those who knew Tolstoy, there was no personal pride; on the contrary, no one could miss his dissatisfaction with himself, eternal doubt in himself, his touching shyness, his reluctance to dazzle, even his inability to play a leading role. . . . In Tolstoy everything was ordinary and simple. He never imposed on others the innermost principles by which he lived, never made them the subject of general conversation. If someone not knowing who he was should by chance find himself in his presence, he would not guess who was before him; he could not believe that this simple and kind old man, listening with such interest to the general conversation, was the very Tolstoy whom the whole world knew.27
Despite Maklakov’s own conviction that Tolstoy’s self-effacement was genuine, he recognized that it might seem a contrivance. As he notes, it put Tchaikovsky off when he met Tolstoy—simply, argues Maklakov, because of the mismatch between the real Tolstoy and the grand image held by the world at large.28
Maklakov was present at Tolstoy’s last departure from Moscow for Yasnaya Polyana, from which he then started on the journey that took him to his deathbed at the railway station in Astapovo. The newspapers had carried word of the departure, and the square in front of the railway station was packed. Everyone rushed toward the carriage that was bearing Tolstoy and his wife and daughters to the station, and the Tolstoys were able to make it inside only by using a special entrance. The crowd rushed to the train, and the wave of people carried Maklakov to the railway car with Tolstoy. Through the open window, Maklakov saw Tolstoy thrust his head forward, and, mumbling with an old man’s voice, with tears flowing down his pale cheeks, he thanked the people for their sympathy, which he said he “hadn’t expected.” He didn’t know what more to say, and, noticing Maklakov, turned to him with relief; no longer able to comfortably appear before the public, he was content to see a familiar face.
Countess Sofia Tolstoy, with a dedicatory inscription to Maklakov, July 2, 1896. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Maklakov closes the 1928 “Teaching and Life” speech with these words:
At Astapovo, a few months [after the departure from Moscow], he said to those nearest him, “You’ve come here for Lev alone, but in Russia there are millions.” He could talk that way and think that way. And the world loved him all the more that he thought that way. The world appreciated that Tolstoy, having received all the blessings that the world can offer, was not tempted by them. The world could not but be touched that, with access to all that, Tolstoy preferred a life according to God. And it was all the more striking that Tolstoy came to the precepts of Christ not because he was ordered by God but because he found them a sensible basis for human life. . . . To not consider Christ God, to not believe in life after death, to not believe in requital, and all the same to preach those precepts, to consider that joy consists for a human in renunciation of individual happiness, in life for the good of others, meant to reveal a faith in good and the goodness of man that no one in the world had ever had.
The world did not follow Tolstoy, and it was right. His teaching was not of this world. But listening to Tolstoy’s message, the world opened in itself those good feelings which the trivia of life had long since drowned; the world itself became better than it ordinarily was. Tolstoy did not flatter it, but stirred its conscience and lifted it to his level. And while Tolstoy lived, the world saw in him a living bearer of faith in goodness and in man. Thus the life of Tolstoy was so dear to the world that on November 7, [1910], when Tolstoy died, the world was no longer what it had been. Something in it died forever. But Russia, in which Tolstoy lived, and which he would not have traded away for anything, Russia, which he loved most of all—Russia, humble, poor and backward, which did not know what misfortunes lay before it, did not foresee that it would soon come to know by its own experience the whole depth of human vileness and cold-blooded indifference, Russia instinctively felt that on the day of his death it lost its protector.29
Did Maklakov’s association with Tolstoy affect his own behavior as a public figure? If you look for specific impacts, you will find few. One of Maklakov’s favorite words is the untranslatable gosudarstvennost, which has some overtones of “rule of law” but tends perhaps even more to connote the simple value of having a working state, standing athwart chaos. He often observed that even a bad state was generally better than no state at all; Tolstoy, of course, engaged in no such pragmatic comparisons. While Maklakov obviously did not like war, he was no pacifist: he believed there were circumstances where the consequences of refusing to fight were worse than those of fighting. But Maklakov’s reasoning was almost invariably pragmatic and consequentialist.
One issue escaped Maklakov’s general rejection of Tolstoy’s political positions—the death penalty. (Even here Maklakov’s position is qualified by pragmatism—he regarded it as essential in wartime.) Perhaps his most famous speech was his attack on a system of virtual kangaroo courts created by the tsar and Stolypin in the summer of 1906. The aim of this system, the so-called field courts martial, was to stamp out an ongoing wave of assassinations. Maklakov’s prime target was the procedures of the courts: their extreme speed, the absence of any right of appeal, and a virtual presumption of guilt once the defendant was charged. We’ll come to the speech in the discussion of Maklakov’s role in the Second Duma. For now, the interesting