possible, evil will die of itself. Nonresistance to evil became
Tolstoy’s main tenet.
But Tolstoy’s Christianity did not bring him peace and
did not end his search, any more than Levin’s quest in Anna
Karenina had ended with his conversion. Never believing in
personal immortality, Tolstoy was not able to accept death’s
physical finality and the thought of his own physical annihi-
lation. He returned again and again to the theme of death,
which continued to haunt him. Efforts to include death in
his vision of harmony on earth by viewing it as a peaceful
merging with nature warred with flashes of nihilism. Only
in his last years did he make his peace with death.
After his conversion Tolstoy condemned his own pre-
1878 fiction, saying that it contained morally bad feelings.
He resumed writing literary works in the mid-1880s, but
they had changed. He now used a bare, plain style that would
be accessible to every reader. Tolstoy wrote two kinds of
works, both fundamentally tracts: short stories for peasants
and children that presented his views on love and nonvio-
lence, and longer stories for the educated reader, such as The
Death of Ivan Il’ich (1886), Kreutzer Sonata (1889), The
Devil (1889), and Father Sergii (1890–1891). He still had
all his literary force, but the joy in life that had animated his
earlier fiction was gone; the longer stories are dominated by
gloomy, strong passions. Most of them express a hatred of
the flesh, the source of life and of death.
Tolstoy’s last work to be published in his lifetime was
Resurrection (1899). It depicts the moral regeneration of
Nekhliudov, a nobleman whose early debauchery had ruined
the life of a young servant girl. In prison, Nekhliudov ob-
serves a religious service during which the priest, after giving
communion, “took the cup back with him behind the parti-
tion and drank all the remaining blood and finished all the
remaining pieces of God’s flesh.” Because of the heretical
passages in Resurrection and his attacks on the church and
state, the Holy Synod excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901. On
the day the decree was announced, a cheering crowd of sup-
porters gathered around his house.
By the 1880s Tolstoy had numerous disciples in Russia
and abroad, many of them misfits or half-mad. One of his
followers, Vladimir Chertkov, gained increasing influence
over him. Tolstoy’s disciples regarded him as a living saint,
and Yasnaia Poliana became a goal of pilgrimages. Groups
of Tolstoyans formed who tried to live by his ideas. All these
groups eventually fell apart. (Many of the early kibbutsim in
Palestine, however, were inspired by the ideology of a Rus-
sian-Jewish Tolstoyan, Aharon David Gordon.) Tolstoy con-
tinued to write in the final years of his life, expressing his
views on most of the social, religious, and political issues of
the day. He corresponded with Mohandas K. Gandhi, and
Gandhi’s doctrine of satyagraha was an adaptation of Tol-
stoy’s nonresistance to evil.
Tolstoy’s relations with his wife had deteriorated as he
became more and more preoccupied with religion. Friction
between her and Chertkov made Tolstoy’s life at home un-
bearable and led to his flight from Yasnaia Poliana in late Oc-
tober of 1910. He had long wanted to live quietly in solitude.
On the train journey he fell ill and was taken to the station-
master’s house at Astapovo, where he died on November 7.
While Tolstoy’s religious writings are peripheral to his
literary achievements, his art is unimaginable without the
moral and religious vision that informs it. Perhaps he cheated
death better than he knew; as artist and seeker he has contin-
ued, generation after generation, to attract passionate adher-
ents, and Yasnaia Poliana remains a focus of pilgrimages
from all over the world.
In one of his Sevastopol stories, Tolstoy had written:
“The hero of my narrative, whom I have tried to render in
all its beauty and who was, is, and always will be beautiful,
is truth.” Tolstoy’s brother Nikolai had said that in a certain
spot at Yasnaia Poliana there was a green stick on which was
written a secret that would destroy evil in men and make
them happy. As a boy, Tolstoy searched in the bushes at Yas-
naia Poliana for this stick. Much later, he wrote: “I believe
that this truth exists, and that it will be disclosed to men and
will give them what it promises.” According to his wish, Tol-
stoy was buried at the place where he thought the green stick
was hidden.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aldanov, Mark. Zagadka Tolstogo (1923). Reprint, Providence,
R.I., 1969.
Christian, R. F. Tolstoi: A Critical Introduction. London, 1969.
Eikhenbaum, Boris. Lev Tolstoi. 2 vols. Leningrad, 1928.
Maude, Aylmer. The Life of Tolstoi. 2 vols. London, 1929–1930.
Noyes, George Rapall. Tolstoi (1918). Reprint, New York, 1968.
Rolland, Romain. Vie de Tolstoï. Paris, 1928.
Tolstoy, Alexandra. Tolstoi: A Life of My Father. New York, 1953.
Weisbein, Nicolas. L’évolution religieuse de Tolstoï. Paris, 1960.
SYLVIA JURAN (1987)TOLTEC RELIGION. In pre-Columbian central
Mexico, Tolteca literally meant “people living at a place
named Tollan [i.e., among the rushes].” However, even then
the name had no single application, and it has none today.
Because there was more than one place called Tollan, the
word Toltec refers not to a single culture or religion, but rath-
er to at least five specific groups of people, all belonging to
Postclassic Mesoamerica: (1) the inhabitants of what is now
the archaeological site of Tula de Allende near Mexico City,
(2) the inhabitants or, more precisely, the elite, called Toltec-
Maya, of Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, (3) the inhabitants of Tol-
lan as it is described in central Mexican historical documents
of the sixteenth century, (4) militant leading groups in other
parts of Mesoamerica claiming descent from a place called
Tollan, (5) members of various, often quite different, ethnicTOLTEC RELIGION 9221