Ivan Zasursky. New Russian Frankenstein

And I really renounced the church, stopped performing its rituals and wrote in my will to my loved ones that when I die, they would not allow church ministers to see me and my dead body would be removed as quickly as possible, without any spells and prayers over it, as they remove any nasty and unnecessary thing so that it does not interfere with the living.

Lev Tolstoy. Reply to the definition of the synod of February 20-22, 1901 1

The director of the Yasnaya Polyana museum, Vladimir Tolstoy, appealed to the church with a request to forgive his great-grandfather. The news was not noticed almost anywhere - only in Moscow Times 2 . As if everything is as it should be - spring is coming, Great Russia has received a new anthem, our Red Banner army is marching victoriously through the mountain villages, and Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson asks the Orthodox hierarchs to forgive his lost ancestor. The Church promises to think about it.

It is difficult to find a person who would feel more passionate hatred for the Russian Orthodox Church and the institution of the church in general than Leo Tolstoy. It should be noted that before his death he was very worried that the church might use this to proclaim reconciliation with the writer. Here is another quote that perhaps sums up his attitude towards this institution:

Of all the godless concepts and words, there is no concept and word more godless than the concept of the church. There is no concept that has given rise to more evil, there is no concept more hostile to the teachings of Christ, than the concept of the church...

There was a robber's nest in Rome; it expanded into robbery, violence, murder; it has taken over the nations. The robbers and their descendants, with atamans, who were called either Caesar or Augustus, at their head, robbed and tortured peoples to satisfy their lusts. One of the heirs of these robber chieftains, Constantine, having read books and being fed up with a lustful life, preferred some dogmas of Christianity to previous beliefs.

He preferred mass to making human sacrifices; he preferred one God with his son Christ to the veneration of Apollo, Venus and Zeus, and ordered this faith to be introduced among those whom he held under his power...

And everyone became happy, and for 1500 years this same faith has lived in the world, and other robber chieftains introduced it, and they are all anointed, and everything, everything is from God. If some villain robs everyone, beats a lot of people, they will anoint him - he is from God. We have a husband killer, a harlot was from God, the French have Napoleon. But the priests, on the other hand, are not only from God, but almost gods themselves, because the Holy Spirit sits in them. Both in the pope and in our synod with its commanders and officials (Leo Tolstoy, “Church and State”) .

The great-great-grandson, who received Yasnaya Polyana under management, travels through the pages of glossy magazines along with stories about pancakes and jam, illustrating a happy family life and continuity of generations. In an interview with the Moscow Times, Vladimir Tolstoy explained his decision to send a letter by saying that “in Russia there is a deep contradiction between the church and the national genius, a very painful contradiction ,” and “for the sake of national harmony” it must be overcome.

In general, this story would hardly have gone beyond the scope of a curious incident illustrating the anecdotal desire of the museum caretaker to make friends with the influential Orthodox hierarchy if it did not fit so well into the emerging trends of social life in the country. Now we can say that the regiment of shepherds has arrived. In addition to the sculptor Tsereteli and the film director Mikhalkov, support finally came from the family of Count Tolstoy. In this way, even “great Russian literature” may be able to match the $100 million publicity plan with which Press Minister Mikhail Lesin planned to change the West’s opinion of the country.

If anyone doubted that as the political system closed, there would be a politicization of culture as a sphere of open conflict, here is confirmation. It was difficult to imagine, however, that the beginning of the season of “cultural politics” would occur with the roar of a classic of Great Russian Literature turning over in his grave.

Harmony seekers can be divided into those who seek it within and those who seek harmony in society. There have always been many of the latter in Russia, and not only in Russia.

This harmony is best expressed by a metaphor where society is compared to the human body. Everything must be one and work in unison. It is, in essence, a monarchical concept and, mind you, an ecclesiastical one too. Its appeal today is due to the fact that those who adhere to it want, of course, to be the head (or, in any case, to be in close proximity to the head). The trick is that if you think in terms of this metaphor, then there cannot be two heads.

If someone else pretends to be a head, it’s not a head at all, but just a pimple or an abscess, if larger. Or a cancerous tumor. Here, call Ilya Muromets - Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin - with a sword. And work, a damask sword or a surgical scalpel, in the hands of those who are supposed to. And if there is a pimple, then cauterize it with an anathema, in order to protect the simple-minded from infection, to protect society. This, of course, is what the Orthodox hierarchs who were in charge of the immune system did to Lev Nikolaevich at one time.

The peculiarity of this vision of society is class and functionality. Each part of the body (read - a social institution) must be responsible for its own business. The sovereign - to pardon, punish and fight. The church is in charge of spirituality, the military (hands) accomplish their feats, and the peasants (legs) feed everyone. If there is disagreement in the body, problems are a disease, a pathology.

The whole in this metaphor is more important than each of its constituent parts - the inanimate and intangible (“social body”), through a play on words, comes to life and receives its own will. This is how a new Russian Frankenstein appears, whose adventures can be read today in any newspaper. There is war in the mountains, in the metropolis a humanities researcher from an institute in the USA and Canada is being tried for espionage, and this, of course, is just the beginning.

Imagine a field in June, the smells and flowers. Or a forest on a hot summer day. Which is better - dandelion or wormwood? Who is in charge - the grasshopper or the sparrow? Who is right - birch or pine? Who knows better - the hare or the bear? How is harmony possible between a chicken and a fox, a hunter and a boar?

There is no public head, everyone has their own. No moral police, no regulations other than the conventional rules and laws of human society, because who will take upon himself the right to tell me that I should be something different? On what basis? This is a liberal position that involves abandoning attempts to find harmony outside - for the sake of the opportunity for each of us to find harmony within.

Tolstoy hated the church, among other things, for its lack of religious tolerance - and hardly anything has changed in this regard. Not so long ago, for example, under pressure from the patriarchy, Moscow State University broke the lease agreement with the Catholic radio station Blagovest. The security guards slammed the switch for convincing when the station was on the air.

The appeal of Tolstoy’s descendants (according to Vladimir, the letter was supported by the family) plays along, wittingly or unwittingly, with the already established opinion that Leo was not entirely sane by the end of his life. Hence the “ridiculous” death of the fugitive, the immoderate pathos of journalism. But this is not clear from the texts. On the contrary, its magnificent examples date back to 1910. Consider, for example, his article “On Socialism”:

You, young people, people of the 20th century, people of the future, if you really want to fulfill your highest human destiny, you must first of all free yourself, firstly, from the superstition that you know what form the human society of the future should take, -secondly, from the superstition of patriotism, Czech or Slavic, thirdly, from the superstition of science, that is, blind trust in everything that is conveyed to you in the form of scientific truth, including various economic and socialist theories, fourthly, from the main superstition, the source of all the evils of our time, that religion has outlived its time and is a thing of the past. Having freed yourself from these superstitions, you must first of all try to study everything that in the field of determining the true foundations, the religious foundations of life, has been done by all the greatest thinkers of the world, and, having mastered a reasonable, religious worldview, fulfill its requirements not in order to achieve you or a purpose determined by anyone, but in order to fulfill one’s destiny as a person, undoubtedly leading to an unknown to us, but undeniably good goal.

This quote was cited to prove sanity, but it, perhaps, also contains an unambiguous indication of which side in our conditional opposition Leo would take. Although he is certainly a preacher and a "shepherd" in passion and fervor, Tolstoy's "In God we trust" is an obvious preference for one over the other, a desire for inner harmony over attempts to find it elsewhere.

But perhaps the most inconspicuous and curious facet of this story is that behind the screen of the “eternal return” of the Russian configuration of the political field, something completely different is also happening. Vladimir Tolstoy does not hide the fact that no matter how this story ends, everything will be for the better, since there will be a “discussion of this problem.” Thus, through the efforts of the descendants of the classic, he returns to political discourse.

On the pages of the Moscow Times, a publication about Tolstoy's letter is adjacent to a report about the action of the Promako PR campaign, which, for money, published a fake in print media only in order to subsequently expose them. This juxtaposition points to a fundamentally new factor in the situation around Tolstoy, namely, the fact that, like any other media character, the classic participates in the postmodern economy of attention. Lev Nikolaevich is certainly a unique brand and represents a key asset for his great-great-grandson. In this sense, it is true - no matter how the discussion of Vladimir’s action ends, he is a winner, because any discussion around Tolstoy increases the value of his assets and leads to an increase in the role of the classic in the semiosphere.

Accordingly, the role of the Yasnaya Polyana museum also increases, which becomes the center of a conflict in which a lot of emotions are invested by all participants in the discussion (not far from family scandals in the classic family, by the way). At the same time, of course, few people care about analyzing the subtleties of the writer’s views (and if anyone cares, please buy the texts). Tolstoy thus becomes the center of a PR scandal in which he plays a character. Plays according to the notes of his great-great-grandson.

Notes:

1 This and other quotes from Leo Tolstoy given in the article are available online at http://library.akcecc.kiev.ua/moshkow/koi/LITRA/TOLSTOJ/wozzwanie.txt.

2 Church asked to forgive Tolstoy's sins, by sarah Karush // Moscow Times, 27.02.01.