Semen Frank on Tolstoj Inessa Medzhibovskaya

This paper proposes to examine the evolution of Semen Frank's (1877–1950) views on Tolstoj, from his earlier Vexi period to the last expansive essay he wrote on Tolstoj in 1933. Such a tactic will be fruitful in bringing out the reasons which made Frank consider Tolstoj an enduring moral model for the twentieth century.

Why is this important? Frank approached Tolstoj's moral canon as an interpretive task, one which the Russian intelligentsia was obliged to fulfil. With a special angle on literary creativity taken early on in his career, Frank reiterated that the way Russian intelligentsia, the germ for wholesome organic socium, fulfills its interpretative task in understanding Pu&shachek;kin (

O zada&chachek;ax poznanija Pu&shachek;kina
), Dostoevskij, or Tolstoj will define its potency and value. In the earlier essays, Frank deconstructs Tolstoj's teaching, a critical period which I propose to call from adulation to valuation. He imputes to Tolstoj a narrow moral utilitarianism and simultaneously an infectious ineffectiveness of his religious teaching to the intelligentsia. In the later essays, he reconfigures the tasks of intelligentsial self-identification for which Tolstoj emerges, reinterpreted, as a new moral beacon in the dark spaces of neposti&zhachek;imoe. This period may be called from valuation to initiation: the very way to approach Tolstoj is a rite of passage, the inhalation of the life-saving essence.

In the late 1900s–1910s, according to Frank, the incense burnt to Tolstoj was a smoke screen that the intelligentsia erected to hide from moral responsibility pressed upon it by Tolstoj's teaching. Of most interest here is Frank's

Nravstvennoe u&chachek;enie L. N. Tolstogo
and
Lev Tolstoj i russkaja intelligencija,
both of 1908. As it would be to the investigator of ethical thought (èti&chachek;eskaja mysl&soft;), conscience to Frank is the result of a highly developed [new] religious consciousness. Of what worth, asks Frank, is a moral prophet of primitivist leanings (like Tolstoj) in modern society, torn between political wars and individual anarchy. Frank is primarily intrigued by why Tolstoj's teaching can be rejected but never efficiently refuted, not even by strong critics like Vladimir Solov&soft;ev. Frank's goal is to elicit glimpses of individual conscience in Tolstoj's readers by exposing the complex meanderings of Tolstoj's opro&shachek;&chachek;enija. He explains that critics of Solov&soft;ev's type fail to notice how Tolstoj's highly principled method fulfills two of most impossible tasks: 1) the exposure of a prevalent social ethical value (by exploiting it exhaustively as a dogmatic premise) and 2) the pushing forward of an individual value (by denying any compromise of premise with instance). Tolstoj's absolute non-violence releases an instance to grow under its own specific moral duress and thus encourages moral individualism. Tolstoj's fruitful individualism [plodotvornyj individualizm] is an instance of novoe religioznoe soznanie, and his preaching is the word of a new type of religious thinker.
Pamjati L&soft;va Tolstogo
(1910) is a eulogy for the self-hater Tolstoj (chu&zhachek;d ljubvi), who accomplished the zara&zhachek;enie dobrom which he preached.
Tolstoj and Bol&soft;&shachek;evism
(1928) is the jealous and anxious account of the reception of Tolstoj in the Bol&soft;&shachek;evik Russia on the eve of his centennial jubilee. Tolstoj's moral and religious dogmatism (especially neprotivlenie) is seen here as a bedrock against the monopoly that Bol&soft;&shachek;evik dogma is trying to establish over art, and the hatred that this art is being forced to serve. Finally,
Lev Tolstoj kak myslitel&soft; i xudo&zhachek;nik
(1933) recalls Tolstoj's moral authority at a time when humanity was taking another fatal step in its descent to total satanization. The essay eulogizes and deifies Tolstoj into modern Godmanhood (not without cause, Vladimir Solov&soft;ev's other coinages vseedinstvo and pred&chachek;uvstvie velikoj istiny are directly invoked). As the summation of Frank on Tolstoj, this essay is a sophisticated contribution to the landscape of tragic disjunctions that marked the interwar period. Tolstoj is placed into context of Russian and European existentialism and embodies the tragedy of an unattained ontologically-anchored goodness. In him, the tragic dichotomy of life versus goodness finds its most vivid representative, but his mighty leanings towards goodness are likewise most vivid representations of the obi&zhachek;ennoe bytie &chachek;eloveka. Tolstoj's moral message, in Frank's analysis, is not a vehicle of choking indoctrination. Critically assessed and applied, it can serve, Frank insists, as a rescuing antidote to violent enforcements of one-sided and detrimental truths.