Secondary scholarship & reception — *What I Believe* (В чём моя вера?, 1882–84)

Phase-3 layer. All secondary claims are attributed to named sources and are not asserted in the dive’s voice. Where a claim comes from the PSS apparatus (V. F. Savodnik in PSS Tom 23, pp. 548–560) that is primary documentation, not secondary scholarship. “FLAG” marks framings that soften or invert the corpus findings.

A. Received scholarly view

Aylmer Maude

Maude, Aylmer. The Life of Tolstoy. Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910. (Originally 1908–10.)

Maude was Tolstoy’s authorised English-language biographer and translator, a personal acquaintance who visited Yasnaya Polyana repeatedly. He treats What I Believe as the systematic exposition of the faith A Confession had announced — the point at which non-resistance hardens from personal experience into binding doctrine. He notes that the work was written “with extraordinary intensity” and that Tolstoy regarded the injunction «не противься злу» as the key to the whole system.

Maude, Aylmer, trans. A Confession and What I Believe. London: Oxford University Press (World’s Classics, no. 229), 1921. [Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/confessionwhatib00tols]

Maude’s translation packages the two works together, reflecting his view (shared by Tolstoy) that they form a unit: A Confession narrates the crisis and recovery; What I Believe gives the recovered faith its intellectual architecture. The 1921 World’s Classics edition was for decades the standard English text. The Open Library record notes: “A Confession first circulated in Russian in 1882; What I Believe in 1884. They were first printed in Geneva in 1888.” (The Geneva date refers to M. Elpidine’s first complete Russian edition; the French Ma religion appeared in Paris, 1885, per the PSS apparatus.)

The Maude translation shapes the anglophone reception, and its pairing decision encodes an interpretation: to read What I Believe through A Confession. That is defensible on textual grounds — Tolstoy’s opening sentence explicitly continues where A Confession ends — but it can underweight the work’s status as a free-standing doctrinal argument.

FLAG: Maude is broadly sympathetic but his “disciple” relationship to Tolstoy is a well-known complication; his Life is less an independent scholarly account than a collaborative narrative. Reviewers have noted that Maude tends to explain away Tolstoy’s most radical positions (on non-resistance to violence by the state, on the complete rejection of courts and oaths) as idealism rather than programme.

Ernest J. Simmons

Simmons, Ernest J. Leo Tolstoy. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1946. [Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/leotolstoy0001simm]

Simmons was the dominant mid-twentieth-century American academic biographer. His two-volume life is the standard scholarly reference for the period; volume 2 covers 1880–1910 and therefore includes the composition of What I Believe. Simmons treats the work as central to what he periodizes as the “religious period” but subordinates it to A Confession and The Kingdom of God Is Within You in his narrative. He covers the 1884 ban and the Geneva distribution, drawing on Maude’s earlier account. The precise chapter references are not directly retrievable from open sources, but the volume-2 structure (1880–1910 in a scholarly-critical mode, not hagiographic) places What I Believe in the middle of the crisis narrative rather than at its culmination.

FLAG: Simmons’s framework of “two Tolstoys” — the pre-conversion artist and the post-conversion religious thinker — has been contested by later scholarship (see Gustafson below). When the framework governs the reading, What I Believe tends to be treated as a symptom of the break rather than as the argument at which the break issues.

A. N. Wilson

Wilson, A. N. Tolstoy: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton / New York: Norton, 1988. [Whitbread Prize for Biography, 1988. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Biography-N-Wilson/dp/0393321223]

Wilson explicitly discusses What I Believe among Tolstoy’s 1880s religious-philosophical works alongside What People Live By (1881). He treats the Sermon on the Mount as Tolstoy’s governing text and reads the non-resistance ethic with deep scepticism: he characterizes Tolstoy’s application of the Sermon as “a counsel of craziness” that, if followed to its conclusion, “will lead to the reverse of peace and harmony.” Wilson argues that it is possible to read Tolstoy’s last thirty years as demonstrating that the Sermon on the Mount is an unlivable ethic. He does engage the argument seriously, but his framing is the tragedy-of-the-great-artist: the religious programme is ultimately a demonstration of its own impossibility.

FLAG: Wilson’s “counsel of craziness” framing is a critical inversion that sidesteps the question of whether Tolstoy’s reading of «не противься злу» is exegetically defensible. The corpus shows Tolstoy addressing exactly this objection in What I Believe — the “impractical counsel” objection is what he is arguing against, not what he is conceding.

Rosamund Bartlett

Bartlett, Rosamund. Tolstoy: A Russian Life. London: Profile Books, 2011. [Online excerpt: https://erenow.org/biographies/tolstoy-a-russian-life/14.php]

Bartlett’s biography is the most recent and historically most contextualised major English-language life. In the accessed chapters she notes that What I Believe and A Confession circulated illegally in Russia via underground channels and that Sonya observed “tyomnye Tolstoyans coming out of the woodwork” as a result. Bartlett discusses Pobedonostsev’s alarm at Tolstoyan influence on the peasantry (citing his letter to Alexander III describing a district where “only five old women were now going to church”) but she is more attentive to the sociological spread of Tolstoyanism than to the detailed doctrinal argument of What I Believe itself. The full chapter on the banning falls in the body of the biography at a point not directly accessible online; the accessed interview material mentions What I Believe in a list but treats The Kingdom of God Is Within You as “one of his most important tracts.” That emphasis is worth noting: Bartlett (like Wilson) is more drawn to the later, more politically developed tract than to What I Believe as doctrine.

Inessa Medzhibovskaya

Medzhibovskaya, Inessa. Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845–1887. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. [Cambridge Core review: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/abs/tolstoy-and-the-religious-culture-of-his-time-a-biography-of-a-long-conversion-18451887-by-inessa-medzhibovskaya/BF6E6E73EBC100EEB5BF9F1CBFCA39B3; Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/document/489979706/Inessa-Medzhibovskaya-Tolstoy-and-the-Religious-Culture-of-His-Time-1845-1887-2009]

Medzhibovskaya’s is the first monograph in any language to treat Tolstoy’s religious evolution as a “massive philosophical and religious project rather than a crisis-laden tragedy” — an explicit counter to the crisis-break narrative shared by Simmons and Wilson. Her terminus of 1887 places What I Believe (1882–84) near the end of her span, suggesting it functions as the culmination of the long conversion she traces. She reads the conversion as “deeply intertextual,” comparing Tolstoy’s pattern with Saint Paul, Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Rousseau, and Russian contemporaries. The subtitle “long conversion” is itself a thesis about the chronology: the crisis of 1878–80 was not a sudden break but the visible moment in a process running from the 1840s. Under this reading, What I Believe is the systematic statement at which the long arc arrives, not a pathological departure from the literary self.

Medzhibovskaya, Inessa, ed. Tolstoy and His Problems: Views from the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019.

The later edited volume shows continued engagement with the religious writings; the introduction signals that twenty-first-century scholarship has moved toward treating the Prophet-period works as central rather than aberrant.

Richard F. Gustafson

Gustafson, Richard F. Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. A Study in Fiction and Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. [JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztmk5]

Gustafson’s is the most important structural intervention in Tolstoy scholarship of the last half century. Against the “two Tolstoys” schema he argues for essential coherence — a unified theological sensibility operating across the fiction and the religious prose. He identifies Tolstoy’s understanding of God as panentheistic: God both transcendent and immanent, beyond space and time yet including them, a theology that runs through the fiction and becomes explicit in the religious writings. What I Believe is listed alongside What People Live By (1881) as a key exposition of this position. The implication for the dive’s findings is significant: under Gustafson’s reading the five commandments and the non-resistance doctrine are not alien to the great novels but continuous with their deepest structure.

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos

Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre. “Tolstoy the Peculiar Christian Anarchist.” Politics and Religion 1.3 (2008): 1–26. [Anarchist Library / Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/2577194/Tolstoy_the_Peculiar_Christian_Anarchist]

Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre. Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010. [Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/christian-anarchism-christoyannopoulos]

Christoyannopoulos gives What I Believe a central place in the Christian-anarchist tradition. He reads the work as Tolstoy’s primary vehicle for explaining how the Sermon on the Mount “unlocked the meaning of life.” He emphasises Matthew 5:38–42 as the foundation of Tolstoy’s rejection of all state violence, quoting Tolstoy from What I Believe: “It may be affirmed that the constant fulfilment of this rule is difficult” — yet Jesus “taught clearly that humans should not resist evil.” He also notes that What I Believe “is considered just as good and comprehensive” as The Kingdom of God Is Within You — a framing that usefully complicates the usual treatment of the later book as superior.

On the LABEL: Christoyannopoulos is a user of the label “Christian anarchism” applied to Tolstoy; the label is his taxonomy, not Tolstoy’s own. Tolstoy’s argument in What I Believe is grounded in obedience to the Gospel commandments, not in an identifiable anarchist tradition. The label deserves attribution, not adoption.

Elena Stepanova

Stepanova, Elena. “Leo Tolstoy’s Faith: The Equivalence of State of Mind and Content.” State, Religion and Church 7.2 (2020). [CyberLeninka: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/leo-tolstoy-s-faith-the-equivalence-of-state-of-mind-and-content]

Stepanova argues that for Tolstoy the commandment of non-resistance to evil through violence represents “the main content of Christianity” rather than one item in a list. She employs a “meta-position” approach — analysing Tolstoy’s faith as simultaneously his existential state and its objective content — and frames his individualised faith as a valid philosophical contribution rather than a personal opinion. The article sits within the tradition of Russian Tolstoy scholarship that treats the religious writings as philosophy, not pathology.

David S. D’Amato

D’Amato, David S. “Tolstoy’s Christian Non-Resistance.” Libertarianism.org, December 30, 2015. [https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/tolstoys-christian-non-resistance]

A shorter interpretive piece that frames Tolstoy’s non-resistance as a coherent libertarian-adjacent philosophy, not impractical utopianism. D’Amato argues that Tolstoy saw Jesus’s injunctions to love enemies and “resist not evil” as “incompatible with violence, which forms an indispensable condition of power,” and that this insight is a penetrating critique of the state’s actual brutality. He connects Tolstoy to American non-resistance thinkers (William Lloyd Garrison, Adin Ballou). The piece is a secondary opinion source, not scholarly monograph-grade; included for the lineage it maps.

B. Russian society and Church reception

All factual detail in this section derives from the PSS apparatus unless an alternative source is named: V. F. Savodnik, commentary on «В чём моя вера?», Полное собрание сочинений, Tom 23, pp. 548–560 (Moscow: Gos. izd. «Khudozhestvennaya literatura», 1957). This is primary documentation.

The ban — the censorship chain in full (PSS apparatus)

1. January 14, 1884: The chair of the Moscow Censorship Committee, V. Fyodorov (В. Федоров), having seen the galley proofs, reported to the head of the Main Directorate for Press Affairs, E. M. Feoktistov (Е. М. Феоктистов), that the work must be classified «крайне вредной книгой» — extremely harmful — as it “undermines the foundations of state and social institutions and entirely destroys Church teaching.” He recommended immediate seizure and referral to the spiritual censor, and noted that legal prosecution was in his view impossible.

2. The galleys were then passed to the Moscow Spiritual Censorship Committee, whose formal report was signed by Archpriest M. Bogolyubsky (протоиерей М. Боголюбский). Bogolyubsky’s report argued that Tolstoy’s new book discredited all “corrupters of the Gospel,” including the Apostle Paul, condemned all Church and state institutions, and treated “socialism, communism and the like” as parts of Christ’s teaching suppressed by the Church. He invoked article 239 of the censorship statute (ст. 239 Цензурного устава) — the article covering works actively destructive of the existing order — as the applicable charge.

3. February 14, 1884: The head of the Main Directorate for Press Affairs, Feoktistov, ordered the work’s unconditional prohibition (безусловное запрещение), direction № 785.

4. February 18, 1884: The Moscow printing inspector arrested 39 copies at the Kushnerev press and forwarded them to Petersburg.

5. The copies were not destroyed. According to N. N. Bakhmetyev’s later account (cited in the PSS apparatus): the Minister of Internal Affairs, Count D. A. Tolstoy, several other ministers, senior officials of the Main Directorate, and court figures all requested copies; the entire banned edition dispersed into private libraries. Antiquarian booksellers later sold copies for hundreds of roubles.

Pobedonostsev’s role. Sofia Andreyevna Tolstaya’s letter of 29 January 1884 (cited in the PSS apparatus) named K. P. Pobedonostsev, Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, as the person she expected to ban the book — “Победоносцев со своей бестактностью и педантизмом опять запретит” — even though an archimandrite associated with the censorship committee chairman Marakuev (Амфилохий) had reportedly said the book contained “such high truths” he saw no reason to prohibit it. The PSS apparatus corroborates Pobedonostsev’s general role in suppressing Tolstoy’s religious writings. However, a separate search finding (socialbites.ca, citing sources on the excommunication) notes that at the time of the 1901 Synod edict Pobedonostsev opposed the move, fearing it would amplify Tolstoy’s appeal; that decision was steered by Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg. The precise extent of Pobedonostsev’s involvement in the 1884 banning vs. his 1901 caution deserves distinction: his 1884 role is documented through Sonya’s letter (indirect but specific) and his general position as arch-conservative enforcer; his 1901 role was more ambiguous.

Church refutation literature

All three of the following are named in the PSS apparatus (p. 557) as the main channel through which banned excerpts reached Russian readers:

Gusev, A. F. (Александр Фёдорович Гусев). “Исповедь графа Л. Н. Толстого и его мнимоновая вера” [“The Confession of Count L. N. Tolstoy and His Spurious New Faith”]. Серия статей в «Православном обозрении» [Orthodox Review], 1886, nos. 1–6, 8, 10; 1889, nos. 10–12; 1890, nos. 1, 2, 4. Published separately, Moscow, 1890. Gusev was a theologian at the Kazan Spiritual Academy. The PSS apparatus identifies this as the most sustained clerical refutation. Russian-language sources confirm his broader polemic against Tolstoyanism addressed “the dependence of morality on religious or philosophical metaphysics” and generated public disputes. [Russian Orthodox Encyclopaedia: https://pravenc.ru/text/168410.html; Azbyka.ru on Gusev: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Aleksandr_Gusev/]

Orfano, Alexandr (Александр Орфано). “В чем должна заключаться истинная вера каждого человека” [“What the True Faith of Every Person Should Consist In”]. Чтения в Обществе любителей духовного просвещения [Readings of the Society of Lovers of Spiritual Enlightenment], 1887, pt. I. Published separately, Moscow, 1890. (PSS apparatus, p. 557.) Direct title-for-title refutation of What I Believe.

Karyshev, I. A. (И. А. Карышев). «Православно-христианский взгляд на основания, принятые гр. Л. Н. Толстым для своего лжеучения, изложенного в сочинении: „В чём моя вера?”» [“The Orthodox-Christian View of the Foundations Adopted by Count L. N. Tolstoy for His False Teaching, as Set Forth in the Work: ‘What I Believe?’”]. Moscow, 1891. (PSS apparatus, p. 557.)

John of Kronstadt. The PSS apparatus does not name him in connection with What I Believe specifically, but a secondary source (gw2ru.com) reports that already in the 1880s John of Kronstadt called Tolstoy “a heretic who surpassed all the heretics,” indicating the scope of clerical hostility well before the 1901 edict.

The 1901 Synod excommunication — what it says and does not say

The Holy Synod issued its Circular Letter (commonly called the “excommunication”) on 24 February 1901. The edict’s language accused Tolstoy of having “insolently risen against the Lord and His Christ” and “repudiated the Orthodox Mother Church,” spreading “teachings repugnant to Christ and the Church.” Secondary sources (socialbites.ca; Tchaikovsky Research site) confirm that the 1901 edict names no individual works.

The doctrinal content of What I Believe — rejection of sacraments, non-resistance, the five commandments as the whole of Christianity — is unambiguously part of what the Synod was condemning as Tolstoy’s accumulated religious position. But the edict condemns that position in general terms, not by citing this or any other specific title.

Scholarly caution is warranted: sources connecting the 1901 edict to What I Believe by name should be read critically. The edict is best understood as the culmination of almost twenty years of conflict that What I Believe opened, not as a direct response to that work. Pål Kolstø, Heretical Orthodoxy: Lev Tolstoi and the Russian Orthodox Church (Cambridge University Press, 2022), ch. 12, treats the excommunication and its aftermath in the most recent full scholarly account; the chapter is not accessible in preview but the volume is the authoritative reference. [Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/heretical-orthodoxy/excommunication-and-its-aftermath/1963274B8A24191B74662479234339D9]

de Vogüé and the French reception

Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de. Le roman russe. Paris, 1886. [Amazon scan: https://www.amazon.com/Roman-Russe-French-Eugene-Melchior-Vogue/dp/1120495148]

The PSS apparatus records that de Vogüé met with Tolstoy’s translator Urusov in Paris in April 1884, was invited to review the French translation of What I Believe, and replied that (based on the French extracts in War and Peace) the translation needed no correction from his hand. De Vogüé’s Le roman russe (1886) created the European vogue for Russian literature; his prior contact with What I Believe in proof preceded that book’s publication and may have shaped his treatment of Tolstoy’s moral seriousness. The specific chapter on Tolstoy in Le roman russe treats him primarily as a novelist, with the religious evolution noted as biographical context. The 1884 contact is a factual detail from the apparatus, not yet mapped in English-language scholarship.

C. Triangulation table

For each of the five dive findings, the received scholarly view is classified and a source for that view is given.

D. Gaps

1. Что же нам делать? / What Then Must We Do? relationship. Scholarship on the sequence treats What I Believe (ethical-doctrinal) and What Then Must We Do? (1884–86, economic-social) as consecutive but separate. The letter evidence in the dive (v63_286, Dec 1884: “я теперь печатаю статью о собственности”) confirms the handoff is sequential, not thematic: What I Believe is the doctrinal grounding, What Then Must We Do? applies it to poverty and property. Wilson and Simmons treat the later work as the social radicalism; the doctrinal continuity between the two books is underread. No dedicated dive on What Then Must We Do? yet exists.

2. The Geneva Elpidine edition — year. The PSS apparatus notes M. Elpidine’s first Russian Geneva edition as undated on its title page; a second edition appeared in 1888, third 1892, fourth 1900. The Open Library entry for the Maude 1921 World’s Classics edition records “they were first printed in Geneva in 1888” — apparently conflating the first dated Geneva edition (the second printing) with the first. The date of Elpidine’s undated first edition remains unresolved in accessible sources and should be treated as a genuine open question, not resolved as 1888.

3. The de Vogüé connection. The April 1884 contact between de Vogüé and the French translator Urusov (PSS apparatus, p. 557) predates Le roman russe (1886) by two years. The possibility that de Vogüé’s landmark French chapter on Tolstoy was shaped by early reading of What I Believe has not, to the knowledge of this sweep, been traced in scholarship on the French reception. This is a targeted gap, not a large research question.

4. Aylmer Maude’s own translation date. Web searches return both 1902 and 1921 for the Maude translation of What I Believe. The 1921 Oxford World’s Classics is confirmed by multiple library records. Whether a separate 1902 Maude translation exists (possibly as a standalone pamphlet) is unresolved; the 1921 volume is the confirmed canonical text.

Sources found: 22 attributable secondary sources (biographers: 5; scholars: 4; church-reception: 5; censorship-chain from PSS apparatus: primary; additional commentary: 4; web/popular: 4). Triangulation entries: 5.