The Luminary of Moscow: Tolstoy's Metapolitics and Oceanic Telos of Mankind

Tolstoy stands among the minds of the late 19th century as one of the greatest anti-Ideologues of his age. His literature remains some of the greatest storytelling ever written- deeply spiritual, philosophic and prophetic. Prophetic in his prediction that the Socialist policies of the revolutionaries would end in great horrors, spiritual in his deep Oceanic wonder that is woven throughout his art- a wonder trying to find a certainty of knowledge- and philosophic in his intellectual meditations which are simultaneously individualistic but Synergistic, cosmic in scope but filled with intimate psychological portraiture. A depth of compassion for all living souls pervades his works. His hate was mostly vectored towards that which should be hated- war, injustice and oppression of the poor, which his pen pal Gandhi founded his movement upon. Tolstoy was insistent on his belief that no government, socio-political ideology or movement could fix society. Rather, the individual's spiritual and moral development was the only hope for society- a belief that led him to reject Socialism but also deeply criticize the Russian Czarist state. His work oscillates between the immanence of individual experience and personal moral responsibility, and the cosmic interconnectivity of all humans throughout all time- a reflection of Schopenhauer's collective unconscious- a reconciliation of antinomies; the starry sky reflected in a puddle.

Tolstoy left an unmanageable corpus behind. He produced hundreds of novels, novellas, short stories and fables, didactic guides, academic briefs, poetry collections, political and geopolitical theorems, religious catechisms and constantly published articles on issues of the day. Tolstoy's earliest novels, such as the trilogy "Childhood" (1852) and "Boyhood" (1854) and Youth (1857), were largely autobiographical in nature. They were deeply romantic in nature, reflecting the Franco-German Romantic themes personified by writers like Goethe, Schiller and Rousseau, whom Tolstoy read. They had a focus on individual experience rather than broader social and philosophical themes. His early diaries, however, show a constant preoccupation with broader moral issues. In the middle of his career, Tolstoy became oceanic in focus, a shift that was in part caused by his reading of Continental philosophy. His historical fiction was interwoven with social issues and spiritual contemporary and produced his magnum opus, "War and Peace" (1869). While it retained his acute psychological insights into individual experience, it also explored profound philosophical questions about the nature of war, history, and human agency. Tolstoy employed a vast canvas, intertwining the personal stories of his characters with the grand sweep of historical events, demonstrating his ability to capture the intricacies of human existence within the tapestry of society. Following the publication of his greatest novels, Tolstoy entered a period of spiritual and philosophical introspection that profoundly influenced his subsequent works. This phase is characterized by his exploration of moral dilemmas, the nature of faith, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. Works like "Anna Karenina" (1877) and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) delve into the complexities of societal expectations, and the existential challenges of confronting mortality. This emphasis on death pervades all of his works from there on out.

In his later years, Tolstoy developed a deeper piety, finally rejecting his place of privilege (he was born into a rich family) and underwent a spiritual awakening that led him to question his own privileged position and to embrace a life of simplicity and moral rigor. He gave away his possessions and titles (scandalizing his family), and lived an ascetic life. This marked a significant shift in his writing, as he increasingly focused on themes related to social injustice, poverty, and the quest for a more egalitarian society. He began as a sceptic, but became a philosopher-ascetic. His works during this period, including "Resurrection" (1899) and "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" (1894), reflect his deepening engagement with issues of social reform and nonviolent resistance. He wrote some of his most poignant philosophic works during this period. In his final years of life, he lived as an ascetica nd focused entirely on philosophical and religious treatises, where he delineated his radical ideas on nonviolence, pacifism, and the rejection of wealth and power. These works, such as "What Is Art?" (1897) and "A Confession" (1882), showcase his attempts to reconcile his spiritual beliefs with the realities of the world. They are lofty and oceanic, which meant they were interpreted in many different directions. The Communist regime which took power only a few years after his death utilized his words to justify their totalitarianism , but later banned Tolstoy and Dostoevsky due to their spiritual themes and emphasis on individual morality.

Continental Connections: The Epic Telos of Mankind

The darker strains of Tolstoy's thought, which would eventually get him Excommunicated from the church, comes at least in part from the Pessimistic, Subjectivist and sometimes Nihilistic philosophy of Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer's apprentice, Nietzsche. Tolstoy taught himself German (his wife was German) and Latin and French fluently. Tolstoy read Schopenhauer's massive work of Platonic Atheism "The World as Will and Representation," and was captivated by his expansive analysis of human desires, suffering, and the illusory nature of the world against the irrational and wild will (Soul) of man. Schopenhauer's emphasis on the insatiable nature of human desires and the resultant dissatisfaction struck a chord with Tolstoy's own observations of the human experience.  Tolstoy's engagement with Schopenhauer's ideas is evident in his later works, where he explores themes of disillusionment, existential despair, and the transient nature of human happiness. You see Schopenhauer's Collective Unconscious: "All living creatures are separated from one another by their bodies, but that which that gives them life is the same in all." (Path of life), as well as a belief that Reason is synonymous with Logos, a living zoetic force with an oceanic Telos. Tolstoy acknowledged Nietzsche's influence, stating in a October 10, 1893 diary entry, "Nietzsche has a mind for the exceptional...in him, as in none other, is felt a profounder knowledge of what a human being is." In his novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Tolstoy grapples with the futility of worldly pursuits and the inevitability of death, themes that bear a resemblance to Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook that would eventually be picked up by Kafka. However, he certainly was not a Pessimist all the way through, and contradicted both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer on several fundamental points. Nietzsche advocated for a full renunciation of all moral values, taking it further than Schopenhauer by rejecting the Genealogy of Morals entirely. For Tolstoy, this was an evil and self-destructive path, and the true answer lay in a return to moral values, love, and the pursuit of a life of simplicity and authenticity. Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have despised each other if they had ever met. But this oceanic vision of his own philosophy where Tolstoy quite literally tried to fix all of the fundamental problems of humanity in one go is very much reminiscent of his reading of Continental idealism via Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who asserted vast metaphysical systems aimed at understanding all of reality. This scope of his philosophic project Tolstoy lifted from the German Philosophers of the 19th and early 20th century. 

Nietzsche likewise read Tolstoy and a bit of Dostoevsky before he died, mentioning Tolstoy briefly in his Genealogy of Morals with a dismissive note:

For nothing!", "Nada!" - nothing thrives and grows here, at most Petersburgers Metapolitics and Tolstoyan "pity"

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Twin Metaphysicians of St. Petersburg and Moscow

The mirror metaphysicians were contemporaries. Tolstoy mentioned Dostoevsky in his diary from November 16, 1869, "Dostoevsky is the only psychologist from whom I have something to learn; he is truly great and his works are precious to me." Dostoevsky in a letter to his brother dated November 1, 1880 wrote, "I think that when it comes to depicting real, everyday life, Tolstoy is unrivalled. No one can match him." Fyodor Dostoevsky hailed Tolstoy as a genius, and vice versa, but expressed reservations about the practicality of his philosophy. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy shared a deep concern for moral dilemmas facing Russia on the precipice of a violent revolution and the existential struggles of humanity. Both writers were Stoics- asserting that the individual must take responsibility not just for their own sins, but their capacity for sin, and without belief in the divine there is no hope for humanity. Dostoevsky was much more practical than Tolstoy, who often asserted a utopian vision for humanity with only a simple piety as the path towards this utopia. 

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were both convinced of the inevitability of Religion. While the "demons" from central European Materialism were convincing the Russian intelligentsia that presuppositionless rationality was progress, both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky saw this as self-deception. For the allegedly pure rationalism of the Post-Protestant world was driven by metaphysical principles, rendering these new "progressive ideas" insidiously and darkly religious in nature. Even Freud, who himself argued for presuppositionless science, called Marxism "Darkly Hegelian" and "Suspiciously Metaphysical". Socialism's tenants are based in a Telos- a moral value hierarchy which decides on what the ideal society looks like. It's an Eschatology of sorts that claims to be beyond religion, but is itself a religion. Tolstoy writes:

It is impossible for there to be a person with no religion (i.e. without any kind of relationship to the world) as it is for there to be a person without a heart. He may not know that he has a religion, just as a person may not know that he has a heart, but it is no more possible for a person to exist without a religion than without a heart.

Still, Tolstoy was in constant conflict with coherent religious ideologies. This peaked with his excommunication from the Orthodox church just a few years before his death, after decades of arguments with the church. This did not bother him, as he had been questioning and attacking the doctrines of the church, and writes at the beginning of his Confession:

 I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it both from childhood and throughout my adolescence and youth. But when I left the second year of university at the age of 18, I no longer believed in anything I had been taught.

In Resurrection, he mocks the "church christians" who turn to the spiritual writers instead of the "real" intellectuals like his beloved Schopenhauer:

And so, to clarify this question, he took not Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Comte, but the philosophical books of Hegel and the religious works of Vinet, Khomyakov, and, naturally, found in them just what he needed: a semblance of soothing and justification of the religious teaching in which he was brought up and which his mind had long since allowed, but without which all life was filled with troubles, and in recognizing which all these troubles were immediately eliminated.

You can see how Tolstoy was halfway between Orthodox Epistemology and the new Central European ideologies of Subjectivity, Perspectivism, and Modernism. Tolstoy rejected the idea that one can be religionless, but adopted the Protestant anti-metaphysical belief that one can be "traditionless" and subsequently that one can be somehow magically Christian but not a part of the institution Christ Himself founded. He critiqued organized religious institutions not from a place of presuppositionless rationality, but from a religious institution composed of one: Tolstoy's church. Tolstoy developed a cult following, ironically creating a para-church hierarchy of authority. This is also one of the central problems that George Orwell points out about Marxism, most famously in Animal Farm- that hierarchies are inevitable, not optional. And if you destroy "institutional" Christianity, you are not actually destroying hierarchies, but rather creating new, hidden and insidious hierarchies of power. So when Protestants abandoned the institution of the church, just like Socialism supposedly abandoned the oppressive hierarchy of "Capitalism", this was little more than self-deception, because all that was happening was the replacement of a clear, obvious and responsible hierarchy with a hidden, pernicious and unaccountable hierarchy. A shadow hierarchy which cannot be fixed or held responsible. A relationship with a transcendent always binds one to the others in that same pattern of worship, as Kierkegaard writes "only in relationship with the Other am I free", so Tolstoy's belief in worship apart from, or outside of, the institution of the church is self-deception.  Tolstoy adopted this central European fallacy, exactly how Dostoevsky describes it in Demons. The philosophic disease of Luther' nascent Sola Scriptura Atheism (the Geneva ideas as Dostoevsky referred to them as) impacted Tolstoy and the rest of the Russian Intelligentsia exactly like a parasite, making the violence, genocides and radical socio-political ideologies of the October Revolution inevitable. Tolstoy's deviation into Subjective spirituality and Protestant-style self-deception follows the exact path Dostoevsky sketches out in Demons.

Once one believes that being a "traditionless" or "institutionless" Christian is possible and that the church is merely a category of people with similar presuppositional beliefs, not an Apostolic institution, Atheism and the breakdown of Atheism into Deconstructivist Post-Modernism is inevitable. As soon as one believes that "God has no representatives on earth", or Christianity is "a relationship not a religion", subjectivity has been instantiated as the fundamental Epistemological model, the Logos has been replaced with a flat rationalism as the core animating nature of reality. The self-deceptive belief that one is following "the bible not tradition" is Metaphysical Subjectivity masquerading as Absolutism. There is a very short distance between a Protestant stating, "I stand upon the Word of God alone" and "there are an infinite number of Genders". Sola Scriptura always leads to reality-collapse as it renders faith a merely axiomatic rationalism predicated upon a personal subjective interpretation of truth. Reality is now a Subjective Experience (me reading my Bible by myself and determining truth), not a super-rational objective and unchanging revelation that is knowable through relationship and inevitably manifest as a spiritual institution, as Orthodoxy holds. In other words, the path of Self-Deception looks like the following:

Traditionlessness [Protestantism / Individualism/ institutionless Christianity] >

Religionlessness [Atheism/ flat rationalism] >

Realitylessness [Modernism & Post-Modernism]

In Tolstoy, we see these central European "Idols" (Solzhenitsyn) or "Demons" (Dostoevsky) of Post-Protestant Subjectivity poisoning his otherwise profound Epistemological musings. Schopenhauer notes this inevitably of irreligion from Protestantism in The World as Will and Representation:

The essence of Protestantism is individualism, which necessarily leads to subjectivism, and this, in turn, to the denial of objective truth.. Protestantism, by rejecting celibacy and actual asceticism in general [i.e. replacement of Stoicism with Epicureanism], as well as its representatives, the saints, has become a blunted, or rather broken-off Christianity, lacking the pinnacle: it runs out into nothing.... by eliminating asceticism and its central point, the merit of celibacy, has actually already abandoned the innermost core of Christianity and is to that extent to be regarded as apostasy from it. This has become evident in our days in the gradual transition of Christianity into the flat rationalism, this modern Pelagianism...

 This "gradual transition" of Christianity into the "flat rationalism" of secularism which Schopenhauer observed in his day is now a universal law; there has never been a Protestant society that has not secularized. There are only Catholic and Orthodox countries left in the world, and "bible believing" non-denominationalism is the fastest shrinking religion on earth, for wherever it spreads, a deep and permanent Atheism is only 2-3 generations behind.

But Tolstoy walked the edge between this Pessimistic Subjectivity derived from Protestantism and the faith of his youth. In his later works "What is My Faith?" and "The Study of Dogmatic Theology" he explicitly affirms the Christian faith, but also critiques dogmatic theology and advocates for a more individual and personal interpretation of faith, a subjectivism he received from Schopenhauer's Post-Protestant Rationalism. Still, Tolstoy keeps this Subjectivism largely tethered to Theism, unlike Schopenhauer. Toward the end of Confessions, he writes about this return to a child-like faith:

And I turned to the study of the very theology which I had once so contemptuously cast aside as unnecessary...That there is truth in the doctrine is certain to me; but it is also certain that there is falsehood in it, and I must find the truth and the falsehood and separate the one from the other. And so I set about it. What I have found false in this doctrine, what I have found true, and what conclusions I have arrived at, constitute the following parts of the essay, which, if it is worthwhile and needed by anyone, will probably be printed sometime and somewhere.

 Dostoevsky notes "When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness they despise." And this explains well Tolstoy's conflict with the Orthodox church. Despite his emphasis on Christ, personal existential connection to the divine and deep piety, Tolstoy's hyper-individualistic and lofty philosophy meant there was a disconnect between him and the church intellectuals, who could not fully understand him. They naturally saw his vulgar explorations of the depravity of humanity as an endorsement of immorality, and his criticism of the faults of the church as some kind of Atheism. Their laziness and inability to understand the magnitude of Tolstoy's labyrinthine system of thought led to Tolstoy scorn the church. A similar pattern happened with Kant that you can see in his 1798 The Dispute of the Faculties, where he responds to the attacks by Theologians on his work, who could simply not wrap their heads around his enormous body of work. Hegel, likewise defended his philosophy from the church in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, again bemoaning the laziness and unearned pride of Theologians who did not take the time to understand his dialectics. 

Tolstoy's specific objections about church dogmas containing untruths are already answered by Apophatic theology, which has been taught by the dogmatic mystical tradition in Orthodoxy for 2,000 years- even in pre-Christian times with the Platonics. But Tolstoy also directly attacked some of the Church's doctrines beyond their inadequate cataphatic nature, influenced by the pietistic Lutheran movement. This unmoored quasi-Unitarianism understandably got him excommunicated, but beyond the specific disputes there was also a broader disconnect caused by the sheer complexity of his philosophical system and his vast body of literature, which often strayed into dark themes. In particular, his novel The Resurrection was used at the Holy Synod of February 1901 as evidence that he denied the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. He did not fight this excommunication - for his individualised piety, adopted from the Protestant-turned-atheist Continental philosophers, had led him to deny many dogmas. But he retained great admiration for some of the deep piety and intellectualism of the Russian Church, and spent his life meditating on the deep workings of God in the world and the nature of the divine law that applies to all. Dostoevsky was more grounded, but both metaphysicians asked the same questions about what it means to be authentically human. Tolstoy's lifelong, unyielding devotion to truth, his passionate recognition of the Imago Dei in all those he encountered, his costly defence of the poor and oppressed, and his violent struggle against his darker side are, ironically, awfully Eastern Orthodox of him.

Do Not Lie: Solzhenitsyn's Echo of Tolstoy's Piety

Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph even. But not through me.

Khrushchev hailed Solzhenitsyn as "our contemporary Tolstoy", ironically coming from the leader of the former Communist Party that had banned Tolstoy's books and banned Solzhenitsyn as well. Khrushchev used Solzhenitsyn to document Stalin's crimes, especially the gulags, which he abolished and allowed over 1 million prisoners to return home, thus correcting a lie that his predecessor had dogmatised. There is a huge overlap between these two great writers, as Solzhenitsyn builds on Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoyevsky. There were also significant differences in their philosophy, but a single line rings true between Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy - do not lie.

In the novel Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn describes the great enemies of the Marxist religion as the false socialist, the foreign capitalist, the traitor to the great cause, the unevolved man, the theist and the individualist. This problem of collectivist movements erasing the individual as the fundamental and most important unit of society is a problem on which Tolstoy commented extensively. Cancer Ward is written with a melancholy and sombre brilliance, with costly humour and a subtle, gentle return to neo-Tolstoyevskian piety. Here we see philosophical notes told through intimate psychological portraits that would snowball a decade later through The First Circle, Lenin in Zurich, and The Gulag Archipelago; humble charcoal sketches that would challenge an empire.

Solzhenitsyn notes that Lenin argued that we must 'resist the evil' of Tolstoy because he denied the Marxist axiom that men live by the 'interests of society'. Tolstoy's meditations on death were existential in nature, which naturally usurps collectivist tendencies. His answer that "people live by love" and that love is by definition irrational (or rather supra-rational) contradicts the progressive dialectic. This was seen as anti-humanist and contrary to the official Marxist philosophy of the state. Tolstoy, along with Dostoevsky, was on the long list of books banned by the USSR for promoting ideas that contradicted the revolution. Solzhenitsyn quietly points this out throughout the narrative, but ironically The Cancer Ward was immediately censored in Russia. It was added to the pile of 'evidence' that eventually led to his exile. The character of Nikolayevich is happy to accept the state teachings - he sees a future for himself in the post-Stalin USSR, and his lymphoma is on the retreat. Yefrem quietly disagrees; his time is short, and his little blue Tolstoy book has made him think seriously for the first time in his life about death, and subsequently about what is 'evil', not to the collective in which he has lived all his life - but to the individual soul.

One clear element in Solzhenitsyn that places him in the company of the great Russian writers of the 20th century is his insistence on his own participation in the evils of his society. His characters, even his protagonists, are not morally good. Rather, what makes Oleg a protagonist is his willingness to admit the evil he is capable of committing and to respond by trying to transcend his environment and move towards the objective good, i.e. holiness. This trait is present in Tolstoy's literature, but reached its apotheosis in Dostoyevsky. Dostoevsky's most depraved, nihilistic and malevolent characters are also the protagonists - almost never the antagonists of the story.

Being, not Environment, determines Consciousness: Tolstoyevskian Wisdom in the face of Socialism

Because of his focus on communal living and equality of all people, Tolstoy's words were used by various Communist writers to justify great horrors, so he cannot be seen as a prophet as we can call Dostoevsky, who warned and predicted the genocides of Stalin perfectly. As Camus noted, "the real prophet of the 20th century was not Marx, but Dostoevsky". Lenin believed that Tolstoy's call for peaceful change in Russian society helped move the revolution forward, but his Pacifism, absolute moral code and non-resistance prevented the Proletarian from rising to power. Tolstoy certainly strayed into reactionism at points and gave room for dangerous metapolitics, but as much depravity as there is in his most irreverent works, there is greater redemption in his most pious. He advocated for unity and brotherhood at an individual level, not a top-down government system and would have hated the hubris and inverted compassion of the Soviets.

Solzhenitsyn agreed with Dostoevsky that Tolstoy's works are so lofty and oceanic that they cannot be applied. Tolstoy condemned Socialism as a new dictatorship of the Proletariat, writing that "So far the capitalists have ruled, then worker functionaries would rule." But at the same time, he was blamed by some for having inspired the 1905 revolution. Solzhenitsyn's character muses on Tolstoy's influence:

‘You mean Christian socialism, is that right?’ asked Oleg, trying to guess. It’s going too far to call it “Christian”. There are political parties that call themselves Christian Socialists in societies that emerged from under Hitler and Mussolini, but I can't imagine with what kind of people they undertook to build this kind of socialism. At the end of the last century, Tolstoy decided to spread practical Christianity through society, but his ideas turned out to be impossible for his contemporaries to live with, his preaching had no link with reality. I should say that for Russia in particular, with our repentances, confessions, and revolts, our Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Kropotkin, there's only one true socialism, and that's ethical socialism. That is something completely realistic.’ Kostoglotov turned up his eyes.

Solzhenitsyn lived the horrors that Tolstoy was afraid of. Solz emphasizes the folly of both the naive Tsarists and the blind Reactionaries. The Tsarist regime squandered deep patriotism through bureaucratic incompetence: "Those who obtain promotion easily never seriously considered that the art of war changes every decade and that it is their duty to keep learning, adjust to new developments, and keep abreast of the times." Dostoevsky had this same argument with Gogol, who was a Tsarist. While they shared a detest of the revolutionaries, Dost warned Gogol of absolving it of all wrongdoing. Solzhenitsyn has this same view- the Tsarist regime was its own worst enemy and created the revolutionaries through its insipid arrogance, pride, and wilful ignorance. Dost in the late 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the late 20th century both eventually came to the same political position of advocating for a self-aware and self-critical patriotism, while condemning Nationalism and its antipodal reactionism. This paradoxical dynamic was put on display in the fact that the assassin of Pyotr Stolypin (Prime Minister of Russia 1906-1911) worked for both the Tsarist secret police and the Arachno-Communist Revolutionaries at the same time.

If only people would realize that they are not sons of any fatherland or government, but sons of God, and therefore they can be neither slaves nor enemies of other people, and those insane, useless, ancient and ruinous institutions called governments, and all the suffering, violence, humiliation and crimes they bring with them, would themselves be destroyed.

Entering WWI was one of these Tsarist follies that helped create the Revolution: "It would have, of course, been much jollier to stand side by side with Germany in an eternal alliance as Dostoevsky had so fervently wished and advised." Vanya, the starry-eyed Tolstoyevskian, meets his hero but is inevitably drawn into a war he does not belong in. To many at this time, Tolstoy was a unifying philosophy that sits above the chaotic religious and political environments stemming from the introduction of central European forms of Protestantism (Anabaptism, Neo-Arian Jehovah's Witnesses etc) and various Socio-Economic ideologies. The ‘devil’ that possessed Solz was Marx’s toxic mixture of the English social empiricism of Hume, Locke, and Smith with the Hegelian dialectic of progressive history infused French Utopianism. This philosophic parasite, a Frankenstein creation of the worst bits of Continental and Analytic Philosophy, eradicated the historic Russian ethos. It brushed aside the wisdom of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and became 'possessed' by the devils of Epicurean Socio-Political religions, crushing the vessels it inhabited:

However wary you are, in seven long years the abominable tranquility of an essentially petit-bourgeois existence will lull your vigilance. In the shadow of something big, you lean against a massive iron wall without looking at it carefully- and suddenly it moves, it runs out to be a big red engine wheel driven by a long, naked piston rod, your spine is twisted and you are down! you belatedly realize that yet again some stupid danger has taken you unawares.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, his character Volodin muses about Epicureanism's influence on Marxism, something Tolstoy warned of in his article On Socialism and his "Letter to the Liberals":

The highest criteria of good and evil are our own feelings of pleasure or displeasure' In other words, according to Epicurus, only what I like is good and what I do not like is evil. This was the philosophy of a savage. Because Stalin liked killing people did this mean that he regarded killing as good? And if someone found displeasure in being imprisoned for having tried to save another man, was his action therefore evil? No – for Innokenty good and evil were now absolute and distinct, and visibly separated by the pale-grey door in front of him, by those whitewashed walls, by the experience of his first night in prison. Seen from the pinnacle of struggle and pain to which he was now ascending, the wisdom of Epicurus seemed no more than the babbling of a child.

Remember your Death and you will not Sin

Solzhenitsyn directly mimicked Tolstoy's 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Смерть Ивана Ильича) with his 1962 "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". The Russian Greats repeatedly focused on the certainty of biological death as the penultimate fact, the only fact of life that is true, absolute, or relevant. In A confession, Tolstoy extrapolates this idea which Ivanovic faces in the story: "No matter how often I may be told, 'You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live,' I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false."

Tolstoy's sketch of the life of Pyotr Ivanovic represents a critical nexus in his thinking following his 1870's conversion around the linchpin of the "only true fact" of death. This is his aetiological exploration of what the ramifications of knowing one's own death experientially; a pensive, autobiographical and metaphysical musing on what it means to truly live a life with meaning; here he draws a difference between a societal understanding of goodness and 'true life', i.e., maintaining a metaphysical relationship with Goodness. In pure Tolstoyan form, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is designed to make you uncomfortable.

This line of thinking was adopted but taken in a very different direction by Nietzsche, Camus, and their secularist disciples. Tolstoy's Epistemology is subtly different from Camus' and it leads to fundamentally different conclusions about the meaning of life. Tolstoy sees this unavoidable reality of death as illuminating super-realities; Camus does not. Tolstoy sees the fact of death as a truism that demands a relationship with the eternal and a reason to feel deeper and live better; Camus, in his craven narcissism, sees this reality as an anodyne. Tolstoy sees it as morally transformative; Camus sees it as morally disintegrating. Camus takes this immutable fact one-dimensionally, and in the abyss of French materialism, sees no metaphysical principle to extrapolate from it.

Tolstoy muses that an openly evil life is not as wrong as a comfortable and happy life, displaying how much he hated Epicureanism: "Ivan lived a life most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." In other words, Ivanovic's choice to make happiness the penultimate goal on a day-by-day basis was the choice to embrace absolute death. And here near his end, he found no community to ease his pain. "And he has to live like this, alone, on the edge of destruction, with nobody at all to understand and to pity him. There has been daylight; now, there is darkness. I have been here; now, I am going there. Where? He could hear nothing except the beating of his own heart." This is intensely autobiographical, for Tolstoy was quite irreverent and pushed everyone away from him before his religious conversion. In his old age, he became more pious and reconciled with his wife, whom he had mistreated.

Tolstoy's story ends simultaneously hopeful and bitter. In his last hours, he finally repents and releases the hate and arrogance and embraces the divine, but his family never understood this. Death was no more for Ivanovic, not because he was not going to die, but that final development in his moral fortitude towards a silent but real repentance brought him life for the first time. In Tolstoy's post-conversion life, he began to sketch the reality that living a 'good' life where you assert your goodness and right to heave up on never having done anything horrible is not enough to be genuinely alive; an active relationship with goodness through repentance and self-denial is necessary; all else is a living death. At his end, Ivanovic found his beginning.

The omnipotent narrator of Cancer Ward notes "the whole of his life had prepared Pudduyev for living, not for dying". In the chapter titled "Idols in the marketplace", the patients argue about death and whether one should acknowledge it. Some do not want to, because the recognition- the awareness and understanding of the implications of the end of life- is contrary to the Socio-political 'Idols of the tribe' which they have lived their life in service to. Personal acceptance of their own pending non-existence threatened their Marxist ideology, and thus their emotional homeostasis, and the very purpose of their life in the first place. Dostoevsky used the metaphor of Demons; Solzhenitsyn uses the imagery of Idols.

Because what do we keep telling a man all of his life? 'You're a member of the collective!' You're a member of the collective!' That's right. But only when he's alive. He may be a member, but he has to die alone.

Decades later, Solzhenitsyn finishes this thought in his 1978 Harvard Commencement speech:

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.

Tolstoy may have not been a Saint, but he died a Stoic.  Appended to his 1884 Confessions are his last notes written on his deathbed, where he expresses his last his last doubts and his last hopes:

I cannot even make out whether I can see anything down there, in that bottomless abyss over which I am hanging and to which I am being pulled. My heart clenches, and I feel horror. ... The infinity below repels and horrifies me; the infinity above attracts and affirms me. In the same way I am hanging on the last of my last, not yet sprung out from under me, over the abyss; I know that I am hanging, but I look only upward, and my fear passes away. As it happens in a dream, some voice says: "Notice this, this is it!"... All this was clear to me, and I was happy and calm. And it was as if someone was saying to me: look, remember.

And I woke up.