Lenin on Tolstoy: Between Imaginary Resolution and Revolutionary Christian Communism

Abstract

Lenin's criticisms of Tolstoy, spread over half a dozen articles, provide both an anticipatory insight and a blind spot. The insight is that they offer the first example of what would later be called an imaginary resolution of real social and economic conditions. The contradictions of Tolstoy's works are manifested as, on the one hand, incisive critiques of the depredations of the transition between feudalism and capitalism, and, on the other, as inadequate and unarticulated solutions. But these contradictions give voice to the contradictory political situation of the peasants. The blind spot is that Lenin dismisses Tolstoy's response — non-resistance to evil and the recovery of the simple life of Christian devotion and poverty — as reactionary and misguided. What Lenin fails to register is that both elements of Tolstoy's works — the simplicity of collective life as well as the incisive and revolutionary critiques (which Lenin wished to appropriate for the socialists) — come out of the tradition of revolutionary Christian communism.