Leo Tostoy and Sects

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The mutual influence of more religously herectic and ascetic idealsbetween Tolstoy and some of the mystical sects has been the whole downplayed and neglected by the researchers. Tolstoy had, however, an actual and quite active connections with some radical sects, including khlysti, skoptsy, among others, especially in the 1880s and onwards after the conversion. Apparently, he read widely literature concerning these sects, some of which is found in his library. He had conversations with scholars in this fieldl. He seems to have been familiar with precepts of khlysty. He led a lengthy debate with skoptsy on the meaning of castration in an ascetic life. His intellectual and moral involvements with the creed of the mystic sects are naturally reflected in his writings of this period. The Kreutser Sonata carries a utopian message of the Kingdom of God on Earth which will be realized when the mankind eliminates gender and restores its status before the "Fall, " an idea much similar to the one … More held by the skoptsy. The murdered wife is likened to a "sister, " according to the conception of the khlysti. The stabbing of the wife can paradoxically be reread as an act of castration (genderless in Russian), operated on her and thus making Podnyshev a skopets. The concepts related to the mystical sects are all highly ambiguous and ambivalent. The scorching of a finger observed in The Devil and Father Sergius can be read as a symbolic act of castration, which in fact is consumated in the case of Father Sergius by his self-amputation of his finger.The call for vegetarianism observed in Father Sergius is fully developed in other propagandistic writings such as he First Step." The principle is related by Tolstoy to ascetic purposes, together with his call for temperance on alchoholic drinks and tabacco. This diverts him away from the humanitarianism of European vegetarianism, often wrongly connected with Tolstoy and rather associates him with the Russian mystic sects, which were on the whole vegetarian on the ground similar to that propounded by Tolstoy. Thus, the immersion of Tolstoy into the ideologies of the mystic sects seems to be far more deeply rooted than imagined earlier. The research done on the basis of the Grant-in-Aid in the years 1999 and 2000 has brought to light much new material and a hitherto unknownaspects of Tolstoy's works, and offered a fresh impetus for work to be done in future. Less