Probing Tolstoy’s Search for Religion

Review essay of Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Tolstoy’s Quest for God (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers), 2007, i-vii, 199 pages, ISBN 978-0-7658-0376-4, $34.95.

Five years before the end of his life, the celebrated author and luminary of the Russian classical literature Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) declared that “All of my life I have been concerned with religious questions, and outside of them I see no meaning in human existence.” Most admirers of his literary works would find this statement at odds with a standard opinion about Tolstoy’s “obsessive religiosity.” It allegedly revealed itself abruptly and dominated primarily his old age, causing—sadly, many agreed—the renunciation of his own earlier masterpieces. For his part, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, the writer’s psychoanalytic biographer, adheres to his trade’s number-one rule: to take at face value that which his subject chooses to expose of his inner world. His new book presents Tolstoy’s entire adult life as a quest for a personal God.

Rancour-Laferriere the academic intellectual wants to be fair to Tolstoy the spiritual seeker. He does not conceal his personal skepticism—bordering on dismissive impatience—about what he sees as an assortment of the writer’s “unfounded assumptions, paradoxes, contradictions, non sequiturs, irrelevancies, repetitions, historical inaccuracies, and

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other serious problems.” Still, he grants that the great novelist was a very influential religious thinker in Russia and abroad (pp. 5-6). The scholar admits frustration with Tolstoy’s spiritual journey, during which he “cannot settle on some consistent doctrine or dogma about God” (p. 7); this is very unintellectual and unscholarly of Tolstoy, yet entirely consistent with his well-known diatribes against the professorial—”learned and stupid”—modes of inquiry. Finally, for the sake of objectivity, Rancour-Laferriere prefers to consider the novelist’s religious searching not via the depicted inner dilemmas of his literary characters in works such as The Death of Ivan Ilich, Resurrection, and late didactic stories, but by studying his “thinking itself, and as expressed by Tolstoy himself in his own person” (p. 6).

With this in mind—and with great erudition—Rancour-Laferriere scrutinizes with the eye of a psychoanalyst an array of primary sources, including Tolstoy’s published confessions, correspondence concerning matters of faith, and the 13 volumes of his diaries. The scholar finds them “introspective in the extreme, and therefore…of great psychological value.” According to Rancour-Laferriere, “many passages in the diaries demonstrate a considerable degree of psychopathology” (p. 2). In his previous publications, he has already employed a psychoanalytic approach to examine the writer’s character-formation and behavior patterns (as in Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother [London: Macmillan, 1998]); now he confirms: “…like the medical student who must study cadavers in order to learn basico anatomy, I have over the years become inured to Tolstoy’s fixation on death, his preoccupation with violence/nonviolence, his grandiose narcissism, his manic-depressive mood fluctuations, and other disturbed Tolstoyan thinking that fuels the quest for God” (p. 7). For the author, Tolstoy’s creed is, in fact, a symptom and a corollary of psychopathology.

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Tolstoy describes his religious journey as beginning with a childhood goal of self-perfection, which forced him “to seek guidance,” eventually “found in faith.” This path Rancour-Laferriere characterizes as “narcissistic in nature, that is, it very much focused on the self” (pp. 14-15). As a young man, the Russian pondered on spiritual meanings of his physical illnesses, finding in such exercise “obvious moral benefit” for himself. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, says Rancour-Laferriere, this is a “characteristic twist of moral masochism” (pp. 15-16). So were, in his opinion, Tolstoy’s “chronic guilt feelings,” even if his list of recollected transgressions—none imagined—would by most ethical standards validate a tinge of remorse also in someone not prone to self-degrading blame: “I killed people in war, summoned others to duels in order to kill them…Lying, thieving, promiscuity of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder…yet…my contemporaries…still consider me a relatively moral man” (Cited on p. 43).

Rancour-Laferriere considers periodic loneliness and concomitant fears to be manic-depressive episodes, which Tolstoy utilized to enhance his faith, diagnosed as a regressive fantasy. His belief in God, the scholar qualifies, was “less and less dependent on mood, and will become established as a kind of mental fixture” and a lasting “antidepressant.” The writer’s famous crisis, in which he found himself torn between the intrinsic demands of his deepened belief and identity as a world-famous author, Rancour-Laferriere characterizes as “psycho-religious flux” of a disturbed individual in dire need to affirm and magnify his “narcissistic realm” (pp. 17-18, 20-21, 65, 167-168).

Tolstoy acknowledged “an inscrutable Source on which our life depends” and accepted “a reflection, or a particle, or a manifestation of this Source in oneself.” For Rancour-Laferriere it was yet another proof of the man’s boundless grandiosity, as if he were equating himself with the Infi-

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nite when praying to merit the consciousness “not the whole of God, but only one of the manifestations of him, accessible to me” (Cited on pp. 2-3, 169-170). Tolstoy’s exalted claim to see divinity in others would be nothing but hypomania; his expressed ideal of loving God in others without being loved in return, would be “hypomania with a masochistic spin” (pp. 173-174).

To get to the root of the Russian’s multi-sided folly, articulated in religious idiom, Rancour-Laferriere refers to post-Freudian psychoanalytic studies, which link “adult experience of God and…. early childhood experience of the mother.” On her the child depends totally, and later in life she serves as a mental representation of God. Tolstoy was cut off from the most essential source of security and love since, says Rancour-Laferriere, she “had the audacity to die on him before he was fully able to speak.” His “quest for God thus begins and ends with his quest for his mother” (pp. 37, 180).

One could arguably take this line of reasoning to the point of absurdity by applying it to any idealistic calling. A diagnosis for the officer-volunteer fighting for a just cause may be mental derangement, manifested by a choice of abnormal behaviors—from ritual-orientation (saluting), to compulsiveness (persistent exercise of self-protective techniques), to aggression (justified preoccupation with violence), to death-fixation and suicidal ideation disguised as martyrdom (selfless heroism). One’s conduct in combat may easily qualify as episodic narcissism with pronounced anti-social co-morbidity. Such psychoanalytic tagging, however erudite, would obviously not reveal one’s real motivations or experience. Similarly, a person can be plagued by guilt and low self-esteem, as certainly was Tolstoy, who undoubtedly also suffered from depressive moods; yet, no scientific method may logically preclude coexistence of these and other psychological predicaments with spirituality, which he

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might have genuinely recognized within himself as a reality, independent from any acquired mental condition. In other words, no systematic mode of interpretation—psychoanalysis including—may legitimately apply itself to a sphere to which it has no direct access, except by usurpation and over-extension of aptitude.

Rancour-Laferriere emphasizes Tolstoy’s “hostility toward scholarship, and toward scientific knowledge generally.” He “believed that science was opposed to religion, and he opted in favor of the latter” (pp. 3-4), unlike his Freudian biographer, who makes the opposite choice. Tolstoy perception of life and its meaning “was religious by definition… Science was irrelevant. For example, the notion that religious behaviors and attitudes themselves might have been the product of Darwinian natural selection never entered Tolstoy’s mind” (p. 5). Paradoxically, Rancour-Laferriere’s position with regards to faith—at least as it is presented in his scholarship—is essentially analogous, albeit in the reversed sense: he adopts as his baseline the axiom that religious conviction is a derivative of a person’s psychological makeup. The more pronounced is one’s devotion (and its various manifestations), the more symptomatic it is of a detrimental mental condition. While Tolstoy indeed could not imagine that belief was a product of natural selection, Rancour-Laferriere leaves outside his sphere of intellectual concern a possibility that spiritual awareness may constitute a self-regulating experience, an intrinsic state, existing in its own right, autonomous from any particular set of psychological circumstances.

Tolstoy’s Quest for God is timely and indispensable precisely because its fundamental argument underlines an imperative methodological issue scholars in the field of psychohistory face today—the need to reconcile research, based on the academic modus operandi, with its intricate subject matter. Admittedly, in the humanities and social sciences its

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complexity often exceeds the scope of conventional intellectual discernment. This book exemplifies both—high achievements of the existing scholarship and our challenge to make a daring step beyond it, towards a new method.

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