In his first religious tract, A Confession (1884), Tolstoi claimed that for most of his adult life, until his “conversion,” he had been living as a “nihilist.” Closer reading of his diaries and letters, however, reveals a very different picture: Far more than most of his contemporaries in the Russian upper classes, Tolstoi had been preoccupied with religious questions, and for long periods of time had prayed regularly – also before his quest for meaning led him to embrace Orthodoxy temporarily. However, throughout his life, and also during his stint as a practicing Orthodox Christian, his relationship to the Russian Church was marked by ambivalence. As long as he professed the Orthodox faith, he practiced it with some “mental reservations”; conversely, when he later left the Church, he did not make a clean break with the religion of his forefathers, as virtually all Tolstoi scholars would have us believe. In fact, in A Confession he explicitly wrote that in the Russian Church he had found “truth interwoven with lies with the finest threads,” and he saw it as his task to disentangle these two elements in Orthodoxy from each other. How he went about doing that, I show in Chapter 3.

This final chapter draws together the various strands in my research, and links up to the explanatory matrixes introduced in Chapter 1. I show how the ambiguity towards the Russian Orthodoxy that runs like a red thread throughout Tolstoi’s life and work is mirrored in equally strong ambiguity towards Tolstoianism and its originator in the assessments of various Orthodox authors. For instance, in their anti-Tolstoian pamphlets they complained that he had “rediscovered a long-discovered America”; that he had come as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”; had “hidden behind a mask of goodness”; had “stolen the pearl of the Gospels,” and so on. In fact, all these laments and accusations implied that there was significant coincidence between Tolstoi’s teaching and Orthodox doctrine and religiosity. That is not to say that Tolstoi was an Orthodox in spite of himself. From a theological-dogmatic point of view, Tolstoi was undoubtedly a heretic. However, that term has no relevance for an inquiry into the history of ideas. My task here has been to move beyond such labels, looking for ideational and historical connections behind all the hostility and mutual recriminations between Russian Orthodoxy and Tolstoi’s heterodoxy. All this, my study has documented in full.