Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/231

Rh theorists, the most influential of all, as we have seen, being de Maistre.

I have mentioned the Russian predecessors and teachers of Pobědonoscev, but another name must be added to the list, that of Leont'ev, about whom we are to learn in the next section. Nearly all Pobědonoscev's ideas may be found in the writings of Leont'ev no less than in those of Le Play, and it is possible that these two thinkers made the strongest impression upon Pobědonoscev's mind. But the chief procurator gave expression to Leont'ev's ideas in the Russian forensic style. Leont'ev's ideas led him to a monastery remote from the world; but Pobědonoscev, adopting these same ideas, could bask at the courts of Alexander III and Nicholas II. Leont'ev insisted upon the need for great deeds of deathdealing significance; whereas Pobědonoscev (as we learn from a London report concerning the tsar's decree of January 26, 1905) asked to be promoted to the second class of the official hierarchy, and was granted the privilege of wearing an extra stripe upon the trousers of his full-dress uniform, to show that he ranked as a minister.

In view of these facts it is not agreeable to have to institute a comparison between Pobědonoscev and Tolstoi, and yet the official and personal relationships between the chief procurator and Tolstoi impose such a comparison. Somewhat prematurely, in 1900, Pobědonoscev refused Tolstoi the right to a religious burial, whilst in 1901 he had Tolstoi excommunicated. These measures suggest hostile sentiments and yet it is impossible to avoid comparing Pobědonoscev with Tolstoi. Both men manifested the same aversion to civilisation, science, and philosophy; to both, religion seemed the alpha and omega of endeavour. Tolstoi's estimate of parliament, democracy, and many other institutions, was closely akin to that of Pobědonoscev. The great difference between the two men lay, however, in this, that Tolstoi wished for a rational religion, Pobědonoscev for a mystical and positively irrational religion. In this matter Tolstoi's opponent was in the centre of the great mystical movement which affected so large a part of the Russian intelligentsia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the movement whose greatest prophet was Dostoevskii. Pobědonoscev, too, had learned from Dostoevskii, having had personal relations with that author. A strange comparison this between Pobědonoscev and Tolstoi—Tolstoi to whom