5

Tolstoy, Ge, and Two Pilates A Tale of the Interarts

J EFFERSON J.A . G ATR ALL

n Lev Tolstoy’s folktale “Where Love Is, !ere God before or a#er his celebrated “conversion,” does the Iis Also” (1884), the protagonist, a pious shoemaker, Word ever become incarnate as a literary character. hears what he believes to be Christ’s voice one night in For Tolstoy, the Christ $gure was foremost a his sleep: “Martin, Martin! Watch outside tomorrow, problem of words, not images. !is does not mean I’m coming.”1 !e next day Martin sees passing before that his image could not be misrepresented. Tolstoy his window an old man struggling through the snow, was, in fact, seldom satis$ed with how painters a soldier’s wife out begging with her newborn, and an portrayed Christ in their own medium. A#er securing elderly market woman quarrelling with a boy thief. a permanent place among Russia’s cultural elite with One by one, Martin invites these guests into his home, the serial publication of War and Peace (1865–1869), listens to their troubles, and assists them however he Tolstoy pronounced judgment on one painting of Christ can. At the end of the day, disappointed at not having a#er another over the next four decades. In private seen Christ in person, he opens his Bible to a telling letters, he dismissed Fritz von Uhde’s popular series passage: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the of gospel scenes in modern settings as “meaningless least of these who are members of my family, you did it genre,” while the historicism motivating such works to me” (Matt. 25:40).2 Martin understands at last that as Vasily Polenov’s Christ and the Adulteress (1886, “the Savior did, in fact, come to see him.”3 !rough this GRM) and Vasily Vereshchagin’s Execution on a Roman surprise ending, Tolstoy thus frustrates the conventions Cross (1887, private collection) he found misguided, of the Jesus redivivus tale, a popular nineteenth- tendentious, or both.4 In Anna Karenina (1878), century genre that had attracted such predecessors as one character criticizes Gustave Doré’s celebrated Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Balzac, and Flaubert. Tolstoy’s biblical illustrations for being “too realistic”;5 in a Christ has much to say to the modern world, but he letter, Tolstoy claims that Doré “worried only about need not return in the "esh to do so. In less schematic beauty” in creating the same illustrations.6 As for the form, this pattern is repeated in many folktales that Old Masters, for whom he had little patience as a rule, Tolstoy wrote from the 1880s onward: Christ becomes Tolstoy was especially indignant at the grotesqueries manifest not through his image and likeness, but of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1541).7 Tolstoy’s through the enduring truth of his teaching. Indeed, dissatisfaction with existing representations of Christ nowhere in Tolstoy’s voluminous literary output, either extended to Russian iconography, both traditional and revisionist. !ere is no room for a Russian Christ in critics, and curators on the subject of how best to paint Tolstoy’s personal canon.8 is satire of Orthodox liturgy Christ provides an unusually fruitful opportunity in Resurrection (1899), in which he mocks priests for stepping outside the hermeneutic enclosure of an for worshipping the image of a god whose body they individual artist’s oeuvre and into what can be termed also eat, was one of the contributing factors behind the “politics of the interarts”; that is, the ways in which his excommunication in 1901. In Tolstoy’s view, the di%erent types of cultural producers interact over a Old Russian icon re"ected “the religious worldview of common set of artistic problems. On the one hand, the people in the midst of which it arose,” and in that without detracting from the visual sophistication of his sense it was authentic “Christian art.” !e Russian icon own poetics, it can be said that Tolstoy was less prone had nevertheless always been based on “corruption of to fetishizing “the image” as an ideal model of creative Christ’s teaching.”9 Tolstoy was less sympathetic toward process than were most major nineteenth-century the e%orts of Viktor Vasnetsov and Mikhail Nesterov novelists. In this sense, Tolstoy’s peculiarly nonpictorial to modernize Russian iconography. He responded staging of Mikhailov’s Admonition of Pilate serves as a coolly to Nesterov a#er the painter forwarded him an foil to the ekphrastic impulse pervading the novels of illustration of his Holy Russia (1905, GRM); Nesterov’s many of his contemporaries. On the other hand, the Christ, for Tolstoy, looked like an “Italian tenor.”10 priority of word over image in Tolstoy’s Christology Instead of turning to the face of the Russian icon, bore iconographic consequences for actual painters. For Tolstoy strives to hear and understand the words of Ge, whose career had been launched by a revisionist the Teacher. Already in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy subtly depiction of the Last Supper, the Tolstoyan Christ undercuts the preeminence of the Christ image in presented an artistic challenge. Rather than fabricating the arts through a minimally ekphrastic portrayal of his own literary portrait of Christ, Tolstoy drew on !e Admonition of Pilate, a painting by the character his outsize authority to consecrate those rare Christ Mikhailov. !e signi$cance of Mikhailov’s painting is images that he felt satis$ed the twin demands of art and not exhausted by its metapoetic function in Tolstoy’s religion. Yet the task of producing such an image, as novel, moreover. !is $ctive Admonition of Pilate has Tolstoy understood, ultimately belonged to the painter. intermedial ties to a number of paintings that had provoked polarized reactions in the Russian press, notably Aleksandr Ivanov’s Appearance of Christ to the People (1858, GTG), Nikolai Ge’s Last Supper (1863, Beyond the Metapoetics of the Christ Image GRM), and Ivan Kramskoi’s Christ in the Wilderness Near the midpoint of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy (1872, $g. 5.1). In such paintings, the aesthetics of introduces the character Mikhailov, an impoverished modern realism are brought to bear on the sacred painter from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts iconography of the True Face. Beyond his role within now working in a small town in Italy. While living the novel, then, the character Mikhailov constituted abroad, Anna and Vronsky, along with the medievalist a critical intervention by a writer into a major Golenishchev, visit the artist’s studio in the hope of controversy in the art world. A decade later, Tolstoy seeing his un$nished masterpiece, !e Admonition intervened even more directly in the production and of Pilate. Signi$cantly, Golenishchev $rst mentions reception of yet another painting of Christ in a realist Mikhailov to Anna and Vronsky a#er reading an style, this time Ge’s scandalous What is Truth? (1890, unfavorable review of the painting in a Russian GTG). For Tolstoy, Ge alone had resolved a critical newspaper. According to Golenishchev, the painting impasse in the history of Christian art, portraying represents “Christ as a Jew, with all the realism of Christ neither as a god nor as a mere historical $gure, the new school.” Before Anna or Vronsky even have but, with unmatched success, as a teacher. a chance to see the painting, Golenishchev becomes Tolstoy’s reactions to two very di%erent paintings of a veritable compendium of clichés in denouncing its Christ before Pilate—Mikhailov’s $ctive Admonition “realism.” None of the other characters, least of all the of Pilate and Ge’s What is Truth?—form the outline painter himself, ever actually use this word. Yet it is of a remarkable chapter in the modernization of the clear that a public controversy of the sort typical for Christ image in late imperial Russia. Given his unique realist paintings of Christ is already brewing around social position as both a religious $gure and a leading Mikhailov’s Admonition of Pilate. Golenishchev, a tastemaker, Tolstoy’s extended dialogue with painters, nobleman like Vronsky, expresses his concern that

 T OLSTOY, GE, AND TWO PILATE S

5.1. Ivan Kramskoi, Christ in the Wilderness, 1872. Oil on canvas, 180 x 210 cm, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

Jefferson J.A. Gatrall  the painter, due to his provincial origins and lack of through the perspective of Mikhailov, whose internal education, had succumbed during his studies in St. monologue is more central to Tolstoy’s own metapoetics Petersburg to “unbelief, negation, and materialism.” In than are the details of his painting. particular, Mikhailov has followed the “false direction” Instead of re-creating Mikhailov’s painting in words, of the “Ivanov-Strauss-Renan relation to Christ and Tolstoy focuses on how other characters misinterpret it. religion painting”: “if they don’t want to portray God, Like Golenishchev, Vronsky and Anna fare poorly in their but rather a revolutionary or a wise man, why don’t responses to Mikhailov’s Admonition of Pilate. During they take Socrates, Franklin, or Charlotte Corday the couple’s brief sojourn in Italy, Vronsky dabbles in instead, only not Christ.” Later, in Mikhailov’s studio, painting imitative of the early Italian Renaissance. Like Golenishchev takes the artist to task for having painted a German Nazarene, he even takes to wearing a hat and a “Man-God” instead of a “God-Man”: “in front of scarf “in the medieval manner.” For Vronsky, Mikhailov’s Ivanov’s [Appearance of Christ] a question arises both painting demonstrates great “technique,” a catchword for the believer and for the unbeliever—is he God or that the artist does not consider particularly "attering or not?” In a rare articulate moment, Mikhailov replies original. To his credit, Vronsky does notice a “charming” that he had not thought that this would be “an issue for painting of two boys $shing among the scattered works educated people.”11 in Mikhailov’s studio. Mikhailov himself had forgotten !rough the voice of the unsympathetic Golenishchev, about this genre painting, which had been a source of Tolstoy attacks several di%erent trends in modern “su%ering and delight” for several months straight only Christology, from the historical Jesus of David Strauss three years before. Even Golenishchev, Mikhailov’s and Ernest Renan to Vladimir Soloviev’s philosophy of harshest critic, is “sincerely” taken by this second Godmanhood. Perhaps most directly, Golenishchev’s picture. Anna, in contrast to Vronsky, is concerned with comments parody the responses that Dostoevsky’s the content of Admonition of Pilate, as she praises the characters make in !e Idiot (1869) before a reproduction “remarkable expression of Christ.” Yet Mikhailov $nds of Hans Holbein the Younger’s !e Dead Christ in the her words no more insightful than others’: “It was one Tomb (1521). On seeing the original in Basel, Dostoevsky of a million true things that could be said. . . . Of course himself had told his wife that “one could lose one’s faith there’s the expression of the bureaucrat in Pilate, and of from that picture,” a remark later repeated by Myshkin charity in Christ.”14 in !e Idiot.12 Set ekphrases of Renaissance religious Anna, who views Christ as the “center of the paintings—not least Ippolit’s harrowing description of picture,”15 becomes herself the subject of a portrait Holbein’s Dead Christ from the same novel—perform by Mikhailov. As Amy Mandelker argues, Mikhailov’s central metapoetic functions in numerous Russian, portrait of Anna represents the most successful French, and English novels of the period. In Daniel of his three paintings in the novel.16 Conversely, Deronda (1876), a#er the eponymous hero discovers the Mikhailov’s Admonition of Pilate, while it does “make secret of his Jewish background, George Eliot discusses an impression” on his visitors, $nds the least receptive at length Titian’s Tribute Money (1518), dwelling on the audience of his works. While Mikhailov considers painter’s portrayal of a Jewish Christ. In Là-bas (1891), Christ “the greatest theme open to art,”17 this is not to note one last example, Joris-Karl Huysmans devotes necessarily a view he shares with Tolstoy, who in Anna pages to the gruesome details of the Isenheim Altarpiece Karenina and elsewhere tends to devalue the choice (1515) by Matthias Grünewald, an artist whom the of subject matter—long a standard criterion in the novelist praises as the “most frenzied of realists.”13 In academies—as a principal measure of a painting’s place of a Renaissance masterpiece, Tolstoy in Anna worth. In What is Art? (1897), for example, a genre-like Karenina tellingly supplies his own $ctive painting. Yet illustration trumps religious painting in a comparison where he departs most from other novelists lies in his between two works from the same artist: resistance to the Christ image as a master model for the interarts. In contrast to the ekphrastic metapoetics We have a painter named Vasnetsov. He painted icons of Dostoevsky, Eliot, or Huysmans, Tolstoy does not for the [Vladimir] Cathedral in Kiev; he is praised as describe the content or composition of Mikhailov’s the founder of some sort of great new Christian art. painting other than to note the placement of two key He worked over these icons for more than ten years. $gures: Christ in the foreground, and John in the !ey paid him tens of thousands [of rubles], and all background. Even these minimal details are refracted these icons are the vulgar imitation of an imitation of

 T OLSTOY, GE, AND TWO PILATE S

imitations, without a single spark of feeling. And this and visual media in his $ction.21 Beyond contradictions same Vasnetsov, for Turgenev’s story “!e Ostrich,” internal to Tolstoy’s theory of art, the use of one artistic sketched an illustration [. . .] in which a sleeping boy is medium to articulate the rules of another nevertheless depicted [. . .] with an ostrich over him. And this picture involves relations of power. In Anna Karenina, the 18 is a sincere work of art. novelist reserves for himself the $nal word on whether the work of a painter serves as a suitable model for Like the $rst-generation Peredvizhniki, Tolstoy his own prose. !is hierarchal relation of novelist-as- rejects the academic hierarchy of religious and critic over painting-as-model is characteristic of the historical painting over genre. !e illustration of an ekphrastic metapoetics that pervade the realist novel ostrich or of two boys $shing may well represent true in Russia, France, and Britain. Furthermore, these “Christian art” (a recurring term in What is Art?), while power relations operate not simply between words and realist religious paintings (Mikhailov) or modernized images within individual novels but between novelists icons (Vasnetsov) turn out to be mere imitations. Yet and painters as cultural authorities in the social sphere. Tolstoy’s iconoclasm extends even further than the !e power imbalance between the novelist and the controversy over high and low styles. Even within painter in the nineteenth century belies any deference Admonition of Pilate, Christ is not necessarily the most that the former may pay in their $ction to the images of remarkable $gure. Mikhailov remains painfully aware the latter. In surveying the $eld of cultural production that the “foreshortening of Christ’s leg is not correct”; in nineteenth-century France, Pierre Bourdieu in another passage he frets that his Christ is simply a emphasizes the substantial and enduring disparity in “repetition of those endless Christs of Titian, Raphael, social prestige between painters and writers, “despite Rubens.” In contrast, he is disappointed that none of his their increasing exchange of symbolic services.”22 As guests notice the $gure of John “in the background,” Elizabeth Valkenier has shown in the Russian context, which he knows to be the “height of perfection.” It the predominantly noble-born tastemakers of the would be a mistake to take the inner thoughts of the cultural elite o#en complained of a lack of education highly impressionable Mikhailov at face value. Yet it among painters admitted to the St. Petersburg Academy, does seem that the Christ $gure in Admonition of Pilate the latter usually the sons of the petty bourgeoisie, has not yet emerged as an adequate expression of what provincial priests, or liberated serfs; Russian painters, 19 had once been a sincere and ecstatic “discovery.” Valkenier writes, were o#en “saddled with a sense of !rough the staging of Mikhailov’s painting, Tolstoy social, cultural, and legal inferiority.”23 !is imbalance thus decenters the Christ image in two ways—as a between novelist and painter was o#en maintained on subject of the highest importance in Christian art both sides, moreover. When Ilia Repin learned of the generally and as the focal point of one painting in character Mikhailov in Anna Karenina, for example, he particular. In both cases, Mikhailov’s Christ is undercut could barely contain his joy: “Lev Tolstoy himself (our by the same criterion of aesthetic judgment: true idol) chose to write about us!!!”24 Christian art is that which provokes a sincere response In terms of cultural capital, the lower-class in others. Mikhailov $nds himself similarly at a disadvantage Over the past few decades more than a half dozen before his aristocratic visitors. Although displeased critics have leaned on Mikhailov’s Admonition of with their responses, he is “unable to say anything in Pilate as a metapoetic tool in their own readings of defense of his own thinking.”25 At a biographical level, Anna Karenina. !us the painting has been called “the Mikhailov bears a certain resemblance to the painter emblem of the book”; “the key that opens the basic Aleksandr Ivanov. Like Ivanov, to whom Golenishchev principles of the novel’s poetics”; “an episode with twice refers, Mikhailov lives in Italy in near poverty intense metapoetic and hermeneutic qualities”; “a focal and devotes years to a painting of Christ that generates point in the novel’s debate on visual aesthetics”; and controversy before its completion. Yet it is Kramskoi the “point” at which “the general philosophical and who arguably serves as the most immediate model 20 aesthetic conception of the novel rises to the surface.” for the character Mikhailov. Kramskoi painted two Several critics have further explored the apparent portraits of Tolstoy while living at the latter’s estate contradiction between Tolstoy’s outspoken criticism of in the fall of 1873; at that time the artist also $rst mixed media, especially Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, conceived Mockery, a large-scale, un$nished painting and his own no less frequent metapoetic use of musical in which Christ is scorned by the people of Jerusalem

Jefferson J.A. Gatrall  in the presence of Pilate (GRM).26 Without insisting on go to the le#, all that will be mine, it all could be mine, I a complete identi$cation of Mikhailov with Kramskoi, feel in myself the presence of a terrifying mental power, the relationship between Tolstoy and the real-life talent, and, in the end, I have passions.”29 painter is indicative of the politics of the interarts at the In conservative reviews, paintings of Christ that time. Tolstoy, as one of Russia’s foremost cultural $gures did not conform to established iconographic norms in the 1870s, honored Kramskoi with a much sought- were also frequently dismissed as being “not Christ.” a#er commission for his portrait; in return, Kramskoi Realist paintings, in departing from long-standing served Tolstoy as a tertiary character whose artistic traditions, depicted Jesus in ways that rendered him productions help propagate the writer’s own views unrecognizable, literally or $guratively, to viewers. on art. Kramskoi, like Repin, was for his part highly !is situation underscores a dilemma common to deferential to the authority of Tolstoy. Twelve years a#er any attempt at iconographic revision: a Christ not he painted Tolstoy’s portrait, Kramskoi confessed in recognizable as such is no longer Christ. Kramskoi’s a letter that he was still haunted by the writer’s words response to such objections was uncompromising: about Christ: “In conversation, you once declared that “many have told me, ‘it’s not Christ, how do you know ‘Christ and his teaching were no more than a historical that he was like that?’ I allowed myself the temerity moment in the development of humanity.’ Many times to answer that even when he was alive they did not I’ve heard similar judgments, but never did it seem so recognize him.”30 His compatriot Vasilii Vereshchagin, devoid of hope.”27 whose Palestinian Sketches were banned in Russia and For all their similarities, Kramskoi, unlike Mikhailov, caused a major scandal in Vienna, further sought to was nevertheless a profoundly articulate interpreter of defamiliarize the Christ image in writings on his own his own work. As Valkenier has documented, Kramskoi, paintings. !e historical realism of his paintings— a self-educated son of the petty bourgeoisie, was acutely including his notorious Execution on a Roman Cross self-conscious about his origins. In letters he confessed (1887)—was admittedly speculative. Yet they were that he “envied” no one “so much as an educated necessarily closer to the truth than the academic and person,” and he o#en criticized fellow artists on the Renaissance models that conservative critics held as grounds that they “could not talk, could not behave, normative. In a manifesto on “realism,” written to and were insu&ciently well educated.”28 Kramskoi coincide with an exhibition of his Palestinian Sketches mounts an especially sophisticated defense of Christ in New York in 1891, Vereshchagin declares that “we in the Wilderness in his letters. Realist painters across are di%erent from [the old masters] in many respects; Europe—from William Holman Hunt to Edouard we think di%erently, we are more daring in our Manet to Max Liebermann—were o#en criticized synthesizing of facts about the past, present, and future. for focusing on the human as opposed to the divine . . . Is it really possible in the present age to accept the aspect of Christ’s dual nature. Few artists defended traditional understanding of God in a literal sense?”31 their humanizing of the Christ image with as much Many painters in fact admitted their nonconformity to rhetorical "air as did Kramskoi, who wrote to a number accepted beliefs. To return to Kramskoi, he prophesizes of his supporters in the wake of his painting’s debut at in the same letter that “a time will come when it will the $rst Peredvizhnik exhibition in St. Petersburg in be necessary for art to review and revise its former 1872. In Kramskoi’s revision of the Temptation, Christ premises, because in the end Christ is, in essence, is no more than human, as he confronts not the Devil, a great and most sublime atheist.”32 Here Kramskoi as in the gospels, but his own inner demons. Facing indeed anticipates one of Nietzsche’s major heresies in the choice between continuing or abandoning his still !e Antichrist (1889). nascent mission, Christ experiences, as Kramskoi writes In short, Kramskoi, at least in his letters, is much in a letter, “despondency” (otchaianie) and “moral less tongue-tied than his supposed avatar Mikhailov. disintegration” (nravstvennoe razlozhenie). In the In Anna Karenina, the only part of Kramskoi’s defense painting, this psychological state is visually reinforced of Christ in the Wilderness that Tolstoy echoes is the in a number of ways, including Christ’s downcast eyes painter’s peculiar confession that he had actually and the desolate desert background. In the same letter, seen a vision of Christ. In an 1876 letter to Vsevolod Kramskoi resorts to literary means, including free and Garshin, Kramskoi describes in detail what he calls a indirect speech, as he dares to imagine Christ’s thought “hallucination”: “Once, at a time when I was especially process in the $rst person: “to go right? to go le#? If I busy . . . I suddenly saw a $gure sitting in profound

 T OLSTOY, GE, AND TWO PILATE S thought. I very carefully began to watch him, to walk inner vision over the false meanings attributed to him. around him, and during all that (quite long) time that Tolstoy indeed seems concerned less with Mikhailov’s I was observing him he didn’t move or seem to notice Admonition of Pilate in itself than with undercutting me.”33 In Anna Karenina, Mikhailov insists he could the ability of his audience to say anything meaningful not paint an image of Christ that “was not in his soul”: at all about the work. !is deference of the novelistic “If a small child or a cook could see what was revealed word before the painted image forms a peculiar chapter to them, then they would be able to portray what in the ancient paragone between poet and painter. they saw.”34 Tolstoy thus infantalizes what Kramskoi Mikhailov’s Admonition of Pilate, whatever its "aws may pathologizes: revelation as the source of true art. be, preserves an aura of authenticity denied to the word As these parallel passages indicate, Mikhailov and environment in which it is found, from the characters’ Kramskoi do share an understanding of the need clichéd responses to the narrator’s minimalist ekphrasis. for sincerity in artistic vision. From the Nazarenes Yet in Anna Karenina, as in so many other novels, the and the French realists to the pre-Raphaelites and price of the image’s power is the painter’s silence. the Peredvizhniki, sincerity was a rallying cry for virtually every major secession movement in the nineteenth-century art world. On the one hand, critics and artists pushed the concept of sincerity backward Toward an Iconography of the Tolstoyan Christ in time toward the pre-Renaissance painter, a sort of Mikhailov’s Admonition of Pilate was hardly Tolstoy’s artist-priest $gure who works in sel"ess anonymity last foray into the subject of the Christ image. Shortly and only from genuine inspiration. On the other a#er the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy started hand, such midcentury critics as John Ruskin and work on Confession. In terms of cultural history, it is Jules Champ"eury co-opted the term sincerity for di&cult to overestimate the authority that this seminal the new movement of realism.35 !e sincerity of yet o#en misunderstood document conferred on the realist consists in remaining faithful to nature, Tolstoy, not least in the realm of Christian iconography. or to social reality, without embellishing that which In his comprehensive study of Tolstoy’s $ction and might be harsh and ugly yet undeniably true. In theology, Richard Gustafson persuasively challenges the Anna Karenina, Tolstoy follows the $rst of these two notion that there are “two Tolstoys, the pre-conversion tendencies, allying sincerity not with an outward artist and the post-conversion religious thinker and $delity to reality but rather with inward vision. !ere prophet.”38 At no stage of Tolstoy’s career were religion are three very di%erent medieval $gures in Tolstoy’s and art far from one another in his thoughts. Yet it staging of Mikhailov’s painting in Anna Karenina: certainly seemed to Tolstoy’s contemporaries that he the medievalist Golenishchev, who is writing a book had made a radical break from literature when he about Russia’s Byzantine heritage; Vronsky, a false began distributing manuscript copies of Confession in medieval artist who simply imitates the style of early 1879 (the censors delayed its publication until 1884). Italian painting; and Mikhailov, who, like a stereotype Here the text’s $rst readers followed its spirit, if not of the authentic medieval artist, labors to uncover its letter. In his autobiography, Tolstoy structures his all the layers of a “revelation” that unfolds before ongoing search for truth as a series of Buddha-like him.36 Given how o#en nineteenth-century novelists renunciations: “Faith in the signi$cance of poetry and as a group ally themselves with the “brother of the in the evolution of life was indeed a faith, and I was brush”—in Henry James’s phrase37—the erudite yet one of its high priests.” He had “naïvely” thought he pretentious Golenishchev seems at an inevitable could “teach everyone, not knowing myself what to disadvantage before the inarticulate yet sincere teach.”39 As the hagiographic tone of Confession itself Mikhailov. What is a de$ciency for Kramskoi (or suggested, Tolstoy was experimenting with new forms Mikhailov) becomes an advantage for Tolstoy. for teaching beyond the merely poetic. Even more so In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy follows a well-worn path than his rejection of Church or State, his avowed loss of of realist novelists who exploit the mimetic immediacy faith in literature provoked strong reactions among his of the painted image in their struggle against the contemporaries. abstractions of the philosopher. In Mikhailov’s To borrow Bourdieu’s terms, what changed from workshop, painter is privileged over scholar, the Anna Karenina to Confession two years later was less artist’s painting over its critical reception, and his Tolstoy himself than his “position-taking” in the $eld

Jefferson J.A. Gatrall  of cultural production. Speci$cally, Tolstoy’s Confession of the gospels, Tolstoy, like an overly enthusiastic icon- initiated a public rite of passage from his secure status restorer, scrapes o% so much doctrinal palimpsest that as a novelist in Russia to his highly contested role as only the thinnest layer of original image survives. !us the founder of a religious movement. Here Tolstoy’s he jettisons much of the staple material of Christian status in Russia parallels that of Zola in France to a iconography, including the birth of Jesus, all of his remarkable extent. As Bourdieu suggests, not only miracles, and the Resurrection. Unlike Strauss and did the literary $eld attain its apex of autonomy from Renan, moreover, Tolstoy shows no interest in piecing the $eld of power in the second half of the nineteenth together the life of the historical Jesus according to “the century; in the process, new and highly unstable useless manner of science and the history of religion.”42 position-takings for professional writers also emerged, As a result of such exegetical iconoclasm, what remains including the “intellectual,” a position that Zola helped are mostly the logia of Christ—his sermons, sayings, to “invent.”40 As for Tolstoy, he was able to build on and parables. the autonomy and prestige of an imaginative writer to Such parsimony in matters of iconography from become not just an intellectual or cultural critic but— the world’s most famous religious dissenter at the time improbably and largely beyond his own control—the prompted more than one painter to reexamine their $gurehead of a modern, global religion based on the artistic assumptions concerning the Christ image. In the “teachings” of Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, wake of Confession and the religious tracts that followed and Schopenhauer, among others. From the early in quick succession in the early 1880s, members of 1880s till his death in 1910, Tolstoy’s interactions with Russia’s cultural elite tended to frame their own praise painters were complicated by the extraordinary level of or criticism of Tolstoy as a choice between competing charismatic authority that he commanded across the social positions: following the example of Turgenev’s social sphere. deathbed open letter imploring Tolstoy to “return to In Confession, Tolstoy also made public his literature,” many refused to recognize in him any other renunciation of Russian Orthodoxy. As with Luther legitimate position than that of novelist; others, such as before him, one of Tolstoy’s immediate tasks as the the young Chekhov, succumbed with varying degrees leader of a nascent schismatic movement was a new to the charisma accompanying his newfound position translation of the gospels. During the years 1880–1885, as prophet. Among painters, Kramskoi belonged to the Tolstoy devoted considerable labor to A Harmony and former camp. In 1885 he wrote to Tolstoy—with whom Translation of the Four Gospels, a work that stirred he had not otherwise communicated for more than debate long before its publication in Geneva in 1891. a decade—to urge him to reconsider the path he had In this work, Tolstoy includes passages from the four selected: gospels in the original Greek, in the canonical 1821 Russian version, and in his own translation, all laid I don’t know whether it is possible to be a prophet in out in parallel columns. !rough extensive glosses an age of the telegraph. . . . If you want to stir “charity” he further compares his work with contemporary in the human heart, if you are a teacher, don’t try to translations into other European languages. Most prove what is necessary [. . .] but simply command. importantly, for each thematically organized section But if you aren’t a teacher, but rather a human being he provides his own “exposition”; that is, retellings who is preoccupied and deeply worried about personal, of select gospel passages that together comprise a irresolvable moral questions, then wait a little, step back, uni$ed narrative of the life and teaching of Jesus. His and form them into images. . . . Christ is not a myth and expositions were later published separately in multiple not the creation of a poet, but a real person. !e artist 43 languages. Ironically, he de$ned this thoroughly gives real, living images. exegetical undertaking through an analogy with the art of icon restoration: “the life and teaching of Jesus In this letter Kramskoi o%ers a textbook rendition [is] like a wondrous painting that, for temporary of the Christ image as a model for artistic process. purposes, has been covered over with a layer of dark Kramskoi further points to Dostoevsky and to Tolstoy’s paint [. . .which] one must scrape o%.”41 He repeats this own novels—which had previously “lacked an emphatic analogy in various forms throughout his commentary moralizing tendency”44—as exemplars of such to illustrate his opposition to the false dei$cation of intermedial alchemy, that is, the poet’s reduction of Christ by the major churches. Yet in his own retelling words into images.

 T OLSTOY, GE, AND TWO PILATE S

Kramskoi thus articulates precisely the type of thought over a manuscript of the banned tract What literary project that Tolstoy had come to regard with I Believe. As an established artist, Ge was also well deep suspicion. For Tolstoy, it was no longer enough positioned to serve as an illustrator in Tolstoy’s populist to picture the Christ image; new art forms, both verbal endeavors. In 1886 Ge agreed to illustrate a new version and visual, had to be found to convey Christ’s teaching of Tolstoy’s “What do Men Live By?” (1881), the $rst in ways that e%ect real social change. Max Weber work of $ction the writer had published since Anna de$nes the role of the prophet in terms not unlike Karenina and one that had especially enchanted the those of Kramskoi: “the genuine prophet [. . .] preaches, painter. In this folktale, a shoemaker assists a stranger creates, and demands new obligations.”45 Tolstoy was whom he $nds lying naked and motionless near a indeed preoccupied with the neglected genre of the shrine. !e stranger, who is invited to live with the “commandment.” At the conclusion of Resurrection shoemaker’s family, turns out to be an angel. Like (1899), for example, the protagonist Nekhliudov Tolstoy’s later “Where Love Is, !ere God is Also,” condenses the Sermon on the Mount into $ve core this tale rehearses a common plotline in hagiographic “commandments” (zapovedi). literature; namely, either Christ or an angel appears on earth as a man in great material need in order to test the Having read the Sermon on the Mount, which he had charity of Christians. always found moving, [Nekhliudov] saw in its teaching Tolstoy’s choice of an angel over Christ in both now for the $rst time, not beautiful abstract thoughts, tales is not an incidental one. !e rules for portraying presenting largely exaggerated and unrealizable demands, imaginary agents, which are not real yet serve a moral but simple, clear, practical commandments, which, if purpose, di%er from those for the teacher Jesus, who is obeyed (and this was fully possible), would establish a a genuine historical $gure. Such, at least, is the manner 46 completely new foundation for human society. in which Tolstoy treats the miraculous elements in the sacred texts of Buddha and his followers: “excluding For Mikhail Bakhtin, these gospel passages at the end its miracles, looking at them as fabula that express of Resurrection represent a “dead quotation, something thought, this teaching opened the meaning of life to that falls out of the artistic context.”47 Bakhtin’s well- me.”49 !e key term “fabula” helps distinguish the known objection is valid in an aesthetic sense, yet iconography of Tolstoy’s own folktales, where angels ultimately one-sided. Tolstoy’s experiments with the and miracles are common, from the cult of image “commandment” as a literary genre, if not always more commonly encountered in the mainstream successful, represent a remarkable development in their realist novel. Rather than distilling the essence of own right. As a matter of cultural history, Tolstoy’s religious experience into a single and culminating “practical commandments,” especially his injunction “do image of Christ, Tolstoy disperses the morals of his not resist evil with evil,” did in fact reverberate across the o#en fantastic tales throughout the length of their $eld of power in late imperial Russia. storyline. Appropriately, Ge sketched not one but In contrast to Kramskoi, Nikolai Ge, a cofounder of twelve illustrations for “What do Men Live By.” Tolstoy’s the Peredvizhniki, sought to develop an iconography numerous folktales likewise break from the nostalgia that would correspond to Tolstoy’s aesthetically characterizing the Jesus redivivus tale, that is, stylized minimalist Christology. Indeed, Ge’s evolving artistic legends involving Christ’s return to earth. Unlike Balzac collaboration with Tolstoy from 1882, when the two in “Jésus-Christ en Flandres” (1831) or Flaubert in “La $rst met, until Ge’s death in 1894 provides a compelling légende de Saint Julien le Hospitallier” (1877), Tolstoy counter-model to the ekphrastic metapoetics of the is not restoring legends from a simpler past for the realist novel. A#er becoming a full-blown disciple, edi$cation of an educated readership; on the contrary, Ge spent large amounts of time at the writer’s country the Russian novelist wrote and self-published tales for estate Iasnaia Poliana, where he taught the writer’s mass distribution to Russia’s culturally disenfranchised daughter drawing, an approved Tolstoyan visual art. He peasantry. As if con$rming their contemporary also avidly read Tolstoy’s theological works with an ear relevance, two of Ge’s illustrations for “What do Men for their practical instruction: he adopted vegetarianism Live By?” were blocked by the censor. Tolstoy further and even abandoned the use of oil paints for a time.48 waived copyright for his tales, a decision that facilitated As if commenting on his own conversion experience, their rapid dissemination to an international audience. Ge’s 1884 portrait of Tolstoy represents the writer in Ge’s participation in Tolstoy’s populist endeavors

Jefferson J.A. Gatrall  did not end with his illustrations for “What do Men already twice, and today, having had a vision of you, I 52 Live By?” In 1884 Tolstoy, along with the leading wanted to write you several words of love. Tolstoyans Vladimir Chertkov and Petr Biriukov, founded Posrednik (!e Intermediary), a populist In response to such letters, Tolstoy generally urged publishing house that was to prove highly proli$c over Ge not to neglect actual work on his paintings. Tolstoy the next few decades. Aside from Tolstoy’s many folk even wrote to Repin that he feared the words Ge used to stories, Posrednik published annotated illustrations on describe his planned Passion series would prove “more 53 “gospel themes” as part of its broad intervention in the forceful and artistic than the impression” made by the moral education of the Russian peasantry. In each of paintings themselves. In a lengthy homage to Ge a#er these planned publications—“!e Temptation of Our his death, Repin echoed Tolstoy’s thought, lamenting Jesus Christ,” “!e Last Supper,” and so forth—a gospel that no one had ever “stenographed” the painter when 54 passage appears above an illustration with an editorial he spoke of his own work. gloss explaining this passage’s meaning underneath. Ge’s own heady approach to Christian iconography None of the illustrations or texts was signed, despite placed him in a unique position—a#er the initial the involvement of such well-established artists and euphoria of conversion had subsided—to develop a writers as Repin and Garshin. In the summer of 1886, compelling image of Christ as teacher. By the end of Ge sent Tolstoy a detailed plan for gospel illustrations the 1880s, as Repin’s reminiscences make clear, Ge of his own. In the $rst of eight illustrations, Ge had fallen under the in"uence of yet another master intended to portray the following “vision”: “John the of biblical hermeneutics, namely, the Church father Evangelist with a book. He’s writing and sees John Tertullian. As Tertullian argues in his anti-docetist [the Baptist], who points to a crowd of people; in the treatise De Carne Christi Libre, written in 206, “[men] middle is the Savior holding the hand of a child. [. . .] despised [Christ’s] outward appearance, so far was his Behind the Savior are Elijah and Isaiah; behind them body from being of human comeliness, not to speak of are Socrates, David, Buddha, and Moses, and behind celestial glory”: “it was precisely the non-marvellous them are Abraham with his son and Moses. !e sky is character of his terrestrial "esh which made the rest 55 covered with two "ying angels.”50 In John’s vision, Ge of his activities things to marvel at.” !e $rst of Ge’s incorporates three major $gures of Tolstoy’s Confession paintings with a Tertullian-inspired Christ was What is (Christ, Socrates, and Buddha) into a modi$ed version Truth? (1890, $g. 5.2). As Repin records, Ge intended to of the Annunciation. !at John is portrayed writing portray a Christ who, “in protest against the pagan ideal,” his gospel further re"ects Tolstoy’s interpretation assumed the “most humble and insigni$cant human of Christ as teacher. It is not clear whether Ge ever image in order to demonstrate to people that what was 56 executed this illustration.51 Yet its uneasy con"ation of important was the soul.” In What is Truth? Ge indeed traditional Christian iconography and post-Christian presents a shockingly unattractive Christ. Pilate, in the ecumenicalism re"ects the kinds of artistic challenges pose of a Roman orator, stands in the light of a palace that the Tolstoyan Christ posed. door. !e question “What is truth?” (John 18:34) has Perhaps not surprisingly, it was not as an illustrator become purely rhetorical, as Christ remains silent and in of Tolstoyism that Ge most impressed Tolstoy. In shadow. Short, wispy-haired, purse-lipped, and steely- addition to collaborating over gospel illustrations, eyed, Ge’s Christ has no peer in nineteenth-century Ge communicated frequently with Tolstoy about his Russian religious painting. !e furor that What is Truth? plans for a series of large-scale paintings devoted to the provoked at the eighteenth Peredvizhnik exhibition in events of the Passion. Ge’s early letters to Tolstoy are 1890 exceeded in intensity the controversy surrounding distinguished by an almost mystical tone of reverence Ge’s own Last Supper (1863) nearly three decades earlier. and intimacy. Alexander III could barely contain his disgust in ordering What is Truth? to be taken down from exhibition, calling 57 I work with delight, all the time planning to come to you the picture “repulsive.” A#er being forced into exile, [. . .] what I am making, I will take with me to show you. Ge’s painting caused further controversy in several !ere’s no such thing as space, and not because railroads German and American cities. According to Repin, one 58 exist, but because true love destroys all distance. I am American critic wrote a whole book condemning it. all the time with you; I live at one with you in thought, Despite himself being wary of what he called Ge’s 59 I even see you in visions: I’ve seen you in my dreams “exceptionally unattractive” Christ, Tolstoy—in

 T OLSTOY, GE, AND TWO PILATE S

5.2. Nikolai Ge, What is Truth?, 1890. Oil on canvas, 233 x 171 cm, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

Jefferson J.A. Gatrall  a reversal of the roles of master and apprentice— than “an epoch in the history of Christian art.” Prior placed his own formidable in"uence at the service of to the modern period, Tolstoy explains, “Catholic art the painter’s much-besieged masterpiece. A#er the had predominantly portrayed saints, the Madonna, painting’s removal from the St. Petersburg exhibition, and Christ as gods.” More recently, artists across Tolstoy wrote letters to critics abroad in an attempt Europe had begun to portray Christ as a mere to guarantee the painting’s safe passage through the “historical $gure,” needlessly alienating Christian foreign press. In advance of the painting’s exhibition viewers who, albeit falsely, still view him as God. in Boston, for example, he explained its meaning to an Tolstoy proceeds to break down the diverse attempts American journalist: of artists in Russia and Europe to escape this double bind into $ve broad categories: (1) painters who Here a conversation takes place (John 18:33–38) in “polemicized directly” against the divinity of Christ, which the magnanimous governor wants to descend including “the pictures of Vereshchagin and even en bon prince to the level of the barbaric interests of his Ge’s Resurrection”; (2) painters who “tried to produce subjects. . . . Jesus is tormented, and it takes only one treatises of these subjects as historical—among them, look at [Pilate’s] well-groomed, self-satis$ed, smug [. . .] Ivanov, Kramskoi, and again Ge’s Last Supper”; (3) face for him to realize the abyss separating them as well painters who “wanted to ignore any controversy [. . as the impossibility and terrible di&culty of making .] (Doré, Polenov)”; (4) painters, such as “[Fritz von] Pilate understand his teaching. . . . !e merit of the Uhde,” who attempt “to bring Christ God down to picture, in my opinion, consists in the fact that it is true earth, as well as from the pedestal of history onto the (realistic, as is now said) in the most authentic sense soil of [contemporary] life. [. . . ] Christ in the guise of the word. Christ is not such, as would be pleasant of a priest, barefoot, in the presence of children, etc.” to look at, but precisely as someone must be who has Tolstoy reserves the $#h category exclusively for Ge’s been tortured all night and is still being tortured. And What is Truth?: “Christ and his teaching not in words Pilate is such as any governor must be [. . .] even in alone, but in word and deed, in confrontation with 60 61 Massachusetts. the teaching of the world.” Tolstoy elaborates on this $#h category in a letter to his American contact: “In Given his own outspoken rejection of beauty as a our era there have been attempts to portray a moral criterion of truth in art, Tolstoy—almost alone among understanding of the life and teaching of Christ”; Ge’s Russian or international critics—was able to until Ge’s What is Truth?, Tolstoy asserts, “these 62 look past the shock of Ge’s Christ in order to analyze attempts had not been successful.” In the end, it is to the painting’s surface realism and, more importantly, Ge that the honor goes for rendering the Christ image its rich ideational texture. For most of Ge’s viewers, viable in modernity. neglect of Christ’s beauty, an entrenched iconographic In this remarkable series of letters, Tolstoy surveys signi$er, was tantamount to a rejection of his divinity. the controversies surrounding realist paintings of Christ Ge’s Christ is indeed all too human. Yet the unsightly in Russia and Europe with a rhetoric as authoritative appearance of Christ serves to accentuate the rigors in tone as it is dazzlingly reductive. !e writer-turned- of his uncompromising teaching. !e Christological prophet does not necessarily interpret What is Truth? in insights of Tertullian and Tolstoy are thus harmonized a persuasive manner. Even in Tolstoy’s own terms, Ge’s in an iconography that is entirely Ge’s own. In What painting proved as alienating as any listed in his $rst is Truth? Ge had dared to invoke the wrath of public category above, and there remains a seeming disconnect opinion by tarnishing the beauty of the Christ image. between the silence and stillness of Ge’s Christ and It is a testament to Tolstoy’s acumen as a critic that he Tolstoy’s emphasis on this $gure’s “teaching in word recognized, even exaggerated, the importance of Ge’s and deed.” Tolstoy and Ge continued to exchange views innovation. on religious art in their correspondence as the latter Tolstoy may not have been able to prevent What is worked on other paintings in his series on the Passion, Truth? from being removed from public exhibition, including Golgotha (1893, GTG) and Cruci"xion (1894, but he did ensure that it would return to Russia by location unknown). And Tolstoy continued to defend pressuring Pavel Tretiakov, who disliked the painting, Ge in letters to critics in Russia and abroad. As the to purchase it. In a letter to Tretiakov of July 1890, writer explains to Tretiakov on the occasion of Ge’s Tolstoy argues that Ge’s painting comprises no less death in 1894:

 T OLSTOY, GE, AND TWO PILATE S

!e run-of-the-mill public wants Christ-icons to which Notes they can pray, but [Ge] gives them a Christ who is a living person; this produces disenchantment and dissatisfaction, 1. L.N. Tolstoi, “Gde liubov’, tam i bog,” in just like a man, who had been expecting to drink wine Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [herea#er PSS] (Moscow: but is given water instead, spits out the water in disgust, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi even though water is healthier and better than wine. Last literatury, 1937), 25:38. Unless otherwise noted all winter I went three times to your gallery and each time I translations are mine. involuntarily stopped before What is Truth?, completely 2. New Revised Standard Version used here and independently of my friendship with him and even throughout. 63 forgetting that it was his picture. 3. Tolstoi, “Gde liubov’, tam i bog,” 45. For further analysis of this folktale, see Wolfgang Kasack, Christus Curiously, in this same letter, Tolstoy claims that he in der russischen Literatur: Ein Gang durch die “knows no better Christ” than the one in Kramskoi’s Literaturgeschichte von ihren Angängenbis zum Ende des Christ in the Wilderness, a work that he had four years 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1999), 60–62. earlier consigned to his second, “historical” category.64 4. Tolstoi, letters to P.M. Tret’iakov, 30 June 1890 It is hard not to wonder how Tretiakov must have and 19 June 1984, in L.N. Tolstoi i khudozhniki: Tolstoi reacted to this apparent about-face. !e collector ob iskusstve: pis’ma, dnevniki, vospominaniia, ed. I.A. already owned Kramskoi’s masterpiece, so at least he Brodskii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 96, 119. was not being asked for more money. 5. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, in PSS 19 (1935): 275. For the purposes of understanding Tolstoy’s 6. Tolstoi to Tret’iakov, 30 June 1890, in Tolstoi i undeniable impact on the fate of Ge’s What is khudozhniki, 98. Truth?, what is most crucial is not the merit of his 7. See Tolstoi, Chto takoe isskustvo?, in PSS 30 judgments but rather the charismatic authority that (1951): 130. empowered him to make and even enforce them. 8. For a recent discussion of the Russian Christ in Tolstoy’s engagement with Ge, Kramskoi, and others nineteenth-century painting, see Laura Engelstein, over the problem of the Christ image presents an “Between Art and Icon: Aleksandr Ivanov’s Russian extreme yet illustrative case of the role that writers Christ,” in Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal o#en assumed in the production and reception of Path (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), art works beyond their ostensible area of expertise. 151–91. Over the $nal decades of imperial Russia, Tolstoy’s 9. Tolstoi, Chto takoe isskustvo?, 70. charisma constituted a sociological fact. !e high level 10. Tolstoi, in conversation with Iu. I. Ugumenova, of charismatic authority that he commanded across July 1907, quoted in A. Mikhailov, Mikhail Vasil’evich the social sphere—unmatched in Russia and rivaled Nesterov: zhizn’ i tvorchestvo ([Moscow]: Sovetskii only by Zola’s globally—does not diminish or delimit khudozhnik, 1958), 214. Ge’s accomplishment. !us Ge is not simply the o&cial 11. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 34, 35, 43, 44. illustrator of the Tolstoyan Christ, as if he were a real- 12. See Anna Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia (Moscow: life Mikhailov. Yet neither must Tolstoy be viewed as Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1981), 175, 437. a meddlesome dilettante burdened by the irresolvable 13. J.K. Huysmans, Là-bas (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 37. contradictions of his own worldview. Rather, the value 14. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 34, 41, 42, 43. of What is Art? ultimately derives from social processes 15. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 45. involving the interaction of multiple cultural producers. 16. Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: Ge’s much-disparaged Tolstoyism helped guide him Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel toward one of the most original and provocative Christ (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 110. images in a highly competitive artistic environment. 17. Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina, 41, 43. Tolstoy’s most important role nevertheless lay in 18. Tolstoi, Chto takoe iskusstvo?, 146. the value that he conferred on the $nished product. 19. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 40, 44. !at What is Truth? is still on permanent display in 20. Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and the Tretiakov gallery, and in the canons of Russian Stranger: A Study in Fiction and !eology (Princeton, art history, is due, at least in part, to Tolstoy’s timely NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 143; V.E. intervention. Vetlovskaia, “Poetika ‘Anny Kareninoi,’” Russkaia

Jefferson J.A. Gatrall  literatura, no. 4 (1979): 17; Svetlana Evdokimova, 35. See Jules Champ"eury, Le Réalisme (Geneva: “!e Drawing and the Grease Spot: Creativity and Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 3; John Ruskin, Modern Interpretation in Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy Studies Painters (London: J.M. Dent, 1929), 3:60–65. Journal 8 (1995–1996): 33; Justin Weir, “Tolstoy Sees the 36. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 42. Truth but Waits: !e Consequences of Aesthetic Vision 37. Henry James, “!e Art of Fiction,” in !e House in Anna Karenina,” in Approaches to Teaching Anna of Fiction: Essays on the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (Westport, Karenina, ed. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker (New CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 29. York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 38. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger, xiv. 175; Kupreianova, “Vyrazhenie esteticheskikh vozzrenii 39. Tolstoi, Ispoved’, in PSS 23 (1957): 6. i nravstvennykh iskanii L. Tolstogo v romane ‘Anna 40. Pierre Bourdieu, !e Rules of Art: Genesis and Karenina,’” Russkaia literatura, no. 3 (1960): 124. Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel 21. See Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina, 49–51, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 129. 105; Rimvydas Silbajoris, Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His 41. Tolstoi, Soedinenie i perevod chetyrekh evangelii, Art (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1991), 153. On ekphrasis in PSS 24 (1957): 797. in Tolstoy, see also Mack Smith, Literary Realism and 42. Tolstoi, Soedinenie i perevod, 12. the Ekphrastic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania 43. Kramskoi, letter to Tolstoi, in Kramskoi: Pis’ma, State University Press, 2008), 115–56. stat’i, 2:170, 171. 22. Pierre Bourdieu, !e Field of Cultural Production: 44. Kramskoi, letter to Tolstoi, in Kramskoi: Pis’ma, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New stat’i, 2:171. York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 47. 45. Max Weber, !e !eory of Social and Economic 23. Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. !e State Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A.M. and Society: !e Peredvizhniki and !eir Tradition (New Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: !e Free York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 10–17. Press, 1964), 359–61. 24. I.E. Repin to V.V. Stasov, 12 April 1878, in Tolstoi 46. Tolstoi, Voskresenie, in PSS 32 (1936): 443. i khudozhniki, 68. 47. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in !e 25. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 43. Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Carol 26. On the connection between Mikhailov and Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Kramskoi, see especially Kupreianova, “Vyrazhenie Texas Press, 1994), 344. esteticheskikh vozzrenii i nravstvennykh iskanii L. 48. Vsevolod Dmitr’ev, “Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge,” Tolstogo,’” 124–25. Apollon, no. 10 (1913): 32. 27. I.N. Kramskoi to Tolstoi, 29 January 1885, in Ivan 49. Tolstoi, Ispoved’, 52. Nikolaevich Kramskoi: Pis’ma, stat’i, ed. S.N. Gol’dshtein 50. N.N. Ge to Tolstoi, 14 July 1886, in Nikolai (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965–66), 2:170. Nikolaevich Ge: Pis’ma, stat’i, kritika, vospominaniia 28. Kramskoi, “Zapiski po povodu peresmotra ustava sovremennikov, ed. N. Iu. Zograf (Moscow: Iskusstvo, Akademii khudozhevstv,” in Kramskoi: Pis’ma, stat’i, 1978), 128. 2:297–98, quoted in Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 14. 51. At least one of Ge’s gospel illustrations, “!e 29. Kramskoi to A.D. Chirkin, 27 December 1873, in Last Supper,” was prepared for publication. It was Kramskoi: Pis’ma, stat’i, 1: 218. not permitted by the censor and has since been lost. 30. Kramskoi, letter to Chirkin, in Kramskoi: Pis’ma, Ge submitted a second set of planned illustrations to stat’i, 1:219. Chertkov in 1891. Zograf, Ge: Pis’ma, stat’i, 340nn27–28. 31. V.V. Vereshchagin, “Realizm,” in Povesti. Ocherki. 52. Ge to Tolstoi, 26 October 1893, in Ge: Pis’ma, Vospominaniia, ed. V.A. Kosheleva and A.V. Chernova stat’i, 128. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1990), 197; Vereshchagin, 53. Tolstoi to I.E. Repin, 15 April 1892, in Ge: Pis’ma, Realism, trans. B. MacGahan (New York: American Art stat’i, 169. Galleries, 1891). 54. Repin, “Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge i nashi pretenzii 32. Kramskoi, letter to Chirkin, in Kramskoi: Pis’ma, k iskusstvu,” Niva 11 (1894): 540. stat’i, 1: 219. 55. Tertullian, Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation, 33. Kramskoi to V.M. Garshin, 16 February 1878, in ed. Ernest Evans (London: S.P.C.K., 1956), 37–39. Kramskoi: Pis’ma, stat’i, 1:446–47. 56. Repin, “Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge,” 540. 34. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, 42. 57. Alexander III, quoted in Ge: Pis’ma, stat’i, 352n57.

 T OLSTOY, GE, AND TWO PILATE S

58. Repin, “Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge,” 540. I have not been able to identify any book $tting Repin’s description. 59. Tolstoi to Ge, 5 November 1893, in Ge: Pis’ma, stat’i, 184. 60. Tolstoi to George Kennan, 8 August 1890, in Ge: Pis’ma, stat’i, 149, 150. 61. Tolstoi to Tret’iakov, 30 June 1890, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 98–99. 62. Tolstoi to Kennan, 8 August 1890, in Ge: Pis’ma, stat’i, 150. 63. Tolstoi to Tret’iakov, 19 June 1894, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 122. 64. Tolstoi to Tret’iakov, 30 June 1890 and 19 June 1894, in Tolstoi i khudozhniki, 98, 122.

Jefferson J.A. Gatrall 