The Rise of the Philosophy of Life Between Nikolay Strakhov and Lev Tolstoy

Chapter 3 The Rise of the Philosophy of Life Between Nikolay Strakhov and Lev Tolstoy 3.1 Nikolay Strakhov’s Mediation between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were united, first and foremost, by a sense of the inner tragedy of the epoch in which they lived, and which they experienced, contem- plated, and described in entirely different ways. During the second half of the 19th century, they both became the spiritual organizers of a nascent religious explosion, and of a radical break with tradition in search of a new religious worldview. Tolstoy would find himself at its very epicenter. Nikolay Nikolayevich Strakhov was an important mediating figure between these two writers early in their careers, and was destined to play a significant role in their lives. Despite his renown at the time, and his friendships with a number of famous writers and thinkers, his name rarely means much to the contemporary reader. Strakhov—to recall the key facts of his biography—was a philosopher, journalist, literary critic, educator, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the Psychological Society and of the Slavic Society. His creative longevity (lasting the entirety of the second half of the 19th century) was connected with an ascetic and non- possessive attitude of one who had surrendered himself entirely to the ‘work of thought’. He represented a certain type of homo legens; acquiring and col- lecting books was his chief passion, his ‘worldly pleasure’, ‘the sport and hunt- ing of this worldly monk’ (in the words of the critic Boris Nikolsky). Strakhov was a rare kind of learned bibliophile who had gathered a personal book collection representing all the main branches of science and scholarship in edi- tions dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries. (His heirs would transfer his collection, comprising about 12,500 volumes, to the library of St. Petersburg University.) In 1858, the journal Russkiy Mir (‘Russian World’) published his first article, ‘Letters Concerning Organic Life’, thanks to which Strakhov became exception- ally close to Apollon Grigoryev, the theorist of ‘organic criticism’ and a comrade- in-arms to the Dostoevsky brothers. Beginning in 1860, Strakhov (under the pen-name of Kositsa) collaborated closely with the Dostoevskys on the cre- ation of the ‘journal of the Russian idea’ (pochvennichestvo)—Vremya (‘Time’, 1861–63), which made a goal of ‘reconciling the followers of Peter the Great’s © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��0 | doi:10.1163/97890044406�3_005 <UN> 104 Chapter 3 reform with the folk principle’. The publication of his article ‘A Fateful Ques- tion’ (concerning relations with the Poles) caused—fatefully indeed—the clo- sure of the journal. In 1864–65, the new journal Epoch replaced its shuttered predecessor; Strakhov continued working as its editor. For many years, he lived in extreme poverty, ‘feeding on the groundcover’, to use his own expression, meaning his translations from several different languages, the best-known of which were his versions of Kuno Fischer’s History of Modern Philosophy, Hip- polyte Taine’s De l’intelligence, Alfred Brem’s Life of Animals and Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism. In the mid-1860s, Strakhov returned to journalism, working in Otechestvennyye Zapiski (‘Domestic Notes’, 1867), The Journal of the Ministry of Education (1869), and founding and editing Zarya (‘Dawn’, 1870–72). In 1873, he became the librarian of St. Petersburg Public Library’s ju- risprudence department. From 1874 to his death, he was a member of the Edu- cation Ministry’s scholarly committee. Strakhov possessed enormous erudition, a special critical sense combined with a delicate and sympathetic penetration of other’s ideas, and a gift of ‘the gentle yet thoughtful word’, in Ivan Aksakov’s phrase. His ability to enter into the ideas of others earned him the title of ‘all-comprehending philosopher’ (in the words of Apollon Grigoryev) as well as the status of Russia’s foremost literary critic—yet, at the same time, the humiliating moniker of a ‘shadow’ of his own great friends: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Afanasiy Fet, Nikolay Danilevsky, Vasiliy Rozanov, and others. The under-appreciation of Strakhov-the-philosopher stemmed from the fact that he professed no active religious or revolutionary position, flew no banners, forced none of his ideas upon society—it stemmed, in short, from his intellectual non-partisanship. His readership, too, felt, that his work was lacking in the courageous flight of speculation, in free imagina- tion, in religious themes—all the things that so enlivened the public journalism of his time. However, his philosophical works, journalism, criticism, and the years of his correspondence with his contemporaries all reveal a non-trivial mind, a ‘bright rationalist’ (in the words of N.Y. Grot), a connoisseur and ap- preciator of European philosophy and Russian culture, and a singular conver- sationalist. A deep and subtle thinker, he was skilled in reconciling the most diverse positions, without speaking sharply in any direction. Nonetheless, in political philosophy, Strakhov’s disposition was distinctly Slavophile. His philosophical words include The World as a Unity (1873, published fragmentarily, as individual articles, over the 1850s and 1860s), The Struggle with the West in Our Literature (1881), On Eternal Truths (My Argument Concerning Spiritism) (1886) and On the Fundamental Concepts of Psychology and Physiology (1886). His fundamental philosophic endeavor involved the search for a methodologi- cal foundation for a new type of rationality, whose core would be the act of <UN>.

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