LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      The famine of 1891 appears to have occasioned Maklakov’s first actual meeting with the great writer.⁴⁹ Even before that, the famine triggered a kind of anonymous encounter. At the end of the 1880s Tolstoy had published an article criticizing the custom of student carousing on Tatiana Day. On the eve of the day in 1891, Russkie Vedomosti published a letter, signed only “Student,” saying that if in the past one might not have heeded Tolstoy on this, it was indecent to ignore his point now. Evidently, the restaurants were empty the night of Tatiana Day; the “Student” was Maklakov.⁵⁰

      After efforts to ban discussion of the famine, the government retreated and allowed the public freedom to help the hungry. Tolstoy normally scorned charitable activity by the rich, seeing it as a way for them to justify themselves: “If a rider sees that his horse is being tortured,” he said, “he should not try to buoy it up but should just get off.” Seeing the popularity of attempts to provide food, he prepared an article criticizing the efforts. But his friend I. I. Raevski invited him to see the peasants and the volunteers’ special cafeterias. Tolstoy came for two days and ended up staying two years, working tirelessly and becoming head of the social aid scheme.

      Many came to help, often losing their positions and health to do so. Of course, all the so-called Tolstoyans came. In one of his appeals, Tolstoy endorsed a proposal that landowners offer to take in peasants’ horses to feed them through the winter. He especially liked this kind of help, as it would connect a peasant with a particular helper. Maklakov responded to the appeal, and through his acquaintances and luck he arranged more than 300 such adoptions. After Tolstoy returned to Moscow, the Tolstoyans came to report to him what they had done and brought Maklakov along. This was the first time Maklakov saw him close-up and talked with him.⁵¹

      In the course of famine work, Tolstoy often told an Indian story that nicely reflected his self-effacement and sense of irony. Some sort of rich person, wanting to serve God, found a poor, sick hungry person under a fence. Obedient to God, he brought the poor man to his home, washed him, fed him, was kind to him, and showed him respect, and then rejoiced that he was able to do God’s will. After a few days, the poor man, feeling that all this had been done not for him but for the other’s soul, told the rich man, “Let me go back under my fence; it’ll be easier for me there.”⁵²

      In a later chapter we’ll return to Maklakov’s relations with Tolstoy, his analysis of Tolstoy’s thought and life, and the ways they may have influenced him. For now, we need see only a snippet of their relationship in Maklakov’s student years. Maklakov observed that Tolstoy, who jokingly called him an “old young person,” didn’t try to reeducate him. At some point in Maklakov’s Moscow university life, Tolstoy asked him to join him for a walk, and in time that turned into a habit. While they walked, Tolstoy asked him about student life. It was flattering to chat with him, though Maklakov never understood why his stories might interest the writer. Later a conversation with Tolstoy about bicycling offered him a possible answer. Maklakov knew that Tolstoy bicycled a good deal around his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana; he asked Tolstoy why he didn’t make these tours on horseback. Tolstoy explained that he needed an occasional complete rest for his mind. If he walked or rode, it didn’t prevent him from thinking, so his mind got no rest. If he went by bicycle, he needed to keep an eye on the road and watch for stones, ruts, and holes, and then he wouldn’t think. “I understood why my stories were necessary for him during our walks. He could avoid listening, but they prevented him from thinking and gave his mind a rest.”⁵³

      We have seen how Maklakov ultimately abandoned history for law, and a word is in order on his history studies. Vinogradov took him under his wing and, responding to a failed effort by Maklakov to develop a students’ circle for digging more deeply into Vinogradov’s work, started a special seminar. Maklakov’s seminar paper was based on a recently found fragment of parchment by Aristotle and tried to explain when and why ancient Athenians chose leaders by lot. To this day the question excites scholarly debate, but how Maklakov’s answer stacks up against current learning need not detain us. For our purposes, his answer is most interesting in prefiguring his later advocacy of reconciliation and a spirit of compromise between the Russian government and its adversaries, or, more broadly, among the social forces at war in early twentieth-century Russia. He advanced the theory that in an Athens in which four clans of about equal weight contended for power, the strategy of having government chosen by lot did not manifest any particular political theory but simply provided a way out of what might otherwise have been a hopeless logjam.⁵⁴

      Maklakov’s 92-page essay was published in “Scholarly Notes of Moscow University,” with a preface by Vinogradov. As Maklakov later observed, “Of course no one read the Scholarly Notes.” But he acquired over 100 copies and, at Vinogradov’s suggestion, sent them to professors and other scholars. This didn’t pass unnoticed in the scholarly world—a Professor Buzeskul, of Kharbovskii University, cited it several times in his two-volume history of Greece.⁵⁵ In his memoirs, Maklakov goes on about this at some length and excuses it on the grounds that it is a pleasant memory of the good past. He closes the account by describing an exchange that occurred while he was a member of the Third Duma. One of his sisters met a professor who had written a favorable review of Maklakov’s essay. Knowing she was the sister of the deputy Maklakov, the professor inquired if she happened to know what had happened to the young scholar of the same name who had published work on ancient Greece and then had disappeared over the scholarly horizon. Learning that the scholar and the deputy were one and the same, he appeared for a long time not to believe it and then said with a sigh, “But we expected so much of him.”⁵⁶

      Maklakov’s university years included a tragedy that haunted him the rest of his life. He had met one Nicholas Cherniaev through the Novoselov colony, where Cherniaev’s sister had lived. For a long time Cherniaev was his closest friend, and they saw each other daily. Cherniaev had been drawn to Tolstoy by his understanding of Christ’s teachings and could never reconcile those teachings with the world. To him, activities of the state and of revolutionaries seemed the denial of those teachings. He solved it by concentrating entirely on science. Maklakov thought that Cherniaev was stuck in a dilemma from which there was no exit, and they silently agreed not to talk of these matters.

      When Maklakov was working at home on a paper, Cherniaev’s younger brother, a medical student, came and asked him to come home with him. Cherniaev, he said, had been burning his papers, and the brother feared some misfortune. Maklakov’s paper was due the next day, and he didn’t go. In memoirs written in his mid-80s, he wrote that he could not forgive himself for that. The next morning the brother came to his apartment and told him that Cherniaev had killed himself in the park, leaving a letter saying only that he’d used potassium cyanide and that no one was to blame for his death.

      He had written letters for various friends, including several for Maklakov. One said that Maklakov had great talent, but nothing else, and went on in that vein. “I don’t believe in your heart, nor in your strength. You always exaggerate; you show more than you are.” He ended the letter with these words, full of passion: “I thought despite all that you loved me, but I was mistaken; you haven’t taken notice of my life, and you don’t notice anyone’s life, anyone’s grief. You are no Christian, and without that there is little value in all your talents. Farewell.” He added a postscript: “I wrote this a while ago, and now with a few hours left alive I have lost my pride and approach you asking for a favor: don’t forsake my Lisa [his younger sister]. Visit her, if only occasionally, bring her a book, and help preserve God in her.” Maklakov observes that she herself preserved God in herself and became a scientist, like her brother.⁵⁷

      At the end of Maklakov’s time in the history faculty, he accepted the invitation of a relative—the brother-in-law of his stepmother, an artillery general—to do his military service in Rostov. The venture was preceded by yet another Maklakovian scrape, this time for acting as the party responsible for a student party that he didn’t attend but that got out of hand. He was banned from Moscow for three years after his military service—a ban that was soon dissolved. The military service was of a special type reserved for educated persons and known by the extraordinary term volnoopre-deliaiushchiisia. The service proved extremely easy, as his relative was the principal person in town, and

Скачать книгу