What is Christian Anarchist Art? Leo Tolstoy and the Literature of The Intermediary, 1885-1890

This dissertation investigates the Christian anarchist dimensions of Leo Tolstoy’s publishing house The Intermediary between the years 1885 and 1890. It argues that publications for The Intermediary form a corpus of politically radical literature that intertwines religious morality, anti‑state, anti‑money, anti‑clerical, and pacifist motifs with a literary style designed for mass consumption. The first chapter conducts a close textual analysis of Tolstoy’s stories for The Intermediary in the context of the four pillars of Tolstoyan Christian anarchism: the repudiation of state authority, the denunciation of monetary exploitation, the rejection of institutional religion, and the advocacy of non‑violent resistance. By bringing Tolstoy’s “stories for the people” into conversation with his thought as expressed in the non-fiction works What I Believe (1884) and What, Then, Must We Do? (1885), the dissertation demonstrates how Tolstoy’s literary output enacted his ideological commitments while also exposing inherent contradictions. The second chapter expands the analysis to contributions by educated male writers, revealing a surprisingly aesthetically heterogeneous corpus that both reinforces and expands Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist vision. Specifically, these texts enrich the project of The Intermediary in their compelling depictions of forgiveness, compassion, and an economy built on sharing that, intentionally or not, echoes Kropotkin’s anarchist communism of the time. The third chapter examines works by peasant and women authors published in The Intermediary, uncovering a more ambivalent stance toward Tolstoy’s idealized village commune and exposing gendered constraints embedded in his vision of labor and motherhood. While these writers amplify Tolstoy’s anti‑state and anti‑money critiques, they also foreground the lived realities of poverty, gendered oppression, and the absence of viable alternatives, underscoring the gap between Tolstoy’s aspirations and the material conditions of his intended readership. The dissertation contributes to Tolstoy studies by mapping the intersection of literature, ideology, and praxis in a significant but still understudied publishing venture. It also contributes to anarchist scholarship by presenting a compelling, if occasionally fraught, image of a Christian anarchist literary project that is rarely ever recognized as such, one which negotiated the tensions between doctrinal purity, popular pedagogy, literary production, and the socioeconomic constraints of late Imperial Russia.

Department dc:contributor.department

Slavic Languages and Literatures

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Boyer, Braxton

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Orwin, Donna T

• anarchism
• Leo Tolstoy
• Russian literature
• The Intermediary

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/153526

OAI record oai:identifier

https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Autoronto.scholaris.ca%3A1807%2F153526