A writer snubbed in a society burned by utopian thought.

MOSCOW - A couple of months ago one of Russia’s elder statesmen set out on a paradoxical mission: to rehabilitate one of the most beloved figures in Russian history, Tolstoy.

In a country that rarely passes up a public celebration, the anniversary of his death, on November 20, 1910, was not commemorated by noisy galas or government-financed cinematic blockbusters. Officially speaking, it was barely noted at all.

With this in mind Sergei V. Stepashin, a former prime minister here, sat down to write to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to ask forgiveness on behalf of Tolstoy, who was excommunicated 110 years ago.

The impulse had swelled up during a lonely visit to an unmarked mound of earth where Tolstoy is buried.

“You look at the house where he lived and worked, where he created his works, and then you come to a place where there is nothing but this small hill,” said Mr. Stepashin, who has close ties to the church. “It was puzzling, on a human and a moral plane.”

Ambivalence toward Tolstoy is new in Russia.

The publication of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” made Tolstoy so famous that one contemporary described him as Russia’s second czar. He used that position to rail against the church, as well as the police, the army, meat eating, private property and all forms of violence.

As the 50th anniversary ofTolstoy’s death approached, the Central Committee of the Communist Party began preparing two years in advance.

For the centennial, in a Russia wary of utopian thought, there was nothing of the kind. Though a star-studded Tolstoy biopic, “The Last Station,” opened in Moscow, it was filmed in Germany and directed by an American. The Russian filmmaker Andrei S. Konchalovsky, a producer of the film, said he petitioned the Russian government for support. In the end, he said, he was forced to invest his own money.

None of this came as a surprise to Vladimir I. Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s 48-yearold great-great-grandson, who oversees the museum at Yasnaya Polyana, the author’s estate.

Ten years ago he asked the church to revisit the 1901 ruling that excommunicated his great-great-grandfather. He received no answer.

Mr. Stepashin, now president of the Russian Book Union, shared the sense that the writer was getting overlooked.

But while the church’s response to his letter acknowledged Tolstoy’s “unforgettable, beautiful works,” it also said that Tolstoy “purposely used his great talent to destroy Russia’s traditional spiritual and social order.”

Intellectuals were astonished.

“It’s as if in the 20th century the church did not survive persecution that made Tolstoy’s criticisms look like childish prattle,” wrote the literary critic Pavel V. Basinsky, whose new book examines Tolstoy’s final days.

Mr. Basinsky’s book is part of a wave of new works that, like the film “The Last Station,” plunges into Tolstoy’s flight from the family estate to take up the life of an ascetic. He died a few days later at a train station.

At the time, Russian pundits cast his decision as a spiritual triumph, but the new works retell it as a tragedy, said William Nickell, author of “The Death of Tolstoy.” His followers are manipulative parasites and his ideas are hopelessly utopian.

“It is as if he is lumped now with communism,” Mr. Nickell said. “Good idea in principle, but a disaster in practice.”


By ELLEN BARRY and SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY