After his rad­i­cal con­ver­sion to Chris­t­ian anar­chism, Leo Tol­stoy adopt­ed a deeply con­trar­i­an atti­tude. The vehe­mence of his attacks on the class and tra­di­tions that pro­duced him were so vig­or­ous that cer­tain crit­ics, now most­ly obso­lete, might call his strug­gle Oedi­pal. Tol­stoy thor­ough­ly opposed the patri­ar­chal insti­tu­tions he saw oppress­ing work­ing peo­ple and con­strain­ing the spir­i­tu­al life he embraced. He cham­pi­oned rev­o­lu­tion, “a change of a people’s rela­tion towards Pow­er,” as he wrote in a 1907 pam­phlet, “The Mean­ing of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion”: “Such a change is now tak­ing place in Rus­sia, and we, the whole Russ­ian peo­ple, are accom­plish­ing it.” In that “we,” Tol­stoy aligns him­self with the Russ­ian peas­antry, as he does in oth­er pam­phlets like the 1909-10 jour­nal, “Three Days in the Vil­lage.” These essays and oth­ers of the peri­od rough out a polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and cul­tur­al crit­i­cism, often aimed at affirm­ing the rud­dy moral health of the peas­antry and point­ing up the deca­dence of the aris­toc­ra­cy and its insti­tu­tions. In keep­ing with the theme, one of Tolstoy’s pam­phlets, a 1906 essay on Shake­speare, takes …