„Бог не уместится в книжке“ Orthodoxie, Islam und Tolstojs Poetik der Verfremdung

Abstract

The first part of the article is about Tolstoy‘s idea of religion and the estimated role of the Islam in Tolstoy‘s religious thinking. Referring to the media theory of writing we start with some preliminary considerations about the interrelationship between aesthetic and religious communication. That way we try to understand the significant shift from aesthethic writing towards pedagogical and religious interests which can be traced within the evolutions of the „classical“ Russian writers of the 19th century like Nicolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky or Lev Tolstoy. In the case of Tolstoy Victor Shklovsky‘s poetics of estrangement gives us the possibility to analyse not only Tolstoy‘s novels but also his turn towards ethics and religion and to define the specifics of his religious discourse, where the poetics of estrangement continue to work. Crucial for Tolstoy‘s idea of religion is an obsessive rejection of book and literacy based forms of transcendent experience thus eliminating confessional differences. In this context we also find Tolstoy‘s remarkable estimation of the Islam. The second part of the article deals with the public evidence of Tolstoy‘s appreciation of the Islam, which gained a politically relevant prominence among the Muslims of the Russian Empire and which forced the Orthodox Theological Academy in Kazan to intervene by a series of journal publications. Here we present a discourse analysis of two texts published by the Orthodox missionary and theologian Jakov Koblov under the title „Count Tolstoy and the Muslims“ (1904) in the journal The Orthodox Messenger. In his texts Koblov refers to an exchange of letters between Tolstoy and the Tartarian Muslim Efendiar Volkov, which circulated in manuscript form among the Muslim intellectuals of Kazan. Koblov‘s polemic argumentation has two aims. First he tries to show that Tolstoy‘s dialogue with the Muslims must be considered as a misunderstanding and as a dubious brotherhood motivated only by pure renitence; the Orthodox theologian insists, that there actually cannot be any common intellectual and ethic interests between the Russian Tolstoy and the Tartarian Volkov. Koblov‘s second argumentation is directly focussed on the modern and hermeneutic approach, which is characteristic for Volkov‘s letters about Islam and which essentially differs from Tolstoy‘s Gnostic religious understanding. Koblov blames Volkov‘s enlightened understanding of the Islam as a false rational Europeanisation of religious faith indicating also an unthankfulness regarding all the educational and cultural goods given to the Tatarian Muslims by the Russian Tsar.