ABSTRACT
The importance of the personal lives of thinkers became clear to during the initial study of intellectual history. Ideas have played an exceptional role in Russia’s history. The autocracy’s monopoly of power and the high esteem enjoyed by European culture made thought the realm of politics and gave the thinker a powerful voice as a leader of society. Ethical and political imperatives engulfed personal life; success or failure in one was bound to have an impact on the other. In this respect the history of ideas can tell only part of the story of the Russian intelligentsia. Russian intellectuals embraced Western doctrines but filled them with their own meanings, often transforming them as they tried to apply them to their lives. The sexual conflict reemerged with renewed intensity in the later 1870s, when Leo Tolstoi began to develop his ideas, and when his marriage, which had been happy during the previous decade, became troubled.
