This thoughtful book examines a seemingly familiar topic: Lev Tolstoy's relationship to the Orthodox Church in which he was raised, which he tried to embrace intellectually and emotionally, and which he then rejected, just as intellectually and just as emotionally. It repaid him by rejecting him in kind. That, at least, is what we think we know. But did he in fact reject it? And did it in fact reject him?

Pål Kolstø argues that, despite Tolstoy's own disavowals and despite the 1901 public statement by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church acknowledging that Tolstoy had placed himself outside its fold (they avoided using the term excommunication), the man and the church body remained far more intertwined. Given Tolstoy's Christian formation, his lifelong grappling with what forms that Christianity ought to take, and above all his enduring intimacy with the Russian Orthodox tradition, it might be more appropriate to describe their mutual love-hate attitudes with the social media status of ‘in a relationship’.

Appropriately for a series called ‘Ideas in Context’, Kolstø sets both Tolstoy and the Orthodox Church in their late imperial Russian milieu. To understand something of the passions Tolstoy prompted, one has to understand what society regarded as normal, whether in a good or unexceptionable way (Christian ideals in general), or in a negative way (the overwhelming and apparently uncritical support the Russian Orthodox Church offered the imperial apparatus). Kolstø provides these details. He considers Tolstoy as a practising Orthodox Christian, illustrating his arguments with abundant extracts from Tolstoy's letters and diaries. These selections, which trace Tolstoy's personal trajectory, might be even stronger if Kolstø devoted more attention to explaining why some things are important. For example, when he quotes Tolstoy as praying the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the ‘O Most Holy Trinity’, it might be worth noting that these are relatively standard prayers, and that Tolstoy's inclusion here of the less standard ‘Gates of Mercy’ (from Great Compline) might be an indicator of greater-than-usual knowledge and devotion (p. 10). In his early years Tolstoy emerges as an exemplar of what one might call normal-to-strong upper-class (not intelligentsia or lower-class) piety (chapter ii).

When chronicling Tolstoy's break, Kolstø includes a rare analysis of the reception of Tolstoy's Examination of Dogmatic Theology – a thankless but important task (chapter iii). He wryly explains why that work attracted virtually no response: ‘With even the enemies of the Church not finding it worthwhile to consider this work, believers saw no reason to spill ink on it either’ (p. 46). He then considers Tolstoy's evolution from the perspective of the reigning forms of greater-than-usual Orthodox piety – asceticism, wandering, holy foolishness and spiritual eldership – devoting a full chapter to each (chapters iv–viii). As Tolstoy was keen to see Christianity realised in the world, he also studied Orthodox social ideals as embodied by John Chrysostom (chapter ix).

The book really hits its stride when Kolstø examines the attempts by the Russian Orthodox Church to counter the Tolstoy threat. The challenge was two-fold. First, even professors in Orthodox theological academies acknowledged both some of Tolstoy's criticisms and the damage done to Orthodox teaching by generations of Russian bishops besmirched by supporting corporal and capital punishment, serfdom and other social ills. Tolstoy might be wrong in his dogmatic pronouncements, they recognised, but he managed to explain and convey the significance of the Gospel message to society like no one else (pp. 154–5). Second, as Alexandr Kravetsky has also noted, the late imperial Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy was infinitely less skilled than Tolstoy (and than its own early twenty-first-century successor) in using what might be called political technologies and social media. As a result, even though they desperately tried to counter him – supported, one might point out, by their most charismatic priest and a large cross-section of the Russian population – media consumers remained on Tolstoy's side and not theirs. That is why the Synod's public yet waffling otluchenie (they could not bring themselves to simply but quietly excommunicate him) only confirmed the conviction of intelligentsia society – unfairly in this case – that the Church was acting at the behest of the state. Having started an information war it was destined to lose, the Church compounded its PR blunder by trying to suppress commemorations of Tolstoy's 1908 jubilee (chapters x–xii). The near-farcical private requiem served by a rogue priest (reminiscent of itinerant priests centuries earlier hawking their services in the crossroads) at Sofia Tolstoy's behest two years after the civil ceremony Tolstoy had requested was the last ignominious gesture (chapter xiii).

But who won in the long run? Paradoxically, Kolstø argues, it was neither Tolstoy nor the institutional Russian Orthodox Church. Instead, it was something that each might have found congenial: the cause of Christianity in general. In challenging the worst aspects of the institutional Church, Tolstoy succeeded in getting the intelligentsia to take Christianity seriously. Although Kolstø limits himself to Tolstoy and the Russian Orthodox Church until 1917, one could suggest (as did Nicholas Berdiaev and others) that Tolstoy's Christian influence became most powerful after the revolution – but thanks to his literature, not his preaching or his celebrity cult. Because Tolstoy's works were part of the Soviet canon, even under official atheism and persecution, through them generations of young Komsomol and Pioneers absorbed Christian themes. This meant not only broad ideas uttered by characters like the peasant Platon Karataev, but also concrete Orthodox rites: both Natasha Rostov in War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina fast and attend church daily before going to confession and communion at key turning points in their lives. Such evocative accounts likely left more of an impression than ‘What I Believe’ or ‘The Gospel in Brief’. Russian Orthodox Christianity's chief opponent thus inadvertently became one of its caretakers. With Heretical Orthodoxy, Kolstø has conveyed both the details and the passion of one of the most venomous and bracing modern Church versus art feuds in modern European cultural and intellectual history.