Toporoff

Toporoff, the head of the Holy Synod, embodies the state's cynical manipulation of religion as an instrument of social control. His position involves an inherent contradiction: he is charged with defending a divine institution that, by its own claims, cannot be shaken by the gates of hell, yet he must do so through human bureaucracy, violence, and political maneuvering. This contradiction does not trouble him, for he is a man devoid of moral sensibility, a dull official who sees the church not as a spiritual body but as a department of state whose function is to keep the common people docile and obedient.

Nature and Methods

Toporoff's entire approach to his office is founded on the belief that the common people are fundamentally different from men like himself. He is fully convinced that the people need what he can very well do without, for at the bottom of his heart he believes in nothing and finds such a state very convenient and pleasant. Yet he fears lest the people might also come to such a state, and looks upon it as his sacred duty to save them from it. His feelings towards the religion he is keeping up are compared to those of a poultry-keeper towards the carrion he feeds his fowls on: carrion is disgusting, but the fowls like it, therefore it is right to feed them on carrion. He regards the worship of icons—the Iberian, Kazan, and Smolensk Mothers of God—as gross superstition, but since the people like it and believe in it, the superstition must be kept up. He never considers that the people only like superstition because enlightened men like himself, instead of using their light to help others escape darkness, use it to plunge them still deeper into it.

Key Actions and Decisions

When Nekhludoff brings him the petition of the sectarians who have been separated from their families and exiled to the Caucasus for reading and discussing the Gospels, Toporoff immediately recognizes the case. He had previously let the matter proceed along its cruel course—the Archdeacon and Governor had arranged to exile the sectarians, separating husbands, wives, and children on the pretext that their marriages were illegal—because he thought no harm could result from confirming the decision, whereas allowing the peasant sect to remain where it was might cause others to fall away from Orthodoxy. The affair also proved the zeal of the Archdeacon. Now, however, with Nekhludoff—a man with some influence in Petersburg—taking up the case, Toporoff fears it might be specially pointed out to the Emperor as something cruel, or might get into the foreign papers. He therefore takes an unexpected decision, promising to give orders that the measures be revoked and the people reinstated in their homes. He writes a letter on the spot, sealing the envelope and handing it to Nekhludoff with a stretched-lip imitation of a smile. When Nekhludoff asks what these people suffered for, Toporoff raises his head and smiles as if the question gives him pleasure, replying that he cannot tell, but that the interests of the people guarded by him are so important that too great a zeal in matters of religion is not so dangerous as the indifference now spreading. He dismisses Nekhludoff's objection that families are being separated in the name of religion with patronizing condescension, treating the objection as a pretty but one-sided view from the height of his far-reaching office in the state.

Thematic Significance

Toporoff represents the ultimate corruption of institutional religion, where the church becomes a department of the police state, more concerned with suppressing dissent and maintaining the social order than with any spiritual truth. He is the living proof of Nekhludoff's growing conviction that all the words about justice, law, religion, and God are mere words hiding the coarsest cupidity and cruelty. The old man whom Nekhludoff meets on the ferry and later in the prison cell directly challenges this system, calling Toporoff and his kind the servants of Antichrist who bear his seal on their foreheads. Toporoff's comfortable existence, his immunity to the suffering he causes, and his complete lack of any genuine religious feeling make him one of the most damning figures in the novel's indictment of the alliance between church and state. He is a man who has made a career of feeding the people on spiritual carrion, and he does so with the quiet assurance of one who believes he is performing a necessary and important duty.