circumstances, widely celebrated for his art, highly respected for his
character, and in his domestic life blessed with every reason for
contentment. Yet all the gifts of fortune sank into insignificance
before that vexing, unanswered Why? In the face of a paralyzing
universal aimlessness, there could be to him no abiding sense of life in
his personal enjoyments and desires. The burden of life became still
less endurable face to face with the existence of evil and with the
wretchedness of our social arrangements. With so much toil and trouble,
squalor, ignorance, crime, and every conceivable kind of bodily and
mental suffering all about me, why should I be privileged to live in
luxury and idleness? This ever recurring question would not permit him
to enjoy his possessions without self-reproach. To think of thousands of
fellowmen lacking the very necessaries, made affluence and its
concomitant ways of living odious to him. We know that in 1884, or
thereabouts, he radically changed his views and modes of life so as to
bring them into conformity with the laws of the Gospel. But before this
conversion, in the despairing anguish that attacked him after the
completion of "Anna Karenina," he was frequently tempted to suicide.
Although the thought of death was very terrible to him then and at all
times, still he would rather perish than live on in a world made heinous
and hateful by the iniquity of men. Then it was that he searched for a
reason why the vast proportion of humanity endure life, nay enjoy it,
and why self-destruction is condemned by the general opinion, and this
in spite of the fact that for most mortals existence is even harder than
it could have been for him, since he at least was shielded from material
want and lived amid loving souls. The answer he found in the end seemed
to lead by a straight road out of the wilderness of doubt and despair.
The great majority, so he ascertained, are able to bear the burden of
life because they heed the ancient injunction: "_ora et labora_"; they
_work_ and they _believe_. Might he not sweeten his lot after the same
prescription? Being of a delicate spiritual sensibility, he had long
realized that people of the idle class were for the most part inwardly
indifferent to religion and in their actions defiant of its spirit. In
the upper strata of society religious thought, where it exists, is
largely adulterated or weakened; sophisticated by education, doctored by
science, thinned out with worldly ambitions and with practical needs and
considerations. The faith that supports life is found only among simple
folk. For faith, to deserve the name, must be absolute, uncritical,
unreasoning. Starting from these convictions as a basis, Tolstoy
resolutely undertook _to learn to believe_; a determination which led
him, as it has led other ardent religionists, so far astray from
ecclesiastical paths that in due course of time he was unavoidably
excommunicated from his church. His convictions made him a vehement
antagonist of churchdom because of its stiffness of creed and laxness of
practice. For his own part he soon arrived at a full and absolute
acceptance of the Christian faith in what he considered to be its
primitive and essential form. In "Walk Ye in the Light," (1893), the
reversion of a confirmed worldling to this original conception of
Christianity gives the story of the writer's own change of heart.
To the period under discussion belongs Tolstoy's drama, "The Power of
Darkness," (1886).(29) It is a piece of matchless realism, probably the
first unmixedly naturalistic play ever wrought out. It is brutally,
terribly true to life, and that to life at its worst, both in respect of
the plot and the actors, who are individualized down to the minutest
characteristics of utterance and gesture. Withal it is a species of
modern morality, replete with a reformatory purpose that reflects deeply
the author's tensely didactic state of mind. His instructional zeal is
heightened by intimate knowledge of the Russian peasant, on his good
side as well as on his bad. Some of his short stories are crass pictures
of the muzhik's bestial degradation, veritable pattern cards of human
and inhuman vices. In other stories, again, the deep-seated piety of the
muzhik, and his patriarchal simplicity of heart are portrayed. As
instance, the story of "Two Old Men," (1885), who are pledged to attain
the Holy Land: the one performs his vow to the letter, the other, much
the godlier of the two, is kept from his goal by a work of practical
charity. In another story a muzhik is falsely accused of murder and
accepts his undeserved punishment in a devout spirit of non-resistance.
In a third, a poor cobbler who intuitively walks in the light is deemed
worthy of a visit from Christ.
(29) The only tragedy brought out during his life time.
In "The Power of Darkness," the darkest traits of peasant life prevail,
yet the frightful picture is somehow Christianized, as it were, so that
even the miscreant Nikita, in spite of his monstrous crimes, is sure of
our profound compassion. We are gripped at the very heartstrings by that
great confession scene where he stutters out his budget of malefactions,
forced by his awakened conscience and urged on by his old father: "Speak
out, my child, speak it off your soul, then you will feel easier."
"The Power of Darkness" was given its counterpart in the satirical
comedy, "Fruits of Culture," (1889). The wickedness of refined society
is more mercilessly excoriated than low-lived infamy. But artistically
considered the peasant tragedy is far superior to the "society play."
* * * * *
Tolstoy was a pessimist both by temperament and philosophical
persuasion. This is made manifest among other things by the prominent
place which the idea of Death occupies in his writings. His feelings are
expressed with striking simplicity by one of the principal characters in
"War and Peace": "One must often think of death, so that it may lose its
terrors for us, cease to be an enemy, and become on the contrary a
friend that delivers us from this life of miseries." Still, in Tolstoy's
stories, death, as a rule, is a haunting spectre. This conception comes
to the fore even long after his conversion in a story like "Master and
Man." Throughout his literary activity it has an obsessive hold on his
mind. Even the shadowing of the animal mind by the ubiquitous spectre
gives rise to a story: "Cholstomjer, The Story of a Horse," (1861), and
in one of the earlier tales even the death of a tree is pictured. Death
is most terrifying when, denuded of its heroic embellishments in battle
pieces such as "The Death of a Soldier" ("Sebastopol") or the
description of Prince Andrey's death in "War and Peace," it is exposed
in all its bare and grim loathsomeness. Such happens in the short novel
published in 1886 under the name of "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,"--in
point of literary merit one of Tolstoy's greatest performances. It is a
plain tale about a middle-aged man of the official class, happy in an
unreflecting sort of way in the jog-trot of his work and domestic
arrangements. Suddenly his fate is turned,--by a trite mishap resulting
in a long, hopeless sickness. His people at first give him the most
anxious care, but as the illness drags on their devotion gradually
abates, the patient is neglected, and soon almost no thought is given to
him. In the monotonous agony of his prostration, the sufferer slowly
comes to realize that he is dying, while his household has gone back to
its habitual ways mindless of him, as though he were already dead, or
had never lived. All through this lengthened crucifixion he still clings
to life, and it is only when the family, gathering about him shortly
before the release, can but ill conceal their impatience for the end,
that Ivan at last accepts his fate: "I will no longer let them suffer--I
will die; I will deliver them and myself." So he dies, and the world
pursues its course unaltered,--in which consists the after-sting of this
poignant tragedy.
* * * * *
Between the years 1879 and 1886 Tolstoy published the main portion of
what may be regarded as his spiritual autobiography, namely, "The
Confession," (1879, with a supplement in 1882), "The Union and
Translation of the Four Gospels," (1881-2), "What Do I Believe?" (also
translated under the title "My Religion," 1884) and "What Then Must We
Do?" (1886). He was now well on the way to the logical ultimates of his
ethical ideas, and in the revulsion from artistic ambitions so plainly
foreshown in a treatise in 1887: "What is True Art?" he repudiated
unequivocally all his earlier work so far as it sprang from any motives
other than those of moral teaching. Without a clear appreciation of
these facts a just estimate of "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889) is
impossible.
The central character of the book is a commonplace, rather well-meaning
fellow who has been tried for the murder of his wife, slain by him in a
fit of insensate jealousy, and has been acquitted because of the
extenuating circumstances in the case. The object of the story is to lay
bare the causes of his crime. Tolstoy's ascetic proclivity had long
since set him thinking about sex problems in general and in particular
upon the ethics of marriage. And by this time he had arrived at the
conclusion that the demoralized state of our society is chiefly due to
polygamy and polyandrism; corroboration of his uncompromising views on
the need of social purity he finds in the evangelist Matthew, v:27-28,
where the difference between the old command and its new, far more
rigorous, interpretation is bluntly stated: "Ye have heard that it was
said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto
you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart."
Now Tolstoy thinks that society, far from concurring in the scriptural
condemnation of lewdness, caters systematically to the appetites of the
voluptuary. If Tolstoy is right in his diagnosis, then the euphemistic
term "social evil" has far wider reaches of meaning than those to which
it is customarily applied. With the head person in "The Kreutzer
Sonata," Tolstoy regards society as no better than a _maison de
tolérance_ conducted on a very comprehensive scale. Women are reared
with the main object of alluring men through charms and accomplishments;
the arts of the hairdresser, the dressmaker, and milliner, as well as
the exertions of governesses, music masters, and linguists all converge
toward the same aim: to impart the power of attracting men. Between the
woman of the world and the professional courtezan the main difference in
the light of this view lies in the length of the service. Pozdnicheff
accordingly divides femininity into long term and short term
prostitutes, which rather fantastic classification Tolstoy follows up
intrepidly to its last logical consequence.
The main idea of "The Kreutzer Sonata," as stated in the postscript, is
that sexless life is best. A recommendation of celibacy as mankind's
highest ideal to be logical should involve a wish for the disappearance
of human life from the globe. A world-view of such pessimistic sort
prevents itself from the forfeiture of all bonds with humanity only by
its concomitant reasoning that a race for whom it were better not to be
is the very one that will struggle desperately against its _summum
bonum_. Since race suicide, then, is a hopeless desideratum, the
reformer must turn to more practicable methods if he would at least
alleviate the worst of our social maladjustments. Idleness is the mother
of all mischief, because it superinduces sensual self-indulgence.
Therefore we must suppress anything that makes for leisure and pleasure.
At this point we grasp the meaning of Tolstoy's vehement recoil from
art. It is, to a great extent, the strong-willed resistance of a highly
impressionable puritan against the enticements of beauty,--their
distracting and disquieting effect, and principally their power of
sensuous suggestion.
The last extensive work published by Tolstoy was "Resurrection," (1889).
In artistic merit it is not on a level with "War and Peace" and "Anna
Karenina," nor can this be wondered at, considering the opinion about
the value of art that had meanwhile ripened in the author.
"Resurrection" was written primarily for a constructive moral purpose,
yet the subject matter was such as to secrete, unintendedly, a corrosive
criticism of social and religious cant. The satirical connotation of the
novel could not have been more grimly brought home than through this
fact, that the hero by his unswerving allegiance to Christian principles
of conduct greatly shocks, at first, our sense of the proprieties,
instead of eliciting our enthusiastic admiration. In spite of our
highest moral notions Prince Nekhludoff, like that humbler follower of
the voice of conscience in Gerhart Hauptmann's novel, impresses us as a
"Fool in Christ." The story, itself, leads by degrees from the
under-world of crime and punishment to a great spiritual elevation.
Maslowa, a drunken street-walker, having been tried on a charge of
murder, is wrongfully sentenced to transportation for life, because--the
jury is tired out and the judge in a hurry to visit his mistress. Prince
Nekhludoff, sitting on that jury, recognizes in the victim of justice a
girl whose downfall he himself had caused. He is seized by penitence and
resolves to follow the convict to Siberia, share her sufferings,
dedicate his life to her redemption. She has sunk so low that his hope
of reforming her falters, yet true to his resolution he offers to marry
her. Although the offer is rejected, yet the suggestion of a new life
which it brings begins to work a change in the woman. In the progress of
the story her better nature gradually gains sway until a thorough moral
revolution is completed.
"Resurrection" derives its special value from its clear demonstration of
those rules of conduct to which the author was straining with every
moral fiber to conform his own life. From his ethical speculations and
social experiments are projected figures like that of Maria Paulovna, a
rich and beautiful woman who prefers to live like a common workingwoman
and is drawn by her social conscience into the revolutionary vortex. In
this figure, and more definitely still in the political convict
Simonson, banished because of his educational work among the common
people, Tolstoy studies for the first time the so-called "intellectual"
type of revolutionist. His view of the "intellectuals" is sympathetic,
on the whole. They believe that evil springs from ignorance. Their
agitation issues from the highest principles, and they are capable of
any self-sacrifice for the general weal. Still Tolstoy, as a thoroughly
anti-political reformer, deprecates their organized movement.
Altogether, he repudiated the systems of social reconstruction that go
by the name of socialism, because he relied for the regeneration of
society wholly and solely upon individual self-elevation. In an
essential respect he was nevertheless a socialist, inasmuch as he strove
for the ideal of universal equality. His social philosophy, bound up
inseparably with his personal religious evolution, is laid down in a
vast number of essays, letters, sketches, tracts, didactic tales, and
perhaps most comprehensively in those autobiographical documents already
mentioned. Sociologically the most important of these is a book on the
problem of property, entitled, "What Then Must We Do?" (1886), which
expounds the passage in Luke iii:10, 11: "And the people asked him,
saying, What shall we do then? He answered and saith unto them, He that
hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath
meat, let him do likewise." Not long before that, he had thought of
devoting himself entirely to charitable work, but practical experiments
at Moscow demonstrated to him the futility of almsgiving. Speaking on
that point to his English biographer, Aylmer Maude,(30) he remarked:
"All such activity, if people attribute importance to it, is worthless."
When his interviewer insisted that the destitute have to be provided for
somehow and that the Count himself was in the habit of giving money to
beggars, the latter replied: "Yes, but I do not imagine that I am doing
good! I only do it for myself, because I know that I have no right to be
well off while they are in misery." It is worth mention in passing that
during the famine of 1891-2 this determined opponent of organized
charity, in noble inconsistency with his theories, led in the
dispensation of relief to the starving population of Middle Russia.
(30) "The Life of Tolstoy," Later Years, p. 643 f.
But in "What Then Must We Do?" he treats the usual organized dabbling in
charity as utterly preposterous: "Give away all you have or else you can
do no good." ... "If I give away a hundred thousand and still withhold
five hundred thousand, I am far from acting in the spirit of charity,
and remain a factor of social injustice and evil. At the sight of the
freezing and hungering I must still feel responsible for their plight,
and feel that since we should live in conditions where that evil can be
abstained from, it is impossible for me in the position in which I
deliberately place myself to be anything other than a source of general
evil."
It was chiefly due to the influence of two peasants, named Sutayeff and
Bondareff, that Tolstoy decided by a path of religious reasoning to
abandon "parasitical existence,"--that is, to sacrifice all prerogatives
of his wealth and station and to share the life of the lowly. He
reasoned as follows: "Since I am to blame for the existence of social
wrong, I can lessen my blame only by making myself like unto those that
labor and are heavy-laden." Economically, Tolstoy reasons from this
fallacy: If all men do not participate equitably in the menial work that
has to be performed in the world, it follows that a disproportionate
burden of work falls upon the shoulders of the more defenseless portion
of humanity. Whether this undue amount of labor be exacted in the form
of chattel slavery, or, which is scarcely less objectionable, in the
form of the virtual slavery imposed by modern industrial conditions,
makes no material difference. The evil conditions are bound to continue
so long as the instincts that make for idleness prevail over the
co-operative impulses. The only remedy lies in the simplification of
life in the upper strata of the social body, overwork in the laboring
classes being the direct result of the excessive demands for the
pleasures and luxuries of life in the upper classes.
To Bondareff in particular Tolstoy confessedly owes the conviction that
the best preventive for immorality is physical labor, for which reason
the lower classes are less widely removed from grace than the upper.
Bondareff maintained on scriptural grounds that everybody should employ
at least a part of his time in working the land. This view Tolstoy
shared definitely after 1884. Not only did he devote a regular part of
his day to agricultural labor; he learned, in addition, shoemaking and
carpentry, meaning to demonstrate by his example that it is feasible to
return to those patriarchal conditions under which the necessities of
life were produced by the consumer himself. From this time forth he
modelled his habits more and more upon those of the common rustic. He
adopted peasant apparel and became extremely frugal in his diet.
Although by natural taste he was no scorner of the pleasures of the
table, he now eliminated one luxury after another. About this time he
also turned strict vegetarian, then gave up the use of wine and spirits,
and ultimately even tobacco, of which he had been very fond, was made to
go the way of flesh. He practiced this self-abnegation in obedience to
the Law of Life which he interpreted as a stringent renunciation of
physical satisfactions and personal happiness. Nor did he shirk the
ultimate conclusion to which his premises led: if the Law of Life
imposes the suppression of all natural desires and appetites and
commands the voluntary sacrifice of every form of property and power, it
must be clear that life itself is devoid of sense and utterly
undesirable. And so it is expressly stated in his "Thoughts."(31)
(31) No. 434.
* * * * *
To what extent Tolstoy was a true Christian believer may best be
gathered from his own writings, "What Do I Believe?" (1884), "On Life,"
(1887), and "The Kingdom of God is within You," (1893). Although at the
age of seventeen he had ceased to be orthodox, there can be no question
whatever that throughout his whole life religion remained the deepest
source of his inspiration. By the early eighties he had emerged from
that acute scepticism that well-nigh cost him life and reason, and had,
outwardly at least, made his peace with the church, attending services
regularly, and observing the feasts and the fasts; here again in
imitating the muzhik in his religious practices he strove apparently to
attain also to the muzhik's actual gift of credulity. But in this
endeavor his superior culture proved an impediment to him, and his
widening doctrinal divergence from the established church finally drew
upon his head, in 1891, the official curse of the Holy Synod. And yet a
leading religious journal was right, shortly after his death, in this
comment upon the religious meaning of his life: "If Christians
everywhere should put their religious beliefs into practice with the
simplicity and sincerity of Tolstoy, the entire religious, moral, and
social life of the world would be revolutionized in a month." The
orthodox church expelled him from its communion because of his
radicalism; but in his case radicalism meant indeed the going to the
roots of Christian religion, to the original foundations of its
doctrines. In the teachings of the _primitive_ church there presented
itself to Tolstoy a dumfoundingly simple code for the attainment of
moral perfection. Hence arose his opposition to the _established_ church
which seemed to have strayed so widely from its own fundamentals.
Since Tolstoy's life aimed at the progressive exercise of
self-sacrifice, his religious belief could be no gospel of joy. In fact,
his is a sad, gray, ascetic religion, wholly devoid of poetry and
emotional uplift. He did not learn to believe in the divinity of Christ
nor in the existence of a God in any definite sense personal, and it is
not even clear whether he believed in an after-life. And yet he did not
wrongfully call himself a Christian, for the mainspring of his faith and
his labor was the message of Christ delivered to his disciples in the
Sermon on the Mount. This, for Tolstoy, contained all the philosophy and
the theology of which the modern world stands in need, since in the
precept of non-resistance is joined forever the issue between the Law
and the Gospel: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an
eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not
evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the
other also."
And farther on: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love
thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you. Love your
enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and
pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you." ...
In this commandment Tolstoy found warrant for unswerving forbearance
toward every species of private and corporate aggression. Offenders
against individuals or the commonwealth deserve nothing but pity.
Prisons should be abolished and criminals never punished. Tolstoy went
so far as to declare that even if he saw his own wife or daughters being
assaulted, he would abstain from using force in their defense. The
infliction of the death penalty was to him the most odious of crimes. No
life, either human or animal, should be wilfully destroyed.
The doctrine of non-resistance removes every conceivable excuse for war
between the nations. A people is as much bound as is an individual by
the injunction: "Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to
him the other also." War is not to be justified on patriotic grounds,
for patriotism, far from being a virtue, is an enlarged and unduly
glorified form of selfishness. Consistently with his convictions,
Tolstoy put forth his strength not for the glory of his nation but for
the solidarity of mankind.
The cornerstones of Tolstoy's religion, then, were these three articles
of faith. First, True Faith gives Life. Second, Man must live by labor.
Third, Evil must never be resisted by means of evil.
* * * * *