Joseph Krauskopf

“ We became prosperous; prosperity brought luxury, and luxury, as always, brings corruption. The thirst of gold is upon us, and, in our eagerness to quench it and to gratify our lust of luxury, our one-time lofty principles and aspirations are dragged down and trampled in the mire. We build city upon city, and pride ourselves in making one greater than the other, and, in the mean time, we wipe out village after village, whence have come our strength and moral fibre. The price of real estate in the cities is soaring to the skies, while farms are deserted and farm-houses decay. ”

“ No Czarian funeral more solemn than Tolstoy's.
And even though no priest was nigh when the last rites over his remains were performed, there were present, besides his family, those who were more sacred in his eyes than priests or metropolitan, more honorable than even the Procurator of the Holy Synod—his dearly beloved peasants. It was these who followed him to his last resting place. It was these who sang the mortuary hymn Everlasting Memory, at his open grave. ”

“ I do not wish to become connected, in any way, with a corporation—however respectable and learned—which, by some lamentable misunderstanding, has put me side by side with that atheist Leo Tolstoy—the most malignant heretic of our unfortunate age—who, in presumption and arrogance, surpasses all previous heretics of any age. I do not wish to stand beside Antichrist. I am surprised furthermore, to see with what indifference the University Council regards that satanic author, and with what slavishness it burns incense to him. ”

“ Three-fourth of what passes for Christianity, he said, has no historical nor logical nor spiritual warrant. He saw how its fundamental principle, the equality of all men as sons of God, had been perverted to give the classes the right to enslave the masses. He saw how a divine being had been made of Jesus, and how this enabled the church to say that living the life he lived, and practicing the precepts he preached was impossible for human beings. He had read in the Scriptures not to resist evil, and yet had been taught the soldier's trade, the art of killing. ”

“ Our church still makes of religious hatred an act of piety. It still measures God by the passions of man. Had the church the power in our days which it at one time had, and were the age of martyrdom not past, she would long since have silenced me for rebelling against her irrational teaching and for denouncing her craven supineness in the midst of outrageous wrongs and injustices, as now they silence men in our country for rebelling against unjust enactments of the government."
Tolstoy hoped for the reign of universal good-will. ”

“ And the hundreds of young men who have received their agricultural training at the National Farm School, and the hundreds of others, young and old, who, directly and indirectly, have been encouraged by that school to forsake the congested cities and to take up the farmer's life, owe their escape from the miseries of the Ghetto, and their enjoyment of health and happiness, to the promise asked of me by that noblest of all farmers, count Tolstoy. ”

“ It was these whose labors and outlook he had sought to soften and to brighten, who delivered the briefest and most eloquent eulogy that has, perhaps, ever been spoken: "His heart has burst because of his unbounded love for humanity. The light of the world is extinguished." ”

“ With what right do men speak of the abolition of slavery, when every time they look into the mirror they see a slave-driver, when they live in idleness, and fatten on the heart's blood of the down-trodden, when they indulge their stomachs with the choicest of dainties, and wrap their bodies in silks and broad cloths and furs, while those, whose slavish toil provides these luxuries and comforts, have not enough food to keep body and soul together, nor enough of raiment and shelter to keep from freezing? ”

“ Your people are crowding into your large cities by the thousands and tens of thousands. You have built up Ghettoes worse than those of Europe. There is excuse for it in Russia; there is no excuse for it in the United States. Yours is the right to own land and the best of it, and to till as much of it as you please. Granted that ages of enforced abstention from agricultural labor have weaned the elder generation from a love [22] of country life and farm-labor, why may not a love for it be instilled in the young? Lead your young people to the country and to the farm. ”

“ Upon answering his question to the best of my ability, he asked: "Why is it that war, which is the greatest curse of mankind, has so many advocates, and peace, the greatest of all blessings, so few?" After some discussion we both agreed that it was due to that strange perversity of human nature that sees the right and approves of it, and yet often willfully chooses the wrong. ”

“ Whole systems of political and social and moral reform are crowded between the covers of a novel, which, if published in any other form of literature, would condemn the author to life-long imprisonment in the Siberian mines. The novelist in Russia does not look upon himself as an entertainer nor as a money-maker, neither is he looked upon as such. He is the prophet, the leader, the teacher, the tribune of the people, the liberator—the emancipation of the Russian serfs, for instance, was entirely [35] due to the novel. He has serious work to do, and he does it seriously. ”

“ His views respecting labor and capital.
The sad lot of the poor and the riotous extravagances of the rich were constantly recurrent subjects of discussion with him. "We speak of the abolition of slavery," said he, "but we have abolished only the word, the poor are enslaved as much as ever. We need a new emancipation, the emancipation of the rich from the tyranny of their money, from the thraldom of the false view of themselves and of society. ”

“ In spite of herself church has made a saint of him.
In refusing religious sepulture to the holiest man in Russia, the Greek orthodox church performed the crowning feat in her long series of stupidities. And yet, by that act she did, in despite of herself, the very thing she did not wish to see done. Like Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust who, in response to the question who he is, says: "Ich bin ein Theil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft," so did she prove herself the power that sought the evil and yet performed the good. ”

“ Were the yoke of autocracy removed, there would arise in Russia an army of Tolstoyans as vast and mighty as the host which Ezekiel in his vision saw in the valley of dry bones.
Religion of future will be largely Tolstoyan.
The religion of Russia of the future will be largely that which Tolstoy lived and taught, and it will be the religion of a large part of the rest of the world. Time's sifting process will eliminate whatever is untenable in his system of moral and social and eco [51] nomic philosophy, which sprang more from a flaming heart than from a cool, calculating mind. ”

“ We keep things quiet by throwing crumbs of charity to those who are in need of justice more yet than they are in need of bread. Some day they will tire of crumbs, and will ask their full share of what the rich eat and have, and, if denied, they will make short work of it. Our origin and our destiny should have warned us against repeating the fatal errors of the past. But for our colossal resources, we would long since have been dashed against the rocks. We may yet save ourselves by going back to the farm, and taking up anew the life and labors of our fathers. ”

“ God puts more education into the human heart than man has ever been able to put into the head. Some of the wisest and best people hereabouts are peasants who have never seen the inside of a school, and who do not know one letter from another." "What of Paul," I asked, "who certainly enjoyed the benefits of the Greek schools of his day?" To which he replied "The schools made of Paul a theologian, and Christianity would have been the better without the theology of Paul." ”

“ That is true of all power, temporal as well as of ecclesiastic, and it would be more fortunate still if governments were as restricted in their power as is the church, if all power, all authority, were to cease, if the good that is inherent in every human being were to be given a chance to germinate and to flourish, and every man learn to live in complete harmony with the highest of all laws, the law of peace and good-will, which God has written into the human heart. ”

“ He was not the first of the world's great reformers and lovers of humanity to lose heart and to experience spells of despair. Moses and Elijah and Jesus and others had their hours of agony, and prayed that the end might come, and deliver them from their hopeless labors. And many who, like Tolstoy, closed their eyes in the belief that they had utterly failed loomed large in subsequent ages among the greatest of the world's benefactors. ”

“ They were read all the more outside of Russia, and by the thousands of copies within Russia. And the more they were read the larger loomed his world-fame, till he became too large for banishment or prison, for fortress or Siberian mine.
Challenged government to do its worst.
With all the fiery zeal of an ancient Jewish prophet, he challenged the government to do its worst, "to tighten the well-soaped noose about his throat" as it tightened it about the throats of thousands of better men than any that are in the service of the autocrat or of his hirelings, the bureaucrats. ”

“ At best, few people understand the meaning of a novel in such a country as Russia, where free press, free pulpit, free platform and free speech are unknown, where the novelist attempts to do the work of all of these, under the guise of fiction, the only form of literature that has a chance to pass the eye of the censor. ”

“ Tolstoy finds the answer very simple. It is because the minority have money, and the workingmen need the money to feed their families. Millions of workingmen submit "because one man has usurped the factory, another the land, and a third the taxes collected from the workmen." Were the millions, who now slave for the rich, to get their food from the soil, the rich, to keep alive, would be obliged to raise their own food, and the double redemption would have begun. ”

“ As our subsistence comes from the soil so can justice and right and happiness come from it alone. Help can never come from wealth, for wealth is the [19] creator of poverty and inequality and injustice. It can not come from the government for that exists largely for the purpose of keeping up inequality and injustice. It cannot come from the church, for she fears the Czar more than she fears God. It cannot even come from the schools which tend to train a class of people who think themselves too good for manual labor."
Saw solution of Jewish problem only in agriculture. ”

“ In it he endeavored to show that Christianity and patriotism were incompatible, that the latter was an artificial creation, skilfully nourished by rulers for selfish purposes. On account of it wars are waged, evils are wrought, sufferings are inflicted by Christians upon Christians, who are religiously taught to love one another, to forgive one another, to do good to each other, and who are patriotically trained to hate and overreach each other. Humanity, he said, must be put in the place of patriotism. ”

“ The higher distinction she confers generally at the stake or on the gallows, within prison walls or in the torture chamber, upon men of great minds or great hearts, upon lovers of truth and fearless enunciators of it, upon men who because of their love of humanity defy the power that interdicts God's greatest gift to man: the right to think and the right to believe and speak in accordance with the canons of reason and with the dictates of conscience. ”

“ The others, sleepless and unfed, labor beyond their strength, ruining their moral and physical health for the benefit of these few chosen ones." It is natural that the rich should not object to this arrangement, said he, the surprising thing is that the poor take it so complacently. "Why do all these men, strong in physical vigor, [39] and in the habit of labor—the enormous majority of humanity—why do they submit to and obey a handful of feeble men, generally incapable of anything?" ”

“ As a bitter opponent of violent measures, he saw but one way for righting the wrongs of society, and that is in the well-to-do descending to the lowly and starting life anew with them on a common level, and rising with them step by step to the higher planes. And to prevent a relapse to the old iniquitous state, he advocated the eradication of capital, which he held responsible for many of the inequalities and tyrannies and miseries of society. ”

“ He does not recognize God in three persons (or three persons in one God) , and he calls the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, a mortal human being. He scoffs at the idea of Incarnation. He perverts the text of the Gospel. He censures the Holy Church and calls it a human institution. He denies the Church Hierarchy and ridicules the Holy Sacraments and the rites of the Holy Orthodox Church. Therefore, the Holy Synod has decreed that no priest is to absolve Count Tolstoy, or give him communion. ”

“ Let the rich, said he, convert their money into land and parcel it out among the poor, and claim for themselves no more than an equal share with the others. Merely wishing the poor well, and yet continuing the old state of affairs, is like sitting on a man's neck and crushing him down, yet all the time assuring him and others that we are sorry for him, and wish to ease his condition by every means in our power except by getting off [40] his back. ”

“ In asking me the difference between reform and orthodox Judaism in America, and between American Reform Jews and Russian Karaitic Jews, and in replying that the difference exists mainly in the synagogue, that outside of it there is little or no difference in life and in social relationship, Tolstoy replied: "Our church has not yet arrived at the stage of tolerance of different religious beliefs. That is the reason why such people as the Jews and Doukhobors and Stundists are persecuted, and such men as I are in ill repute. ”