Tolstoyanism

“ But if Tolstoy is not a great influence in Russia, what is his value as a representative of Russian ideas? The first thing notable is that his philosophy, even although he finds its germs more widespread in Russia than anywhere else, is a general human philosophy in its application, and is even more generally comprehensible than his art. Yet Tolstoy is really a very faithful representative of Russian life. If Tolstoy has never made a Russian sect, the Russian sects have made Tolstoy. He is a pupil, not a teach. ”

“ Either view seems to strike at the general applicability of his doctrines. If the Russian peasant is really the spiritual salt of the earth by history and race, what of the other races? If he is merely a better man because he leads a primitive life, what of his future, and what of the future of the advanced races? For Tolstoy is no dreamer, and he knows very well that the machine even of false civilization” cannot be stopped. ”

“ Our tool is the pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and nourish. Let us remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the the first printer of Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: ‘It is not my business to sow grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the spirit broadcast in the world.’”
As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the seed of the mind! ”

“ Again, and more especially, because the Russian people is of all peoples most thoroughly steeped in the true Christianity, so that the coming revolution should realise, in the name of Christ, the law of union and of love. Now this law of love cannot be fulfilled unless it is based upon the law of non-resistance to evil. [17] This non-resistance (let us mark this well, we who have the misfortune to see in it simply an Utopian fad peculiar to Tolstoy and to a few dreamers) has always been an essential trait of the Russian people. ”

“ Most critics approach the Russian giant in complete ignorance of the mental and spiritual atmosphere and climate in which his genius developed. They study his character under the strange impression that the preacher of the simple life was himself a simple man.
As a matter of fact, Tolstoy never was a simple man. Indeed, I do not know in the whole range of European literature a personality more uncannily complex and perplexing. ”

“ All this is very characteristic, not only of Count Tolstoy, but of Russians in general. While the Russian is the very first to rush and put all his thoughts into immediate action,—a circumstance which makes the abstract revolutionary much more dangerous in Russia than elsewhere,—he is by no means a worshiper of absolute ideals either in thought or in action. As it is in Russian literature, it is very much in Russian life. ”

“ Let us not expect Russia to do what she is incapable of, to restrict herself within certain limits, to concentrate her attention upon one point, or bring her conception of life down to one doctrine. Her literary productions must reflect the moral chaos which she is passing through. Tolstoï comes to her aid. More truly than any other man, and more completely than any other, he is the translator and propagator of that condition of the Russian mind which is called Nihilism. ”

“ Or again, tracing the action between cause and effect, Tolstoi has observed how at every stage the individual will is overruled by a Higher Will; how in the battlefield the leader does not lead, but follows; how victory and defeat are equally at the mercy of forces beyond human control. And thus we see the gambler and Bohemian of earlier years transformed into a Russian Puritan and a Christian Nihilist.
But although the burning problems of modern life are presented to us in all their aspects, Tolstoy is too much of an artist to obtrude his own theories upon his audience. ”

“ The realism of the great Russian’s novels is, therefore, more in line with the modern tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on, not merely as the conscience of the Russian world revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia’s onward march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. ”

“ Everything is thought of in terms of the whole people. And in the new heroism of self-sacrifice, individuality is surrendered and lost in mass-consciousness. One need hardly be reminded of how this philosophy drives Tolstoy to give up family and friends and to seek the extinction of his individuality in the communal life of the peasant-sects.
In the whole of our rapid survey of the chief aspects of nineteenth century Russian literature, we have sought to determine the underlying ideas, to set forth the basic principles as found in social, political, ethical, and even religious theories. ”

“ It would be difficult to give a complete list either of the beliefs of the Tolstoyans, or of their colonies, in many of which members of the highest aristocracy were to be found.
"We have in Russia tens of thousands of men who have refused to swear allegiance to the new Tsar," wrote Tolstoi, a couple of years before his death, "and who consider military service merely a school for murder."
We have no right to doubt his word—but did Tolstoi know all his followers? Like all who have scattered seed, he was not in a position to count it. ”

“ The man of example is much rarer than the man of precept. So while we all are familiar with Tolstoy as a worker in the field, a herdsman, a shoemaker, and a schoolmaster, Tolstoy at rest from his labors, or laboring only at the perfecting of his own ideas, is a figure unknown to most.
Yet though Moscow is Count Tolstoy's home throughout the whole of the long Russian winter, Tolstoy is in it, but not of it. He forms no part of its common social or common intellectual life. The great mass even of educated Russians know little about the greatest man who has ever lived among them ”

“ But Tolstoy himself puts his ethical teachings on the summit; his novels at best have been only instruments, and. as he has many times declared of late, unfit instruments. He is the last man to set any store upon his reputation as an artist, and he has condemned unhesitatingly the whole theory of art upon which his earlier works were constructed. So, if we eliminate distrustful officials, and an educated class which respects moral courage and intercession for the weak but regards the Tolstoyan gospel with contempt, we are brought at once to the bed rock of Russian society—the people. ”

“ I do not admit for one moment that any European policy is more suited to European races than Russian policy is suited to Russia. Both are bad and opposed to Christianity. (Like many other Russians, Tolstoy always spoke of 'Europe' as a distinct geographical unity, of which Russia forms no part.) But every nation has its own social spirit, which is as clearly defined as its religious spirit, and all this perpetual talk of modeling and remodeling has no more practical value than a proposal to reconstruct the religion of Confucius upon the religion of Christ. ”

“ During these years Tolstoy published a remarkable series of works: War and Revolution, The Great Crime, The End of a World. During the last ten years of his life he occupied a situation unique not only in Russia but in the world. He was alone, a stranger to all the parties, to all countries, and rejected by his Church, which had excommunicated him. [4] The logic of his reason and the revolutionary character of his faith had “led him to this dilemma; to live a stranger to other men, or a stranger to the truth.” ”

“ Now, therefore, the people are turning towards the man who has been for a long time looked up to as expressing the consciousness of humanity—Leo Tolstoi. What a deep antagonism between the doctrine of love and non-resistance and the doctrine of violence and terror and dictatorship! And yet Tolstoism plays a leading part in Russia to-day, and the dictators tolerate the followers of the great apostle, and even given them a certain preferential treatment as compared with the members of other parties and movements. ”

“ Without some firm ground under one's feet it is impossible to write. And that is why at present he cannot write, and this will continue to be the case till his soul finds something on which it can rest.
[224] To any one acquainted with the history of Russia at that period, but not acquainted with Tolstoy's idiosyncrasies, it must indeed seem strange that the story of his life can be told with so little reference to the Emancipation or the Reform movements of the years 1860-1864, to which allusion has already been made. ”

“ He could admire no one, not even himself. He scorned the gifts which were given him, and the greatest gifts of the greatest men. But this landmark of Tolstoy’s [Pg 208] evolution, his turning his back on the Church, and on his work, is a landmark in Russian history as well as in Russian art. For far less than this Russian thinkers and writers of high position had been imprisoned and exiled. Nobody dared to touch Tolstoy. He fearlessly attacked all constituted authority, both spiritual and temporal, in an epoch of reaction, and such was his prestige that official Russia raised no finger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Undoubtedly Tolstoy is actuated by a genuine desire to free Russia, but the idea was unmistakably imbedded in my mind that his Christianity was like Napoleon's description of a Russian. Scratch it and you would find Tartar fanaticism under it,—the fanaticism of the ascetic who would drive his own flesh and blood into the flames to save the soul of his domestics. This impression grew as I watched the attitude of the countess toward her husband. What must a wife think of such a husband's views of marriage when she is the mother of thirteen of his children? ”

“ The earlier reformers had regarded the Russian peasantry as so much valuable raw material, which would display its true value when impregnated with revolutionary moral and political ideas. Tolstoy never had anything to do with revolution; and in morals he found a better standard among the peasants than anywhere else. He was convinced that culture had nothing to do with morality, and he became therefore a pupil rather than a master in the great peasant school. ”

“ And the answers to the questions on this Petersburg night, on which the daylight streamed into the window from under the blind, were quite indefinite. All seemed mixed in his head. He recalled his former state of mind, and the former sequence of his thoughts, but they had no longer their former power or validity.
"And supposing I have invented all this, and am unable to live it through--supposing I repent of having acted right," he thought; and unable to answer he was seized with such anguish and despair as he had long not felt. ”

“ It would teach them that ritualism is older than any religion. And a little plain thinking would teach them how harsh and fanciful are the mass of their own ethics, how very civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to strike a blow. ”

“ But just because this ideal has nowhere yet been accomplished, it is the true ideal of our day : and, more, it is the nearest ideal, and one which, before it is; accomplished in other countries, should now be accomplished in Russia. Wipe out your sins by a good deed ; while you still have the power, strive to destroy the ancient, crying, cruel injustice of private property in land, which is so vividly felt by the whole agricultural population, and from which they suffer so grievously ; and you will have the support of all the best people — the so-called "intellectuals." ”

“ Holiness is attained by flirting with sin, by subduing the will to live. People do desire to live, but he tries to persuade them: "That's all nonsense, our earthly life." It is very easy to persuade a Russian of this; he is a lazy creature who loves beyond anything else to find an excuse for his own inactivity. On the whole, of course, a Russian is not a Platon Karatayev, nor an Akim, nor a Bezonkhy, nor a Neklyudov; all these men were created by history and nature, not exactly on Tolstoi's pattern, he only improved on them in order more thoroughly to support his teaching. ”

“ From a man who, although he was a great writer and a Russian nobleman, was yet a man like others of his kind, influenced by traditionary ideas of class and outward appearance; a man of conventional habits and ideas; Tolstoi emerged a free soul. He shook off the illusion of historical life and culture, and stood upon free, moral ground, estimating himself and his fellows by means of an insight which ignores the world's conventions and despises the world's standards of success. In short, Tolstoi had received Illumination and henceforth should he reckoned among those of the new birth. ”