speaking, what I take from my brethren should go to my debit, only what service I do them should go to the credit of my account.
Tolstoy became a strict vegetarian, eating only the simplest food and avoiding stimulants. He ceased to smoke. He dressed in the simplest and cheapest manner. Attaching great importance to manual labour, he was careful to take a share of the housework: lighting his own fire and carrying water. He also learned boot-making. Especially he enjoyed labouring with the peasants in the fields, and found that hard as the work was he enjoyed it, and, strange to say, could do better mental work when he only allowed himself a few hours a day for it than he had been able to do when he gave himself up entirely to literary work. Instead of writing chiefly novels and stories for the well-to-do and idle classes, he devoted his wonderful powers principally to clearing up those perplexing problems of human conduct which seem to block the path of progress.
Besides some stories (especially short stories for the people, and some folk-stories which he wrote down in order that they may reach those who are not accustomed to go to the peasants for instruction), many essays and letters on important questions, and a drama and a comedy, his chief works during the last twenty years have been these thirteen books: —
(1) My Confession.
(2) A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, never yet translated.
(3) The Four Gospels Harmonised and Translated, of which two parts out of three have been (not very well) translated.
(4) What I Believe, sometimes called My Religion.
(5) The Gospel in Brief, a summary of The Four Gospels, and better suited for the general reader than the larger work.
(6) What then must we do? Sometimes called What to do?
(7) On Life, also called Life: a book not carefully finished, and not easy to read in the original. The existing English translation makes nonsense of it in many places, but a new one has now (1902) been announced by the Free Age Press.
(8) The Kreutzer Sonata: a story treating of the sex-question. It should be read with the Afterword, explaining Tolstoy’s views on the subject.
(9) The Kingdom of God is Within You.
(10) The Christian Teaching: a brief summary of Tolstoy’s understanding of Christ’s teaching. He considers that this book still needs revision, but it will be found useful by those who have understood the works numbered 1, 4, 5 and 6 in this list.
(11) What is Art? In Tolstoy’s opinion the best constructed of his books. The profound outcome of fifteen years’ consideration of the problem.
(12) Resurrection, a novel begun about 1894, laid aside in favour of what seemed more important work, and completely re-written and published in 1899, for the benefit of the Doukhobórs.
(13) What is Religion, and what is its Essence? (Feb. 1902.)
The subjects that occupied him were the most important subjects of human knowledge, those which should be (though to-day they are not) emphatically called Science: the kind of science that occupied “Moses, Solon, Socrates, Epictetus, Confucius, Mencius, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, and all those who have taught men to live a moral life.” He examined “the results of good and bad actions,” considered the “reasonableness or unreasonableness of human institutions and beliefs,” “how human life should be lived in order to obtain the greatest well-being for each,” and “what one may and should, and what one cannot and should not believe; how to subdue one’s passions, and how to acquire the habit of virtue.”
When Tolstoy began to write boldly and plainly about these things, he quite expected to be persecuted. The Russian Government, however, has considered it wiser not to touch him personally, but to content itself with prohibiting some of his books, mutilating others, and banishing several of those who helped him. Under the auspices of the Holy Synod, books were published denouncing him and his views (an advertisement for which, as he remarked, Pears’ Soap would have paid thousands of pounds), his correspondence was tampered with, spies were set to watch him and his friends, and finally he was excommunicated, in a somewhat half-hearted fashion which suggested that the authorities were ashamed of their action.
These external matters, however, did not trouble him so much as did a spiritual conflict. Indeed, at one time, imprisonment would have come as a relief, solving his difficulty. The case was this: He wished to act in complete consistency with the views he had expressed, but he could not do this — could not, for instance, give away his property — without making his wife or some of his children angry, and without the risk of their even appealing to the authorities to restrain him. This perplexed him very much; but he felt that he could not do good by doing harm. No external rule, such as that people should give all they have to the poor, would justify him in creating anger and bitterness in the hearts of those nearest to him. So, eventually, he handed over his property to his wife and his family, and continued to live in a good house with servants as before; meekly bearing the reproach that he was ‘inconsistent’ and contenting himself with living as simply and frugally as possible.
At the time of the great famine in 1891-1892, circumstances seemed to compel him to undertake the great work of organising and directing the distribution of relief to the starving peasants. Large sums of money passed through his hands, and all Europe and America applauded him. But he himself felt that such activity, of collecting and distributing money, “making a pipe of oneself,” was not the best work of which he was capable. It did not satisfy him. It is not by what we get others to do for pay, but rather by what we do with our own brains, hearts and muscles, that we can best serve God and man.
Since 1895 he has again braved the Russian Government by giving publicity to the facts it was trying to conceal about the persecution of the Doukhobórs in the Caucasus. To aid these men, who refused military service on principle, he broke his rule of taking no money for his writings, and sold the first right of publication in Russia of Resurrection. But of this act, too, he now repents. Whether for himself or for others, he has found that the attempt to get property, money or goods, is apt to be a hindrance to, rather than a means of forwarding, the service of God and man.
Tolstoy is no faultless and infallible prophet whose works should be swallowed as bibliolaters swallow the Bible; but he is a man of extraordinary capacity, sincerity and self-sacrifice, who has for more than twenty years striven to make absolutely plain to all, the solution of some of the most vital problems of existence. What he has said, is part, and no small part, of that truth which shall set men free. It is of interest and importance to all who will hear it, especially to the common folk who do most of the rough work and get least of the praise or pay. But, in England and elsewhere, his message is only beginning to reach those who most need it, and has been greatly misunderstood. Many of the ‘cultured crowd’ who write and talk about him as a genius, twist his views beyond all recognition. They enter not in themselves, neither suffer they them that are entering in, to enter.
The work he has set himself to co-operate in is not the expansion of an Empire, nor is it the establishment of a Church; for man’s perception of truth is progressive, and again and again finds itself hampered by forms and dogmas of State and Church. Sooner or later we must break such outward forms, as the chicken breaks its shell when the time comes. The work to which Tolstoy has set himself is a work to which each of us is also called: it is the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God, that is, of Truth and Good.
“Tolstoy the Artist” and “Tolstoy the Preacher”
by Ivan Panin
