573

p Marx’s world outlook is dialectical jmaterialism. Whereas Tolstoy, on the contrary, is not only an idealist, but was all his life in his mode of thought the most pure-blooded metaphysician.  [573•*  Engels says that the metaphysician "thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. ’His communication is "yea, yea; nay, nay”; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.’ For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another."  [573•**  This is precisely the mode of thought 574 that is so characteristic of Count Tolstoy and that people who have not attained dialectics, Mr. M. Nevedomsky, for example, imagine to be this writer’s "strongest point”, the "explanation of his universal charm and his close link with the present day".  [574•* 

p Mr. M. Nevedomsky values in Tolstoy his "absolute consistency”. Here he is right. Tolstoy was indeed an "absolutely consistent" metaphysician. But precisely this fact was the main source of Tolstoy’s weakness, precisely because of it he remained apart from our liberation movement; precisely because of it he could say of himself—with complete sincerity, of course.—that he sympathised as little with reactionaries as with revolutionaries. When a person withdraws to such an extent from the "present day”, it is absurd to even speak of his "close link" with it. And it is obvious also that it was Tolstoy’s "absolute consistency" that made his teaching “absolutely” contradictory.

p Why should we not "resist evil by violence"? Because, Tolstoy replies, "one cannot put out fire with fire, dry water with water, or destroy evil with evil".  [574•**  This is precisely the "absolute consistency" that characterises the metaphysical way of thinking. Only for the metaphysician can such relative concepts as good and evil acquire an absolute meaning. In our literature Cbernyshevsky has long since explained after Hegel that "in reality everything depends upon the circumstances, upon the conditions of place and time" and that "the former general phrases by which good and evil were judged without an examination of the circumstances and causes thatfgave rise to a given phenomenon, that these general, abstract aphorisms were unsatisfactory. Every object, every phenomenon, has its own significance, and it must be judged according to the situation in which it exists".  [574•*** 

p But the "absolutely consistent" Count Tolstoy would not and could not judge social phenomena "according to the situation in which they exist”. Therefore in his preaching he was never able to go further than unsatisfactory "general, abstract aphorisms”. If many “honest” and “educated” gentlemen now see a kind of “force” in these "general, abstract aphorisms”, this merely testifies to their own weakness.

p Chernyshevsky also raises directly, inter alia, the question of violence. He asks: "Is war disastrous or beneficial?" "This cannot 575 be answered definitely in general,” he says, "one must know what kind of war is meant, everything depends upon the circumstances, upon time and place. For savage peoples, the harmfulness of war is less palpable, the benefits of it are more tangible. For civilised peoples, war usually does more harm than good. But the war of 1812, for example, was a war of salvation for the Russian people. The Battle of Marathon was a most beneficial event in the history of mankind."  [575•*  But for the censorship, Chernyshevsky would have found other examples too, of course. He would have said that there are cases when internal war, i.e., a revolutionary movement directed against an obsolete order, is a most beneficial event in a people’s history, in spite of the fact that the revolutionaries are compelled of necessity to resist the protectors’ violence by force. But the dialectical arguments with which Chernyshevsky supported his idea were completely incomprehensible to the "absolutely consistent" Tolstoy, and only for this reason was he able to put our revolutionaries in the same category as our protectors. That is not all. The protectors must have appeared less harmful than the revolutionaries to him. In 1887 he wrote: "Let us recall Russia over the last twenty years. How much true good will and readiness to sacrifice has been wasted by our young intelligentsia on trying to establish the truth, on trying to do good to people. And what has been done? Nothing. Worse than nothing. Immense spiritual forces have been destroyed. Stakes have been broken and the earth has been trampled harder than; ever before, so that it will not take a spade."  [575•**  If later he, perhaps, no longer considered revolutionaries more harmful than protectors, he nevertheless saw nothing in their actions but terrible villainy and foolishness.  [575•***  And this again was "absolutely consistent”. His teaching on the "non-resistance of evil by violence" is best explained by his following argument:

_p “If a mother beats her child, what pains me and what do I consider evil? The fact that it hurts the child or the fact that the mother is experiencing fits of rage instead of the joy of love?

p “I think that both are evil.

_p “Man by himself cannot do anything evil. Evil is alienation: between people. And therefore, if I wish to act, I can do so only with the aim of destroying the alienation and restoring the^contact between mother and child.

p “How am I to act? Force the mother?

_p “I shall not destroy her alienation (sin) from the child, but merely introduce a new sin, alienation from me.

576

p “What am I to do?

p “One thing only—put myself in the child’s place,—that will not be foolish."  [576•* 

p Such a method of fighting evil could prove effective only on one condition: if the wicked mother were so surprised at seeing an adult stranger lie down next to her child that she dropped the rod. In the absence of this condition it would not only fail to destroy the "alienation (sin)" of the mother from the child, but would lead to a "new sin"—her alienation from me: the mother might, for example, greet “my” selfless action with scornful ridicule and continue her cruel activity, without paying the slightest attention to it. This is precisely what happened when Tolstoy .produced his / Cannot Keep Silent!^^1^^™

p He said the following: "I am writing this and shall do my utmost to disseminate what I am writing both inside and outside Russia, in order that one of two things should happen: either these inhuman deeds stop, or my connection with these things is destroyed, either I am put in prison, where I would realise clearly that all these horrors are not being done for me any more, or, which would be best of all (so good that I dare not dream of such happiness), they dress me like those twenty or twelve peasants in a shroud and push me off the bench like them, so that by my weight I pull the soaped noose tight around my old throat."  [576•** 

p In suggesting that the soaped noose be put on him and he be pushed off the bench, Count Tolstoy is only repeating his idea .that when a mother is beating her child we do not have the moral right to take it away from her and can only put ourselves in its place. What came of this idea in practice is what I said should •come of it: the hangmen continued to do their job as if they had not heard Tolstoy’s request: "hang me with them”. True, the great writer’s vivid picture of the cruelties committed by hangmen aroused public opinion against the government and thereby increased somewhat the chances of a new upsurge in the revolutionary movement in Russia. But given his negative view of this movement, the "absolutely consistent" Tolstoy could not have -wanted this secondary result.  [576•*** 

p On the contrary, he feared it. This is clear from his last article •on capital punishment, written on October 29 in Optina Pustyn 577 and entitled "The Effective Means”. In it lie argues that "in our Lime what, is needed for an effective light against capital punishment is not breaking down open doors and not expressions of anger al the immorality, cruelty and senselessness of capital punishment. No honest and thinking person who lias known the Sixth Commandment over since childhood needs to have the senselessness and immorality of capital punishment explained lo him. Nor are descriptions of the horrors of the actual execution itself necessary”. Usually alien to the viewpoint of practical expediency. Count Tolstoy adopts it here, arguing that describing the horrors of capital punishment does harm by reducing the number of would-be hangmen, as a result of which the government is compelled to pay more for their services! Therefore the only permissible and effective means of fighting capital punishment is "to instil in all people, particularly hangmen’s employers and those who approve of them”, correct ideas about man and his altitude towards the world around him. It now emerges, therefore, that we no longer have to put our sinful body at the disposal of the furious mother beating her child: it is enough to introduce her to Count Tolstoy’s religious leaching.

It can hardly be necessary to argue that such "absolute consistency" definitely precludes all possibility of a "close link" with the "present day".