p Count L. Tolstoy’s moral preaching—in so far as he engaged in M,—resulted in the facl that he himself, without wishing to or realising it, went over to the side of the people’s oppressors. In his famous appeal "To the Tsar and His Assistants" he said: "We appeal to you all—to the Tsar, to the Ministers, to the Members of the Council of State, to the Privy Councillors, and to those who surround the Tsar—to all, in general, who have power, to help to give peace to the nation and free it from suffering and crime. We appeal to you, not as to men of a hostile camp, but as to men who must of necessity agree with us, as lo fellow workers and brothers."  [580•*  This was a truth the full profundity of which Count Tolstoy himself did nol realise, just as the "honest, educated" people who are today indulging in a real orgy of sentimentality do not realise it either. Count Tolstoy was not only a son of the Russian aristocracy, he was for a long time its ideologist, although not in all respects, it is true.  [580•**  His brilliant novels show the best side of the life of our nobility, although without any false idealisation. It is as if the repulsive side of this life—the exploitation of the peasants by the landowners—did not exist for Tolstoy.  [580•***  This is due to the fairly distinctive, but at the same lime invincible conservalism of our great writer. And this conservatism in turn explained the fact that even when Tolstoy 581 finally turned his attention to the negative side of the life of the nobility and began to censure it from the moral point of view, he nevertheless continued to concern himself with the exploiters and not the exploited. Anyone who cannot sec this will never reach a proper understanding of his morality and his religion.

p In War and Peace Andrei Bolkonsky says to Bezukhov: "You want to free the peasants, that is very nice, but not for you (I do not suppose yon have ever had a peasant flogged to death or sent to Siberia), and still less is it good for the peasants.... But those who really need it are the people who perish morally, who by their acts fill themselves with remorse, who suppress this remorse, and grow coarse, because they have the power of punishing arbitrarily. It is for these people that I am sorry, and for their sakes I should like to liberate the peasants."

p Naturally, Tolstoy would never have said aboul the peasants as Bolkonsky does in the same conversation: "If they are beaten, flogged, and sent lo Siberia, I do not think they are any worse for it.” Count Tolstoy understood that they were far worse for it. All the same he was far less interested in the suffering peasants than in those who made them suffer, i.e., the people of his own estate—the nobility. In order to help the reader understand his mood I shall quote the example of his own brother, N. N. Tolstoy.

p Fet tells how N. N. Tolstoy came to see him one day and got very angry with his serf coachman who had taken it into his head to kiss his hand. "Why on earth did the swine suddenly decide to kiss my hand?" he said irritably, "lie’s never done it before."

p Fet thought it necessary to add that this unflattering remark about the coachman was made only after the latter had gone off to the horses  [581•* : and 1 readily acknowledge N. N. Tolstoy’s delicacy. But his delicacy did not eliminate the feature of his psychology thanks to which he continued to call his coachman a swine even after he had decided firmly that a servant’s kissing his master’s hand was an insult lo human dignily. But if the servant is a “swine”, whose human dignity is insulted by bis kissing the hand? Evidently that of the delicate master. Thus even the awareness of human dignity is coloured here by a vivid touch of estate prejudice. And it is this estate prejudice that pervades the whole of Count L. Tolstoy’s teaching. Only under its influence could he have written his article "The Effective Means”. Only having grown accustomed lo regard oppression from the angle of the moral harm that it causes oppressors could Count Tolstoy have said to his country when he was dying: I recognise 582 your having no other right than that of promoting the moral improvement of your tormentors.

p There is no need to add that only an idealist could have been sincere, like Tolstoy, in such striving for justice that itself was unjust by its very essence. In this case the materialist would not have got by without a very considerable amount of cynicism. Indeed, only idealism permits one to regard the demands of morality as something independent of the concrete relations between people that exist in a given society. In Count Tolstoy, however, as a result of his characteristic "absolute consistency" as a metaphysician, this usual shortcoming of idealism went to the utter extreme, expressing itself in a decisive counterposing of the " eternal" and the “temporal”, the “spirit” and the “body”.  [582•* 

p Unable to replace the oppressors by the oppressed in his field of vision,—in other words, to change from the viewpoint of the exploiters to that of the exploited,—Tolstoy was naturally bound to direct his main efforts towards the moral improvement of the oppressors, urging them to refrain from repeating their evil deeds. This is why his moral preaching acquired a negative character. He says: "Do not be angry. Do not fornicate. Do not take oaths. Do not fight. This for me is the essence of Christ’s teaching."  [582•** 

p This is still not all. The preacher who aims at morally reviving people spoiled by their role of exploiters and who cannot see anyone in his field of vision except such people, cannot help becoming an individualist. Count Tolstoy expatiated a great deal on the importance of “uniting”. But how did he understand the practice of “uniting”? Like this: "We shall do that which leads to uniting,—approach God, and we shall not think about uniting. That will come in measure with our perfection, with our love. You say: ’it is easier together’. What is easier? Ploughing, mowing, knocking in piles—yes, that is easier, but one can approach God only on one’s own."  [582•*** 

This is pure individualism, which also explains, inter alia, the fear of death that played such a major role in Tolstoy’s teaching. Feuerbach, who developed in detail the idea expressed in passing by Hegel, maintained that the fear of death which is characteristic of modern mankind and which determines presentday religious teaching on the immortality of the soul, was a product of individualism. According to Feuerbach, the individualistically inclined subject has no other object apart from himself, and therefore feels an irresistible need to believe in his own immortality. In the ancient world, which did not know Christian individualism, the subject had as his object not himself, but the 583 political entity to which he belonged: his republic, his city state. Feuerbach quotes Saint Augustine’s remark that the Romans substituted the glory of Rome for immortality. Count Tolstoy was just as unable to delight in the ambiguous “fame” of the Russian empire as in the exploitatory feats of the noble Russian nobility. The influence on him of the progressive ideas of his day made itself felt here. But he was also incapable of going over to the side of the masses exploited by the stale of the nobility. Feuerbach would have said that the only thing left to him was to have himself "as an object”, to desire personal immortality. Count Tolstoy zealously argued that death was not terrible at all. But he did this only because he was unbearably afraid of it. The readers of the Sotsial-Demokrat will understand without my explaining it that the conscious proletariat regards the practice of “uniting” in quite a different way than did Tolstoy. And if certain working-class ideologists now call Tolstoy the "teacher of life”, they are very mistaken: it is quite impossible for the proletariat to "learn how to live" from Count Tolstoy.