586

p The importance of Tolstoy’s preaching lay not in its moral and not in its religious aspect. It lay in the vivid portrayal of the exploitation of the people, without which the upper classes could not exist. This exploitation is examined by Tolstoy from the viewpoint of the moral evil that it caused the exploiters. But this did not prevent him from portraying it with his customary, i.e., colossal talent.

p What is good in the book The Kingdom of God Is Within C/s? The passage which describes the torturing of the peasants by the governor. What can one agree with in the brochure This Is My Life? Only, it would seem, with what it says about the close connection of even the most innocent pastimes of the ruling class with the exploitation of the people. What moves the reader in the article / Cannot Keep Silent/? The artistic description of the execution of the twelve peasants. Like all "absolutely consistent" Christians, Tolstoy is an extremely bad citizen. But when this extremely bad citizen begins with characteristic power to analyse the emotions of the representatives and defenders of the existing order; when he exposes all the intentional and unintentional hypocrisy of their constant references to the public good, one has to credit him with a great civic service. He preaches nonresistance to evil by violence, but those of his pages that are of the kind just indicated arouse in the reader’s soul the sacred desire to pit revolutionary force against reactionary violence. He advises us to confine ourselves to the weapon of criticism, but these excellent pages of his undoubtedly justify the sharpest criticism by weapons.  [586•*  This—and only [this—is valuable in Count L. Tolstoy’s preaching.

587

p But the excellent pages referred to constitute only a small part of what he wrote in the last thirty years. Everything else—in so far as it is imbued with his moral and religious tendency—goes against all the progressive aspirations of our age; everything else belongs to the sphere of an ideology that is totally incompatible with,,the ideology of the proletariat.

p But here is a remarkable thing! Precisely because everything •else belongs to the sphere of an ideology totally incompatible with the ideology of the conscious proletariat, precisely because of this the ideologists of the upper classes have found it morally possible to "pay homage" to Count L. Tolstoy’s preaching. True, it has condemned their faults. But this is no great misfortune. After all, many Christian preachers also condemned the faults of the upper classes, but this does not prevent Christianity from being the religion of modern class society. The main point is that Tolstoy advises us not to resist evil by violence. If the French Chamber of Deputies "paid homage" to Tolstoy almost on the very same day when it "paid homage" to Briand for his energetic suppression of the strikers,^^181^^ this happened for the simple reason that Tolstoy’s preaching does not frighten the exploiters in the least. They have no reason whatever to be afraid of it and, quite the reverse, every reason to approve of it because it gives them .a nice opportunity, without any serious risk, to "pay homage" to it and thereby show their good side. Naturally, the bourgeoisie would never have "paid homage" to a preacher like Tolstoy when it was in a revolutionary mood. Such a preacher would have been replaced by its own ideologists then. But today circumstances have changed, today the bourgeoisie is moving back, and today its sympathy is guaranteed in advance for any intellectual trend infused with the spirit of conservatism, particularly for one the practical essence of which lies in "not resisting evil by violence”. The bourgeoisie (and also, of course, the bourgeoisiefied aristocracy of our day) realises or, at least, suspects that the main evil of our time is its exploitation of the proletariat. How can it help "paying homage" to people who say: "Never resist evil by violence"? If Krylov’s cat who stole a chicken were asked whom he considered the best "teacher of life”, he would probably have "paid homage" to the cook who did not fight evil by violence, ibut confined himself to exclaiming:

p You ought to feel ashamed of walls, not only people!...
Tom Cat’s a scoundrel, Tom Cat’s a plain thief..., etc.^^182^^

p Some of Tolstoy’s followers consider themselves extreme revolutionaries for the very doubtful reason that they refuse to do military service. However, firstly, the existing order would become more secure if only those who were prepared to defend it by 588 the force of weapons joined the army; secondly, the main enemy of militarism is the class self-awareness of the proletariat arid its consequent willingness to resist reactionary violence by revolutionary force. Anyone who clouds this self-awareness and weakens this willingness is not the enemy of militarism, but its friend, even though, with the persistent formalism of the sectarian, and without fearing persecution he might refuse all his life to take up a soldier’s rifle.

p As for Russian bourgeois “society”, it is now in a mood which was bound to encourage it to "pay homage" to Count Tolstoy’s preaching. It has not only lost faith in the possibility of resisting the violence of the reactionaries by the force of the revolutionary people; it has become more or less convinced that such resistance is not in its interests. It would like to put an end to its old dispute with absolutism by means of a peacefu 1 agreement. The tactics of the most influential of its “left” representatives, the Cadets,^^183^^ are aimed at this. Count Tolstoy’s moral and religious preaching is now, under the present circumstances, merely a translation into mystical language of the “realistic” politics of Mr. Milyukov.

p One may not agree with consistent people, but one must approve of their logic. People of the Cadet mode of thinking are quite right in their way to pay homage to Count Tolstoy. But what is one to say of the countless “honest”, “educated” gentlemen who think themselves "more left" than the Cadets and sometimes nourish even terrorist sympathies, yet "talked a lot" about Count Tolstoy’s “exodus” from Yasnaya Polyana and were moved by the alleged greatness of the disgraceful idea expounded in the article "The Effective Means"?

_p Such eclectics have always been pitiful, and Chernyshcvsky rightly ridiculed them so caustically in his description of Victor Hugo. But they are particularly pitiful in present-day Russia, where the period of decline that started after the stormy events of 1905-07 is just beginning to end. Their worship of Count Tolstoy reminds one of the religiosity of Lunacharsky, Bazarov and K°. I once said, using an expression of I. Kireyevsky, that this religiosity is simply "the wadded jacket of modern despair".^^184^^ And the same applies to worship of Tolstoy not as a great artist—this is perfectly understandable and legitimate worship—but as a "teacher of life”. Even the most energetic people who take part in demonstrations now deem it necessary to parade in this drab attire, suitable only for old women. Social-Democrats should do their best to make them stop wearing it.

p Heine was right in saying that the new age needs a new attire for the new cause.

P.S. People are now beginning to compare Tolstoy with Rousseau, but such a comparison can lead only to negative conclusions. Rousseau was a dialectician (one of the very few dialecticians 589 of the eighteenth century); Tolstoy remained to the end of his days a metaphysician of the first water (one of the most typical metaphysicians of the nineteenth century). Only a person who has not read or lias not understood at all the famous Discours sur Vinegalite parmi les homines could liken Tolstoy to Rousseau. In Russian literature the dialectical nature of Rousseau’s views was already expounded some twelve years ago by V. I. Zasulich.^^180^^