Leo Tolstoy

Predictably, Tolstoy himself was among the least satisfied with the results of his philanthropic work, describing his activities in Begichevka as ‘stupid’ in a letter to Strakhov, who was appalled (SAT-ML, II, p. 324). He knew those he managed to help were a tiny part of the several hundred thousand people who died during two years of hunger, along with the millions who barely survived. Moreover, he was aware that his efforts could not tackle the roots of the problem. The abundant harvest of 1893 did not mean that hunger, poverty and misery would end. He aspired to change the world and the soul of man, not merely to alleviate the consequences of hunger. In the midst of the relief operation, he was writing, rewriting and correcting his new book The Kingdom of God Is Within Us, in which he concentrated on the problem of non-violence, which he believed was the most important of the five commandments of Jesus.

Since Tolstoy first began to develop his particular Gospel, he found that he was not a voice calling in the wilderness. Many thinkers, sects and communes had been preaching and practising non-violence long before he was converted to the idea. Tolstoy sought to acknowledge the contribution of this disparate community of spiritual brothers and followers for whom he had become a natural leader. He set out to refute the objections of those who thought violence was compatible with Christianity or an engine of progress and necessary condition of human life. He would uproot an unjust and corrupt social order by attacking it at what he considered its most vulnerable point.

For Tolstoy, the power of rulers, government officials, generals and judges depended on the voluntary consent of millions of ordinary people to follow their orders. Thus the most effective way to undermine this was universal rejection of military service in any form. Tolstoy filled the pages of his book with the personal stories of people who had chosen to suffer persecution rather than take up arms or swear oaths that ran counter to their consciences.

Tolstoy had begun writing The Kingdom of God Is Within Us before the famine. On a train to Begichevka he had met soldiers sent to suppress riots caused by a dispute between peasants and a landowner over a mill. According to his follower and early biographer Pavel Biryukov, this encounter with decent, open-faced young men who were nonetheless ready to kill their brethren made as powerful an impression on Tolstoy as that of the death of his brother or the sight of the execution he had witnessed in Paris. In the conclusion to the book, Tolstoy explained this transformation of ordinary people into professional torturers and murderers as a kind of social hypocrisy that allowed a man to believe the atrocities he had to perform were necessary and justifiable. Tolstoy conceded that a person may not always be able to follow his conscience, but at least he should not deceive himself about the real motives for his behaviour. This sincerity was the first step on the road to moral regeneration. Anyone who let the ‘Kingdom of God’ enter his soul would finally find himself unable to resist it.

To submit such a work to a Russian publisher would have been pointless. Having finished the book in 1893, Tolstoy immediately sent it abroad both for translation and publication in the original. Rules were more lenient for books in foreign languages as their audience was inevitably limited to the educated classes, but in this case the Russian censors moved quickly to ban imports of even the French translation of ‘the most harmful book they had ever forbidden’ (CW, XXVIII, p. 366). Nevertheless, this did not stop any literate Russian from reading it in hectographed copies.

Living according to the rules of the Kingdom of God was not easy. In September 1891, after prolonged conflicts, Tolstoy finally convinced his wife to publish a statement renouncing copyright for the works he had written after 1881, the year of his conversion. His earlier works, including the two great novels, remained Sofia’s exclusive property. She also continued publishing and selling Tolstoy’s collected works, even if their contents were not protected by copyright. The next spring Tolstoy gave his land away. Renouncing his rights as a landowner, he transferred ownership not to the peasants but to his wife and children.