Leo Tolstoy

This letter was signed, ‘loving you Lev Tolstoy’. Stolypin again agreed to intervene in the case Tolstoy mentioned, but had nothing more to say in response. Both were growing tired of each other. Tolstoy later said that it was childish of him to believe that the government would listen to him, but he was still glad he had written to the emperor and to Stolypin, at least to be sure that he had done ‘everything to find out that it is useless to address them’.²¹ Still he felt himself responsible for being so forgiving towards a person he increasingly regarded as a serial murderer or, as he wrote in his last unsent letter to Stolypin in August 1909, ‘the most pitiable man in Russia.’ (Ls, II, p. 690)

To implement his reforms, Stolypin needed to suppress the revolution and he was doing this with increasing cruelty. He started by introducing courts martial for civil crimes. Executions, extremely rare in Russia for a century and a half, were taking place on a daily basis and on an unprecedented scale. Each day the now liberated press reported on new hangings and shootings. On 9 May 1908, after reading one such report, Tolstoy began recording his article ‘I Can’t Be Silent’ on a phonograph, but he was overpowered by emotion and soon found himself unable to continue. He spent the whole following month carefully working on the text, which became what is arguably the most famous and most powerful denunciation of capital punishment ever written in any language. Extracts from it appeared on 4 July 1908 in several Russian newspapers, all of which were fined for publishing it.

Tolstoy begins the article with a naturalistic, detached description of a hanging in which his indignation manifested itself only in the precision of his account of the horrifying details. He wrote about the situation in the country, where hatred was growing and little children were now playing out terrorist acts, expropriations and executions in their games. He insisted that, while all killing is abominable, soldiers who obey orders, terrorists who risk their lives, and even actual executioners, who are mostly illiterate and know that their job is disreputable, are more deserving of pardon than the cold-blooded and self-righteous murderers who send people to the gallows. In closing, Tolstoy acknowledged his own moral responsibility for everything that was happening in his country:

Everything now being done in Russia is done in the name of the general welfare, in the name of the protection and tranquillity of the people of Russia. And if this is so, then it is also done for me, since I live in Russia . . . And being conscious of this, I can no longer endure it, but must free myself from this intolerable position! It is impossible to live so! I, at any rate, cannot and will not live so. That is why I write this and will circulate it by all means in my power, both in Russia and abroad. I hope that one of two things may happen: either that these inhuman deeds may be stopped, or that my connection with them may be terminated by my imprisonment, whereby I may be clearly conscious that these horrors are not committed on my behalf. Or better still (so good that I dare not even dream of such happiness), I hope that they put on me, as on those twelve or twenty peasants, a shroud and a cap and push me too off a bench, so that by my own weight I may tighten the well-soaped noose round my old throat. (CW, XXXVII, p. 94–5)

The resonance of the article was comparable only to that of Zola’s J’accuse, published ten years earlier. Tolstoy was accustomed to admiration and hatred. He had already received death threats and remained unfazed. Still, he was aware that whatever he wrote, he would not be arrested or hanged. For twenty years, the tragedy he described in The Light Shines in the Darkness had been torturing him.

In his later years Tolstoy was especially friendly with Maria Schmidt, an old spinster who had adopted his philosophy and settled near Yasnaya Polyana, sustaining herself with hard manual labour. She was so humble and kind that even Sofia, who disliked Tolstoyans, always mentioned her favourably. Schmidt did not approve of ‘I Can’t Be Silent’ because it lacked ‘love’. With enormous difficulty, she managed to convince the author to omit personal attacks on Stolypin, Nicholas II and others. Tolstoy, who called hatred ‘the most painful of all feelings’, was struggling to contain his fury. Worst of all, it was a fury born of despair.