Leo Tolstoy

Overcoming strong resistance from the left and the right, Stolypin succeeded in bulldozing his main reforms through the Duma. The peasants were granted the legal right to leave the commune while retaining their strips of land as private property that they could farm or sell, to buy state land and receive subsidies for resettlement. The peasant commune was doomed. Stolypin wrote that twenty years of internal and external peace would transform Russia – this dream proved to be no less utopian than Tolstoy’s Georgism. He was assassinated by a terrorist in 1911 just as he was about to be dismissed from his post. With the revolution suppressed, the emperor no longer needed a ruthless reforming zealot at the helm of the government. Three years later, Russia entered the First World War, which ended in a new revolution, followed by civil war and later the annihilation of the Russian peasantry in the horrors of forced collectivization and the Gulag. Tolstoy was fortunate not to witness these developments, but he could read the writing on the wall.

Maria Schmidt: the exemplary Tolstoyan, 1886.

In the summer of 1908, when Tolstoy was writing ‘I Can’t Be Silent’, Chertkov returned to Russia after being amnestied, and settled nearby. Conversations with his old friend and favourite disciple gave a lot of comfort and support to the ageing writer. Staying at Chertkov’s house, Tolstoy used to wander around and talk to peasants without being recognized. At Yasnaya Polyana, where everyone knew him, this would have been impossible. He recorded the growing plight and hardening resentment of the poor, who started speaking about the educated elite as ‘parasites’, an epithet Tolstoy had never heard before. Use of this word did not bode well for the privileged; later it became a Bolshevik catchword that justified the extermination of the ruling classes. Some conversations, however, were different.

During one of his strolls, Tolstoy met a handsome, intelligent and hard-working young peasant who quickly acquiesced to the stranger’s admonitions about alcohol and promised to quit drinking. Tolstoy could hardly believe in such rapid success, but that evening the young peasant came by to borrow brochures about the evils of intoxication. With obvious satisfaction, he conveyed his mother’s gratitude to the old man. Proud of himself, he also confessed that he was already engaged to a nice girl.

Having congratulated the convert, Tolstoy asked a question ‘that always interested him when he dealt with the young nice people of our time’:

Forgive me for asking, but please, tell the truth, either don’t answer or tell the whole truth.

He looked at me calmly and attentively. ‘Why is not to say?’

Have you sinned with a woman?

Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered simply, ‘God save me, this has never happened.’

That is good, really good, I said. I am glad for you.

Tolstoy published an essay about this conversation under the title ‘From the Diary’. Several days later, he added a conclusion and a new title, ‘Grateful Soil’. The full text appeared in late July 1910:

What a wonderful soil to sow, what a receptive soil. What a terrible sin it is to throw there the seeds of lies, violence, drunkenness, debauchery . . . We, who have a chance to give back to this people at least a bit of what we have ceaselessly been taking from them, what do we give him in return? Aeroplanes, dreadnoughts, 30-storey buildings, gramophones, the cinematograph and all the useless stupidities that we call science and art. And most importantly, the example of empty, immoral, criminal life . . . ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!’ (CW, XXXVIII, pp. 35–6)

This turned out to be the last work he published in his lifetime.

Tolstoy was never a stubborn technophobe. He rode a bicycle, recorded his voice on a phonograph sent to him by Thomas Edison, used trains and put photographs on the walls of his room. He often said that there was nothing inherently good or bad about railways: the main problem was where and for what reason does one travel. Modernity in his eyes failed this litmus test. There was no hope for the peasant he encountered, even if the young man would be able to abstain from drinking and remain chaste. For decades, Tolstoy was fighting against the overwhelming force of history. He had never surrendered, but now he knew that it was time for him to leave the battlefield.

Tolstoy in 1908.

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A Fugitive Celebrity