Tolstoy

As Tolstoy’s ideas matured, partly under the impact of all the new kindred spirits with whom he had come into contact, he had come to realise that there was one more important book he needed to write after What I Believe. The idea of non-resistance to violence was a central plank in his religious and ethical system, but he did not feel his exegesis had been sufficiently wide-ranging in works he had published thus far. As Jonas Stadling described it after conversations with Tolstoy at Begichevka, the new book was going to be ‘a kind of counterblast to the increasingly martial spirit of the time, that seemed almost personified in the young German Emperor’.¹⁶⁹ Tolstoy had thought initially that he would be able to write this new book quickly, and he already had a full draft two days after his return to Yasnaya Polyana, but he would not be satisfied with his manuscript for another year. The Kingdom of God Is Within You became his magnum opus amongst his religious writings, and its importance can be gauged by the fact that when Tolstoy finally finished it in May 1893, he had written over 13,000 manuscript pages – almost as many as he wrote for War and Peace, Anna Karenina and his later novel Resurrection put together.¹⁷⁰ It was also his most strident work yet.

Tolstoy begins by discussing some of the people who had felt moved to express their support after reading What I Believe by sending him letters, brochures and books. He also answers his critics, before going on to assert that neither believers nor non-believers understand Christianity, and that it is impossible to live as a true Christian in conventional society. Finally, he analyses contemporary attitudes to war and the meaning of conscription, and is categoric about the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity with any form of government. By the end of the book Tolstoy is no longer able to maintain the calm tone with which he begins his treatise. In his twelfth and incandescent last chapter he recounts meeting a battalion of 400 soldiers when he was on his way to Begichevka for the last time. Armed with rifles, they were travelling by special train to quell disturbances amongst the starving peasants whom he had been trying to help. For Tolstoy, this served only to confirm the validity of his ideas.¹⁷¹ In July 1892 Tolstoy set out a useful summary of the main ideas in his treatise in a letter to Charles Turner, an English teacher who had settled in Russia, and translated some of his works:

In this book there are three main ideas: 1) Christianity is not only worship of God and a doctrine on salvation, as it is understood by the majority of false Christians, but is first of all a different understanding of life, which changes the whole structure of human society; 2) from the time of the arrival of Christianity there have been two opposing tendencies: one that has been clarifying over time the new and genuine understanding of life which it has given people, and another which has been distorting Christianity and turning it into a pagan doctrine; in our time that contradiction has become particularly acute and is fully expressed in universal armament and general military conscription; 3) the necessary solution of this critical contradiction, which has been concealed by an absurd degree of hypocrisy in our time, can only happen through the sincere effort made by each individual person to coordinate one’s life and actions with those moral foundations one considers to be true, regardless of the demands of family, society and government.¹⁷²

In March 1893, as soon as The Kingdom of God Is Within You was finished, Tolstoy started despatching his manuscript abroad for translation and publication. French and Italian translations appeared at the end of 1893, and in a letter to Tolstoy of 29 October Nikolay Strakhov reported from St Petersburg that the religious censor had deemed the French translation of The Kingdom of God Is Within You to be the most harmful foreign book it had ever had occasion to ban from distribution in Russia. The French and Italian translations were followed in early 1894 by a German translation and three in English, two of which were published in London and one in America. One of these editions reached a twenty-five-year-old Indian lawyer working in South Africa called Mohandas Gandhi. He was already practising non-violence, but had succumbed to doubts which were completely and immediately erased when he read Tolstoy’s text. Gandhi was particularly struck by the fact that Tolstoy practised what he preached, and was not willing to compromise when it came to searching for the truth.¹⁷³