The Great Sin — tolstoy.life research

An essay of 1905. Its Russian title is The Great Sin («Великий грех»); the English translation published the same year was titled A Great Iniquity. Source text: PSS Tom 36, pp. 206–230.

The essay argues that the deepest cause of the people’s poverty is not the political order but the private ownership of land, which it names a great sin, of the same kind as serfdom and slavery. It takes up Henry George’s case against landed property in full, presents the solution George worked out as the just way to hold land while states and taxes remain, and locates the real cure not in law but in a change of conscience.

The argument

It was written during the 1905 Revolution, when liberal, social-democrat and revolutionary alike were certain the answer was political. The essay’s answer is older and simpler: a man is born onto the earth and then denied the right to use it, and no constitution touches that. Two separate pieces — one against the intelligentsia who set themselves up as the people’s defenders, The People’s Defenders («Народные заступники»), and one on Henry George — were fused into a single charge.

Landed property is filed among the wrongs humanity has begun to outgrow — cannibalism, human sacrifice, judicial torture, serfdom, capital punishment, war — and named the next one due to fall. George’s case is taken up without reserve: private property in land is the surviving form of slavery, the root of poverty, and it is returned to again and again. What is granted only as a concession is the practical measure: given a state and its taxes — institutions the essay does not itself endorse — the solution George worked out is the least unjust way to hold land while they last. The change actually asked for is moral. As serfdom fell not by Alexander II’s decree but because private men came to feel its sin, so the land will be freed when those who profit from holding it wake to what they do.

Near the end the whole argument rests on one old peasant at Tula station who, hearing an article on the “agrarian question” read aloud, follows none of the jargon and grasps only that “the seizure of land by those who do not work it is a great sin” («захват земли неработающими людьми есть великий грех») — and crosses himself. The indictment then closes on the writer’s own class: “we, Russian parasites” («мы, русские паразиты»), fed by the labour of the people, will understand our sin.

The title

“The great sin” («Великий грех») is the essay’s own phrase, repeated in the text — in the narration and in the peasant’s mouth. The 1905 English translation, by Chertkov and Mayo, appeared in The Times of London as A Great Iniquity, and the shift is not small. “Iniquity” carries the wrong out of religion and into law and economy; “a” makes it one wrong among many where “the” made it the one. The English softens just what the essay means to press. Who settled on that title is a question worth its own note; the point here is that the title is already an interpretation — and a softening one.

The cut

The essay was finished in May 1905, and then made shorter. Chertkov came to Yasnaya Polyana that month and proposed a series of cuts; two whole chapters and parts of others came out. He agreed, and within days regretted it. The diary, 6 June: “I shortened The Great Sin, threw out much. I am sorry for it” («Сократил Великий Грех, выбросил многое. Мне жалко»). What was taken out was not lost — it survives among the discarded drafts printed in the PSS (Tom 36, pp. 464–475) — so the essay first written can be read against the one that went to print.

It was the sharper text. Where the published essay names the wrong, a cut passage holds it open as unfinished: land ownership “is a great sin… a sin not past but present, not temporary but constantly committed” («есть великий грех… и грех не прошедший, а настоящий, и не временный, а постоянно совершаемый»). And where the published essay holds that no law can put the wrong right, a cut passage turned that claim straight onto the very reforms 1905 was demanding: “no constitution will secure the people’s rights; a constitution will secure the right of the propertied, idle, parasitic classes — but not the rights of the people” («никакая конституция не обезпечит его прав. Конституция обезпечит право достаточных, праздных, паразитных сословий, но не права народа»).

One cut is the only one whose reason is on record. In proof, the essay’s whole opening — its introduction as first drafted — was given a title of Chertkov’s own, A Necessary Revolution («Необходимый переворот»), and published on its own in the émigré paper The Free Word («Свободное слово»). Within that piece a single paragraph was lifted out of the introduction and set apart at its end, under an editorial note. The paragraph: “the life of a people is shaped not by the outward forms imposed on it from without, but by the inner activity of individual persons” («жизнь народа слагается не вследствие внешних форм… а внутренней деятельностью отдельных личностей»). His reason, in a letter that July: it “stands in contradiction with all that precedes it” («стоит в противоречии со всем предыдущим») — against the essay’s insistence that the outward forms of land-holding must change. So the two things the essay holds together — that the real change is inward, and that the outward arrangement must go — were quietly parted, and the inward-only half set outside the essay.

The text that went to print is a shade gentler than the one written: the sin a little less absolute, the politics a little less bare. It was cut with his assent, and against his own regret.

The essay was softened a second time, in English, by the same hand. The 1905 translation Chertkov made with Mayo blunts the Russian where it is most exact. Three separate words — consequences, consequence, results («последствия», «следствием», «результатов») — all come out as one English “result”, and the opening sentence loses with them its warning of what will follow. The Mazzini epigraph that opens section VIII loses its “only” («лишь»): great changes that “always have been and will be only the consequence of great religious movements” («всегда были и будут лишь следствием великих религиозных движений») become “always have been and will be the result of,” the sole cause made one cause among several. The title had already done as much at the threshold. The same editor had, in What Is Art?, been the channel that carried the uncensored text past the Russian censor; here he cut the Russian himself, and then his English cut it again. The findings are set out in the fidelity report.

What the essay leaves open

Two questions the essay raises and does not settle. The solution George worked out is praised as elaborated “to such a degree of perfection” that no better, more just or more peaceful one could be devised — and the real remedy is held, in the same breath, to be a religious awakening rather than that practical measure. Praise and reservation stand together, unreconciled. And if landed property is to be undone, what becomes of money, which the essay leaves in place?