---
layer: reference
lastUpdated: 2026-05-27
tags: [research, biryukov, doukhobors]
lang: en
source: tolstoy-lit.ru
volume: 3
chapter: 5
---

# Volume III, Chapter 5. Bondarev. Palkin. Déroulède

**Source:** https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-5.htm

**Text:** P. I. Biryukov (1860–1931), *Biography of L. N. Tolstoy*, Volume III. Public domain.
**Translation:** English translation for the tolstoy.life research platform (2026-05-27), from the continuous Russian capture in [`../ru/chapter-05.md`](../ru/chapter-05.md).

---

In his book *What Then Must We Do?* L. N. writes:

> "In the whole of my life two thinking Russian men have had a great moral influence upon me and have enriched my thought and made clear to me my world-outlook. These men were not Russian poets, scholars, or preachers; they were two remarkable men living now, both of them peasants: Sutaev and Bondarev."

Both these remarkable men are now dead. Of Sutaev we have already spoken briefly in the second volume; now we shall speak of Bondarev, since L. N.'s communication with him took place chiefly in 1886 — that is, at the very time up to which we have carried the description of L. N.'s life.

The first to speak in print of Bondarev — though without naming him — was Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky, in his article printed in *Russkaya Mysl* (Russian Thought) in 1884. It appears that L. N. too learned of Bondarev from this article, since in his first letter to Bondarev, speaking of the receipt of a manuscript containing an abridged exposition of his teaching, L. N. adds: "I had earlier read extracts from it, and they struck me very much by the fact that all this is true and well expressed."

Then, in the same letter, L. N. goes on to make this appraisal of Bondarev's work:

> "Having read the manuscript," he says, "I rejoiced still more. What you say is holy truth, and what you have said will not be lost in vain: it will expose the falsehood of men. I shall strive to make clear the very same thing. It is the business of men who have come to know the truth to speak it to men and to fulfil it; but whether they will get to see the fruits of their labours, that God alone knows."

What, then, is this teaching that so struck L. N. by its significance and its closeness to his own views?

In his preface to Bondarev's work L. N. sets forth the essence of his teaching thus.

> "The fundamental thought of this work is as follows: in all the affairs of life, what matters is not what precisely it is good and needful to know, but rather which of all the good and needful things or deeds is of the very first importance, which of the second, which of the third, and so on.
>
> If this is important in the affairs of life, then it is all the more important in the matter of faith, which determines the obligations of man.
>
> Bondarev maintains that the misfortune and the evil of men have come about because they have recognized as their religious obligations many empty and harmful ordinances, while they have forgotten and concealed from themselves and from others their chief, first, indubitable obligation, expressed in the first chapter of Holy Scripture: 'in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread.'
>
> This law seems very simple and long since known, but this is only how it seems; and to convince oneself of the contrary, one need only look around oneself. Men not only do not recognize this law, but recognize the very opposite. Men, by their faith — all of them, from the highest personage to the lowest — strive not to fulfil this law, but to evade its fulfilment. And it is precisely to the clarification of the eternity and unalterability of this law, and of the inevitability of the calamities that flow from departure from it, that the above-named work of Bondarev is devoted.
>
> This law, in Bondarev's opinion, must be recognized as a religious law — like the keeping of the Sabbath and circumcision among the Jews, like the observance of the sacrament of the fast among church Christians, like the fivefold prayer among the Mohammedans. Bondarev says in one place that if only men were to recognize bread labour as their religious obligation, then no private, particular occupations could hinder them from fulfilling this work, just as no special occupations can hinder church-going people from observing the idleness of their festivals. Of festivals there are reckoned more than eighty, whereas for the performance of bread work there are needed, by Bondarev's reckoning, only forty days.
>
> '…Bread labour,' says Bondarev, 'is the medicine that saves mankind. Let men but recognize this primordial law as a divine and unalterable law, let each recognize bread labour as his inalterable obligation — that is, that he should feed himself by his own labours — and men will all be united in faith in one God, in love of one another, and the calamities that oppress men will be done away with.
>
> …All will work and eat the bread of their own labours, and bread and the articles of first necessity will no longer be articles of purchase and sale.' What will be then?
>
> What will be is that there will be no men perishing from want. If one man, through unhappy chances, does not earn enough food for himself and his family, then another man, who through favourable conditions has acquired a surplus, will give to the man who has none — will give precisely because he has nowhere else to put his bread, since it is not for sale.
>
> There will be none of that turn of human thought by which all the efforts of the human mind are directed not toward easing the labour of the toiling, but toward easing and adorning the idleness of the idle. The participation of all in bread labour, and the recognition of it as the head of all the affairs of men, accomplishes what a man would accomplish with a cart that foolish men were dragging along upside down on its wheels, if he were to turn it over and set it on its wheels. He will not break the cart, and it will go along easily.
>
> But our life, with its contempt and denial of bread labour, and our corrections of this false life — this is a cart that we are dragging along upside down. And all our corrections of this matter will be of no avail until we turn the cart over and set it as it ought to stand.
>
> Such," concludes L. N., "is Bondarev's thought, which I fully share."

And so, between these men, standing by their outward position at two different poles of culture and civilization, there began a spiritual communion, an attraction toward each other, and an active correspondence was struck up.

Bondarev was a Sabbatarian sectarian, exiled to a settlement for the propaganda of his teaching from the territory of the Don Host to Siberia, to the town of Minusinsk, and there he died not long after his acquaintance with L. N.

In his next letter to Bondarev L. N. says, among other things:

> "From your article I have drawn much that is useful to men, and in the book which I am writing on this same subject I mentioned that I drew this not from the learned and wise of this world, but from the peasant T. M. Bondarev. My own writing about this I should very much wish to send you, but for five years now everything that I write on this subject — on the fact that we all live not according to the law of God — all this is forbidden by the government, and my little books are forbidden and burned. This is the very reason why I wrote to you that you trouble yourself in vain in submitting petitions to the Minister of the Interior and to the Sovereign. Both the Sovereign and the ministers forbid even speaking of this. For this very reason I am afraid that they will not permit your preaching to be printed in full and entire either, but only with abridgements. I should wish to read your large work, but if this is so difficult, then what is to be done."

At last L. N. received also Bondarev's large manuscript, his complete work with additions.

> "Both the one and the other," writes L. N. in his third letter, "are very good and entirely true. I shall strive both to preserve the manuscript and to circulate it in copies or in print, as far as is possible."

And indeed, many of L. N.'s friends began to copy out this work and carried it all over Russia.

In the same letter L. N. endeavours to make clear to Bondarev that, besides the concealment of the primordial law "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread," there is yet another cause for the existence of evil among men. This cause is also a concealment, but of another law: "ye have been told: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say — resist not evil." In L. N.'s opinion, these two laws support one another, and were there no violence, men could not free themselves from bread labour and compel others to work for them.

Since Bondarev belonged to the sect of Sabbatarians — that is, founded his views upon the books of the Old Testament — he, with the irritation and disdain proper to Old Testament sectarians, regarded the New Testament, and held the preaching of love to be hypocrisy. On this ground a friendly polemic arose between him and L. N. To one of Bondarev's letters, in which he endeavours to convince L. N. of the fruitlessness of the preaching of love, L. N. answered, among other things, thus:

> "I have received your manuscript and read it. I agree with you that love without labour is mere deceit and is dead; but one cannot say that labour includes love within itself. Animals labour, getting themselves food, but they have no love: they fight and destroy one another. And so it is with man too."

In this letter, written already in 1887, L. N. endeavours to persuade Bondarev, who complains that his work cannot be printed.

> "Human thought," says L. N., "is important precisely in this — that it acts upon men freely, and not by force, and no one can compel men to think thus and not otherwise, and at the same time no one can stop and hold back human thought, if it is true, thought with God. Truth will have its way, and sooner or later all men will recognize it. Only, just as it was not given to Moses to enter into the promised land, so too it is not given to men to see the fruits of their labours. But one must sow and rejoice that God has brought one to be a sower of the good seed, which will spring up to the benefit of men, if it be good. So it is with your thoughts too. They have already served many to their benefit, have disclosed falsehood to them and pointed out the truth, and, as one candle is lit from another, they will go on being lit further. Only that man can grieve that my thoughts are not recognized at once, now, and are not carried into execution, who does not believe in the truth of his thoughts; but if one believes that my thoughts are thought with God, then there is not the slightest care: God will have His way, and will find servants for Himself, and knows His own time; and for me there remains only to rejoice that it has befallen me to be a servant of the eternal work of God."

One of the earlier of L. N.'s letters to Bondarev is devoted to a compact exposition of Henry George's theory of the single tax and the nationalization of the land. At the close of the letter L. N. sums up in such brief theses all the advantages of adopting and carrying into life the theory of Henry George.

> "1) The advantage of such an arrangement will consist in this — that there will be no men deprived of the possibility of making use of the land.
>
> 2) In this — that there will be no idle men possessing lands and compelling others to work for them in exchange for the right to make use of the land.
>
> 3) In this — that the land will be in the hands of those who work it, and not of those who do not work.
>
> 4) In this — that the people, having the possibility of working on the land, will cease to be enslaved as labourers in the factories, the mills, and as servants in the towns, and will disperse to the villages.
>
> 5) In this — that there will no longer be any overseers and tax-collectors at the factories, the mills, the establishments, and the customs-houses, but only collectors of the payment for the land, which cannot be stolen and from which it is easiest of all to collect a levy.
>
> 6) Chiefly, non-working men will be delivered from the sin of making use of the labour of others — a sin of which they are often not even guilty, since from childhood they have been brought up in idleness and do not know how to work — and from a still greater sin: all the falsehood and the shifts to justify themselves in this sin; and working men will be delivered from the temptation and the sin of envy, of condemnation, and of bitterness against non-working men, and one of the causes of the division of men will be done away with."

L. N. sets forth interesting thoughts about Bondarev in the article about him which he wrote for the dictionary of S. A. Vengerov:

> "How strange and wild," L. N. begins this article thus, "would it have seemed to the refinedly educated Romans of the first century, had someone told them that the half-literate, obscure, confused, often unintelligible letters of a wandering Jew to his friends and disciples would be read a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times more, would be more widely circulated and would influence men more, than all the poems, odes, elegies, and elegant epistles of the writers of that time so beloved by refined people. And yet this is what happened with the epistles of Paul. In just the same way, strange and wild must my present assertion seem to men — that the work of Bondarev, over whose naïveté we smile indulgently from the height of our mental grandeur, will outlive all those works which are described in this lexicon, and will produce a greater influence upon men than all of them taken together. And yet I am sure that it will be so."

Further on he cites a thought of the English philosopher Ruskin, expressing in other words the very thing the intelligent Russian peasant says:

> "It is physically impossible, that the true religious knowledge or pure morality should exist among our classes of a nation, who do not work with their hands their bread" — that is, that it is physically impossible for true religious knowledge or pure morality to exist among those classes of a people who do not earn their bread with their own hands.

And in conclusion L. N. again endeavours, in compact but vivid form, to express Bondarev's thought:

> "Bondarev does not demand," says L. N., "that everyone should without fail put on bast shoes and go to walk behind the plough — though he does say that this would be desirable and would free men sunk in luxury from the errors that torment them (and indeed, nothing but good would come even from the exact fulfilment of even this demand) — but Bondarev says that every man ought to consider the obligation of physical labour, of direct participation in those labours the fruits of which he enjoys, his first, chief, indubitable obligation, and that men ought to be brought up in such a consciousness of this obligation. And I cannot imagine in what way an honest and thinking man could fail to agree with this."

Continuing to take an interest in Bondarev's work, L. N. attempts to have it printed in Russia. He offered it to the journal *Russkaya Starina* (Russian Antiquity) and for this purpose wrote a preface to it. In a letter to me he writes the following about Bondarev:

> "…Yesterday, after your departure, I resolved to have Bondarev's article translated into English, and I proposed to our governess that she do this. She will do it well, with Masha's help. Bondarev has gripped me very much indeed, and I cannot recover from the impression I have received."

And further:

> "I have written to Bondarev, and I write that you will send him the manuscript. It would be a good thing if you were to write him a word. Might one propose to Sibiryakov that he print Bondarev abroad? The trouble of the printing I would take upon myself; together with *Life* the proofs could be sent to Grot."

I, of course, made haste to carry out L. N.'s commission, sent off the manuscript to Bondarev, and wrote him a letter. But for some reason this letter did not reach him; it was returned to me from the post "on account of the addressee not being found," and so I never managed to enter into communication with him.

L. N.'s family had this winter to live through a great grief. The little son Alyosha died.

Here is how L. N. describes this death in a letter to Chertkov:

> "I know only that the death of a child, which formerly seemed to me incomprehensible and cruel, now seems to me both reasonable and good. We have all been united by this death still more lovingly and closely than before. Thank you for your letter. I was expecting precisely it. May God help you to do our common work, the work of love — by word, by deed, by abstinence, by effort: here he did not speak a single bad word, did not do what would have been worse; here he overcame timidity and false shame and did and said what was needful, what was good, what was loving — all tiny, imperceptible acts and words, but it is precisely from these mustard seeds that there grows up this tree of love, which covers the whole world with its branches. It is this very work that may God help us to do with friends, with enemies, with strangers, in moments of the highest and of the very lowest mood. And it will be well with us, and well with all." (*)

(* Chertkov Archive. *)

At the same time L. N. continued to correspond with friends. In the spring he wrote to N. N. Ge from Moscow:

> "I have worked very much. All that is to go into the twelfth volume, and so I did not leave. From your letter I see that the bog of everyday life is sucking you in. Hold on, my dear fellow, as I too strive to hold on, knowing firmly that my work (and yours is the same) is to further the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, by making clear its laws, but doing this in no other way than by a good life — and a good life consists in loving relations with all men. Up to now God helps me in the latter. May He help you too. It appears to me that our work is the clarification of the truth; it is sometimes dead, all bristling, and does not enter into men, and before the expression of the truth one must dispose men by love to receive it."

Filled with such thoughts, L. N. strove in his personal life to follow them, and he did indeed live a simple working life, as far as his strength allowed him and as far as it was possible, without violating love, to change the circumstances of his life.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge was at this time absorbed in an immense religious-artistic labour. He had conceived the idea of illustrating L. N.'s new works. Among the first he made illustrations to the story *What Men Live By*. These illustrations were issued as an album of phototypes by the photographer Panov. L. N. took much trouble over this edition. He liked the illustrations both for the mood conveyed in them and for the mastery of the work. The issue of these illustrations belongs precisely to this time — that is, to the spring of 1886.

City life, always hard for him, became, in the spring, with the awakening of nature, more than he could bear. This time he conceived the idea of making use of his complete freedom and walked on foot from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana. On the eve of it he wrote of this to Chertkov:

> "I do not know what I shall do on the way and in the country, but I hope that I shall serve in some way for my keep. I am going, chiefly, in order to rest from the luxurious life and at least a little to take part in the real one."

And so on 1 April, in the evening, he set out with a knapsack on his shoulders from Moscow through the Serpukhov Gate, in the company of two young friends: Nik. Nik. Ge, the artist's son, and Mikhail Alexandrovich Stakhovich.

The very departure did not pass off without a curious circumstance. Stakhovich, having unexpectedly for himself made up his mind to accompany L. N., had not brought a passport with him. They recalled some law permitting two noblemen to attest the identity of a third, and so L. N. with his own hand wrote out an attestation of identity for Stakhovich, signed it, and N. N. countersigned it. And with this passport, issued to him by L. N., he set off on the road. (*)

(* The original of this passport is in the Tolstoy Museum in Petersburg. *)

For L. N. such a walking-trip had, besides its significance of principle — the satisfying of his own needs by himself — also the significance of a broad and free communion with the people; this communion always gave spiritual nourishment to him himself and was afterwards reflected in artistic images that became the possession of all mankind.

This time he could observe with joy the fruits of his labours in the field of popular literature. They fell in along the road with an old wanderer, who walked on with them and recounted to them *What Men Live By*. He had learned this story from someone who had read the little books of *Posrednik* (The Intermediary). Thus this legend, which had come out of the people, returned to it in the artistic reworking of a literary genius, and once more became the people's own.

On this walk fate threw in his way yet another man, who gave him the material for a new, powerful literary work, known under the title *Nikolai Palkin*. We borrow the description of this meeting from his notebook. This description has preserved all the freshness of the immediate impression, and in this respect is far stronger than its literary working-up. In this original version it has not yet appeared in print.

> "We spent the night with a soldier of ninety-five. He had served still under Alexander I and under Nicholas.
>
> 'Well, do you want to die?'
>
> 'To die! How I want to. Before I was afraid, but now I ask God only one thing — only to take communion, to repent, for there are many sins.'
>
> 'And what are these sins?'
>
> 'How, what are they? The service was not the same then. The soldiers praised Alexander, he was merciful. But it fell to me to serve under Nikolai Palkin. So the soldiers nicknamed him. What there was then!' he began, growing animated. 'Then for fifty strokes they did not even take down your breeches, but a hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred — they flogged you to death. It was a matter of being under orders. They give you a hundred and fifty strokes for a soldier (the retired soldier had been a non-commissioned officer, and is now a candidate), and you give him two hundred. Yours will not heal from it, and you torment him — there is the sin. What there was then! The non-commissioned officers used to kill men to death. With the butt of a musket or with the fist. He dies, and the authorities say: "He died by the power of God."'
>
> He began to tell of 'running the gauntlet.' A well-known, dreadful business. They lead the man along, with bayonets behind, and all strike, and behind the ranks the officers walk and beat them. 'Strike harder.' A bloody cushion all down the back, and death in fearful torments. All are executioners, and no one is guilty. The candidate said outright that he does not consider himself guilty. 'It was by the court.'
>
> And I fell to recalling all that I know from history of the cruelties of man in Russian history, of the cruelties of this Christian, meek, kind, Russian man. For my fortune or my misfortune, I know much. Always, in history and in reality: 'How does he cry out?', 'When?'. I was drawn toward these cruelties; I read of them, heard of them, or saw them, and grew numb, pondering, listening, peering into them. What I needed from them, I did not know, but I unavoidably needed to know, to hear, to see this.
>
> Ivan the Terrible drowns, burns, executes, like a beast. This is terrible. But for some reason the deeds of Ivan the Terrible are for me something far off, like a fable. I did not see all this. So too with the times of the Interregnum, of Michael, of Alexei. But with Peter, the so-called 'Great,' there began for me something new, living. I felt, reading the horrors of this raging, drunken, dissolute beast, that this concerns me, that all his deeds oblige me to something. At first this was a feeling of malice, then of contempt, a desire to humiliate him, but all this was not the thing. My feeling demanded something of me, as it demands something when in your presence they outrage and torment one near to you, and not only one near, but simply a man. But I could not find and understand what my feeling demanded of me, and why I was drawn to this. Still stronger was this feeling of indignation and loathing in me at reading the horrors of his harlot, who became tsaritsa, still stronger at reading the horrors of Anna Ioannovna, of Elizabeth, and strongest and most repulsive of all at the description of the life of a true harlot and of all the baseness of those who surrounded her — a baseness that to this day remains in their descendants. Then Paul (he for some reason did not arouse indignation in me). Then the parricide, and the régime of Arakcheyev, and the rods, the rods… The beating to death of living men by living men, by Christians, deceived by their leaders. And then Nikolai Palkin, whom I came upon, together with his dreadful deeds.
>
> Only very recently did I understand at last what I needed in these horrors, why they drew me. Why I felt myself answerable in them, and what I needed to do with regard to them. I need to tear from men's eyes the veil that hides from them their human obligations and calls them to the service of the devil. They will not wish to see, the devil will overpower me, and they — the majority of them — will go on serving the devil and ruining their own souls and the souls of their brothers; but at least someone will see: the seed will be cast, and it will grow, because it is the seed of God. The matter goes thus: men have gone astray, the servants of the devil — that is, of evil and of deceit. For the attainment of their small, paltry ends — like Nero's burning of Rome — they commit dreadful cruelties upon their own. Cruel, erring men there have always been, but the men of whose cruelty I speak have made their cruelty hereditary: what one does, the other does not renounce. Time — that is, the general condition of men — goes forward, and it turns out that what Peter did, Catherine cannot do; what Paul did, Alexander cannot do. What Alexander did, Palkin cannot do, his son cannot do. But if he cannot do the same, he can do something else. And he does this something else, and he and his helpers say: why recall the old and embitter the people? And the old is forgotten — not only forgotten, but erased from memory; and the new, just the same as the old, begins to be done and is done, as long as it is possible, in the same form; when it becomes impossible, it changes its form, but remains the same.
>
> The evil lies in this — that men suppose that it can be necessary to do evil to men, that there can be no sin in doing evil to men, that from evil to men there can come good to men.
>
> There was a Nikolai Palkin — why recall it? Only an old soldier before his death recalled it. Why irritate the people? In just the same way they spoke under Palkin about Alexander and the régime of Arakcheyev: why recall it? In just the same way about Paul; in just the same way about Catherine and the enserfment of Little Russia, and the murder of her husband and of Ivan, and all her horrors. In just the same way about Biron, Elizabeth, Peter. And so now they speak of serfdom, of all those who have been hanged (among them boys of fifteen and sixteen). In just the same way they will speak of the present time too, of those killed in solitary confinements and in fortresses by the thousand, and in just the same way of the people dying of starvation. Why recall it? How, why recall it? If I have had a malignant or dangerous illness, and I have been cured and have become clean of it, I shall always recall it with joy. I shall not recall it only when I am ill and still just as ill, and even worse, and want to deceive myself. And we are ill, and just as ill. The illness has changed its form, but the illness is still the same, only it is called otherwise. *Le roi est mort, vive le roi!* (*) The illness with which we are ill is the murder of men. But murder is not yet everything. Let Palkin have tormented, killed ten times more men — if only he did this himself, and did not corrupt men by compelling them to kill and torment men, giving them rewards for this and assuring them from youth to old age, from school to church, that herein lies a man's holy obligation.
>
> (* The king is dead. Long live the king! *)
>
> We know about the tortures, about all their horror and senselessness, and we know that the men who tortured men were intelligent, learned men for that time. And yet such men could not see that absurdity, intelligible now to a small child — that by the rack one may darken the mind, but one cannot find out the truth. And deeds such as torture have always been among men — slavery, the Inquisition, and others. Such deeds do not die out. How, then, of those deeds of our own time, whose senselessness and cruelty will be just as evident to our descendants as torture is to us? They exist; one need only think about them, seek them out, and not say that we shall not recall the old. If we recall the old and look it straight in the face, then our new, present-day violence too will be disclosed. It will be disclosed because it is all, and always, one and the same. The tormenting and the murder of men for the benefit of men.
>
> If we only call by its true name the stakes, the brandings, the tortures, the headsmen's blocks, the service men, the musketeers, the recruit levies, then we shall find the true name also for the prisons, the jails, the armies with universal military conscription, the prosecutors, the gendarmes. If it is clear to us that it is absurd and cruel to cut off heads on the block by a court with torture, then it is just as clear that it is scarcely less absurd and cruel to hang men or to put them in solitary confinement, equal to or worse than death, by the court of prosecutors and class representatives. If it was absurd and cruel to execute, then it is still more absurd to put men in jail in order to corrupt them; if it is absurd and cruel to catch peasants for soldiers and brand them on the hands, then it is the same with universal military conscription. If the *oprichniki* are absurd and cruel, then it is the same with the guards and the army.
>
> Eighteen hundred and eighty years ago, to the Pharisees' question whether to give tribute, it was said: to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. If men had any faith at all, they would consider at least something due to God, and first of all that which the God-man taught — not to kill. Then deceit would cease to be possible. To the tsar or to anyone else — everything you like, the believing man would say, but not that which is contrary to the will of God. And the tormenting and the murder of men are contrary to the will of God.
>
> Come to your senses, men! For one might excuse oneself by ignorance and fall into deceit so long as the will of God was unknown, so long as the deceit was not understood; but as soon as it is expressed clearly, one can no longer excuse oneself. After this your acts take on a different, dreadful significance. A man who does not wish to be an animal cannot wear a uniform and the instruments of murder; he cannot go to a court of law, cannot levy soldiers, set up prisons and courts. Come to your senses, men!" (*)

(* Archive of Princess M. L. Obolenskaya. Moscow. Tolstoy Museum. *)

This time L. N. did not stay long at Yasnaya. He returned to Moscow, but from there he was drawn once more to Yasnaya; by the end of April he was already there. In the first days of May he writes from there to his wife:

> "At home there were many peasants who had come. There was always poverty, but all these years it has gone on increasing, and this present year it has reached an appalling pitch, troubling the rich willy-nilly. It is impossible to eat in peace even one's kasha and a roll with tea, when you know that here, close by, people I know — children (like the children of the Chilikins at Telyatinki, the wet-nurse Matryona of Tanya's Sanya) — are lying down to sleep without the bread which they ask for and which there is not. And there are many such. To say nothing of the oats for seed, the lack of which torments these people for the future — that is, plainly shows them that in the future too, if the field is not sown and is given over to another, there is nothing to expect but the sale of the last that they have and the beggar's bag. One can shut one's eyes, as one can shut the eyes of him who is rolling into the abyss; but the situation is not changed thereby. Formerly they complained of poverty, but rarely, only some of them; and now it is one general groan. On the road, in the tavern, in the church, in the houses — all speak of one thing: of want. You will ask: what is to be done? How is one to help? To help with seed, with bread, those who ask — that one can; but it is not help, it is a drop in the sea, and besides, this help in itself denies itself: you have given to one, to three… why then not to twenty, not to a thousand, to a million? What, then, is to be done? How is one to help? Only by one thing: by a good life. All the evil comes not from the rich having taken from the poor; that is a small part of the cause. The cause is that men — rich, and middling, and poor — live in a beastly way, each for himself, each treading upon the other. From this come grief and poverty. The salvation from this lies only in this — in bringing into one's own life, and thereby into the life of other men, something else: respect for all men, love for them, care for others, and the greatest possible renunciation of oneself, of one's egoistic joys. I am not instilling this into you or preaching to you; I am only writing what I think — thinking aloud with you. I know, and you know, and everyone knows, that human evil will be done away with by men, that herein alone — herein lies the task of men, the meaning of life. Men will work, and do work, for this; why then shall we not work for this very thing? I would have written my fill to you about this, but for some reason it seems to me that you, reading this, will say some cruel word, and my hand will not go on to write further."

All through the summer of 1886 L. N. worked intensely at the heavy field labour of the peasant. He took upon himself the *tyaglo* (work-allotment) of the widow Anisya Kopylova, harnessed himself to this work, and saw it through to the end. His closest helpers were his daughters Tatyana and Marya Lvovna, especially the latter, who in her energy and skill at work yielded nothing to the peasant girls. Sometimes L. N.'s joyousness and vigour drew his family too into the work. Yasnaya Polyana was at that time full of young energies. In both the related families, the Tolstoys and the Kuzminskys, young men and girls were growing up; comrades and friends came to visit them, and things were in full swing. When the whole of this troop fell upon the work, then, notwithstanding their lack of skill, there resulted a tangible effect from the application of all this mighty force, for the most part idly going to waste. But the enthusiasm passed, and L. N. was again left alone with Marya Lvovna.

Here are two extracts from L. N.'s letter to his friend the artist N. N. Ge, in which his mood and the course of his thoughts that summer are vividly expressed:

> 21 May 1886. "I rejoice that all is well with you and that you are at your work. It is good both to mow and to plough, but there is nothing better than to go and work for the benefit of men in one's own accustomed craft. Kolichka I met only in passing, but even so a most joyful impression remained. We have been four days here, having moved. Work we have up to the throat, and I am happy in this. I flatter myself with the thought that the work is not useless: both the continuation of the article *Ch. N. D.* and the writing for cheap popular editions. And of works begun, but to which my hands have not yet come round, there is an abyss. Look at our life, at mine, at yours (I think of yours, with all your family and the various moods in it), and your head will go round, if you think of how all this will be, how all this is better to arrange. But one need only look at the same thing, only with the thought: how am I now to do the very best for A, for B, for C, with whom I come into contact — and all the difficulties that had presented themselves are torn apart like a cobweb, and everything falls into place such as one would not even have devised. Seek ye the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all the rest shall be added unto you; but we begin to seek that which ought to be added. And that we shall not find for anything (because it is given only as a consequence of the seeking of the Kingdom), and we shall lose the Kingdom too. You know this, but how good it would be if all knew that this is not a fine phrase, but the most practical of practical rules. I already know it by experience. You go on doing things *au jour le jour* (*) — if only not to do anything bad — bang! there grows up such a big, good, kind, pleasant matter!"

(* From day to day. *)

In the next letter, of 18 July, he writes:

> "Yesterday I received your joyful letter, dear friend — joyful because it is from you, and because you write about your works. Most of all I like, by its conception, 'The Temptation,' then 'Behold the Saviour of the World,' but, of course, one can judge and understand only on seeing them. It would be a great joy for all of us — everyone loves you — and, chiefly, for me, if you were to come to us; but I dare not and will not summon you, tear you away, disturb the course of your work — that is, of your life. With us all was, on the outward side, quite well, but a fortnight ago S. A. fell ill with an inflammation of the bladder and is now lying in bed. (*) She is much better, and lies down only out of precaution. The children, beginning with Seryozha and ending with Masha, have done much peasant work in the field. Seryozha and Tanya have now gone off for a few days to the Olsufyevs; the rest continue, and I with them, according to my strength. On the inward side all is well. One despairs often, grieves, and all in vain. If there is in the soul, and when there is, a spring of living water, then it does not stop and cannot but produce consequences; only one must not count upon them, must not look back. I am writing nothing, but I do not cease to live, thank God — that is, to move in that direction in which I, like you, joyfully feel that I am always with you."

(* "She overstrained herself at the haymaking." Note of S. A. on looking through the manuscript. *)

In the summer of this same year Yasnaya Polyana was visited by an interesting foreign guest; notwithstanding the importance which he ascribed to his mission, all the Yasnaya Polyana inhabitants received him with a certain comic astonishment. This was the Frenchman Paul Déroulède.

L. N. himself tells of this visit in his article "Christianity and Patriotism," written on the occasion of the conclusion of the Franco-Russian alliance and the Toulon festivities.

> "Some four years ago (*) — the first swallow of the Toulon spring — a certain well-known French agitator in favour of war with Germany came to Russia to prepare the Franco-Russian alliance, and was with us in the country. He came to us at the time when we were working at the haymaking. During lunch, having returned home, we made the acquaintance of our guest, and he at once recounted to us how he had made war, had been a prisoner, had escaped from captivity, and how he had taken upon himself a patriotic vow, of which he was evidently proud: not to cease agitating for war against Germany until the wholeness and glory of France should be restored.
>
> (* It should have been said 'eight,' since the article 'Christianity and Patriotism' was written by L. N. in 1894. In the last period of his life L. N. often forgot the exact dates of events. *)
>
> In our circle all our guest's convictions as to how necessary an alliance of Russia with France was for the restoration of France's former boundaries and her might and glory, and for securing us against the noxious designs of Germany, met with no success.
>
> After the conversation with him we went to the haymaking, and there he, hoping to find among the people more sympathy with his ideas, asked me to translate to an already old, sickly peasant, with an enormous hernia and yet enduring at his labour — our comrade at the work, the peasant Prokofy — his plan of action upon the Germans, consisting in this: that from two sides one should squeeze the German who finds himself in the middle between the Russians and the French. The Frenchman acted this out before Prokofy, touching with his white fingers, from both sides, Prokofy's sweaty hempen shirt. I remember the good-naturedly mocking astonishment of Prokofy, when I explained to him the Frenchman's words and gesture. The proposal to squeeze the German from two sides Prokofy evidently took for a joke, not allowing the thought that a grown and learned man could, with a calm spirit and in a sober state, speak of its being desirable to make war.
>
> 'Well, suppose we squeeze him on both sides,' he said, answering with a joke, as he thought, to a joke, 'he will have nowhere to go — we must give him too some room.'
>
> I translated this answer to my guest.
>
> '*Dites-lui que nous aimons les Russes*' (tell him that we love the Russians), he said.
>
> These words struck Prokofy, evidently, more than the proposal to squeeze the German, and called forth a certain feeling of suspicion.
>
> 'And whose man will he be?' Prokofy asked me, pointing with his head distrustfully at my guest.
>
> I said that he was a Frenchman, a rich man.
>
> 'And what is he here for, on what business?' Prokofy asked.
>
> When I had explained to him that he had come in order to rouse the Russians to an alliance with France in the event of a war with the Germans, Prokofy evidently remained entirely dissatisfied, and, turning to the women who were sitting by the haycock, in a stern voice, which involuntarily expressed the feelings called forth in him by this conversation, called out to them to come and rake the unraked hay into the cocks.
>
> 'Now then, you crows, you have dozed off. Come on! It is time to squeeze the German here. There is still the mowing not cleared, and it looks as though they will go to squeeze him from Wednesday on,' he said.
>
> And then, as though afraid of offending the visiting stranger by such a remark, he added, baring in a kindly smile his teeth eaten away to half their length:
>
> 'Better come and work with us, and send the German too. And when we have done our work, we will go and make merry. And we will take the German too. They are just such people.'
>
> And, having said this, Prokofy drew his sinewy hand out of the fork of the pitchfork on which he was leaning, swung it onto his shoulder, and went off to the women.
>
> '*Oh, le brave homme!*' (Oh, the good man!) exclaimed the courteous Frenchman, laughing.
>
> And on this he then concluded his diplomatic mission to the Russian people."

The autumn of this year brought new and important events — both grief and joy — the consequences of which no one could foresee, and yet they found an echo throughout the whole educated world.