Source: https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-15.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 (2026-05-26), from the continuous Russian capture in ../ru/chapter-15.md.
The second famine winter, of 1892–1893, set in. The expanse of Russia visited this time by the failure of the harvest was considerably smaller, but, on the other hand, there where it fell to people to live through this hard time a second time, it was many times harder. Exhausted by the preceding bad years and brought to utter ruin in the previous, famine winter, they were no longer able to resist the natural calamity. And in those places where formerly we had fed people, we now treated them as patients and often buried mighty labourers — ploughmen — wasted to death. Submissively they bent their bowed backs and uncomplainingly died of the famine, of spotted typhus.
One of the characteristic features of spotted typhus is its contagiousness, which spreads not only to the population itself but also to the medical personnel. Doctors, medical assistants, and nurses fall ill. There were many such cases before my own eyes, both in the previous winter in Samara Province and, as I now had to encounter again, in this following winter in Ryazan Province. As soon as the epidemic of spotted typhus appeared near Begichevka, in the autumn of 1892, it became necessary to organize medical, and chiefly sanitary, assistance. It was necessary to find premises in which to set the sick apart, improving and easing the conditions of their life and strengthening their feeding. And the main thing was to find people ready to go selflessly into the struggle with the epidemic, with the manifest danger of disease and death. This was not so very easy.
In consequence of the diminished scale of the calamity, in consequence of the cooling of the former ardour of donations in Russian and foreign society, and in consequence of the striving of the governing classes to declare as quickly as possible that now “all is well,” the inflow of donations and the offer of personal services significantly weakened.
Lev Nikolaevich, worn out by the previous winter, was in need of rest; and besides, his presence, given the reduced scale of the relief, was not necessary. Having charged me with directing the work of relief, he of course continued to stand at the head of the affair, came to Begichevka, gave further instructions, and printed reports of our activity.
Besides the medical relief provided by the zemstvo during the typhus epidemic, relief was also organized with the participation of L. N. To nurse the sick under the direction of the zemstvo physician there came a relative of L. N.’s, the wife of Sofya Andreyevna’s brother, Marya Petrovna Bers. Unhappy in her family life, she went joyfully to this work, ready to give up her life, which she valued little.
She settled in a peasant hut, tended the sick, and soon caught spotted typhus herself. Then she was conveyed to Begichevka, to the Rayevskys’ house, and everything was done that could be done in the struggle with this disease. She could not hold out, and died — calmly, with full consciousness, with the sense of duty fulfilled — on 20 October 1892.
L. N. at this time could not come to Begichevka, and we exchanged letters. In them is clearly reflected the agitation he experienced as he followed this illness, with all its fluctuations and its fatal outcome. I shall give from these letters several characteristic extracts.
On receiving the first news of Marya Petrovna’s illness, L. N., among other things, wrote to me:
“Dear friend P., I have just received your letter to Tanya. We are all terribly agitated by M. P.’s illness and long to come to you, but they will not let us go. Tanya is not here; she is in Moscow. Masha, however, has not given up the hope of going to relieve you at the sick woman’s side. Please send news of M. P. You all forbid us to be anxious about you, but I cannot think of you without reproaches of conscience and a feeling of guilt before you, and chiefly — of love. Tell M. P. that we are all with her in soul, and shall be with her in body as soon as it is needed. Does she not need anything? But no doubt you will provide her with everything, beginning with a nurse.”
L. N., as usual, met with resistance in his family when he made ready to go. Such resistance arose with all questions when the carrying out of L. N.’s wish might threaten harm to his animal personality, and when the carrying out of that wish might bring him nearer to that ideal of personal life which L. N. always bore in his soul.
As always, so on this occasion too, L. N. had to endure spiritual torments. Here is what he writes to me, among other things, in the next letter, in reply to my notice that the illness had taken a threatening course:
“It is terribly hard, dear friend Pavel Ivanovich, that not one of us can come to relieve you in the care of M. P. Masha wished to go, met with terrible resistance, and I do not know how she will decide. It seems she is not going. By feeling I know, and she too knows, what ought to be done. Perhaps one ought to go, and to submit is weakness; but I cannot. And so, probably, neither can she. The money — you already know that it has been sent to you. I wrote to you at Klekotki. Do not reproach us, dear friend; we are with you in soul. For me… It is often hard for me. And from the fact that it is hard, I conclude that I am not doing what I ought.”
On receiving news of Marya Petrovna’s death, L. N. wrote to S. A., who was at that time in Moscow:
“Marya Petrovna’s death is very touching. The ancients used to say that those whom God loves die young. And her death is a good one. With everyone there will remain a feeling toward her; whereas, on every side, nothing but grief awaited her.”
In one of the following letters to S. A. he returns to this death and conveys the words of the nurse:
“She suddenly grew weak and felt that she was dying; she made one or two arrangements — to pay some small debts — and said: ‘Lord, forgive me my sins!’ And soon she lost consciousness. And in that state she remained for about a day. They buried her at Nikitskoye.”
The consciousness of the nearness of death did not leave her even during her illness. It often fell to me to go up to her bedside and render her small services. She always tried to send me off as quickly as possible, fearing that I should catch the infection, and as she did so she would say: “Why, for me it is easy to die, but your life is still needful to many.”
Probably people had need of her death.
L. N.’s inner life at that time, as always, went on with peculiar intensity.
In his intercourse with his fellow workers in the feeding of the famine-stricken, L. N. strove, besides giving them practical counsels for their work, to give them also explanations on the most essential questions of life. And they, of course, showered him with all manner of questions, from which L. N. had to choose the most important.
At the same time, among the workers who called themselves like-minded companions of L. N.’s, there became noticeable a dissatisfaction with that inner understanding of religious questions and of the teaching of Christ — an understanding founded on the higher reason — which was proper to Lev Nikolaevich and which he expressed in his writings. L. N. began to receive from these people long letters with questions both about “living faith” and about “the living Christ,” the substance of which lay in this: that they expressed a need for an outward, mystical worship of God.
L. N. answered these letters in detail, setting forth and explaining his views; and here is what, after one of such letters, he records in his diary:
“21 August 1892. During this time I received and wrote a long letter to N in answer to his — about the living Christ. In this letter the following needs to be corrected:
I wrote at first that ardent, glory-loving people, then wrote: some; but I ought to have written neither the one nor the other, but — people who have understood the teaching of Christ superficially, who have understood only its consequences, and not its very method, which consists in the establishment by each man of his own relation to God. For the attainment of these consequences they set up a society of people demanding of one another the performance of certain acts, and, besides this, they try themselves to frighten and to work upon their own feelings by various representations, so that the desired consequences may be fulfilled.”
A conversation occasioned by his book On Life leads him to the following reflections:
“I was talking with N. He says: ‘In your On Life it is said that if a man dies, then so it must be. That is not true.’
He is right. That is not true. One cannot say that. To the question, Why did this one die and that one live? — one cannot answer, just as one cannot answer the question, Where shall I be after death?
These are two questions: ‘where’ and ‘shall be,’ which ask in what relation I shall stand to space and time when I go out of my present condition, in which I cannot think outside of space and time — when I pass into that condition in which there can be neither space nor time.
But the question as to wherefore, why this one died and this one is alive, is just such a question, asking in what relation of causality stands a man who has gone out of the world of causality.”
And here are several severe thoughts about music, as a pleasure.
“We were talking about music.
I say again that this is a pleasure only a little higher in kind than food.
I do not wish to give offence to music, but I wish for clarity. And I cannot acknowledge what people maintain with such vagueness and indefiniteness — that music somehow elevates the soul.
The point is that it is not a moral matter. Not an immoral one, any more than eating is. Indifferent, but not moral. This is what I hold to. And if it is not a moral matter, then one’s whole attitude to it is quite a different one.
It is a pleasure of feeling, like the feeling (sens) of taste, of sight, of hearing. I agree that it is higher — that is, less lustful — than taste, than eating; but I hold to it that there is in it nothing moral, as people try to assure us there is.”
It is remarkable that a similar thought about music was recorded by L. N. thirty years before, in his diary of 1861, during his second journey abroad, when he was acquainting himself with the organization of school affairs in Western Europe. He then visited many outstanding men, and among others he visited the German writer Auerbach, whose works he greatly valued. After his meeting with him he recorded in his diary:
“Christianity — as the spirit of mankind, above which there is nothing. Reads verse delightfully. Of music, as ‘Pflichtloser Genuss.’ A turning, in his opinion, toward depravity… He is forty-nine years old. He is straight, young, believing; he does not sing denial.”
Such is the steadfastness of L. N.’s opinion about music. This view of his was, of course, reflected also in his criticism On Art, which he then began to write.
And in connection with this there arises in him a new question — about the meaning of life, about beauty, and about good.
With timidity, as if before the discovery of a new, unexpected treasure, he records in his diary:
“I thought for the first time — however dreadful it is to think and to say this:
The aim of life is just as little the reproduction of one’s own kind, the continuation of the race, as it is the service of people, and just as little the service of God.
To reproduce one’s own kind — wherefore? To serve people? But then, those whom we shall serve — what are they to do? To serve God? Can He not, without us, do what He needs? But He can have no need of anything.
If He bids us serve Him, it is only for our own good. Life can have no other aim than good, than joy. This aim alone — joy — is fully worthy of life.
Renunciation, the cross, the giving up of one’s life — all this is for joy. And joy there is, and it can be in no way disturbed, and it is constant.
And death — a passage to a new, unexplored, wholly new, other, great joy.
And there are sources of joy that are never exhausted: the beauty of nature, of animals, of people — never absent. In prison — the beauty of a ray of light, of a fly, of sounds. And the chief source: love — mine toward people and people’s toward me.
How good it would be if this were the truth. Can it really be that it is for me to disclose something new?
Beauty, joy merely as joy, independent of good, is repulsive. I made this clear to myself and gave it up. Good without beauty is tormenting. Only the union of the two — and not the union, but beauty as the crown of good.”
And, having recorded this profound thought, he modestly adds:
“It seems that this is like the truth.”
At this time Lev Nikolaevich was reading and translating the work of the Geneva writer Amiel, Le journal intime (Amiel’s Diary). Thinking about a preface to this translation, he records in his diary the following thought:
“To Amiel I should like to write a preface, in which to express that which he says in many places — that a new Christianity must take shape, that in the future there must be a religion. And meanwhile he himself lives, partly by Stoicism, partly by Buddhism, partly — and chiefly — by Christianity as he understands it, and with this he dies. He is, like a bourgeois gentilhomme fait de la religion, sans le savoir (*). It is hardly to be doubted that this is the very best. It has not the temptation of admiring itself.”
(* A genteel commoner who speaks of religion without himself noticing it. *)
This preface was written by him and printed, and the thought recorded in the diary is partly expressed in it, though in a somewhat different form.
And at the same time he records this thought:
“If I were given the choice — to people the earth with such saints as I can only imagine to myself, but on condition that there be no children; or with such people as there are now, but with fresh children constantly arriving from God — I should choose the latter.”
No less remarkable are the thoughts jotted down by him in his notebook of that time.
At this time the persecutions of certain friends of L. N.’s had begun; probably he expected some repressive measures against himself as well. For this reason such entries are met with in his little notebook:
“‘I have a most high command.’ But I have the most high command of all — to intercede for my brothers, to denounce the persecutors.
In order to make me hold my tongue, there are two means: one — to repent; the other — to kill or imprison me, not to let me out.
And indeed, only the first is possible, and therefore tell that man whom you call the Tsar that, instead of me, he should occupy himself with Schlüsselburg, with penal servitude, with the rods.”
At this time L. N. was working on his book The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Subjecting in this book the existing state structure to severe criticism, L. N. naturally thought about the destruction of the old forms and the building of new ones. And here he jots down such thoughts:
“‘Look how well we have painted up the house, decked it out with flags, with branches — and what have you got? Ditches, stones.’ But that is the foundation of the new building.”
After a visit from N. N. Strakhov, his gentle, contemplatively disposed friend, L. N. records:
“A conversation with Strakhov. He wishes to find good in everything. That is excellent. But let him beware of finding good that which we are called to destroy!”
Having freed himself from the direct direction of the work of feeding the famine-stricken, which had greatly burdened him, L. N. began to feel a certain emptiness of life, which had been temporarily filled by this complicated affair. Of this he wrote to me, among other things, on returning to Yasnaya Polyana from Begichevka:
“With us all is as of old. We live alone, and it is good; but for the poor girls it is empty. How true is that which He said: ‘But whoever wishes to know whether I speak the truth, let him try.’ One has only to make the trial — however poor, however clumsy, however impure, mingled with human glory, the life of service may be — for life afterwards to lose for one all its — as the English say — bouquet, its charm. And this I am experiencing with joy myself, and I see it in the girls. I have my writing, which a little — in the measure in which I believe in its usefulness — helps me to live; and there is the weakness of old age; but for the young, and for those who have tasted of the spring of the living water, there is no more returning to the semblance of life. And this is what is precious, and at this I rejoice. I received a letter from a revolutionary, probably from Petersburg — a good one. He writes that for the Saratov mutiny people are to be executed, and that I ought to write an appeal. Of course, I shall not write it; but all such reminders help me to believe that I may be of use. With my writing I am making progress, but I have still not finished it.”
The “writing” that then filled the life of Lev Nikolaevich was The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a book on which he laboured two years; it has its own history, and it is of great significance in the life of Lev N., and therefore we shall dwell upon it somewhat longer.
Several years had already passed since the publication of L. N.’s book What I Believe, which had cast into the world a new understanding of Christianity, and had shown the world the necessity of resolving the dilemma: either to renounce the name of Christians, or to acknowledge that violence is incompatible with Christianity. Many years had passed since the publication of the second book too, and the world had still not resolved this dilemma. But the seeds of the new understanding of life had been cast into the world, and they must yield their shoots. And the first sprouts had already come up, and had produced confusion among a mankind entangled in the thickets of a half-religious, half-scientific, half-egoistically-animal world-view, which expressed itself in the general struggle for the sweet slice of the pie.
As soon as What I Believe began to be circulated in the Old World and the New, there began to flow in to L. N., from all corners of the world, both favourable and unfavourable opinions of it.
“One of the first responses to my book,” says L. N. in his new work, “were letters from American Quakers. In these letters, expressing their sympathy with my views as to the unlawfulness for a Christian of all violence and war, the Quakers communicated to me details about their so-called sect, which for more than two hundred years has professed in practice the teaching of Christ about non-resistance to evil by violence, and has not employed, and does not now employ, weapons for the defence of itself.”
A great joy for L. N. and his like-minded companions was the receipt of two remarkable documents sent from America: both documents had been written fifty years before, had lain forgotten, and had been called back to life by the appearance of L. N.’s work What I Believe.
The first document was the “Proclamation of the principles adopted by the members of a society founded for the establishment of universal peace among men.”
This proclamation had been drawn up and published by Garrison and his friends in Boston in 1838. The basis of this proclamation was the thought that all violence, whether personal or governmental, is contrary to the teaching of Christ, and that peace can be established only by the way of the renunciation of the use of any violence whatsoever.
The other document, of approximately the same epoch, was the “Catechism of Non-Resistance,” drawn up by the then already aged Adin Ballou, with whom L. N. still managed to enter into written communication. In this catechism, in the form of questions and answers, were affirmed the same principles of the incompatibility of violence in any form whatsoever with the Christian teaching.
Remarkable are the last question and answer of this catechism; we shall give them here in full:
Q. — But when only a few shall act thus, what will become of them?
A. — If even only one man were to act thus, while all the rest agreed to crucify him, would it not be more glorious for him to die in the triumph of non-resisting love, praying for his enemies, than to live wearing the crown of a Caesar, bespattered with the blood of the slain? But whether it be one man or thousands of men, firmly resolved not to resist evil with evil — it is all the same, whether among enlightened or among savage neighbours — they are far more secure from violence than those who rely upon violence. The robber, the murderer, the deceiver will sooner leave them in peace than those who resist with weapons. Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword; but those who seek peace, who behave in a friendly, inoffensive way, who forget and forgive offences, for the most part enjoy peace, or, if they die, they die blessed.
Thus, if all were to observe the commandment of non-resistance, then, obviously, there would be neither offence nor evildoing. If such people were the majority, then they would establish a rule of love and goodwill even over those who gave offence, never resisting evil with evil, never employing violence. If such people were a fairly numerous minority, then they would produce upon society so corrective a moral action that every cruel punishment would be abolished, and violence and enmity would be replaced by peace and love. If they were only a small minority, then it would rarely experience anything worse than the contempt of the world, while the world, meanwhile, without itself feeling it and without being grateful for it, would continually be growing wiser and better from this secret influence. And if, in the very worst case, some of the members of the minority were persecuted to death, then these, having perished for the truth, would leave behind them their teaching, already hallowed by their martyr’s blood.
Peace be with all who seek peace, and may all-conquering love be the imperishable inheritance of every soul that voluntarily submits to the law of Christ:
“Resist not evil with violence.”
These two documents were the very ones that L. N. laid at the foundation of his new work.
At first L. N. proposed to devote it to two questions, both alike determining his new world-outlook: ecclesiastical deceit and state violence. But in the course of his work his attention was wholly absorbed by the second question, to which the abundance of accumulating material also contributed.
Soon there were communicated to him facts of refusal of state violence that had taken place among the Russian sectarians — the Molokans, the Doukhobors, and others — among the Mennonites who had settled in Russia, and among the sect of the Nazarenes living in Austria; he received the remarkable work of the Czech Peter Chelčický, and so forth.
Since the basic instrument of state violence was the army, with the universal military conscription introduced in all the states of continental Europe, L. N. concentrated his attention precisely on this question. And at first he spoke of his new writing thus: “I am writing about universal military conscription.” But the work broadened out, and the events of life gave new material for his critical analysis, and his writing grew into an extensive treatise, presenting a powerful criticism of the existing order of life and giving wide, far-reaching perspectives of new human relations.
At first L. N. answers his critics, dividing them into the secular and the ecclesiastical, and then he passes on to the depiction of the wretchedness of the life of contemporary mankind, filled to overflowing with insoluble contradictions. This is, perhaps, the most powerful, the most irresistible part of the book. We shall give from this description several extracts, in order to convey a notion of its character and force.
“Whatever the cast of thought and the degree of education of a man of our time, be he an educated liberal of whatever shade, be he a philosopher of whatever persuasion, be he a scientific man, an economist of whatever school, be he an uneducated, even a religious man of whatever confession — every man of our time knows that all people have an equal right to life and to the goods of the world, that some people are no better and no worse than others, that all people are equal. Everyone knows this beyond all doubt, firmly, with his whole being; and at the same time he not only sees around him the division of all people into two castes — the one toiling, oppressed, in want, suffering; the other idle, oppressing, luxuriating, and making merry — he not only sees it, but, willing or unwilling, on the one side or the other takes part in this division of people, which his consciousness rejects, and he cannot but suffer from the consciousness of such a contradiction and of his participation in it.
The ancient slave knew that he was a slave by nature; but our worker, feeling himself a slave, knows that he ought not to be a slave, and therefore experiences the torments of Tantalus, eternally desiring and not receiving that which not only might, but ought to, be. The sufferings of the working classes, arising from the contradiction between what is and what ought to be, are increased tenfold by the envy and the hatred that flow from this consciousness.
The worker of our time, even if his work were much lighter than the work of the ancient slave, even if he had obtained an eight-hour day and a wage of three dollars a day, would not cease to suffer; because, working at things which he will not use, working not for himself of his own free will, but from need, for the caprice of luxuriating and idle people in general and, in particular, for the gain of one rich man, the owner of a factory or a works, he knows that all this is taking place in a world in which there is acknowledged not only the scientific proposition that work alone is wealth, that the use of the labour of others is an injustice, an unlawfulness punished by the laws — but in a world in which there is professed the teaching of Christ, according to which we are all brothers, and the dignity and the merit of a man lie only in serving one’s neighbour, and not in making use of him.
In a still greater contradiction and suffering lives the man of the so-called educated class.
He knows that all the habits in which he has been brought up, the deprivation of which would be a torment to him — all of them can be satisfied only by the tormenting, often ruinous labour of the oppressed workers, that is, by the most evident, gross violation of those very principles of Christianity, of humanity, of justice, even of science (I mean the demands of political economy), which he professes. He professes the principles of brotherhood, humanity, justice, science, and not only lives in such a way that that oppression of the workers which he denies is necessary to him, but in such a way that his whole life is a making use of this oppression; and not only does he live thus, but he directs his activity to the maintenance of this order of things, directly contrary to that in which he believes.
The ruling classes are, in their relation to the workers, in the position of one who has pinned his adversary down beneath him and is holding him there, not letting him go — not so much because he does not wish to let him go, as because he knows that he need only let the pinned man loose for an instant to be himself at once cut down, because the pinned man is embittered and there is a knife in his hand. And therefore, whether they be sensitive or not sensitive, our rich classes cannot enjoy those goods which they have stolen from the poor, as the ancients did, who believed in their right. Their whole life and all their pleasures are poisoned by reproaches of conscience or by fears.”
L. N. points further to the indefinite, insincere attitude of educated people toward these contradictions.
Some, the less sensitive, try to conceal them; others, the more sensitive, see them, speak of them, but give them the character of a tragic, fatal inevitability.
The knot of all these contradictions is the universal military conscription, which demands of a man, in the name of the state, the renunciation of all that is dear to him. And indeed, universal military conscription is needful for the maintenance of the state with its violence; but is the state itself needful? The sacrifices brought by a man in its name are so great that it might, perhaps, be more advantageous for a man not to submit to it. But the state does not let its victims go, and from of old subjects them to itself: by intimidation, by bribery, by hypnotization, and by the application of military force.
The way out of this contradiction lies in the acceptance of the Christian teaching:
“A man need only understand his life as Christianity teaches him to understand it — that is, understand that his life belongs not to him, not to his personality, not to his family or to the state, but to Him who sent him into life; understand that he must therefore fulfil, not the law of his personality, of his family, or of the state, but the in-no-way-limited law of Him from whom he proceeded — in order not only to feel himself wholly free of all human power, but even to cease to see this power as anything that can constrain anyone.
A man need only understand that the aim of his life is the fulfilment of the law of God, in order that this law, replacing for him all other laws and subjecting him to itself, should by this very subjection deprive, in his eyes, all human laws of their obligatoriness and constraining force.
The Christian frees himself from all human power by the fact that he regards, for his own life and the life of others, the divine law of love, implanted in the soul of every man and brought to consciousness by Christ, as the sole guide of his own life and the life of other people.
The Christian may be subjected to outward violence, may be deprived of bodily freedom, may be unfree from his own passions (he who commits sin is the slave of sin), but he cannot be unfree in the sense of being constrained by any danger or by any outward threat to the commission of an act contrary to his consciousness.
The profession of Christianity, the refusal to carry out state violence, is the most terrible instrument of the destruction of the state, and the people who stand in power know this and employ all their forces to prevent the manifestation of these — as yet still isolated — flashes of Christian disobedience.
But the matter has already gone too far: governments already feel their own defencelessness and weakness, and the people of Christian consciousness, awakening from their drowsiness, are already beginning to feel their strength.
‘I came to cast fire upon the earth,’ said Christ, ‘and how I am straitened until it be kindled.’
And this fire is beginning to be kindled.
The spreading of the Christian truths that deny violence is accomplished not only by the one inner, gradual way of the knowledge of the truth, through the prophetic feeling of the consciousness of the vanity of power and the renunciation of it by separate individuals, but also by another, outward way, by which great masses of people lower in development at once accept the new truth simply through their trust in the first. Such is the force of public consciousness.
And this absorption by people of the Christian world-view transforms power itself, with which, independently of its will and unconsciously to it, a process of Christianization takes place.
Something takes place with people resembling the process of boiling. All the people of the majority of the non-Christian understanding of life strive after power and struggle, attaining it. In this struggle the most cruel, the coarsest, the least Christian elements of society, doing violence to the most meek, the most sensitive to good, the most Christian people, come forth by means of their violence into the upper strata of society. And here, over the people who find themselves in this position, there is accomplished that which Christ foretold when he said: ‘Woe unto you that are rich, that are full, that are renowned’; there is accomplished this — that people, being in power and in possession of the consequences of power, glory and wealth, on reaching the various aims that they themselves have set themselves in their desires, come to know the vanity of them and return to that position from which they came forth.
Thus, on every side, mankind is pushed onto the path of salvation.
The condition of Christian mankind, with its fortresses, cannons, dynamites, rifles, prisons, gallows, churches, factories, custom-houses, palaces, is indeed terrible; but, after all, neither the fortresses, nor the cannons, nor the rifles fire of themselves at anyone, prisons do not lock anyone up of themselves, gallows hang no one, churches deceive no one of themselves, custom-houses detain nothing, palaces and factories do not build themselves and do not maintain themselves — all this is done by people. But if people understand that this need not be done, then none of this will be.
And people are already beginning to understand this. If not all yet understand it, then the foremost people understand it, those whom the rest follow. And to cease to understand what the foremost people have once understood, they can in no way do. And as for understanding what the foremost have understood, the rest of the people not only can, but inevitably must.
So that the prophecy that the time will come when all people shall be taught of God, shall unlearn how to make war, shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks — that is, translating it into our language, when all the prisons, fortresses, barracks, palaces, churches shall stand empty, and all the gallows, rifles, cannons shall remain without use — is no longer a dream, but a definite new form of life, toward which, with ever-increasing rapidity, mankind is approaching.
But when will this be?
Eighteen hundred years ago Christ answered this question, saying that the end of the present age — that is, of the pagan ordering of the world — would come when (Matt. XXIV, 3–28) the calamities of people should increase to the utmost degree, and at the same time the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God — that is, the possibility of a new, non-violent ordering of life — should be preached throughout all the earth.
‘But of that day and hour knoweth no man, save my Father only’ (Matt. XXIV, 36) — Christ says there at once. For it may come at any time, at any minute, and at the very time when we do not expect it.
All that we can know is this: what we, who make up mankind, ought to do and ought not to do in order that this Kingdom of God should come. And this we all know. And it is enough that each man should begin to do what we ought to do, and cease to do what we ought not to do — it is enough that each one of us should live by all that light which is in us — for that promised Kingdom of God, toward which the heart of every man is drawn, to come at once.”
With this there ended this remarkable book, when there befell L. N. one of those fateful events which so many times in his life had opened to him new paths of life or had confirmed and consolidated a decision once taken. Such, in his childhood, had been the death of his father and his grandmother, his clash with his French tutor; then his sudden journey to the Caucasus, which carried him out of the Moscow restaurants, with their cards and gypsies, into the bosom of wild Caucasian nature. Such, for him, had been the Sevastopol horrors, the death penalty in Paris, the death of his beloved brother, and so forth; the Moscow census and his acquaintance with the poverty of the city. And of the same character was the event that took place on 9 September 1892.
I was living at that time in Begichevka, managing Lev Nikolaevich’s soup-kitchens. We were awaiting his arrival for the drawing up of the report for the past year, and on the appointed day, 9 September, he arrived. I met him on the porch of the house, as he was getting out of the carriage. The joyful smile of welcome froze upon my lips when I saw the agitated, distressed, gloomy face of L. N. I understood that something had happened on the way.
And no sooner had L. N. come into the house than, without sitting down, with agitation and with tears in his voice, he began to tell of what had happened to him. Since he himself related this in his book, we give that account here:
“At one of the railway stations the train on which I was travelling met an extra train conveying, under the presidency of the governor, troops with rifles, ball cartridges, and rods for the torturing and killing of these very same famine-stricken peasants.
The torturing of people with rods for the carrying out of the decision of the authorities — notwithstanding that corporal punishment was abolished by law thirty years ago — has of late been more and more frequently applied in Russia.
I had heard of this, had even read in the newspapers of the dreadful tortures of which the Nizhny Novgorod governor Baranov seemed to boast, of the tortures that had taken place at Chernigov, Tambov, Saratov, Astrakhan, Orel; but not once had it fallen to me, as now, to see people in the process of carrying out these deeds.
And here I saw with my own eyes Russians, good people imbued with the Christian spirit, with rifles and rods, going to kill and to torture their hungry brothers.
The occasion on which they were travelling was the following:
On one of the estates of a wealthy landowner the peasants had grown a wood on a pasture held in common with the landlord (they had grown it, that is, had protected it during its growth) and had always made use of it, and therefore considered this wood their own, or at least common property; but the owner, having appropriated this wood to himself, began to fell it. The peasants lodged a complaint. The judge of the first instance wrongly (I say wrongly on the word of the prosecutor and the governor, men who ought to know the case) decided the case in favour of the landlord. All the higher instances, including the senate, though they might have seen that the case had been decided wrongly, confirmed the decision, and the wood was adjudged to the landlord. The landlord began to fell the wood, but the peasants, unable to believe that such an evident injustice could be committed against them by the highest authority, did not submit to the decision and drove off the workmen sent to fell the wood, declaring that the wood belonged to them and that they would go as far as the Tsar, but would not let the wood be felled.
The matter was reported to Petersburg, whence the governor was instructed to carry the decision of the court into execution. The governor demanded troops. And here the soldiers, armed with rifles and bayonets, with ball cartridges, and besides this with a supply of rods, specially prepared for this occasion and conveyed in one of the carriages, are travelling to carry into execution this decision of the highest authority.”
This same thing, only with the addition of the personal, immediate feeling of the dreadful impression just experienced, L. N. related to us on arriving at Begichevka. This occurrence compelled him once more to work over the conclusion of his book and to affirm with new force the proposition that the well-being of the ruling class is founded upon the violence and the suffering of the oppressed working majority. The way out of this situation lies in the acknowledgment of the truth. In this alone is a man free. And once a man has acknowledged the truth and has become conscious of his own deviation from it, then he becomes the leaven which, though in small quantity, transforms the whole mass of the dough into a wholly different shape. By this acknowledgment of the truth alone is the Kingdom of God established on earth, both within and without man.
This book produced a powerful impression on all who became acquainted with it. Expressing the anti-state side of the teaching of Christ, it called forth great alarm in administrative circles. To print it in Russia they did not even attempt. People began to copy it out and to hectograph it. At this time typewriters came into use, which eased both the copying itself and the reading of the manuscript.
And this book began rapidly to spread, while in its tracks went the gendarmes with their searches, not seldom ending in the arrests and exiles of those who kept and circulated this book. A strict order was issued for the non-admission of foreign editions of this book, whether in Russian or in foreign languages.
Since in this book L. N. touches upon the contemporary state structure and treats it most negatively, it was precisely this book that served as the first occasion for the ranking of L. N. among the anarchists — which, with certain reservations, must be acknowledged as just. But the point is that the anarchism of L. N. — that is, the denial of violent organization and of power — is founded on the proposition that a man who has been spiritually reborn, who has assimilated the Christian teaching, bears within himself the inviolable divine law of love and truth, which has no further need of reinforcement by human laws. And therefore the anarchism of L. N. leads not to disorder and licence, but to the highest moral order and to a righteous life.
The persecutions of L. N.’s like-minded companions had begun even before the appearance of this book, as soon as L. N.’s views began to penetrate among the people. This partly coincided with the famine years. In the first place, the noise raised by the Moskovskie Vedomosti (Moscow Gazette) around the name of L. N., on the occasion of extracts from his articles on the famine in which the Moskovskie Vedomosti discerned a summons to mutiny, compelled the administration to be on its guard. There reached Lev Nikolaevich rumours from court circles that, when the Emperor Alexander III had ordered the case concerning Lev Nikolaevich to be stopped, with the words “je ne veux pas ajouter à sa gloire la couronne d’un martyre” (*), Pobedonostsev had declared that, since the sovereign had ordered that Tolstoy himself not be touched, the measure of struggle against him would be the persecution of his like-minded companions and friends.
(* I do not wish to add to his glory the crown of a martyr. *)
And indeed, these persecutions began. During the famine years L. N.’s authority among the people grew greatly; the sectarians began to lend an ear to his words and very easily to assimilate his anti-church and anti-state views. [1]
Notwithstanding that the publications of Posrednik (The Intermediary) passed the strict government censorship, by their negative quality alone — by their ignoring of ecclesiastical authority — they acquired in the eyes of the sectarians a considerable influence; while by their preaching of love and mutual aid, of sobriety and industry, and by their exposition of ancient Greek wisdom, they acquired among the sectarians of various persuasions a considerable authority, and in some already established sects they called forth a new, rationalistic moral-social current. Such were the movement of the Young Stundists and that of the Doukhobor-Fasters; to this latter movement we shall return again, when we come to set forth the events connected with the Doukhobor movement.
One of the centres of the Young Stundist movement was Kharkov Province, chiefly the Sumy district. One of the active figures of this movement was Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich Khilkov.
A pupil of the Corps of Pages, a Life-Guards Hussar and afterwards a Cossack officer, a wealthy landowner, he had taken a heroic part in the Russo-Turkish war in Transcaucasia. Partly his acquaintance with the Doukhobors, partly a personal encounter face to face with death, compelled Khilkov to ponder a different solution of the moral-social questions of life; he left the service and settled on his farmstead in Kharkov Province. A great quantity of land that had come to him from his mother he handed over to the landless peasants, remaining with a single peasant allotment of seven desyatinas, on which he farmed for several years. His authority among the local peasants was, of course, extraordinarily great. Having received from abroad L. N.’s work What I Believe in French, and having seen from this book the kinship of his own views with those of L. N. Tolstoy, he became an active spreader of them among the people. Apostasies from the church became more and more frequent around him, and he was soon accused of spreading Stundism — that is, of a sect recognized by the synod as especially harmful.
He was exiled to the Caucasus and settled at first at Bashkichet, in Tiflis Province. There he of course at once attracted the attention of the local sectarians — the Doukhobors and the Molokans — and, accused of propaganda of Tolstoyism among them, was moved to the remote Armeno-Tatar town of Nukha, in Elizavetpol Province.
Khilkov’s exile to the Caucasus from his estate in Kharkov Province took place in January 1892.
Of course, the administration did not confine itself to the exile of Khilkov alone. In October of that same year L. N. wrote to me, among other things:
“Letters have been received from Mit. Alyokhin and from Bodyansky. They were both seized and put in prison and conveyed under escort: Mitr. to Poltava, it seems, while Bodyansky is still sitting, I think, in Belgorod, and is being exiled for five years to Transcaucasia. For what, I do not know. I answered them at Poltava.”
Then there followed the deportations of Dudchenko, Prokopenko, and others.
Of course, by these movings-about of people sincerely devoted to their idea, the unwise government only sowed the very ideas with which it was struggling, and strengthened the authority of those who bore them. Such is the immutable law of the struggle with that which is “of God,” as the evangelical Nicodemus once said.
And this scattering by the government of the new ideas led to important events in the life of the Russian people.