Giuseppe Mazzini

Giuseppe Mazzini (Джузеппе Мадзини) was an Italian revolutionary and writer. The Great Sin (1905) quotes him once, at the opening of chapter VIII.

The line reads: “Great social transformations,” says Mazzini, “always have been and will be only the consequence of great religious movements.”¹

What the religious movement is

The paragraphs that follow say what the movement is. It “consists in loosing that great sin which has long tormented and divided men not in Russia alone, but in the whole world”.² The sin can be loosed “neither by political reforms, nor by socialist projects in the future, nor by revolutions in the present, and still less by philanthropic donations or by governmental institutions for the purchase and distribution of lands to the peasants”.³ What is needed is “only the consciousness of their sin by all the men who commit it or take part in it, and the desire to be rid of it”.⁴

The source

The PSS commentary calls the line a paraphrased and shortened quotation from a Posrednik pamphlet, Selected Thoughts of Joseph Mazzini, compiled by L. P. Nikiforov (Moscow, 1905), p. 5, thought 4.⁵ The wording, “only” included, is therefore Tolstoy’s own rendering.

The 1905 English translation, A Great Iniquity, leaves out “only”: “always have been and will be the result of great religious movements”.⁶

Open questions

• Life dates, birthplace and identifiers need an authority file.
• The anthology’s own wording of thought 4, to set beside the paraphrase.
• Whether the writings of these years (A Circle of Reading, the essays of 1904–08) quote Mazzini or other political figures more often than before, and how their words are handled. A question for a dive.

Dive provenance

• 1905-the-great-sin (2026-06-30) — the chapter VIII epigraph (E11) and the PSS commentary on its source. Routed to a page of his own in the entity steer, 2026-08-12; revised from Johan’s notes on 2026-10-02 (the dive’s annotations.md).