INTRODUCTION A few words of introduction are necessary to this volume which contains two of Tolstoy's most remarkable works. Between the com- pletion of Anna Karenina, early in 1877, and the resumption of his literary activity in the year 1885, with his popular Tales, Tolstoy devoted himself to religious reflection and to a close study of the Gospels and of dogmatic theology, although the latter subject repelled him. Apart from a retranslation of the Gospels with volu- minous notes, the works contained in this volume are almost the only literary productions of his that appeared between his forty-ninth and fifty-seventh year, that is to say during eight of the years when his powers were at their zenith.
An attempt was made in Russia to suppress these books, but they circulated clandestinely in large numbers, in hectographed copies and also in volumes printed abroad and smuggled into the country. No adequate reply to Tolstoy's terrific onslaughts upon Church and State was produced, and within a single genera- tion, in Russia, the institutions he attacked had crumbled to dust.
These books have been translated into all civilized languages and have circulated far and wide. Nowhere have the views they contain vii viii INTRODUCTION been adequately met. On the contrary they have now become part of the air we breathe, and denunciations of Church and State, Parlia- mentary Government, Capital, and the institu- tion of property, as well as of law and order in general, have become commonplaces of democratic rhetoric, and those institutions are now in some circles regarded as offences against the people which must be swept away as a prelude to putting down the mighty from their seats, exalting the humble and meek, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away.
This is serious. Our country has not yet fol- lowed in the footsteps of Russia; but here too an axe is laid to the root of the tree. What is said in these works cannot be suppressed. It is closely interwoven with some of the pro- foundest truths humanity has known; but it will deal a death-blow to civilization unless it can be answered. Lowell well exclaimed: — 4 Oh Lord, ef folks wuz made so’s’t they could see The begnet pint there is in an idee!
Ten times the danger in ’em th’ is in steel; They run your soul thru an’ you never feel, But crawl about an’ seem to think you’re livin’, Poor shells o’ men, nut wuth the Lord’s forgivin’. Till you come bunt ag’in a real live feet.
An’ go to pieces when you’d ough’ to ect! ’ If the attack here made with power, con- viction, and effect on the moral basis of our lives cannot be, and is not, convincingly met, it will continue to eat into the piles on which our house stands, and the whole order of our lives will crumble into dust.
INTRODUCTION IX A Confession is the most important of Tol- stoy's autobiographical writings, and will bear comparison with the most famous confessions ever penned; but it soon merges into a con- sideration not of his own life alone, but of the life of us all, to whom a brief existence ending in inevitable death has been given here on earth.
The conclusion he reaches in A Confession and in What I Believe is, that personal life lived for one's own ends must be a misfortune to any one intelligent enough to realize the facts; and that the only escape is to merge one's life with that of £ the son of man ': that light of reason manifest in all humanity, which will endure when our personal career is ended* and which comes to us from a source outside ourselves. Life, he says, is a blessing for him who identifies himself with the son of man in the task of establishing the kingdom of God on earth, here and now. Life is a misfortune for him who seeks his personal welfare, which is an effort death inevitably baffles.
Tolstoy's interpretation of Christ's five com- mandments differs very considerably from that given by the Church, but he introduces an intelligible and practical meaning which most of us had never suspected till we read his books. Together with much that is profoundly true and immensely important, Tolstoy announces and elaborates a theory of non-resistance, and expounds a doctrine of Christian anarchy which, plausibly as he states it, appears to be as gross a superstition as any of those he attacks.
If his theory be right (and he claims for it INTRODUCTION x Christ’s authority), nothing can, and nothing should, save our industrial, political, or national existence from destruction. If, however, Christ meant this, it is curious that he did not say more than a few words of doubtful inter- pretation on a matter to wdiich Tolstoy found it necessary during the last thirty years of his life to devote many volumes. Furthermore, Christ said, ‘ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s/ bidding us apparently give some recognition to government to which, Tolstoy says, we should give none. Even if Christ meant what Tolstoy says he meant, if this conflicts, as it does, with our reason, conscience, and experience of life, it is still our duty to reject it. For, as Tolstoy has said, we select Christ’s teaching and prefer it to other teach- ings, and call it divine, because it appears to us reasonable and true. If, on the contrary, after being interpreted by Tolstoy, it turns out to be plainly false, we must reject Christ’s authority rather than substitute falsehood for truth.
We here face a stupendous problem, which only those who read this book carefully are likely to realize fully.
The amazing fact remains that Tolstoy’s works, which have had a large circulation the world over, greatly influencing the lives of many people, and paving the way for a complete vZ collapse of the fabric of Russian civilization, have, on this practical and crucial matter of non-resistance, met with no adequate reply. At any rate I know of no reasoned rejoinder to INTRODUCTION xi INTRODUCTION xi ? Tolstoy's teaching that shows a proper appre- ciation of the force of his case and meets it on its merits, except the reply to him given in the second volume of my Life of Tolstoy (and briefly recapitulated in the subsequently pub- lished Leo Tolstoy ). Here again a strange thing happened: Just as Tolstoy's doctrine had been : before the world for over twenty years practi- cally unanswered, so my reply, when it appeared, passed uncontroverted. The book itself was well received and appreciatively noticed, but that crucial matter, the repudiation of the theory of Non-Resistance, was nowhere men- tioned. Even Tolstoy himself (who was by that time probably too old, too ill, and too harassed to deal with the matter) only said, when I submitted it to him, 4 1 have only one thing to object to in your article, namely, that it destroys my position at its roots/ I never knew what he really meant by that remark, but I feel sure he was too wedded to the view he had made his own to be seriously shaken by anything that could be said against it.
It is usually no part of a translator's duty to controvert the views expressed in a work he is translating, especially if he be in cordial agree- ment with a great part of it. But having devoted attention to this particular problem for over thirty years, and having, by close participation in the Tolstoy colony at Purleigh, and in the Dukhobor migration to Canada, as well as by personal intercourse with Tolstoy, his family, and his associates, had unusual opportunities of studying the effects of his INTRODUCTION xii teaching in actual life, I feel that it would hardly be fair to the reader to pass by the per- plexities I have myself lived through without an occasional foot-note to indicate the joints in Tolstoy's armour.
Finally, I venture to suggest that if our spiritual leaders believe that there is anything in our existing institutions, industrial, legal, religious, or national, which deserves defence, they should produce some reply to the indict- ment formulated in this book, and should publish the same before it is here, as already in Russia, too late to save the existing structure.
I do not suggest a wholesale acceptance or repudiation of Tolstoy's teaching, the difficult but necessary task is to discriminate and to sift the wheat from the chaff.
Aylmer Maude.
Great Baddow, Chelmsford, November 6, 1920.
NOTE Foot-notes by Tolstoy are marked L. T.; for the rest the translator is responsible.
A CONFESSION AN INTRODUCTION TO A CRITICISM OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY AND AN EXAMINATION OF THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING.
B A CONFESSION I I was baptized and brought up in the Ortho- dox Christian faith. I was taught it in child- hood and throughout my boyhood and youth. But when I left the second course of the university, at the age of eighteen, I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.
Judging by certain memories, I never seri- ously believed, but merely relied on what I was taught and on what was professed by the grown-up people around me; and that reliance was very unstable.
I remember that before I was eleven, a boy, Vladimir Milyutin (long since dead), a grammar school pupil, visited us one Sunday and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school. The discovery was that there is no God, and that all we are taught about Him is a mere invention (this was in 1838). I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news. They called me to their council, and we all, I remember, became very animated, and accepted the news as some* thing very interesting and quite possible.
I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitry, who was then at the university, 3 4 A CONFESSION suddenly, in the passionate way natural to him, devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the Church services, to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, we all — even our elders— unceasingly held him up to ridicule and called him, for some unknown reason, ‘ Noah/ I remember that Musin-Pushkin, the then curator of Kazan University, when inviting us to a dance at his house, ironically persuaded my brother (who was declining the invitation) by the argument that even David danced before the Ark. I sympathized with these jokes made by my elders, and drew from them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too seriously. I remember also that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and that his raillery, far from shocking me, amused me very much.
My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our level of education. In most cases, I think, it happens thus: a man lives like everybody else, on the basis of prin- ciples not merely having nothing in common with religious doctrine, but generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a part in life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a man’s own life he never has to reckon with it. Religious doctrine is professed far away from life and independently of it. If it is encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from life.
By a man’s life and conduct, then as now, it was and is quite impossible to judge whether A CONFESSION 5 he is a believer or not. If there be a difference between a man who publicly professes Orthodoxy and: one who denies it, the difference is not in favour of the former. Then, as now, the public profession and confession of Orthodoxy was chiefly met with among people who were dull and cruel, and who considered themselves very important. Ability, honesty, reliability, good* nature and moral conduct were more often met with among unbelievers.
The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church; and Government officials must produce certificates of having received Communion. But a man of our circle, who has finished his education and is not in the Government service, may even now (and formerly it was still easier for him to do so) live for ten or twenty years without once remem- bering that he is living among Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the Orthodox Christian Church.
So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually under the in- fluence of knowledge and experience of life which conflict with it, and a man very often lives on, imagining that he still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in childhood, whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.
S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to believe. When he was already twenty-six, he once, on a hunting expedition, at the place where they 6 A CONFESSION put up for the night, by habit retained since childhood, knelt down in the evening to pray. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: ‘ So you still do that? * They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received Communion, or gone to church for thirty years. And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in reality there had long been an empty place, and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their senselessness, he could not continue them.
So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of people. I am speaking of people of our educational level, who are sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession of faith a means of attaining worldly aims. (Such people are the most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.) These people of our education A CONFESSION 7 are so placed that the light of knowledge and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they have not yet noticed it.
The religious doctrine taught me from child- hood disappeared in me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. From the time I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church or to fast, of my own volition. I did not believe what had been taught me in child- hood, but I believed in something. What it was I believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God; but I could not have said what sort of God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted in I again could not have said.
Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith — my only real faith — that which, apart from my animal instincts, gave impulse to my life — was a belief in perfecting myself. But in what this perfecting consisted, and what its object was, I could not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally— I studied everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I tried to perfect my will, I drew up rules which I tried to follow; I perfected myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of exercises, and accustoming myself to endur- ance and patience by all kinds of privations.
8 A CONFESSION And all this I considered to be the pursuit of perfection. The beginning of it all was, of course, moral perfection; but that was soon replaced by perfection in general: by the desire to be better, not in my own eyes or those of God, but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more famous, more important and richer than others.
to ,to d( fc n i II Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history of my life during those ten years of my youth. I think very many people have had the same experience. With all my soul I wished to be good; but I was young, passionate, and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule; but as soon as I yielded to nasty passions I was praised and encouraged.
Ambition, love of power, covetousness, las- civiousness, pride, anger and revenge — were all respected.
Yielding to those passions, I became like the grown-up folk, and I felt that they approved of me. The kind aunt with whom I lived, herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a married woman: ‘ Rien ne forme un jeune homme} comme une A CONFESSION liaison avec une femme comme il faut.’ 1 Another happiness she desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-camp, and if possible aide- de-camp to the Emperor. But the greatest happiness of all would be that I should marry a very rich girl and so become possessed of as many serfs as possible.
I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing, and heartache. I killed men in war, and challenged men to duels in order to kill them; I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder — there was no crime I did not commit, and for all that people praised my conduct, and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man.
So I lived for ten years.
During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness, and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. To get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and to display the evil. And I did so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness, which gave meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this, and was praised.
At twenty-six years of age2 I returned to 1 Nothing so forms a young man, as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.
2 Tolstoy makes a slip here: he was twenty- seven.
B* io A CONFESSION Petersburg after the war, and met the writers. They received me as one of themselves and flattered me. And before I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated all my former strivings to improve. Those views furnished a theory which justified the dissoluteness of my life.
The view of life of these people, my com- rades in authorship, consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in this development we — men of thought — have the chief part; and among men of thought it is we — artists and poets — who have the greatest influence. Our vocation is to teach mankind. And lest the simple question should suggest itself: What do I know, and what can I teach? it was explained in this theory that this need not be known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very natural for me to adopt this theory. I, artist and poet, wrote and taught, without myself knowing what. For this I was paid money; I had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame, which showed that what I taught was very good.
This faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of life was a religion, and I was one of its priests. To be its priest was very pleasant and profitable. And I lived a considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity. But in the secondhand especially in the third A CONFESSION 11 Syear of this life, I began to doubt the infallibility of this religion and to examine it. My first cause of doubt was that I began to notice that I the priests of this religion were not all in accord among themselves. Some said: We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is needed, but the others teach wrongly. Others said: No! we are the real teachers, and you teach wrongly. And they disputed, quarrelled, abused, cheated, and tricked one another. There were also many among us who did not care who was right and who was wrong, but were simply bent on attaining their covetous aims by means of this activity of ours. All this obliged me to doubt the validity of our creed.
Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors' creed itself, I also began to ob- serve its priests more attentively, and I became convinced that almost all the priests of that religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in my former dissipated and military life; but they were self- confident and self-satisfied as only those can be who are quite holy or who do not know what holiness is. These people revolted me, I became revolting to myself, and I realized that that faith was a fraud.
But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me: the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I naively imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach 12 A CONFESSION everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.
From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice: abnormally developed pride, and an insane assurance that it was my vocation to teach men, without knowing what.
To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of those men (though there are thousands like them to-day), is sad and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one experiences in a lunatic asylum.
We were all then convinced that it was neces- sary for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote — teaching others. And without remarking that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life's question: What is good and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we all, not listening to one another, talked at the same time, sometimes backing and praising one another in order to be backed and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one another — just as in a lunatic asylum.
Thousands of workmen laboured to the extreme limit of their strength day and night, setting the type and printing millions of words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still went on teaching and could in no way find time to teach enough, and were always angry that sufficient attention was not paid us.
It was terribly strange, but is now quite com- prehensible. Our real innermost concern was to A CONFESSION 13 get as much money and praise as possible. To gain that end we could do nothing except write books and papers. So we did that. But in order to do such useless work and to feel assured that we were very important people, we required a theory justifying our activity. And so among us this theory was devised: 4 All that exists is reasonable. All that exists develops. And it all develops by means of Culture. And Culture is measured by the circulation of books and newspapers. And we are paid money and are respected because we write books and news- papers, and therefore we are the most useful and the best of men/ This theory would have been all very well if we had been unanimous, but as every thought expressed by one of us was always met by a diametrically opposite thought expressed by another, we ought to have been driven to reflection. But we ignored this; people paid us money, and those on our side praised us; so each of us considered himself justified.
It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lunatic asylum; but then I only dimly sus- pected this, and like all lunatics, simply called all men lunatics except myself.
Ill So I lived abandoning myself to this insanity for another six years, till my marriage. During that time I went abroad. Life in Europe and my acquaintance with leading and learned 14 A CONFESSION Europeans 1 confirmed me yet more in the faith ba in which I believed, of striving after perfection, j &i for I found the same faith among them. That j p: faith took with me the common form it assumes fc with the majority of educated people of our day. j l It was expressed by the word 4 progress/ It j \ then appeared to me that this word meant some- { thing. I did not as yet understand that, being ^ | tormented (like every live man) by the question « how it is best for me to live, in my answer, £ Live in conformity with progress/ I was re- plying as a man in a boat would do if when carried along by wind and waves he replied to what for him was the chief and only question, J 4 whither to steer', by saying, 4 We are being carried somewhere/ I did not then notice this. Only occasionally — not by reason but by instinct — I revolted against this superstition, so common in our day, by which people hide from themselves their lack of understanding of life...So, for instance, during my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head part from the body, and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no *j theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world, on whatever theory, had held it to be necessary, I knew it to be unnecessary and 1 Russians generally make a distinction between * Europeans and Russians.
A CONFESSION 15 bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good * and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I. Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother’s death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more i than a year, and died painfully, not under- standing why he had lived, and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying. But these were only rare instances of doubt, and I actually continued to , live professing a faith only in progress. 4 All evolves and I evolve with it: and why it is that I evolve with all things will be known some day.’ So I ought to have formulated my faith at that time.
On returning from abroad I settled in the country, and chanced to occupy myself with peasant schools. This work was particularly to my taste, because in it I had not tojface the falsity which had become obvious to me and stared me in the face when I tried to teach people by literary means. Here, also, I acted in the name of Progress, but I already regarded Pro- gress itself critically. I said to myself: 4 In some of its developments Progress has proceeded v/rongly; and with primitive peasant children one must deal in a spirit of perfect freedom, letting them choose what path of progress they please/ In reality I was ever revolving round one and the same insoluble problem, which was: How to teach without knowing what to teach.
16 A CONFESSION 16 A CONFESSION In the higher spheres of literary activity I had realized that one could not teach without know- ing what; for I saw that people all taught differ- ently, and by quarrelling among themselves only succeeded in hiding their ignorance from one another. But here, with peasant children, I thought to evade this difficulty by letting them learn what they liked. It amuses me now, when I remember how I shuffled in trying to satisfy my desire to teach, while in the depth of my soul I knew very well that I could not teach any- thing needful for I did not know what was need- ful. After spending a year at school work, I went abroad a second time, to discover how to teach others while myself knowing nothing.