After six years of work, V–A–C Sreda online-magazine is closing and will be transformed into an archive.
In our first issue, we published Leo Tolstoy’s essay ‘What Is Art?’ In our final issue, we present an article written following Tolstoy’s death in 1910 by the journalist, literary critic, and political figure Stepan Shaumyan. Tolstoy’s death was mourned by people from a wide range of social groups, who called him a great “teacher of life.” In his letter, Shaumyan reflects on what Tolstoy actually taught his contemporaries and how his ideas could be embraced by people with such different interests, views, and social positions — from workers and peasants to government officials, journalists, and doctors.
(Letter to the editor on honouring the memory of L. N. Tolstoy)
The death of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and everything related to it continues to command the world’s attention to this day. It is not just members of the press, journalists, and writers—people who are compelled by their professions to regard the death of the famous “uncrowned king of writers” as a momentous event of the times—but people from all other professions and social strata as well: doctors, lawyers, merchants, noblemen, workers, peasants, even many members of the clergy and bureaucrats, regardless of nationality or religion—who are talking and thinking a great deal about this death.
“The world has been orphaned”—this is what they repeat everywhere, expressing their deepest and sincerest sorrow over a loss that weighs heavily on everyone. “The world has been orphaned” — a great writer, a great artist, a great man and citizen is no more. And, more than this—and this seems to be what touches people most deeply—a great thinker, a great “teacher of life”—is no more.
This is what everyone says.
Our city, too, has not lagged behind others in the expression of its feelings of sorrow. Our newspapers, our literary-artistic circle, our City Duma, and the entire population—from the prominent capitalist G. Z. Tagiyev, who sent a telegram to the deceased’s widow, to various groups of workers—everyone has responded to this event. And, once again, in mourning Tolstoy, everyone laments not merely, nor even primarily, a greater writer, or artist, and so on, but a great thinker, a teacher of life.
These circumstances have provoked and continue to provoke a great bewilderment in me, the writer of these lines, who is full of deep respect for the memory of the deceased.
That in the person of Tolstoy the world lost a truly remarkable artist, an expert of the human soul, the creator of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, Master and Man and other artistic works, the ennobling and elevating effects of which were felt by millions of people, is beyond any doubt or argument. That a powerful enemy and denouncer of contemporary socio-political and clerical lies is no longer—this too is also known to many.
People who have read the remarkable artistic works of Tolstoy and felt, along with the author, a deep sorrow at the description of the deaths of one or another of his main characters, cannot but feel sorrow faced with the death of Tolstoy himself, who surpassed all of his characters as their creator, who contained them all in his sensitive and deep soul.
Nor can all those to whom the struggle against contemporary lies and state horrors is dear fail to become preoccupied with pain upon the death of Tolstoy.
Yet it is strange that these people—the categories of people enumerated above—do not limit themselves to the acknowledgement of these merits, to the recognition of L. N. Tolstoy as a great. Almost all of them have suddenly also proclaimed Tolstoy to have been a teacher, and themselves, accordingly, to have been his pupils and disciples.
Perhaps this is the case; perhaps there is some fatal misunderstanding here, yet this is undoubtedly the impression conveyed by all the articles in the newspapers being printed today (among them our local papers), by all the speeches being pronounced at assemblies, and by the telegrams being sent to the deceased’s family and to the metropolitan press.
What is the matter here? Is it our ignorance—our ignorance of the teachings that Tolstoy so insistently and unremittingly preached for thirty years, or is it carelessness, unscrupulousness of expression, lack of proportion and measure in the words being pronounced at so seemingly solemn a time? Or does the mystery lie in some other, third thing?
The teaching of Tolstoy was not merely a protest against clericalism, not only the cry of a tormented soul expressing itself in the words: “I cannot be silent.” These are only individual elements in his teaching, its negative side, or, more precisely, particular deeds of Tolstoy, which, though logically related to his teaching, can be examined and evaluated independently of it.
Tolstoy did not just reject clericalism and the death penalty. He also rejected all of our “worldly life,” all of our culture. Tolstoy was a disciple of Christ. For thirty years, he preached, and he preached not in jest or with empty words, but so that people would enact his teachings in practice: so that we would renounce property, state organisations, the church, the courts, the family—everything that constitutes our lives as we exist in relation to the modern forms of these institutions—all of us who call Tolstoy our “teacher.”
“To be poor, to be a beggar, to be a vagabond, that is the very thing Christ taught, that without which one cannot enter the kingdom of God, and without which one cannot be happy here on earth”—declares Tolstoy with deep conviction, proposing that, in the name of this ideal of his, people renounce, above all, property—the primary source of evil on earth.
“To be a beggar, to be a wanderer…” And here I ask myself, can people, whose ideals rest upon property and wealth, whose life is based upon a legal code prescribing four years of penal servitude for vagrancy and, not infrequently, the death penalty for expropriation (that is, depriving others of their property)—can such people consciously and sincerely call Tolstoy their “teacher”…?
In the name of non-resistance to evil by violence, Tolstoy advocates rejecting state authority, oaths, military service, judicial institutions, prisons. But can it really be that all these doctors, lawyers, judges, merchants, editors and newspaper publishers, and so on, all those who abide by state authority and military service, and this not out of fear, but as a matter of conscience, those who swear oaths in their millions every day, and sentence “criminals” to prison in their courts—can they really be sincere when they mourn the death of the “great teacher of life,” the “teacher of love”?
In the name of love and of non-resistance to evil by violence, Tolstoy preaches to workers and peasants—the nine-tenths of the humanity, as he terms them—the rejection of the “false assumption that we can secure the welfare of our lives by a struggle with others.” It is not struggle, but love and humility that L. Tolstoy preaches. “The workman is worthy of his meat,” says Tolstoy, paraphrasing Christ, “there can no longer be any question of whether a man who has no property will die of hunger.” Those who have property, that one-tenth of humanity, will themselves ensure that those who are without property and in need of it, such as workers, do not die of hunger. “Latterly,” Tolstoy asserts in one passage, “this one-tenth has deliberately seen to it that the nine-tenths should be properly fed.” As Christ said: “Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat. And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the labourer is worthy of his hire.” All that is needed is the desire to work, and all will be fed. They say that children who cannot work will die of hunger. This is false, answers Tolstoy. People rear calves because they will be of use to them in future. “This is why,” he concludes “children can never be left without care.”
For Tolstoy, the most terrible problem of modern life did not exist—the unemployment of millions of people who wish to work, wish to be “worthy of care,” but are not allowed to to do so, the problem of the death by starvation or near-starvation of these millions and their children, recorded daily in police and other statistics.
“‘The workman is worthy of his meat.’ No one will die or is dying of hunger,” Tolstoy assures us. Yet, on the other hand, being a beggar, being a vagrant, is the highest happiness on Earth. And therefore, once more and always: “not a struggle for sustenance, or for better conditions of life, but love, all-forgiveness, and humility…”.
And here I ask myself again: can it really be that workers consciously call Tolstoy—who understands, or, rather, so strangely misunderstands the most fundamental questions of modern life—a “teacher of life”? Can they really see in him a “great thinker,” before whom they, “along with all of humanity,” must bow down?
One could continue this enumeration of the basic theses of Tolstoy’s teaching and ask, after each one, again and again, how and why do people call Tolstoy a teacher of life? And most importantly: how and why do major capitalists, members of the intelligentsia, peasants, and workers, how and why do they all simultaneously bow down before Tolstoy as before a teacher, a brilliant thinker, and moralist?
The local press and local orators remarking on the death of Tolstoy have made no attempt whatsoever thus far to address these potential sources of bewilderment. They have called—and continue to call— Tolstoy a “great thinker,” a “great moralist,” a “great teacher,” yet they have made no attempts to explain to us for what reason they call him this. They note with satisfaction and even with enthusiasm that Tolstoy’s genius succeeded in uniting all classes, social estates, and nations within his teaching (or around it), but they have not explained to us the mystery of this remarkable phenomenon.
Perhaps this has arisen because the local writers and social representatives who have made statements regarding the death of Tolstoy supposed, in our opinion highly incorrectly, that the best way of honouring Tolstoy’s memory would be a call for a “great silence”? In any case, now that the first smarting pain of their loss ought to have passed, they are obliged to answer to readers’ bewilderment. One of them said that Tolstoy’s death “makes words necessary,” but such “words” have thus far been understood only as eulogy. The death of Tolstoy necessitates, in our opinion, words, but thought-through, sincere, and fearless words, in as far as Tolstoy despised nothing less than servile, blind prostration before great people, heroes, geniuses. Remember how deeply he is troubled in War and Peace by the people slavishly worshipping Napoleon, what murderous hate he reserves for the Polish colonel who throws himself into the water instead of crossing the deep river over the bridge, causing the drowning of a mass of people, only in order to express his adoration to Napoleon. And how, perturbed by people’s absence of respect for their own humanity, he proudly tells them: “Remember that in each of us there is no less, if not more, greatness of soul than in the great Napoleons.”
Tolstoy would express the same thing again in his religious writings, stating that the son of God lives in each person, and that all people are equal before God.
Somewhere Tolstoy writes that though he loves the God he has come to know, he loves truth more than God; if someone could prove to him he was mistaken, he would reject his God.
Those who would like to adequately honour the memory of Tolstoy should remember all this well.
Love Tolstoy, but love truth more than Tolstoy.
More than once, Tolstoy noted with deep amazement that for two thousand years, the people of European countries have called themselves Christians while living lives that are full negations of Christianity. People call Christ their “teacher,” but everything they do is opposed to what Christ taught. And he remarks with bitterness and amazement that so many are the lies that have accrued around the name of Christ that, after 1800 years, it was only with great difficulty that he was able to “uncover” the teachings of Christ.
Is fate not laughing upon the great elder? All the world sings his glory, calls him a great moralist, a “teacher of life”—yet no one, it seems, asks the question of why we refer to him thus, and all, it seems, while calling him their teacher, do the opposite of what Tolstoy taught. Will someone arriver someday to “uncover” the teachings of Tolstoy?
To all these questions, to all our bewilderments, simple and clear answers are needed, honest, thought-through, and (once again!) fearless words.
It also needs to be clarified why such an identical fate unites Christ and Tolstoy. Is there not something fatal in the very essence of the teachings that were preached both by Christ and, two thousand years later, by his disciple, Tolstoy?