Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

He was simply overcome with pity and with shame and indignation that our civilization can permit such things. So he went back to Yasnaya alone, and feeling ill with despair; he took things to heart in an extraordinary way. But gradually the peace and loneliness of the country comforted him, and he set to work on a book about his experiences with the poor in Moscow, and called it “What Then Must We Do?” He simply wrote down what he had seen and heard, and asked what we were to do to destroy what is in truth slavery—starving people struggling to live and driven to crime by their miserable conditions, while others have riches and luxury, even throwing their superfluous food to the dogs and enjoying the fruit of other people’s labor.

It was impossible for Tolstoy to have any respect for civilization as such, unless it really helped men. He judged it fairly by what it did and found it wanting. He longed to see real progress, not merely mechanical progress. He did not call progress making battleships, inventing flying machines, or electricity, or explosives if people’s hearts remained hard. He wanted to see a spiritual progress, people being kind and helpful to one another.

The root of all the evil lay in man’s selfishness, he thought, and the corruption of Governments: these he considered existed only for the benefit of the rich. We must remember that the Russian Government at that time was one of the most backward of so-called civilized Powers, and what we call representative government did not exist at all, but a government by a few for the few.

Tolstoy also set himself to the great work he had dreamt of doing as a young man, that of separating the true from the false in the teachings of the Church. The Greek or the Russian Church does not differ fundamentally in its doctrines from the Roman Catholic or Protestant churches.

Tolstoy saw that man needed some religion or chart to guide him through life, and being himself profoundly religious by nature, he did not, like Voltaire, merely scoff and destroy, but tried also to build up and to construct something really tangible and helpful to human beings.

The truth he believed lay in the teaching of Christ. “If you wish to understand the truth,” Tolstoy said, “read the Gospels”; and the book he wrote on the Gospels is an explanation of Christ’s teaching. He asked himself, were the things that children and ignorant people taught true? and if they were not they should be exposed publicly. Every honest man should speak out. But people he saw were so confused in their minds about religion that they thought it must be supernatural, senseless, and incomprehensible, or it wasn’t religion.

Tolstoy wanted to make it a real and living force. He told the peasants in his books that God was not the cruel, revengeful, punishing Person they had been taught to believe Him; that He did not go about hardening people’s hearts and directing them to murder, and that they would not go to Hell for being unbaptized. On the contrary, he told them that God was good and that every human being, as the son of God, was good too, and could increase, by loving goodness, the divine in himself, by loving others as himself and by acting toward everybody as you would they should act toward you. But to kill another or abuse him, or to profit at the expense of any man, this was what made misery in the world. Tolstoy preached that all men are equal, as Christ had, and that nothing can be done by force or by violence, but only by love.

The Church in Russia was able to exercise a sort of inquisition, employing people to spy on suspected free-thinkers all over the country. There existed at the time, about a hundred miles from Moscow, a Bastille, or fortress, where persons objected to or suspected by the Russian Church, were shut up. In its dark and damp dungeons innocent people would be left for many years, sometimes forgotten altogether. Tolstoy would most certainly have been arrested and probably sent there, if he had not been an aristocrat with an aunt at court who pleaded for him with the Czar. As it was, he was excommunicated by the Holy Synod, the head of the Russian Church.

Tolstoy was proving dangerous, his influence was beginning to be felt; he was undermining the power of the Church and State by showing the poor people that they have a right to live and that all men are equal; that Christ had said so, and that the Church has no right to misrepresent His words.

Tolstoy’s books were no longer allowed in libraries; newspapers were forbidden to mention any meetings held in his favor. Telegraph offices actually refused to take messages of sympathy sent him, though abusive telegrams arrived quite punctually.