Mammonart: An essay in economic interpretation

by Upton Sinclair

Tolstoi married, and raised a large family upon this estate. His wife was a devoted admirer of his literary work, and copied his manuscripts many times over with infinite pains. During the years 1865-69 he wrote “War and Peace,” which most critics consider one of the great novels of the world. I will merely record my regrets. There are a vast number of characters, scattered all over Russia; each character has several long Russian names, and, according to Russian custom, will be called different names by different groups of persons—to say nothing of diminutives and nick-names. I labored diligently to keep track of these characters, to remember which was which and what each was doing; but I failed.

Next came “Anna Karenina”: a sort of Russian high-society version of “The Scarlet Letter.” Anna is a woman who has been sold in the usual way to an elderly gentleman; she is a contented wife, until she meets a young cavalry officer whom she truly loves. Instead of engaging in a polite intrigue, according to the custom of her time, Anna takes the new love affair more seriously than she takes her marriage, and so Tolstoi drives her and her lover to suicide. This harshness greatly shocked the critics of the time, who said that Tolstoi was “killing flies with an ax.”

There are several attitudes one can take to the problem of the “eternal triangle.” You can say, as polite society said all over Europe, and still says, that adulterous intrigue is a small matter, provided you make a pretense of hiding it. Or you may say with me, that when a married woman finds she truly and deeply loves another man, it is her duty to get a divorce and marry the man she loves. Or you may say, with most of the “heavy” novelists, that there is nothing for the various characters to do but to die horrid deaths.

Tolstoi was on the way to the great crisis of his life, a spiritual conversion which involved a complete repudiation of the sexual element in love. He decided that it was the duty of men and women to repress their physical desires and become inspired Christian ascetics. When people asked him how, in that event, the human race was to continue to be propagated, his answer was that we didn’t have to worry about that, because so few people would be able to practice the code he laid down. It is difficult to see how a moral teacher could advance a doctrine more obviously absurd than that. The better elements of the race are to sterilize themselves, and posterity is to be begotten by weaklings and conscious sinners! There is only one possible explanation of such a doctrine; it is the reaction of a man whose passions are beyond his control. We know that such was the case with Tolstoi; he was a gross man, and Gorki reports that even in his old age his conversation was unbearably obscene, and his attitude toward women low. Such a man can conceive of asceticism, but he cannot conceive of true idealism in the sex relationship.

If Tolstoi’s conversion had had to do with sex matters alone, it would have had but little significance. But it was something far greater than that; it was the cry of anguish of a member of the privileged classes, who realized that his whole life, all his equipment of leisure and knowledge and power, was made out of the blood and sweat and tears of the debased masses of his Russian people. He wanted to give up his landed estates, and live as a peasant, and return to the workers what he had taken from them. But, alas, in the meantime he had raised a large family, and this family had something to say about the matter. The Countess Tolstoi had been her husband’s devoted helper, so long as he was content to remain a literary man; but when he wanted to become a prophet and a saint, she thought he was mad. She had the children to look out for, and the children, of course, wanted to grow up as their father had done, in the great world of pleasure and fashion.

Tolstoi himself retired to live in a hut; he put on peasant’s clothes and spent his time cobbling shoes. He gave up his copyrights, but he could never get the courage to give up his land; so he continued to grow rich, in spite of all his agonized preachings, and the balance of his life was continuous contradiction and disharmony. In the end he could stand it no longer; he saw his children quarreling over the property, like so many birds of prey over a carcass, and so he went out from his home, with no one but his secretary. For a time no one knew where he was, and at last he was discovered, ill and dying. His flight was one of the great gestures of history, and the scenes which took place about his death-bed summed up in dramatic form all the conflicting forces of the time.

Tolstoi had repudiated the Russian church as a creature of superstition and exploitation. He had gone back to primitive Christianity, and the church had excommunicated him. Now, when he was dying, they wanted to get him back, realizing that their very existence depended upon it. If they could not persuade him to confess and repent, they would lie about it, and say that he had done so, as orthodox churches have done for many other great heretics. So here were Tolstoi’s friends, mounting guard in the railroad station where he lay dying, to keep the priests and the bishops away! And here also were the police agents and spies, a swarm of vermin, prying into the affairs of every person about the death-bed, and telegraphing in panic to headquarters for instructions. When the great soul had passed on, and the body had to be moved, some students tried to sing a hymn, and there were the usual scenes of brutality to which the Russian people were accustomed.

Tolstoi had met some of the revolutionists of his time, but had been cold to them; he was not interested in politics, only in religious and moral questions. His conversion first took the form of absolute non-resistance to evil. Later on he came to modify it to the doctrine which Gandhi is now spreading throughout all Asia, “non-violent resistance.” You shall not use physical force against your enemy, but you oppose him by word and teaching, by your power of endurance and of moral conviction; so you shame him, or rouse the moral forces of the whole world to rebuke him.

Tolstoi applied that treatment to the state church and to the police. Of course, if he had been a peasant or a workingman, or even a poor student or literary man, he would have been beaten to death with the knout, or shipped off to Siberia to perish in a convict camp. But he was a member of the nobility, and his family influence protected him, until he had become so famous throughout the world that he was greater than the Tsardom itself. In his last years he lived as a majestic symbol of the protest of the Russian people; he poured out arguments against war, against government cruelty, against landlordism, against priestcraft; and all the powers of darkness in Russia did not dare to lay a finger upon him.

In his later years he wrote several novels, one of which I personally consider his greatest. This is “Resurrection,” which tells the story of a young Russian nobleman who seduces a peasant girl, and later on in life discovers her as a prostitute. He becomes conscience-stricken because of what he has done, and sets out to redeem her, follows her to Siberia and saves her, and in the end they live that life of brotherly and sisterly love which Tolstoi had come to preach. This story contains frightful pictures of the whole Russian system; it was translated into an immense number of languages, and it probably did more than any other one book to undermine the Tsardom.