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Lunacharsky Articles and speeches on international politicsAbout Tolstoy's work
It is impossible to better characterize the era in which Tolstoy spoke than Lenin did. Tolstoy is an extremely significant figure for Russian society and is in the deepest dependence on the characteristics of the era in which he appeared. Here is what Lenin writes about this:
"L. Tolstoy began his literary activity in the existence of serfdom, but already at a time when it was clearly living out its last days. Tolstoy's main activity falls on that period of Russian history which lies between its two turning points, between 1861 and 1905. During this period, traces of serfdom, direct experiences of it penetrated through and through the entire economic (especially rural) and the entire political life of the country. And at the same time, it was precisely this period that was a period of intensified growth of capitalism from below and its imposition from above.
What were the experiences of serfdom? Most and clearest of all is the fact that in Russia, a predominantly agricultural country, farming was during this time in the hands of ruined, impoverished peasants, who ran an obsolete, primitive economy on old serf allotments, cut down in favor of the landowners in 1861. And, on the other hand, agriculture was in the hands of the landlords, who in central Russia cultivated the land with the labor of the peasants, the peasant plow, the peasant horse for "cut-off land", for mowing, for watering places, etc. In essence, this is the old feudal system economy. The political system of Russia during this time was also thoroughly saturated with serfdom. This can be seen both in the state system before the first attempts to change it in 1905, and in the predominant influence of the landowning nobles on state affairs, and in the omnipotence of officials, who were also mainly - especially the highest - from the landowning nobles.
This old patriarchal Russia after 1861 began to rapidly collapse under the influence of world capitalism. The peasants were starving, dying out, ruined like never before, and fled to the cities, leaving the land behind. Railroads, factories and factories were intensively built, thanks to the "cheap labor" of the ruined peasants. Large financial capital, large-scale trade and industry developed in Russia.
It was this quick, hard, sharp breaking of all the old "foundations" of old Russia that was reflected in the works of Tolstoy the artist, in the views of Tolstoy the thinker.
Tolstoy knew excellently rural Russia, the life of a landowner and a peasant. He gave in his works of art such images of this life, which belong to the best works of world literature. The sharp breaking of all the “old foundations” of rural Russia sharpened his attention, deepened his interest in what was happening around him, and led to a turning point in his entire worldview. 2
And so, according to Lenin, Tolstoy is himself a representative of old Russia, he is a gentleman, a landowner. He lives at a time when this old Russia is rotting. It is rotting by itself, first of all at its core, in serfdom. No one more or less decent, more or less moving his brains, more or less honest could no longer hold on to these “old foundations”, but considered them only remnants of the accursed past. But what shook these "old foundations" from the outside? What was going to replace them? Capitalism, but capitalism in the form of primitive accumulation, capitalism that ruins the peasant and the master, young, especially predatory capitalism, which in general does more harm than good.
As a gentleman, Tolstoy hardly notices the positive aspects of capitalism at all, while he sees the negative aspects keenly. Hatred for the capitalist world, hatred for the bourgeoisie that is victorious over the landowners, is Tolstoy's basic social feeling. But in this protest he could not rely on the nobility itself. There are similar phenomena in Russian literature. Herzen the barin is already protesting against capitalism and appealing to the muzhik. The Narodniks, protesting against capitalism, appeal to the peasant. Tolstoy is especially typical in this respect. In order to somehow bruise capitalism, to oppose something to capitalism, to find some kind of ideal, some kind of truth that could cling to in the struggle against capitalism, Tolstoy had to reject the lordly caste of old Russia, and together with the bureaucracy, the clergy, and take hold of the peasant truth with both hands here, too, from the point of view of peasant truth, to try to denigrate the bourgeoisie. But, as you know, the Narodniks, and even Herzen and Bakunin, were revolutionary, in the proper sense of the word, that is, they believed that it was necessary to rely on the revolutionary instincts of the peasantry, that it was necessary to raise this peasantry, unleash rebellious energy in it and call forth peasant uprisings, if possible merge them into one stormy, revolutionary sea against the autocracy. Tolstoy, as you will see, does not have this tendency. merge them as far as possible into one stormy, revolutionary sea against the autocracy. Tolstoy, as you will see, does not have this tendency. merge them as far as possible into one stormy, revolutionary sea against the autocracy. Tolstoy, as you will see, does not have this tendency.He does not believe at all in any revolutions, and does not want any revolutions , he knows the peasantry of that time better than the muzhik utopian socialists of his day.
In essence, the Narodniks, in thinking that the peasantry could be a tremendous revolutionary force, were in a certain sense right. Under favorable conditions, with a sufficient number of wanderers, with a vanguard to lead the peasantry, the peasantry can be a revolutionary force. The Narodniks here were more right than Tolstoy. But they were right in the sense, incomprehensible to themselves, that if the Russian proletariat were added to the peasantry, then an explosive would be obtained. But at that time there was almost no proletariat in Russia, and few people understood that it was also necessary for the bourgeoisie to first create a proletariat. Tolstoy did not understand this. Like the populists, Tolstoy wanted to rely on the countryside against the city, against the landowner, against the tsar, but since he saw that the countryside in itself was not revolutionary, he not only saw it, but he himself shared this passivity of the village, was himself in this respect the bone from the bone of the village as such, with its Oblomov features, then he created a different idealization of the village than Zlatovratsky and Uspensky, than Bakunin and Herzen. He was looking for other ways to idealize the village.
Tolstoy says that when he first read the works of Rousseau, he directly trembled with emotion and delight, and after that, for some time, instead of a cross, he wore a small portrait of Rousseau. This is extremely typical. What did Rousseau's unique revolutionary idea boil down to? It boiled down to the fact that civilization, science, art, technology, the development of state forms, etc., are not only not real progress, but, on the contrary, a deterioration in morals, that human happiness, a genuine, real righteous order of life, lies behind , and therefore the backward sections of society, such as the peasantry, are closest to it. Even among the peasantry, says Rousseau, one can find something of the good old manners, but the city is completely rotten and good for nothing. Rousseau, of course, was not a gentleman, but Rousseau was a typical tradesman: the son of a small watchmaker from the bourgeois city of Geneva, from a typical bourgeois country - Switzerland, at that time extremely backward in terms of industry. Thus, it was an idealization of the petty-bourgeois "just order of life."
Rousseau was consistent in his ideas and was already captured by the revolutionary movement of minds that began in his time and broke out during the years of the revolution. Social shifts have already taken place, capitalism has loosened the soil of old Europe. Therefore, Rousseau reached revolutionary thoughts. He said that private property is the basic sin of our society, and in this sense he seemed to be the forerunner of the coming socialism. But at the same time, this did not in the least prevent him from being the greatest reactionary, for science and technology, that is, that which was to lead to capitalism and at the same time create the gravedigger of this capitalism and the true finalizer of social development - the proletariat, and through capitalism create objective conditions real, that is, a socialist, well-organized and rich human society, Rousseau denied these forces of economic progress. If history had taken the paths he indicated, then all progress would have stopped, we would have to go back far to a savage existence, and there, in this semi-savage existence, Rousseau would have tried to realize some ideals of justice.
Voltaire, who was also a revolutionary, but a bourgeois revolutionary, fully recognized the progress and development of civilization as a blessing, joked at Rousseau that virtue is a good thing, but do we really need to walk on all fours?
Tolstoy, still a young man, sheds tears on the pages of Rousseau's works and wears his portrait like a medallion around his neck. To such an extent, the new bourgeois world causes disgust and nausea in him, as in a sensitive gentleman, the owner of a sharp mind and a warm heart.
There was a time when, having gone to St. Petersburg in his student years, he was convinced that progress - a certain advance towards enlightenment, towards the complication and improvement of life - is, as it were, a law of nature and that this is a consoling phenomenon that resolves painful questions regarding society and its destinies. . But very soon Tolstoy notices that "progress" cannot satisfy him in any way. At the end of this short period, which lasted only four or five years, he writes thus:
“There are two concepts of progress that do not coincide at all with each other. For the majority of educated society ("educated" he emphasizes), the whole interest of history lies in the progress of civilization. For us, this interest lies in the progress of the general welfare. The progress of the general welfare not only does not follow from the progress of civilization, but for the most part is the opposite of it. And if so, then it is impossible to justify anything by “progress”, because it can only be justified by “good”, and not by “moving forward”. 3
As you can see, the thoughts are naive, but if we take into account that there was no smell of Marxism then for the vast majority of the intelligentsia, if we take into account that people did not yet understand the role of capitalism, then Tolstoy cannot be reproached for these thoughts. Oh! you say: progress, science, technology, parliaments, all kinds of jury trials, etc. But what do I see? From this progress of ours, the poor man does not get richer, but becomes even poorer, three skins are pulled from him, he is trampled under foot.
This is the same as what Herzen said. Tolstoy entered the same period of anti-bourgeois revolutionism. He could not, of course, oppose capitalism and its progress to the old nobility only with an as yet indefinite ideal, which, however, lay aside from the road of bourgeois progress. Rousseau's echoes here are quite obvious and clear. Even in the most meager and gray periods of Tolstoy's development, there can be no question of him taking the nobility itself as such as an ideal. I will quote only one quotation from his private letter to his aunt, written at the time when he was shaking the ashes of this theory and liberalism from his feet:
“In Russia it’s bad, bad, bad. In St. Petersburg, in Moscow, everyone is shouting something, they are indignant, they are expecting something, but in the wilderness the same thing is happening - patriarchal barbarism, barbarism and lawlessness. Would you believe that, having arrived in Russia, I struggled for a long time with a feeling of disgust for my homeland, and now I am just beginning to get used to all the horrors that make up the eternal atmosphere of our life ... ”He saw, for example, how a lady beat her girl in the street. “And my steward,” he writes to his aunt, “wanting to serve me, punished the gardener who was on a spree by sending him barefoot through the stubble to guard the flock, and was glad that the gardener had all his legs in wounds ...” 4
Here are the little pictures that Tolstoy met and that made him shudder with horror. The fact that he thus shudders with horror throws him out of the bounds of the landlord class. Of course, various landowner traits could remain in him, but such a person cannot be called a spokesman for the interests of the landlord class. He definitely says: vile, nasty, you need to somehow get away from this, destroy it, this can no longer be tolerated. And since he considers capitalism to be an even greater harm, and denies liberal progress, where could he go? Bakunin went into anarchy, Herzen into revolutionary populism. It would seem that Tolstoy should have looked for a similar outcome. After all, Tolstoy, in essence, comes out with his main works at a time when the rise of populism was already passing. The main center of gravity of his writings falls on the time when society in its best parts had already lost faith in those forms of struggle recommended by the Narodniks. Therefore, if Tolstoy's lordly nature, inwardly lordly, and some of his features, also social, and not just individual, if they did not push him away from the revolution, he would in this case also have to be a revolutionary without a revolution, already because that the cards of the revolution were all covered by that time. We will see further that this is socially explained in more depth. that the cards of the revolution were all covered by that time. We will see further that this is socially explained in more depth. that the cards of the revolution were all closed by that time. We will see further that this is socially explained in more depth.
II
Lenin perfectly understood Tolstoy's peculiar and wonderful duality. In his article "Leo Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution" he writes:
“The contradictions in the works, views, teachings, in the school of Tolstoy are really flashy. On the one hand, a brilliant artist who not only provided incomparable pictures of Russian life, but also first-class works of world literature. On the other hand, there is a landowner who is a fool for Christ. On the one hand, there is a remarkably strong, direct, and sincere protest against public lies and falsehoods; , I am ugly, but I am engaged in moral self-improvement: I do not eat more meat and now eat rice cakes. On the one hand, a merciless critique of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government violence, the comedy of court and state administration, revealing the entire depth of the contradictions between the growth of wealth and the gains of civilization and the growth of poverty, savagery and torment of the working masses; on the other hand, the foolish preaching of "non-resistance to evil" by violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, tearing off all and sundry masks; - on the other hand, the preaching of one of the most vile things that there is in the world, namely: religion, the desire to put priests in the place of government priests on moral conviction, that is, the cultivation of the most refined and therefore especially disgusting priesthood. Truly the preaching of one of the most vile things that exists in the world, namely: religion, the desire to put priests in their place in the official position of priests for moral conviction, that is, the cultivation of the most refined and therefore especially disgusting priesthood. Truly the preaching of one of the most vile things that exists in the world, namely: religion, the desire to put priests in their place in the official position of priests for moral conviction, that is, the cultivation of the most refined and therefore especially disgusting priesthood. Truly
You are poor, you are abundant,
You are powerful, you are powerless
- Mother Russia! five
Further it says:
“The patriarchal village, which had only yesterday been liberated from serfdom, was literally handed over to the flow and plunder of capital and fiscus. The old foundations of peasant economy and peasant life, foundations that had really held out for centuries, were being demolished with extraordinary rapidity. And the contradictions in Tolstoy's views must be assessed not from the point of view of the modern working-class movement and modern socialism (such an assessment, of course, is necessary, but it is insufficient), but from the point of view of that protest against the impending capitalism, the ruin and dispossession of the masses, which had to be generated patriarchal Russian village. 6
This entire acute process of decomposition explains why he, the gentleman, began to live by the revolution. Everything spread around.
“Tolstoy is great,” writes V. I. Lenin, “as an exponent of those ideas and those moods that had developed among millions of the Russian peasantry at the time of the onset of the bourgeois revolution in Russia.” 7
This means that precisely because Tolstoy joined the peasantry in his struggle against the bourgeoisie, he was filled with the revolutionary content of the peasantry, he took the point of view of the peasant people, he began to smash to smithereens in his theoretical propaganda, as an artist and as a publicist, all that that exhausted, that tormented, that ruined the peasantry.
“Tolstoy is original,” writes Lenin, “because the totality of his views, taken as a whole, expresses exactly the features of our revolution, as a peasant bourgeois revolution.
The contradictions in Tolstoy's views, from this point of view, are a real mirror of those contradictory conditions in which the historical activity of the peasantry was placed in our revolution. On the one hand, centuries of serfdom and decades of forced post-reform devastation have accumulated mountains of hatred, malice and desperate determination. The desire to sweep to the ground the state church, the landlords, and the landowner government, to destroy all the old forms and regulations of land ownership, to clear the land, to create a hostel of free and equal small peasants in place of the police-class state - this desire runs like a red thread through every historical step. peasants in our revolution, and there is no doubt that the ideological content of Tolstoy's writings corresponds much more to this peasant aspiration than to abstract "Christian anarchism", as the "system" of his views is sometimes assessed.8
That is, Lenin says: do not think that this gentleman simply invented peasant socialism for himself. No, his revolutionary spirit does not go separately from the revolutionary spirit of the peasants. When the peasants have reached the idea of protest, when in general the peasant thought, excited, begins to ponder over its fate, it willingly takes up Tolstoyism. Don't we know this? Don't we know, for example, that the Doukhobors, by different paths than Tolstoy, came to absolutely the same doctrine. The Dukhobors are a revolutionary peasant aristocracy. At the same time, "revolution without revolution", only moral revolution, revolution without violence, etc., is a true identity with Tolstoy's teaching. This is the best proof that Tolstoy really was the ideologist of this part of the peasantry. But I have already noted what part of the revolutionary peasantry: that which is not capable of consistent revolution by opposing force to force. And Lenin notes this:
“On the other hand, the peasantry, striving for new forms of community life, had a very unconscious, patriarchal, holy foolish attitude to what this community life should be like, what kind of struggle it is necessary to win freedom for itself, what kind of leaders it can have in this struggle, how the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia belong to the interests of the peasant revolution, why is it necessary to overthrow tsarist power by force in order to abolish landownership ... In our revolution, a minority of the peasantry actually fought, organizing at least for this purpose, and a very small part rose up with weapons in their hands to exterminate their enemies, to destroy the tsar's servants and landlord defenders. Most of the peasantry wept and prayed, reasoned and dreamed, wrote petitions and sent “applicants”—quite in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy!”9
This passivity of the peasants, the inability to organise, the inability to really improve one's position in practice, this desire to squander in words, complaints, hopes, prayers, etc., this peculiar peasant Oblomovism, immobility, indecision, confusion - it also showed itself in the greatest ideologist of the peasants - Tolstoy, although he came from the nobility; it showed itself in the fact that he combined these passionate protests and the impotence to translate them into the living language of the struggle.
In another article, entitled "L. N. Tolstoy”, Lenin gives a general assessment of Tolstoy, and this is extremely valuable for us. He says this:
“The era of the preparation of the revolution in one of the countries (that means the 70s, especially the 80s and 90s. - A. L. ), crushed by the feudal lords, acted, thanks to the brilliant coverage of Toletoy, as a step forward in the artistic development of everything humanity." 10
This is wonderfully said and testifies to Vladimir Ilyich's tremendous penetration into the essence of the true history of culture. See what he says. Tolstoy was a real artist, he was, in this respect, ahead of the artistic development of all mankind. And what, what kind of power was refracted in it? Was it poured into these values, which partly led all of humanity forward? This was the preparation for our gigantic revolution. Our revolution groped, trying to find a way out for the multi-million peasantry, blindly stumbled upon these and other obstacles, hurt itself, found false paths, suffered, tossed about, protested and was disappointed. And this protest, insofar as it was reflected in a brilliant representative, a representative as brilliant as our Vladimir Ilyich, only with a different, artistic, and not active coloring, - created in Tolstoy an unusually concentrated, vivid expression of all these quests. To such an extent, the questions raised at the same time turned out to be important and they were expressed with such force that their artistic reflection outstripped even much more advanced countries.
Marx taught that the height of the development of art may not at all correspond to the height of the development of the economy. That is, it is not the case that in an economically powerful country the art is powerful. There may be a perfect discrepancy between the one and the other. And Marx gives an example: rarely, and perhaps never, did art stand as high as in ancient Greece, but in terms of economics, of course, we surpassed the Greeks in many ways.
And Lenin also thought so. A backward country, tormented by the feudal lords, blind, illiterate, has found its own ideologist of the peasantry, its mouthpiece, a defector from another class, an eccentric gentleman - and as a result, the art of the world rises to such heights, to which in more progressive countries, enlightened and normal countries, it couldn't get up.
Lenin goes on to say:
“Tolstoy the artist is known to an insignificant minority even in Russia. To make his great works truly the property of all , we need a struggle and struggle against a social system that has condemned millions and tens of millions to darkness, oppression, hard labor and poverty, we need a socialist revolution. And Tolstoy not only gave works of art that will always be appreciated and read by the masses when they create human conditions of life for themselves, overthrowing the yoke of the landlords and capitalists, but he was able with remarkable power to convey the mood of the broad masses, oppressed by the modern order, to describe their situation, to express their spontaneous feeling of protest and indignation. 11
This is how Lenin looks at Tolstoy. He believes that his works will always be appreciated and read by the masses, that they will be especially dear to the masses when the masses create human conditions for themselves, that socialism will become a prerequisite for making Tolstoy accessible to everyone .
You can, like Denike, argue with Marx, argue with Lenin, but that is exactly what he said.
IIIThe significance of Tolstoy is extremely great, primarily because he is a man of immense vitality.
When you read various Tolstoyans depicting Tolstoy, you notice that they portray him as a saint, a righteous man, who, it is true, sometimes gets angry, but in general is a very unctuous old man. It's a lie. Tolstoy was a voluptuary, a scolder, a man of blind fits of anger, and at the same time a man who moved so quickly that he said of himself: “I am tearful to the point of obscenity; I, even when I was a young man, was called Leva-reva. When Gorky, a real artist, approached Tolstoy, in his famous pamphlet he portrays Tolstoy in such a way that nothing remains of the image of the unctuous man that the Tolstoyans are trying to portray him; when Gorky wants to find the best word for Tolstoy, he says: terrible sorcerer. Once in the morning Gorky saw Tolstoy standing on the seashore and thinking something, and it seemed to him that Tolstoy was conjuring and that all nature obeyed him. Such an impression in Gorky grew from Tolstoy, and this is much closer to the truth than words about holiness. 12 Tolstoy, it is true, wanted to imitate holiness, but we see that he himself was the exact opposite of holiness. He was a man unusually in love with life.
Tolstoy had a genius trait - an extraordinary, amazingly broad vitality associated with social feelings and passions. In addition, he came from such a class, he was in such a financial position that he had every opportunity to process this huge stream of his life impressions aesthetically perfectly. He did it with a skill that none of his predecessors from the same class could do. But, in addition, Tolstoy also changed the purpose of his work and therefore changed the form of his work. For the first time - and firstly - he strove for simplicity. And he achieved this classic "Tolstoy" simplicity. Why did Tolstoy strive for extreme simplicity? He rushed to her because he did not want to write for the bar. He set such a goal: you need to be terribly serious and honest in art. He set this goal because, firstly, in his opinion, art was an expression of the severity of suffering due to the breakdown of the old way of life, which Lenin spoke about, and, secondly, because it brought him closer to the peasant truth. Tolstoy is very malicious and describes with equal hatred both the priest who serves the liturgy and the opera at the Bolshoi Theater, because both seem to him false. He strives to create art that would be truthful and serious, in which there would be no embellishment. When asked: what is art? – Tolstoy gives a brilliant and profound answer, which we acknowledge in its main part: “Art is a way of infecting the general public with the experiences of the artist.” So Tolstoy believes that the most important thing is his experience and, of course, a very serious one, because otherwise what would they infect - serious, which is a public good, and that all methods of art should be just a means to ensure that this infection is as possible acted more strongly. Of course, he had to develop a new aesthetic. The elegance of form here recedes into the background. He polishes all his works, but not for finesse. For what? For this charm of simplicity, which, in his opinion, is the highest pearl of art. Tolstoy rose above all writers because not a single writer wrote so simply. Sometimes it seems that Tolstoy writes clumsily: he will put four “whats” in one and the same phrase. But he does it on purpose, in order to immediately give the impression of a deep thought that does not care about its appearance. But the whole phrase will be turned in such a way as to give the maximum impression of the truth itself, so that everything is as simple and convincing as what we see around us in nature.
This feature of Tolstoy, this enormous artistic truthfulness, completes the image of Tolstoy as a social artist, as a master of expressing our common experiences, because in revealing his experiences, trying to infect them, he, of course, had to choose those that are more or less universally human. , not even those that were class, because he left his class and hated his class.
Thus, if Tolstoy possessed a morally heroic vitality, then to express this vitality he had an incredible wealth of palette made by his predecessors, and all the opportunity to devote himself entirely to this business, not worrying about material wealth. And if you add to this that he stood at a turning point and came to such truth and simplicity that none of the artists who came before him even imagined, you will understand what Tolstoy is and what the Tolstoy art school is. You will understand that Tolstoy's artistic school is an obligatory school for every proletarian writer of ours, for what kind of a proletarian writer is he, if he does not have powerful experiences, then he should not write: what will he infect? It must be a powerful nature. He must be a real artist, must know his craft, give yourself to this business with all your love, and it should be as simple as possible. But this should not be that simplicity, which is worse than theft, which consists in illiteracy, in stuttering, in the inability to speak.
I return to Tolstoy as a philosopher.
The moralist in Tolstoy constantly poisons the happy pagan mood.
And here, joyful paganism is replaced by something else, more difficult.
In addition to the frequently recurring fear of sin, Tolstoy had another fear. Perhaps he would have dealt more with the fear of sin than with the fear of death. When Tolstoy wrote Resurrection, Chekhov wrote a letter to Gorky, where he says:
“I read it and was dumbfounded. The whole book is written by a man who is terribly afraid of death and deceives himself and others and clings to scriptural quotations. 13
This is a characteristic of a good half of all Tolstoyanism. Tolstoy, for all his passionately powerful vitality, and precisely because his vitality was so powerful, could not but appreciate his personality, which gave so many experiences, and thought in horror about death. Eroshka, the hero of his story "The Cossacks," says very simply: "The grass will grow, so you need to use it now." a mistress who clutches at the remnants of life that is leaving her.15 He believes that it would be necessary to meet death very bravely. He wrote a thing that is entirely dedicated to death. This is the Death of Ivan Ilyich. Dying is described with merciless truthfulness. When Tolstoy came close to the very fact of death, he needed to make peace with it, as it were, and he says that Ivan Ilyich, at the approach of the last hour of death, finally realized that there was no longer death, but there was light. But these, of course, are just words that cannot convince anyone in the least. This is not how people die - they do not feel the light, but to the end they feel a breakdown, a dimming of memory, sometimes severe pain. Tolstoy knew this very well, and here he flavored death with some kind of sugar so that it would not be so scary. The fear of death is all the more powerful in him and constantly overcomes him, which is mixed in him with the fear of sin. Life constantly pushes him to sin and is sweet with this sweet sin, but ends in death. Between these two nightmares, it is impossible to be calm. All his life Tolstoy was tormented by these problems. Consciousness of sin in an individualistic society, where the happiness of each is bought by the misfortune of others, sin constantly hangs over each person. In such an era, where everyone was pushing each other and tearing this “happiness” from each other, it was especially scary to state this, and therefore I wanted to find some way out, to find a sinless life. We know a sinless life only in socialism, where the efforts of each and the happiness of each are combined with the efforts and happiness of others. But Tolstoy could not see this. He needed to find someone else. In the same way, Tolstoy's fear of death rose to such convulsions only because of this, because he rushed about like that, because he built such buildings of thoughts and images in order to shield death before him, because he was terribly vital.
However, one cannot imagine that Tolstoy, proceeding from some kind of emptiness or some kind of conscious philosophical atheism, under the influence of the fear of death and sin, invented God. No, he believed in him since childhood. On the contrary, great development led him to doubt God. In his era, it was almost impossible to get out of the framework of the contradictions that tormented him. They pushed him back to the recognition of God.
While still young, he writes in his diary: “I prayed to God to win at cards - and I won. It strengthened my faith greatly.” He writes this to a young man of eighteen years, and something similar goes on until the end of his life. I read his unpublished diaries, dating back to the time when he was over seventy years old, and there are such phrases: “I got up - I can’t sleep. Lord, Lord, help me. I doubt, I hesitate ... what should I do? I can't live without you." I'm roughly quoting. Then an addition: “I got up early in the morning, calm, my faith got stronger.”
This person constantly lives among such fluctuations, because his inner sense of faith intensifies in him, perhaps as a result of the smallest life events, health status, etc. And the arguments, no matter how many of them he brought to himself and others, these arguments are unconvincing . But nevertheless, he again and again brings new and new arguments, because he needs God. Where does he get this god from? Will he take this god in the church? In no case. Church, pop - it terrifies him. He says: "I would rather give my child to be torn apart by dogs than call a priest to perform a witchcraft ceremony on him." To what hatred comes to the church!
And so he began to develop a translation of the gospel and his theological works, in which he tried to make Christianity a religion without mysticism, without rituals, etc. However, in this purified Christianity, mysticism actually remained very much. How did Tolstoy justify his new deity? Precisely the need to absorb the presence of God mystically. “Death is not terrible for me, because I am in God. Since I am in God, I will not die. But not every person is in God. Man, who lives by his own body, has fallen away from God. You have to believe in God. What does it mean to live in God? It means to live in truth. Live in love. The one who lives in truth, the one who lives in love, feels God in himself, he is immortal, he is not afraid of death.
From whom did Tolstoy borrow this god? To a large extent, the man. True, the muzhik himself for the most part lives by the priestly faith, but Tolstoy understands with extraordinary sensitivity that the muzhik will not need the priestly faith in his further development, that the muzhik will have no need for the priestly faith when he goes through a good school, when he becomes smarter, becomes ridiculous. But this does not mean that he will not need any faith. He brilliantly sees what we are now seeing - this is the colossal spread of evangelism, Baptism among the advanced peasantry. And by the end of his life, he could see the Doukhobors spreading, despite the terrible persecution from the government. It was a real peasant religion without a priest. These were attempts by the peasantry to create their own social truth, their own good neighborly life. This expressed an idealized idea of the good neighborly life of small proprietors; they were attempts to express their ideal in a religious form, to subordinate individualistic aspirations to a general law, calling it god and truth. These peasant sects were the same purified religion, the same reformation that Tolstoy also took up. We now have not a reformation, but a revolution. But we can say straight out what Tolstoy was. Tolstoy was a reformer. Tolstoy was our Zwingli, what Tolstoy was. Tolstoy was a reformer. Tolstoy was our Zwingli, what Tolstoy was. Tolstoy was a reformer. Tolstoy was our Zwingli,16 by our Gus. 17 He directed his activities in such a way that instead of a revolution, as an answer to all the enormous disorder of life, he would say: “Let's purify the concept of God, create a new religion, a religion of brotherhood and love, holiness, truth, etc., and everything will be resolved by this, because that if we live according to this religion, we do not need any social reforms. This, of course, is the colossal harmfulness of Tolstoy's teachings.
I do not set myself the goal of analyzing at least most of Tolstoy's major works. I can only attempt to outline the general outlines of an analysis of those works of his which especially won him fame among world writers, that is, two huge novels written in the prime of his life. These are "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina".
Let's start with War and Peace.
What is the central part of the novel that runs from its beginning to its end? At one point this is revealed in a simple phrase. Tolstoy says: “The more a person renounces his individual actions, and enters into a collective action, the more he finds himself in his place and achieves more.” "War and Peace" is a depiction of cumulative action. But Tolstoy considers such a set of actions not only that which determines history, not only historical events that he sees as a colossal process that, in essence, moves against the will of individual people. For him, the whole world, the whole solar system, all the nature that surrounds us, the whole course of phenomena is a huge “everything”, which has its own laws, unusually beautiful and majestic, therefore subject to acceptance, requiring the subordination of certain forces to itself.
As soon as instead of a thought of the whole people, instead of a thought logically arising from the whole of being, you separate yourself, you are already split off, you have already fallen away from the bosom of nature, and no matter how you act, you are in fact a pitiful little blade of grass. For example, Napoleon, who ruled kingdoms, turns out to be ridiculous and pitiful, because he opposes his ambition, his egoism, his supposedly heroic mission, his personality to the total action and tries to overcome the natural course of history.
Therefore, Tolstoy makes Andrei (the hero of the novel), in which he portrays one part of himself, painfully understand in a whole series of experiences that ambition, a thirst for fame, a thirst for individual happiness - all this is false and disastrous. When this became clear to Andrei, all that was left for him was to die, to die, perhaps from despair that he had fallen away from this whole.
Most of all, the peasant Karataev feels the “whole”, who obeys everything, endures everything, who, so to speak, floats on the surface of the life stream without hurting anyone, and no one hurts him. Describing Karataev, Tolstoy says: “His life, as he himself looked at it, had no meaning, like a separate life. It made sense only as a part of the whole, which he constantly felt. 18 Karataev did not say this: “the whole”, “I”, but he, like grass grows, like some duck on the shore quacks, he did not think anything about himself.
But what is available to Karataev is difficult for an intelligent person. Pierre Bezukhov comes to the Karataev acceptance of life with great torment and great upheavals. But, having come to this, he accepted everything, accepted the world and joyfully contemplated around him the eternally incomprehensible and endless life.
Thus, Pierre Bezukhov - this is the bulk of the content of the novel - through all sorts of quests and torments comes to Karataevism, reasonably comes to Karataevism - not instinctively, spontaneously, like Karataev himself, but reasonably, through great trials, worries. He comes to this conclusion: "We must bless life and obey its laws."
Maybe it's Eroshka? The hero of the story "The Cossacks" Eroshka also says: "We must bless life and obey its laws." But Eroshka considered life, as it is, to be something divine. He said that everything is created according to its own laws: both strength and struggle are blessed things.
Eroshka had a purely pagan world outlook, and there was no question of truth in it. Pierre can't do that. Pierre says: "No, it must be true." The truth lies in the brotherhood of man, men should not fight each other. And the only way to save people is through preaching. So far, there are few saved people, but it is necessary that everyone be saved. The saved does not want happiness only for himself - he will willingly give his soul for others.
When the bloody enmity between one and the other stops, then it will turn out that “God’s work” is over, that all these forces of nature, all this power and beauty are at the same time truth and goodness.
Here is the world view of the novel. And all the characters show how a person approaches or departs from this truth, behind which God is felt, as Tolstoy thinks. Reconciliation with this god, which is bought at the price of love and self-denial, is the goal of life. We Communists are also not against agreement, we also say: let there be peace and tranquility on earth, and then a person will find true happiness.
But when we Communists ask ourselves: how can this be done? - then we answer that this can be done only through the class struggle, and Tolstoy denies this struggle. He says: "Peace to the whole world, embrace, brothers." We know that you can shout beautiful words as much as you like, but no one will hug. They will continue to exploit each other. And we know that our struggle is not like any other, it represents the last struggle through the elimination of class society, the class principle. Tolstoy could not understand this, and so he died without understanding it.
Everything positive in the novel "War and Peace" is a protest against human egoism, vanity, superstition, the desire to elevate a person to universal human interests, to expand one's sympathies, to elevate one's heart life. It's all very good.
Let's move on to the novel "Anna Karenina", to which the epigraph is prefaced: "Vengeance is mine and I will repay." The main part of the novel is the fate of the secular woman Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy painted Anna Karenina with the most brilliant colors, pagan, those with which he is great, he described a magnificent woman. Everything that relates to the appearance of Anna Karenina, to her youth, yearning for love - disgust for the old, worthless, nasal official husband, her greedy demand for happiness, light, freedom - all this is so remarkable that we almost do not notice the social moment in Anna Karenina. Of course, she is just a beautiful, young lady full of life, nothing more. Despite this, for us she becomes, first of all, a living being, and she is a beautiful, freedom-hungry animal that breaks, as best she can, the chains of St. Petersburg landlord, bureaucratic morality, and we sympathize with her. All of us, readers, even the most progressive ones, fall a little in love with Karenina, we all envy Vronsky a little and are jealous of him.
But suddenly what happens? Suddenly it turns out that she is a criminal: in order to achieve her happiness, she had to cheat on her husband. The reader of our time will say: but what is she to blame for? Nature itself created her healthy, beautiful. She needs love. And in the end she is punished, moreover, not only with internal remorse, but falls under a train that kills her. And God turns out to be the executioner: "I will repay." A terrible dream of Anna Karenina is described, how an old man is fiddling with some kind of iron and preparing something. As if the Lord God himself puts his iron into action in order to crush the criminal.
But what is the crime? All the same, Tolstoy cannot stand on the point of view that since she was married in a church with the disgusting Karenin, then, as a result, she must live with him to the end. Otherwise, de, man, you are subject to wheeling!
No, Tolstoy has a different meaning: he deliberately transforms for a moment the official Karenin. For a moment, this dry bureaucrat manifests a German sectarian religiosity of a purely Petersburg type, a small trickle of divine morality under the influence of suffering, as if in the essence of social suffering: “the wife taught the horns, left with the child.” Karenin begins to say words such as: “Yes, I will forgive you everything, I love you, I am ready to suffer, I am ready to sacrifice myself,” etc. This is done very skillfully. This does not make Karenin a stilted or false personality. Such a moment can happen to such a person. He is depicted with incredible truthfulness by Tolstoy. He marvelously portrays the moment when Karenin speaks of his suffering for the first time and becomes confused: "I suffered so much." This "pe-le" ... pierces Anna's soul, because she sees in him an old man, almost a child who babbles, can't control words. Tolstoy wants to seize both us and Karenina for pity towards, in essence speaking, a soulless, dry bureaucrat, a herring in uniform. Tolstoy again plays his favorite song against Eroshka, against "live, to the fullest and to the bottom", for "carefully, so as not to hurt anyone."
Tolstoy wants to repeat the sermon of War and Peace. He wants to say: “You live in such a way that you do not cause suffering to anyone. If you yourself cannot achieve happiness otherwise than by crushing someone’s paw, give up your happiness.”
You see what, in essence, is the most counter-revolutionary theory. It is counter-revolutionary not only because then the same thing must be said about the whole class: one cannot achieve one's happiness if this can be done only at the cost of struggle, blood, suffering. But even since we are talking about a separate healthy, young individuality, is it possible to say that you do not dare to seek your happiness if someone can suffer from this? It is impossible to put the suffering of people who are completely worthless, people who are completely unnecessary as a terrible barrier for oneself.
We are indignant against a god who declares: "I will repay." We tell every Karenina, if she were our classmate, and just a woman, we say: “You have the right to happiness, strive for the light, for freedom, do not be afraid, you will not fall under any wheels!”
It is characteristic how the other part of this novel depicts Levin’s searches, how he tries, this kind landowner, to make life so reasonable and not offend anyone, but ends up with what Tolstoy lived for many years, ends up with a deeply philistine and landowner doctrine . You have to take care of yourself and your family. It is necessary to build a reasonable, happy life, but so that it is socially useful and, if possible, not to offend anyone.
How to relate to Tolstoy's holiness and self-denial?
We oppose this with our love of life, our desire to conquer life, to arrange life, to humanize life, to make it serve us in all the realism of our demands and the possibilities inherent in us. We are not for narrowing, but for expanding it. Tolstoy says: "Capitalism is building a Babylonian pillar, but, of course, God will mix languages and force them to fight among themselves."
So what? Refuse to build a "pillar", that is, urban culture, return to their shacks? No, we continue to build this pillar through the accumulation of wealth, through science, through technology, and we know that there is a force that solders again those who have split into different languages. We have one language that says: "Proletarians of all nations, unite!"
You ask me: in this case, Lenin, apparently, was mistaken when he said that forever and forever Tolstoy will be dear to us? No. Let us list what is valuable for us in Tolstoy.
Firstly , a gigantic depiction of life, both in content, which captures with tremendous depth, and in execution, in an unusual combination of artistry and simplicity. In this sense, he remains a teacher for us.
Secondly , the sharpest criticism against the bestial properties of life. It is unlikely that any writer can find such a constant, concentrated, sharp protest against any injustice and against all forms of oppression of man by man. In this Tolstoy is our ally.
And his terrible thirst for truth, love, consent, which he knows how to express in such wonderful words, is all our task. We crave it too. We know that this cannot be achieved by self-denial. But this is our ideal, and since he calls to this ideal with a clear, loud voice, he is our brother, our teacher.
And Marxism, dispelling the mists of Tolstoy, does not at all say this, just as Lenin does not say this either: let us burn Tolstoy's writings or leave them in disregard for the worms, for the professors who will study them. No, on the contrary, we say to Tolstoy: you are the prophet of our peasantry, its ideologist, with all its great positive and with all its negative sides.
"On the work of Tolstoy" - a lecture delivered at Sverdlovsk University in 1926. First published under the title "Leo Tolstoy" in Komsomolskaya Pravda (chapter one - 1926, No. 299 (482), December 25; chapter two - 1927, no. 1 (487), January 1; third chapter - No. 7 (493), January 9; fourth chapter - No. 13 (499), January 16). Subsequently, it was used as a preface to Poln. coll. thin prod. L. N. Tolstoy, ed. I. I. Glivenko and M. A. Tsyavlovsky (supplement to the Ogonyok magazine for 1928) and reprinted in the collection “About Tolstoy” (GIZ, M.-L., 1928) already under the title “About Tolstoy’s work” .
We print according to the text of the publication: A. V. Lunacharsky, “Russian Literature”, Goslitizdat, M., 1947, pp. 247–268.
Lenin , L. N. Tolstoy and the modern labor movement. Soch., vol. 16, pp. 300–301.
An inaccurate quotation, rather a retelling of Tolstoy's discussion of progress from his article "Progress and the definition of education" ("Yasnaya Polyana", 1862, December). See L. N. Tolstoy, Poln. coll. cit., vol. 8, p. 346.
From Tolstoy's letter to A. A. Tolstoy dated August 1857. See Correspondence between Tolstoy and A. A. Tolstoy, St. Petersburg, 1911, pp. 80–81.
Lenin , Leo Tolstoy, as a mirror of the Russian revolution. Works, vol. 15, p. 180.
Ibid., p. 183.
There.
Ibid., pp. 183–184.
Ibid., p. 184.
Lenin , L. N. Tolstoy, Soch., vol. 16, p. 293.
Ibid., pp. 293–294.
See present. ed. M. Gorky, "Leo Tolstoy", pp. 477–478.
Lunacharsky recounts the content of the letter from memory. Chekhov wrote to Gorky on February 15, 1900: “Why don’t they send me Foma Gordeev? I read it only in snatches, but I ought to read it, as I recently read The Resurrection. Everything except Nekhlyudov’s relationship to Katyusha, which is rather obscure and contrived, everything in this novel struck me with the strength and wealth, and breadth, and insincerity of a man who is afraid of death, does not want to admit it and clings to texts from the Holy Scriptures ”(M Gorky and A. Chekhov Correspondence, articles and statements, M.–L., 1937, p. 55).
In the story “Cossacks”, Eroshka, in a conversation with Olenin, recalled the words of a “military foreman”: “You will die, he says, grass will grow on the grave, that’s all.” See "Cossacks", ch. XIV.
Lunacharsky is referring to the story "Three Deaths".
Zwingli Ulrich (1484–1531) Swiss religious reformer.
Hus Jan (1369-1415) - Czech religious reformer and fighter for national independence.
See War and Peace, vol. IV, part one, ch. XIII.