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Tolstoy and our modernity

First published: "Literary heritage" volume 69: Leo Tolstoy: In 2 books. / 1961. - Prince. 2. - S. 403-426. — M.: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Pub. V. D. Zeldovich

Scientific foreword by K. N. Lomunov .

Comrades! I ask you to regard my lecture today as a kind of honor act.

I am not at all going to give you a eulogy to the "great writer of the Russian land," as Tolstoy is commonly called. In our Soviet Union, anniversaries and celebrations of this kind have a slightly different character than in old Russia and Western Europe. Here, for example, is a typical case. The famous French writer Andre Gide (who is considered one of the embellishments of French literature and, moreover, a person who specifically tries to carry out ethical principles in his novels) responded to a request about how he could respond to Tolstoy's anniversary with such a curious letter. He says that one can only speak positively about the jubilee, but that would be an insipid hymn; to express some kind of critical attitude towards Tolstoy, to make certain restrictive remarks, in his opinion, is inappropriate during the anniversary.

We look at it completely differently. We think that a jubilee is not an academic celebration, not an empty holiday, but, like everything that is done in our country (or how everything should be done in our country), the jubilee should be a practical and fruitful act. Since a well-known person, a historical event stands before us as being celebrated, as being honored, then our honoring should consist in understanding all its positive and negative sides and telling the whole truth about it.

In relation to Tolstoy, this task is especially great. In Tolstoy, there are undoubtedly, firstly, traits of great positiveness that make him, in some respects, a teacher for us even now. He did not die at all - the interest in him is gigantic. Not a single writer, either old or new, according to the references of libraries, is now read like Tolstoy; no writer has such an enormous influence on our young proletarian literature. A number of our leading proletarian writers, who gave us just the most valuable works, frankly admit that they learn from Tolstoy. Therefore, we cannot treat Tolstoy simply as the past.

At the same time, there are a number of features in Tolstoy that are objectively terribly interesting. Whether they are good or bad, they are grandiose and expressive. A Marxist cannot pass by such a prominent figure, by such an overwhelmingly large figure, it is impossible for a citizen of our country to pass by without a definite, very attentive reassessment.

Finally, as is well known, there are traits in Tolstoy that directly contradict our worldview and our activity, which posit some, and, moreover, extremely important, lines of his preaching as hostile to us.

It is extremely important for us to emphasize, understand and elevate those aspects of Tolstoy that can be useful to us, to evaluate, to place definite emphasis on everything that is characteristic of the understanding of Tolstoy's era, and, finally, to establish for the appropriate struggle against them those aspects of Tolstoyism, which we consider harmful.

We believe that the jubilee that was held in Moscow, and all the jubilee literature that was created around this jubilee, are a great social phenomenon. In some ways we have put Tolstoy on the pedestal he deserves, and in some ways we have helped to overcome the well-known traits of Tolstoyism. We have outlined the work that must be carried out in order to assimilate Tolstoy. And to assimilate Tolstoy does not mean hitting your forehead in front of him, as if in front of some kind of idol, or sweepingly rejecting - "Oh, this is not ours!" To assimilate means to analyze and understand very subtly the entire diverse complex that we call Leo Tolstoy and his legacy. In this work we have a mighty compass to orient us. These are notes and truly brilliant articles by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin about Tolstoy. Of course, it would be ridiculous if we took these articles as something, so to speak, limiting Tolstoy's research, and became afraid - there are such people among us - to take at least one step to the right or left: the teacher said, and if you please stick to that , What did he say. Lenin wrote several very short articles with a small number of pages and lines; he brilliantly outlined the main approaches to Tolstoy, but, of course, he himself imagined that great studies of Tolstoy and many new ideas would grow from here, that a large building would gradually be built from here in the same spirit that was laid down by this Leninist initial analysis of Tolstoy's works ‹...›

What particularly strikes everyone in Lenin's articles on Tolstoy is the installation of the fact that the greatness of Tolstoy, the importance that he acquired on a global scale, the enormous artistic and inner strength that lies in the legacy of Tolstoy, is characterized by Lenin as a reflection of a cultural-historical shift in biologically brilliant, highly gifted nature. Lenin, as it were, assumes in advance that if there is a great man, a great writer, then this means that he reflected some kind of great shift. If such a writer resonates on a global scale, then this means that the historical shift that this writer reflects is something significant for the whole world.

What social phenomenon, what huge historical event does Lenin consider to be the basis of Tolstoy's artistic works? This is a decisive change from the feudal-landlord or landlord-autocratic system in Russia to the capitalist, bourgeois system.

Tolstoy has come to the end of our noble literature; all of it, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, marks different stages in the struggle of the nobility with the bourgeois-petty-bourgeois, capitalist order advancing on it. The giants of noble literature, like Pushkin or Lermontov, signify, to a greater or lesser extent, internal shifts in the consciousness of the nobility. Between the bison, the conservative nobles, the nobles of the Asian type, on whom the autocracy relied in most cases (although it sometimes maneuvered towards the liberal nobility), advanced nobility deployed, in most cases more or less declassed, shaken in their economic foundations, interested in development of grain production and grain trade on new principles. This part of the nobility followed the path of noble liberalism and said: “If we want to preserve our homeland, we must ensure its further development, we need to Europeanize it, we need to learn from the West that political freedom, that cultural upsurge, those forms of production and culture, which make the countries of the West stronger than we are.” The Western liberal current in our nobility, as you know, manifested itself in the united type of the penitent nobleman, the anti-serf-owner from among the nobles themselves, who had brilliant representatives who reached such revolutionary forms as left-wing Decembrism. This nobility seemed to be making a concession to the bourgeoisie, since the entire West built its republics, its constitutions, its flourishing of industry, agriculture, trade under the influence of the bourgeois revolution and thanks to the bourgeois revolution. But the further course of events forces the nobility in subsequent generations to largely revise their judgment regarding the Europeanization of Russia. Capitalism invades Russia itself in the person of the Kolupaevs, Razuvaevs and Derunovs, so beautifully described by the nobles themselves, in the person of a prominent kulak who, on the one hand, cuts down noble groves and cherry orchards, buys their estates from the nobles or bread from the estates, gradually settles down as whoever has power in their country enters into a bosom alliance with the Orthodox Church, with the autocracy, which peaces him, patronizes him, and, on the other hand, declares war on all democratic and semi-democratic progressive forms that could undermine his right as a merchant, as a moneybag to rout, to plunder in the country.

Capitalism in Russia is capitalism of primitive accumulation, which began to manifest itself with particular force in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and so on. In this thirtieth birthday, he especially came to the fore with his predatory, destructive, predatory side and, of course, he beat not only the peasant, not only the tradesman, but also the proletariat that had begun to take shape under his blows. He also beat the landowner.

Not only in the conservative-landowner, but also in the most liberal part of the nobility, who were culturally very high, refined - just the most talented people from the nobility were sent here - a revision of attitudes towards the West began. Here we see, first of all, the organization of Slavophilism.

It is not surprising that part of the Slavophil movement, which we call right-wing Slavophilism - it was an expression of the tendency of more or less literate among the bison and feudal lords to somehow justify themselves before their conscience and the whole world, to find some slogans, some rules, which -theories from the point of view of which it would be possible to justify their entire alien-eating existence, all these dark, prison principles of life, which they demanded in their interests. And we know that even Gogol, thanks to the peculiar path of his development, came to right-wing Slavophilism and, by referring to the will of God, sanctified serfdom as well.

But much more interesting are the left-wing Slavophiles - Kireevsky, Aksakov, Khomyakov and others. These are people who had wonderful feelings towards their people, who wanted the right development for Russia, who wanted the good for themselves and others, people with a great European education, who have visited Europe and seen that European development, following the path of capitalism, brings with it the negative features of this capitalism - the merciless exploitation of man by man, the ruin of the peasants and the middle class, along with the ruin of the feudal nobility and its transformation into declassed elements, and, finally, the appearance of the proletariat, that capitalism brings with it a monetary, dry-accounting attitude to everything, a measure of everything to some shop arshin, a complete loss of all romance, all spiritual and spiritual attitude towards a person. In the great monument that was the first manifestation of acute proletarian thought in Europe - in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" - Marx and Engels, after praising capitalism for its merits, for how he advanced science, how he developed machine technology, how he strengthened man's power over nature, they move on to a gloomy page, which speaks of the prosaism, amoralism of capital, its inhumanity, that it undresses everything, everything leads to naked calculation between people, devoid of any poetic halo, to dry egoism. All this is absolutely true. The French Revolution proclaimed the rule of reason in the light of clarity and precision. And when the fog cleared, clarity and accuracy triumphed, it turned out that money is the engine of everything, and it was calculation that took possession of all human relations. The people whom Tolstoy loved very much, whom he considered his predecessors and allies - Carlyle, Sismondi and Ruskin - Europeans - they said approximately the same as our nobles said; it was better that time when the master and his serf were connected by human relations - the owner and property; and much worse is the time when the capitalist treats the proletarian as a complete stranger. The landowner took care of his man and took pity on him, just as he took pity on and looked after his cattle. The capitalist soullessly hires, squeezes out the last juices, throws away, takes another in his place. In past times, said Sismondi, Carlyle, and others, nevertheless, God was used as a witness to every contract and all kinds of interhuman relations, there was a God, they feared God; and here God has been forgotten, and apart from naked egoism, nothing else exists - this is a fall, not progress.

Our nobility, which itself suffered from the onslaught of the bourgeoisie, adhered to this point of view. I will give two or three examples of this kind of relationship.

Well, let's say, Herzen Alexander Ivanovich. Herzen was the leader and, to a large extent, the most brilliant representative of the landlord Westernism. All his youth was spent in a furious struggle against the Slavophiles. He argued that the desire of the left Slavophiles to embellish the past, to be too critical of the West and to think that

On the basis of its semi-Asian culture, Russia can achieve something better than the West - all this is fiction. No, Herzen said, you need to go to the West for training, to Western science, to Western forms of life. And young Herzen, brilliant, gifted, believing in life, said: it's nothing that the West is still in a transitional period, that the big bourgeoisie still rules there; after the revolutionary movement takes control of the course of human affairs, something else will come. He shared the dreams of the best utopians - Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others. It seemed to him that industry and science in their further development would lead to socialism, that is, to such an order when people would live on the principles of brotherhood and equality.

Herzen emigrates abroad, lives abroad, lives there until the revolution of 48, until the attempts of the proletariat to take power into their own hands. All kinds of Cavaignacs and Schwarzenbergs shoot down the proletariat, throw it back, the bourgeoisie turns out to be the complete master of the situation, and Herzen recoils in horror from the very Europe that until then he constantly glorified. Herzen declares that really a huckster, mediocrity, philistinism, devoid of any imagination, without cultural roots and without any broad ideals, a narrow, insignificant huckster with his dirty hands took possession of everything and, except for cheap calico and any other hack-work, nothing will be squeeze out of human muscles and nerves. And there is no one even to protest against this: all the efforts, all the brilliant efforts of European thought, of European love of freedom, eventually came to the dictatorship of money.

Looking for comfort in this world, looking for strength that could help to get out of all this horror, to whom does Herzen appeal? Certainly not to the nobility from which he came. He knows perfectly well that the Russian nobles, for the most part stingy, poorly educated feudal lords, are, of course, not the kind of trump card that can be played against the European bourgeoisie. He appeals to the other pole of the rural world - to the peasant. He says: Russian peasant - that's where the salvation is; The Russian muzhik believes that the land is God's, the Russian muzhik is unspoilt, he has a tremendous inner will, he carries within himself some high moral rules. If the agrarian revolution triumphs in Russia, the Russian peasant will really be able to establish completely new forms of life. In our country, fortunately, Herzen said and thought so, there is no strong bourgeoisie that could, having overthrown the autocracy, instead of freedom and socialism, which we dream of, establish their own bleak clerical regime, and there is no proletariat that has no land under its feet and turned out to be weak in its struggle with the bourgeoisie, but there is this peasantry standing firmly on the ground, which has arranged and preserved the commune. It must own all the land, all production on earth. If the best part of the intelligentsia goes to the peasantry and teaches them how to build a new world in which they, the peasantry, and their children can be happy, then the peasantry will respond to this propaganda of the intelligentsia and build the world that we all dream of.

The nobleman Herzen at first dreamed of Europeanizing Russia, but when he saw that Europe itself had become bourgeois, he rejects the bourgeoisie with all the strength of his lordly soul and turns to his antipode, the peasant, elevates this peasant to the pearl of creation and is, thus, the ancestor revolutionary populism.

We see the same thing in the example of Bakunin. Bakunin is a gentleman, a big landowner in the Tver province. He sits at the feet of Hegel, studies German philosophy, becomes imbued with the revolutionary ideas of the West and wants to bring them to Russia; as an emigrant, he rushes like a fiery torch all over Europe, kindles riots wherever he can, hopes that the European poor will turn out to be the gunpowder that he can set on fire with his revolutionary Russian flame, and ends up hating Europe, considering it rotting , outcast, and again approaches the same Russian peasant, draws unprecedented pictures, appeals to Pugachev, to Stenka Razin, waits for the time when the rebel intellectual convinces the peasant that he can no longer be tolerated, and the peasant will take up his ax to cut down the current society under the root and from chopped firewood to create some kind of chambers in which the future generation will live cheerfully and freely. Bakunin gave utopia a strong masculine smell, he returned to the Russian land, to the Russian countryside, to that still low-standing form that promises to unfold into the highest that can be on earth.

It is in this context, in this series, that Tolstoy will also have to be considered.

Tolstoy came from a very strong landlord family, and was himself a very strong landowner. It can be said that until the 80s, although he often had various internal cracks, which his biographers talk about, a class-conscious nobleman prevailed in him. When he first wrote his "Childhood" and "Adolescence" and flashed them all over Russia, Nekrasov invited him to the famous magazine that he edited, and introduced him to the best people in Russia, the forerunners of the revolution with the great Chernyshevsky at the head. But Tolstoy, in order to provoke them, talked about such black-hundred, thick-dog-noble topics that they did not know how to approach this prickly officer with such monstrously reactionary views that sounded paradoxical to their ears. And Tolstoy later said that Nekrasov brought him together and introduced him to some stinking seminarians, but he showed them their place. It was a clash of people of two completely different and irreconcilable classes.

Already at this time, Tolstoy was imbued with such class hatred for the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeoisie, for the capitalist way of life, which completely corresponds to the strength of his lordly nature. He is a gentleman, a manor, a bread man, the owner of a certain number of souls during serfdom and after the abolition of serfdom - a landowner on whom the peasants depended. He loves the old way of life, this stable, landlord-serfdom way of life. This way of life is cracking as a result of the emergence of capitalism, and capitalist relations are hateful to it. He travels to the West and brings out the most bleak impressions from his journey. He not only utterly denies the Europe he has seen and which seems to him truly mercantile, unprincipled, godless, but also denies all the prospects of this Europe. He very early, back in the 60s, begins to say that all the stories about progress are not worth a damn. He says that all this progress leads to one thing: the rich exploit the poor, that all the words about happiness, which science and technology supposedly lead to, are wrong, because science and technology serve only the rich to enable them to exploit others. As a result, on the one hand, we have the exploited, and on the other, a pack of exploiters who fear rebellion against themselves and tremble before the mass they oppress, a mass that has also been crippled and has lost every image and likeness of man.

This is, in general, the essence of Tolstoy's view of the West and its way of life. But where should Tolstoy himself go, whom should he oppose to the West? And yet in the epic "War and Peace", this "Iliad" of the Russian nobility, we find a great flowering of its class self-consciousness. He believes that this is the most durable, best, richest class of the human race - the high nobility. He deeply believes in it. And when they tell him that in "War and Peace" we have only a parade of the Russian nobility, because there are no serfs there, but didn't these same nobles flog their serfs, torture them? - then Tolstoy answers: firstly, this is exaggerated, and, secondly, - I don’t want to write about it. Very frankly and simply, he says that he does not want to portray these negative sides of the nobility. He depicts the nobility in its prime, he loves it madly and wants to perpetuate the memory of this nobility.

It is indeed, in a certain period of its development, something highly remarkable. Why?

In our vast semi-Asiatic country, on the bent backs of the peasantry, which served it "the nobility" and from which it could do whatever it liked, possessing great material wealth, our large and even middle-sized nobility still had fresh Asiatic forces in itself. They were hunters who spent time on the plains and fields, breathed fresh air in the winter snowy time and summer heat, breathed the air of their fields and their forests. All Asian expanse and prowess was characteristic of our nobility. At the same time, these were people who traveled abroad, spoke four or five languages and absorbed all the most subtle that was available in the West, decorated their gardens with marble statues, listened to Beethoven's music in elegant estates and enjoyed novels and compositions of first-class foreign writers. And this combination of European sophistication with this Asian boldness and breadth gave a very special bouquet, which had not been anywhere before and which will never be repeated later. A special human type was created, very powerful in its own way, and Tolstoy, who himself belonged entirely to this type, with his brilliant mind, his brilliant instinct, could feel and depict this class in its prime with his brilliant artistic pencil.

But in order to portray him, this heyday, does he describe his contemporaries? No. He feels that his contemporaries have rotted, that his contemporaries have cracked, that some other force is already pushing the nobility out of life. Therefore he goes to the 12th year; goes to the Napoleonic-Alexander epic, he takes the fathers - the fathers seem to him more "real" than his generation.

Undoubtedly, "War and Peace" is such a work in which Tolstoy tried to give, through the apotheosis of the nobility, a solution to the contradiction that tormented him - the departing old Russia and the advancing, disgustingly bourgeois bourgeoisie.

What does he credit to the nobility?

Nikolai Rostov is deprived of any desire for freedom; he is a purebred landowner, confident in the truth of the landlord regime and autocracy. When Pierre Bezukhov at the end of the novel develops his Decembrist ideas for him and says that the tsar should understand and go towards his thoughts about the welfare of the people, then Nikolai Rostov says: “And if the authorities order me to put my squadron on horses and go chop you with sabers into a cutlet I'll do it in one minute." And he says this to his closest friend! So, of course, this cheerful, confident, juicy, biologically powerful Nikolai Rostov, a vigorous Russian landowner, should have thought. Tolstoy is well aware that he is limited, that in essence he is stupid, but he admires him just as he admires the greyhound dog, which is also stupid, but with a magnificent strong movement grabs the wolf.

But Tolstoy himself was a complicated man who at that time had, as I have already said, great doubts; he also portrays the hesitant, self-doubting nobility.

Andrei Bolkonsky is a nobleman who yearns for inner harmony, a nobleman who wants to justify himself. When he, mortally wounded, sees the eternal sky turned backwards and clouds floating across the sky, he comes to the conclusion that everything earthly is perishable and transient, that it was stupid in his life that he wanted wealth, nobility, honor, etc. that, in essence, this eternal nature with the eternal sky and clouds floating across it is some kind of unshakable truth, and all human fuss is nothing, some kind of rubbish.

Pierre Bezukhov is always unsatisfied, all the time he is looking for and does not find any inner meaning of life that would allow him to say: “well, now I see correctly, I live holy.”

What do these figures mean? By this Tolstoy wants to say: we, the nobility, are not only Nikolai Rostov; we are also bearers of the greatest impulses of conscience, the most subtle and lofty manifestations of the spirit. Somewhere in the background is the peasant Karataev; Tolstoy wants to show that this peasant, a harmonious personality, is in deep harmony with the bars, a peasant who needs nothing, who calmly submits to everything, is always good-natured and always behaves with dignity. This is the ideal peasant, on whose forced labor all the beautiful edifice of the nobility is based.

In essence, in War and Peace, Tolstoy forces this peasant-lordly world with its leader, the passive Kutuzov, who makes no plans, does not aspire anywhere and relies on the will of God, to defeat the West with its Napoleon and aspirations to conquer the world.

The novel "War and Peace" was an attempt by the great master to build an exalted peasant-lordly world, where the peasant is below and, like a caryatid, hunched over, but submissive and happy, carries the entire master's building on his back. This manor building had to seem so beautiful with all its Natashas, ​​with its conscience, with all the Piers, in order to justify all the contradictions. And the insignificant West, with its anxieties, with its excessive exaltation of the mind of individual personalities, will break like a wave against the rocks, against the unshakable strongholds of the Russian-noble world.

But a few years later, in Anna Karenina, you see something else. You already see a confused, completely insecure romance. Vronsky is no longer what Nikolai Rostov was. Vronsky is a narrow-minded person, "well done man", first of all - a biological type, a vigorous figure; but he has some traits that do not allow him to be happy. So, instead of arranging his life, like everyone else, he took and fell in love with someone else's wife and went crazy on this. The former man, the real man, would not have done this, but this one did - and this is his misfortune. And in the end, he does not know where to put his hammered little head and goes to the Balkans to stand up for some little brothers there.

Even worse is another nobleman, Oblonsky. This is a frivolous landowner who has squandered his estate, a half-ruined landowner who lives only on handouts from the government, like an official who humbly sits in the hallway of some European banker and only then blushes when he remembers how this banker treated him impolitely.

Levin is trying to restore his estate, behaves respectably, marries, produces children, does it like Tolstoy himself. Levin is a self-portrait of Tolstoy. But he does not know how to deal with the peasant. Here is a gap in the inner landlord life. Some kind of wave of new life is tearing him down, ruining his household, making him constantly think, constantly torment himself over various new questions, about which Levin's father would never have thought.

The world is decaying.

And the most central person, Anna Karenina, is extremely interesting for the inner growth of this gentleman, Tolstoy, who will then come to his amazing positions.

Natasha Rostova is a wonderful, biologically gifted girl, beauty, freshness, organic strength; and at the time of her girlish flowering, she is depicted by Tolstoy so captivatingly that in all world literature it is difficult to find an image of a girl so captivating and bewitching. After various minor sins and troubles that occurred at the beginning of her life, she finds a suitable husband, gives birth to children for him and after that does nothing but diapers, children's and housework.

But after all, Tolstoy tortured his own wife in the nursery, diapers and household chores. From the diaries of Sofya Andreevna we now see how from time to time a living person cries out for mercy. But Tolstoy, with the firmness of a real man from Domostroy, again and again thrusts her into this nursery, into these diapers, into this household, arguing that this is the real vocation of a woman. Natasha Rostova voluntarily and willingly enters into this calling. And when some people said - how pitiful that Natasha promised so much and gave so little, how pitiful that she is such an amazing girl and such a prosaic woman, they did not understand Tolstoy at all. It's the same as calling the apple blossom poetic and the apple itself prosaic. For Tolstoy, the fruit follows the flower, and Natasha married is a further stage in the development of a woman.

Tolstoy wrote on the first page of Anna Karenina: "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay." This indicates that Tolstoy refers to Anna Karenina as a criminal. This is where he leads the whole story. Nevertheless, in the same novel, he points out that Kitty Shcherbatskaya also fell in love with Anna Karenina, and all readers of this novel invariably fall in love with her, because in this woman her vitality, her impulse for love, for freedom and happiness are so great that it captures and convinces us. Tolstoy said it was a sin. In Anna Karenina, the demand of her flesh runs like a red thread, the demand of the male whom she herself chose, and not the cracker Karenin, with whom the church and life connected her. And because she dared to do so, she dies under the wheels of the train. There is an inner metaphysical meaning here: if you want happiness, then you die, for happiness is not at all the destiny of man. We must think not about happiness and love, but about duty. If you are a wife, pull your strap; if you have children, you are obliged to fulfill your maternal duty. And you have no right to change your fate - this is selfishness and sin.

Why did Tolstoy preach this way, why does he have so many pages devoted to this "higher" ethics? After all, he himself loved life, he himself depicts love as the most wonderful human flowering - and at the same time he tramples it. Why?

Yes, because he trampled it in himself. He buries in himself a self-willed greed for life. Why did he hate this happiness so much? We will return to this below, but for now, only the following conclusion is important for us: in the 70s, when Anna Karenina was written, Tolstoy depicts the nobility as decaying. The nobility no longer flourishes. It is full of all sorts of passions. This is no longer the fragrant flowering that has existed until now - this is already confusion, sin, and partly surrender of one's class positions.

Here the same thing happened to Tolstoy that happened to Herzen and Bakunin, only differently and, perhaps, in many respects more consistently.

Seeing the inevitable misfortune of his class, this proud nobleman does not want to surrender to the mercy of the bourgeoisie, he wants to find his own channel, his own path. But he also realized that nothing could be done about the nobles. Entering the fight against the bourgeoisie, he began to criticize everything - private property, the thirst for enrichment, the exploitation of man, science, which brings with it only the enrichment of some and the impoverishment of others, art, which consoles only idle people, he began to beat backhand all human culture - this is his tremendous revolutionary greatness, although, in our opinion, he went too far in his criticism of European bourgeois culture, burning it to the root. And after he broke, as it seemed to him, this glass ball of magnificent European culture, he wanted to say - that's what you are, and we, they say, ... looked back - and what? Found that "we" are exactly the same. What could he say about the nobility? What - the nobility does not have private property, the nobility does not seek enrichment? The nobility does not exploit people? The nobility does not use science for this exploitation? The nobility is not entertained by art? Of course, all this is. Therefore, when Tolstoy, after devastating criticism of the European bourgeoisie, turned to the Russian nobility, he came to the conclusion that if old Russia had only the nobility, it would also have to be incinerated by criticism, like the West. But we still have a man who will save us. In the ancient social order there was a world of men, a world without bourgeois and without nobles. And if the bourgeoisie and nobles want salvation and happiness, let them turn into peasants, for only here is the real truth. The truth is that the muzhik does not exploit anyone, does not seize anyone's life, builds a roof over his head with his own hands, shoes and clothes himself with his own hands, feeds himself with his own hands and does not strive for material goods. When you strive for more than food, necessary, necessary clothing, you will begin to oppress your neighbor, that bagpipe will begin from which the towers of Babel grow with all the arts, factories and plants that are not needed for human happiness - they grow on blood, on resentment, grow on sin, and a person perishes, forgets himself, departs completely from his original sources, from his original nobility, grows on this soil, we will get a good-natured, friendly person. As the agitated surface of a liquid poured into a vessel is only ripples and excitement, and when it settles down, the liquid calms down, the calmed surface turns out to be empty, but reflecting the sky, reflecting the stars, so is a person when he calms down, when he ceases to seek acquisition, he will kill egoism and passions in himself when he ceases to be agitated - he finds in himself God, happiness, tranquility and peace, finds love, because love appears immediately, as enmity dies away, and enmity is generated precisely by this acquisition. Therefore, we will all be like peasants, we don’t need cities, we don’t need railways, we don’t need any science. One must live almost like an animal, but an animal with a human mind. Living in this way, a person feels the great bliss of a quiet, peaceful, loving existence and thereby returns to God.

Here is Tolstoy's social philosophy. A huge gentleman, with enormous life and mental talents, fighting for his peace with the bourgeoisie, with his criticism destroyed all the foundations of the bourgeois world, but thereby set fire to his own noble house, but he left the peasant huts. This is the only place where a person can live a righteous life. From this came a whole series of the strangest social conclusions, to which I shall return at the end of my report.

When we Marxists say that the essence of Tolstoy is what I have just told you about, then we are objected: this is an insignificant part of Tolstoy. It was not these social interests that primarily interested him, not criticism of the bourgeoisie as such, not various questions of classes and their relationships. This is not the case with Tolstoy. We are interested in Tolstoy as a person in terms of his intimate experiences, in posing questions in the face of conscience.

To this we answer: it would, of course, be very pitiful if Tolstoy's intimate experiences belonged to him alone. If he only wrote about things that are his own, who would read him? And he evoked a response in hundreds of millions of human hearts. This means that the same intimate experiences are very widely developed in modern humanity. For example, human egoism is something more intimate. A person wants to think only about himself, so that he feels good. Meanwhile, Adam Smith was able to build a political economy based on the premise that every person is selfish.

When a person has intimate features that are inherent in other people of his class and era, then such a person is social.

So it was with Tolstoy. He had two fears. He fought them and started this fight from a very early age. These fears were the cause of his mental upheaval in the early 80s and haunted him to his last breath, to the last moment of his life. It was the fear of sin and the fear of death and the struggle with them. Why, then, can these feelings be considered broadly social? Because the concept of sin and the struggle for righteousness lie within the entire aristocratic, peasant, philistine, bourgeois society, i.e., any society based on private property.

A private owner who has his own house, his own economy, his own trade, his own trade, his own family, cares about his prosperity, cares about the satisfaction of his lusts and needs and looks at his surroundings as something secondary, considers it possible to snatch a piece from another for your own needs. This is a state of competition, constant competition between neighbors, competition of individuals, individual groups, entire countries - it is so great, so intense that even in Egyptian and Babylonian times there was a trend most clearly formulated in the well-known Roman proverb: homo homini lupus est - " man is a wolf to man. This is still very mildly said, because wolves, when they hunt in a pack, do not eat each other, but people in a class society eat each other and even with great pleasure. In the 17th century one of the most typical bourgeois thinkers - Hobbes - repeats that man is a wolf to man, and declares that man is a wild creature to such an extent, that he is always ready to tear apart any of his neighbors, to subjugate him, reduce him to a state of slavery, and wage war of all against all, that better the most tyrannical king, the bloodiest government, than the absence of power. For only the government, only the police, is the force that can establish at least some order among these wild people.

I will not dwell on this idea. Each of us knows what it is; everyone knows that both religion and morality were called upon to moderate the war of all against all, to establish rules, control, internal control of man over man, over his impulse to sin, and that it was from this that the construction that rises as a kind of dome, over all this chaotic society. When a person seeks to satisfy all his passions and thereby brings evil to others, this is sin, this is such a phenomenon that, if it spread and multiplied, would make the whole social life unthinkable; therefore, it is necessary to establish rules that would reach the very bottom of human consciousness, rules of morality and conscience, rules that say what he should and what he should not do. The limit of the correctness of life is its righteousness, holiness, i.e. e. such a life in which a person does not sin at all. Now, if all people would live righteously and none of them would interfere with the other, then an ideal society would be created.

Why was Tolstoy so struck and shocked by this idea? First, because this genius personality had sinful urges stronger than the average person. If you read Tolstoy's diaries, you will see how he was overwhelmed with all these passions from early youth. He also wants wealth, and often leads a very steep landlord line; for example, how characteristic is the phrase in his letter to Sofya Andreevna, written in 1869: “I bargained with the peasants; of course, one could press even more and squeeze even more out of them, but even so, Sonyushka, you will be satisfied. And this strong economic bias very often made itself felt during the whole period while Tolstoy was a landowner. He, moreover, had a great urge for ambition, for glory, for a terrible, inexhaustible lust for power. Gorky already at that time when Tolstoy himself and the whole choir of reverent admirers around him also considered him a righteous man and a saint, he said that the first thing that struck in Tolstoy was his extraordinary lust for power - everyone should believe like him. Such a victorious enthusiasm with which he entered the struggle for his convictions had previously manifested itself in his purely secular, everyday behavior.

In particular, he was characterized by sexual passion. She was his scourge throughout his life, and this struggle with lust and the quick surrender of all positions of this lust plays a huge role in Tolstoy's diaries.

Finally, cartege, revelry sometimes seized him with the force of some kind of whirlwind, and for several months he whirled in the last circles of debauchery - of course, mainly when he was young. All this is clearly imprinted in his diaries and his works. The sin that made the biggest impression on him, such that in later years it served as the source of his most socially brilliant novel Resurrection, is the sin of a man against a woman, a powerful man against a humble woman. Tolstoy in the Kreutzer Sonata calls a woman a source of the most burning pleasure that exists in the world, the most seductive creature for a man, and says that here sin calls, here the devil inflames our body, calls us, but if you succumb to sin, then destroy the life of some girl and you will have to bear this cross.

So this fury of the sinful, according to Tolstoy, flesh, this force of egoism should have plunged him into periods of saturation, during which the low voices of lust were already silent and the voices of higher considerations began to sing, which reproached him for having done evil - well-fed lust no longer protects a person who, at its call, has committed a sin.

Tolstoy had an uncanny ability to delve into himself. His diaries represent this unearthing of all his ulcers. When the storm of immediate passion passes, Tolstoy begins to analyze what he did, whether he did it badly, etc., etc. And this consciousness, inherent in every person of an unorganized society, that without higher truth, without holiness, awaits us death, in Tolstoy it was developed to monstrous proportions. He has hellish self-abasement.

Tolstoy needed to find a way in which sin could be conquered and thereby annihilate the pangs of repentance. What path does he find? He says: there is no need to strive for anything, you must absolutely not set yourself any tasks of an acquisitive nature. This means - to kill the passion in yourself, it means to bewitch, to calm down your passions. And if you do this, then you thereby escape from sin, thereby you find righteousness in yourself, something human, spiritual, consisting of the soul, sent from somewhere above to the world of matter. This matter embraced the human soul from all sides, slapped our body around it with all its dirty passions. It is necessary to escape from the power of this matter, to return back to some kind of high, bright homeland. And this can only be done by the soul when it breaks all its ties with the body.

Just as the Buddhist teaching calls to give up everything that is sweet in this world, so Tolstoy calls to give up everything connected with matter, to become free, to become god-like. In the Kreutzer Sonata, where the fight against the sin of voluptuousness is brought to the highest measure, Tolstoy directly poses the question: well, if we completely free ourselves from this voluptuousness, if we even declare marriage a source of jealousy and sin, if we say that the virgin state is a state that is characteristic of a high person, then the birth of children will stop, then the human race will no longer be able to exist? And not at all afraid of this paradox, Tolstoy answers: it is unlikely that humanity will ever come to this. But suppose that all people on earth would reach such purity, there would be no marriage, there would be no children, all mankind would die. That would be great. This would mean that mankind had conquered matter, that it would proudly, quietly, peacefully, miraculously drown in God, in morality, in purity. Is it so important to live in the body? It doesn’t matter at all, it is only a source of suffering, but such a death, which happened not because your head was broken or this or that microbe exuded your insides, but because you became a saint - such a death is a victory.

And so, in his struggle with sin, Tolstoy is already leading us not only to that curtailed peasant life, where there is neither science, nor art, nor technology, but there is general poverty and general cultural squalor, but he is already turning towards leading us to end of the human race. He says that happiness is the complete renunciation of happiness. This should be noticed.

Why was Tolstoy so terribly afraid of death?

He digs into himself all the time. The first thing that occupies him is to understand his own experiences, to harmonize them, to find a way out of internal contradictions. But this inner world of his, Tolstoy's personality, is enormous. Truly right comrade. Shatsky, our famous teacher: when Tolstoy tells what he sees, it seems that he sees with a hundred eyes; when Tolstoy listens, it seems that he listens with a hundred ears. He was a huge man in his biological endowment, who took life into himself with unheard-of power. Gorky, in his famous book on Tolstoy, tells how Tolstoy, thinking that he was alone, observed nature; It seemed to Gorky that this was a great sorcerer and he had some kind of mysterious connection with nature. It was the right impression. Nature flowed into him in streams, and it seeps into us drop by drop. All feelings went through him with great pressure, he had an immense, huge temperament, which made him a powerful talent. Sensations and thoughts that could appear even in small people, he raised to such a height, because everything was done with him enormously, because he was terribly fond of life.

When, in the early 60s, on a trip to the Volga to buy an estate, he experiences what he called the “Arzamas horror,” when the horror of death attacked him at one inn, he screams, literally screams: “I want to live! I curse the power that created us and sentenced us all to a painful death penalty! Real cries against the existence of death as such. “I love life, I want to live. Life must be immortal."

Tolstoy was religious, he believed in all church rites for a long time, took communion himself and communed children. But Tolstoy was at the same time too European, too cultured, too critical, too much an analyst, and he could not believe without doubt. He, like the unfaithful Thomas, needed to put his fingers in his ribs, he needed someone to unshakably prove that a person is immortal. He could not allow himself to be deceived by any spiritualists, any priests. He passionately wanted to believe, because if you believe, then this skeleton-death will not be able to mock you. And how amazingly Tolstoy described this state! Everything has lost its meaning: I want to revel in the pink bloom of the visions that I call up and I cannot enjoy them; I love my wife and cannot approach her, for I see her body, which is gradually dying; I love children, and I think what they were born for, when were they sentenced to death? This is how he experienced the fear of death. And so Tolstoy forces himself to believe.

He came to the Christian world outlook. He says: when you give up all passions, when you don’t ask anything from life, when you don’t appreciate any earthly happiness and pleasure, when you become indifferent to earthly things, then it won’t matter to you whether you live or die. And you will die majestically and calmly, just as peasants die, or like a tree in the forest, you will not have the convulsions of Ivan Ilyich, who clutched at pillows and sheets, so that the hand of death would not tear him away from being; you will not have a stupid fear of death, for you will not cherish the trinkets of life. But this is not enough, says Tolstoy, - when you reach such a state when the vault of heaven is reflected in your soul, you will feel that life is not earthly vain life, that this life is a simple unrest, simple transient, where nothing exists, for every moment passes - and now it is no more, but there is genuine, eternal life, and a person will touch this eternal life when he leaves the realm of passion, and then he will understand that death does not change anything, that this peace that lives in him soul, there is superhuman, supernatural peace. This Tolstoy wants to call God. Therefore, he concludes: God is, firstly, love; God is righteousness, which appears when a person is cleansed of sins, for it mortifies the passions; God is death, rest, peace, which we feel in ourselves when we move away from being <?> and from the whole realm of passion and lust. The central point of Tolstoy's preaching therefore became the preaching of forgiveness, turning back, renunciation of the struggle for one's own happiness, etc.

Such are the revolutionary reactionary ideas of Tolstoy.

Why are Tolstoy's ideas revolutionary? Because, proceeding from reality, he beats with a battering ram all the untruths of life and under his blows the whole world of social disarray and social evil cracks and trembles.

Why are they reactionary? To the question of what kind of life should be built, he points back, calls for the rejection of all the achievements of science and technology, of everything that a person has now achieved in his psychological growth, of all hopes for the future. You need to withdraw into yourself, become small, round, distract yourself from any desires - back to the peasant, and further than to the peasant - to the savage or even further to some kind of animal that does not want anything, to something , which is equal to zero. Just like the philosophy of yogis, which says - the more you erase everything human in yourself, even the very thought, the closer you will come to what is sacred - this is the deepest reaction that proclaims the collapse of everything that has been worked out by the gigantic efforts of the human genius and that which alone can bring truly human happiness.

Reactionary in Tolstoy is also the fact that he points out the “right path” as non-resistance to evil by violence. He says: since the main thing is refusal, then the more you give up, the more you limit yourself, the closer you will go to righteousness. It is necessary to preach to the rich that wealth is illusory, that strength is an evil that does not bring happiness to a person, you need to persuade them. And if they cannot be persuaded, then what can we do, we, the oppressed, peasants and workers, let us agree not to serve them, refuse to carry out military service, refuse to work in factories and factories, refuse to pay any kind of taxes. True, they will beat us with whips for this, put us in prison, drive us somewhere to the North Pole - well, we will suffer, we will die, we will suffer sweetly for the truth, we will die sweetly for the truth. And in the end, with this sermon and this holy example, we will overcome evil on earth.

We can answer this: Lev Nikolaevich, you are a Christian and believe that two thousand years ago another teacher - Jesus - preached in Palestine the same thing that you preach now, and you believe that he was greater than you; but now two thousand years have passed and you have to preach the same thing again, because the world still lies in evil; another two thousand years will pass, another Tolstoy or some Jesus will appear and preach the same thing again - and so on ad infinitum. How do you guarantee that your preaching will be any stronger than the preaching of Jesus in Palestine, or Lao Tzu, or Buddha, or other sages whom you consider greater than yourself?

Our world outlook is at a great distance from Tolstoy. We accept all Tolstoy's criticism of social untruth. But he does not see that the bourgeoisie is somehow "sinful", but the worker is "righteous", he does not see what the worker brings with him, the same antipode to the bourgeois world, as the peasant was the antipode to the noble world. He does not understand that science and technology have only now, for the first time in history, matured to such a power when, armed with them, a person can make all of humanity rich, when precisely the development of the productive forces, which caused the exploitative class of the proletariat and created prerequisites, absolutely unprecedented in history, for the working masses, under the leadership of the organized proletariat, to be able to take these gigantic forces—science and technology—into their own hands. Tolstoy does not see that everything has changed.

We do not want to go back to the wretched man who has no factories, no railroads, no ships, who lives a savage life, on the contrary, we go to a highly developed person with many requests, but also many opportunities to satisfy them. This highly developed person can enter into a fraternal union with other people not on bare earth, not with a plow-mother, in order to pick out food for himself from the earth, but as a master of colossal steam, electric forces. If we wrest all this from the hands of private property, if all this becomes public property, then in 10-20 years - this is an insignificant period in world history - we will really organize the kingdom of reason and bright people on the basis of rational power over nature. Righteousness in the sense of peace between people, renunciation of all wars - we see all this ahead, and our teaching and our activity actually lead to this. But it leads through the struggle, for those who stand in the front and enjoy the privileges will not give in without a struggle. This is the huge difference between Tolstoy's worldview and ours.

I now pass from Tolstoy, the thinker and preacher, to Tolstoy, the artist.

It is unlikely that Tolstoy could have achieved such fame and such influence if he did not have a huge gift to infect other people with his feelings and ideas, he knew this gift of his and called it artistic talent. He says: art comes down to being able to infect other people with your feelings and ideas. And he believes that the power of infection is great because it shows in the images some intimate feelings and big ideas, the bearer of which is the artist. Indeed, his works of art are saturated with his ideas.

Tolstoy is first of all a tendentious writer, a writer of ideas. His great merit lies in the fact that with his works he showed what greatness, what intensity, what exciting interest and what distribution a writer achieves when he is an artist in form and profound in content. In our time we constantly meet people who say that there would be content, and the form is not so important - it is only necessary that the direction of the writer be correct, that he agitate in favor of our cause and propagate clever things. But these people forget that if this is not put into an artistic form, then it is much better and more useful to present it in the form of a newspaper article, speech or lecture. On the other hand, Tolstoy did not recognize art only as a form. Tolstoy says that such formal art is pure debauchery, the purest self-pleasure, which is worthless. Where there is no great idea, where the artist did not come up with anything major and new, where he did not feel anything passionately, there he could not write. Proletarian writers also hate purely formal art and are convinced that without this art being ideological, living, full-blooded, all-round, it is impossible to achieve a real effect.

Tolstoy was the greatest realist. In his works you will not find either abstractions or fantasies; they breathe real life. Tolstoy himself was a great vitalizer, all his passions and sensations were terribly strong. Hence the wealth of colors that he has. On the other hand, he was a truth-seeker, a truth-seeker, he did not want to lie either to himself or to others. He was wrong, but what we consider his mistakes, he considered the profound truth. He does not allow himself to lie, he does not allow himself to embellish, he wants to be infinitely honest.

From this abundance of content and unwillingness to embellish, pervert the content, realism is obtained. If we had an author with a very rich content, but no conscience as a writer, there would be a huge flowering, a chaotic abundance, but there would be no realism.

In order to be a genuine realist, to proceed from vast life experience and life impressions and at the same time not to deviate from reality, in order to be such a realist, Tolstoy developed his own special style.

When you read Tolstoy, it seems to you that he is a semi-literate person. He has clumsy phrases. Recently, a Moscow professor said: the phrase with which "Resurrection" begins is completely illiterate, and any teacher of the Russian language would give his student a two with a minus if he brought him such a page. How is it so? Tolstoy rewrote all his works 5-7 times, made endless corrections, nurtured all this, and suddenly such imperfection! This imperfection is by no means accidental. Tolstoy himself wants his phrases to be clumsy, he is afraid that they should be polished and smoothed, because he considers that this would be frivolous. No one will believe a person who talks about very important things and does not worry and makes sure that his voice is musical and everything goes smoothly and subtly. In this case, sincerity is lost, faith is lost that a person is telling you about what is really important to him. Tolstoy wants to achieve artlessness, the greatest simplicity in everything he says on his own behalf, in everything he says as an author. He talked a lot, for example, about the style of Turgenev, about the style of Korolenko. They were great stylists, but he condemns them to some extent. He thinks that their phrases are too elegant, that their style is too polished, too much added sugar, which supposedly should be pleasant for the reader.

Such a comparison can be used: Tolstoy conveys everything in such a way that you do not see the book, you forget the author - and this is the highest art that you can imagine. If you read Turgenev or Korolenko, then you will see everything, as if through patterned windows, it will seem to you - what good glass, what colors and stains, you will always see the author, a skillful stylist who stands between you and reality, and this will prevent you from absorbing the true reality.

Does this mean that a naive writer who does not know how to master his own style can convey reality? Not at all. The simplicity of Tolstoy is the highest simplicity, it is the simplicity of a man who has overcome all artificiality, who discards any colored glasses because he no longer needs them, and who is such a master that he can show a thing as it is.

This syllable, perfectly suited to realism, is extremely important for us.

What is new and significant about Tolstoy is that he is an extraordinary master of introspection or the psychology of introspection, that is, that he shows what is happening inside a person.

Not so long ago, various critics wrote in our country that a proletarian writer should not deal with psychology—what is psychology, they say, when we generally deny the soul? Sorry, we need to know what the person thinks, feels. We see that a person does this and that, but it is important for us to know what he thinks. We need to know ourselves and others, and we need to know not only what comes to the surface, but we need to know the general temperament, to know what is hidden. Tolstoy has an extraordinary ability to transform into different people. He speaks for an old woman and a young girl, on behalf of a child, a horse, he speaks on behalf of people of the most diverse classes, and each time with the most convincing truth. This is a power that only the artist possesses. We have no other way to penetrate our consciousness, and therefore the foremost, most mature proletarian writers, of course, will take advantage of this. In the work of the young writer Fadeev, in the story "The Rout", you will see what different people do and feel, and this made this story the richest in its colors. Fadeev is a talented student of Tolstoy as an artist.

Then, for Tolstoy, the thoroughness of finishing, the epic, calmness of the story is extremely important. Already Dostoevsky, who was a city dweller and a city writer, speaks of Tolstoy with envious hatred in this regard: “It is good for him with Yasnaya Polyana, where he lived first as a host, and then as a dear guest, it is good for him, a wealthy person, to sit and write for years novels, but this is how I feel when the editor writes to me: if you don’t send me the next chapter by the next issue, then ... What is it? And the fact that I will be left without money, I will not be able to buy medicines for my wife, I will not be able to leave the city where I am tired of living, I will need the most elementary and necessary things for me. And what about the proletarian writers? We cannot provide proletarian writers. When the time of transition passes into the epoch of organic socialist construction, everyone will be well off enough to work quietly in this or that favorite occupation, but this is not yet the case. And now, say some of our writers and their theorists, we should rather learn from nervous writers who write quickly, who grasp superficially, as Chekhov said: “Why do you need a description of a whole story about a moonlit night? Say that on the mill dam the neck of the bottle sparkled in the moonlight. Here is a moonlit night for you. But this is liquid, this is impressionism, characteristic of the race that the bourgeois philistinism unfolded in the era of machinery and, most importantly, the vicissitudes of competition. Should the proletarian writer submit to this, should the proletarian writer write in a super-Chekhovian style, in a Jazz Band, telegraph style, or, on the contrary, should he return to real, genuine, finished craftsmanship, to this enormous conscientiousness and persuasiveness? We are told: we do not have time now to write like that. Yes, we do not have time to read. Our reader needs to quickly read a short story. Where is there enough time to read a novel in several volumes? Is not it? Is it true? In addition, in our fleeting time, interest in some topics quickly cools. But I am not talking here about newspaper-magazine, semi-reporting works, but about those that cover significant topics of lasting significance. Ask librarians what people read the most these days? Novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Nobody is afraid of these volumes. When it is well written, there will be time to read. That is why it is necessary to find time to write. And no matter how painful it may be to say to young writers in our hurried time, but you have to: think over what you wrote, then put it aside, let it lie down, rewrite it, think it over again, rewrite it again. True, the fee will not be given to you very much. Financially, it's hard. Perhaps that is why the proletarian writer should not break away from the machine, from this or that service. You need to write such things slowly, a few hours a day and not every day. Any idea needs to be nurtured, thought through. Perhaps in this perseverance, which the proletarian is fully capable of and by which he compares favorably with the nervous intellectual, he will find both self-confidence and epic greatness. Here is the critic Comrade. Yermilov says that when you read Tolstoy - "strangers", but you can't forget them, you can't throw them out of your memory; and in our works people do not live, like dolls. This is partly because a doll can be quickly portrayed, and a literary depiction of a whole world of living people is a matter that is given not only by talent, but also by time, very hard hard work.

Rails can be driven through a machine, chintz can be made by a machine, but only man can create, and we will never invent a machine capable of writing a novel, and therefore creativity will always be a matter of human nerves and human hands. Here love will always come first. The thoroughness of Tolstoy's work is the ideal that we must learn from.

Plekhanov said that we accept Tolstoy "from here to there." Our anniversary celebrations said the same thing: from here to there.

We are related to Tolstoy by this imperious impulse, thanks to which master Tolstoy rushed out of his world and reached his revolutionary anarchist destructive ideas. But we deny what the other side of its belonging to the old world showed itself - a lack of understanding of the significance of science and technology, complete deafness in relation to the proletariat, to what it brings with it; and hence the hatred of the revolution. We reject his ideal—peasant narrow-mindedness, non-resistance to evil by violence, useful to our enemies and harmful to us.

We are told: you reject Tolstoy as a moralist and thinker and accept Tolstoy as an artist. This is not true. We do not at all deny all of his teachings as a thinker and moralist. Lenin characterized his criticism of the bourgeois regime as exemplary and in some respects unsurpassed. In his critical part, Tolstoy is also powerful as a thinker. On the other hand, if we say that the artist Tolstoy can be taken without criticism, then we are doing a disservice to our youth and the proletariat, because Tolstoy put his ideas into works of art. So here the rule is preserved: "from here to there."

Here are the conclusions we come to. Of course, we are proud when foreign writers, who came here as a kind of magicians, bringing gifts, but not to the cradle, but to the grave of Tolstoy, declare: what a great country must be, in which such a genius could be born! Yes, from the depths of peasant suffering, during the upheaval, in which Russia was passing to another stage of historical development, and from the deep doubts of the class that was then advanced in terms of its culture - the nobility, the colossal, problematic, painful and dual figure of Tolstoy grew up.

But we still have incomparably greater pride: when capitalism has created a sufficient proletarian base for us, our country put forward for a new shift a new genius - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, to whom the eyes and hands of the working and oppressed of the whole world turned. He also brought the truth with him, but this truth is no longer problematic, it is the real truth, not dual, it is the apex truth, it is the truth that is the truth of today.

We must read Tolstoy, study, perceive what is salutary in him, and put aside what can cause doubt in us and what we must eventually overcome. From this point of view, Tolstoy represents an enormous cultural material.

That is why the government, taking a critical standpoint in relation to Tolstoy, publishes a number of complete collections of his literary works, a huge, in 92 volumes, academic national edition of Tolstoy's works, which includes every note of his, all his correspondence, all his diaries, all that only this brilliant man wrote. Everything that he left us, we want to make the property of the people.

Vladimir Ilyich, denying many things in Tolstoy, condemning Tolstoy for many things, said: “in Tsarist Russia, his works are not the property of the people; it is necessary that socialism come in order for Tolstoy's artistic works to become the property of the people.

We know that our people will not accept Tolstoy with reverence and uncritically and, on the other hand, will not reject him as something they do not need. Our great class, so alien to him in many ways, does not turn away from him and does not bow before him, but says: great predecessor, great brother, great collaborator, you are great in what is positive in you, and great in your mistakes. You cannot die, you will live with us, you will work with us to build that human happiness that you dreamed of, although outlining the wrong paths to achieve it.

The article has a scientific preface by K. N. Lomunov, 1969. Foreword: [A. V. Lunacharsky about Tolstoy. Unpublished 1928 lecture]

( ! ) The content of the following footnote is obsolete, since a later article by Lunacharsky was discovered later . — Approx. site.

* The published lecture by Lunacharsky is his last work devoted to Tolstoy (after that, he only wrote the preface to the book by A. M. Evlakhov "The constitutional features of the psyche of L. N. Tolstoy." M., 1931). In connection with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tolstoy in 1928, a government commission was created under the chairmanship of Lunacharsky, which included: M. N. Pokrovsky, I. I. Stepanov-Skvortsov and V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. As chairman of the commission, Lunacharsky repeatedly spoke in the Soviet and foreign press, explaining the significance of Tolstoy's anniversary, the main problems of his work. Of the numerous lectures and reports given by Lunacharsky during this period, only three remained unpublished. Their transcripts are stored in the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. One of these transcripts is not correct at all and it is not known where and when this report was read (judging by the general structure and individual examples, it undoubtedly refers to the same time). The second transcript contains Lunacharsky's report "Tolstoy and the Revolution" at the solemn public meeting of the All-Union Committee for Honoring Tolstoy on September 10, 1928 at the Bolshoi Theater. The stenographic record was made unsatisfactorily and corrected only partially. Lunacharsky's lecture, which has been preserved in the third, fully corrected transcript, is devoted to the same theme. The lecture was delivered in Leningrad on September 30, 1928 and was called "Tolstoy and Our Modernity". Subsequently, after an appropriate revision, Lunacharsky planned to print it in Lengiz as a separate brochure (the revision consisted mainly in shortening the text and a slight stylistic correction, not made by Lunacharsky, but im undoubtedly authorized). The archive, along with the transcript, contains a letter to Lunacharsky from Lengiz dated March 21, 1929:

"Dear comrade. Lunacharsky. In view of the release of a large amount of literature on the anniversary of Tolstoy, as well as the very lengthy editing of the transcript by you, the publication of your pamphlet at the present time will be belated. We will send you your transcript at the same time.”

(f. 142, op. I, unit hr. 549).

Thus, Lunacharsky's last pamphlet on Tolstoy, prepared by him for publication, remained unpublished.

The lecture "Tolstoy and Our Modernity" completes Lunacharsky's many years of work on the study of the philosophical views and artistic creativity of the great writer.

The shorthand record contains the questions put to Lunacharsky after the lecture and his answers to the questions. Since these answers were intended to once again popularly explain some of the problems raised in Lunacharsky's speech, we do not reproduce them in this publication.

V. Zeldovich